Christopher Pearson on climate change, way back when in Sceptic spells doom for alarmists:I expect that when the history of global warming as a mass delusion comes to be written, Australia's leading geologist will be recognised as a member of the international sceptical pantheon. As far as the progress of what passes for national debate is concerned, in all likelihood 2009 will be seen as the turning point and divided into the pre and post-Plimer eras.
Christopher Pearson quoting Tony Abbott in what seems to be an approving way for his consistently nuanced position on anthropogenic global warming, in the post-Plimer era, in the strangely titled column Why Abbott warmed to the sceptics:
On prudent intervention Abbott said: "Every sensible person understands that we have to protect the environment because it's the only one we have. This is why the debate over climate change shouldn't be couched in morally loaded terms, such as believers and sceptics.
Say what? You mean the column was only titled 'warmed to the sceptics' as a jolly jape between Catholic chums lying straight in bed? Where warnings about couching debates in morally loaded terms is just disingenuous code or sly innuendo for the joys of couching debates in morally loaded terms?
Of course, you loonies, because here's Christopher Pearson avoiding morally loaded terms. When talking about climate change, always use cool, rational, reasoned, professional, scientific terms such as: mass delusion, anthropcentric delusion, rabid environmentalists with religious belief systems, non-scientific leaps of faith, eco-fundamentalism atavistic in character, antics, skulduggery, pseudo-scientific pronouncements, Joseph Stalin, Trofim Lysenko, the politicisation and bureaucratisation of science, the jig is up, religio-magical, articles of faith, apocalyptic warnings, twaddle, and so on and so forth, including endorsing this heartfelt rational scientific cry of fear:
"The environmental religion embraces anti-human totalitarianism. Some environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an indisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and public relations campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their argument is based on the spreading of fear and panic to declare the future of the world to be under serious threat.
"In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making.
"In science, we are in awe of nature. In religion, we are in awe of God. Yet the new environmental religion is in awe of nothing. It is spiritually vacuous and negative. Christianity has a long tradition of using music for worship. The music, especially from the time of Bach and onwards, underpins all Western music. The environmental religion has no music, no traditions, no scholarship, no nothing. The new environmental religion has no big questions. It has no unknowns."
As well as being a nullity, eco-fundamentalism is atavistic in character.
Oh yes, nullity fundamentalism and atavism all in the one scientific sentence.
Now if you were an ad hominem type, you might want to play the same game, and wonder about Pearson's expertise in science. Well he has a BA honours from Flinders University and a Dip. Ed. from the University of Adelaide and he just loves the Latin mass.
Business Council of Australia president Michael Chaney summed up the pragmatist case. "The public generally accepts global warming as an inevitability. That is likely to drive any political response. I am of the school that thinks of this issue in the same way that I think of home insurance. I doubt if my house will burn down but I'm prepared to pay a premium just in case."
This is a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion. Yet we know that strong leadership can change public opinion through time. I think the Prime Minister could and should have taken a bolder stand right from the start of the debate. He should have sacked ministers, especially in the environment portfolio, who falsely asserted an incontrovertible link between global warming and carbon dioxide. He ought to have promoted more of the informed debate we have seen in the pages of The Australian from the likes of Bjorn Lomborg and Bob Carter. No doubt we are a more credulous people than our grandparents were, but he might have tried appealing to the scepticism that was once such a prominent feature of the national character.
Is it terribly galling for Tony Abbott to run a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion?
Business Council of Australia president Michael Chaney summed up the pragmatist case. "The public generally accepts global warming as an inevitability. That is likely to drive any political response. I am of the school that thinks of this issue in the same way that I think of home insurance. I doubt if my house will burn down but I'm prepared to pay a premium just in case."
This is a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion. Yet we know that strong leadership can change public opinion through time. I think that Tony Abbott, as the new leader of the opposition, could and should take a bolder stand right from the start of the debate. He should sack shadow ministers, especially in the environment portfolio, who falsely assert an incontrovertible link between global warming and carbon dioxide. He ought to promote more of the informed debate we have seen in the pages of The Australian from the likes of Bjorn Lomborg and Bob Carter. No doubt we are a more credulous people than our grandparents were, but he might try appealing to the scepticism that was once such a prominent feature of the national character.
Explain it to me First Dog (more First Dog here):
Yippee. Suddenly it seems, I too am an overqualified scientist, capable of flailing around with the best of them. Though I prefer Haydn's Nelson Mass. Is that naughty of me?
Never mind, back to glossing Pearson. Remember this way back when in Christopher Pearson: Hotheads warned, cool it?
... there is something terribly galling about the federal Government deciding to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on controlling emissions of what will turn out to be, in all probability, a perfectly harmless gas. I hope Howard is still enough of a conservative at heart to be haunted by that thought for the rest of his career.
Business Council of Australia president Michael Chaney summed up the pragmatist case. "The public generally accepts global warming as an inevitability. That is likely to drive any political response. I am of the school that thinks of this issue in the same way that I think of home insurance. I doubt if my house will burn down but I'm prepared to pay a premium just in case."
This is a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion. Yet we know that strong leadership can change public opinion through time. I think the Prime Minister could and should have taken a bolder stand right from the start of the debate. He should have sacked ministers, especially in the environment portfolio, who falsely asserted an incontrovertible link between global warming and carbon dioxide. He ought to have promoted more of the informed debate we have seen in the pages of The Australian from the likes of Bjorn Lomborg and Bob Carter. No doubt we are a more credulous people than our grandparents were, but he might have tried appealing to the scepticism that was once such a prominent feature of the national character.
Is it terribly galling for Tony Abbott to run a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion?
Why of course not. Only last last week Pearson himself was running the Roman line in A change in the way we think:
In the course of the past week, two opinion polls have stunned the political class across the Anglosphere.
An American CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted on December 2 and 3 found that people who believe in man-made global warming, 54 per cent last summer, are now in a minority at 45 per cent.
One-third of those who accept there's a global warming trend attribute it to natural causes.
Never mind the science, feel the weight and the width of the Roman line, aided and abetted by the joys and wonders of modern polling. So naturally it's entirely appropriate for Tony Abbott to act the Roman as people began to wonder about his 'climate change is crap' line:
An American CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted on December 2 and 3 found that people who believe in man-made global warming, 54 per cent last summer, are now in a minority at 45 per cent.
One-third of those who accept there's a global warming trend attribute it to natural causes.
Never mind the science, feel the weight and the width of the Roman line, aided and abetted by the joys and wonders of modern polling. So naturally it's entirely appropriate for Tony Abbott to act the Roman as people began to wonder about his 'climate change is crap' line:
... what had changed, as he said at the time, was the politics. There was a radical disjunction between urban voters resigned to an emissions trading scheme and country constituencies who were increasingly furious about it.
Forget the science, feel the weight and the width of the people's fury.
But hey, there's a problem peddling the Roman line with the plebeians who in their idle superstitions still cling to the pseudo-religion of science. So it's important to peddle a different Roman line to the simpletons who need to bow down to the old, false gods like Hermes.
Which is why it's so handy Abbott still remains a firm believer in climate change. All that nonsense about what he said in the Victorian hamlet of Beaufort is nonsense:
A less likely candidate for a Damascene conversion would be hard to imagine. He (Abbott) was as convinced then as he had been back in March of the need for "prudent insurance against possible future harm". Nor had his view changed that: "It's quite likely increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has had some effect on climate, but the debate rages among scientists over its extent and relative impact, given all the other factors at work."
Sure, Christopher Pearson might think that climate change science is crap, but not Tony.
Why, not only is Abbott a fervent greenie and a stout-hearted environmentalist and a one-time active trade unionist in favour of strikes, and a reformed fundie Catholic chauvinist who promises in the future to listen to his wife on women's issues, he's really almost a new Labour Tony Blair type:
Even Britain's Tony Blair, who spent his premiership insisting that the science was settled on man-made global warming, had drifted on Monday in Copenhagen to a prudent intervention position that is quite close to Abbott's. Blair's present view is: "It is said the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn't need to be. What is beyond debate, however, is that there is a huge amount of scientific support for the view that the climate is changing and as a result of human activity. Therefore, even purely as a matter of precaution, given the seriousness of the consequences if such a view is correct, we should act. Not to do so would be grossly irresponsible."
Oh yes, grossly irresponsible. But hasn't Pearson for years campaigned on the notion that to act would in fact be grossly irresponsible and an abuse of a harmless innocent gas?
Never mind, Tony Blair is now a wondrous guru, worthy of quotation and emulation, Tony Abbott's best new progressive conservative ally, and while we pay homage to the past, wasn't the war in Iraq a jolly good idea, pip pip, wot wot.
Oh, ain't it a wonderful world, where a man who has spend many columns and so many words trying to kneecap the notion of global warming and the theology of the true believers, now should mount a 'prudent intervention position' as a prudent policy position for Abbott.
Because you see what Abbott is offering along with it is a "drawn-out debate with, at this stage, a pre-ordainted conclusion even less." Yippee, more columns to write, endorsing him while berating the religionistas.
Sweet, sweet world. And all the better because it follows the dictates of the Romans:
If one of the main issues at the next election is the question of who can be trusted to manage the politics of climate change, I expect the government will try to take maximal advantage of -- by his own admission -- a bored journalist's recollections of that evening. Abbott came away from Beaufort, not convinced that the weight of the scientific evidence had shifted dramatically one way or the other but that people in the bush were no longer swallowing bland technocratic reassurances there was only one conclusion to be drawn and one responsible policy option and certain, as he said, "the politics of this issue really had changed".
Dearie me, the politics of the issue had changed! What a wonderfully scientific approach. For a Roman.
Can I just re-edit the thoughts of Christopher Pearson and bring them up to date?
Business Council of Australia president Michael Chaney summed up the pragmatist case. "The public generally accepts global warming as an inevitability. That is likely to drive any political response. I am of the school that thinks of this issue in the same way that I think of home insurance. I doubt if my house will burn down but I'm prepared to pay a premium just in case."
This is a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion. Yet we know that strong leadership can change public opinion through time. I think that Tony Abbott, as the new leader of the opposition, could and should take a bolder stand right from the start of the debate. He should sack shadow ministers, especially in the environment portfolio, who falsely assert an incontrovertible link between global warming and carbon dioxide. He ought to promote more of the informed debate we have seen in the pages of The Australian from the likes of Bjorn Lomborg and Bob Carter. No doubt we are a more credulous people than our grandparents were, but he might try appealing to the scepticism that was once such a prominent feature of the national character.
Don't worry, he has, he will, and he is. And please, no more chatter about scepticism being a natural function of science. Let's just keep the debate honest, let's divide the world into "maddie true believer fervent fundie atavisitic eco-environmentalist warrior religionistas" and scientifically driven nuanced sceptics of the Christopher Pearson kind.
There, global warming sorted in a trice.
Why on earth bother with Copenhagen - such a fine example of the UN world government moving at one to take over the world and impose draconian world bureaucracy, as predicted by Lord Monckton, and so unanimous and effective in its processes - not when Christopher Pearson can explain how handy insurance is, while explaining that insurance is a totally useless concept.
So it goes on loon pond, as the Catholic church still debates the problem of pain:
Suffering is part of human existence from birth until death, and every human person suffers in a variety of ways: physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually.
Oh I know there are answers (A Pope's Answer to the Problem of Pain), but can someone explain why any one would flagellate themselves, wear a cilice, or read Christopher Pearson?
Some things are just too profoundly deep and bizarre and disturbing to understand ...
Explain it to me First Dog (more First Dog here):
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