Yes, he really did say it, he really did.
He really truly said he looked up wikipedia to discover that Australia has had bushfires for a long time:
...And the point that we're all making is this: that Australia has, since European settlement and obviously well before that, had a history of recurrent bushfires.
I looked up what Wikipedia said, for example, just to see what the rest of the world thought, and it opens up with the fact that bushfires in Australia are frequently occurring events during the hotter months of the year, large areas of land are ravaged every year by bushfires, and that's the Australian experience ...
What's the worst thing about this?
Is that he thought that citing Wikipedia would give him some authority? Oh the pond loves Wikipedia as much as the next person, and loves to read about fire-stick farming, but let's face it, the one sure guaranteed way to lose street cred and the argument is to say, well Wikipedia said ...
Is it that he had to resort to a wiki entry to discover that Australia has had bushfires during the hotter months of the year for many years, and long before European settlement?
Is it his belief that Wikipedia is a sure way to find out what the rest of the world thinks?
Is it that he's incapable of distinguishing between bushfires happening, and the implications of the science, which suggests that severity and frequency might be affected? In much the same way as Tony Abbott ...
Or is it that his stupidity was made known to all by way of the BBC World Service, and you can listen to it here, as can the rest of the world? And it presumably will stay online for a long time ...
If you head off to listen, hang on long enough for the BBC interviewer to quote Tony Abbott saying climate science is crap - bleeped for sensitive ears - and then for the ponce Hunt to say she's being profoundly rude and he won't stand for being sworn at, and for her to say that she's merely quoting your prime minister, and for Hunt to retort that it was a private conversation taken out of context ...
It's first class comedy.
It's also indignant crap of course, absolute, sublime crap, but proving, should anyone doubt, that Hunt is a prissy flake of the first water ... and might, as the heat keeps getting turned up, give the poodle Pyne a run for his money.
Is there an upside? Well it's nice to see an actual interviewer put a little fire to the belly, and watch the flake wriggle and squirm ... you can get the same visual effect from katsuobushi ... sounds, or sights, rarely if ever produced by the forelock tuggers in the Australian media.
And perhaps it's a signal to the world that Australia is now off in la la land, and if anything meaningful is going to happen regarding climate science and change, it won't involve Tony "the argument is absolute crap" Abbott and Greg "Wikipedia" Hunt ...
Professor Roger Jones of Victoria University then turned up in a state of some agitation to comment on Hunt's remarks.
The silly Prof started quoting statistics, yammering on about a Bureau of Meteorology data set since 1972-73, which he outrageously claimed showed that - since 1977-78 - the forest fire index in Victoria had increased by a third ...
Sorry silly old Prof. If it isn't on wikipedia, it simply doesn't cut the mustard.
Oh sure the CSIRO and the federal and state governments and assorted universities have all kinds of experts, but what can you say? These fools simply aren't aware Australia has had bushfires going back a long long way ...
Who'd have thunk it? Who'd have known? Thank the long absent lord for Hunt and his assiduous wiki searches ...
(Below: of course the intertubes is full of alternative explanations)
I have just listened to Greg Hunt. My head is spinning. This mob are major league propagandists. How do they sleep at night? How do they look at themselves in the morning mirror? How do they take pride in their work? They are major league propagandists.
ReplyDeleteI caught Hunt's BBC interview last night while almost off to the land of nod and almost fell out of bed at his abusive shot at the interviewer and trying to rewrite history. What a total slime bag! These blokes are nothing but facillitators for pig ingnorant capitalists who care about nothing but money and power,whatever the cost.
ReplyDeleteMakes one embarassed to be Australian.
Sun, moon & several planets line up. Now, will Turnbull cut him down, or let him swing for a few more months?
ReplyDelete"and watch the flake wriggle and squirm". What about "watch the fluke wriggle and squirm" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trematoda
ReplyDeleteWhy didn't he ask George Pell who has all the answers?
ReplyDeleteClimate change is real and serious, and we're going to do nothing about it. Anyone else hear that?
ReplyDeleteYep.Loud and clear, but by the time the opposition gets it shit together Oz will look like Texas with bells on.
ReplyDeleteAvaaz is running a petition and Get Up are organizing rally for Melb.(17/11th), but I don't know what it will take to stop these clowns as they are pure tea-party lunatics.Cheers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bushfires_in_Australia&offset=&limit=100&action=history
ReplyDeleteHave Hunt, Abbot, or lieberal spinners edited the wiki "Bushfires in Australia" page prior to or since Hunt's BBC interview? Easy done, and activity picks up just prior.
By golly Anon that's a remarkable amount of activity, and a lot of it revolving around questions which have been "politicised" ... false users, uncited assertions, false references etc... good old wikipedia ... and with an insistence that bushfires and climate change are two different things:
DeleteEverything in the climate change section is as fair as this author can be with the sources given. The introduction had a source which said the same thing as the climate change section with a more recent citation. This makes the entire page concise and to the point, without repeating itself. This is an article about bushfires, not about climate change.
And now it actually deigns to mention the possible implications of climate change for bushfires ...