Sssh, don't mention horse-racing ...

(Above: the Fairfaxians score with a great bit of product placement. Whenever you think of a fire cloud, think yummy ice cream. The pond got its licks here).


Sssh, whatever you do, don't mention horse racing.

Well it's completely useless, it claims it's a sport but the last time the pond spoke to a horse the usefulness of equine aerobic fitness was flung into doubt, and it's really only an excuse for socially destructive gambling, or for John Singleton to screw his staff in search of more money with which to indulge his horse habit ...

And we're about to enter the summer racing season, once known as the spring season until the climate changed...

You see, it's easier to simply avoid the subject of horses because no one's following the injunction not to mention climate science.

Lenore Taylor broke early yesterday with Bushfires and climate change - debate is not improper. It is essential, which turned out, on clicking through, to have the actual header We need to talk about bushfires and climate change - if not now, when?

She took exception to Tony Abbott's proposal:

Abbott has presented Direct Action as a static, finite, contained, pain-free, nothing-much-to-see-here response – with a specific, capped amount of money and a timeframe confined to the next seven years. In fact, the Coalition has repeatedly insisted that Direct Action measures “make sense anyway” even if climate change did not exist – “sensible” things such as planting trees. But a 5% reduction is the bare minimum Australia has to do in response to evolving global efforts to face up to a growing problem. It has probably already been superseded as a 2020 target, and Australia will certainly be required to do much more after that date.

Plant more trees? Better get a bit of controlled burning lined up ...

Taylor seemed to think that a little more education might be in order:

... surely, if there is credible reason to believe that human-induced climate change is increasing the likelihood or frequency of these fire disasters, those same politicians have a duty to understand that risk and explain how they are doing everything possible to contribute to global efforts to address it.

But action man Captain Courageous isn't interested in getting out of the front line and getting his head into musty science books and dull statistics, so there's a guaranteed dead end.

And then Taylor got agitated about Greg Hunt, looking and sounding more and more light weight as he tries to sell the sounds of silence:

....he also appeared to suggest that the prevalence of fires was not out of the ordinary, that fire activity in recent years was within the bounds of normal, and that any future discussion of the link between climate change and fires would be something for other people. 
 “We’ve had well over 200 years of bushfires since European settlement. It’s a feature in the history of Australia … I will let others in time debate the issue of severity but right now the focus has to be on those affected and those fighting the fires and I know there have been some attempts by some to politicise it. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do … I do think we look at this in the long term in the context of Australia’s history and what we need to be preparing for in the future.”

Indeed. Could there be any better cue than that for prattling Polonius, our very own Hendo, to enter the debate, and mention climate science in Twisted logic links the tragic NSW bushfires with the Prime Minister, climate change and abolishing the carbon tax? (forced video at end of link).

Well at least he rarely mentions horse racing ...

Hendo's contribution to climate science?

Labor's choice right now is not helped by the sense of urgency engendered by the tragic NSW bushfires and the perception that unusually high temperatures are the cause. Yesterday, a colleague sent me a clipping from the Herald reporting that on October 13, 1946, the temperature in Sydney reached 35 degrees.

It's hard to imagine more asinine point-scoring than that.

Not impossible, but bloody hard, as if somehow Sydney having a 35 degree day in 1946 somehow settled anything. Why, you might as well point out that Sydney's hottest day ever was 45.8 degrees on the 18th January 2013, and that Sydney's hottest summers since records began in 1859 occurred from 2002 to 2005 ...

But then Hendo has always been leery about discussing the actual science of climate science. Instead he resorts to well worn tropes and memes:

Of course, if Australia had introduced Rudd's scheme it would have done nothing to stop the bushfires. Australia's carbon emissions are but a tiny fraction of world output. Moreover, the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events remains uncertain. NSW experienced record bushfires half a century ago and earlier. It is just that there were no alienated political types around to lay the blame on political leaders.

Never mind that Australia's per capita contribution is high - even the reptiles at the lizard Oz ran a story about Nation in top three for carbon emissions - and so we're conspicuous pace setters. And never mind that we're currently busy shipping coal to Japan, China, Korea, India and other parts of Asia to assist them in contributing way more than a tiny fraction of the world's output ... (just ask the preening, boastful Coal Association for details here)

And never mind that Hendo exhibits all the classic signs of a denialist, though he can't quite bring himself to say it, and so must be content with "uncertain", and the beyond the banal observation that NSW experienced record bushfires half a century ago and earlier.

There are two sure signs of denialism at work - idle chatter about the weather, and equally idle chatter about past events, be they cold snaps, bushfires, droughts or floods. The capper is quoting from Dorothea Mackellar's poem My Country, about Australia being a wide brown land of droughts and flooding rain and pitiless blue skies and fire and famine and thirsty paddocks and so on and etc.

Hendo's evocation of past record bushfires is par for that course. Along with a jibe about "alienated political types", which at least is a variation on his usual chatter about sectarians and inner city elites.

The rest of his piece is safely political, and all about why the Labor party should fall into line with Abbott's Direct Action policy, never mind that no one seems to know what direct action is all about, or what it might involve by way of actual policy, apart from planting new trees as fuel for bushfires.

Pathetically, he even raises the old double dissolution routine, as if Abbott would be taking this seriously, as opposed to just kicking it around the park ...

The piece is really only interesting for a brand new bit of word play:

Rudd lost his way in early 2010 when Labor dropped the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme without replacing it. From that time he was deauthorised and was replaced by Julia Gillard in June 2010.
Gillard at least managed to form a minority government after the August 2010 election. However, the former prime minister also became deauthorised when, in February 2011, she broke her promise not to introduce a carbon tax.

Deauthorised?

What, they were having trouble with deauthorizing their iTunes account?

It certainly is a quaint usage, and the pond is inclined to deauthorize Hendo on the matter of climate science.

But there are plenty of others to take his place.

The Daily Terror, which has the corporate memory and mindset of a tabloid and therefore can't remember a single thing it wrote last week, has reverted to form, combining its perfect fear and loathing of Clover Moore with climate:

It's amazing how "sssh, don't mention climate science and bushfires because it's political" seems only to apply in very limited circumstances to certain people, because also on the front digital page we have Tim Bleagh offering up his peculiar insights, and he's happy to blather on about climate science and bushfires:

The Clover Moore story is a classic parochial Terror beat up and hatchet job - well done Vikki Campion with 'Mumbo jumbo' Lord Mayor Clover Moore jumps on the burning bandwagon - which didn't stop it spreading through the Murdoch empire like a brush fire, and all to do with the way greenies are blocking back burning, never mind that Barry O'Farrell's government has now been in power since March 2011 and has claimed to have increased back burning by two and a half times ...

Blair's piece, Warming up to an issue, starts off with a reference to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which is silly, because the obvious historical connection to climate science is surely the assassination of Julius Caesar.

We keed, we keed, but only because Blair is so profoundly dumb. He seems to think that climate science - or if you will global warming hysteria - began with a young lefty Bill McKibben.

McKibben is a favourite demon of the denialists, and Blair finds himself in an alternative universe:

Just imagine - if McKibben had been born black or poor or gay, he might have devoted his life to some other quest and we'd have been spared decades of climate scaremongering. From little things, stupid things grow.

Actually, from stupid misrepresentations of history, stupid Blair columns grow.

If you want a brief history of climate change science, why not head off to the wiki here. you might be surprised that McKibben doesn't actually score a specific mention, and you might be surprised - if you've been airheaded by Blair - just how far back it stretches.

Not that McKibben isn't now a prominent activist, more to remind yourself of how profoundly stupid Blair is ...

And sure enough you get this for the Blair wrap up:

Australia can't possibly take what McKibben describes as "serious action" on climate change. We only produce 1.4 per cent or so of the entire globe's human-caused carbon emissions. 

Yes, and never mind the coal we ship, or the conspicuous consumption example we set.

That's why the carbon tax is such a vile fraud, and why Labor's vote fell so far in the last election. 
Let's worry about more pressing matters than climate change. By which I mean every single matter anybody can think of.

And that's why the Daily Terror is an incredibly stupid rag promoting the incredibly stupid thoughts of incredibly stupid people.

Now you might think the pond hasn't engaged with Blair's arguments, but truth to tell, there's no point arguing with stupid people,  especially the ones that got their incredibly stupid degree in science from a spell as a cadet on The Truth ...

The Truth, as old stagers will recall, was a wild cat rag dedicated to big bare tits, gossip, humour of a dunny kind, and a lavish horse racing guide on how to piss your money against the wall gambling ...

Oh, sssh, whatever you do, don't mention horse racing ...

Finally, the pond is pleased to note that assorted expenses scandals keep on ticking over quite nicely, the latest involving John Alexander, as reported in 'Electoral business' behind John Alexander's taxpayer trip to Margaret River.

Apparently and allegedly, one of the reasons John Alexander turned up in WA wine country (and what nice country it is) was to study traffic congestion, and a few indignant punters wondered why he didn't just hop in a car and try to avoid gridlock in Sydney ...

And of course as soon as Alexander pops up, so does the evasive pervasive silence surrounding MP Don Randall's trip to Cairns ...

Poor old Slipper. He clearly lacked the evasive skills necessary to explain junkets as important electoral business ...

As usual, David Pope runs with the fuss, and manages to skewer a number of targets in one go.

Knight, Leak and Wilcox might be the Walkley nominees this year - they're all obsessed with an obsessive Ruddster as you can see here .

All nice work in their own way, but Pope and Rowe are the heavy hitters in the pond's world ...

Who else could capture the frenzied partying and link it to the frenzied rorting and the gay bashing crowd?