Of course the pond is shocked, believe it if you can believe Maurice Newman ...

Talk about wildly excited.

No, not the news that Maurice Newman, aka """, believes in climate science ...

See that gold bar, that sign you have to pay if you want to access the rotating digital splash of doom at the top of the lizard Oz page ...

Well the pond slid through, like it was greased with KY jelly, and didn't have to pay a dime or even google to get around the paywall ...

What fun, but at least we now know what Newman is really worth.

Of course the actual read was beyond tedious.

Right at the get go, Newman managed the obvious. His favourite routine is to berate people for turning science into a religion, and then he comes out with Readers may be shocked to hear I believe in climate change.

Damn right, belief has got nothing to do with it. He might accept the findings or the conclusions of current climate science, and in due course if there are alternate findings, he might accept or disagree with them. What joy if it turned out the world was flat, the moon made of green cheese and climate science a passing figment of the imagination.

Belief is best left to those who want to practise cannibalism in their local church on Sunday, munching on human flesh and swallowing a little human blood. That takes oodles of belief and diddly squat by way of science.

Things don't get any better when you get to the opening meat on offer in Newman's Mother Nature suggests the party's over for IPCC.

Given the low-grade attacks on me following my piece "Crowds go cold on climate cost" (The Australian, Dec 31) readers of Fairfax publications and The Guardian may be shocked to hear I believe in climate change. I also accept carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The trouble is, I cannot reconcile the claims of dangerous human CO2 emissions with the observed record. 
I admit it. I am not a climate scientist. That said, I have closely followed this debate for more than two decades, having been seasoned originally by the global cooling certainty of the 1970s.

Oh sure, it takes an admirable cheek and chutzpah to say you don't have the first clue about something, are completely unqualified, and then proceed to vent your ignorant, uninformed opinions to the world, or perhaps more bizarrely, given that the forum is the reptiles of the lizard Oz, expect to shock the readers of Fairfax - busy coping with their dose of Switzer denialism - or The Graudian ...

That begins to sound really weird ...

I mean if you wanted to shock them, why not shock them directly?

In the usual way Newman is still making it personal and all about him - that's what happens when you have an insatiable ego. And he's still quoting Roy Spencer:

The climate consensus of the 70s, like the period since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, was dominated by politics, not science. I was reminded of how deeply political awareness has infected today's academies when I received an apology from a respected climate scientist who corrected his own public cheap shot at me. He said, "I attempt to be politically even-handed ... I try to steer a middle course as a scientist." 
Really? Surely science is not about neutrality? It is about evidence and conclusions which fall where they will. So when an internationally acclaimed climatologist like Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama at Huntsville dispassionately analyses climate models covering 33 years and concludes that both the surface and satellite observations produce linear temperature trends that are below 87 of the 90 models used in the comparison, he does not politically neutralise his findings. They are empirical fact.

Dispassionate? Only in Newman's alternative universe.

A nanosecond's googling of the kind perfected by Greg Hunt would confirm that Roy Spencer doesn't have the reputation he once had, not since he slipped into the creationist/intelligent design tent.

You can wander far and wide just by googling Roy Spencer and creationism and/or intelligent design, and you can land on many pages dedicated to the fun, including Yes, Roy Spencer IS a creationist.

Who'd have thought we'd still be having creationist fun this late in the game. Perhaps only in America, where the Pew survey keeps on asking the question and reporting it here:

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis, six-in-ten Americans (60%) say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” while a third (33%) reject the idea of evolution, saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” The share of the general public that says that humans have evolved over time is about the same as it was in 2009, when Pew Research last asked the question.

Meanwhile back with Newman, whom the pond understands is not related to Alfred E. - well at least the spelling proposes but perhaps they're brothers in surrealistic satirical arms - another name is flung into the digital ether without thought or pause:

Spencer is joined by celebrated Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen, who says: "I think that the latest (AR5) IPCC report has truly sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase." He is "willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now". Any takers?

Uh huh. Science as a form of gambling.

But again if you bother to google Lindzen, you quickly land on his wiki, and discover that the man has regularly shot himself in his foot, and maybe gambling isn't his strong suit:

According to an April 30, 2012 New York Times article, "Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point "nutty." He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate." However, he believes that decreasing tropical cirrus clouds in a warmer world will allow more longwave radiation to escape the atmosphere, counteracting the warming. Lindzen first published this "iris" theory in 2001, and offered more support in a 2009 paper,but today "most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited" according to the Times article. Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained "some stupid mistakes" in his handling of the satellite data. "It was just embarrassing," he said in the Times interview. "The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque. (here for the footnotes)

Speaking of a level of hilarious incoherence, as one does.

If you want a more detailed look at Lindzen, head off to that New York Times article, Clouds' Effect on Climate Change is Last Bastion for Dissenters (may be paywall affected), published at the end of April 2012, and ending this way:

In his Congressional appearances, speeches and popular writings, Dr. Lindzen offers little hint of how thin the published science supporting his position is. Instead, starting from his disputed iris mechanism, he makes what many of his colleagues see as an unwarranted leap of logic, professing near-certainty that climate change is not a problem society needs to worry about. 
 “You have politicians who are being told if they question this, they are anti-science,” Dr. Lindzen said. “We are trying to tell them, no, questioning is never anti-science.” 
 Among the experts most offended by Dr. Lindzen’s stance are many of his colleagues in the M.I.T. atmospheric sciences department, some of whom were once as skeptical as he about climate change. “Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’ ” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”


So why doesn't Maurice "let the evidence and conclusions fall where they will" Newman worry about the reliability of his sources, and quote alternative understandings?

It can't be the word count, because he's allowed to blather on endlessly in his unscientific way. There seems to be plenty of space to consider difficulties and contingencies and exceptions and concerns, instead of run with dogmatic certainty ...

Nope, it's because he's in the grip of a "belief" and anyone floating in the ether who supports that "belief" is just more grist to the mill.

Newman is the perfect example of a person not open to debate and informed discussion.

Inevitably when you get into this situation, the debate stays personal and political:

What we now see is the unravelling of years of shoddy science and sloppy journalism. If it wasn't for independent Murdoch newspapers around the world, the mainstream media would be almost completely captured by the IPCC establishment. That is certainly true in Australia. For six or seven years we were bullied into accepting that the IPCC's assessment reports were the climate science bible. Its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, told us the IPCC relied solely on peer-reviewed literature. Then Murdoch papers alerted us to scientific scandals and Donna Laframboise, in her book The Delinquent Teenager, astonished us with her extraordinary revelation that of 18,000 references in the IPCC's AR4 report, one-third were not peer reviewed. Some were Greenpeace press releases, others student papers and working papers from a conference. In some chapters, the majority of references were not peer reviewed. Many lead authors were inexperienced, or linked to advocate groups like WWF and Greenpeace. Why are we not surprised?

You see, the reptiles at the lizard Oz are saving the world, and Maurice "I'm no scientist" Newman can berate others for being inexperienced ...

Self-serving? Down the rabbit hole with Alice and Maurice?

You betcha.

And of course it wouldn't do if the piece couldn't be rounded out with a bout of international conspiracy theory:

The IPCC was bound to be captured by the green movement. After all, it is a political body. It is not a panel of scientists but a panel of governments driven by the UN. Its sole purpose is to assess the risks of human-induced climate change. It has spawned industries. One is scientists determined to find an anthropogenic cause. Another is climate remediation. And, naturally, an industry to redistribute taxes to sustain it all. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, this cartel will deny all contrary evidence. Its very survival depends on it. But the tide is turning and Mother Nature has signalled her intention not to co-operate. 

And finally a return to that Wagnerian motif that it's all about him, Maurice:

In the meantime, childish personal attacks on those who point out flaws in IPCC reasoning and advice only increase scepticism. They are no substitute for empirical evidence and are well into diminishing returns. The party's over.

This from a man whose empirical evidence consists of quoting a couple of scientists with a dubious reputation.

The trouble of course is that the more attention is paid to Newman, the more gratified he is, and the more he goes on in ways certain to attract attention.

It's childish, and some might think it wiser just to play a stone wall, in a Shakespearean way, and ignore him, but once again at the bottom of the piece comes that killer conclusion:

Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council.

So what will Maurice be telling Tony Abbott about the billions he intends to piss against the wall fighting a problem that allegedly doesn't exist ...?

How does Greg Hunt sleep at night?

Tell me grasshopper, what is the sound of crickets?

So what's the real point of all the climate wars and the distractions arising therefrom?

Does David Pope provide a clue? And more Popery here.

Yep, make out like bandits while the sun shines, and never mind if it's a little warming. Just don the budgie smugglers and smuggle away ...