A confusing flurry of tangled, mixed messages from the reptiles at the lizard Oz ...

(Above: the pond has run it before, and likely will run it again, and always checks for more David Pope here)

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

Here's Henry Ergas being satirical in Strapped in for mid-air dharma (behind the paywall because never mind the date, reach for the purse), yet it carries the date of April 7th.

After a severe flurry of pinches, the pond confirmed it was April 14th. Seven days ago, the story first saw digital light of day, yet there's dear old desiccated Henry at the head of the Oz's digital commentariat parade this very day:

Look, there he is, which leads to the question, down, deep down on the right hand side.

Did the reptiles think Ergas's brand of juvenile, undergraduate humour hadn't had enough of an airing? Or is raiding the mausoleum the new and EXCLUSIVE way forward?

As for the piece itself, it's tragic. Academic humour? As the immortal Johnson once remarked, Sir, an academic being funny is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all:


Linking arms with some of the party’s legendary Gold Pass users, Plibersek led the Labor Elders Choir in 1960s protest songs, including the iconic We Shall Not Take Off. (“We shall not take off/We shall not take off/Why, deep in my heart, I do believe/we shall not take off today”). Other passengers, whose flights showed no signs of departing, praised the campaign for reflecting “conditions on the ground” while the choir burst into I Still Call Trades Hall Home.

It's possible to imagine young Henry slurping a lithe, spirited red, springy and sappy in its youthfulness, and cackling with delight at his clever impudence, as he pounds away at the keys of his typewriter, and he nails the comrades to the floor, but only if you're a follower of Dali and inclined to surrealism.

There's reams more, all ripping yarns and jolly good satirical fun:

Reminiscing about Aeroflot in the golden days of the Brezhnev era, Rhiannon criticised Tony Abbott’s move to reintroduce knights and dames into Australian honours. “If instead Alan Joyce could aspire to the Gold Star (Two Sickles) of the Hero of Socialist Labour,” she said, “you’d get Soviet quality on Qantas and Australians flocking to state rail: a win-win solution.”

But strangely there's not a single joke about Alan Joyce pissing money against the wall on a venture into Asia at precisely the time that Asian airlines were cashed up, buying up fleets, and competing fiercely for travel dollars, nor a single joke about Joyce and the Qantas management driving the airline into the ground. Strange, it must be that some academics only have a funny right-wing elbow ...

Never mind, let's leave the dharma bum to chortle, and look forward to him chortling about the state of network Ten, guided as it has been by such exemplary capitalists as Lachlan Murdoch and Gina Rinehart.

"We destroyed Ten so as to save it," muses Gina. "Who could hope for a higher dharma, or fiercer satire, than that?"

But after that blast from the past, it was time to move on, and where else but to Graham Lloyd who contributed a magnificent six paragraphs on climate change under the header Panel in search of message to keep it in the game (behind the paywall because you have to pay to for the pleasure of such detailed scribbling).

Six whole pars. And the first and the last were single, rather short sentences!

Now elsewhere you could read detailed reports on the matter at hand - yesterday the Fairfaxians printed quite a detailed UN calls for drastic action to stop climate change.

The message seemed clear enough:

The world must take radical steps to combat climate change, and begin right away – but if it does, the cost of a greener, healthier future will be surprisingly small. 
However if the world wishes to avoid ecological catastrophe, it will probably need new technologies that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it underground. 
This is the message of a new major climate change report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in Berlin on Sunday.

Uh huh. That sounds like a clear enough message.

And yesterday The Graudian seemed to have no trouble deciphering the message in IPCC climate change report: averting catastrophe is eminently affordable:

Catastrophic climate change can be averted without sacrificing living standards according to a UN report, which concludes that the transformation required to a world of clean energy is eminently affordable. 
“It doesn’t cost the world to save the planet,” said economist Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, who led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) team. 
The cheapest and least risky route to dealing with global warming is to abandon all dirty fossil fuels in coming decades, the report found. Gas – including that from the global fracking boom – could be important during the transition, Edenhofer said, but only if it replaced coal burning.

The Graudian went on at some length, and provided sundry links here and there, and at the same time there were other messages out there, like the one headed The Statistical Probability That Climate Change Is Not Manmade Is 0.1 Percent:

“The main rational argument held by climate skeptics is that, the global warming hypothesis depends on these giant models—they say, if the evidence is so strong, we shouldn’t need supercomputers to demonstrate it,” he said. “Well, it turns out, we don’t. Without supercomputers, I got quite similar results, and I can use this paleodata to suggest the probabilities [that climate change falls within established natural variation].” 
 To do that, Lovejoy used surface air temperature measures from NASA, NOAA, and and the Climate Research Unit, and the paleodata proxies (at 100-year time intervals, where they are believed to be most accurate) to complete a statistical analysis of whether what we saw happen prior to human pollution matches up at all with what we’ve seen since humans began putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It doesn’t. 
“Even if you allow for very, very extreme natural fluctuations, the worst you can do is reject the hypothesis [of natural variation] with 99.8 percent certainty,” Lovejoy said. “This study will be a blow to any remaining climate change-deniers … their two most convincing arguments—that the warming is natural in origin, and that the computer models are wrong—are either directly contradicted by this analysis, or simply do not apply to it.”

Yep, it only takes a few minutes of anyone's time to google up a few messages which seem clear enough. Whether you want to pay any attention or heed the messages is another matter, but it seems poor old Graham Lloyd has a scrambled receiver.

It's a bit like he's a crystal radio set with a hum in his ears:

(found here by way of link)

Yes, poor old befuddled Lloyd is confused, a right old corn cob of chaos:

The IPCC is becoming tangled in its own mixed messages regarding the cost and consequences of tackling climate change. 
The political imperative ­remains to highlight the risks of runaway climate change and ­inject a keen sense of urgency into calls for action on a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, due to be inked in Paris next year. But the message — both in terms of the science and financial cost — is making it an increasingly hard sell. 
Release of the fifth assessment report in December was muddled by confusion over why global average surface temperatures had not risen for more than a decade despite strong growth in carbon dioxide emissions. After years of denial, the IPCC report finally acknowledged the “hiatus” and put forward a number of possible explanations, including natural climate variability and increased ocean heat. 
Further debate followed the release last month of the working group two report into climate change “impact and adaptation”, which estimated global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of 2C at between 0.2 and 2.0 per cent of income. 
This was much lower than many had expected, given the 5 to 20 per cent estimated by Lord Stern in his advice to the British government. Today’s IPCC report shows the cost of acting to reduce carbon emissions to keep warming below 2C could be as high as 11 per cent of global consumption by the end of the century. The political reality is that Australia has taken climate change off the G20 agenda, Europe is scrapping its subsidies for renewables and Germany is turning back to coal. 
And the IPCC is struggling for a clear message to keep its political objective on track.

That's it. That's Lloyd in his entirety.

Mixed messages, hard sell, muddle and confusion, the hiatus that many climate scientists claim isn't a hiatus at all, and an alarmist assessment of 11% at the very moment the Graudian was reporting something entirely different:

Diverting hundred of billions of dollars from fossil fuels into renewable energy and cutting energy waste would shave just 0.06% off expected annual economic growth rates of 1.3%-3%, the IPCC report concluded. “The report is clear: the more you wait, the more it will cost [and] the more difficult it will become,” said EU commissioner Connie Hedegaard. The US secretary of state, John Kerry, said: “This report is a wake-up call about global economic opportunity we can seize today as we lead on climate change.”

Nope, the report isn't clear, at least to Graham Lloyd.

Which brings the pond to a deeper existential question.

Why does Graham Lloyd exist?

No, not on a personal level. No doubt his mother had her reasons, and no doubt Lloyd leads a life teeming with relationships and personal pleasures ...

It's more on the professional level.

Here's a man who ostensibly handles the environment for the reptiles at the lizard Oz, yet he seems confused and incapable of discerning clear messages, or when he does discern a message, he seizes on the wrong one, or old ones, or anything at all that will help serve a climate denialist agenda that seems to have been adopted as a peculiar professional - and personal - mission by the reptiles at the lizard Oz ...

What does he think each day he drags himself out of bed? Does he look in the mirror and wonder at the weirdness of it all?

Or does even that confuse and startle him, with a message that really is very tangled and mixed?

So there we have it. Week old stories, and stories with a mindset somewhere back in some mythical Luddite past where science is too confusing and too hard, and its messages too befuddling and bemusing ...

The pond thinks it's time for Graham Lloyd and the other reptiles to step into the modern age of communications.

Here's the very thing, fresh from 1936 when radio men were all the go, and women stuck to their knitting...