In which the reptiles of the lizard Oz are a comprehensive jihadist bust, but the pond tries to offer links and distractions ...

 

Lately, what with assorted reptile jihads going down as befits the Australian Daily Zionist News, climate science denialism seems to have taken a back seat, and the consequences of the recent wild weather gone unremarked.

The reptiles at the Nine rags have tried to compensate ...

Global warning: Trump’s war on the planet heats up (*archive link)
Nick O'Malley
Environment and Climate Editor

King Donald makes an easy target ...

Married to readings of average temperatures, which lag but waltz ever upwards in harmony, the Keeling Curve is the world’s most simple and transparent illustration of climate change. The curve, and the field of climate science it accelerated, is not only one of the US’s great achievements and gifts to the world, but a demonstration of the efficacy of long-term and dedicated scientific practice.
Naturally, the Trump administration wants to destroy it.
In March, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it could save $US150,000 by ending the observatory’s lease on an office and in the administration’s midyear budget proposal, it flagged ending the organisation’s funding. The assault on the Mauna Loa Observatory is part of a far wider attack on climate science and action mounted by the Trump administration over the past year.
Some highlights: In April, the administration disbanded the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which had once been home to the climatologist James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony before Congress was key to introducing the world to the climate threat.
In August, Trump ordered a halt in the construction of the near-complete $US4 billion Revolution Wind project, a wind farm of 114 turbines off the coast of Rhode Island that by next year would have been providing enough electricity for 350,000 homes if the developer had been allowed to finish the job. Courts intervened, though days before Christmas, Trump again sought to force a halt to Revolution, and a second project called Empire Wind, also nearing completion.
Trump has raged against wind energy ever since turbines were built near his golf course in Scotland. “I’ve studied it better than anybody I know,” he said in a 2019 speech. “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. They’re noisy. They kill the birds.”
In September, Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly devolved into a rant against climate science and renewable energy. “This ‘climate change’, it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump said. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.”
Trump told world leaders, who listened in silence: “I’m really good at predicting things. I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from this green energy scam, your country is going to fail.
“Radicalised environmentalists,” he said, wanted to “kill all the cows.“

And so on, and Bianca joined in ...

Climate whiplash: We can no longer pretend this isn’t a crisis (*archive link)
By Bianca Hall

What will it take for policymakers to take this more seriously?
That’s the question a desperate-sounding Jeremy posed on local ABC talkback radio as he drove through central Victoria, which has been ravaged by bushfires for the past week, while his family was on the Great Ocean Road trapped by floodwaters.
Queenslanders have been warned to brace for further flooding and heavy swells in coming days, as another cyclone threatens to form off the coast – even as recovery from ex-cyclone Koji continues.
In both NSW and Victoria, authorities on the weekend warned people to limit the time they spend outdoors to reduce exposure to bushfire smoke. That smoke, it should be remembered, contains toxic particles from everything incinerated in the fires – not just trees and grass, but buildings, factories, vehicles, and more.
Communities in southern New South Wales have been hit by fires. Communities in Queensland’s central highlands were urged to evacuate on Thursday morning as the Mackenzie River inched ever closer to its peak. Large areas of Western Australia remain gripped by severe heatwaves and fires.
Hundreds have been made homeless by the Victorian bushfires. Many more are now homeless – tourists, thankfully temporarily – due to the flash flooding that swept through the Great Ocean Road and Gippsland on Thursday.
These are not just “weather events”, and it’s not like we haven’t been warned. Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades about the devastation that unchecked fossil fuel production and consumption, and the resulting warming, will bring.
They have warned that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which exacerbates sudden storms, just like the one that smashed through the Great Ocean Road.
And yet, there is a maddening tendency to treat each environmental crisis that climate change throws at us as another isolated incident.
Surely, that pretence must now fall.

There was even a graph, in approved  ABC Finance report style...

It's all a bit late.

Not that the pond is bitter, but see how that graph was performing back in 2010?

The pond remembers the glory days when the Nine rags, then under the name of Fairfax, hosted ratbags of the Paul Sheehan kind ...

Beware the climate of conformity (that's an intermittent archive link back to 2009)

...The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven And Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia's foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven And Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.
The book's 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years' research and a depth and breadth of scholarship. As Plimer writes: "An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history."
The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia's most eminent geologist. As such, he thinks about time very differently from most of us. He takes the long, long view. He looks at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time. He writes: "Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone."
Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive". Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations' peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)

And so on, and that's when it mattered, and that's when things might have been set in motion.

Instead the Nine rags went all in on click bait trolling with the likes of Miranda the Devine...

Green ideas must take blame for deaths (*archive link)

The Devine was in her prime back in February 2009:

So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

Devine flourished in those days:

Planet doomsayers need a cold shower (*archive link)

...As a University of Adelaide geologist, Dr Ian Plimer, writes in his new book, Heaven And Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, scientists are usually "anarchic, bow to no authority and construct conclusions based on evidence … Science is not dogmatic and the science of any phenomenon is never settled."
His dense book, crammed with 2311 footnotes, is a comprehensive scientific refutation of the beliefs underpinning the idea of human-caused climate change.
"It is meant to be an overwhelming demolition job," said Plimer on the phone from Adelaide where he is preparing a field trip this weekend to Broken Hill to study rocks.
He wrote the book, "for those out there with an open mind wanting to know more about how the planet works. The mind is like a parachute. It only works when it is open".
From the geologist's perspective he says our climate has always changed in cycles, affected by such variables as the orbit of the planet and our distance from the sun, which itself produces variable amounts of radiation. One of the lessons of 500 million years of history, he says, is that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature.

Sorry Nick, sorry Bianca, it's long way past too late, and how much better if young Warwick had driven your rag  into bankruptcy and oblivion. 

Your rag helped pave the way for the onion muncher and his kind, and now the Devine panders to King Donald, climate science denialist in chief. Your rag was an enabler, complicit in the folly, for which we now see the fruits.

Of course your rag struggled to match the out and proud loonacy of the lizard Oz, and characters of the Lloydie of the Amazon kind. Cf Crikey ... (sorry paywall, but this is all of it):

Back to reptile studies and the reason the pond did that extended Tootle is that today is a comprehensive bust.

The pond should note that yesterday rabid Zionist Our Henry was out and about, gambolling in company with Gawenda ... 

The pond will do no more than provide intermittent archive links ...

This is more than just a storm in a teacup. Our culture is being shredded;

Adelaide Writers Week hypocrisy shows how our intellectual class is betraying Australian tolerance
In demanding a platform, Randa Abdel-Fattah seeks to convert into a right what is merely a privilege: a privilege whose sole condition is the mutual respect she has repeatedly rejected.That ought to be uncontentious.
By Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott

The pond only notes it for diligent students and for those wanting to have a chortle at a rabidly intolerant bigot ranting about the need for tolerance in relation to this storm in a lizard Oz jihad teacup.

Another notable Zionist was also out and about and was still hanging around like a bad smell this morning ...

Conspiracy, hypocrisy: how Adler burned down Writers Week house
How Louise Adler burned down the Adelaide Writers’ Week house
Is this the biggest fiction? Louise Adler resigned over ‘Jewish lobby’ influence. Yet she allegedly tried to cancel a Pulitzer Prize winner herself, exposing contradictions in her free speech stance.
By Michael Gawenda

Is there anything lower or more intellectually debasing than joining in a lizard Oz jihad? While alleging that apparently the board had no agency whatsoever in the matter? 

One thing's certain - Jew on Jew action can be as wild as ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

As for debasement, Dame Slap blowing in from Planet Janet above the Faraway Tree was on hand to provide a definitive answer:

It’s setting norms, not laws, that will purge Jew hatred
Powers and mandates mean nothing without courage. No law – current or new – is a substitute for guts.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Remember when the reptile jihad was all about legislation and the quicker the better to pander to the Zionist lobby? But remember, the reptile spirit is to get them coming, and then going, and then coming and going again...

Have at her if you will, but the pond suspects that changing the behaviour of the current genocidal government of Israel might help.

As for the rest, the reason it's a bust is that this day's fare is what the pond calls headline nodders...

You read the headlines, and you nod, and perhaps say, "ah, so and thus", and then move on, knowing that all you need to know was embedded in the headlines ... while perhaps wondering, "is the lettuce still in with a shot?"

For some weird reason the reptiles have taken to encouraging chairman Xi and his minions on the Taiwan matter...

Note to DFAT: There’s no room for compromise on Taiwan question
Taiwan is a province of China, just as Tasmania is a state of Australia. This is the only correct understanding of the ‘one China’ principle.
By Xiao Qian

Dredging up China's ambassador like a cat gorged with platitudes gives the reptiles a chance to boast of an EXCLUSIVE

EXCLUSIVE

Prepare for ‘reunified China’, envoy warns

China says Australia must accept Taiwan reunification or face ‘no forgiveness’

Beijing’s ambassador has delivered a stark message comparing Taiwan to Tasmania while threatening Australia faces a choice between Chinese trade benefits and supporting Taiwan’s status quo.
By Anthony Galloway

The pond likes to imagine that back in the 1930s the reptiles would regularly have provided space for Herr Joachim von Ribbentrop advising "prepare for reunified Germany, envoy warns". 

What EXCLUSIVES those would have been...

How King Donald's Greenland putsch has empowered rogue states ...

The best the reptiles could muster was a mild clucking and tut-tutting from the lizard Oz editorialist buried deep in the commentary section ...

Perhaps the bromancer will surface later in the day, perhaps not.

As for the current lizard Oz jihad on Albo, his hate speech and gun laws, the reptiles continue to get him coming and going, but did he have to make it so easy for them?

Yet again the pond was reminded of that quote from The Wire:

Royce's ex-chief of staff, Coleman Parker, to Norman: "They always disappoint. Closer you get, the more you look. All of them."

Never mind, the pond always believes, with Scarlett, that tamarrah will be a better day ...or at least another one.

And so to end this day, the pond could have indulged in a survey of fine King Donald tweets ...

"The Fact That They Would Even Try To Pass Such A Bill Should Tell You Everything About How Much They Hate You": 34 Of The Very, Very, Very Best Political Tweets Of The Week

But that's for the likes of BuzzFeed.

Instead a note by a correspondent sent the pond haring off to cartoons in ancient 1950s times ... where McCarthyism suggests King Donald isn't the exception, so much as the rule ...

There were a couple of sites worth a squiz ...Let Me Finish ...

I checked out the third volume of Walt Kelly’s Pogo strips, Evidence to the Contrary, which runs from from 1953 to 1954. As acknowledged in the notes at the back of the volume, this is when the strip started getting political, satirizing Joseph McCarthy and the fervor for weeding out communists. McCarthy is caricatured in Simple J. Malarkey, a rather sinister wildcat introduced as a cousin of occasional villain Wiley Catt.
He’s assisted by Mole MacCarony, an extreme germophobe who walks around with a Flit gun that he sprays at just about everybody and everything, and later takes issue with migratory birds as well. He’s also incredibly near-sighted, as befits his species. He’s based on Patrick McCarran, an anti-communist senator from Nevada who supported limiting immigration and denying visas for ideological reasons.
The two of them join Deacon Mushrat’s bird-watching club, with Malarkey taking it over by threatening the Deacon with a shotgun, and starts casting suspicion on everyone.
The two are assumed to have killed each other in June 1953, but they both later reappear at a time when McCarthy was no longer being taken as seriously. MacCarony receives a taste of his own medicine when Albert accuses him of kidnapping with absolutely no evidence, and then starts a bomb scare when he mistakes a young woodchuck’s gibberish for subversive foreign speech. In August 1954, Malarkey shows up in the company of a badger named Charlie. He was named after someone called “Indian Charlie” whom McCarthy cited as his childhood mentor, but is drawn to look like Richard Nixon.
Malarkey, MacCarony, and Charlie all wear sacks on their heads a few times, and while of course McCarthy wasn’t affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, Kelly wanted to point out the similarity of their paranoid prejudice. The satire is silly and absurd, yet would presumably have hit close to home when the strips first ran and McCarthy was surprisingly popular. After all, if you DIDN’T support him, he was liable to brand you a communist.

A few more samples ...

Truth to tell, back in the day, the pond was more MAD magazine, though not as early as this sample ...

In that panel you can see Roy Cohn whispering into McCarthy's ear, and the ghost of Roy is still whispering into King Donald's ear to this very day ...

Re Herb Lock, here's a few cartoons, found at PBS ...

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was ...

A final word on climate science.

Anyone interested in those ghastly days can refresh memories with a Kiwi academic paper, available in pdf form for download:

Climate Change in the Media: Climate Denial,
Ian Plimer, and the Staging of Public Debate
Angi Buettner
Victoria University of Wellington

And so to keeping ancient cartoon spirits alive ...