Tag: climate change
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Don’t mock George Brandis
He’s trying to be intellectual. In fact, today’s xkcd comic about free speech is delightfully well-timed, considering yesterday’s remarks by George Brandis about free speech in an online magazine called Spiked. The magazine quotes Brandis as follows: He isn’t a climate-change denier; he says he was ‘on the side of those who believed in anthropogenic global…
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Sorry Tony, you fail the Turing Test
It’s election time again, and that means its also incoherent-shouting-about-taxes time. Tony Abbott is quick off the block, claiming that “the carbon tax and the mining tax are anti Western Australian taxes.” It’s almost too drearily, predictably inane a comment to warrant analysis. But one of Abbott’s skills, I now realise, is his soul-crushing dreariness, the…
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Fred Singer’s climate consensus denial
So I read with some bewilderment [1]In the naïve sense of one who expects intellectual honesty. a recent article by Professor S. Fred Singer on climate change. It jumps around a bit but mostly tries to attack the idea of scientific consensus. Singer’s logic leads from platitudes like this: Scientific veracity does not depend on fashionable…
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Denial in carbon politics
This is a follow-up to my previous post on Greg Hunt’s paradoxical lack of enthusiasm for discussing climate change policy. He’s very quiet on the Coalition’s “Direct Action” policy, and very loud on the Coalition’s promise to remove Labor’s carbon tax. (Highly suspicious, given that one is theoretically necessitated by the other.) But will the…
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If not the carbon tax, then what?
Greg Hunt, the Opposition’s spokesperson on Climate Action, is trying very hard to convince anyone who will listen that the Coalition can and will repeal Labor’s carbon tax if it wins government. He responds to a well-considered piece by David Forman on the political difficulties of doing so. I want to make two points about…
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Straw alarmism
So much is said in the political catastrophe surrounding climate change that I can’t quite imagine anyone keeping up with it. However, rbutr has informed me that one particular pseudo-anonymous article at something called the “Independent Journal Review” (or “IJReview”) could do with a closer look, and so I shall oblige. The IJReview discusses James Lovelock’s…
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Curing viral misinformation
A great deal of mischief is caused, regularly, by viral misinformation. Factoids that support one side of any controversial issue are rapidly copied and pasted many times over (the “echo chamber”). By the time anyone manages to marshal the truth into a coherent response, it’s too late — the lie has convinced enough people for…
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Hopes for 2012
Here’s a bit of everything for the new year — some hopes for what we could and should be doing as a nation, in no particular order. We must address the asylum seeker debate with decency, maturity and humility. We should accept many more refugees, and at the same time encourage other countries to do so…
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The Galileo gambit movement
I’ve had another sudden fit of pseudo-artistic buffoonery. I stumbled across the Galileo Movement largely by way of Wendy Carlisle’s Background Briefing report: In February this year a new group emerged: the Galileo movement. Its scientific advisers are the who’s who of the international climate sceptics movement. Its patron is the powerful Sydney radio personality Alan…
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Qualifications required to debate AGW
Until recently, I was a little confused by some of the standards being applied to the protagonists of the political debate on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). However, I’ve now drawn up a handy flow chart to help resolve the confusion. (Click on the image for a slightly larger version.)