Tag: climate change
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Carbon parochialism
One of the most effective arguments against pricing carbon in Australia is that horrible rhetorical question: how much effect will it have in isolation? Carbon price opponents think they’re onto a winner here, and their success (I think) has largely been in framing it as a national rather than a global issue. In reality, reducing…
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Paul Nurse on climate change denialism
“Science Under Attack“, by Paul Nurse for BBC Horizon (via Hot Topic).
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Dams might be the new controlled burns
The Queensland flood disaster continues in tragic and dramatic fashion, though Sri Lanka and Brazil have it even worse. However, there is a yet more pressing concern in some quarters. You see, this isn’t just about lost lives and property, but about the future of market economics. The real question is: how can we blame this…
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Who is Dennis Ambler?
Continuing on (a bit) from my [intlink id=”1426″ type=”post”]last post[/intlink], I’m going to examine another of Dennis Ambler’s articles for the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). This one is mostly a long rambling swipe at lots of different and very accomplished individuals, and not (as in the other case) an outright attempt to reinvent the…
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Consensus Bashing
The Science and Public Policy Institute certainly does provide a lot of hilariously twisted commentary on climate change. Two years ago (January 2009), Doran and Zimmerman (D&Z) published a paper based on Zimmerman’s masters thesis. Unsurprisingly, they found that the vast majority (97%) of climate scientists think climate change is real and human-induced. This kind of…
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An assault on the sensibilities
It’s probably about time I had something to say on matters unrelated to the Australian political situation. Which brings me to my other, recently neglected pet blogging topic – climate change. I came to hear of the 10:10 campaign and Richard Curtis’s “No Pressure” short film via Deltoid, The Guardian and Climate Progress. I’m not…
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Was it right? (part 2)
This is a counterargument to a [intlink id=”1069″ type=”post”]previous post[/intlink], in which I argued the case for switching from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Prime Minister Julia Gillard (or rather, why certain objections were unfounded). Gillard’s rise to power may have restored Labor’s popularity for the time being (and certainly at a very opportune moment),…
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I vote for a hung parliament
How did it come to this? The Greens, supposedly a party of the “far left” (whatever that means), are now the flag bearers for a market-based policy – carbon emissions trading. Rudd along with three successive opponents – Howard, Nelson and Turnbull — all pledged to introduce or support an ETS. Now the Labor Party…
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The ABC of climate change denial
The ABC chairman Maurice Newman’s thoughts on the reporting of climate change are, I think, symptomatic of the damage that denialism has inflicted. He was interviewed on Wednesday, and appears more than a little ignorant of the state our of climate knowledge, and even a little naïve regarding scientific processes. Newman says: My view on…
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Climate reporting – compare and contrast
There’s a subtle difference here that I can’t quite put my finger on. An article in The Register (by Lewis Page): Agricultural brainboxes at Stanford University say that global warming isn’t likely to seriously affect poor people in developing nations, who make up so much of the human race. Under some scenarios, poor farmers “could…