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What delusionary world do ABC people inhabit? The national broadcaster’s editorial director, Alan Sunderland, last year fulminated against “liars and cheats and deceivers” generating fake news for the gullible. He wrote, “All responsible media organisations promise to aim for accuracy, to tell all sides of a story… Some, like the ABC, promise never to take an editorial stand or express an opinion, while others promise to make clear the distinction between their reporting and their commentary…” (My emphasis)
Oh, I see. There’s no ABC green-left narratives on lovely wind and solar energy, or ABC tear-jerking for discredited Sri Lankan “refugees”, or for stacking panels with ‘progressives’ and blackballing the Institute of Public Affairs…
My incredulity accelerated when I came across Sunderland’s 11-page audit of the ABC’s coverage of Al Gore’s Melbourne-Sydney visit in mid-July 2017. Gore came to push his new climate-horror film “An Inconvenient Sequel”.
Sunderland’s “Editorial review of ABC interviews with Al Gore, July 2017” checked if the ABC’s coverage of Gore was biased and/or excessive, and whether Gore suckered the ABC into unduly promoting his film. Sunderland also checked whether the ABC, as per charter, was “present(ing) a diversity of perspectives so that, over time, no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented.”
Actually Gore was here again only last June, when the Queensland government spent $320,000 for his Climate Week appearance. (His regular fee is $100,000). My partial list of some Gore visits is 2003, 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007, 2009, 2014 (rostrum-sharing with Clive Palmer), 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019. He’s about as newsworthy as a Collins Street tram.
Moreover, Gore’s Inconvenient Truth film was deemed in late 2007 by the UK High Court’s Justice Burton to have nine errors,
the first two of which are apparently based on non-existent or misunderstood evidence, and the balance of which are or may be based upon lack of knowledge or appreciation of the scientific position, and all of which are significant planks in Mr Gores’ ‘political’ argumentation.
The Judge said the Education Department had also been violating laws against feeding politically partisan material to students. As a result the film can only be shown in UK schools if students are also given guidance notes both about the errors and the film’s agitprop content. Teachers must note
areas where there is undisputed scientific consensus …Areas where there is a strong scientific consensus but where a small minority of scientists do not agree (and) areas where there is political debate.
By the way, Gore successfully bluffed 7.30’s Heather Ewart in 2009 that he won the Justice Burton case:
EWART: There was also, though, a British judge who ruled that there were in fact, I think, nine errors when it was challenged in court?
GORE: Well, the ruling was in my favour.
Sunderland’s audit first deals with a “suggestion” that his ABC climate enthusiasts booked 18 interviews with Gore. Not true:
Our investigations revealed a total of 8 separate interviews were conducted.
However
Segments of some these interviews were picked up, edited and repeated across a range of different programs in addition to that [eight], meaning that Al Gore’s visit generated substantial coverage across the ABC.
He asks, was this “excessive and unjustified by the editorial value?” His answer:
There is no evidence to suggest this was the case.
The primary interviews are conveniently listed[1] as
# July 10 – 7.30 with Stan Grant; “Hack” interview with Tom Tilley
# July 11 – Radio National (Gregg Borschman); Sydney Radio Breakfast (Robbie Buck); Perth Radio Drive (Belinda Varischetti); Melbourne Radio Drive (Alicia Loxley)
# July 12 – Brisbane Radio Afternoon (Kelly Higgins-Devine)
# August 3 – One Plus One (Jane Hutcheon, doing a 30-minute lifestyle suck-up).
In the 7.30 interview, Stan Grant – who sometimes bucks the system – did ask about accusations that Gore exaggerated his alarmism, also making mention of the South Australian SA blackouts. His other questions were patsies, such as “Gore’s view of President Trump’s attitudes and their impact on the US reputation” — sheesh, there’s a hard-ball interrogation for you, not! Grant further asked if climate change agitation is “affected by the rise of populism” — “populism” being ABC code for any success from right of centre.
Sunderland is thrilled by Gregg Borschmann’s interrogation of Gore. He hails the “highly experienced specialist journalist on environmental issues” who “explored a range of issues more closely”. The punchy ones included (I’m not making anything up):
# More pointed questions on whether Australia was an international ‘laggard’ on climate change
# Whether the world had reached a tipping point and the impact of climate change was now irreversible
# A detailed discussion of some of the more extreme methods and technologies for tackling climate change
Sunderland is miffed that Gore didn’t get a Dorothy Dixer from his ABC myrmidons on the dreaded Adani coal mine (as at 2017; now a mine which Labor is strangely fond of). This omission was remedied by ABC’s Brisbane radio and the Hack program.
Three key points which no ABC person brought up in the eight 2017 interviews are
(a) Why with your multi-million fortune did you never re-shoot Inconvenient Truth to correct the errors – which even included that all citizens of sinking Pacific islands have evacuated to New Zealand? Surely that failure’s Inconvenient when you’re offering a Sequel?
(b) Given that the swimming pool of one of your three mansions uses the same electricity as six average US homes, might you be accused of emissions hypocrisy?
(c) Does your partnership’s profit of $US200m plus from carbon trading in 2008-11 suggest a conflict of interest in your promoting of green energy? Are you now a big investor in Beyond Meat, a plant-for-meat substitute beneficiary of the UN climate push against real meat?[2]
Sunderland has a threefold justification for the ABC’s welter of publicity for Gore. First, he’s a former vice-president (1993-01 – two decades ago) and crusades on climate; second, he made an influential climate film (12 years ago), and third, he has a new film when Australia has “gas shortages, power blackouts, rising electricity prices and policy challenges informed by the recent Finkel Report.” Citing householders’ energy-price horrors is refreshing frankness for the ABC people, 3% of whom are on $200,000-plus a year. For that well-heeled cadre home energy costs are but small change.
Sunderland then checks how good Gore’s new film is by selecting what he presents as a representative sample of overseas reviews: two from the far-left Guardian; one from the liberal Washington Post; one from Variety, the bible of way-left Hollywood; and one from 9to5 Mac, a magazine specializing in Mac news and comment. Since Al Gore is a board member of Apple Inc., that might be seen as just a touch incestuous.
Sunderland’s selection of reviewers illustrates the ABC collective mind: legitimate views from right of centre are beyond his imagination. His sample found the film awesome (with quibbles about lack of fresh agitprop) and therefore “the actual content of the new movie was sufficiently newsworthy” for the ABC to tout.
Sunderland then wonders if the uncritical mass of ABC interviews of Gore “result(ed) in disproportionately representing a particular perspective”. No, he finds. And on the warming catastrophism hypothesis, he writes with straight face
Our coverage, like that of other media outlets, has included a wide range of other perspectives to ensure appropriate impartiality.
He lists views from the Bureau of Meteorology; the NSW Nature Conservation Council; the would-be $US100b a year Green Climate Fund (seriously); Flannery’s Climate Council; “a representative group of 35 local government bodies”[3]; Coalition, Opposition and Greens politicians[4]; the independent financial think-tank ‘Carbon Tracker Initiative’ (actually climate finance lobbyists); G20 leaders meeting to discuss the Paris Agreement (don’t mention Trump); the National Greenhouse Inventory; “Pacific leaders meeting in Fiji for a Climate Action Pacific Partnership event”; the ACCC on energy prices; Arrium in Whyalla; the Australian energy regulator, and the true-believing Queensland Resources Council.[5]
In the real world, the 2015 CSIRO poll (p4) showed that 54 per cent of Australians don’t buy the human-caused-warming story. There is no hint of this vast demographic in Sunderland’s “ diversity”.
Concurrently with Gore’s 2017 tour, the world’s top-rated warming sceptic, Marc Morano, also visited Melbourne to push his own film, Climate Hustle. Morano launched his film on Wednesday night (July 12) and Gore launched his on Thursday morning (13th). I got to both . Morano tried to give Gore the Hustle DVD, but Gore’s minders shut down this promising conversation. Gore’s security people physically stopped audience members and a Herald Sun photographer taking pics and recordings during his speech. They missed me and I posted a full transcript on Morano’s New York blog.
Strangely the ABC which “presents a diversity of perspectives” and never knowingly downplays a legitimate point of view, did not interview Marc Morano in Melbourne. Morano was interviewed by Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, but the rest was silence. Nature journal has ranked 386 sceptics globally and placed Morano at No 1[6].
Sunderland, “having ascertained that Al Gore’s views were newsworthy and the ABC’s coverage of them was not disproportionate”, moves on to whether eight duplicate interviews robbed other ABC programs of resources.
Sunderland found that overall, the seven news interviews were duplicates except in style and “chatty non-material issues such as Al Gore’s more general views on President Trump…and whether he might make another movie in another ten years’ time.”
Sunderland, with 30-plus years at the ABC and SBS, knows how interviewees manipulate their interrogators. Gore has a sheaf of “talking points” which he “repeated in all the interviews”. Sunderland reconstructs Gore’s cheat sheet from regularities in the interviews. One staple is “comparing the spin used by climate change sceptics now and the tobacco lobby in the past (used in four out of the seven interviews).” That canard is of course from the crazed Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt book of 2010.
Other Gore porkies include
“The price of electricity from solar and wind, and now the price declines in battery storage and efficiency improvements of all kinds – these are economic realities that are really kicking in in a very powerful way. (used in 6 out of the 7 interviews)”.
My Fact Check: In the first quarter of 2019, Victoria and New South Wales recorded their highest underlying energy prices on record, while Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania recorded their second-highest energy prices on record. Retail electricity prices have near-doubled since 2004.
# “In the last decade, the climate-related extreme weather events have become much more common, much more destructive” (used in six out of the seven interviews).
My Fact Check: Take just one of dozens of examples – “…as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.” Andy Pitman, Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, UNSW.[7]
There is no mention by Sunderland of any ABC interviewer challenging Gore’s mendacious cheat-sheet claims.
He finishes with one-hand/other-hand conclusions. Gore swamped all interviews with his talking points, so there was indeed ABC duplication. But the plethora of interviews earned a lot of “localisation” brownie points for state programs and personalities. Both Sunderland and Michelle Guthrie, then the ABC’s managing director, urged more coordination and rationalization, but neither showed an awareness that Gore is a hypocritical money-grabbing driver of the climate-apocalypse bandwagon.
Tony Thomas’s new book, The West: An insider’s tale – A romping reporter in Perth’s innocent ’60s is available from Boffins Books, Perth, the Royal WA Historical Society (Nedlands) and online here
[1] Date aired by ABC; they were all recorded earlier about the same time
[2] A long time Gore partner David Blood is co-chair of World Resources Institute which has released a 570-page report against meat consumption
[3] Sunderland doesn’t say but I’ll bet the 35 were those mobilized by the Climate Council for grassroots alarmism
[4] One Nation (4.3% of the national primary Senate vote in 2016 and 9.2% of the Queensland primary Senate vote) was not worthy of ABC mention let alone interviewing.
[5] “Climate change is a critical global challenge, which must be addressed by all parts of society. The resources industry is committed to being part of the global solution.”
[6] Perth’s world-reknowned sceptic Joanne Nova ranked 99th, Ian Plimer 51st.
[7] June 19, 2019, at 1.11.20 on Soundcloud. Hat tip: Joanne Nova
One needs to wonder how long the world must endure this superstitious nonsense.
The previous decent into mass hysteria began in 1594, when King James published his celebrated work “Daemonology”, prompting King Henry of France to label him “the most learned fool in Christendom”.
The book outlined all the technical details involved in identifying witches, hunting them down, subjecting them to trial, and the skillful art of execution. In elaborate prose it described the how and why of dealing with the undead; the requirement to drive a stake through the heart of a werewolf, and how to identify and capture a vampire. For more than a hundred years the populace dutifully tortured and murdered innocent people by the hundreds.
The “climate” superstition is the modern equivalent. There is no more Truth in the warming nonsense, the “greenhouse” nonsense, or the sea level rise nonsense than there is in the myths of the Dark ages.
Sooner or later it will be Mother Nature herself that reveals the evil in this scam.
“Gore is a hypocritical money-grabbing driver of the climate-apocalypse bandwagon.” TT
That said, Gore also sees himself as doing God’s work as a post-modern Noah. His mission: to re-sanctify the Earth by transforming plough shares into swords, Wall Street shares and carbon (dioxide) credits into dollars, etc., in the battle against global warming and climate change deniers.
A quote from his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance:
“Many Judeo-Christian prophecies used images of environmental destruction to warn of transgressions against God’s will. For those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, it is hard to read about the predictions of hurricanes fifty percent stronger than the worst ones today, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases that we have fostered, without recalling the prophecy of Hosea: “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”… Many believers and non-believers shared a “deep uneasiness about the future, sensing that our civilization may be running out of time.” “
rod.stuart – 6th September 2019
“One needs to wonder how long the world must endure this superstitious nonsense:
My guess is a long time. Perhaps as long as that for the witchcraft/weather scare centuries ago.
One day a new noun will be coined to describe the phenomenon:
.Climate-craft, n., 1. The practice of divining Gaia’s climate or weather by using entrails, fire, air, water, thunder, lightning, models, etc. 2. A discipline that attributes any change in the biosphere to human activity, esp. one that attempts to monetise a benign trace gas crucial for organic life while simultaneously demonising it. See cargo cult, haruspex, witchcraft.
Rod and Alice,
May I suggest you work those posts of yours up into a duo nightclub act.? Could be the start of careers fit to eclipse Bing Crosby & Bob Hope, or Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis.
“The practice of divining Gaia’s climate or weather by using entrails, fire, air, water, thunder, lightning, models, etc….” You could build your act on there: one of you picking through the (I suggest rubber) entrails while the other artiste, dressed up as a witch doctor, chants incantations and spells of all kinds.
Could go over big on cruise ships as the glaciers melt around the world, and particularly if Antarctica’s Totten lets go and gondoliers find they can do a brisk business up and down the streets of every port city in the world.
You just have to think outside the square. Just repeat to yourself as often as required to retain self-assurance: climatology is bunk!; the 198 scientific organisations are all wrong! the glaciers are not melting!; the seas are not rising! Gore is a fraud….!!!!
How do I know?
Tony Thomas told me so!
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Old MacDougall has a farm, eeee-eye-eeee-eye-oh!
Go and educate yourself, Ian. Start here:
judithcurry.com
While you’re about it, check out logical arguments. Your current stock-in-trade, eg ad hominem, post hoc ergo proper hoc, argument from authority, and so on ad nauseam do nothing for your credibility.
Mr. MacDougall
A growing proportion of the population realises full well that the entire CAGW meme is nothing but wacky balderdash from beginning to end.
It is a mendacious fantasy, from the ‘warming’ that is actually cooling, through the idiotic hypothesis of a ‘greenhouse effect’, through the notion that human activities can alter the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, to the histrionics about sea levels, and the unsubstantiated claim that CO2 is even remotely associated with the weather, this invented “climate crisis” is simply fictional make-believe.
In the meantime, that fringe of the population that buy this climate crap is simply stupid, ignorant, and gullible.
DT: Thanks for the link and the encouragement, “… eg ad hominem, post hoc ergo proper hoc, argument from authority, and so on ad nauseam… ” But are you sure you understand what those big words mean? A lot of Latin in there. Maybe you could get your teacher or the school librarian to help you.
Aside from that, Judith Curry has an interesting post at that link you gave:
Notice she is talking about computer models.
Apparently, they are OK by her. Perhaps even when they do not suit her case. Someone from around here should contact here and explain to her the error of her ways.
Links next..
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2016/07/global-warmings-grand-inquisitors/
https://judithcurry.com/2019/07/21/geothermal-ocean-warming-discussion-thread/#more-25017
First link:
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2016/07/global-warmings-grand-inquisitors/
Last link:
https://judithcurry.com/2019/07/21/geothermal-ocean-warming-discussion-thread/#more-25017
Sigh! Through me, you’ve just discovered the existence of Judith Curry and you are now telling me, who has been reading her blog (among many others) for years, what she is talking about. You should be wary about quoting her, or of quoting the papers she refers to because, in the world of true believers, she is persona non grata (more Latin for you) because in their terms she is a climate change denier. Look her up in Wikipedia and you’ll see how they treat non-believers.
When you become more familiar with her, and she really is worth following, you’ll discover that her essential position is that there is far too many unknowns in the infinitely complex climatic systems for any significant degree of certainty to be derived from models. Her hobbyhorse is uncertainty, and the prophets of doom hate her for it. It is that uncertainty that makes accurate predictions based on models ridiculous.
Oh dear – the trollster has quoted the abstract of a paper on a model about *geothermal* heating of deeper ocean waters. Trollster really is a straw man.
DT:
As the chemist turned British PM Margaret Thatcher (I think rightly) said, we should give the planet the benefit of any doubt.
Use your scroll down button if you decline to read it, but I posted the following (I think originally addressed to Alice and mentioning Judith Curry) on this site some time back:
“Please correct me if you think I am wrong, but the atmosphere-hydrosphere-lithosphere-cryosphere-biosphere combination is the most complex system we know about, in the entire Universe. Climatology as a discipline has to take account of all parts of it. Added to that, the human economy (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biosphere) is choc-a-bloc with vested interests, which are all well-connected politically. But all the same, you might find something interesting or even challenging in the 1120 pages of https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=atmospheric+chemistry+and+physics,+Seinfeld+and+Pandis&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
“A few years back, there was concern about the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, the destruction of which could, according to experimental science, result in a sufficient increase in ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface of the Earth, to have inevitably deleterious and unknowable effects on pretty well all life on it. You no doubt recall that chlorofluorocarbons were widely in use as spray-can propellants.
“I never once saw any chlorofluorocarbon denialism, nor can I recall any. Spray-can manufacturers quickly found substitute inert propellants. Very rapidly, the Montreal Protocol was signed by all the governments of the world. The two ozone treaties have been ratified by 197 parties (196 states and the European Union), making them the first universally ratified treaties in United Nations history.
“By contrast, the science on anthropogenic global warming and climate change (AGW&CC) is widely under challenge, particularly by the ‘conservative’ political Right. (ie ‘conservative’ of existing economic arrangements, but not necessarily of biospheric life as we know it.) This despite its endorsement by 198 scientific organisations world-wide, including the CSIRO, the Royal Society and the [American] AAAS. The AGW&CC ‘sceptics’ leave themselves no way out or forward save to maintain either that (1) all those organisations have been dudded and played for complete suckers by alarmists (mainly from the [choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!] Left, aided and abetted by the [choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit again!] ABC) – in other words, they are a complete bunch of fools; or (2) that whether they believe in it or not, the scientists involved are just in it for the research grants money, and are thus no better than charlatans straight out of The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. That of course, still leaves the ‘conservatives’ the option of holding both (1) and (2) to be true.
“It would only take one genuine insider to blow the whistle on all of this. The AGW&CC ‘sceptics’ thought they had it and were on the money with ‘Climategate’, but a British Parliamentary inquiry turned that hope to dust.
“Of the AGW&CC denialists you cited in your penultimate post, and only as far as I can ascertain, Judith Curry [emphasis not in original – IM] is the one climatologist among them. If some of her climatologist colleagues have given her a hard time then I can only say they are wrong to do so, should decease forthwith, and on that issue and that alone, she has my unconditional and unequivocal support. That is because of the remote possibility as happens occasionally in science that the maverick is right and the mainstream is wrong. (Lavoisier being arguably the best example, and his name invoked by denialists for that reason.)
“As far as I have been able to ascertain, the last 2.58 million years have seen the Earth for the first time in its entire history with icecaps at both geographic poles: held in place by the fact that the Arctic Ocean is virtually landlocked and the South Pole is covered by the Antarctic Continent. Thus we are conducting a huge and uncontrolled (except maybe for Venus: not a good look for the AGW&CC denialists there) experiment on the only planet we have, and have been in completely uncharted territory ever since Svante Arrhenius (in 1895) drew the world’s attention to the fact that CO2 traps heat.
“The main danger as I see it and as has been pointed out by many: the methane trapped in the soils of the Arctic tundra is already coming out at above normal rates as the Arctic warms, and could amplify the warming effect of the CO2 from coal combustion enormously, with God knows what effects and results. But none of it looks good.
“The AGW&CC denialists that hang around this site must from their own positional needs, be 100.000% right. Because if there is the slightest chance they are wrong, they are betting their whole future and everyone else’s against it.
“But wait! There’s more! Not only is this site against the scientific mainstream, it has also come out solidly against renewable sources of energy, as in:
1 The Renewable Energy Myth
2 Get Them Young, Make Them Green
3 The Great Renewable Energy Rort
4 German Green Energy
5 Finally, Warmists Find a Real Threat
6 Going green costs jobs
7 They Make It Easy Being Green
8 Teach ’em Green, Raise ’em Stupid
9 The Green Gulf Between Fact and Fancy
10 The solar- and wind-power capacity to meet Labor’srenewable-energy target would cost between $80 billion and $100 billion dollars.
11 Inherit the Wind (and not much else)
12 Green dream jobs
13 Coal, There’s Just No Alternative
13 With Friends Like Oxfam…
14 Blinded By The Sun
15 Banking on the Climate Hustle
16 Young Heads Filled With Green Mush
17 Etc
18 Etc, etc.
19 Etc, etc, etc.
“Which leads me to the conclusion that this site is in the pocket of the fossil-carbon lobby, or compromised by it in some serious way. Even from the point of view of AGW&CC ‘sceptics’, it makes no sense to act otherwise than to use renewables wherever possible for power-generation in order to conserve the fossil-carbon deposits, (useful for steel-making, coal-tar and its derivatives and feedstock for the chemicals industry) rather than to convert them to $$$$ asap for the private enjoyment of an ever-diminishing coterie of proprietors, with the enormous wealth involved trickling down to an ever-expanding pyramid of relatives, beneficiaries, on-hangers, camp followers, carpetbaggers … And of course, the lawyers for all of the above….. “
I was going to mention that, but got side-tracked. But at least he seems to have accepted that Curry is the genuine article and a sceptic who demands respect as a scientist who cannot be dismissed as a crank. Maybe it’s the beginning of his getting of wisdom.
ianl:
I suggest you read it all again: I was citing Curry with reference to computer modelling; not geothermal heating of ocean water. Perhaps a bit too subtle for you?
Here’s another link that might help you understand why so many of us distrust the UN, the IPCC, and the entire climate alarmism industry.
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/
Donna LaFramboise is not a scientist, nor does she purport to be. But she is an investigative journalist who has investigated the IPCC in great detail. She has shown how the IPCC is not a scientific organisation as so often reported in the mainstream media, but entirely a political organisation explicitly aimed at redistributing wealth from the developed world to the undeveloped world.
Read and weep.
And yet another one for you, Ian.
https://www.thegwpf.com/category/press-releases/
All very well. A nitpickers’ field day. But the BIG unanswered and not even addressed question: why the campaign against renewables I cited above?
In the immortal words of that great American leftist President, “It’s the economy, stupid”.
The real question that remains unanswered and unaddressed is “Why?” Why are we inflicting this hair-shirt regime on the poorest members of our society to no measurable benefit.
First it was Al Gore ramping up and exploiting James Hanson’s carefully choreographed campaign against global warming. The only thing that could prevent or alleviate total disaster of uncontrollable rising temperatures and seas “real soon now” was to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide, hitherto a beneficial trace gas essential for life on earth but now, hysterically, to be known as “carbon pollution” by brain-damaged leftists slavishly following brazen frauds like Al Gore, emulating the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But then the world simply stopped warming at any unprecedented rate. So what now?
The other great unasked and unanswered question is “Cui bono?” The renewables industry is destroying the stability of our essential electrical networks, even before we consider the rest of the outrageously expensive entries on the debit side of the ledger, eg the wholesale destruction of raptors, bats by windmills and the effective desertification of tens of thousands of hectares of productive land by solar farms. These “renewables” cost more and produce more carbon and other pollution than the fossil fuel power stations they are driving out of business.
Scientists and other experts, as advisors, are essential to good policy making, but they must never be allowed to actually make the policies that will govern people’s lives. Good governance is a function of politics, not science, because there are too many other things, unknown to scientists, to be considered in formulating Government policy.
Well argued and evidenced, Tony. The ABC’s violation of its charter in news and current affairs, and the increasingly fatuous rationalisations Sunderland and its Audience and Consumer Affairs unit offer to justify climate change and green-left one-sidedness is now legendary and I have concluded the news and current affairs part of the ABC is beyond redemption.
Some of us had hoped, however, that bastions of cultural education such as ABC Classic FM might be spared the post-modernist march through the ABC, having held out bravely for the last few decades. If they could continue honestly performing the cultural dimension of ABC’s charter, perhaps they could survive happily when the ABC is finally broken up and its valid operations contracted out in sections to reduce the risk of future capture.
No such luck, on recent indications. The bizarre pursuit of a yoof audience has led to the rise of a generation of groovy announcers with grating manner and a high propensity to dilute the music with personal discussion of philosophies of parenthood, coping with depression and other ‘morning radio’ pap. Then this morning, on ‘Threatened Species Day’, the last straw: Announcer Greta Bradman invites on someone with an interest in classical music to give us their view of the world. Guess who? Professor Peter Ridd, perhaps? No way: Bob Brown! https://www.abc.net.au/classic/programs/weekend-mornings/weekend-mornings-bob-brown/11469254
Sadly for the musical cultural literacy of Australians and democratic access to Sydney and Melbourne concerts and touring artist live performances, ABC Classic is also in rapid decline. Only the low-profile streaming service of ABC Jazz seems to stick to its knitting.
Might as well shut down the whole operation.
DT: The solar panels on our roof help shade and thus cool the house. If you look closely at the solar farms there is plenty of space under the panel arrays for stock to graze on. “The renewables industry is destroying the stability of our essential electrical networks…” another fossil-carbon furphy. Pumped hydro and batteries (like our set) store the renewables-generated power very effectively and handle load variations well. Moreover, the sky is the limit for solar and wind, whose capital and installation costs are ever-decreasing. And I hate to be the one who has to tell you this, but the Earth has finite reserves of fossil carbon, and about the most brainless use for them is as power station fuel. That is, apart from the fact that every fossil carbon enthusiast inevitably winds up as an AGW denialist. Goes with the territory.
Moreover, solar power can be generated locally, in villages and towns across the world, with no transmission lines required. In Australia, solar is now the cheapest and most effective way to pump bore water to head tanks on rural properties; again no connection to the grid required. Everywhere I go in the bush these days, I see good old Aussie water-pumping windmills (brands like Southern Cross and Comet) derelict, often with solar setups beside them drawing the water up that the windmills used to. draw.
As for windmill strikes on wildlife: that is an argument for banning cars and trucks and having no roads. As a conservationist, the sight of road-kill does not worry me, as it shows that the road-kill species are about. It is when you don’t see road-kill that you should start to worry.
IMG (who clearly has renewed his subscription to Quadrant):
“But the BIG unanswered and not even addressed question: why the campaign against renewables I cited above?”
Why not ask why the mad campaign FOR “renewables”? It is mad, even if you pretend you don’t see that.
Because even a non-brainwashed schoolgirl should be able to understans that “renewables” acceptable to the Warmist movement do not generate power when their sources don’t work – when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine. Battery storage cannot mitigate this absolute certainty because their capacity is finite no matter how many city-size huge arrays you deploy. Their technology is not able to improve substantially in the forseeable future.
Hence we are signing our own suicide note by blindly implementing this march over the abyss. We need to stop the madness. Stop believing in this new religion!
Ian, I have absolutely no problem with solar power on domestic roof tops or to power those farm tasks you mention. We’d certainly have grabbed them for our place back in the day if they’d been available and affordable.
But they should never be allowed to feed back into the network to destabilise it.
As for massive solar farms such as the several that exist on the outskirts of Canberra, and the huge one installed outside my old home town, Nyngan, the ground underneath is absolutely sterile. Not an ant could survive there. And your comparison of wildlife casualties of wind generators is as ridiculous as it is irrelevant.
Ian, more here on Donna Laframboise’s analysis of the IPCC.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/2012/IPCC.html
With “experts” like that who needs enemies?
rod.stuart – 6th September 2019
A growing proportion of the population realises full well that the entire CAGW meme is nothing but wacky balderdash from beginning to end.
Some good news: a light-bulb moment at the WMO.
: https://www.thegwpf.com/wmo-secretary-general-warns-against-climate-doomsters-and-extremists/
London, 6 September: The General-Secretary of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the alarmist narrative on climate change has gone off the rails and criticised the news media for provoking unjustified anxiety.
Speaking to Finland’s financial newspaper Talouselämä (“The Journal”) on 6 September 2019, Petteri Taalas called for cooler heads to prevail, saying that he does not accept arguments of climate alarmists that the end of the world is at hand.
Dr Taalas also spoke of the dangers of green extremism:
“While climate scepticism has become less of an issue, now we are being challenged from the other side. Climate experts have been attacked by these people and they claim that we should be much more radical. They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats.”
To Taalas, the deep greens have been abusing the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, cherry-picking parts that they think will support radical action.
The IPCC reports have been read in a similar way to the Bible: you try to find certain pieces or sections from which you try to justify your extreme views. This resembles religious extremism.
An ironic development, given that one the biggest alarmists is the UN itself, including of course the WMO.
It was after all the UN Secretary General’s warning last September, claiming we face the threat of “runaway climate change” if nothing is done, that set in motion the latest wave of climate change hysteria, inspiring Extinction Rebellion to take to the streets and Saint Greta to take to the high seas and high moral ground.
Is this a split in the UN over what constitutes the “right” degree of climate catastrophism, or just pre-UNGA74/COP25 positioning to prevent it from being upstaged by “doomsters and extremists” like ER and Saint Greta?
watch this space.
Hey IMG: ” I see good old Aussie water-pumping windmills (brands like Southern Cross and Comet) derelict, often with solar setups beside them drawing the water up that the windmills used to. draw.”
….or maybe ready to serve on cloudy days or moonless nights? or when the wind blows….
irsr:
The good old Aussie windmill cannot function without replacement of the galvanised steel pipes that bring up the water. Service of the pump (normally down below the standing water level at the bottom of the bore) s a once-a-year specialist job that the owner cannot do himself/herself. The expense involved is what has killed both of our two mills.
A solar pump has an electric submersible bore pump down the bore which pushes the water up to the head tank through polythene pipe (the manufacture of which is a far better use of the fossil carbon involved). As long as the Sun is shining the pump is pumping. Dawn to sunset. 24/7. Even on cloudy days.
The last time I checked, about five years ago, a solar setup was quoted $8,000 all up. Probably cheaper today. Just to get the power lines to the site for an electric submersible would be $20,000, then the cost of the gear, and then power bills forever and ever amen.
That is what is driving the big switch to solar in the bush and allowing costs to run ever downwards. Anything else is a compleat no-brainer.
I take it, irisr or whatever your real name is, that you own a coal mine and a couple of oil wells. Though I hate to have to be the one who tells you this, the coal and oil will eventually run out, even if rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere turn out to be having no effect on the world’s climate. (Bit hard to convince too many cockies of that right now, in the middle of the worst drought on record and continent-wide. But as the fossil carbon gets scarcer over the next 2-300 years, its price will just go up. Supply and demand. So what will our descendants do then?
Don’t tell me, let me guess. NUCLEAR…!
Tony,
27 comments, of which the execrable racist, MacBot has 10. You really need to be more careful of the company you keep as insanity is infectious. I protected myself by not reading any of his boring waffle as it is always just a repeat of his previous fictions. It did amuse me that his comments are longer than your article. Clearly, Gabriel and his cattle are no longer talking to him, so he has to plague us as his only ‘friends’.
Now to the serious business of defunding and disposing of the ABC (maybe we could throw in the MacBot as part of the package).
I had the ABC’s 774 and 621 on my car radio favourites (as on parts of our rural roads they are just about all I can pick up) as I drive my DIESEL RUV from place to place (determinedly benefiting the planet by creating as much CO2 as I can). After 5-minutes of listening to an inane interview on 621 I deleted it and 774 as Cd’s and silence are better (just as I have determined to ignore anything the MacBot writes). I was hoping the rising sea levels would have washed over his farm by now, but as the levels at Fort Denison are actually declining my wishes are unlikely to be fulfilled.
I am on the Board of an enterprise that just had a ‘Green’ presentation on why we should replace all our fluorescent lights with LED’s. We were breathlessly told that we would save 129 tonnes of CO2 and (I swear) exactly $9,xxx.62 cents. Not $0.61 cents or $0.63 cents. All the exactitude and certainty of a cult. We are considering their offer as the ‘government’ has decreed our taxes will subsidise this boondoggle.
They take away the hundreds of fluoros for disposal by recovering the mercury and neon gases (at no cost to us) as that is fully paid for by the ‘taxpayer’ and safely burying the glass and metal parts. The ‘taxpayer’ is an apparently mythical beast that we need not concern ourselves about as they can be bled infinitely as they are imprisoned by a system from which there is no escape.
It is just 8-weeks until I flee again on a diesel-burning cruise ship around the Pacific, before returning to Oz for a mere 12-days of touring in my DIESEL SUV and then flying overseas for 4-months in a sensible country that has now completed the extensions to the coal-fired power station. I expect that means my endlessly reliable supply of electricity will be even cheaper than before (it was already just 30% of the Oz per kw rate, but that gap will now increase).
This one’s for you, Ian Mac. Read it and weep.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/07/propagation-of-error-and-the-reliability-of-global-air-temperature-projections-mark-ii/
I noted tonight that the Greenfools are now complicit in planning future horrendous deaths by burning people alive. They are preventing cool damp weather burn-offs as we have just had and extended wet and cold winter with one ski-field recording its lowest average winter temperatures since 1956 {during the last Ice Age, I think}. They still have 1.6m of snow cover and are predicting the skiing will continue into late October).
Apparently they prefer ‘Back Saturday’ style uncontrolled firestorms during hot, dry, windy days, especially if a few people are BBQ’ed along the way. Amorality, thy name is Green.
DT: “This one’s for you, Ian Mac. Read it and weep.”
I followed your link, and have just dried the tears from my eyes. No, I exaggerate. I only found it mildly amusing. It did not even earn a condescending smile.
Even if it is true that “climate models have no predictive value”, does that rule out AGW?
We have been through this uncertainty business before re Judith Curry. Science is not based on certainty; just on probability. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Highly likely, but not guaranteed to an infinite number of decimal places.
Your case; correct me if I am wrong, is that it should and can be business-as-usual until there is watertight proof of the AGW hypothesis. I guess that means that you are happy to drive round blind corners in yore car. If that is so, then one day your cheerful optimism is highly likely to bring you undone. Not absolutely for sure, mind.
There is no 100% guarantee that our present fossil-carbon use will not trigger runaway climate change. Therefore according to you, we can burn all the coal we want, with the coal barons cheering us on all the way. Of course, they may finish up in tropical Greenland with Donald Trump for company. But what the hell? They will be able to have endless rounds of golf with him on his courses.
A further contribution by Judith Curry towards the education of young Ian Mac. Enjoy.
https://www.city-journal.org/global-warming?utm_source=C…=email&utm_term=0_6c08930f2b-9335464312-109335729
It appears that at Quad Online here I have been placed in the same position of Socrates in ancient Athens: charged and found gullty of impiety on every issue that site reveres, except Islam and Islamism. Anthropogenic climate change, the ABC… you name it.
The important point is that, in the true spirit of philosophy, reason, science and enquiry, I have invited my fellow participants here to refute what I say and am always prepared, as a seeker after truth, to change my mind. But so far, nobody here has given me reason to do so.
Ironically, I only came here originally out of interest in the poetry of Les Murray, with whom and his mate Peter Barden I spent many an hour in pleasant conversation in my university days.
NB: The poetry of Les never did much for me. I very much prefer Lawson, Paterson and the immortal Fr PJ Hartigan (‘John O’Brien’).
Ianl,
Daniel Andrews just earned his $46K pay RISE as we just had our first TWO blackouts in my suburb (totalling maybe 15-minutes).
I was so pleased to sit in total darkness as it allowed me to contemplate our energy-less future in Oz and my contribution to saving the planet.
Well, at least until the Chinese take over and build coal-fired power stations to run their industries in their Oz colony …
Ignore the MacBot or he will continue to think we are the only friends he has now that Gabriel and his cattle no longer talk to him.
Eyn Pyssant might care to contemplate sea-level rise from wherever and buy/sell real estate accordingly.
WARNING: It’s in the (choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!*) Grauniad.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/oct/08/how-extreme-sea-level-events-are-going-to-increase-in-australia