Doomed Planet

Turning Kids’ Grey Matter a Mushy Green

Australian schools in the past decade have forced literally millions of kids to watch Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007 an outraged English truck driver and parent took the education minister to the High Court in 2007 over the film’s gross inaccuracies, with Justice Burton ordering UK teachers must not show it without first warning kids it is politically partisan and contains nine significant errors. Those include Gore’s absurd claim that many low-lying Pacific island populations had already been  evacuated to New Zealand. Despite his vast wealth, Gore has never edited prints of his film to remove the errors.

No such mandatory warnings have accompanied Australian screenings. The Australian Academy of Science, our supposed bulwark against science misinformation, has made no objection to the brainwashing, although its president rushed to condemn a sceptic equivalent film in 2007.

The propaganda cycle is now being repeated. Kids in class are being drenched with Damon Gameau’s saccharine documentary 2040 about purported solutions to a purported climate crisis. The film doesn’t actually tell kids, “Vote Green”, but it calls for strong new political leadership. “Wouldn’t it be terrific if new leaders emerge who could navigate us to a better 2040,” Gameau hints.

Pushing the film into classrooms is Cool Australia, which has provided teachers with at least 32 ready-to-use lessons based on the documentary. The film is backed and part-funded by bedfellows, the Australian and Victorian governments.

Gameau reveals his inner Zeitgeist in interviews, which include an urge to re-shape our democratic ways. He imagines a “shift from a society built upon industry to a life-sustaining civilisation” which he called “The Great Turning”. As he spoke at Byron Bay (where else?) a year ago, a certain Olivia Rosebery “boldly stood in the audience” and sang her own song, ‘No more need for greed and hunger if we respect the Mother’s ways.’”

In an interview last May regarding COVID-19, he likes all the “silver linings”. He says,

Do we really need all these things, this excess of all these things we’re told are going to make us happy? In fact, I’m happier with a lot less of this stuff. And that excess is the very thing that would be destroying us ecologically…. So, I think that’s been a great win. So, how do we take this time to now rebuild with a lot more resilience … with food or energy or even our democracy. This is the time to have those discussions and think quite radically. And thankfully some countries and regions around the world are doing that.

Interviewer: What is bringing you hope during these unprecedented times?

Gameau: I would say, the fact that we do have closed shops, the streets are empty and we’ve got these silent skies. I think that’s a clue that we do care about each other, somewhere deep down…

As a documentary, his 2040 would normally be laughed away, but played in class to susceptible kids from about age 6 upwards, it’s pernicious. He’s also happy to do speeches on how to save the planet. But, “Please note that a speaker fee will be applicable.”

This essay will first detail the workings of leftist lobby Cool Australia, then analyse the content of 2040.

Few parents know that Education Departments around Australia have farmed out much of their kids’ schooling to green/Left lobbies. The most significant is Cool Australia, operating in 8400 primary and secondary schools —  90 per cent of all schools. Nearly half our teachers use the lessons, downloading them 2.1 million of them last year.[i]

Cool Australia delivers’s a win-win for everyone except Coalition supporters. Its agenda is anti-capitalism, anti-growth, and anti-coal, gas and petroleum. It’s pro the re-writing of the Constitution for the benefit of the Aboriginal industry, and watering down our Western heritage in favor of a licorice allsorts multi-culturalism. Cool Australia’s CEO and founder, Jason Kimberley, boasts how Cool turns kids into green activists, whether or not they’ve yet learnt to tie their shoelaces.[ii]   The video below shows how it’s done.

While most of Cool Australia’s ready-to-use topics are innocuous or praiseworthy, recall that the Antifa and BLM mobs now torching US cities are “mostly peaceful”. Our kids are lining up as Greens cadets, demanding “zero carbon” and the up-ending of two centuries of capitalist progress. Another example is Cool Australia’s foisting the anarchism of dark-green Canadian raver Naomi Klein onto teens and pre-teens.

I’ve been documenting Cool Australia’s work for half a decade (here, here, here) and have noticed how the organisation has ratcheted up in the past year by pushing into classes a barking-mad climate “documentary” called 2040. The film, after five years’ gestation, sports high production values, cute actors and storyline. It’s had respectful reviews in the New York Times and LA Times and, according to Gameau, ‘the UN is going to show three minutes [of it] to all world leaders’. Taxpayers paid for some of it via the Australian Government and Screen Australia and the Victorian Government and Film Victoria.[iii] Below is a sample of what taxpayers got for their money.

Cool’s 32 lessons are half an hour or more.[iv] Add the kids’ viewing of the entire 92-minute film, and a typical nipper might tangle with this travesty for  a full day of school. Never mind the 3Rs, where Australian kids’ performance is sliding internationally.

The Cool Australia charity was founded in 2008 by Just Jeans heir[v] and climate alarmist Jason Kimberley, now teamed with leftist warriors including WWF, Earth Hour and the Human Rights Commission, and titans like Google, Atlassian and Foxtel. Cool Australia gets into classes on-line with 1400 ready-to-use lessons tapped by 120,000 teachers for 3.2 million kids.

Cool Australia has only eight full-time staff, $1.3 million in revenue (none from government) and a flock of savvy pedagogues. (Charity watchdog ChangePath rates it zero stars out of three for transparency). But Cool Australia has leveraged its way into almost all schools by mapping its free lessons according to teachers’ required curricula. Because of a mandatory cross-curricula priority for “sustainability”, Cool Australia is pushing against an open door. The priorities were designed in 2008-09 by Julia Gillard and state Labor governments.

At a recent gathering with Cool Australia, the former president of the Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, is quoted by Jason Kimberley, “Only UNICEF has a greater school’s penetration and they had a 50-year head start … You are, quite seriously, the good guys in education.”

Cool Australia saves teachers 1.65 million hours of lesson-preparations yearly, and plugs the yawning holes in their worldly knowledge with its own climate, refugee, “global citizenship” and gender tropes. Teachers love it, since about 45 per cent of them are teaching outside their expertise and three-quarters complain of unmanageable workloads. Says one teacher: “I haven’t touched Geography since the mid 1980s, and there I was, explaining resources – with an eventual focus on water – to Year 7! Cool Australia rescued me at a time of dire need and ever so slight panic.”

The Human Rights Commission is notorious for its years-long persecution of innocent Queensland University of Technology students who complained on social media about being kicked out of an Indigenous-only computer room.[vi] Cool Australia quotes ex-HRC head Gillian Triggs, “With values such as empathy, collaboration and real world learning there [has been] a close synergy with Cool Australia. In just a few months, our animated video, interactive time-line and lesson plans reached more than 1,200 schools.” This HRC grievance-mongering involved 640,000 students and 14,000 lessons.

Cool Australia’s overt goal is to turn kids into child soldiers in the culture wars, via its “unique action-based pedagogy”. Jason Kimberley says, “Cool Australia’s role is to educate in a way that empowers young people to take agency and tackle the many challenges that urgently require twenty-first century skills. Our focus is always on what can be done.”

Cool Australia’s surveys show that after absorbing its materials, 70 to 80 per cent of kids adopt its positions, change their behaviour towards social and environmental issues, and are ready “to take action”. Here’s from a set of guides for 10-to-12 12 year olds, most unable or unwilling to put their singlets in the wash.

Step 1: Think about some of the big issues that are facing the world at the moment. How can we ensure that the world’s population can have its basic needs around food, water, housing, clothing, employment, education and health met whilst also looking after the environment and reducing the effects of climate change? … Your idea could aim to make a change in your house, your street, your school or your neighbourhood.

A mainstream Cool Australia cause is Earth Hour, when the woke folk dispense with electricity for 60 minutes (renewables’ unreliability is already achieving that). But Cool Australia’s Earth Hour folderol by last year had reached 2.3 million kids via 50,000 downloaded lessons.[vii]

 Now let’s get back to the 2040 doco. By time travelling into the future, the film can pretend that every green policy works. Make way for rainbows and unicorn stampedes! Its climate solutions include swapping steaks for seaweed and pulling down levels of evil CO2 to return the atmosphere to 350ppm CO2 (now 412ppm). That’s some feat.

To scare and prime the kids, the perceived status quo is from Al Gore’s climate-porn: allegedly CO2-caused cyclones, floods, droughts, acid oceans, bushfires, melted ice-caps and those long-foreseen but invisible millions of climate refugees. While touting its message as positive, there’s enough doom-talk in this film to give kids and even credulous adults a lot of what Gameau calls “climate grief”.

The end-result of the solutions in 2040 is ecstatic kids literally playing ring-a-rosy in the park (I’m not making that up) and birds twittering in a car-less CBD (ditto). Car parks become vege plots and push-bikers wave to sharers of electric driverless cars. Trucks? Who needs those when we live in green self-sufficient communes?

In the plotline 2040‘s protagonist helps his real-life 4-year-old daughter, Velvet, to navigate through climate perils to his 20-years-hence nirvana. He spends half the film in airports and planes to Bangladesh, Stockholm etc. He’s begged off the guilts by using carbon credits and planting a few trees to save 90 tonnes of CO2 by 2040. China happens to be putting out 10 billion tonnes CO2 a year, but Gameau doesn’t mention China once. Here’s how director Gameau shows kids how to deal with sceptics.

# Governments spend $10 million a minute subsidising fossil fuels.

He doesn’t say which governments or which currency, but it looks like $A5.3 trillion a year. Australia’s total GDP is only $2 trillion.

# US fossil fuel vested interests are now spending $US1 billion a year preventing us from lowering emissions, using the tobacco-lobby playbook of creating doubt and confusion.

This $US1 billion appears sourced from a debunked 2013 paper by “environmental sociologist” Robert J. Brulle in the journal Climatic Change.[viii] He added up the total spending of 91 US conservative organisations instead of their fractional spending on climate, and mysteriously lumped even arch alarmist James Hansen among his list of “deniers”.[ix] The tobacco analogy is febrile hand-waving from Naomi Oreskes in her Merchant of Doubt tract, 2010.

# Sceptics create websites full of misinformation like claiming the science is not settled and that climate-peril is a religion.

No science is settled, as Einstein would vouch. The IPCC’s now-disgraced skirt-chasing leader Rajendra Pachauri himself said his cause was religious.[x]

# Exxon-Mobil finances multiple “denier” groups to make it look like “denialism” has broad support.

The oil giant funded 43 skeptic groups with a total $US16 million from 1998 to 2005. That was $US260,000 a year per group and it ceased 15 years ago. For perspective, Australia’s climate princess, Dr Joelle “Paper Withdrawn” Gergis, got $A692,000 taxpayer money just for one study, which she had to retract in 2012 because of statistical flaws pointed out by skeptics, and she re-did it over the subsequent four years 2013-16. Renewables are now a $US1.5 trillion per year juggernaut. Meanwhile, world-leading skeptic bloggers like JoNova (Perth), Paul Homewood (UK) and Anthony Watts (US) mostly live off tip jars.

# “Deniers” create algorithms and “bots” masquerading as humans to populate the web with climate falsehoods.

The source list points to a 2011 blog post. Its content is just nuts].

The film’s “fact-based dreaming” has spooky or inspirational music to reinforce its messages. It starts with Gameau’s house getting filled with choking smoke after he stokes his fireplace. That represents rising CO2. He mourns that little daughter Velvet will be facing “a deteriorating environment” as ice caps “melt faster than scientists predicted”. That’s odd as the Arctic ice extent has been stable for half a decade and the Antarctic is cooling, not heating.

The oceans, which are alkaline anyway, we’re told are getting so acidic that its animals struggle to make their shells (nonsense). In fact NOAA concedes the historic ocean pH measurements are unreliable, so no conclusions are possible.[xi]

Sea rise, continues the flick, threatens “hundreds of millions” of people. (The UNEP in 2005 predicted a 50 million horde of climate refugees by 2010. When none showed up, it sneakily changed their arrival date to 2020. Now they’d better advance it again to 2030).

Every ten minutes Gameau interviews some of his 100-kid stockpile in the six-to-eleven age bracket, and they repeat memes from adults, like

Ten-year-old girl: “I would like for the government to have done something on global warming and pollution as now I think they are not really doing anything about it.” [Except waste $US1 trillion a year].

“I don’t want to see people eating meat because that is from animals.” [Gameau says we’ll be salivating over “pretty convincing” meat substitutes].

 “The sea looks like a big big mess.”

“The beach would not be the same if you could not swim in the water and whales are all gone.”

 “I wish they would stop killing off animals and forests like that. That would be cool.”

Gameau comments without irony: “It’s sobering to learn how pre-occupied kids are with the state of the planet.”

Daughter Velvet, berates a guilty adult: “What were you guys thinking?”

Adult (shame-facedly): “Well sometimes we weren’t.”

Gameau’s first solution is from Bangladesh (would we all just love to live like Bangladeshis? OK, probably not), which he celebrates for deploying “solar microgrids” powering what looks like 15W light globes. (The others enjoy fossil-fired mains 220V power. Renewables in Bangladesh are currently 2.5 per cent of its electricity capacity, and the renewables target is only 10 per cent.[xii] Mustn’t tell schoolkids that inconvenient truth, Mr Gameau.

His narrative also claims that somehow we will get those all-important solar household batteries “so cheap you are not even going to notice”. The cost of a battery system: currently between $2000 and $20,000., which are certainly numbers large even to be noticed. Many countries, he dreams, could be close to 100 per cent renewables by 2040, presumably when the sun will be shining at night and the wind never stops.

He trots out a succession of “experts”, like Oxford’s Dr Kate Raworth. She’s a “renegade economist”  and “the brain behind the widely influential theory of Doughnut Economics.” She plans for a free economy where the value created is shared more equitably, granting prosperity to everyone in the world without climate change or pollution, the film says.

Cars are scrapped or converted to electric drive (wow, what would the mechanic charge?). The film provides another of those wonderful ‘peak oil’ forecasts:  “If no-one buys (normal) cars, oil demand will peak and go down dramatically and never come back”. We will have “less road rage” and actually hear birds singing in the city. (The flick’s sound editor splices helpfully “tweet, tweet” into the sound-track at this point).

Another of Gameau’s talking heads is author/film-maker Helena Norberg-Hodge, who “has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for more than 30 years.” She pushes purer living patterns in both “North and South” hemispheres, according to her blurb, which explains she mastered her green methods over decades of work in Ladakh, Kashmir, which is famous for its religious mask-dancing and weaving. Her books include Learning from Ladakh and the rather ambitious Schooling the World.

Australian actress, Davini Malcolm, plays a shaman in Gameau’s film. She was born “Lindy” but received the name “Davini” from her Indian spiritual teacher, Osho, in 1994. She went on to help produce and write the 13-part children’s TV Series Teenie Weenie Greenies and do a film, Lotus Birth, of her experience having twins in the bath. The births were preceded by her partner, Peter, and their two boys around the piano singing what the DVD notes call their famous and delightful “fart song”.

In 2040 a glum fellow Eric Toensmeier lectures our kids that “even if we ceased all our human emissions altogether, cut emissions to zero, we would still be toast” because we’ve passed some phony tipping point “and on our way to a point of no return”. So we have to sequester and store existing “carbon” (he means CO2 but only nerds do chemistry). Experts describe how to “flip” global crop and livestock farming to cut emissions through soil regeneration and fence-free cattle grazing. Gameau’s case study is Cole Seis who has reworked his 2000 acres at Shepparton and claims savings of over $2 million – except “I don’t know where the $2 million went,” he says.[xiii]

 The future-stepping Velvet explains that someone did get stung for the costs of all this transformation: “Those who polluted our era with excess carbon [she means CO2] had to pay a penalty and the money raised paid farmers to clean our air.” This innovative economic planning is acompanied by vision of “smoke” aka steam, billowing from a coal-fired power station.

Next up is marine permaculture for the oceans “to get the overturning circulation going again”, quite a task. A 100 square kilometre patch of oceanic desert between Australia and America would be switched to permaculture, producing food to stave off those “unprecedented numbers of [climate] refugees”, according to Gameau. Seaweed farms flourish for thousands of kilometres in the Bay of Bengal and around the coast of Africa, contributing to ‘thriving local economies’.

The film’s explanatory notes say, “Kelp and seaweed are nature’s climate warriors … Researchers estimate that if 9 per cent of the world’s ocean surfaces were used for seaweed farming, we would be removing 53 billion tonnes of CO2 per year from the atmosphere.” Hmm, what’s 9 per cent of the oceans? On my estimate, four times the size of Australia. That’s a challenge.

Cool Australia tells kids:

Students will investigate the relationship between seaweed farming, the health benefits of eating seaweed and climate change. They will use this info to develop an infographic that uses numbers to convince their peers to eat more seaweed.

Can we surmise Cool Australia founder Jason Kimberley does his bit by lunching on kelp and algae? Somehow I doubt it.

De-commissioned oil rigs, we learn, “become exciting tourist destinations for those keen to explore marine life.” Who needs silly old oil and plastics? Newsreader Angela Pippos is wheeled on to read this fake script: “Big banks continue to take a hit as the public shifts its money away from organisations that support fossil fuels.”

But no flick, even 2040, can be all bad. It earns my one-star review for urging that Third World girls be educated for later marriage and family planning. It shows Nobel Peace-winning Malala Yousafzai saying, “One pen can change the world.” I’d like to know which religionist shot Malala in the head and why, but that’s a message too far for Gameau and Cool Australia.

He closes his concoction with rapturous music and vision of youngsters of all colors and creeds dancing in a hi-tech ambience through a forest. One white-clad 20-something grows from her shoulder-blades giant butterfly wings that actually flap. Gameau rhapsodises that this generation is “celebrating regeneration” (geddit?) because CO2 levels are coming down. This must be the cheesiest movie clip ever made or even imaginable.

Gameau leaves his world-straddling Boeing at the airport and heads home to start planting stuff, as distinct from planting stuff in kids’ heads. There are so many helpers involved in this 92-minute mock epic that ten minutes are needed for the closing credits.

Cheryl Lacey is an education strategist and author of Marching Schools Forward (Connor Court, 2019). She comments:

Whether schools are being used by Al Gore, Cool Australia, Gillard, the Greens, or even the Liberal party, the truth is that schools have become nothing more than a playing field for power and wealth distribution. This ‘child abuse’ isn’t new. Education’s been bastardised for at least 50 years: the Greens especially have  deeply penetrated young minds.  It’s no surprise that 90% of all schools are buying into Cool Australia’s propaganda. Just print and distribute. No teaching required. As for thinking? Impossible.

Remarks in a Tagespiegel article from Germany last week seem quite applicable to Australian schools. The former Potsdam Climate Institute Director, Prof. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber is quoted: “The closing of ranks of science and youth in the fight for a new society that is sustainable in its management and living is like a ‘big bang’. We need these heroes and heroines who are not even of age”.

Tagespeigel comments,

These minors are well organized in their own schools – that is their basis. But something has changed fundamentally. Whereas ten years ago, the climate and environment clubs in the schools themselves were not taken seriously by students and particularly frequented, today they are the smallest units from which mobilization and organization for the big demonstrations are done. (Translation by Pierre Gosselin, Notrickszone)

I know conservative politicians are timid but why are they supporting schools’ campaign for their own extinction?

Tony Thomas’s new book, Come To Think Of It – essays to tickle the brain, is available here as a book ($34.95) or an e-book ($14.95) 

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/hinter-den-kulissen-von-fridays-for-future-berlin-was-die-jungen-aktivisten-treibt-und-wer-sie-sind/26197788.html

[i] Cool Australia Impact Report, 2019

[ii] Impact Report: “The outcome is better engaged students who commit to individual and community action. This approach goes beyond a simple transfer of knowledge. It builds on an individual’s capacity for transformational change.”

[iii] Some items I’ve tracked include Film Victoria: 2018-19, $22,000; 2017-18, $88,000; 2016-17, $10,000. Screen Australia, 2016-17, $15,000 (development), unstated (production).

[iv] In a search, “2040” comes up in 64 lessons

[v] Craig Kimberley sold his Just Jeans empire for $64m in 2001. 

[vi] The HRC also trawled for complaints about The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak, who died of a heart attack during the furore.

[vii] Cool Australia Impact Report, 2019

[viii] Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations

[ix] Hansen is known as “the father of the global warming movement” from his 1988 testimony to Congress.

[x] Pachauri: ‘For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.’ 

[xi] The data collected prior to 1989 are typically not well documented and their metadata is incomplete; therefore, such data are of unknown and probably variable quality.

[xii] 48 power plants with a combined generation capacity of 16,875 megawatts (MW) are under construction in Bangladesh. State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid says the power division has been working on uninterrupted, reliable and quality power at reasonable and affordable prices.

[xiii] “Colin Seis discovered a new way of farming after his 2,000-acre family farm burned to the ground in a devastating bushfire. The disaster forced Colin to rethink his approach and develop a radical new farming technique. It was so successful it became a global agricultural movement, known as ‘pasture cropping’.”

29 thoughts on “Turning Kids’ Grey Matter a Mushy Green

  • Stephen Due says:

    Serious reform of the State School system could only occur on a geological time-scale. To counter the influence of the State system, Australia needs more independent schools, and that can be achieved within realistic timeframes. State Schools are a socialist system. They grant a measure of control over the education of the child that is dangerous, effectively enabling government-approved propaganda to be forced on children irrespective of the wishes of parents. The notorious Safe Schools program is a prime example. The parent should have control of the education of the child. Independent schools provide real choices for parents and children, without threatening parental authority or the integrity of the family. Free enterprise, not state control, is necessary to provide genuine diversity in schooling and excellence in educational outcomes. One size does not fit all.

  • T B LYNCH says:

    Sounds like we are living in the new Jonestown.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    Tony, as always a meticulously researched piece that once again exposes the irony of the anti-science regressives who fly their flag from the ‘consensus science’ (read activist MSM) flagpole. My only issue rests with your comment…’world-leading skeptic bloggers like JoNova’. If Jo had her way we would all be living under a lockdown regime that would put Chairman Dan in the little league and we would view the the head cold that is COVID-19 as something akin to the bubonic plague. She has essentially applied the same alarmism she accusers climate activists of, to the WhuFlu panicdemic. Rather, you may like to direct your audience to Cap Allon’s website – Electroverse – who has been consistent on both Climate and COVID-19 alarmism.

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    A deeply disturbing trend in Australian education and one a Liberal government might be expected to counter by demanding less time be spent on this or any other sort of specious indoctrination and far more on the basic foundations of reading, comprehension and mathematical competence for daily life at least, including some knowledge of the use and abuse of statistics in the media. There is plenty of that if one seeks resources! Lazy teachers should not be allowed to use materials provided by ‘helpful’ political entities.

    The only hope might lie in the fact that kids often object to singing the tune pushed on them by their teachers at school and by their education in general. As real jobs get scarcer and green madness is more exposed for what it is and as the next generation faces the burdens left to it by the socialist green policies of today, things may change.
    Or they may get worse, for the failures of socialism and greenery often lead to more of it, as a ‘cure’, rather than less of it.
    Apply more leeches. Bleed the patient dry.
    They used to do that in extremis in times past too.

  • ianl says:

    Elizabeth, one may hope of course, but Sheridan’s article in today’s Aus is as good a summary as any as to How The West Is Lost.

    “In a Country where Clamour always intimidates and faction often oppresses the Government, the regulations of Commerce are commonly dictated by those who are most interested to deceive and impose upon the Public.” [Adam Smith]

  • DG says:

    The nature fantasist love talking about mother earth and ‘her’ ways. A read of Sick Societies by Robert Edgerton will quickly show where this has led in the past. Yanomamö: The Fierce People by Napoleon Chagnon is also an eye opener.

  • Lewis P Buckingham says:

    CK, In the same vein the Arctic Sea Ice Holocene cover if anything is rather high when compared to the last ,Medieval ,warming. We are still in an ice age. The extra CO2 isn’t doing its IPCC projected job compared to the planetary, out of contact control, the Medieval Warm Period.
    https://postimg.cc/RN8WX4th
    Last year a local State School administrator suggested I count birds in my backyard as part of Aussie Bird. She suggested I go to a website.
    Lo and Behold the banner streaming across the top was littered with Dinosaurs and the word Extinction.
    This was when the Extinction Rebellion was revving up.
    I discussed this with her recently and she said that there were young children at the school very afraid of the future due to the pandemic and climate change.
    As a teacher may mark ‘Could do better’.

  • Lewis P Buckingham says:

    IMac The seas are rising.
    But at around the same rate as before we started putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
    The rate of change of the rate of sea level rise is not changing rapidly, if at all.
    Which means that whatever planetary mechanism that causes sea level rise or fall is still operating at the same rate as it did before we started driving cars.
    The planet then is giving us a controlled experiment.
    One of the reasons I lost my faith in the IPCC hypotheses.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    ‘Forget it’ – Without question, the most intelligent contribution Ian has made in this forum. I note you have not addressed the above average extent and mass of Antarctica ice sheet nor the above average global snow loads experienced in 2020 in your alarmist, fearmongering narrative, which appears to be motivated more by a desire to dismantle the fossil fuel industry and prop up the lithium industry as anything else. Can’t explain it Ian? Just another inconvenient truth for you Ian? Are you just another Turnbull and Holmes a Court seeking to profiteer of Lithium and other rare earth metals?
    Also, given that any meaningful renewable energy system requires storage, so that facilities such as my local emergency department can run 24/7 without interruption and that storage relies on finite noxious and volatile Lithium batteries, please explain to me how you manage to ascribe the term renewables to such a system. One suspects only through a blind eye. But I wouldn’t expect you to think that deeply about the limitations of what you are proposing because sheep rarely do. Of course I would also expect that you will putting your hand up to manage the 100’s of millions of depleted large Lithium batteries your utopia creates along with housing 100 metre high wind turbines in your back yard, but somehow I doubt it. I am also willing to bet that your daily life involves running fossil fuel driven machinery on your farm along with posting on this forum with all the communications infrastructure that entails derived from fossil fuels from your computer to the fabrication of transmission towers. This places you in that special category of obnoxious humans – the rank hypocrite. Of course you could go and live in a cave shielded from the requirements of fossil fuels, disavow yourself of modern luxuries and medical care – but that may be just a little too authentic for a rank hypocrite like yourself. Meanwhile I will continue my daily interactions with the ocean, mostly surfing, as I have done for the last half a century, during which time the sea level has not changed one iota. Satelllite altimetry of mean sea level is deeply flawed due to the multitude of computational (fossil fuel derived) corrections required to gain any meaningful result, meanwhile trusty tide gauges from around the globe demonstrate no such universal mean sea level rise. You are welcome to delude yourself all you like back on your farm removed from daily interactions with the coastline. Lastly, to Lavoisier name you can add Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Enjoy your ongoing endeavours attempting to instill as much anxiety and depression into the kiddies as possible – a truly noble cause for the likes of you.

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    Ian,there are more erudite, in the sense of specialised, sites than this on which to fight the battle of the CO2 hypothesis and its malfunctioning in the sort of ‘models’ that we have recently seen Sars-Cov-2 and Covid19 being overhyped within. Go to Google Scholar and start looking.

    Garbage in, garbage out, as they say, and anyone with any knowledge of how power groups can coalesce when there is a sniff of funding will know that professional organisations and governments will often go with the flow. And that some of them have recently stopped doing so. Even Britain’s Royal Society has had to pedal back due to pressure from its members.

    If you are going to cite ‘funding’ by fossil fuel interests as a major argument against the reaction of mainly retired scientists (because cancel culture) trying to put a strong counter-argument to the classic green hype, then I will do the same, and refer you to James Delingpole’s ‘Watermelons’, which analyses the way trillions of dollars are stacked up against countering views opposing the CO2 madness.

    If you still are of the ilk that sees CO2 as floating around our skies in black balloons, or in ‘your internet-usage’ clouds of dark stuff in government pamphlets (Gillard’s) and a current energy-company ad, then there is no hope for you, for this is the sort of sleight of hand about the issue that the unwitting populace are being fed.

  • ianl says:

    Elizabeth

    I’m dumbfounded. I’m not refuting the trollster with Sheridan’s article. He (the trollster) has been on this site harping away for some years. Please look at the back threads – I’ve hammered him time and again, eventually ignoring his ranting. There is no point to playing with him. No one here has ever agreed with him, at least to my knowledge, so he can play in his cot all he likes.

    The last time I did this was (I think) about November last year. That refutation did have a minor effect, in that his vanity was wounded but evetually nothing changed. His basic underlying gripe is that seam gas exploration was, or was to be, permitted on his property by law and although he is entitled to due compensation for land disturbance he resents the intrusion.

    Sheridan’s article was aimed at Morrison, who has done a triple backflip with pike on the energy supply issue. Liddell is a 1.8GW coal-fired station in the Hunter. AGL refuses to maintain it, will not sell it to someone who will, and proposes to replace it with unreliable renewabubbles with about 1/3rd the capacity when the wind blows. Morrison proposed a 1GW gas plant in the middle of the Hunter coalfield, then retracted that to 250MW. NSW is now 1GW short of demand on an almost daily basis but Our Glad refuses to acknowledge this – reduced demand is her intention, not increased reliable supply.

    I’ve discussed and analysed the AGW hypothesis here with others quite a few times. The trollster just plays in his cot.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    Ian, So your post above consists predominantly of cut and paste from another site that is utterly and hopelessly outdated. Most of the data referred to even predates 2014 which was the largest extent and mass of Antarctica sea ice on record. If sea ice extent is to higher latitudes than average this would allude to both air and sea temperatures north of Antarctica in both eastern and western hemispheres being colder so as the the sea ice mass will form and be maintained. There is no getting around this fact by hiding behind outdated school kid research on wikipedia.
    There is no moral virtue in capital investment and profiteering in noxious, volatile Lithium over fossil fuels. It is simply a transference of market capital from a mineral with the relatively harmless CO2 as its by product to another metal (Lithium) that is as environmentally disastrous as Lead (Pb) with same end result for the market of the fat cats ruling the roost. Oh what fools rush in! How shiny the reflection did seem!
    You are yet to confirm whether you are hosting large scale wind turbines on your property and willing to be the recepticle for millions of depleted and degrading large lithium batteries? Or is yours a do as I say, not as I do Crusade?
    Well there are none so hypocritical…

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    I am not sure who is the ‘trollster’ here and who isn’t in this discussion above. I see only what I read above, which is that you seem to be claiming some validity exists for the CO2 hypothesis because a lot of people think it is fine in spite of no real empirical evidence. Well, a lot of people thought, and some still think against all empirical evidence, that the Covid19 modelling from Ferguson at Imperial College was a great piece of work. I don’t. Same for the CO2 hypothesis, which is minimal if it exists as a heat factor in the complex climatic system of this planet, and thus there are far more significant things to worry about than flimsy ‘renewables’, especially in the current geopolitical situation.

    If I had my way we would be replacing Liddell with a spanking new HILE coal-fired power station using Japanese high tech and experience and be gearing up to produce a number of others too. I’d do it on Government loan bonds or even taxes if I had to and I’d make sure it happened very quickly so this country has a future, not an energy mess ahead. I would certainly not be wittering about gas on this side of the Australian continent when we have the best black coal in the world freely available, and there is more coal in the world than we can ever seriously use up for thousands of years. Coal is lovely stuff. Tell everyone you know. Your grandchildren will thank you for it. The Chinese, by the way, seem to like it a lot.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    The trollster is the Lithium industry propagandist who frequents this forum on a regular basis. Yesterday snow settled on the ground around Ballarat in late September – must be a sign of run away global warming eh? Can’t let this real empirical evidence get in the way of profiteering from BIG Lithium and a religious zealotry around AGW though can we! Venepuncture once enjoyed medical consensus from all representative professional bodies.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    IM: So when its colder and wetter than average its weather but when it is drier or warmer than average its climate – got it!
    As far as you can gather – ‘opinion is that as a result of AGW there will be increased energy in the atmosphere, which could result in polar vortices and cyclonic depressions dragging cold air out of Antarctica and northwards to Australia, thus producing an illusion of ‘cooling’. is an utterly baseless assertion. The colder weather patterns are due to a wavy meridional jet stream dragging colder air from the poles to higher latitudes as evidenced by the tracking of deep low pressure systems emanating in the Southern Ocean across higher latitudes. This is a well documented phenomenon mediated by reduced solar output in the form of sunspot activity – which is exactly what has been occurring throughout 2020. And since when is actual cold temperatures an “illusion”. The only illusion here is your pathetic grasp of science portrayed as some kind of factual understanding. If there is increased heat energy in the atmosphere from CO2 then why is the Antarctic ice sheet at above average mass and extent given that your AGW posits that this energy will be amplified at the poles – where has this trapped heat energy gone? You have just shot your own argument in the foot! As for your representation of BIG Lithium, as I stated in earlier post anyone who is a champion of any meaningful contribution of large renewable energy supply has to accept that storage is a critical component. Storage can only be achieved by pie in the sky pumped hydro schemes and large lithium batteries. I don’t expect someone of your calibre to have thought that through but it nonetheless remains a unavoidable reality that champions of renewables are champions of big Lithium – there is no way around it!

  • Citizen Kane says:

    IM: ‘The globe is divided into hitherto stable climate zones: polar, temperate, tropical etc. Weather: wet, dry, stormy etc takes place within them.’ So the ice ages are just a conservative (root word for conservationist) conspiracy theory then. The most recent just 12000 years ago, pure myth. The maunder minimum which forced the vikings to pack up shop in Greenland after a prolonged balmy period was merely 500 years ago. You really have a very narrow frame of reference and a utopianist view of the world, something that afflicts most on the left of politics, hence this same ill gotten notion that all colonisation emanated out people with white skin from Western Europe, or that its genesis even started from there. One can only put all of this poor epistemological frame of reference down to both low standards of education and a ideological march through those institutions. It an unfortunate Orwellian world in which we currently live and you are just another party bot.
    Finally, this above educational deficit also blinds you to the energy deficit required to pump the water back to a place where it can once again generate energy (unless of course there is a prolonged dry spell, which is inevitable at some point) and it has also blinded you to the fact that you are a BIG Lithium propagandist by design or default.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    IM: Nice try, but it was you who said ‘…hitherto stable climate zones…’. Now its ‘…they change with time…’. This ‘flip flopping’ is another example of poorly developed cognitive and reasoning capacity so evident in the arguments you and others like you present. I work in the agricultural sector and thank goodness that most I encounter are far more pragmatic grounded and reasoned thinkers than yourself. Now lets take your example of the solar bore pump as you so proudly exhibit it as a shining example of what we can come to expect in your utopian world, and apply it to my local emergency department. Looks like all casualties after about 4;30 pm in winter will just have to fend for themselves. Genius!

  • Citizen Kane says:

    Furthermore, talk me through how these solar panels are manufactured again? Something about the need for thermal coal to smelt the silicea for the panels that then are luclky to have a lifespan of 10 years (another ‘renewable’ sham). Of course the Lithium battery required to store any energy it might make also is lucky to have a lifespan of 10 years. Meaning every decade, the system needs to be replaced in its entirety – renewable alright! Hence the reason no one bothers with a second hand Prius – due the fact that a replacement Lithium battery is far more expensive than the value of the vehicle. So the whole thing is simply discarded at about the 10 year mark. What an environmental victory you are achieving. It is quite clear to me that you don’t really give a damn about the environment, you are simply here to push BIG Lithium.

  • Doubting Thomas says:

    Your ability to fantasise is incredible, Ian. To suggest that the excellent adaptation of solar or even wind power systems to the very small and localised generation needs to pump water on farms or in other similar situations can reasonably and economically be scaled up to supply base load power to cities and industrial applications is ridiculous.

    Here in the People’s Democratic Republic of the ACT where, as in Victoria and South Australia, socialist governments have been in almost uninterrupted power for decades, if not generations, huge tracts of land, hundreds of acres, have been covered by solar panels. The lying conmen in power regularly assure us that our territory’s electricity requirements are being met from these and other renewable resources. But, for some strange reason we remain connected to the national grid.
    In the meantime, a little further afield, more and more wind generators defile the landscapes, killing untold thousands of raptors and bats, and driving residents mad if they are unfortunate enough to live within earshot of a wind generator.
    Apart from all the adverse environmental problems associated with wind generators, each and every one of them requires a base of about 200 tonnes of environmentally dubious concrete, together with roads through farm and parkland for construction and maintenance. The life of a generator is said to be 25 years after which the whole thing needs to be decommissioned and, presumably, replaced. Who will pay for the removal and environmentally safe disposal of the worn out systems? The US gives us a clue about the likely reality of the future situation. Thousands of decommissioned wind farms will be left to rot where they stand as their former owners and operators cut and run through bankruptcy and other escape hatches.
    Thousands of solar panels sterilise the land on which they squat. Apart from all the other problems, they also have limited lives and will need to be safely disposed of. Once again, who will pay?
    Unless and until we grow up and accept that the nuclear option is the most environmentally safe option, and take urgent action to catch up to the rest of the technologically advanced nations, these debates are futile.

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    Anyone who takes President Trump’s joke about buying Greenland seriously doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Every time Trump cracks a joke, which is often his style, some leftist spuriously ‘fact checks’ it while the President laughs all the way to re-election. I very much hope he wins. He is clear-sighted about overhyped AGW.

  • Lewis P Buckingham says:

    Ian Mc
    One way of determining if some scientific hypotheses is correct on CO2 is to look at the theoretical predictions and compare them with an out of contact control, such as our own planet.
    There is no long term consistent relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration[‘a well mixed gas’] and average global surface temperature.
    https://i0.wp.com/www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
    As for the idea that CO2 causes more hurricanes and wild weather this was not the initial prediction of the IPCC.
    That’s because it is the temperature difference between the tropical and polar zones that drives atmospheric circulation, apart from the spin of the earth.
    The CO2 hypotheses predicts warming faster at the poles, with little warming at the equator. The temperature difference between these climatic zones then becomes smaller.
    Since the atmosphere acts as a giant heat engine, it does not ‘need’ to transfer heat between these zones as quickly, hence cyclonic activity should diminish, as CO2 global differential warming increases, favouring the poles.
    Recently every storm is reported with bated breath by the MSM as a ‘sign’ of the CO2 rise.
    However that is not in the theory.
    In science one has to be consistent.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    IM: Or BIG Lithium as you now be known on this forum – in life one also need be consistent to be regarded as having that critical human attribute of integrity. As a grazier, your whole livelihood depends on adding to the AGW that you so vehemently proselytize. So not only are you an intellectual minnow – Venus has no oceans and no biosphere, you are a rank hypocrite as pointed out earlier in this thread in response to two posts which you have subsequently removed due to your lack of courage for your convictions and because they consisted of unattributed cut and pastes from other sites. Your arguments are folly. Despite the 47% increase over 1800 levels of CO2 the earths lower atmosphere is just 0.43 degrees warmer. http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_August_2020_v6.jpg. Loose coorelation does not equal causation a mistake that most diminished intellects often make. And no this is not unchartered territory – the planet has been here many times before and well beyond and the biosphere is still as life giving as ever. How do you answer that in your doomsday – end of days scenario?
    So BIG Lithium you may want to destroy the mental health of our youth as your raison d’etre so as you can profiteer from BIG Lithium, but many of us will resist your toxic mentality and toxic future.
    BIG Lithium you really are a sub-optimal human being and that is putting it as politely as possible.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    No BIG Lithium, you are not a rank hypocrite because of the absence of said posts, (which contained such niceties as knuckle draggers, galahs and shills) and rather because you preach BIG Lithium while making a living that requires large CO2 emissions. all the way from paddock to plate Because you will not make the commitment to hosting industrial size wind turbines on your property and because you do not seek to be responsible for all the toxic disgarded Lithium for which you lobby. Add to that, that your AGW hypthesis is patently false and in the clear evidence of that you still seek to abuse and inflict harm on the youth of today. But what else should we expect from BIG Lithium.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    Western Plains – perfect place too send all those tens of millions of large toxic, noxious and volatile depleted and degrading Lithium batteries. Then BIG Lithium can to begin to practice what he preaches. I’ll drink to that!

  • Citizen Kane says:

    BIG Lithium, you now resort to threats. I would expect no less from a propagandist for the toxic Lithium Industry. At least now we can lobby our local federal politicians to Consider Ian MacDougalls property on the Western Plains for the site of tens of millions of depleted, degraded and toxic Lithium Batteries. He has repeatedly said he had no issue with it and would bend over backwards to accommodate a Lithium riddled future. Generous of you BIG Lithium. 🙂 Solar requires Coalar (to be manufactured in the first place)

  • pgang says:

    Oh, is the Lock-the-Gate NIMBY back?

  • Marcus Harris says:

    It’s time fir Tony Thomas to break up this interminable post and counter post between IM and CK. Neither will agree with the other and those in one camp or the other won’t change either.

  • lhackett01 says:

    Perhaps a reading of the paper at https://www.scribd.com/document/383385011/, Global Warming Misunderstood, might shine some light on the discussion. It presents enough hard evidence to cast doubt on the prevailing AGW belief. The many scientists who dispute the IPCC position that mankind is responsible for climate change continue to be emasculated by the media, politicians and others who too readily believe man must be responsible for calamities. The ready response of those who do not want to hear from scientists and others who have substantial evidence to dispute the anthropogenic basis for climate change is to say they will rely only on ‘the scientific consensus’; that is, essentially the IPCC position. This is akin to the matter of Copernican heliocentrism and Galileo’s championing of it during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Galileo met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture”. Of course, the “consensus” believers were wrong then and are likely wrong now. Science must never be judged by consensus, which might be only the noise issuing from the echo chamber of a self-congratulatory group.

Leave a Reply