Doomed Planet

A Pronounced Degree of Misrepresentation

There’s a rib-tickling clown show going on between the ABC, from Leigh Sales down, and the WA Museum Boola Bardip. Murdoch University, in pink polka-dot pants, is also prancing around the podium. They’re all competing to inflate the credentials of Perth-based climate zealot Mr Bill Hare.

It’s not a trivial contest. Hare founded and runs the lavishly-funded and Greenpeace-linked Climate Analytics lobby, endlessly quoted by the ABC and other left media to buttress their anti-capitalist CO2 narrative.[i] Climate Analytics was born from the dark-green Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) , which has led the way into Germany’s current energy crisis. Hare is a long-standing PIK “visiting scientist”. [ii] PIK has its anti-gas and anti-coal tentacles all over Australia including the ANU and Melbourne University, where Analytics co-founder Malte Meinshausen is an associate professor, perhaps now an orphan since the university’s pro-chancellor Mark Hargreaves axed his home at the Marxist “Sustainable Society Institute” last Monday as unsustainable. (Hargreaves said it was “a difficult decision”. I can’t see why). Let us hope would-be Aborigine Bruce Pascoe’s professorship in “indigenous agriculture” might be next for the chop.

Bill Hare is a spruiker in the green lawfare in WA against Woodside’s plan to build the $16.5 billion Scarborough gas project – let’s kiss the North-West gas jobs and exports goodbye, it’s not as though Australia’s got any economic problems. Hare’s outfit wants an end to Australia’s thermal coal exports by 2030 and gas production ceasing soon after. Back from COP Glasgow, he gloats about COP26 forming “a new coalition, led by Denmark and Costa Rica, known as the Beyond Gas and Oil Alliance. Sooner rather than later, we can expect it to come for Australia’s fast-expanding LNG export industry.”

So let’s see what the clown fight is about:

♦ WA Museum Boola Bardip contends that Hare is a Nobel Laureate, a brother-scientist to the likes of the fairly clever Albert Einstein and Adelaide’s penicillin pioneer Howard Florey. Moreover, he’s a “world-leading” home-grown climate science “superstar” and “Master Mind” who has the key to the survival of the human race (I’m not making this up).

♦ For years the ABC has depicted Hare (about 65) as a “physicist” Ph.D.[iii] His actual pinnacle was a B.Sc.Hons (Murdoch) in 1982 when he was about 26.[iv]

♦ The woke Murdoch University was so thrilled with Hare’s climate spiel that in 2008 it gave him an Honorary Doctor of Science, citing, among other things, “his climate change activism and political acumen have seen him described as ‘the best climate lobbyist in the world’.” Then it told him he could strut his Honorary Ph.D. all over the place, contrary to long-established Murdoch, pan-academic and government protocols.[v] [vi](Don’t let someone with an Honorary Doctorate in Veterinary Science spay your Labradoodle puppy).

I’ll first cover the nonsense emanating from WA Museum Boola Bardip, which had a $400m re-birth a year ago that included its interesting new name (it means “many stories”, we’re told). Then I’ll describe the ABC’s decade-long love affair with Hare despite my forlorn counter-attacks — I win the battle each time but continue to lose the war. Finally, I’ll profile Mr Hare, doing my best to remain my charitable self.

 

THE Museum Boola Bardip saga began three months ago, when it decided to run a “carefully curated” speaker program of climate-hysteric speakers. The show was billed re-assuringly as ‘A safe place for compelling conversations’.  (It doesn’t sound “safe” to me, with topics like “ Politics of the Precipice”, “Rediscovering Hope” and “End Game/Adaption, Regeneration & Strategies for Survival”). The museum loves to talk the talk:

Our vision — to be an excellent and vibrant museum service, valued and used by all Western Australians and admired and visited by the world … We will be creative, resourceful, imaginative, innovative, agile and entrepreneurial; we will be commercially astute, embrace change and aspire to excellence in all that we do.”

Pity that the museum’s not astute enough to differentiate B.Sc(Hons) versus the Nobel Prize. Here’s how the museum spruiked its public event in September (emphasis added):

A Call to Climate Action

The Master Mind…

Dr Bill Hare is a career climate scientist and world-leading climate policy expert with over thirty years of experience in the science, impacts and policy responses to climate change. He is a Nobel laureate, adjunct Professor of Energy at Murdoch University and co-founder of the global science-based think tank Climate Analytics, playing an active role in the development of the international climate regime through the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement.

So why isn’t he a household name? [What a perspicacious question!].

The third instalment in the Tipping Point series is a unique opportunity to hear this homegrown superstar in the climate science arena recount his story and share his expert opinions on the urgent action necessary for our survival.

The museum, as “community educator”, inspired others to rush to interview its inspirational Nobelist, presented by “passionate dedicated [and gullible] volunteers”. On September 8, the day before the museum beclowned itself, RTR’s Fiona Bartholomaeus “kicked off with a robust chat between Nobel Laureate and policymaker Dr. Bill Hare” to share his “cutting-edge strategies for responding to the current crisis.”

I had a good listen to his 15-minute spiel and was surprised he did not clarify that he hasn’t won a Nobel Prize and that his PhD is honorary.[vii]

The museum advertised to sell tickets for its September 9 talk by ersatz Nobelist Hare at $18 each. To ascertain whether this contravenes truth-in-advertising law, I queried ACCC headquarters, which referred me to WA Consumer Protection which does the local compliance and enforcing. The WA body responded,

The Australian Consumer Law (WA) (ACL) provides a number of guarantees for goods and services purchased within Australia. The ACL prohibits business from engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct during the course of providing a service to a consumer. The ACL does apply to the Crown and Crown agencies, but they must be acting in trade and commerce. This means that the activity itself must occur within a business context. A singular transaction is unlikely to constitute a business context. A government entity that is undertaking a purely governmental or regulatory activity, such as the performance of a statutory function, would not be considered to be carrying on a business. A number of other considerations are also relevant.

The Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety Consumer Protection Division (Consumer Protection) is responsible for administering the ACL in Western Australia. In order to have this matter properly assessed for consideration under the ACL, a complaint would need to be submitted. More information about submitting a complaint is available on our website:

 The Western Australian Ombudsman can consider complaints concerning public authorities such as State Government agencies. The Ombudsman can be contacted on (08) 9220 7550 or via its website.

WA Museum Boola Bardip didn’t deliberately mislead the public about Mr Hare (although ignorance is no excuse in law) and the incident was a one-off.  So I’ll merely give them a caution and recommend they refund all the $18 tickets they sold.

Anyway, how come the WA Museum conferred the Nobel Prize on Mr Hare? Most likely, Boola Bardip fell for the three-card trick organised by late IPPC chair (2002-15), perjurer and lascivious owner of a pair of infamously roving hands Rajendra Pachauri. In 2007 the IPCC per se got half a Nobel Peace Prize. The porn-novelist Pachauri, in an interval between cruel harassments of his think-tank’s female employees with demands for sex –including at the 37th IPCC plenary in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013 — told all the thousands of IPCC report compilers that they were each a Nobel Laureate.[viii] The Nobel authorities in Oslo slapped down Pachauri and said without equivocation that the IPCC won the Peace Prize, but none of its individual contributors was allowed to claim Laureate status. That didn’t stop the CSIRO types and 100-200 other Australian IPCC contributors flashing the Nobel Prize certificates that Pachauri handed out. Those scrolls have the same value as Zimbabwean $50 trillion notes.[ix] Top climate scientists continued to take their certificates seriously, such as America’s Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, who in an affidavit accused his detractors of the brand-new crime of “personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient.”[x] The Nobel secretariat in October 2012 told its Nobel-winning myriad claimants to back off:

The prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winnerNo individual, no matter what their involvement with the IPCC, can pass themselves off as a Nobel Laureate. Not even Dr Rajendra Pachauri is an individual laureate.”

I have previously urged the IPCC to issue a recall notice for its Nobel certificates, as these bits of paper might continue to befuddle the naive, such as Boola Bardip, the ABC and other woke scribblers. In any case, this is not a Nobel Prize but the Nobel “Peace” Prize, an annual political gesture from Oslo that has gone to the likes of billion-dollar thief/terrorist Yasser Arafat (1994), and to President Obama in 2009 for making pretty speeches.

This brings me now to the ABC and its “Dr” Hare. My campaign diary reads:

November 17, 2006: the ABC introduces Hare as “Greenpeace adviser”.

May 4, 2007: ABC’s (now deceased) Mark Colvin in the same breath says Bill Hare is both a lead author for the IPCC 2007 Report and IPCC synthesis writer, “while on paid leave from Greenpeace International, where he worked as director of climate policy from July 1992.”

So the ABC found nothing remarkable in a Greenpeace activist on Greenpeace salary playing key roles in drafting the supposedly scientifically-neutral IPCC report.[xi]

31 Oct 2007: The ABC again interviews Hare who is wearing his Greenpeace hat. He is introduced as “from Greenpeace International”.

12 March 2008: “Kerry O’Brien discusses global warming with Dr Bill Hare.” (Hare wasn’t conferred even with his honorary doctorate until March 17 but he would have been notified earlier).

March 13, 2008: Another ABC reference to “Dr” Hare, four days before his investiture.

 December 10, 2011 and December 3, 2012: More grovelling ABC interviews with “Dr” Hare.

October 8, 2018: Laura Tingle interviews “Dr” Hare on Leigh Sales’ 7.30.

April Fool’s Day, 2019: Four Corners transcript refers 13 times to Bill Hare as “Dr” Hare.

April 7, 2019: I complain to the ABC and request corrections. I say the ABC would not refer to comedian Mr Yahoo Serious as “Dr Serious” even though he has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Newcastle University, 1996. (Others are TV chat-show hostess and ex-Dolly editor “Dr of Letters Lisa Wilkinson” via Wollongong University and disillusioned Age cartoonist “Dr Michael Leunig”, three-fold endoctored via Latrobe, Griffith and ACU.

April 11, 2019: Four Corners executive producer Sally Neighbour responds,

“I am advised that Bill Hare has an Honorary Doctorate of Science awarded to him in 2008 by Murdoch University for his work on climate change science and policy. Murdoch University itself refers to Bill Hare as ‘Dr’ in some of its publications. 

It is not uncommon practice to refer to people with Honorary Doctorates as ‘Dr’. I understand this is often qualified with the reference (h.c). For the purpose of our program, we did not feel this was necessary as most viewers or readers would not be familiar with the term. I am happy to take your comments onboard should we interview Bill Hare again on Four Corners. I will also convey your comments to Laura Tingle.”

May 7, 2019: Michael Slezak on ABC News Analysis interviews “Dr” Bill Hare.

October 24, 2021: David Speers on Insiders interviews “Dr” Bill Hare.

Nov 5, 2021: RN Breakfast with Sally Sara: “Dr” Bill Hare again

Nov 11, 2021: ABC 730: A fawning Leigh Sales achieves six references to “Dr” Hare on one 7.30 program.

Nov 14, 2021: I complain again to the ABC about “Dr” Hare:

It is particularly egregious to refer to him in his science capacity as “Dr” Hare. A couple of years ago I complained about your use of “Dr” Hare and Sally Neighbour informed me the ABC would be more careful about it. Please correct all ABC versions where you call him “Dr” Hare — or at least explain that he has only an honorary doctorate for his lobbying activity.

After 18 days, on Dec 2, 2021, Matt Galvin of ABC News Management replies:

I have referred your concerns to ABC Language, a unit that meet (sic) regularly and advise (sic) ABC staff on correct language usage. They have pointed me to the ABC’s publicly-available style guide

 Titles (medical and academic)

Honorary doctorates do not usually confer the Dr title. A rule of thumb: if someone’s academic or medical status has no bearing on a story, they probably don’t need the courtesy title…

Considering the above, ABC News agrees that as Bill Hare is the CEO of Climate Analytics, it would have been sufficient in both of these recent instances to introduce him without the ‘Dr’ honorific. Please be assured that both programs will be advised about the correct usage of such references. Thank you for bringing this matter to the ABC’s attention.

So Four Corners and Laura Tingle stuffed up about “Dr” Hare in 2019, the ABC organised a corrective, Leigh Sales et al stuffed it up again last month and the ABC again conceded fault and applied its corrective to ensure it would be repeated no more. All well and good, the system seems to be working albeit with some sand in the gears.

But this is the “most trusted” ABC we’re talking about. The very day after I received the apology from ABC News Management’s Matt Galvin (Dec 2), the ABC published a new report by its reporter Rebecca Turner (Dec 3) touting “Dr” Hare all over again.

Dr [sic] Hare, who received support from the CCWA [Conservation Council of WA] for the [Woodside] study, said WA did not need Scarborough gas to keep the lights on …”So really on the time scale of a decade or so, we could be 100 per cent renewable in the electricity space by the early 2030s, as are other places.”  [Like where, exactly?].

Ms Turner confusingly called him “Bill Hare”, “Mr Bill Hare” and “Dr Hare” all within six paragraphs. Wayback Machine finds that her original story said “Dr” Hare and not “Mr” Hare. But when the ABC updated it to allow Woodside to correct Hare’s wonky figures, the “Mr Hare” mention arrived, perhaps because Woodside stressed its opponent’s lowly “Mr” title. But the ABC didn’t notice, or didn’t care, about using “Dr Hare” a para later.

As for the report the ABC’s Turner cites, we find co-author Hare now coyly describing himself as “Bill Hare, D.Sc.(hon. causa) (Murdoch).” In a decade of following the climate debate, I’ve never seen another scientist citing an honorary degree for a science paper. So I file yet another complaint to the ABC on December 7:

Despite being twice advised that the ABC would cease calling Mr Bill Hare of Climate Analytics “Dr” Hare, ABC News has reverted to “Dr Hare” just one day after Matt Galvin (ABC News Management) assured me it wouldn’t happen. Can you please correct that Dec 3 report and take steps to ensure that ABC people cease referring to “Dr” Bill Hare. Thanks.

Dec 8, 2021: ABC News Management’s Matt Galvin responds promptly and politely, “Thanks for pointing this out Tony – the correction has been made.”

However, instead of a correction, the ABC has merely done a ‘stealth edit’ to remove the “Dr” from its reference to Hare.

I’ve mentioned that Mr Hare hasn’t won a Nobel yet. His fans can nominate him for one in say, Literature, here.

Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from author at tthomas061@gmail.com or publisher Connor Court

 

[i] A list of funders on Climate Analytics website as at 2018 includes Greenpeace Foundation, Australian Conservation Fund (ACF), Christian Aid (huh?), World Bank, UNEP, Carnegie, and numerous EU and German agencies. It has more than 30 scientists on its payroll.

[ii] Potsdam Institute’s loopy founder Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber boasted about his “plan for a transformation of society” and “a new basis of our coexistence”. His deputy Ottmar Edenhofer got a bit too frank and said that climate policy “has almost nothing to do any more with environmental protection” and “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

[iii] Do a search of “Dr” Bill Hare quoted on his own Climate Analytics website and it comes up 30 times. Analytics’ latest 2019 annual report under “Management” says “Dr Bill Hare is a physicist and climate scientist with 30 years’ experience in science, impacts and policy responses to climate change .”

[iv] He began high school in 1969 which would put his birth date around 1956.

[v] To protect the public from a jungle of spurious academic titles and claims which could even lead to serious harms, the federal-state Australian Qualifications Framework was set up in 1995. AQF rules include,

Use of titles by graduates

The title ‘Doctor’ will not be used by those who hold an honorary award. An honorary award is not an AQF qualification … As such any certification documentation issued to an honorary award recipient will specify that the award is honorary. 

[vi] Murdoch has since honoured Hare with its 2017 Keith Roby Lecture and a “Distinguished Alumni Award”. 

[vii] RTR was so pleased with its “Nobel Laureate” guest that it also ran the interview the day after the WA Museum event. RTR linked directly to the Museum’s “Laureate” item.

[viii] Pachauri resigned abruptly in February, 2015, when accused by a 29-year-old female subordinate of an 18-month sexual harassment onslaught.

[ix] Pachauri: “I have been stunned in a pleasant way with the news of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for the IPCC. This makes each of you Nobel Laureates and it is my privilege to acknowledge this honour on your behalf.”

[x] A top member of the IPCC cabal, Kevin Trenberth, emailed his pals at Christmas: “Season’s greetings to all my fellow Nobel Laureates, even if we did not get to go to Oslo.”

[xi] Bill Hare was a Greenpeace International spokesman as “Climate Policy Director” 1992-2002, its “Chief Climate Negotiator” in 2007, and a Greenpeace “legend”. Notwithstanding, he was also a 2007 IPCC lead author and an expert reviewer on two out of three sections of that report, and one of 40 people on the “core writing team” for the big-picture Synthesis Report. He was a lead author for the 2014 report.

15 thoughts on “A Pronounced Degree of Misrepresentation

  • STD says:

    The beard Tony, what’s he trying to hid?

  • John Cook says:

    I admire your tenacity, Tony. I have no faith in the ABC to get it right.
    Thanks

  • Daffy says:

    The other bubble to burst is ‘Associate Professor’ often a fancy part time lecturer.

  • Claude James says:

    Fake scientists are bad for human well-being. So are multiculturalists.

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    Daffy, ‘Associate Professor’ is a genuine academic position and title in Australia. It is, however, an American import from a different system to that under which Australia’s first universities were founded, which used the British modes. Traditionally, in Britain, the equivalent position ot the American ‘Associate Professor’ was Senior Lecturer, which Australian universities still use a rung below in the hierarchy now towards their position of Associate Professor. Next step up after that is a full Professor.
    I think you may have in mind the title of Adjunct Professor. An Adjunct Professor is invited on the basis of certain skills to use this title when engaged on university activities only and it lasts only for a specified period of time. It is often not renewed and implies only a tangential relationship to the traditional research professoriate. In this manner, it is similar to the position of Honorary Professor, such as that held by Mr. Dark. It conveys no genuine academic rank.
    In my view, academic rank once did hold a value with regard to intellectual achievement. But the system has become so downgraded with the introduction of so many universities and varous forms of malfeasance in appointments within universities that an academic title alone conveys very little in and of itself. What was it gained for, who awarded it, and why, become critical issues.
    Similarly with regard to Nobel Prize issues.
    Well done, foot soldier Tony, in making the ABC adher to their own proclaimed reporting standards.

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    oops/ Mr. Hare, not Mr. Dark. Dark by nature may have been on my mind. 😉

  • ianl says:

    Tony Thomas’ persistence here is very heartening.

    It’s obvious, though, that the ABC has no real intention of abiding by its’ own admissions on the use of honorary PhD’s for green propaganda.

    Saving the planet from Ultimo is far too important to countenance honesty in what is really only a “semantic quibble” (as the ABC’s limp responding comments imply). Gaming it has more influence within the public (” … most viewers or readers would not be familiar with the term [h.c] – Sally Neighbour, ABC) and informing them of the actual situation destroys that influence.

  • STD says:

    Yes ,well said Elizabeth. If their ABC thinks of us as a bunch of mushrooms ,then surely it is only fitting that yours truly ,Mr Hare should hold the associated title of Adjunct Professorship of Champignons .

  • Suburban Boy says:

    Don’t foget “Doctor Karl” on Their ABC. For a man who holds no doctorate and doesn’t practise medicine the honorific is unjustified and misleading.

  • Daffy says:

    Elizabeth, you are right, me culpa. Adjunct was what I was after. Mind mangling all by me.

  • Peter OBrien says:

    Kruszelnicki has a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery so he probably qualifies for the courtesy title via that route.

  • en passant says:

    It is truly depressing to witness how deeply the world has embraced the New Dark Age of the Climate Con, the Wuhan Sniffle, Totalitarianism and rejection of the benefits of industry we all enjoy.
    was in PNG when a ‘Cargo Cult Curse’ infected a Highlands Village. They killed all their pigs and destroyed their gardens then awaited the arrival of ‘cargo from the sky’. It turned out they were right as RAAF aircraft arrived bring food.
    Who would have thought Oz would follow the same path – but we are.

  • norsaint says:

    And they wonder why we’re switching off the media in record numbers.
    Well done Tony!

  • Alice Thermopolis says:

    Another fine post. Thanks TT.
    Note the disclaimer here:
    https://climateanalytics.org/disclaimer/

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