Tag: cranks

Everybody’s somebody’s fool

ListenerSept0815.jpg It’s possible that Bill Ralston believes that his columns in The Listener are amusing. Perhaps he also thinks they’re challenging. It’s plausible that his editor agrees on both counts, or the columns might no longer appear – as is true of so many fine Listener columnists of recent memory. How sad then that Ralston so miserably fails, so often, on both counts. This week (full text available next week), he rails against “scares”, and after chastising Time magazine for herpes, Aids, Y2K and bird flu panics, launches into climate change.

At the risk of being labelled a “climate change denier”, a phrase that deliberately feasts on the resonance of the last word, implying one is the kind of disgraceful person that would also deny the Holocaust, I wonder if we are being fed another massive overreaction to a natural phenomenon.

OK, I’ll bite. If you deny the reality of a problem, then you are a denier. No Holocaust reference implied or intended. A statement of fact – it’s what the word means. And if you’re still wondering about the reality of the problem, you are simply displaying your ignorance. There are few spectacles so unedifying (or unamusing) as an ill-informed would-be curmudgeon interviewing his typewriter on a such a well-documented issue. Ralston even manages apparently approving references to Rodney Hide’s astonishing display of ignorance last week.

Twaddle, Bill. Complete twaddle.

Here come de judge

judge How does an intelligent layman decide between the competing claims of the climate cranks (including Rodney Hide), and the position presented to us by scientific institutions and the IPCC? It’s easy to assume that there are “two sides” to the story, and that both should be heard. This is the idea that Avenues – a glossy freebie magazine in Christchurch – decided to use for a series of articles earlier this year. The editor, Jon Gadsby (who has since left), lined up NZ C”S”C veteran Gerrit van der Lingen to take the crank side, while Professor Bryan Storey, director of the University of Canterbury’s Gateway Antarctica programme took the IPPC position. In his introduction to one of the pieces Gadsby said:

This whole project is a major one, and something Avenues has not entered into lightly. We are though, if one side is to be believed, facing the single greatest threat to life in the history of humankind. If the other side is correct, we are in the midst of the single greatest, stage-managed deception in recorded history.

Nicely put, Jon. The final judgement appeared in the magazine’s August issue, provided by the recently retired High Court judge, Justice John Hansen. His summing up is interesting for the approach he took, even if his finding comes as no surprise.

Continue reading “Here come de judge”

I’m wrong about everything

rodenymorph.gif It’s official. ACT is the party of climate denial. Not only have they been endorsed by the NZ C”S”C for their rejection of the ETS, but Rodney Hide has confirmed his status as a full-blown crank in an astonishing speech to the ACT Upper South Regional Conference in Christchurch on Sunday. The errors he makes and the ignorance he displays are so egregious that the speech amounts to a public suicide note from a politician with aspirations to a role in governing this country.

Continue reading “I’m wrong about everything”

Life on Mars?

Digging through Hansard (as one does when one should be working) in search of Rodney Hide’s pearls of wisdom, I was most amused to read the speech made by Gordon Copeland. It traverses a well-trodden trail of sceptic talking points. Gordon manages to bring in British winemaking, the sun as a driver of climate change, before launching into this:

Unlike Rodney Hide, I am not a climate change scientist.

How wrong can a man be in so few words?

Therefore, my approach to this issue, as it would be with many others in this Committee, is to get the very best scientific explanation that we can from a number of sources that an increase in global warming is due to increasing levels of emissions. Whether those emissions are carbon-related is, as Rodney Hide has said, only a hypothesis. It is not fact. It has now been discovered that an increase in carbon levels over thousands of years follows a warming in the climate.

At this point Marian Hobbs tried to get Gordon back to the matter in hand (clause by clause debate of the ETS bill), but he wouldn’t be deflected:

The conventional wisdom in recent years has been that global warming follows increasing levels of carbon. If that is the case, then we would also expect Mars, for example, not to have had any change at all in its climate over many years because there is no carbon up there to emit. But, in fact, Mars is warming, as is Earth. Therefore, there is a link back to the sun.

Words fail me. I can only suggest that Jilted John might be on the right track (though, of course, I could not possibly suggest that he was technically correct).


JImmy Saville, where are you when we need you?

Barabajagal (Lovelock is hot)

Lovelock.jpg Morning Report is full of surprises. Last week it was Sean Plunket extemporising a ruthless skewering of Winston Peters, this week it’s Sean completely missing the point in an interview with James Lovelock (stream, podcast – 8:20am). The programme apparently noticed that Lovelock doesn’t think much of emissions trading as an answer to climate change, and decided to let him air his views. What role should NZ play in addressing the problem, Plunket asked?:

I think the role of New Zealand […] is to be a lifeboat. The world may get almost intolerable during the coming century.

Sean however is on-topic with the big emitters’ view of the ETS, keen to emphasise the “billions of dollars” the scheme will cost, but Loveock’s main point seems to whizz over his head. The man who thought up the concept of Gaia is saying that it’s too late to do anything to stop catastrophic change and that’s why an ETS of any kind is a waste of time. I was somewhat surprised to find that the NZ C”S”C have had a sudden rush of blood to the head and think that Lovelock’s interview somehow supports their position, linking approvingly to the interview – as have some fellow travellers.

Just in case there’s any confusion, read and inwardly digest this Guardian extract from a recent piece by Lovelock in a special edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A devoted to geoengineering (all articles available free). Lovelock doesn’t mince his words:

Whatever we do is likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. To continue business as usual will probably kill most of us during the century. Is there any reason to believe that fully implementing Bali, with sustainable development and the full use of renewable energy, would kill less? We have to consider seriously that as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option is often kind words and pain killers but otherwise do nothing and let Nature take its course.

The usual response to such bitter realism is: then there is no hope for us, and we can do nothing to avoid our plight. This is far from true. We can adapt to climate change and this will allow us to make the best use of the refuge areas of the world that escape the worst heat and drought. We have to marshal our resources soon and if a safe form of geoengineering buys us a little time then we must use it.

Parts of the world such as oceanic islands, the Arctic basin and oases on the continents will still be habitable in a hot world. We need to regard them as lifeboats and see that there are sufficient sources of food and energy to sustain us as a species. Physicians have the Hippocratic Oath; perhaps we need something similar for our practice of planetary medicine.

Lovelock describes himself as a “geophysiologist” in the title of the full article. Nice job description. From a New Zealand perspective, you might want to ponder how we respond when the world starts trying to get into our lifeboat – and how long it might be before it starts to happen. Pity Sean didn’t think to ask…

[Update: small hat-tip to myself. “Lifeboat New Zealand” is a phrase I use in the book (and #12 here). The Herald picked up on it at the time of the launch last year. Nice to know someone agrees…]