You gotta to hand it to Rodney Hide – his bumptiousness knows no bounds. Yesterday he sent a public “letter” to John Key: What Rodney’ll tell John If You Give Him Enough Act Mps! And in it he repeats his now-familiar climate crank schtick:
John, you gotta get the country out of this Emissions Trading Scam.
I’ve read the NZIER report. Have you read it?
John may not, but I have. It manages to make the economic consequences of an emissions trading scheme look very bad, by making some ludicrous assumptions – the biggest of which is that New Zealand acts totally alone, that the rest of the world does nothing. That single assumption makes the rest of the NZIER report meaningless – except as a source of daft numbers for the likes of Rodney Hide, the Greenhouse Policy Coalition and Federated Farmers to wave around.
So after beating around the bush with a bird in one hand and a cleft stick in the other, he reveals his credentials:
“I’m not your classic climate change denier. I’ve been worried about the future of the planet since I was 15.
(“Although it’s funny. Back then, the wise ones were all saying we were going to freeze to death in a new Ice Age. I was so terrified, I went and became an environmental scientist.)
Rodney certainly isn’t your classic crank, but I have to suspect that he’s creatively re-interpreting his personal history when he asserts that he became an “environmental scientist” because of the global cooling scare. There are two problems with this statement. There wasn’t a global cooling scare, and Rodney isn’t an environmental scientist (see this comment on an earlier Hide post for a description of the course he did). His Wikipedia entry has the details:
After returning to New Zealand, Hide gained a degree in resource management from Lincoln College, Canterbury. He then took up a teaching position at Lincoln, first in resource management and later in economics. He completed his master’s degree in economics from Montana State University in record time.
His first degree was in zoology and botany, so he does have a science background: it’s just a pity he seems to forgotten all about it.
And over the next 30 years, I found out my green friends were well-meaning, but they weren’t very well-informed.
So I’m not as worried about the future of the planet as I used to be. Even the UN now admits the globe stopped warming in 1998.
No, “the UN” hasn’t admitted that the globe stopped warming in 1998. Because it didn’t. This is something so easily checked that you might expect Hide to show some regard for veracity – but his pronouncements on climate change show no interest in the truth.
Hide seems to think that being bumptious and amusing is enough to allow him to tell lies and get away with it. He’s like a little child, bouncing up and down being outrageous for an audience. It’s about time someone told him to shut up and go to his room. Here’s hoping the good voters of Epsom save John Key from the tragedy of having Hide in his cabinet, should the election result give National the numbers to govern.
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Thanks to a brief encounter at last weekend’s