"The Chasers War On Everything" co-founder Julian Morrow during his 2009 Andrew Olle Media Lecture televised by Auntie last Sunday night:
"At this point I want to take a gratuitous swipe at the Prime Minister. And I want to make very clear, I'm going out of my way to do this as an act of petty personal revenge because he went out of his way to criticise us, especially as he hadn't seen it. To me Kevin Rudd's enthusiasm for buying in on any cultural controversy - from Bill Henson to The Chaser to Gordon Ramsay - is a bit unseemly, and at risk of sounding old-fashioned, not very Prime Ministerial. Frankly, I was stunned a few weeks ago that Mr Rudd wasn't tweeting alternative names for Vegemite's iSnack2.0, or phoning Indonesia to see if as well as those poor Sri Lankans, they'll also give asylum to the poor bastard who came up with the one name in Australia less popular than "Kyle Sandilands".
Kevin Rudd clearly fancies himself as an intellectual leader of this country. But being a true intellectual leader means more than tossing off the odd economics essay for The Monthly between nanosleeps on your weekend off. It means setting the tone for the national discourse and resisting, rather than inciting, hysteria."
Former PM John Howard also had this very nasty habit of running off at the mouth on anything and everything in the hope of scoring brownie points with voters, but it's still good to see Rudders being called on this."As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change.
It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change skeptics in all their colours – some more sophisticated than others.
It is to destroy the CPRS at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad, and our children’s fate – and our grandchildren’s fate – will lie entirely with them.
It’s time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.
The first category of those opposed to action is the vocal group of conservatives who do not accept the scientific consensus. This group believes the science is inconclusive and does not provide an evidentiary basis for anthropogenic climate change.
In Australia, before the 2007 election, this group was thought to be relatively small. There appeared – for a time – to be bipartisan consensus on the need for action on climate change. In recent times, this bipartisan support has frayed.
As one Liberal Member of Parliament said to Phil Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald last year:
“[at the last election we supported an ETS because] we were staring at an electoral abyss. We had to pretend we cared.”
(SMH, 28 JULY 2008)
More recently that pretence has been increasingly cast aside. Would-be Liberal leader Tony Abbott said in July this year that “the science … is contentious to say the least”.(27 July 2009)
Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said:
“I remain unconvinced about the need for an ETS given that carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth”.
Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston said:
“Levels of carbon dioxide have risen in the world, but whether or not this is the sole cause or just a contributor to climate change is, I think, unanswered.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)
Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin said this year:
“CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant… This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)
Alternative Liberal leader Joe Hockey – who knows better – has been drawn into the same sort of doublespeak, remarking on the Today Show in August:
“Look, climate change is real Karl, you know whether it is made by human beings or not that is open to dispute.”
(12 AUGUST 2009)
Even the leader of the Opposition, once Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has flirted with this doublespeak, telling Alan Jones on 2GB: “I think most people have at least some doubts about the science.”
(19 JUNE 2009)
The tentacles of the climate change skeptics reach deep into the ranks of the Liberal Party, and once you add the National Party it’s plain the skeptics and the deniers are a major force."
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Leader of the Libs Malcolm Turnbull gave a few people a good belly laugh last week when (with fingers crossed behind his back) he repeatedly fronted the microphones saying that he didn't want to do a running commentary, make the task harder for, or give off-the-cuff advice to the Prime Minister in relation to the possible use of force to remove asylum seekers on board the Ocean Viking. Of course making life difficult is the Opposition's raison d'être and something Truffles has been doing with gusto ever since these asylum seekers first propped and bucked.
1 comment:
The science of climate change is over. CO2 levels and climate science is dead. One of the first pargraphs of the copenhagen treaty is a statment that the signer agrees with the conclusions of the UN IPCC. The conclusion of course is that climat echange is casued by humna activity. In other words, when the treaty is signed, the investigation into the science of climate change is finished, climate science will no longer be needed. Wow, the funding that the climate scientists have enjoyed for many years will dry up fast, and climate scince will return to obscurity once again. The Copenhagen negotiations will not be about the truth of the science, it will revolve around population control, paying the 'carbon debt' to poor countries and the launching of the UN as our Global Government. So stop talking about CO2 and the dmage it does, what we need to debate now is the UN as our new government. All the rest of the climate science talk is not relevant anymore.
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