The unravelling of the climate religion continues: Graham Richardson is an old-school Australian Labor powerbroker and former senior minister, and yesterday he was bagging out Adam Bandt, the Greens MP, for his atrocious timing, and “meanness of spirit” in using cyclone Debbie to score political points about climate policy “while hundreds of thousands of people are wondering what they will have left.”
What’s remarkable is how flat out unapologetic, no-pussy-footing plain and clear he is, and how much he is making the same points that sensible skeptics have been saying. Is this the first sign of a shift in the ranks of the Labor Party?
Richardson, 2015 was determined to fight for carbon pricing:
You need not worry, dear readers. This fearless correspondent will continue to wage war on this issue even when all my comrades have surrendered.
Graham Richardson 2017:
It is becoming increasingly difficult to remain a hard-core supporter of climate change belief. The entry into the debate this week of zany zealot Adam Bandt was horribly wrong on several fronts.
He [Bandt] made the staggering claim that Malcolm Turnbull would have “blood on his hands” if he supported the building of coal-fired power stations, exclaiming that these stations would cause even more cyclones to hit the coast.
There is no evidence upon which to base this claim. In fact, over the past three or four years, far north Queensland has had almost no cyclones and experienced wet season failures in each of these years. The dam in Townsville is at a miserable 18 per cent because of those failures.
Sounds like a true skeptic:
Cyclones have been around forever and the advent of coal-fired power stations has neither increased nor decreased their frequency.
You would think this bloke would have learned a real lesson from Tim Flannery’s attempts…
Richardson goes on to mention failed predictions, and how Flannery got it “spectacularly wrong” and even how Arctic ice is melting, but Antarctic ice is stable. It’s not news to us, but to hear from a Labor guy is. And Richardson was one of the ones leading Labor into the Enviro-green mould nearly 30 years ago. Fitting then, if all these years later, he is leading them out of it:
As far back as 1989, I was the minister who took a submission to cabinet on global warming, as this phenomenon was then called. I am not prepared to dump my core belief, but like the sceptics, my view has gradually changed and so should theirs.
To get some idea of just how far he has come, here’s what he said nearly two years ago:
“Labor vacated the arena of argument. The sceptics and deniers have turned the 70 per cent-plus belief in climate change into a minority because no one has engaged them.” – Graham Richardson, May 2015
And I can’t resist, indulge me, I still like my reply at the time: No one has engaged the deniers! Oh really? says JoNova
That’s right Graham, we unfunded bloggers and the few surviving skeptical scientists not evicted and blackballed from our universities (yet) have tricked 20% of the population because no one has put forward the climate change arguments except for: The Climate Commission, CSIRO, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, The ABC, The BBC, The Guardian, Fairfax, The Australian government, most universities, The EU, The UN, The World Bank, and the IMF.
With a budget of nothing we’re winning. Why? We have nature on our side.
Reading Richardson’s comments in 2015, he might argue that he was bagging out the Greens then, and he still believes in climate change now, the difference is that now, he sounds more and more like a skeptic and has gone in hard to mock the prophets of doom.
Richardson 2015:
I am starting to feel like the lone Japanese soldier stranded on a long-forgotten Pacific island still fighting a war for a lost cause. I am still a believer in climate change. I am not hysterical about it and don’t believe our cities and towns are about to be inundated by some permanent tsunami caused by human activity. I do believe our rainfall patterns will be interrupted and some areas will be drier, others wetter. It would be wonderful if we could focus on what those changes might be.
The Labor Party need more sensible voices like Richardson. To Richardson, when he says skeptics should be willing to change their views, I say, absolutely. My views are still open to change, and in the last ten years they’ve changed, I’ve become more and more skeptical.