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A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

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The Australian gets serious

In Hot and Bothered, the Australian has ramped up the descriptors of the hacked emails from the CRU. The terms are appropriate: “apparent fraud”, “disturbing”, “doctoring evidence”, and “scandal”.

This is a story finally that the media just cannot ignore.

Nick Minchin is also elevated to unofficial chief climate change sceptic of Australia, a post that didn’t exist yesterday. Suddenly unconvinced people have credibility.

“Minchin says the apparent fraud signifies a “rather disturbing culture, at least in the East Anglia CRU, which is one of most significant in the world in terms of determining outcomes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”.

“For those who don’t think the IPCC should be taken as gospel, this does confirm that we shouldn’t be unquestioning of the opinions of the UN committee.”

Brendan O’Keefe also collects comments together from Ian Plimer, Phil Jones, Minister Penny Wong, Kevin Trenberth (“I feel violated”), as well as Tom Nelson, Tim Ball, Greg Hunt (opposition climate change spokesman) et moi. Yes, a whole paragraph.

Finally, a major paper is investigating, and it’s just in time. Today is D-Day for Turnbull. A big day in Australian politics. The Rudd government hands down a new [...]

November 24th, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (44)

ClimateGate — “covered” but not exposed in The Australian

Hackers Expose Climate Brawl Monday Nov 23, 2009

UPDATE Mon 23rd: The Australian put this story on Page 1, and added an image file of “quotes” for which they deserve kudos. This blog comments on the online version. The in-print version is better (see at the bottom).

Caroline Overington writes up the story of the hackers breaking in to the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), but misses the meat of the story. The Australian can tick the box “Covered”, but not tick the box “Incisive”.

She includes a few of the emails, but misses the bombshells while wasting column space discussing irrelevancies. As the Australian Senators sit down to assess the meaningfulness of an Emissions Trading Scheme this week, we can only hope they have better sources of information.

The extraordinary emails from the East Anglia CRU expose how corrupt climate science has become. They are nothing less than startling. Leading researchers have been caught discussing how to “hide the decline”, how to refuse their scientific and legal obligations, and threatening to blackball professional journals to stop legitimate research being published. These same researchers have a long persistent record of hiding data and when faced with a series [...]

November 23rd, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (45)

Turnbull’s crushing loss called a “win?”

Is this the same conference? One newspaper reports a “win” for Turnbull, while another calls it “a slap in the face.”

Below, The Australian reports that our opposition leader won a concession from his party–yet it’s hardly a win. His party (or at least the WA State branch) clearly don’t want him to agree to an Emissions Trading Scheme before Copenhagen. Their “concession” was that he’s allowed to …um, talk about the details of the scheme that he can’t agree too. What Turnbull wanted and desperately needed was a concession that he could pass the ETS legislation in some form, and clearly he hasn’t got that. The real headline should be:

“Malcolm Turnbull wins meaningless concession from WA Liberals.”

[...]

October 12th, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (15)

Science communication pollution

Here’s an example of SciComm Pollution — an article that leaves the world slightly less enlightened than they would have been had it not existed. It’s also proof that the media blackout works so well that even theoretically educated people like, say, an archaeologist, are unaware of basic uncontroversial scientific truths. Here’s Michael Berry, in the Salt Lake Tribune, having trouble reasoning, missing the point, being fully a decade out of date, and acting unwittingly as a public relations agent for a giant bureaucracy.

He tries to claim Senator Orrin Hatch and The Skeptics Handbook are wrong on the Vostok ice cores.

[...]

October 12th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Global Warming, Science Communication, The Skeptics Handbook | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (92)

Global politics is being influenced by the climate fawners

More muddy thinking. Once again, a politico-journalist writes about science and misses the point. Science is not like law, politics or sport: there is no umpire, no judge, no boss who sets the rules (at least not one you can interview). Opinions don’t control the climate, yet Mike Steketee makes the basic error of elevating opinions above The Real World. Steketee is The Australian newspaper’s National Affairs Editor. He’s even won a Walkley award for journalism, yet somehow, the rules of engagement for science writing are so lax he can get away with a commentary which fails the basic test of logic. He pays lip service to the benefits of scepticism in journalism, while he simply repeats official PR from international committees. This is not investigative journalism, or even informed commentary.

“We have the illusion of ‘free press’, but when the press is untrained in logic and reason, free press is just free propaganda.”

What’s so comi-tragic about Steketee is that he’s so sure he ‘understands’ science that he can patronisingly imply that Fielding-the-engineer, might be ‘influenced’ by a contrarian (god forbid, a person who thinks)—all while Steketee is clearly not just influenced, but beholden to group-think. Yawn. There goes [...]

June 24th, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming, Logic & Reason | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (162)

Finally, a politician doing what politicians should do

This is a big step. Steve Fielding in Australia holds a crucial senate vote on the proposed Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). Astonishingly (for a politician) he stands out from the crowd for simply saying the obvious. He wants to “hear from both sides of the debate.”

A simple statement like this should not be remarkable—but it’s so rare. Steve Fielding assumed the mainstream thinking was right, but is now doing what anyone who hasn’t looked at the debate in detail ought to be doing. Some research. It’s a rare occasion when you can see the good side of democracy and free speech in action. He paid for himself to fly to the far side of the world to attend Heartland’s 3rd conference on Climate Change to hear from scientists who are not convinced carbon has a large role to play in our climate.

The Australian newspaper covered it. And Steve expanded today in the Australian on why he went to Washington.

His visit to the Heartland conference has given the Australian ABC enough reason to bother sending a journalist to it (unlike the two previous conferences). See their short coverage from Washington. (Look out for the glimpse of The [...]

June 8th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming, Science Communication | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (67)
 
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