Instant gratification is a powerful, but flawed, human motivator.

Searching for that perfect Christmas gift for your climate alarmist friend? You could do worse than slinging them a book like Emotional Intelligence, Plimer’s, Carter’s or Bookers. Why? Research is mounting that your friend is the victim of a brain glitch. More particularly, he [...]

The real question sociologists will be studying for years to come is: how was an exaggerated scare, based on so little evidence, poor reasoning and petty namecalling, kept alive for two whole decades?

See your tax dollars converted into their scare. Click for a larger image. Reference: Climate Money, Science and Public Policy Institute, 2009.

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1. The money and vested interests on the pro-scare side is vastly larger, more influential, and more powerful than that on the skeptical side. Fossil fuel and conservative-think-tanks are competing against most of the world financial houses, the nuclear and renewable energy industry,  large well financed green activists (WWF revenue was $700m last year), not to mention whole government departments, major political parties, universities dependent on government funding, the BBC (there is no debate), the [...]

Fabíola and Julio Licinio in 1964. She died of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma a few weeks later.

LOST opportunities are invisible but deadly. On climate change, the call to buy insurance by pricing carbon is a cop-out. Where is the cost-benefit analysis? We’re thinking of axing Australian medical research yet we’re supporting solar panel manufacturers in China. It doesn’t have to be this way.

All the money spent employing green police, subsidizing solar or researching how to [...]

The PR machine has spent twenty years pretending to be scientific while they push poll the phrase “carbon is pollution”  (Don’t you want to stop pollution?) But turn the polling inside out and the nonsense is exposed. Stephen Harper takes the PR team’s theme to its logical conclusion and uses it against them.

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Forget plate tectonics and continental drift. A trace gas in the atmosphere can reshape the Earth, at least, that’s apparently how many people see it. A new survey shows that over a third of the population think that climate change induces not just tsunamis, but even volcanic eruptions. Worse, 37% of people are so convinced carbon is pollution that they think it would be a worthwhile aim to reduce the carbon content of their body. (The ultimate diet, you might say).

About a quarter of the population are so plum-confused about what carbon is, they would rather not eat food with carbon in it. (Crikey!) The numbers taken in by the mass delusion are shocking. Nearly half the population think food would be safer without carbon.

This is the unscientific bias of our national bureaucracies, [...]

My speech at the Anti-tax Carbon rally, Wednesday March 23rd.

I used to be a Green. I used to think Carbon dioxide mattered. I still worry about falling fish stocks, old growth forest and erosion, but wind farms won’t help the fish, and solar cells won’t keep the top soil from blowing away. Real environmental  problems are being sidelined by fake ones.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I thought I was well informed, but I was shocked when I found out how what was going on behind the scenes. Everything you may have heard about carbon dioxide can be turned inside out.

How many excuses does it take?

There’s a media war going on here in Australia. At stake is free speech — but the discussion about it is completely disguised and parades instead as a debate about “balance” in science reporting.

It’s reached the point where our national masthead felt the need to issue a whole feature article rebutting their critics (Climate debate is no place for hotheads) which includes quote after quote of The Australian’s pro man-made-global-warming editorials. But why under the Goddess of Free Press should any serious newspaper feel required to declare their belief in a particular scientific theory?

“The Australian ‘s editors are being attacked for questioning authority. They’re supposed to be journalists who investigate everything, not a PR agency who promotes an ideology. In reply the Australian could have been roasting the other media agencies…”

The Australian has been taking heat from the rest of the Australian media (notably Fairfax and ABC employees, and a couple of book writing academics). It’s not that The Australian has held back on publishing the illogical, unreasonable PR, and baseless posturing of vested-carbon-scare-interests, no sir. They are just as ready as anyone to publish the unscientific Lomborgs, [...]

It was self-contradictory, baseless name-calling from a formerly sensible writer.

Rational?

Lomborg and Gore are not so far apart

The only rational response to climate change is to use empirical, observable evidence. Rational people can point to results from 28 million radiosondes, 6000 boreholes, 30 years of satellites, 3000 ARGO ocean diving thermometers, raw data from thousands of surface thermometers, as well 800 peer reviewed references which include studies of corals, caves, pollen grains, ocean floor sediments, ice cores, and diatoms.

Lomborg is happy to call these rational people names, but irrationally doesn’t appear to have read their arguments. His method of quoting scientific studies, which was so successful on other topics, has come unstuck on climate science. He doesn’t realize that the US government poured $79 billion dollars into demonstrating one theory, but next to nothing to research, audit, or question that theory. He’s been tripped up by the skewing effect of monopolistic funding.

Far from being rational or scientific, he accepts the opinions of the Scientific Gods at the IPCC, and ignores the empirical evidence

Far [...]

The debate has moved a peg. Instead of “oil shills” now we’re just paranoid ideologues afraid of reds under the bed.

Naomi Oreskes

The battle cry: the “skeptics” are shills of big oil, has become an own goal. The PR team for the catastrophic theory have no new evidence of Big Oil funding and thousands of people now point out that the UNskeptics were paid 3500 times as much (at least). So they are moving on… the religiously devout believers can’t admit they were wrong, and nor can they look at the evidence, so what’s left? Post hoc random over-analysis of the irrelevant. Before, skeptics were paid hacks… and now they’re wrong because they … are ideologically against big government and regulation. From one ad hom to another.

And again, the ABC uses our taxes to promote the smear campaign,  support neolithic reasoning, and does everything it can to stop people talking about scientific evidence (by spreading misinformation or slurs about all the characters on one side). Oreskes and freelance writer [...]

The world was baffled. What were they thinking?

This colossal PR disaster was 20 years in the making, and it took a special set of conditions to achieve a true marketing black hole. Never before in the history of public relations has so much star-power, money and kudos been used to score such a monstrous global own-goal. The campaign to dehumanize skeptics laid the groundwork and somehow, fittingly, the eco-terrorists own name-calling has come back to bite them.

How could people with red carpet careers make a mistake so smashingly spectacularly awful that they scored negative press all round the world, lost 20% of their members, and drove away three out of four major sponsors within days?

They can’t be written off as a little side group of extremists. 10:10 was sponsored by the UK government, major corporations like Sony, and was a group of nearly 100,000 people (now only 73,000). A hundred odd people must have spent months preparing, with casting, scripting and special effects meetings, so they could capture the effect of exploding ten-year-olds without once noticing the rather invidious parallels with, say, Pol Pot. Incredibly the 10:10 [...]

The admissions are extraordinary. Despite the fact that hardly any of the journalists wrote about Climategate, for many the emails from East Anglia were not just important, but a defining moment (though not, apparently, because it dented their faith in the global warming dogma). Instead, it was the effect Climategate had on editors and others in the office: people who had previously thought climate science was scientific, and environmental journalists were journalists. Suddenly, others realized they had been cheated of the real news, sideswiped by a development none of the supposedly “investigative” reporters saw coming.

Now for the first time, we find out that the formerly respected writers got looks of betrayal.

Probably the most important reaction to the UEA hacking for journalists was in their own newsrooms, among their own editors who are the gatekeepers controlling if your work appears and how prominently. While some UK surveys show no dramatic loss of credibility for climate scientists with the public, here’s how [...]