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Rupert Murdoch, 2009
Three years ago Rupert Murdoch was promising to make News Corporation carbon neutral. He implored his staff to personally reduce their footprint, and to be more creative in convincing the world to act too. He created websites specifically to help spread the message about the need to reduce carbon emissions. And he even bought a hybrid car for himself.
Today Quadrant magazine reports what many of us have been speculating behind the scenes: Murdoch has realized the IPCC and the “consensus” are fake.
The Australian has performed best in giving space to sceptics and dissenters but has stuck to the save the planet line in its editorials, some say because Murdoch said so publicly. Yet in a personal communication with Murdoch he indicated his scepticism to me. Last Friday’s editorial moved in the right direction when it called on politicians to question the science used by the IPCC but it has yet to endorse the call for an independent inquiry by a number of Australian scientists.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/01/des-moore
Rupert Murdoch is unarguably one of the most powerful men on the planet. This is an edited extract of what he said in May 2007 in the first ever […]
Still in the theme of Shock!-The-Media-IS-Reporting-The-News: The Canberra Times announced on it’s front page that CSIRO is not so sure that droughts are due to increased carbon dioxide. Only a few months ago, they announced the exact opposite.
September 2009: A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed what many scientists long suspected: that the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.
Jan 2010: One of the report’s co-authors, hydrologist David Post, told The Canberra Times there was ”no evidence” linking drought to climate change in eastern Australia, including the Murray-Darling Basin.
Back in September, this long study was based on the old trick of using climate models and “subtracting” the natural causes to see what’s left. It’s also known as “Argument from Ignorance”. Since we can’t predict the climate five years in advance, obviously there are factors or weightings in those climate models that aren’t right. Ruling out “what we know” doesn’t prove anything at all, except that there is a lot we don’t know.
When David Stockwell analysed climate models and Australian droughts, he found that random numbers were more likely to predict droughts successfully. […]
The Sunday Times and The Australian both picked up the scandal of the IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers might melt by 2035. The claim turned out to be based only on a WWF report, which in turn was based on a New Scientist article from 1999. The Australian story today was headline front page news: UN’s Blunder on Glaciers Exposed.
The rigorous IPCC methodology amounts to this:
Here’s the IPCC Quote from Chapter 10 of the Fourth Assessment Report:
Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).
10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]
What has The Australian got against a destitute farmer? Compare their coverage of one farmers protest with other hunger strikers:
When a sex offender protesting his innocence went on a hunger strike, it only took 6 days for The Australian to write about it. Taiwan’s former president went on a hunger strike which was reported as it ended after 5 days. Serial killer Ivan Milat only had to wait a couple of days to make the Australian with a hunger strike that only lasted for five days all up, and its conclusion was noteworthy too.* When three Australian Tamils went on a hunger strike they made headlines after 3 days, and also here. Some Sri Lankan asylum seekers agreed to end their hunger strike after 2 days and the story was covered sympathetically.
This is not to detract from the seriousness of some of the above claimants. But compare the reportage about Peter Spencer who started his hunger strike on November 23, 2009. For 25 days there was not even a short note to alert other farmers or landholders that there was a hunger strike underway by an Australian citizen, on Australian soil.
It was Day 26, before […]
We would hope that The Australian would stand up for … Australians. Instead our National masthead is not investigating the claims of an Australian farmer against our government, they’re not interviewing constitutional law experts, they’re interviewing his brother.
Peter Spencer is on Day 47 of a hunger strike and trying to get compensation for all farmers whose land was effectively expropriated. Journalist, Paul Maley could have investigated the veracity of the $10 billion dollar claim, but instead he tries to assess Peter’s mental health and personal finances. While these might be a relevant part of the big picture, the big-picture itself is missing.
“Family Financial dispute helped send hunger striker Peter Spencer Up Pole”
The Australian sub-heading is: “SERIOUS doubts have emerged about the case of Peter Spencer”,… but the serious doubts amount to a 40 year old story, and the fact that Peter owes money to his family, rather than to the banks. Serious? Not on the scale of billion dollar carbon commitments.
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
What’s interesting is that finally–after 45 days without food–Peter Spencer is starting to get some serious national attention. Today Tonight is a prime time “current affairs” show and this cover was fairly sympathetic. The British Financial Times has also run a story, both of these were serious enough to actually interview Peter Spencer. Finally it seems there is some investigation. A few new facts have been filled in, and also a very strong theme linking his actions to the Kyoto agreement.
The saddest point is that Peter Spencer has been trying to get some attention for at least three years, and probably over a decade. He wrote The War On Farmers in January 2006 and it lays it all out. He was already facing foreclosure in 2006.
The farm consists of about 14,000 acres, about 60 per cent of which was cleared before World War II. When I bought it in the 1980s, I had been working overseas to earn the money to buy the place. Unfortunately, I was unable to farm it for some time so extensive regrowth occurred. When I returned to Australia to begin to farm, I found that various laws to preserve native vegetation had been […]
Watch the whitewash– so white it’s Green. The Peter Spencer story has finally broken into the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Two “journalists” paired up to put together almost identical stories as a joint effort, and do their best to add doubt and smear to every part of the Spencer story. It’s a text book case in PR. These two journalists might make passable press secretaries for a Labor government. (Which is a well worn career path).
The big-picture situation, where farmers are asking for $10 billion in compensation for land that was stolen from them, was turned into a story about how the Coalition might be split by a guy on a hunger-strike over land-clearing laws. In reality Peter Spencer could drive one heck of a wedge into the Labor Party, who paint themselves as “helping the little guy” and simultaneously claim they are good economic managers. The Labor government can’t find $10 billion easily anymore, but less than a year ago they gave out $42 billion fairly randomly as a supposedly “clever” economic policy and another $43 billion to get into the broadband business.
Here’s how these major dailies “carried” the story: The Age’s […]
You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason.
In DenierGate, watch New Scientist closely, as they do the unthinkable and try to defend gross scientific malpractice by saying it’s OK because other people did other things a little bit wrong (that were not related) a long time ago. Move along ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing to see…
The big problem for this formerly good publication is that they have decided already what the answer is to any question on climate-change (and the answer could be warm or cold but it’s always ALARMING). That leaves them clutching for sand-bags to prop up their position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility they might have had.
I’ve added my own helpful notes into the New Scientist article, just so you get the full picture.
8.7 out of 10 based on 7 ratings […]
Did I say things were changing? The latest Rassmussen poll shows that the knowledge of falsified data is spreading fast and the polls are collapsing. Nearly 60% of Americans are now suspicious that there has been some falsification of the data.
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.
Only a quarter of US citizens think that scientists agree on the climate. (Possibly just the White House and it’s employees? Only a few days ago a spokesman for the Obama Government was still insisting that he didn’t think the science was “under dispute”.)
How fast that news spreads… or possibly not. (After all, before Climategate, how many polling companies thought to ask a question about scientists falsifying data?)
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
Since 1989 the US government has given nearly $80 billion dollars to the climate change industry. 9.3 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
What if governments poured billions of monopolistic funding into one theory but hardly anything into the alternatives: a theory that suited personal ambitions, profits of major players, careers of scientists, and the aims of naïve greens?
How would you know?
What if governments sacked and bullied scientists who disagreed? If officials used slander and libel in order to suppress scientific opinions? What if public agencies hid their data, refused to supply it, or even lost it; if baseless graphs were publicized and not corrected? Who informs the public and who enforces the rules of science, of science journals, of Aristotle?
What if thousands of scientists rose up in protest, but it went unreported?
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
INTERVIEW-Climate science untarnished by hacked emails-IPCC
The IPCC says ClimateGate doesn’t change anything. (Well Shock Me! Really?)
Source: Reuters
Imagine if a politician called “Jones” had been caught emailing a colleague saying “Delete all those files. Don’t tell anyone about that off-shore tax haven I have. Burn those receipts, ask Keith to burn his too and I’ll let Casper know. By the way, I’ve used that accounting trick Mike talked about to hide the money.”
Let Reuter-wash swing into gear and the “news” article would blandly say Jones’ emails were “seized upon by his opponents, showing he made snide comments, and talked about ways to present his accounts in the most favourable light”. In other words, Reuters wouldn’t mention that he’s been caught red-handed and implicated as a colluding fraud who squandered funds and mislead the public. What’s really newsworthy is that he’s been exposed being not-very-nice, and glossing up his reports. Would we sack those journalists? We couldn’t. But we could cancel our subscriptions and just go searching blogs for the real news.
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
I like Chris Uhlmann, and he’s spoken out with reason before on the issue of skeptics. So I was a little surprised to see him say:
“…one of the reasons Malcolm Turnbull is staring into the abyss is because he is getting too far ahead of many in his party room.
He accepts the prevailing consensus on global warming and is personally committed to an emissions trading system. A significant part of his party does not or believes that this emissions trading scheme is a dog.”
source: Oh Malcolm, how did it come to this? (my italics)
Coming soon: one of those In-the-Matrix moments when reality shifts for our journalists.
Imagine that ambitious powerful people were exploiting science to create a scare to gain power and money. Who would know? How would you find out? Normally, you’d read about it in the press. A whistle-blower would make an announcement, and the press would be all ears, and bring the story to the public. But imagine the press decided not to print anything from whistleblowers, not because they didn’t speak in reasonable tones, and not because they couldn’t back up what they said, but just because they are whistle-blowers? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
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.
“He (Hatch) then misinterprets the 420,000 years of glacial and interglacial stages to indicate that temperature is the forcing factor for rises in CO2, reversing the actual causal mechanism.”
Here, Berry gets it 100% wrong. Temperature is the forcing factor, and even the IPCC agrees. Senator Hatch is referring to the way carbon rises and falls after temperatures in ice core records. Berry implies that Hatch “misinterprets” two lines that clearly rise and fall with an obvious lag. Instead it’s Berry who misinterprets the graph. Carbon can’t control temperature from […]
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 […]
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 […]
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JoNova 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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