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Last updated on August 5th, 2017 at 02:57 pm
Column from me; pre-emptive rebuttal from some gal at the Age.
UPDATE. Andrew Bolt: “In her 2090 words of abuse and moral bullying, Hughes not once – not once – discusses the actual arguments of these scientists, and disproves them.”
- Great column, Tim, as usual. I look forward to the day you are syndicated in the states (I consider you a sort of Mark Steyn in the larval stage).Posted by paco on 2007 06 01 at 01:04 PM • permalink
- So. perhaps “pupal stage” would have been a higher compliment? With “complete insect” being the ultimate compliment?Posted by Tex Lovera on 2007 06 01 at 01:08 PM • permalink
- Billionaires can’t retreat to underground fortresses and live on tinned food for 40 million years, which is how long it took Earth to recover from the Jurassic warming disaster.
Yeah, damn those Jurassic billionaires and their carbon-emitting industries! All life was wiped out for 40 million years, but does anybody care?
Why do I think darling Juliette would be sucking George Monbiot’s toes if given the chance?
- What will be a puzzle to our children’s children…is the attitude of those who knew the score — and not only did nothing but actively campaigned to delay solutions.
Attempting this sort of pathetic emotional blackmail plays well with Lefty Emos (hey, I’ve just made the connection) but fails the rational analysis test.
In 2085 words this bint never once mentioned the central premise of Swindle; the Sun controls our weather. Typically, few of these AGW prophets dare use the ‘S’ word.
- #8 RebeccaH,
Yes, I’m certain, but that’s a mental image I could’ve done without…
:^þ
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 06 01 at 02:14 PM • permalink
- #10 JAFA
In 2085 words this bint never once mentioned the central premise of Swindle; the Sun controls our weather. Typically, few of these AGW prophets dare use the ‘S’ word.
Arrrggghhh! ‘tis one of the words we cannot hear! Don’t ever say that again!
/agw gaia-worshipping knights of ni
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 06 01 at 02:18 PM • permalink
- From Juliette Hughes’ column:
“The contrast between the two documentaries could not be greater: Monbiot’s academic credentials are widely respected and he subjects his work to rigorous fact-checking.
“I asked him why he thought Mykura, with his PhD in mathematics relevant to environmental issues, would commission a documentary as contrary to scientific consensus as Swindle.Well, academic credentials must be happy. If ol’ Moonbat had a PhD, that alone would have provided compelling evidence for the truthiness of the phrase “Piled higher and Deeper”.
But look at this from Wikipedia:
“Monbiot believes that drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat global warming, Monbiot states that climate change is the “moral question of the 21st century” and that there is little time for debate or objections to a raft of emergency action he believes will stop climate change, including; setting targets on greenhouse emissions using the latest science; issuing every citizen with a ‘personal carbon ration’; new building regulations with houses built to German passivhaus standard; banning incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other unnecessary technologies; constructing large offshore wind farms, replacing the national gas grid with a hydrogen pipe network; a new national coach network to make journeys using public transport faster than using a car; all petrol stations to supply leasable electric car batteries with stations equipped with a crane service to replace depleted batteries; scrap road-building and road-widening programmes, redirect their budgets to tackling climate change; Reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; close down all out-of-town superstores and replace them with warehouses and a delivery system.”
All those of you who thought that the name “Moonbat” was not justified may now grovel and beg for mercy.
Further, Moonbat alleges that all deniers are beholden to the coal and oil industries or evil or assorted corporations. Well, these are the books he has published:
-Poisoned Arrows
-Amazon Watershed
-No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania
-The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order
-Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning
-Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.
All those who thought that he had not profited from his environutalism may now … Wait, the Moonbat-name-is-not-justified crowd have already depleted our pardoning resources.Posted by ElectronPower on 2007 06 01 at 02:52 PM • permalink
- …40 million years, which is how long it took Earth to recover from the Jurassic warming disaster.
Juliette Hughes is in need of some intense tutoring and instruction in paleontology. During the Jurassic period, the earth’s climate was fairly warm and humid over the entire planet. During this period the earth witnessed one of the biggest explosions in the diversity of both new animal and plant life. The Jurassic period saw the establishment of huge, lush forests. The statement that this period of earth’s history was a disaster is a statement of profound ignorance. Besides, how can something that happens naturally be defined as a disaster? It was Gaia’s will baby!
Posted by Mark Razak on 2007 06 01 at 02:58 PM • permalink
- Simply ask each rabid, foam-flecked, mouth breathing Gaia worshipper what part and percentage of climate impact the sun has had on observed and recorded temperature variations. Including the ice core and geological evidence.
Hit them where it hurts, in that tiny area alleged to be a functioning brain.
- I read Mr. Blair’s clear, reasoned, and entertaining prose with interest and appreciation of his respect for the thinking human being.
I stopped reading that other person’s article about a few paragraphs. Too many phrases were written to appeal to the unthinking human being who thinks his emotions are cognitive elements. Disrespectful bitch.
But even they need a world to live in. Even the richest mogul in the world can’t breathe hydrogen sulphide. Billionaires can’t retreat to underground fortresses and live on tinned food for 40 million years, which is how long it took Earth to recover from the Jurassic warming disaster. The deniers need to come down from their thrones and join the rest of us in the struggle that faces humankind in the next 10 years — to save our beautiful, blue, amazingly diverse planet from going into lethal meltdown. The reality is harsh, even inconvenient, but we can deal with it if we pull together. Now.
Juliet is just a trifle hysterical. Perhaps she should increase her meds by 300%, and go take a nappie.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 01 at 04:09 PM • permalink
- I wonder about the journos and other trendies such as Ms. Hughes. Does she actually understand what “science” is and what “scientists” are? Does she actually even read, yet alone understand, any of the stuff she yammers on about, or is it just overheard coffee table talk that she repeats.
And for crying out loud, the polar bears are not drowning and starving.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 06 01 at 05:27 PM • permalink
- #22 Oh, RebeccaH, you meant sucking his BIG toe.Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 06 01 at 05:35 PM • permalink
- The polar bears will certainly be out of danger of extinction when we dose them with the Vibearagra recently developed by R&D. PACO Industries has the manufacturing contract, of course. Now all we need to do is deliver the doses. It’s taken by mouth.Posted by Michael Lonie on 2007 06 01 at 06:10 PM • permalink
- This entire passage is an excellent example bad journalism:
Channel Four’s head of history, science and religion, Hamish Mykura, commissioned Durkin’s company, Wag TV, to produce Swindle in a series that also included the documentary Greenwash, by George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist who has held several visiting professorships in a range of disciplines, including environmental policy.
The contrast between the two documentaries could not be greater: Monbiot’s academic credentials are widely respected and he subjects his work to rigorous fact-checking.
I asked him why he thought Mykura, with his PhD in mathematics relevant to environmental issues, would commission a documentary as contrary to scientific consensus as Swindle.
“Channel Four and broadcasters like them are obsessed with creating controversy whether or not that has any merit,” he said. “For them all that counts is what they call ‘noise’.”
But the facts are readily available, I said. Politicians must know what’s really happening to the climate. Why don’t they act?
“Because it is more painful for them politically to take action against global warming than not to. There are powerful lobbies. (John) Howard is beholden to the coal industry as is (George) Bush to the oil industry.”
But even corporate lobbyists need a liveable planet with breathable air, I replied. His answer was immediate: I was mistaken in thinking that corporate employees could connect their human needs to their work.
“A corporation is an entity that has needs, and these are to grow without restraint and deliver returns to shareholders. You could conceive of a corporation run entirely by well-meaning people but because they are bound to the logic imposed by the needs of the corporation, they would do only bad things.”
He explained that the logic of corporate capitalism regards anything that impedes growth as an offence to its interests. The motives for continuing in denial then are strong, despite sound evidence and overwhelming public opinion.
Unskeptical, uncritical, and the interview questions she asks don’t actually challenge her interviewee at all, they just give him an opportunity to give his standard guff another run.
A sympathetic approach is understandable when it comes to biographical subjects, or *possibly* the arts, but major ideological figures? This is exactly the kind of approach they don’t need.
This sort of thing is happening more and more with global warming ‘journalism’.
- #27 ML, Vibearagara, cool.
From now on it won’t be fear of being eaten that ditzy reporters are running from.
Posted by alien kiwi on 2007 06 01 at 06:42 PM • permalink
- Tim, I’m sure 1.6 will be pleased to hear of your interest in swingers.Posted by alien kiwi on 2007 06 01 at 06:46 PM • permalink
- Most TV channels can arrange for an important program to be shown within a couple of weeks. The ABC’s deferral for two months made it look like giving time for the rebuttals and debunkenation to incubate. Plans have to be hatched for “discussion” groups like that pathetic excuse of a show they have now with the 60 Minutes retread.
Juliette is unaware that quoting Monbiot is equivalent to wearing a tinfoil hat while shouting “The debate is over – we will not countenance any denialists!”
- Wonderful column Tim.
Gee this stuff gets crazier each day. Hmm, so Even the richest mogul in the world can’t breathe hydrogen sulphide. Well is that so Juliette Hughes? I concede you are correct, but interesting is it not that we have moved from CO2 to CH4 now to H2S, i.e from carbon dioxide to methane to hydrogen sulphide (or rotten egg gas)? Well you may equate methane to rotten egg gas because people fart methane with a rotten egg gas component, hence the unpleasant smell. But even in global warming parlance, hydrogen sulphide is not a greenhouse gas, however it is deadly and poisonous.
So when it comes to your story, someone has been passing a lot of useless wind and I guess it must be you doing the farting, for all the misinformation you’ve generated.
Would someone please strike a match to this bullshit.
- “The global consensus of scientists who are respected in their fields is that there is a global warming crisis facing every person, animal and plant on Earth.”
And a few years back the “scientific” consensus was that homosexuality was a mental illness (and also that curve balls don’t curve…even though they do).
Consensus means dick. Experimental data gathered under controlled conditions means everything. And, there isn’t a shred of SCIENTIFIC data that supports the proposition your pushing.
So, spare me the blithering about science. You don’t even know what the word means.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2007 06 01 at 07:11 PM • permalink
- ‘Does she actually understand what “science” is and what “scientists” are?’
The answer to that question is: no.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2007 06 01 at 07:15 PM • permalink
- We get an idea of how thoroughly this chick has researched this article when she writes:
Here in Australia, we produce the largest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
Two minutes’ google – could someone wipe my brow?
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 01 at 07:23 PM • permalink
- By the way, a couple of excellent abusive reader comments under Blair’s effort. I have attempted to leave my own and would encourage others to do likewise.Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 01 at 07:30 PM • permalink
- Science and the meeja propagating errors – who’d’ve thunk?
Juz cos some Hunn made an error with a decimal point in spinach’s iron content a century ago …
- #16, CB
Hit them where it hurts, in that tiny area alleged to be a functioning brain.Where it really hurts is the hip pocket.
For the Juliette Hughes and Monbiots of this world, it’s always a case of do as I say, not as I do. Besides being the most sanctimonious, I think you’ll find they’re also the biggest tightwads, always wanting to put your money where their mouths are.
- re #35.
According to that table, Germans produced zero emissions per capita in 1990. Now they are major players.
Posted by pog-ma-thon on 2007 06 01 at 09:05 PM • permalink
- From the Age link:
IT’S June 2007 in Melbourne. Camellias are blooming six weeks early and there are too many houseflies. In the northern hemisphere they’re filming starving polar bears swimming where they used to walk. May was unusually warm — the warmest May on record in Victoria — and the world this year experienced the warmest start to any year on record.
Yeah, sure, I was in Melbourne in 1992, December. Uplift was to be December 18th, Temperatures in Melbourne that December struggled to get into double digits. December is the first month of Summer down under. My roses became dormant. I couldn’t get the washing dry to pack for storage. Global warming. Sure.
But even they need a world to live in. Even the richest mogul in the world can’t breathe hydrogen sulphide. Billionaires can’t retreat to underground fortresses and live on tinned food for 40 million years, which is how long it took Earth to recover from the Jurassic warming disaster.
And that’s just fucking hilarious. What anthropogenic factors were involved in the Jurassic warming period? Was it the Annual Tim Blair/Environment Day Black Smoke and Fume Belching Tyre Burning? The factories? The coal burning?
*I haven’t read the other comments yet, so apologies if I’ve thought the same as others here!
- #14 Mark
The Jurassic period saw the establishment of huge, lush forests. The statement that this period of earth’s history was a disaster is a statement of profound ignorance.
Well said, but profound ignorance is the starting point of many of AGW supporters. That and having them scared
shitlesswitless.And you can’t argue with that, ‘cos the science is there to prove it…
- #42 What anthropogenic factors were involved in the Jurassic warming period?
Why do the words wronwright and TARDIS immediately come to mind?
Posted by Crispytoast on 2007 06 01 at 09:28 PM • permalink
- Hughes is another leftie demanding there be no debate, just blind acceptance that capitalism must be dismantled for the sake of the world. It has been like this since Karl Marx.
Hughes supports her arguments by quoting Clive Hamilton from the Australia Institute, a so-called independent think thank that has ACTU president and ALP controller Sharan Burrow on its board. So much for independence. Hamilton himself has written a string of books attacking people with aspirations to impove their lives. Like all those on the left, Hamilton would rather have $50 in his pocket knowing everyone else has $10 than seeing everyone with a $100.
- “What anthropogenic factors were involved in the Jurassic warming period?”
The silly bitch is probably talking about the extinction level event that took place at the end of the Triassic period.
No one knows what caused it (except her), and there’s more theories than you shake a stick at (including both global warming and global cooling) that attempt to explain it.
Her “Jurassic warming disaster” and the 40,000,000 year recovery period (what an idiot) exists only in her addled lefty brain.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2007 06 01 at 11:00 PM • permalink
- Just how did the earth get so hot during the Jurassic period?
Dinosaur farts?
Maybe the dinosaurs learnt to light them, and before you knew it, it was all over.
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 06 01 at 11:43 PM • permalink
- Since Ms Hughes devotes a good deal of her article to
examining the backgrounds of those appearing in GGWS ( as well as others who do not appear, and are not associated with it as far as I can see), I think it is only fair to note that she is an active Catholic who often writes on matters of Catholic faith and practice.
Presumably therefore, as well as being an ardent AGW believer, she also believes in papal infallibility, transubstantiation, original sin, the Virgin birth, the Assumption of Mary (mother of Jesus), the end of the world, the Last Judgement, Heaven and Hell.
- Here’s what I said last Sunday in response to Tim’s article on Adele Horin:
The funny thing about Adele using tobacco, asbestos and lead to make her argument is that at different times, the scientific consensus was that none of these things was a threat to health.
You have to go back to the Roman empire for lead, but the dangers of asbestos and tobacco were recognised relatively recently. Under 100 years ago in the case of tobacco.
The fact they are now recognised as being dangerous to health is due to researchers who followed scientific inquiry where the facts led them.
Just the sort of thing warmenisers want to make illegal.
Ahha! Snap!
Posted by The Mongrel on 2007 06 02 at 12:51 AM • permalink
- From the sponsored links below the article:
Interested in Mining and Uranium Stocks?
Poor Juliette, who gives her all only to be mocked in this way. Uranium. The Devil’s Element.
Still, those newspaper presses won’t roll on nice thoughts alone.Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2007 06 02 at 12:52 AM • permalink
- Chrisgo, I didn’t think Hughes spent much time at all examining the backgrounds of the scientists who appeared on TGGWS; she just slagged them off as being from the “fringe”, implied that they were on the payroll of Big Oil, and in one case that maybe he wasn’t a scientist at all. Her arguments were so misleading, not to say downright offensive to those concerned, I think the whole piece deserves a bit of the Media Watch treatment.
TGGWS specifically challenged the oft-heard claim that skeptics are in the pockets on Industry, with many of their key interviewees stating quite emphatically how they were not. I’ll eat my keyboard if Hughes has even seen the doco, but nevertheless wonder what it takes to stop her ilk from dropping that specious little remark every time they talk about climate change dissent.
Bolt, as usual, was spot on: Hughes had nothing to say about any of the actual arguments. Too many pieces get described as shrill, emotive or factually flawed, but this one was, without doubt, one of the worst cases of printed hyperventilation I’ve come across. I hope Tim, Andrew and other opinion journalists keep up their fine efforts at confronting such hysterical pap. This documentary is an important one; we can’t let it submerge under the rising levels of enviro-paranoia.
- I finally figured out that Hughes article is as long as it is because she needed the space to work in every logical fallacy in the books (is she looking to make it into the textbooks?). Most of it, however, is made up of simple assertions, both from her and from Moonbat, that logic demands be dismissed out of hand. Moonbat’s ideas about the psychology of corporate employees (he seems to believe they turn into mindless drones the moment they enter the building) and the way business functions is just as ignorant as any ideas posited about science.
- I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but there is a reason that some of us also ‘deny’ the dangers of passive smoking. That is because the actual danger, according to the statistics, is pretty much too small to be measured, and is generally statistically insignificant.
You’ve gotta dig into the actual CDC data to figure this out, not the ‘reports’ they put out about the stats.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 06 02 at 02:31 AM • permalink
- #63 This is why I eat a lot of meat – for the environment.
Thissy here provides some kind of idea about some other greenhouse gases compared to CO2 and the contribution of Australia’s impolite belching ruminants.
I strongly doubt that her statement that Australia has the highest per capita contribution of greenhouse gases is remotely close to correct.
Similarly, we sometimes see claims in the press that Australia has the highest incidence of obesity or beer drinking or suicide – but it is clear that the journos have not lifted a finger to check the international comparisons.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 02 at 08:47 AM • permalink
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