Light Up A Viscount

THERE should be no joy in another’s pain, but lately the temptation to have a good, long laugh at the New Establishment’s pain has been irresistible. Things aren’t going quite as planned, what with those dismal polls and the shocking realization that out there in their millions, there really are people who refuse to believe that a nice new tax will be good for them. It has all come as quite a shock to the anointed, whose analyses of what is good for this wretched government have been so consistently skew wiff*. The carbon tax was supposed to be a natural winner, an easy sell, according to those same bell ringers, who  were out early to hail its genius and howl down all detractors.

Now that it is coming to pieces, now that the newsrooms at the Silly, Phage and Collective represent a large chunk of the hidebound 25% of the population still prepared to vote Labor, there is rage in the air. Watch Jonathan Holmes get in a snit about free speech that isn’t his kind of speech. Hear an ABC interviewer slam down the phone. Be amazed as the bravehearts of our fearless press approach this gangrenous PM on bended knee, begging for guidance that they might report her doings more equitably. The prescription was scatological. Her courtiers took it with their Press Club lunch.

Honestly, if you couldn’t laugh you would cry at the way in which the fury of frustration is manifesting itself, shredding even the pretence of balance. A particularly petulant example went to air over Radio National on Sunday morning. It was called The Monckton Road Show, and if there has ever been reason to clean out the ABC come the next election, this is it. It is a vicious,

For some reason the ABC has yet to post a transcript, but you can hear the full broadcast here.  Take particular note of the bit dealing with Lord Monckton’s rejection of Al Gore’s contention that shrinking Arctic ice is drowning polar bears. Referring to the paper on which Gore based his claim, a Monckton sound byte captures him saying:

 “Gore, for once, actually cites a scientific paper. He cites it wrong, of course, but he does cite it. And what he says is a scientific study shows, for the first time, they are finding polar bears that have drowned, swimming long distances to find the ice … so here is the actual map from the paper: Four dead polar bears!…

…did any of these polar bears, according to the paper he was quoting die because they were trying to find the ice. No, they died because there was a big storm with high winds and high waves and they got swamped. Or, as we scientists call it, shit happens. So there is no basis at any point for Al Gore’s story. It was complete fiction from start to finish.”

Clear on that? Good, because the next snatch of audio is from Carlisle, who is quite definite that Monckton is telling whoppers:

“The scientific paper that Lord Monckton cites does not say the polar bears drowned because of a big storm. The paper suggests that the polar bears most likely drowned because there was less ice for them to seek refuge on because of climate change, and that the drowned polar bears could be statistically significant.”

So let’s go to the paper, shall we? And remember, Monckton says it was bad weather that did for those poor bears. Carlisle tells listeners bad weather had nothing to do with it.

If, however, data are simply spatially extrapolated, bear deaths during a period of high winds in 2004 may have been significant

27 bears may have died as a result of the high offshore winds.

Our count of dead polar bears related to the 2004 windstorm….

Over the next days, high winds occurred across the study area, with light westerly winds switching to strong easterly winds peaking at 54 km/h at Endicott and 46 km/h measured at Kaktovik between 10 and 11 September (Fig. 2). Winds offshore were likely considerably higher … Seas became very rough with wave heights estimated in excess of 2m.

If that is not enough for Carlisle, there is this:

High mortality in 2004 was more likely related to extreme and metabolically demanding conditions, such as high sea states associated with stormy weather…

…Our count of dead polar bears related to the 2004 windstorm almost certainly represents an underestimate

What makes Carlisle’s misrepresentation so remarkable is that she has actually posted a link to the paper on Background Briefing’s web page. All anyone has to do is open and read it – something she appears not to have done.

Or did she? It is a dreadful, uncharitable thought, but in her hatchet job on Monckton, Carlisle seems to make a habit of misstating the papers to which she links. One error might be deemed a misfortune, to paraphrase Lady Bracknell, but to commit so many must be construed as carelessness.

Or perhaps  worse than carelessmness. A second of Carlisle’s gross misrepresentations will be the subject of a subsequent post

UPDATE: There has not been much time over the past week to stay entirely on top of events. Andrew Bolt has already pounced on Carlisle's contempt for professional standards 

UPDATE II: For those too young to remember...

 

Grubs In The Rot

YOU have to wonder, that is the only sane reaction, and not in the sense of being merely curious. It’s the wide-eyed, mouth-agape species of wonder, and what makes the object of such amazement even more remarkable is that an unfolding outrage is going largely unremarked. Indeed, many of those who speak loudest of moral clarity, not least their own, have been the most energetic betrayers of that which they claim to hold most dear. Opaque spectacles are very much in fashion, and the sad thing, as the fuss surrounding Viscount Monckton’s current visit demonstrates, is that they are worn with pride.

We are not talking here about the tour’s freak- and sideshows, an example of which is the post below. For too many years it has been a gotcha game. Nothing wrong with that and, given the trouble the carbon tax is in, much that has been productive and right. If the diggers and the sifters and the amateur source-checkers had not held the wilder warmist nostrums up to the light, who else might have stalled Big Carbon’s panjandrum? Demonstrating, say, that David Karoly has not grasped how droughts raise temperatures, rather than vice versa*, is fun and satisfying, but it is a skirmish when all is said and done, a small tactical action in a war unlikely to end anytime soon.

The polls say the conflict is being won, that faith in the green creed is faltering, and that is most encouraging. But on the strategic front, truth and integrity continue to take a beating. The shameful reaction Monckton has sparked makes that clear as day, just as it spotlights the intellectual corruption that gnaws like a cancer at things still worth saving.

Think about the debasement of debate, if debate be permitted at all. Some 50 educated, intelligent people – people proud to call themselves academics – demand that someone uttering a dissenting view be denied the lectern. One suspects many of those listed in the post below would be amongst the first to denounce any perceived threat to their own academic freedom. Yet they urge the gag. This is remarkable -- remarkably sad and deeply worrying. And it is sadder still for being only one piece of the rot.

What about the press? What about truth’s purported priests, how did they miss the bigger story? Oh yes, the papers covered the demand to gag, but they looked not far beyond it. It was a pissing match they were chronicling, and the centre-ring action was so diverting they failed to notice that “Academics Back Censorship” is the man who bit a dog. Bias in the newsroom? Sure, that goes without saying, but what of supervisors, sometimes known as “editors”, are there are no adults to restrain the youngsters’ opinionated advocacy? Apparently not, so toss onto the pyre any vestigal faith in the notion that the press loves the story, not the crusade.

When Monckton has come and gone, be certain another slugfest will rage, and then the next, and so ever on and on.

The rot, though, that will keep right on eating away at the codes and institutions that have stood us, for the most part, in several centuries of good stead. Foiling the warmists’ follies and fantasies is vital, make no mistake. A revived honesty and the reforms to make it possible, they are essential. It is a long way down without them.

(*droughts raise temperatures because the sun's energy heats dry land faster than it does moist land, no energy being lost to evaporation. In blaming the recent drought and 2009 Victorian/SA heatwave on global warming, an assertion about which hydrologist Stewart Franks set him straight, Karoly turns physics on its head. If a wet Karoly and a dry Karoly both stepped into the sun, the damp edition would remain cooler for longer.)

Want A Grant With That?

"NOTRE Dame has a responsibility to preserve the integrity of academic and scientific research by standing with other Australian universities in condemning figures such as Monckton," writes PhD student Natalie Latter at former Phage editor Andrew Jaspan's latest little mortgage-payer, The Conversation. She adds that articulate sceptics "misrepresent and undermine the work of those who uphold academic standards."

Have a look at the oh-so-scientific jottings in the article's illustration.

 

Serious academic standards there, you bet. The elephant is particularly cute.

Ein Volk, Zwei Standards

AT the newsagent's this morning, the latest Australian edition of The New Internationalist made an arresting sight. Expect Fairfax opinionists, renowned for their consistency in the matter of Nazi allusions,  to be up in arms and out on the streets (even sooner than their employer's declining fortunes will put them there.)

Viscount Monckton was not available for comment.

Die Grüne Bierhalle

THERE are many amusing things about the climate change movement, from adherents’ inclination to fret about hermaphrodism in water fleas to the increasingly desperate efforts of its Australian operatives to persuade fellow citizens that higher taxes are a source of much pride, great joy and no pain. Advanced by advocates who earn too little to be of interest to the ATO or, more often, by those who can afford the services of sharp accountants, that proposition has proven so difficult to sell that any distraction from the ruptured narrative is these days welcomed by warmists with open arms. A week or two back, the sideshow du jour were those death threats that weren’t. Now, the dogs having barked, the catastrophist caravan has moved on to the next illusory oasis, which this week happens to be the visiting Viscount Monckton’s observation that many alarmists would have felt very much at home in a Munich beer hall, circa 1922 or so.

The Silly, as you would expect of an organisation staffed by quality journalists, has been particularly active over the past few days in dismissing Monckton as a nutter. Indeed, Jacqueline Maley – whose thin-lipped mugshot suggests either bad teeth or a gridlocked bowel --  was at it again on Saturday morning.

During a speech in the US, he exhibited projector slides of the Nazi flag, possibly even using one of those laser pointery things to emphasise his case — which was that Professor Ross Garnaut, the government's key climate change adviser, is akin to a Nazi.

He even chucked in a German accent and an hilarious "Heil Hitler" to bring the point home.

It's all stuff that never fails to win over a crowd.

This is Fairfax, of course, which has adopted the novel policy of selling newspapers by all but giving them away, so Maley’s summation of Monckton’s address is an extraordinary curiosity. While just about any coffee drinker, ferry rider, hotel guest, university student or gym patron can count on a free copy of her newspaper, Maley demonstrates a miserly attitude toward the distribution of what, from any company not staffed by quality journalists, might be considered relevant information -- Monckton’s address.

Making her omission doubly curious is the snatch of audio preceding the web version of Maley’s little article – an unfiltered, unquestioned PM asserting that, when she said there would be no carbon tax, that pledge was not at odds with her post-election drive to introduce one.

Of Monckton’s speech, however, not a direct quotation nor link. Doubling the mystery is the fact that the speech, all 60 minutes-or-so of it, is readily available, as a curious taxpayer or even a non-quality journalist might have discovered with minimal effort. Click here to view the presentation and, if you are late for a dental appointment or an assignation with a high colonic irrigator, skip to the 50-minute mark for the comments and slide show at the centre of all the fuss.

Just to set things up, Monckton begins the sequence with a quote from the Austrian Corporal’s Mein Kampf: “There will be no body of representatives which makes its decisions through majority vote.” After that comes a selection of authoritarian reveries from various greenshirts, Garnaut amongst them, starting with a statement from something called the Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change. Perhaps appropriately, it is a German panel and it has been blitzing Chancellor Angela Merkel with some unsettling suggestions, amongst them:

The people must accept the absolute pre-eminence of sustainability and must surrender their own wishes. The guarantor of this virtual contract is the directing State.*

The next Monckton quote is sourced to the University of Adelaide’s  Professor David Shearman, who has also advised the IPCC:

Specially trained philosopher-ecologists will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities.

Those interested in Shearman’s deeper thoughts about what is good for the shallow rest of us can find more on page 134 of his book,  The Climate Change Challenge And The Failure Of Democracy. If that whets your appetite, also see this post at Haunting The Library, where there is a further exploration of Shearman’s hope that a cadre of “eco-warriors” will be raised and indoctrinated from childhood to lead the crusade against the carbon curse. This will be needed, apparently, because humanity is an “eco-tumour” best excised by some ebola-type virus capable of carrying off 90% of us. Almost as distressing, as Haunting The Library reports, is the fact that Shearman’s co-authored book was underwritten in part by “the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.”

As his penultimate quote, Monckton finally gets to the Garnaut utterance, the one that set Maley to such a fit of chortling:

  

The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on a balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change.

Monckton then notes how Garnaut’s view is an affirmation of the view that little people must “accept authority without question, which is a fascist point of view.”

Doesn’t seem too much of a stretch – unless you happen to be churning out quality journalism for a paper, like the Silly, opposed to too much information.

*NOTE: Linguists might quibble about Monckton’s translation, but it seems a fair rendering of the relevant passage, found at the foot of the right column on page eight of the Council’s report, released in March, 2011.

“Die Weltbürgerschaft stimmt Innovationserwartungen zu, die normativ an das Nachhaltigkeitspostulat gebunden sind, und gibt dafür spontane Beharrungswünsche auf. Garant dieses virtuellen Vertrages ist ein gestaltender Staat, der für die Zustimmung zu Nachhaltigkeitszielen die Bürgerschaft an den zu treffenden Entscheidungen beteiligt.”

Readers who feel they can do a better job are invited to post their favoured translations as comments.