The Great Climate Change Swindle

Good evening learned blog surfers, I watched on our glorious ABC television last night some of the best and worst journalism possible.

Martin Durkin - a shockumentary maker of the most repugnant variety pulled together a group of attention seeking contrarians and some unashamedly manipulated graphs to present the following conclusion (note: it was a 'conclusion' being presented, not an argument or a review of any sort):

1. Following the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet bloc, neo-Marxist anti-capitalist peaceniks and Eugenics-based organisations divert their attentions to the environment, and more specifically, the halting of industrial production and development of the world via the notion of anthropomorphic (made-made) climate change.
2. Scientists, in the pursuit of research funds, totally ignore the basic fundamentals of their craft in order to prove that human produced CO2 will affect the climate. The swindle.
3. Thousands of genuine and morally outraged scientists reject the notion of human driven climate change.
3. CO2 is an insignificant element in greenhouse gases and the sun has always and always will determine the climate on planet earth.

With the exception of the paranoid assertion about 'anti-capitalists', the science was starting to get me a little worried, "was it as cut and dried as I had thought".

Luckily for me, and for everyone in Australia (not so lucky for the people in England), the ABC also ran a panel of scientists and journalists to discuss the film after it was shown.

Enter Professor David Karoly. With a barrage of well cited and sourced information he comprehensively discredited every attempt by climate change deniers to use flimsy evidence to support their cries.

I think everyone should try and watch the documentary and the discussions, just to get a feel for how climate change denial presents itself, and why it is wrong. The funniest and/or scariest element during the evening was the young man yelling that masked Hilterian eugenics is the evil behind climate change science - no doubt he also thinks anti-capitalists are involved as well. What fear the poor man must live in.

There are three people in this debate - those who will refuse to accept climate change is man-made, those who will refuse to accept that climate change is not man-made (both using whatever evidence suit their argument), and sceptical rigorous scientists - the majority of whom (98% in fact) conclude that a significant (enough) amount of climate change is man-made.

I've stopped asking why people keep denying the effect we have on the environment - all we can do is ignore their silly cries for attention and work towards a more sustainable and responsible world.