Friday, May 09, 2008

On 'denial'

I gave this release from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition a quick once over yesterday before forwarding it to my son at school.

It has become commonplace knowledge, and is unchallenged, that global average temperature has not increased since 1998. This corresponds to a 9-year period during which the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast, did increase, and that by almost 5%.

The greenhouse hypothesis - which asserts that carbon dioxide increases of human origin will cause dangerous global warming - is clearly invalidated by these data.

As if that were not enough, a leading computer modelling team has recently published a paper in Nature which acknowledges what climate rationalists (the so-called “sceptics”) have always asserted. Which is that, contrary to IPCC assessments, any human influence on global temperature is so small that it cannot yet be differentiated from natural cycles of climate change. The same modellers have even predicted (after the start of the event, of course) that cooling will now occur for at least the next few years.

This morning I see that Chris Trotter has titled his Dominion Post column, The moral equivalent of war. Um. What could that be about I speculate.

"...the fight against global warming must become the moral equivalent of war. The threat we face is much greater than the threat posed to the world by Hitler....indeed the argument is strong for an all party coalition dedicated to bringing us through the crisis. Nor can there be the slightest suggestion that anything other than full equality of sacrifice constitutes the guiding principle of our climate change policies. And most importantly, we must learn to recognise the nay-sayers, the special pleaders, the not-in-my-backyarders, and the climate change deniers for the Quislings that they are and treat them accordingly."


By doing what exactly?

The only war going on here is between emotion and reason.

And I will borrow a quote from this week's Maxim newsletter,

"Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely."

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800 - 1859

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"the climate change deniers for the Quislings that they are and treat them accordingly."

So if you don't worship at the Alter of Gaia you have to be executed? Didn't take too long for that to come out did it. Trotter shows his true humanitarianism.

Brian Smaller

Anonymous said...

Lindsay - I think this has come from the Agenda last Sunday when they had Russell from the Greens on the programme.

This was a theme that Trotter was trying to push - I think this is a way for Trotter to push his communist objectives of ending free trade, and trying to turn NZ into the North Korea of the Pacfic.

Of course, if he said that out loud no one would agree with him.

He's attempting to hid this agenda in the so called concern for the environment.

Anonymous said...

turn NZ into the North Korea of the Pacfic.

You're already there, didn't you notice?

The question is: North Korea or Zimbabwe?