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Think tank’s talking points deepen the divide over climate change
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in. —– Dennis Potter Readers following the Australian news media’s coverage of climate change will probably have detected the conspiracy theories designed to discredit climate science and climate scientists. These conspiracy theories…
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Elaine McKewon receives an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship from the Australian government’s Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. This full-time PhD scholarship was awarded to enable research that is in the public interest and free of vested interests.
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Valiant sceptics have taken on the evil dragon of climate change conspiracy. magia e/Flickr
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in. —– Dennis Potter
Readers following the Australian news media’s coverage of climate change will probably have detected the conspiracy theories designed to discredit climate science and climate scientists.
These conspiracy theories label the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming “a hoax”, “a religion” or a “scare tactic” concocted to justify higher taxes and arbitrary, draconian restrictions on the personal freedoms of “helpless” and “disenfranchised” citizens.
Purveyors of this alternative reality tell us the entire global community of climate scientists has fabricated or exaggerated the threat of climate change to secure further funding for their research. This has been aided and abetted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a “political” organisation bent on fomenting a global warming crisis in order to install a left-wing totalitarian world government.
At first, it may seem surprising that such dramatistic, florid “fantasy themes” would appear so often in editorials and opinion columns of major newspapers – usually penned by conservative members of the press who cast minority-view scientists as modern day Galileos.
Occasionally, the contrarians themselves variously compare the field of climate science to the powerful religious elite who persecuted Galileo and the Stalinist regime who sent dissident scientists to the gulags or to their deaths.
Who is the modern-day Galileo? Children of the Concrete/Flickr
My recently published study, Talking Points Ammo, found that many of these fantasy themes were developed by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a Melbourne-based neoliberal think tank. They were then published in the Australian news media – first via op-eds written by IPA staff and associate scholars, and then by way of ideologically sympathetic newspaper editors, reporters and opinion columnists.
Who is the IPA?
Today, the IPA is a high-profile organisation that consistently rejects the evidence for anthropogenic climate change and opposes mitigation strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its staff and associate scholars are usually presented as independent experts who provide unbiased commentary.
However, the IPA has had a close relationship with the Liberal Party of Australia since its inception in the early 1940s. The IPA was founded by members of the emerging Liberal Party in the early 1940s. Since then, a number of the IPA’s staff – including current executive director John Roskam – have either run for public office as Liberal candidates or worked as staffers for Liberal MPs.
Environmentalists are green on the outside, but suspiciously red when opened. leff/Flickr
Despite its non-profit status, the IPA accepts significant donations from corporate sponsors such as the tobacco industry as well as the fossil fuel, mining and energy industries. These benefit from the IPA’s use of the news media to promote political agendas that serve the interests of those sponsors.
Finally there is the IPA’s board of directors, which usually includes senior Liberal Party figures and senior mining and energy company executives.
News media outlets have just reported that one of the IPA’s associate scholars and most prominent climate contrarians, Professor Bob Carter, is allegedly receiving funds from the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that also rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.
Who is saying what and where
In my recent article I report an analysis of three datasets:
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magazine articles published in The IPA Review between 1989 and 2009
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opinion pieces written by IPA senior staff and published in Australian newspapers between 1989 and 2009.
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editorials and opinion columns that praised IPA associate scholar Ian Plimer and his book Heaven & Earth during April-June 2009, in the lead-up to the first Australian parliamentary debates on introducing an emissions trading scheme.
Using a combination of Discourse Analysis and Fantasy Theme Analysis, the study identified nine discrete anti-climate-science fantasy themes developed by the IPA and published in the Australian news media.
(Discourse Analysis takes into account the practices associated with the production and consumption of media texts. This study examined media texts for their immediate content as well as their relationship to other texts. Fantasy Theme Analysis takes a structured look at the narratives that express a group’s dramatic interpretation of a real-life event; this includes basic components such as characters and plot lines.)
The nine themes were grouped into two categories. In the first category, “a plea for scientific truth”, there are four fantasy themes:
- climate scientists as rent-seeking frauds
- climate scientists as dissent-stifling elite
- Plimer as Galileo
- Plimer as the people’s scientist.
The second grouping, “religious, political and economic conspiracies”, includes five fantasy themes:
- climate science as religion
- environmentalism as religion
- climate science as left-wing conspiracy
- green as the new red
- climate change mitigation as money-spinning scam.
Climate change: it’s a religion. Universe Catholic Archives
To understand these dramatic themes we use Ernest Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory and Fantasy Theme Analysis. As Bormann explains:
“When someone dramatizes an event he or she must select certain people to be the focus of the story and present them in a favorable light while selecting others to be portrayed in a more negative fashion … Interpreting events in terms of human action allows us to assign responsibility, to praise or blame, to arouse and propitiate guilt, to hate, and to love.”
Thus, a fantasy theme is a dramatised morality-based narrative driven by stock characters such as heroes and villains.
In the study’s first grouping of fantasy themes, “the plea for scientific truth”, climate scientists are portrayed as villains whose published research forms the basis of the scientific consensus on climate change. The heroes are contrarian or “sceptic” scientists who reject the scientific consensus and speak truth to power at the risk of incurring the wrath of the iron-fisted “establishment”.
It’s all a conspiracy
These fantasy themes tell the story of a global cabal of climate scientists who are consumed with protecting their privileged status and blind to the “reality” that anthropogenic climate change has no evidentiary basis. The primary plot line sees this powerful scientific elite dominating and controlling the field of climate science and suppressing the “scientific truth” by persecuting the scientific voices of dissent.
Rajendra Pachauri and Ban Ki-Moon conspiring to institute a New World Order. United Nations
In the second category of fantasy themes, “religious, political and economic conspiracies”, by far the most frequently used fantasy theme was “climate science as religion”. This theme enables evidence-based scientific conclusions to be dismissed as an arbitrary set of beliefs or dogma.
The plot line of the fantasy theme “climate science as left-wing political conspiracy” sees the environmental religion’s leftist allies (Labor and Green political parties, and even the United Nations) using climate change as a “scare tactic”. The aim is to consolidate their political power, increase taxes to redistribute wealth, and impose a New World Order that will compromise national sovereignty and restrict personal freedoms.
These two fantasy themes serve to delegitimise the most vocal social groups who support action on climate change: the environmental movement and the political left. They are portrayed not as people rationally responding to a real environmental threat identified by the science. They are variously cast as irrational religious fundamentalists following a doomsday cult or as left-wing conspirators cynically using a fabricated or exaggerated threat to pursue political goals.
A good story can take you a long way
Together, these fantasy themes construct a rhetorical vision – an alternative reality – that is consistent with the ideology promoted by neoliberal think tanks such as the IPA and the hostility they provoke towards traditional “enemies” such as the environmental movement and the political left.
These fantasy themes serve as important markers of group identity for the IPA and its coalition of associate scholars, editors, opinion columnists and readers. They repeat the narratives – for example, in letters to the editor or in online comments or discussion forums. This repetition is a strong indication that they see themselves as members of the group.
Finally, the chaining out of these fantasy themes through the news media serves to build and sustain the rhetorical community. It also continues to propagate doubt about the reality, causes and consequences of climate change. And once doubt is sown, the game is changed. Whether you can back up your statements or not, creating doubt, making a non-contentious issue contentious, entirely reframes the debate.
In this case, the fantasy themes are helping to build and sustain a social movement that has at its core a deep and abiding suspicion of climate science, climate scientists and anyone who accepts the scientific consensus. This further serves to justify inaction on climate change.
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26 Comments
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Tim Scanlon
Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food – Western Australia
Score: +11
insightful +
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The tactics and payments oil companies have made to think tanks that are anti-science have recently been exposed. Internal company documents have come to light showing the fraudulent practices of the people involved.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/denialgate-heartland.html
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-confirms-it-mistakenly-emailed-internal-documents
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-exposed-internal-documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine
http://www.desmogblog.com/mashey-report-confirms-heartland-s-manipulation-exposes-singer-s-deception
This needs even bigger media coverage than the specious accusations leveled at climate scientists. This is documented fraud, not someone’s opinion.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -10
insightful +
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Tim, can you please clarify your claims of fraud on this. It appears the only fraud here is on the part of those (one presumes them to be CAGW activists) who have acquired and disseminated the documents. For it seems that one document, that has been the focus of much attention is a fake, and a very clumsily one at that. Anthony Watts has a concise post on this at WUWT.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/notes-on-the-fake-heartland-document/
None of the climategate emails were faked.
Tim Scanlon
Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food – Western Australia
Score: +8
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Marc you are still in denial. Lakely confirmed the validity of the documents and how they were emailed to people.
Denier fraudsters are just in damage control, trying to convince everyone they aren’t anti-science, when they are.
Oh, and those hacked emails, I’ve actually read them and not just the cherry picked quotes. There is nothing but scientists discussing science there.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -11
insightful +
unconstructive –
Tim follow the link. It should be easy for Heartland to provide the original email.
lets see “scientists discussing science” you say…
Tim Mitchell #0051: Our Wednesday lunchtime Bible study course on John’s Gospel finished last week, so in half an hour we will be gathering some of the regulars together to sit in the sunshine and talk. Perhaps the more informal structure will allow one or two of the students to open up to us? The Lod knows…
Ben Santer 125510087: “Next time I see Pat…
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Tim follow the link. It should be easy for Heartland to provide the original email.
lets see “scientists discussing science” you say…
Tim Mitchell #0051: Our Wednesday lunchtime Bible study course on John’s Gospel finished last week, so in half an hour we will be gathering some of the regulars together to sit in the sunshine and talk. Perhaps the more informal structure will allow one or two of the students to open up to us? The Lod knows…
Ben Santer 125510087: “Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”
Tiim Osborne 4007
Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were
#0419 Mike Hulme –
“I am increasingly unconvinced by the majority of climate impact studies – including some of those I am involved in – and feel we are not really giving the right message to our audiences.”
#3234 Richard Alley
Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.
#0714 Phil Jones – on finding authors for the IPCC AR4 report
Getting people we know and trust is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.
#2009 Keith Briffa – writing zero’th order draft of paleo IPCC AR4 chapter.
I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!
#1656 Douglas Maraun – on how to react to skeptics.
How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.
#0300 Bo Christiansen – On Hockey stick reconstructions
All methods strongly underestimates the amplitude of low-frequency variability and trends. This means that it is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.
#4133 Johnathan Overpeck – IPCC review.
what Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.
etc etc etc
Tim Scanlon
Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food – Western Australia
Score: +2
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And you cherry pick again Marc.
Interesting that you would link to Anthony Watts’ comments, seeing as how he was one of the people shown to have been paid off. We knew he took money from big oil and Heartland to go on his pointless crusade (weather stations located in bad places, really? Can’t think why they adjust data then. Not that weather has anything to do with climate).
I see he gets paid roughly $100,000 per year by Heartleand/Big oil to run a denial webpage now. Talk about vested interest.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -3
insightful +
unconstructive –
I have passed on your comments to Anthony and his legal team and provided them with Andrew Jaspan’s email address. You are lying, defaming Watts and making this site open to legal action. At the the very least an an apology is in order. Here’s what Anthony Watts is doing with the money from Heartland. Surprising that you would not support such an altruistic endeavour that will not cost the public a cent.
“They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind…
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I have passed on your comments to Anthony and his legal team and provided them with Andrew Jaspan’s email address. You are lying, defaming Watts and making this site open to legal action. At the the very least an an apology is in order. Here’s what Anthony Watts is doing with the money from Heartland. Surprising that you would not support such an altruistic endeavour that will not cost the public a cent.
“They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind.
It is simply for this special project requiring specialized servers, ingest systems, and plotting systems. They also don’t tell me what the project should look like, I came up with the idea and the design. The NOAA data will be displayed without any adjustments to allow easy side-by-side comparisons of stations, plus other graphical representations output 24/7/365. Doing this requires programming, system design, and bandwidth, which isn’t free and I could not do on my own. Compare the funding I asked for initially to
get it started to the millions some other outfits (such as CRU) get in the UK for studies that then end up as a science paper behind a publishers paywall, making the public pay again. My project will be a free public service when finished.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/some-notes-on-the-heartland-leak/
Davoe McNamee
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: +2
insightful +
unconstructive –
Oh the Irony. Anthony Watts suing for defamation. This from the guy who implied Michael Mann was involved in the child-sex scandal at Penn State.
One suspects Tim Scanlon will sleep easily without any knocks on the door from Watt’s lawyers.
Davoe McNamee
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: +1
insightful +
unconstructive –
Ah Bob it must be the “the BBC, commercial television, all major newspapers, the Royal Society, the Chief Scientist, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, David Attenborough, countless haloed-image organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and even Prince Charles himself” at it again.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -3
insightful +
unconstructive –
Here’s a more detailed description of the project from the Heartland papers:
Weather Stations Project
Every few months, weathermen report that a temperature record – either high
or low – has been broken somewhere in the U.S. This is not surprising, since weather is highly variable and reliable instrument records date back less than 100 years old. Regrettably, news of these broken records is often used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming…
show full comment
Here’s a more detailed description of the project from the Heartland papers:
Weather Stations Project
Every few months, weathermen report that a temperature record – either high
or low – has been broken somewhere in the U.S. This is not surprising, since weather is highly variable and reliable instrument records date back less than 100 years old. Regrettably, news of these broken records is often used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming or the more ambiguous “climate change.”
Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who hosts WattsUpwithThat.com, one of the
most popular and influential science blogs in the world, has documented that many of the
temperature stations relied on by weathermen are compromised by heat radiating from nearby buildings, machines, or paved surfaces. It is not uncommon for these stations to over-state temperatures by 3 or 4 degrees or more, enough to set spurious records.
Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications. Unfortunately, NOAA doesn’t widely publicize data from this new network, and puts raw data in spreadsheets buried on one of its Web sites.
Anthony Watts proposes to create a new Web site devoted to accessing the new
temperature data from NOAA’s web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. Watts has deep expertise in Web site design generally and is well-known and highly regarded by weathermen and meteorologists everywhere. The new site will be promoted heavily at WattsUpwithThat.com. Heartland has agreed to help Anthony raise $88,000 for the project in 2011. The Anonymous Donor has already pledged $44,000. We’ll seek to raise the balance.
from http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/some-notes-on-the-heartland-leak/
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -1
insightful +
unconstructive –
More media attention?
Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/
Paul Richards
logged in via Twitter
Score:
insightful +
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Marc – would it be appropriate to as believe what one of Josef Goebbels minions said in their media about Nazi Party motive? Please give your readers some credit.
Paul Richards
logged in via LinkedIn
Score: +7
insightful +
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Elaine – you nailed it, excellent piece now watch the fur fly.
This global set of propaganda started by the very same agencies as the tobacco industry used is being see for what it is.
Not before time the human collective intelligence is way beyond “Marlboro Man” tactics, it’s transparent to the generations of youth following, who understand and have learned about these strategies in K8 – K12 classes. The time for reckoning is coming “baby boomers” and older, you are gradually becoming redundant.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst
logged in via email @mail.com
Score: +2
insightful +
unconstructive –
Objection.
Discrimination on the grounds of age.
see Age Discrimination Act 2004
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ada2004174/
Paul Richards
logged in via LinkedIn
Score: +2
insightful +
unconstructive –
Dale – noted and apologise for any sensitivities.
There are evolved “baby boomers” here, they know who they are.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst
logged in via email @mail.com
Score: -1
insightful +
unconstructive –
Paul,
I won’t argue about it. You carried out age discrimination. Read the act
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ada2004174/
Andy King
Physics teacher
logged in via email @bigpond.com
Score: -4
insightful +
unconstructive –
Paul, what would be interesting would be if Elaine was to apply the same critical techniques to the proponents of AGW. Under that constructivist form of scrutiny, that particular viewpoint would not look particularly valid. As it stands her argument adds nothing to the debate and is little more than a hatchett job on a view to which she is clearly opposed – warm & fuzzy if you agree with her, cold and heartless if you dont.
Byron Smith
PhD candidate in Christian Ethics at University of Edinburgh
Score: +3
insightful +
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Someone has had fun with the images and captions on this excellent article by Ms McKewon. Minor point: the first image does not show a dragon.
Gavin Moodie
Principal Policy Adviser
logged in via email @telstra.com
Score:
insightful +
unconstructive –
It is interesting that the IPA and other right wingers call climate science and environmentalism pejoratively a religion, when presumably most of them or their supporters are conservative christians.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -14
insightful +
unconstructive –
Bob Carter pulls in $1550 a month from the private Heartland Institute to promote climate rationalism and this is somehow a scandal? His relationship with Heartland is no secret, he is an author of the Heartland funded NIPCC summary report. The amount Carter gets is 10x less than Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery syphons from the public’s threadbare purse as the government’s number one agent for alarmist climate propaganda and billions less than the cost of Flannery’s advice and dodgy weather predictions…
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Bob Carter pulls in $1550 a month from the private Heartland Institute to promote climate rationalism and this is somehow a scandal? His relationship with Heartland is no secret, he is an author of the Heartland funded NIPCC summary report. The amount Carter gets is 10x less than Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery syphons from the public’s threadbare purse as the government’s number one agent for alarmist climate propaganda and billions less than the cost of Flannery’s advice and dodgy weather predictions that has indirectly lead to the construction of a number of pretty much useless desalination plants and policy decisions that lead to the flooding of Brisbane in 2011. It’s much much less than richly funded Coral whisperer Ove Hough-Goldberg receives from Greenpeace and Rio Tinto.
Amazingly the funding of alarmist scientists by left wing organisations does not raise a ripple here-why?
The real scandal is that governments have turned climate science into a political issue and are only prepared to pay for one side of the scientific debate. That Heartland have chipped in with private finds to support independent minds ought to be congratulated.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -14
insightful +
unconstructive –
Elaine,
All the points you raise have been used by proponents of AGW. So no intellectual honesty in your study then. Shame.
dissenting climate scientists as rent-seeking frauds
dissenting climate scientists as dissent-stifling elite
Hansen as Galileo
Hansen as the people’s scientist.
Non alarmist climate science as religion
Non alarmist climate science as a new creationism
non alarmist climate science as right-wing conspiracy
Nuclear energy as a money-spinning scam.
Eclipse Now
Manager of design firm
logged in via email @optusnet.com.au
Score: +2
insightful +
unconstructive –
Hi Marc,
the biggest point against the dissenting climate scientists is not the scientists, or the funding, but the science. And the fact that the tired old myths they push again and again and again have been debunked and addressed in the peer-reviewed literature. So they dig up a Denialist fan base and guess what they do? Repeat the myths again! It’s only fair. They can’t get published in the peer-reviewed literature, so they go outside it and write science fiction like Ian Plimer’s ‘Heaven and Earth’, one of the worst pieces of anti-science agit-prop ever written. Funny how geologists set themselves up as climate experts. But hey, as a discipline you guys seem genetically predisposed to Denialism. Almost makes me think of that recent kid’s movie “Avatar: the last air-bender”. Experts in earth and air seemed to be old enemies.
Marc Hendrickx
Geologist
logged in via email @gmail.com
Score: -10
insightful +
unconstructive –
Mr Now.
(If that is your real name), The peer reviewed literature increasingly indicates that IPCC climate models have overstated the climate’s response to human activity, be it through increased emissions of greenhouse gases, or landuse change or other factors. This is not to say we will not face challenges in the future as we put increasing pressure on our surroundings, Thankfully the science has shown that the climate Armageddon favoured by a few has a low probability of eventuating.
Avatar (the one with the tall blue smurfs) is a good analogy for the propaganda activists, (such as yourself) have been spruiking.
Bruce Moon
Bystander!
logged in via email @imap.cc
Score: -1
insightful +
unconstructive –
Elaine
I have a concern with your article.
First, let me say I have no concern with you contrasting the views of the IPA – a looney right entity of political conservatism – with the established scientific view towards climate change.
The concern I have appears minor, but I suggest serves to undermine the credibility of your argument.
My concern is that you only canvas the views of the established scientific view towards climate change and those of the looney right IPA.
Despite the strongly held views of the established scientific view towards climate change, there are other credible alternate views about this phenomena. My concern is it would have been preferable had you at least acknowledged that those other views exist, before then seeking to debunk the biased views presented by the looney right IPA. That way, you would have shown you were not engaging in the bigger debate, rather, just targeting the politics of the looney right.
Cheers
Sean Lamb
logged in via Facebook
Score: -5
insightful +
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Ha!
I always knew it. The Liberal Party hates children and wants them all to drown or whatever disastrous outcome it is this month.
Actually the messianism is by no means limited to Climate Change deniers on this issue.
Anyway the mark of a good theory is the ability to make predictions – thus far the record of Climate Change scientists on that score has been somewhat less than stellar.
Simon Chapman
Professor of Public Health at University of Sydney
Score:
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The most amusing thing about “think tanks” is the way they seem to crave status as genuine seats of scholarship. They typically call themselves “Institutes”, you know, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Cancer Institute or the Institute Pasteur. The allow their staff to be called “Fellows”, you know, like Oxford dons. They publish occasional papers. The grain-fed new-fogeyist types who work there have often never had any other job or life experience beyond undergraduate Labor…
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The most amusing thing about “think tanks” is the way they seem to crave status as genuine seats of scholarship. They typically call themselves “Institutes”, you know, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Cancer Institute or the Institute Pasteur. The allow their staff to be called “Fellows”, you know, like Oxford dons. They publish occasional papers. The grain-fed new-fogeyist types who work there have often never had any other job or life experience beyond undergraduate Labor-baiting university club life. But for all their pretentions to occupy seats of scholarship and serious analysis, these dilettantes don’t get the basic principle of academic transparency. They won’t reveal who funds them. This means they can’t get their work published in peer reviewed journals because all serious journals demand full disclosure of competing interests. If you want to see the fruits of this in its apotheosis, check out this video on the homepage of the Boorowa District landscape Guardians, the anti-wind farm group (who interestingly have no interest in guarding landscapes from open-cut coal mining or CSG). http://www.bdlg.org/ The video explains over a great soundtrack that wind and other renewables are actually far “dirtier” energy sources than. The videi is produced by the American Tradition Institute (hey, another one) which has major funding from Lair Petroleum and other energy interests dedicated o fighting greenhouse gas emission reduction. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Tradition_Institute
Twitter:simonchapman6
James Walker
logged in via Facebook
Score: -1
insightful +
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So, why can a fairy tale get up and stay up?
Because the general public have no reason to trust anyone. We can’t get access to the original scientific research (yet – https://theconversation.edu.au/spread-the-word-scientists-are-tearing-down-publishers-walls-5098 – so there’s hope).
Our schools are a joke, so we lack the background scientific education to understand what is going on (consider how the phrase “just a theory” demonstrates a misunderstanding of what a scientific theory *is…
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So, why can a fairy tale get up and stay up?
Because the general public have no reason to trust anyone. We can’t get access to the original scientific research (yet – https://theconversation.edu.au/spread-the-word-scientists-are-tearing-down-publishers-walls-5098 – so there’s hope).
Our schools are a joke, so we lack the background scientific education to understand what is going on (consider how the phrase “just a theory” demonstrates a misunderstanding of what a scientific theory *is*).
In politics, Labor has ignored their homeland to suck up to the trendy lefties, so the crusade against gloabal warming is seen as just another yuppie fad, in the same basket as gay marriage.
In the meantime, the science has been under constant attack for years – so climate change deniers find allies in the anti-immunization nutters, creationists and so forth.
We are as a society in deep trouble, and will be until the general public is once more courted with two facts:
1) Science is *fun*. Public demonstrations of cool science experiments are fascinating and engaging, and rebuild our trust in serious science.
2) Democracy is about people. The general public needs to be re-engaged in the political sphere, so that policy bubbles up from “the wisdom of crowds” not the self appointed ‘elites’.
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