Abuse heats up debate
By Andrew Bolt
Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 07:52am
WHAT a surprise that four politicians still have the guts to insist there's no
proof humans are causing catastrophic climate change.
Why a surprise?
Because look how their scientific arguments have been countered by the usual
howling pack of journalists and warming believers.
Not with one fact, but only with mockery and appeals to the mob. How shameful.
On Monday, the House of Representative's Standing Committee on Science and
Innovation put out a report telling the Howard Government to help research ways
to bury carbon dioxide emissions of power plants.
Fair enough, perhaps.
But the report opened with a claim by committee chairman Petro Georgiou, the
Liberal Labor loves, that was not backed by any evidence his committee called.
"There is now compelling evidence that human activity is changing the global
climate," he preached. If we didn't cut gasses urgently, his report argued, we'd
fry.
Really?
Four Coalition MPs on Georgiou's 10-man committee rightly pointed out there was,
in fact, no proof man was doing much to heat the world.
Their dissenting report - written by former nuclear physicist Dennis Jensen, the
only scientist on Georgiou's committee - refers to some 15 scientific papers,
and quotes eight climate experts who worked with the United Nation's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and deny there is a scientific
"consensus" that man is baking the globe.
Jensen, backed by Danna Vale, Dave Tollner and Jackie Kelly, also listed
problems with man-made global-warming theory - the globe hasn't warmed since
1998; warming has been detected on four other planets with no humans to blame;
Antarctica is gaining ice, not losing it; a new study found no ocean warming
this century and so on.
And, to be sure, Jensen had his report checked for accuracy by six climate
experts, including the former head of our National Climate Centre, William
Kinnimonth, and Professor Richard Lindzen, MIT's famed professor of meteorology.
So how were these scientific arguments reported and rebutted? Observe.
Sydney Morning Herald writer Annabel Crabb simply called one of the four MPs,
Danna Vale, "daffy", and said these "aberrant" MPs acted "just as insects" to
produce what was merely "a thumping vindication for those of us who have always
suspected Vale is from another part of the universe".
Georgiou, meanwhile, announced Jensen was wrong because 43 of the 46 submissions
the committee had from activists, carpetbaggers, grants-chasers and scientists
said so.
(Jensen, in reply, quotes Einstein's retort to 100 writers who'd said his theory
of relativity was wrong: "To defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100
scientists, just one fact.")
Even more laughably, the committee's deputy chairman, Labor's Harry Quick,
dismissed Jensen's science as "a philosophical waffle".
And Labor's environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, again caught without a fact,
resorted to a sneer: "What planet is the Coalition on?"
All that mockery of Jensen and his fellow dissenters - for saying what not one
of their critics could disprove. Is reason dead?
Yes, if the future is Green. Greens senator Christine Milne, given several
minutes on ABC radio to rebut Jensen's arguments, didn't try once, instead
calling him "a dinosaur" and appealing not to science but the mob: "The argument
is that Dennis Jensen doesn't represent the views of the community . . ."
But Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius had advice for those - like the jeerers
above - who prefer the ignorance of the many to the facts of the few: "The
object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding
oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Regards
Bonzo
"To defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one
fact." Albert Einstein
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