The Great Barrier Reef: an unmitigated disaster - if only the Australian public knew...

Here is the video from the Climate Council, with Tim Flannery, Amanda McKenzie and Dean Miller on the disastrous bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.

Graham Readfearn has written about how Ben Webster at the anti-environment newspaper, The Australian, tried to downplay the disaster.

Will Steffen and all of climate science vs Bjorn Lomborg and deniers - no contest! But Tony Abbott picks the loser.

Some Australian readers will have received a copy of this letter from Tim Flannery, which, given it's wide mailout, I think is okay to share more broadly. (Bernard has already posted a copy in the comments).

Deceiving the Australian public

The Australian Government today announced they would contribute $4m for Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg to establish a new “consensus centre” at the University of Western Australia.

In the face of deep cuts to the CSIRO and other scientific research organisations, it's an insult to Australia’s scientific community.

As the Climate Commission, we were abolished by the Abbott Government in 2013 on the basis that our $1.5 million annual operating costs were too expensive. We relaunched as the Climate Council after thousands of Australians chipped in to the nation’s biggest crowd-funding campaign - ​remember this video?

It seems extraordinary that the Climate Commission, which was composed of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, was abolished on the basis of a lack of funding and yet here we are three years later and the money has become available to import a politically-motivated think tank to work in the same space.

This is why the work of the Climate Council is so important- to counter this continuing ideological attempt at deceiving the Australian public. 

Please consider chipping in a few dollars a week to help us stay independent and continue to fight the rising tide of misinformation. 

Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn't take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it's usually a sign those views are politically motivated. 

But with your support we will continue to fight back and reach millions of Australians with information that is based on the best science available. 

Thank you 

Tim Flannery

P.S We're already busy responding to misinformation in the media. We just called out The Australian for deliberately misinterpreting the science and the Prime Ministers Business Advisor Maurice Newman for getting his facts wrong. 

I've also previously written about Maurice Newman's wrong facts, such as here and here and here. And on several occasions about misleading articles in the Australian.

I've also been told about an article in the Guardian on the topic of Bjorn Lomborg's new creation (h/t Bert).

My reaction is the same as Tim Flannery's. One of the very first things the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott did was to abolish the Climate Commission. Australians were outraged, and within only a few days Australian people donated $500,000 dollars to create the Climate Council. And soon doubled it. It must vie with the biggest responses of any appeal for donations.

Now Tony Abbott is reportedly funding a "denier" (as defined by rationalwiki) at around the same annual cost of the then Climate Commission. (I'll need to check the numbers.)

I don't have time to write any more about this. Feel free to express your opinions in the comments.

Disinformation Lesson 1a: Anthony Watts' trained lapdog Eric "Eugenics" Worral plays a dangerous game

Eric "Eugenics" Worrall** vacillates between vacuous and contemptible. Today he's decided to do another smear job on Professor Tim Flannery (archived here). He thinks he can get away with it because he's using the disinformer's trick of linking to someone else telling the same lies.

This recycling of five year old denier memes doesn't mean deniers are running out of puff. They have an endless capacity to recycle disinformation. In fact it's all they've got.

Disinformation Lesson 1a: Cherry pickQuote mine, misrepresent and link

Lesson 1: One of the first lessons disinformers learn is how to cherry pick quote mine. That means taking anything from one word to ten from a blog article, a stolen personal email, a scientific paper or even from a video transcript and putting them in a different context of your choosing. In other words, distorting at best but usually making something up altogether and then falsely attributing it to the person you want to misrepresent or defame.

Lesson 1a: The variation in use today is to link to some other source of cherry picking quote mining to twist and misrepresent. Now that deniers do defamation for a living there are a lot of websites they can link to where people tell lies. Some like Andrew Bolt misrepresent facts for a living. He gets paid handsomely. The Eric Worralls of the world are mere footsoldiers and work for free.

Just this week I've shown two other people at WUWT who've put Lesson 1 or Lesson 1a into practice.

• Rachel DeJong used Lesson 1a making a faked up claim about Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA
• E. Calvin Beissner used Lesson 1, without the link, making a faked up claim about James Powell 

Does Anthony Watts train his disinformers in basic disinformation techniques? Doesn't Anthony know that as publisher, he is equally liable as his "guest essayists" for defamation if someone decides enough is enough? Is he so flushed with the success of cadging a few thousand more dollars from fans in a matter of hours so he can go on a jaunt to the UK that he reckons his readers will cough up again in that eventuality? Maybe so.

Eric "eugenics" Worrall was able to go to Lesson 1a, linking to Australian blogger and shock jock, Andrew Bolt, who's a climate science denier from way back. Incidentally, he's also a good mate of Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott, when he's useful to him. (Tony counts shock jocks/climate science deniers among his "friends" - even promoting science deniers to positions of power in dismantling renewable energy programs.)

WUWT denier is horrified by opinions about climate

A denier on WUWT called Eric Worrall, who finally got turfed from Watching the Deniers, a very tolerant website, is horrified.   This is the same Eric Worrall who persistently expressed his opinion that climate science is like eugenics in the 1930s.

Eric is horrified (archived here) that someone would write:

“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”

The person who wrote the above is Dr Rod Lamberts, deputy director of the Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the ANU, a founding partner of the Ångstrom Group, and a former national president of the Australian Science Communicators.  It was part of an article he wrote for The Conversation.

In that same article, Rod Lamberts also wrote:

At best, presenting people with facts to counter their beliefs makes them ignore you; at worst, it drives them further away. How much more evidence do you need than the singular failure of scientific facts to convince deniers that humans are buggering up the climate?

What delighted Eric Worrall was that Rod Lamberts criticised Tim Flannery.  Rod wrote:

A colleague of mine recently received an invitation to a Climate Council event. The invitation featured this Tim Flannery quote: “An opinion is useless, what we need are more facts."

My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss. Tim Flannery is an experienced science communicator, but that phrase made my jaw drop. It was apparently meant in earnest, but it’s wildly off the mark.

The quote is ludicrously, appallingly, almost dangerously naïve. It epitomises the reasons we are still “debating” climate science and being overwhelmed by climate skeptics/deniers/contrarians in the public space.

The Conversation article offers some food for thought into how to communicate the dangers we are hurtling toward with such nonchalance.  These same dangers that the Eric Worrall's and Anthony Watts of the world want us to hurtle towards faster and faster.

Rod Lambert is in no way suggesting that facts are not important or that we don't need more of them.  He argues:

Ultimately, we can only say “that’s not cricket” for so long. Eventually we have to stop tutting and accept that others aren’t even trying to play cricket – they’re boxing. We can decry climate deniers for their unfair, lowbrow tactics, but their tactics are getting them exactly what they want. Ours are not.

The continuing focus on gathering and presenting more and more scientific data to reinforce a position the vast majority already holds is not leading to the changes we need. Yes, scientists should keep monitoring, researching and reporting on the climate. But assuming that we want people to act according to the science, the focus must now be on influencing positive action.

The question is - will more "facts" make a difference.  We've got facts coming out our ears.  Here in Australia we've just had another "hottest year on record" and yet we elect a Prime Minister who has said the science behind climate change is "crap".  Tony Abbott's first attacks against our nation when entering office were to dismantle as much as he could of any offices that monitor climate and and mitigate climate change and shift to a new clean energy economy.  He's appointed climate science deniers not just to any important posts, but to positions of responsibility in relation to climate change.

So how to get the message out there?  How to persuade voters that putting people like Tony Abbott into arguably the most powerful position in the country is risky at best if not downright harmful.

My thinking is we need both.  The Climate Council has influence.  It gets airplay. When it broadcasts the fact that a hotter Australia is a more dangerous place to live, some people hear it - but is it enough?

As Rod Lambert says:

The biggest impediment to climate action these days is not because of the human frailties that science is hell-bent on resisting – those alleged failings of opinion, belief and emotion. Ironically, it’s exactly because we are still trying to suppress them that we are now stalled.

The Lie about Tim Flannery

Eric finishes up his WUWT article by resurrecting an old denier myth.  He claims that Tim Flannery once said it would never rain again.  He didn't.  It's little wonder that Eric Worrall and Anthony Watts don't link to anything supporting this wrong claim.  The closest they got was an article by Andrew Bolt repeating the lie with a teeny tiny cherry pick from a longer segment on youtube - see the transcript here.  He said in the interview with Lateline back in 2007, referring to the Big Drought:

So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that's a real worry for the people in the bush. If that trend continues then I think we're going to have serious problems, particularly for irrigation.

And we did have serious problems.  Particularly for irrigation. That drought that Tim Flannery was referring to in 2007 didn't break until 2010!  The major dams that got perilously close to empty finally started to fill up again.  Only to be followed by those record-breaking floods that were so bad that they caused a dip in global sea levels.

Why are there still climate science deniers in Australia?

What is the bigger wonder than the Big Drought and the Big Flood and the Big Fires is that there are any climate science deniers left in Australia.  We are used to extremes of weather, but the extremes we've been seeing go beyond what we're used to.

I'm thinking that we need both facts and opinion.

We need the facts, like those reported by the Climate Council and RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress and SkepticalScience.com.

We also need strongly worded opinion, as is being advocated by Rod Lamberts to counteract the three word slogans of idiots like our Prime Minister and deniers at WUWT.


PS There's a new article by Victor Venema that is worth a read in this regard.  He is exploring why science deniers are not interested in facts. In "fact" they eschew facts for fiction.

From the WUWT comments

There are lots of opinions being expressed in the WUWT comments, mostly all worthless.

As Chris4692 says of Eric Worrall's opinion:

March 15, 2014 at 5:07 pm
If you have no facts, you have nothing else but opinions.

Robert of Ottawa's opinion is quite clear.  He says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Australia has a government that rejects the Warmista scare and is gradually dismantalling the state apparatus that propagates it. Hence the hysterical squeals of the Warmista pigs (those at the public trough)

PaulH needs a lesson in Strine and says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:15 pm
My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss.
I have no idea what that means.

Latitude comes up with a novel opinion and is a very deep thinker:

March 15, 2014 at 5:19 pm
of course they can’t win it with facts…….

DirkH has about as much depth as Latitude and says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:37 pm
“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”
Oh, I misunderstood him. What he means is, every warmist will now have to choose between being honest or being efficient. Now that’s a whole new approach. (sarc)

pottereaton is just another dumb fake sceptic who favours WUWT opinion over science and says:

March 15, 2014 at 6:03 pm
The problem with “consensus” climate science from the beginning is that it has been mostly opinions– i.e. speculation and conjecture– and not facts–i.e. solid data and verifiable hypotheses arrived at with scrupulous statistical methods.

Konrad must think there is somewhere hidden group of "sceptics" that haven't yet reared their heads.  Does anyone out there know of a "sceptic" that uses facts or has a case to argue?  Konrad says:

March 15, 2014 at 6:33 pm
“Facts won’t defeat the climate deniers – using their tactics will”
When when this fool finds someone who denies that planet has a variable climate he can use whatever tactic he likes.

If however, this propagandist twit Lamberts is referring to sceptics then he is on a hiding to nothing. After all the sceptics main tactic is to use facts to argue their case.

Of course, a lot of WUWT-ers twist Rod Lamberts' article to mean something quite different.  Like conspiracy theorist Chad Wozniak who says (excerpt):

March 15, 2014 at 5:32 pm
How typical of the AGW crowd – why tell the truth when lies serve your corrupt, perverse purposes better?

What Rod Lamberts is suggesting is that we don't merely quote dry scientific facts at people, we counter the deception of science deniers and show people what those facts mean for them personally and for our nations and for the world as a whole.

The new Climate Council - Australians aim high!

Almost $400,000 raised in just one day for the Climate Council - so Australians will continue to get solid information about our changing climate.

Mostly from small donations.  Australians have spoken!

Source: @ClimateCouncil

It would be great to get it to $5 million.  That would help set it up properly for the longer term.

You can become a Founding Friend and donate here.

Become a Founding Friend of the Climate Council today!

Late edition: see below.

The Climate Commission was shut down and the Climate Council has opened for business.

The twitter account @climatecouncil had such a rush of followers it was automatically suspended!  Hopefully it will be back on Twitter soon.

From the Climate Council website:

1. What is the Climate Council?

The Climate Council is a non-profit independent organisation which aims to provide clear, independent advice to the Australian community. We are fiercely independent and apolitical.

2. Why is it important?

Information: information is the currency of democracy, and Australians deserve to have independent information on the state of our climate. Similarly, emergency services, health professionals, local government and journalists need accurate information about a changing climate.

Action: already this year has been one of the earliest starts to the Australian bushfire season. Last summer was the hottest on record, breaking over 120 extreme weather records. This is the critical decade for tackling climate change and reducing our emissions. But we can’t tackle climate change without a well-informed public – and that’s where we come in. Our expert reports help journalists and the public, with timely, expert, and independent information about climate change and its effects on our economy, environment, security, and health.

3. Who is involved?

The Councillors: All the former Climate Commissioners are supporting the initiative with or without Government funding. We’re volunteering our time to get this set up. (Sou: The Commissioners were Professor Tim Flannery, Mr Roger Beale AO, Mr Gerry Heuston, Professor Veena Sahajwalla and Professor Will Steffen.)

The Public: over the last week, we’ve been flooded with people offering encouragement, support, and even donations to keep us going. They come from all political persuasions – they have one thing in common: they know that independent information so important in our democracy.

The Experts: we’ve worked with Australia’s leading experts in emergency services, climate science, health, and defence. Many of them have spoken out in the last week, to call for us to keep going. They know that climate change has real implications now for our health, our security, our food, and for extreme weather. They value the information we provide and they want us to continue, and to continue working with us.

4. How will it make a difference?

We’ll continue to provide journalists and the public with authoritative independent reports, starting with next week’s international climate science update. This will be accompanied by a range of communications materials relevant to different audiences, videos, infographics, fact sheets, and other resources. Similarly we will continue to provide information to the community directly through speeches, community forums and briefings.

The info-graphic below accompanied the Climate Commission’s Angry Summer report illustrating the wide-ranging number of records that were broken over the last Australian summer. (Click to enlarge)

Australia's Angry Summer

5. How do you plan to cover operating costs?

We have already had some seed funding, and we’re seeking funding from the public. If you’d like to help please visit our donate page.

Become a founding friend of the Climate Council and donate to help get it going.

Late edition:

4:00 pm Tuesday 24 September 2013
The ABC seems to be doing its bit.  I logged onto the home page of their main website and this is what was displayed.  It is unusual for the ABC to give top prominence to climate matters. (Click image to enlarge.)

• The top headline of the moment is the new Climate Council.
• The third top headline was a link to the Media Watch segment from last night, exposing the lies about the IPCC which were being spread by radio shock jocks, newspapers and bloggers last week.

If we cut CO2 emissions today...or Dunning and Kruger visit WUWT again

Update: See below for ABC news item on the horrid but expected decision of this new government to disband Australia's Climate Commission. (The website is still up here.)

---

Anthony Watts has a cartoon by Josh as part of an article (archived here) telling his readers about how PM Tony Abbott has shut down the Climate Commission.  The cartoon is this one:

(you wouldn't) Credit: Josh - who suffers a serious case of the Dunning Kruger Effect
Source: Home of the DuKEs - WUWT

The object of the cartoon is Professor Tim Flannery who chaired Australia's Climate Commission.  Tim Flannery is not a meteorologist but he knows more about climate than all the deniers at WUWT and elsewhere put together.

If you read the top and bottom of the quote, you'd see that Josh (and presumably Anthony Watts) don't understand much about CO2 or climate.  As you'll see if you don't already know, Tim Flannery is, of course, correct.

One gets the feeling that Josh and Anthony Watts believe that a mere cut in CO2 would result in a drop in temperature.  That's pretty silly of them.  Any old cut in CO2 won't drop temperature.  As long as more CO2 is being added to the atmosphere than leaves it, then energy in the earth system will increase and temperatures will keep going up.  CO2 is a greenhouse gas and what it does is absorb IR radiation.  The more CO2 there is the less quickly will earth radiate energy to space.  That's why earth is heating up.

What the science says about CO2 and future temperature

I thought it might be worth writing an article about what the science says if the world suddenly stopped emitting any and all CO2 and what would happen if we started to cut emissions.