Say “Yes” to an Honest and Informed Debate

Sen. Christine Milne demands that the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance:

call off its planned advertising campaign against a price on pollution until it is in a position to engage in honest and informed debate.  [...]

Misinformation, as is being foisted on the Australian public every day by Tony Abbott and his allies, can only undermine our democracy.

“These groups should call off their campaign until an agreement is reached and announced and they are in a position to engage in honest, informed debate instead of a scare campaign that spreads yet more misinformation.”

The Australian Greens, of course, always engage in honest and informed debate, but is “undermining our democracy” really the only thing that the alleged misinformation of “Abbott and his allies” can do?

The “pollution” whereto Sen. Milne refers is not pollution but carbon dioxide, the trace gas essential for life on earth.

The Greens would never engage in an hysterical scare campaign for, remember, they “value trustworthiness, sincerity and truth”:  they’d never claim, despite a complete lack of scientific proof and with no empirical evidence, that anthropogenic global warming would inevitably cause more droughts, more floods, higher seas, more warmth, more coolth, coral bleaching and more bushfires, would they? 

Greens leader Bob Brown says bushfires like the ones raging across Victoria and New South Wales this weekend [February, 2009] will be more frequent if climate change continues.   [...]

“Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25%, 50% more,” he told Sky News.

“It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change.”

The oil, coal and big-resource companies put off the day of action and edged the world further into super-heating  [writes Sen. Brown in the Herald Sun, December 21, 2009].

That means worse drought, bushfires, snow-melt, tropical storm damage and accelerating sea level rises.

The Greens will force the introduction of a carbon price if it wins the balance of power in the senate, leader Bob Brown promised hundreds of party faithful in Brisbane [in July, 2010].
Senator Brown gave two Queensland examples – coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and the recent impact on water supplies of coal companies pushing into farm land on the Darling Downs – as direct reasons why.

“Burning coal is a major cause of global warming [claims Sen. Brown in a media release of 16 January, 2011].  This industry, which is 75% owned outside Australia, should help pay the cost of the predicted more severe and more frequent floods, droughts and bushfires in coming decades.  As well, 700,000 seaside properties in Australia face rising sea levels.”

UPDATE:  Despite the hysterical and deceitful shrieking of the duplicitous Prof. Hoegh-Guldberg, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef are not deteriorating from supposedly warmer seas.  See Kate Osborne et al., “Disturbance and the Dynamics of Coral Cover on the Great Barrier Reef (1995–2009)”:

While the limited data for the GBR prior to the 1980's suggests that coral cover was higher than in our survey, we found no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995.

UPDATE II (4 July):  For more on the very silly Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, see “The Hypocritical Coral Whisperer”, at ABC Watch.

UPDATE III (5 July):  For even more on the foolish Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, see “Slurred by a Coral Whisperer”, at ABC Watch. 

UPDATE IV (6 July):  For an account of Sen. Brown’s ability to give trustworthy, truthful descriptions, see “Bob Brown v. Reality” at Stop Gillard’s Carbon Tax.

Say “Yes” to the Usual Lies

Say Yes Australia has a new campaign:  credulous busybodies are encouraged to download a letter (authorised by Sam McLean, Surry Hills, NSW), print it—somehow Say Yes Australia or Sam McLean can discern that people will print the letter “on recycled paper using environmentally friendly ink”—and then deliver it to grateful neighbours.  Determining neighbours’ e-mail addresses must, we may suppose, be more polluting.

The letter asserts:

Australia produce[s] more carbon pollution per person than any other country in the world[.]

If we interpret “carbon pollution” as “carbon dioxide”, Australia does not produce more carbon pollution per capita than any other country in the world.  (See here.)  Calling industrially produced carbon dioxide “carbon pollution” is deliberately deceitful; and, since carbon dioxide consists of more oxygen than carbon, it would be just as appropriate to call emissions of carbon dioxide “oxygen pollution”.

In fact, a new independent Commission, made up of leading Australian climate scientists, just found that the next decade is the ‘critical decade’ to stop devastating climate change before it’s too late.

No real, independent commission or unbiassed scientist has found any such thing.

The carbon price would only apply to fewer than 1,000 of the biggest polluting companies in Australia – it is not a tax on you and me.  [...]  Polluters might still try to pass the costs on to us.  But revenue from the price will be made available to households to assist with price rises.  That way the policy stays focused on changing the behaviour of the biggest polluting companies.

Of course, big companies are notorious for choosing not “to pass the costs on to us”.  No doubt, any publicly listed company which did choose to pass rising costs on to customers would be roundly condemned by shareholders at the subsequent annual general meeting.

P.S.  I know there are a few people still arguing that climate change doesn’t exist, but the fact is that 97% of climate scientists working in the field say it’s happening, it’s caused by humans, and it’s already causing us major damage like more extreme weather events and sea level rise.  I figure that even if the 3% who claim climate change isn’t real end up being right, not following the advice of the 97% who say we need to reduce pollution now is just not worth the risk.

Ah, yes, the old lie that people deny that the climate changes, and the old lie of the 97% consensus:  seventy-five out of seventy-seven self-selected scientists of unknown qualifications endorsed the man-made global warming orthodoxy in one spurious poll.  The old lie of saying that some scientists argue against “climate change” whereas most real, independent scientists rightly reject the flawed conjecture of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  The old “not worth the risk” fallacy, equating the devastation of economies and the ruination of industries to the disbelief in the deity of Pascal’s Wager.

Sam McLean (or his anonymous ghost-writer) is either wilfully, deliberately and mischievously duplicitous or is the deluded dupe of meretricious, lucripetous pseudo-scientists and the mendacious, misanthracist misanthropists who feign to be in favour of conserving the environment.

UPDATE:  In light of the Say Yes Australia Administrators’ famed propensity to delete comments as supposedly “irrelevant, spam or abusive”, it is interesting to see the published comments: