Of the two climate change wars currently being waged across the globe — the war against climate change and the war about climate change — it’s War 2 that’s now occupying the most territory.
While large armies of government leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and environmentalists continue grimly to fight War 1, against growing resistance, the smaller forces of climate sceptics, conservative politicians and hyperventilating columnists are clearly gaining the tactical ascendancy in War 2.
To sense the growing battlefield momentum inside the Sceptics Army, here’s a sample of comments over recent days:
- ” … in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud … that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug”. – Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
- “Now, even the UN has realised that the scam has been exposed and that the support base for its massive global swindle has melted more rapidly than any Himalayan glacier”. – Piers Akerman, Sunday Telegraph
- “There seems little doubt we will see more examples of IPCC exaggeration: finding holes in the report is beginning to feel like shooting fish in a barrel”. – The Australian
- “Public opinion has changed as the credibility of the IPCC ebbs, the crippling cost of climate change measures becomes apparent and the array of rentseekers and phonies grows.” — Miranda Devine, The Sydney Morning Herald
The failure to achieve anything like consensus at the Copenhagen climate conference in December, combined with the emergence of several embarrassing flaws in the methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has clearly put a rocket under the confidence of the Sceptics Army.
If wars are won through a series of battlefield victories, combined with success on the propaganda front, it now seems that victory in War 1 is far from certain and that guerilla tactics are clearly working in War 2.
what garbage … sane right thinking people(k rudd not included )understand that the worlds climate has never been stable but we dont like the way it has been railroad by the like sof wwf who have used it for thier own aims
taking the k rudds of the world blindly along with them
btw where has sea shepherd gone last time heard of the steve irwin was only a day away
again this mob have used goodwill regarding whales to further their own aims
More war analogy?
Nazi Germany was evil personified through the leadership of Adolf Hitler, a megalomaniac intent on world conquest and the destruction of democratic freedoms everywhere.
“Skeptic” position:
One of the first actions Hitler took in coming to power was the banning of scientific and medical experiments on live animals.
The German military occupation of Norway was a preemptive defensive action against possible British and French invasion of that country.
Poland at the time of the German military offensive against it, was a virtual military dictatorship with accusations of abuse of minorities against it.
You get the picture.
Somehow in the first phase of the ‘climate war’, low status climate scientists of whom Mark Twain’s comment that, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it”, might have applied, caught the ear of government.
Governments always like to appear to be doing something.
Then at some stage those who believed that they still had an awful lot of oil, gas and coal to sell became concerned that governments might actually undertake measures that would interfere with their profits.
I think the outcome of such a war will give our descendants ample opportunity to discover had valid the scientists climate change models were.
Only in Australia. Monckton is lucky he hasn’t been drowned like a sewer rat in the Thames given the bipartisan support for climate change action because England is close to becoming a permanent puddle and after that Atlantis.
Crikey of all publications should know better than to legitimise these wing nuts by referring to them as sceptics.
One does not term a creationist an ‘evolution sceptic’. At best they could be coined ‘reason impaired’, as there is overwhelming empirical evidence to support the theory of natural selection and absolutely no evidence of a creator. Likewise, there is mountains of evidence to support the theory of AGW and no legitimate scientific refutation.
These people are not putting forward a counter argument. They are running a campaign of obfuscation at the behest of the big polluters. That they are gaining some popular traction does nothing to validate their position, and responsible media should be careful to clearly separate populist pseudo science from genuine scepticism.