A press release on One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts’ Facebook page on Sunday evening foretold of a “Major Pauline Hanon’s (sic) One Nation Party” announcement coming at 9am on Monday. In one release, he managed to misspell the name of his leader and his party four times.
Roberts had promised an appearance by “the world’s most eminent climatologists”, and he appeared with two of the more well-known American sceptics, Tim Ball and Tony Heller. The latter goes by the pseudonym Steve Goddard and has signed up to the Obama birther conspiracy theory. His blogs about NASA faking data on climate change have been criticised even by fellow climate change sceptics. The former is a retired professor of geology who claims to have been one of the first climatology PhDs in the world, despite suggestions that his university did not have an office of climatology. Taxpayers did not pick up the bill for their visit, Roberts said, with one paying for his own way and Roberts paying for the other.
An exuberant Roberts launched into the conference waving a 40-page document (claims linked here) that he claims debunks the evidence the CSIRO gave him in a private briefing about climate change.
The theme of the press conference was that the CSIRO was relying on corrupted data from the Bureau of Meteorology and NASA and it had all been a waste of taxpayers’ money. When it came time for questions, David Crowe from The Australian led the charge, asking for an explanation as to why glaciers were melting. Heller/Goddard then claimed that glaciers were like ice cubes and should be melting, and that scientists were just cherry-picking that data anyway.
Then questions came on Roberts’ previous claims about international banks (i.e. the Rothschild family) being part of a big global conspiracy. Al Gore, Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs all got a mention as Roberts reiterated his claims that “international banks” planned to profit from climate change action.
“You want to use the C-word, you go right for it,” Roberts said.
Then BuzzFeed‘s Mark Di Stefano asked about Roberts appearing on an anti-Semitic website called “Jew World Order”. The site links to an alt-right podcast called Fair Dinkum Radio, Roberts talked about his conspiracy theory in 2015. Roberts denied he was anti-Semitic.
“There is no one religion involved. I have nothing against any particular religion,” he said, saying two of the founders of his Galileo Movement were Jewish.
“I respect and admire the Jews,” Roberts said.
When journalists attempted to steer the press conference towards the politics of the day, and the reason why a Senator from a minor party holding a press conference gets attention — mainly Rod Culleton’s future in the Senate — Hanson staffer James Ashby (remember him?) tried to stop them.
“We’re not on the subject of Rod Culleton this morning. We have a different agenda this morning, so stick to it, hey?”
“We’re allowed to ask whatever we want,” a journo shot back.
“You can ask any question you want, but we are here talking about one of the world’s biggest scams,” Roberts replied.
Journalists persisted. And with that, Roberts fled the press conference.
CSIRO won’t be responding, aside from stating it stands by its peer-reviewed science. Crikey understands Australia’s chief research organisation didn’t get the report until 9.19am this morning, after Roberts’ office tried and failed to send an email with the report attached twice before that from 9.06am.
Is Mr Roberts the next one to go to the High Court as being ineligible on account of him being bat-shit crazy?
There definitely should be a challenge on the basis he is not Australian, since the only evidence he has that he is, are the various manipulated documents purporting to show he was born here. He has presented no evidence at all that he is not an abductee by aliens or under mind control and actually has died.
My mistake: manipulated documents purporting to show he has a right as of birth to Australian citizenship! Rather than being an Indian economic refugee. Clearly the documents have been manipulated by Uns22n F0rc2s; w1th1n g0v2rnm2nt!
Well done, Crikey. Keep this fraud (and his repulsive minder) to account. It could be treated as mildly humorous but for The Living Soul being on the public teat for another few years.
Next time Roberts should secure an appearance by the world’s most eminent proof readers.
Despite poor attention to detail in spelling his leader’s name correctly he has the gall to make accusations of dodgy NASA & CSIRO numbers. Physician, heal thyself!
“poor attention to detail in spelling his leader’s name correctly”
He’s just protecting her from big government.
A man visits his doctor because he feels ill. The doctor says that he will die, or become very sick if he does not change his unhealthy lifestyle. He does not believe this doctor and seeks another opinion, and keeps on seeking more opinions. When he has received 100 opinions, three doctors have told him he does not need to do anything – he’s OK. The man says “All those other doctors seem to be contradicting empirical evidence, and their diagnosis is costing their patients millions of dollars in fees and useless medicines. And their views would not be the views of the majority of Australians”.
Diagnosis – the C-word- Crackpot; the S-word – Space shot; the F-word – Foolish
I’m going to have to spend some time reading his challenge to the CSIRO.
I did notice that his graph plotting past atmospheric CO2 levels against average global temperatures did show the spike in CO2 levevels at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 MYA due to a massive release of methane from deep sea methane clathrate deposits (rapidly converted into CO2), but didn’t show the 7 degrees of warming (was the graph fiddled with?).
It does show the subsequent cooling as the atmospheric CO2 decreased with weathering of rocks.
I’m going to have to think about his claim that it’s not possible to distinguish between the CO2 coming from burning fossil fuels and volcanic eruptions based on the ratio of C12 to C13. Plants and photosynthetic bacteria ‘prefer’ to use C12 instead of C13 in photosynthesis, so fossil fuels should contain increased C12.
I suppose one source of CO2 in volcanic eruptions would be the heating of limestone – some of which would be biogenic coming from the deposition of shelled animals at the bottom of the oceans – and eventually subducted into the mantle to subsequently be recycled back into the atmosphere. So it may be true.
I suspect reading his screed is going to be a waste of time.