The Australian Department of Climate Change
People have asked me if the Rudd Government’s postponement of the ETS means we’ve won, as in game over, time for that beach holiday in Broome? But the end of the game is nowhere in sight while our government still has a Department of Climate Change stacked with high paid executives that soak up $90 million a year. The gullible guys who leapt in with both feet are still top-dogs. The end is not even close while two of our largest daily papers don’t realize they are the real Deniers they disparage, or when the second in charge of our opposition still thinks we need to trade carbon. Joe Hockey (our shadow treasurer) said this week that “a carbon price is inevitable”. He used the same old line: “scientists say blah”, as if a consensus of “scientists” is either (a) faultless and incorruptible, or (b) in control of the weather.
Carbon trading, “inevitable“? How about “inane”? Even better: perilous, fraud-prone, and serpentine. It boils down to forced markets trading fake goods that nobody would willingly buy. It’s not a “carbon” market, it’s a Permit Market. And a permit (especially to something unmeasurable) is not a commodity to be traded. What better recipe to bake a crooked cake, and fan the flames of darker human instincts? Yea verily, let’s feed the dark side and invite the charlatans to our table. Why not give them press secretaries, diplomatic immunity, and an expense account as well?
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Speaking of dark: the propaganda rolls on (thanks to your money)
Carmen Lawrence
Carmen Lawrence is a former WA state Premier, who is now the Winthrop Professor at the School of Psychology at UWA. (The same bastion of illogic that fosters Stephan Lewandowsky.)
She’s speaking on Tuesday about ways psychology can help “modify behaviors”, and thus tip-toes around the edge of the dark cesspit of Marxist style control. (It’s not up to you how you behave, it’s up to them.)
Lawrence claims: “We need to know about ourselves to deal with Climate Change”. Me, I think we need to know about microphysical processes in cloud formation instead. Knowing how people respond to TV adverts is about 15th on a list of the ten things we need to do.
In a free world, people convince other people to act with evidence, logic, reason, and good communication, and then the free citizens decide if it sounds like it’s worth the effort, or if “the other guy” (who says the opposite) — makes more sense. Instead of helping us taxpayers to understand the human psyche, the School of Psychology seems to think they should act as a wing of the government, to help change our behavior against our will. Polls in many western nations are split 50:50, this is not about helping a nation of people who’ve said they want to act, this is about changing the way people act, even if half of them don’t want to change.
It’s not what we pay our taxes for, to be “modified”.
In the Soviet Union the government often locked up people who disagreed with them in loony bins, in the tender care of psychologists. How did it work out for the Soviet Union? In retrospect who was right, the government and their psychologists, or the people they locked up?
Lawrence and co can research and discuss the ways to convince us of something, but if the thing they push isn’t real, it’s no wonder the usual technique (the truth) isn’t working for them. They can tie themselves in knots assessing and analyzing what “works”, but unless they can find a way to shift thousands of cubic kilometers of humid air up to the tropopause, they’re missing the point.
(Macha, who emailed this lecture link to me, asked “Hmmm…….in your words, is this “consensus by authority?”. I replied that it looked more like “…climate by psychologists.”)*
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Brainwash the kids
Shout (?) for Climate Change
Then there’s this mindless cheerleading program encouraging students of all ages to “Shout” for climate change. (I guess when you can’t speak with reason, shouting is all that’s left eh?)
If any student wants to create a 60 second advertisement to enter that’s shouting about, say, science, or logic instead of propaganda for bureaucrats, you could send your entry here too just in case the Shouting Team doesn’t have a sense of humor…
What’s worse than teaching kids the half truths of climate change? Worse is not even teaching them half the truth, but teaching them to assume it just IS, and then getting them to write the propaganda for you for free: That’s Orwellian.
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When will I declare it “Over”?
It’ll be time to sit back and party, when there is no government department trying to change the weather, when there are no more baseless propaganda campaigns funded by public money, and when 90% of the public knows the scare was wildly exaggerated. There will come a time when most people will say “I was always suspicious…”
But it’s not really over until they teach logic and reason in primary schools to stop the next generation falling for the next big scare.
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h/t to Linda M for the Hockey story, and Macha for the warning about the free public Psychology lectures.
*And of course, there’s nothing wrong with psychologists discussing climate change, their informed opinion is just as valuable as anyones, but let’s find a psychologist who knows what the fallacy of authority is, and who understands that “positive feedback” is not neccessarily a friendly letter.