Pander to the crocodile. Danegeld. The Australian government has offered $200 million for the UN Green Climate Fund. It’s more advertising money for the Green Blob, guaranteed to fund nice jobs that depend on the belief that man-made climate change is real, dangerous and can be solved by the UN. The cluster of dedicated climate-changing lobbyists will grow (slightly) and Australia’s foreign aid budget will shrink. In the end, it won’t make any difference to the global climate, but it will increase the number of press releases pushing the meme, and demanding more money from the public. Shame.
When Green bullies use outrage to push for money, the answer is not to pay them off, but to out-Green them and expose the hypocrisy.
Imagine if the Abbott government stood up to the so-called environmentalists and said: “We’re doing something real to help the poor and the environment — we’re funding programs direct to make sure the funds go where they are needed most. Large conglomerate centralized groups are inefficient, they tend to feed bureaucracy and junkets. We are going to be the first nation to fund an independent science program. For the sake of the environment we going to audit and check the data and results with experts from many branches of science. We are going to foster debate, leave no stone unturned, check every figure and make sure that environmental science is subjected to the absolute best peer review we can find. The world needs climate models that can predict the climate, and Australia will lead the way in auditing them.”
The real environmentalists in this debate are the ones who want BOM data and methods to be fully replicated and publicly available. The real scientists in this debate are the ones trying to understand how the climate really works by looking at the observations instead of studying opinion polls and inventing conspiracies about “fossil fuel funding”.
If the Abbott government spent a mere 10% of the Climate Fund setting up a research and analytical program to replicate BOM adjustments, or to set up independent climate models that used natural forcings to model the climate, then there would finally be a free market in science. When governments picks winners among scientific theories, as it has in climate science, it cripples scientific progress. As I’ve said for years, before we ask for a free market in carbon credits, we need a free market in science. It time we get real and stop expecting unfunded volunteers to compete unassisted with a one-sided industrial science machine. If the science is settled, and the evidence is obvious, true scientists would not be scared of real debate. They would welcome it. We do.
If Abbott spent $20 million funding skeptics there would be outrage. But the louder the outrage the more it proves that the thing that climate activists are most afraid of is for skeptical scientists to be given the same chance to make their case as unskeptical scientists. It’ s obvious what kind of scientist will win.