Why launch a $15 billion dollar tax? Forget any scientific reason; let’s do it so people overseas don’t laugh at us. This is as good as the reasoning gets. Have you got a Nobel? You too, could waffle on about hobbling our economy in the quest for international popularity.
Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty says Australia is being seen internationally as “public enemy number one” on climate change
“Australia is being regarded as public enemy number one,” said Professor Doherty, who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1996.
The evidence Australia is seen as a public enemy?
“That’s a statement that’s been made to me by a couple of people – so that’s obviously a kind of buzz that’s going around the climate change community.”
Not exactly a large poll or a mass survey, but it impressed Dan Harrison, the Sydney Morning Herald and perhaps Ben Cubby (Environment Editor) too. Who needs evidence when you have the right “buzz”? Baseless ramblings are good to go. File that rant under “Health and Indigenous Affairs” I suppose. It sure isn’t science.
The SMH could interview other Nobel Prize winners who use evidence and reason instead of ideological namecalling based on two anonymous friends.
The polls show that most of the international population don’t care about their own emissions, let alone Austria’s, err, Australia’s. Half the world thinks climate scientists don’t know what they are talking about, and with the help of Doherty, soon they won’t think much of Nobel Prize winners either.
Feel the urge to make grandiose baseless statements about imaginary public feelings? Could it have something to do with the symposium he is at?
Professor Doherty, who is in Hong Kong for an Asia Society symposium on making cities more sustainable, said there was a perception that Australia was not playing a constructive role in the lead-up to the United Nations climate change conference in Paris later this year, which many see as the world’s “last best chance” for global action to reduce carbon emissions.
Did he pay to attend that junket himself?
China says “Yes” to green money, “No” to green action
Doherty says “… [Australia] risks being isolated as China seeks to reduce its reliance on coal.”
In 2013 China and India had plans to add half a million megawatts of coal fired electricity each. Australian is the largest coal exporter in the world, but China digs up ten times more coal than we export, and when they run out that, they have 200 years of shale gas to use as well. To show us how serious they are they’ve bravely agreed to an unenforceable long term climate commitments with no consequences. And to be on the safe side, their population projections show their emissions would peak in 2030 anyway, so they are promising nothing more than business-as-usual. The Chinese obviously don’t give a toss about their emissions, but they will put their hand up to say “thanks for the climate money”. Eighty percent of Chinese people were skeptical in one Gallup International poll. Guess they aren’t as stupid as some others.