Maurice Newman, you are not allowed to say words like “order” “world” and “new”

Never talk about a new world order.

We’re on flak-watch tonight, and pop-guns are going off at the ABC. Jeff Sparrow is firing at Maurice Newman, feeling very superior, and doing namecalling, namecalling, all the way down. Get ready for the Sparrow-personality-test based on tenuous speculative associations with random three-word-phrases. This is the best of ABC-big-gov-lovin’ intelligensia.

The fireworks over Maurice Newman’s opinion on how the UN are using climate for their own powerhungry agenda continues. He not only spoke of “world government” he used the words “order”, “new”, and “world”. You and I thought these were simple words in the Oxford Dictionary, but lo, dumb punters, there is a special secret meaning Jeff Sparrow can reveal. Anyone who uses these words in the correct order is probably also a conspiracy theorist, paranoiac, gun nut, religious fanatic, and survivalist. All that psychoanalysis, and in just three words.

Maurice Newman raised a valid topic, but Sparrow ignores the issue, drops a smoke-bomb to distract loaded with namecalling. As mindless as it is, the ABC editors lapped it up. This is the way the big important issues of national importance get treated at the ABC. What is a geopolitical issue of […]

Clive Hamilton preaches to the believers: tells them to “cringe” at deniers

The ABC keeps giving us more reasons to say “Privatize the national broadcaster”. Such is the quality of the insights on offer.

Clive Hamilton, ethics professor and former Greens candidate, uses most of the alarmist toolbox on the ABC Drum –-the name-calling, hypocrisy, and argumentum ad auctoritatem. He still can’t tell the difference between science and religion, he thinks science works like a church, with decrees issued from the Mount. He talks of the mythical God known as “the science”. Clive has read the leak of the latest commandment from on high, and it says “95%”! There is gnashing of teeth:

Further confirmation of the science will certainly not persuade any climate science deniers. They are beyond persuasion, because the argument is only superficially about the science. It’s really about culture and ideology.

Strangely, he’s unwitting hit upon a truth. But it’s a projection of his headspace, run rife. Who denies the evidence showing climate models are broken. Whose argument is superficial? Who doesn’t even know what science is? Yes, really this is about culture and ideology. His. And it’s a dark ideology; read on.

What Clive wants more than anything is to monsterize anyone who questions his faith. His […]

ABC Rejects — Hansen admit the models are wrong, but alarmism gets the last word on the ABC.

ABC Unleashed knocked back this reply (below) from Cox and Stockwell. The ABC is OK with publishing unsubstantiated smears, and doesn’t feel any need to muddy the water with inconvenient facts.

The essential point here is that Cox and Stockwell noticed that Hansen was inadvertently admitting the models have major flaws. Hansen effectively acknowledges the magnitude of the error by the models is almost half the entire forcing blamed on human emissions of CO2. Hansen thought he was making the point that it’s all awful and worse than we thought, because if aerosols have been cooling the planet more than we expected, then CO2 has been heating it more than we expected too! But in order to claim that, he had to first admit that the models (shock) had been wrong all along. In the end, it’s a speculative war of unknown fudge-factors.

Why does this matter so much?

The alarmists are always telling us that we know CO2 matters because they can’t explain the rise in temperatures without CO2. It’s all argument from ignorance and a fallacy from the beginning. Then when their models didn’t reproduce the cooling from 1945 – 1975, they “discovered” aerosols.

8.2 out of 10 […]

ABC – Agitprop for the Bureaucratic Class

The ABC is so afraid that the public might read comments from global warming skeptics that they frequently censor or delay reasonable comments, while allowing defamatory, unprofessional, and unsubstantiated ones through. (Guess which way the editors of The Drum vote?)

Marc Hendrickx describes how hard it is to get rid of a single baseless defamatory comment on the ABC taxpayer-funded-site:

The following anonymous comment was posted to [Sara] Phillips’s blog shortly afterwards:

Annie : 03 Dec 2010 7:07:53pm

The denialist clowns return again . . . climateaudit.org . . . run by Stephen McIntyre a known climate denialist and extremist right-wing provocateur . . . you are a joke as are your answers . . . laughing hysterically.

Marc Hendrix suggested it be removed as defamatory. The ABC editors protested, and here’s the weird thing, it would have taken them less time to just say “yes” — after all, it’s only a comment. But in the sum total editorial-calculation-of-the-day there was apparently some net benefit in fighting to keep an unsubstantiated insult visible among hundreds of other comments? (Go figure.) According to the ABC editors: “He [MacIntyre] could reasonably be described as ‘right wing’ as a speaking member of the […]

Oreskes, Readfearn: Got no evidence? Throw different names. Skeptics are paranoid ideologues afraid of reds under the bed.

Ad Hominem Unleashed (aka ABC): On the origin of the sceptics

Commentators on a sinking ship search for reasons to “keep the faith afloat”.

The debate has moved a peg. Instead of “oil shills” now we’re just paranoid ideologues afraid of reds under the bed.

Naomi Oreskes

The battle cry: the “skeptics” are shills of big oil, has become an own goal. The PR team for the catastrophic theory have no new evidence of Big Oil funding and thousands of people now point out that the UNskeptics were paid 3500 times as much (at least). So they are moving on… the religiously devout believers can’t admit they were wrong, and nor can they look at the evidence, so what’s left? Post hoc random over-analysis of the irrelevant. Before, skeptics were paid hacks… and now they’re wrong because they … are ideologically against big government and regulation. From one ad hom to another.

And again, the ABC uses our taxes to promote the smear campaign, support neolithic reasoning, and does everything it can to stop people talking about scientific evidence (by spreading misinformation or slurs about all the characters on one side). Oreskes and freelance writer […]

Clive Hamilton’s War on Science

Clive Hamilton writes again on The ABC Drum

It’s a strange, inside-out world. Poor Hamilton seems to suffer from a kind of public form of projection, where he inadvertently lumps skeptics with all his own failures. Everything he claims to be standing for, he unwittingly attacks. Everything he protests about is something he does himself, and in spades. Virtually every point is easily refuted, yet promoted with public money.

It’s quite an achievement. Hamilton is anti-science, intolerant, and hypocritical all at once, and his arguments collapse when measured against his own benchmarks. He resorts to name-calling, and rank speculation without basis or substantiation. The ABC betrays its wafer thin intellectual standards and bias by not noticing that Clive barely makes a point that does not dispute itself.

Clive protests about the War on Science, but doesn’t realize he is waging it.

The thing that makes the scientific method vastly different to all the other philosophies and methods of acquiring knowledge out there is that evidence always stands above opinion. Yet the very core of Hamilton’s arguments depends on the “Consensus”, and Clive apparently hasn’t […]

Lewandowsky: the ABC parades a witchdoctor again

Once more the ABC is posting logical failures, confused non-evidence, and baseless thinking. This time Professorial Fellow Stephan Lewandowsky also tries to talk about economic cost benefits, without analyzing either costs or benefits, and doesn’t seem to know the difference between a free market and a fixed one. Why do they bother?

Lewandowsky says we should act — despite the supposed “lack of certainty”. Given that there are multiple studies and empirical evidence that suggests carbon has no catastrophic effect, what he is effectively saying is we should ignore the observations and be obedient to the Gods of “science” instead. It harks straight from our stone age tribal era.

Right from the outset, let’s be clear, that for all Lewandowsky’s bluster about the scientific evidence, he has never once posted any reference showing observational evidence that the touted positive feedback written into the models-of-doom has any basis in fact. As usual, he points to the Biblical “Consensus”, even though we’ve pointed out the basics of science (that consensus is an unscientific, illogical argument from authority, and is baseless in science). When the government has poured in billions to “find” a consensus, it would be flat out shocking if they couldn’t […]

Got baseless smears and innuendo? Perfect for the ABC.

Re: Climate change ‘brown wash’

Kellie Tranter attacks imaginary deniers who she doesn’t name, cite, or reference. All her inferences and innuendo are backed up by assertive confidence, a pile of convenient guesses, and nothing else. Everything she accuses the Deniers of is something that those on the Big Scare Campaign do–and if the Deniers do it at all, those who sell-the-scare do it 100 times more.

Shouldn’t we be suing the guys who lost the data we paid for?

And countermanding her legal speculation: sanctions for those who provide inaccurate or misleading information are surely more appropriate for the workers who are paid by the citizens to give balanced and careful reporting — rather than those who offer a product for voluntary purchase in the private market.

The citizens are, after all, forced to pay for the services of the Department of Climate Change, the CRU, the CSIRO, BOM and ABC. No citizen is forced to buy Heaven and Earth. The official organisations are chartered to provide the whole truth, not just their favorite parts. Who in their right mind expects a single speech or book from a private individual to encompass the entirety of scientific knowledge?

[…]

Suing the skeptics

Guest post by Anthony Cox on the legal side and on ABC bias

Anthony Cox and David Stockwell sent the letter below to the ABC in response to the article Climate change ‘brown wash’. They wrote:

“Dear sir, On the 27th July I sent you this e-mail:

“Dear sir,

On the 26th July, on Unleashed, an article by Kellie Tranter was published;

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2962929.htm

Since the article was very critical of the sceptical approach to anthropogenic global warming [AGW] it would be reasonable for a sceptical view to be published in response, especially in this election period. Accordingly I have attached a response entitled “suing the Sceptics” which was the theme of Ms Tranter’s piece. Details of the authors of the submitted article are here:

Anthony Cox, lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics.

Dr David Stockwell, environmental scientist.

Regards

Anthony Cox”

I have yet to receive a response from you. The article, with some small typo corrections, is again attached. I can only repeat that, since Ms Tranter’s article was critical of the sceptics’ position, a reply is justified […]

Name-calling fairy dust: “Conspiracy Theorist”

Ad hominem Unleashed on the ABC

On our ABC there’s lots of talk “about evidence” but next to nothing of actual evidence. (The empty homage to “evidence” is handy though, it keeps the pretense alive that it’s a scientific conversation). Stephan Lewandowsky is still doing his Picasso-brain-best to search in all the wrong places for enlightenment.

Is the planet warming from man-made CO2? Lewandowsky “knows” it is. Why? Because the 9/11 truthers are conspiracy theorists (and conspiracies are always wrong). O’ look, a few people ask odd questions about an accident in a building years ago, and sometimes those people are also the species Homo Sapiens Climata Scepticus (!). So it follows (if you are insane) that because some people still doubt the official story of an unrelated past event, man-made global warming will contribute 3.7W/m2 in the year 2079, and we’ll all become souffles in the global Sahara.

I’m not making this stuff up. I’ve tallied up the obvious errors from both articles. His power to confuse himself with red herrings is … “impressive”.

Lewandowsky scorecard for logic and reason

Argument from authority 4

[…]

Who needs a committee report to spot rank deception?

Last week I was invited by the ABC to respond to Clive Hamilton and the Parliamentary Committee report on ClimateGate. It was published a couple of hours ago on the ABC Drum. (Or Try this link, who knows why the article moved? 14-4-09)

The issue of the ClimateGate emails leaked or hacked from the East Anglia CRU is not that complicated. The emails are damning because anyone who reads them understands that they show petty, unprofessional, and probably criminal behaviour. We know the guys who wrote them are not people we’d want to buy cars from. They are hiding information. We don’t need a committee to state the obvious.

The emails show some of the leading players in climate science talking about tricks to “hide declines”, they boast about manipulating the peer review process, and “getting” rid of papers they didn’t like from the IPCC reports. It’s clear the data wasn’t going the way they hoped, yet they screwed the results every way they could to milk the “right” conclusion. Above all else, they feared freedom of information requests, and did everything they could to avoid providing their data. ClimateGate shows these people were not […]

The climate industry wall of money

This is the copy of the file I sent the ABC Drum Unleashed. I’m grateful they are allowing both sides of the story to get some airtime (though Bob Carter’s , and Marc Hendrickx’s posts were both rejected. Hat-tip to Louis and Marc). Unfortunately the updated version I sent late yesterday which included some empirical references near the end was not posted until 4.30pm EST. (NB: The Australian spelling of skeptic is “sceptic”)

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the “deniers”, the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed. Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.

The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it’s chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they […]