climate change and flat earthers

Mike Carlton was spot today in his opinion piece in the SMH


PARDON me for pointing out the bleedin' obvious but for those who have not been paying attention much of the planet has been devastated by extraordinary weather in the past year.

We have had our floods in eastern Australia and, as the doughty Anna Bligh called it, the most terrifying cyclone of all. Floods have also swept China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and southern Africa, killing thousands and leaving tens of millions homeless.

Kenya is suffering a long drought that threatens widespread famine. A vast area of South America is also in severe drought, although record January rains in Brazil triggered mud slides that killed more than 700 slum dwellers near Rio de Janeiro.

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Massive and unseasonally early snow storms pummelled Europe and North America before Christmas, taking more lives, and this week again the US has been hammered by what the US National Weather Service called ''a historic killer blizzard''.

Given this catalogue of global disaster, would now be a good time for the climate change flat-earthers to shut up and listen, do you think? Just for a day or two, or even five minutes?

They won't, of course. The global warming denialists ignore the great body of world scientific opinion. When the Queensland catastrophe leaves the headlines the local lot will be at it again, barfing up their crackpot notions.

No reputable climate scientist claims the disasters listed above have been caused solely by global warming. Nor did the Green senator Bob Brown blame the coal industry for the Queensland floods; if you check the record, you will find he was thoroughly verballed on that one.

The argument, Brown's included, is simply that as the planet gets warmer, these rains and floods, droughts and blizzards will become more frequent and more destructive of life and the environment.

A lot of the denialist stupidity is ideological, as in Tony Abbott 's infamous remark that climate change is ''crap''. He and his conservative fellow travellers worship that idiotic British peer and coolist Lord Monckton, who also believes Barack Obama wants to impose a ''communist one-world government'' on us.

Others, such as Sydney's Catholic archbishop, George Pell, resort to theology. Pell has said that belief in man-made global warming is a pagan superstition.

And last month he felt moved to write: ''A month or so ago, the global warmers were announcing 2010 as one of the hottest years on record. Then a colossal freeze descended on Europe and, more recently, on the east coast of North America.

''Nothing so delicious has happened since President Obama had to leave the global-warming summit in Copenhagen a day early so his aircraft would not be snowed in.''

This is singularly fat-headed, even for an archbishop. The death and misery caused by this icy deliciousness is a curious subject for priestly wit. In fact, the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation confirmed last month that ''2010 ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998 ? Arctic sea ice cover in December 2010 was the lowest on record.''

The third lot of climate denial ratbags are those tabloid media pundits cynically banging the populist drum to drag in the hordes of bogan nongs out there.

These are people who believe they are beset by a cabal of lefties, Greenies, gays, femi-Nazis, Muslims, venal and incompetent public servants and latte-sipping intellectuals conspiring to deprive them of all they hold dear, like their inalienable right to own a jet-ski and to name their children Breeyanna and Jaxxon.

To them, climate change is another part of the plot. They are beyond help.

Trawling the TV news channels on Tuesday for the latest from Egypt, I hit on a chat between two of the nastiest people in America, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News outfit.

O'Reilly has the smirk of a welshing Irish bookmaker. Beck looks like a child's inflatable swimming pool toy, with an IQ to match. Together, they were ''analysing'' the demonstrations on the streets of Cairo, in infantile terms.

''Mubarak: bad guy!'' announced O'Reilly. ''But then he's our guy.''

''It's the Marxist communists [sic] and the jihadists doing all this stuff,'' said the pool toy.

They would not recognise it but these two dolts unwittingly put their finger on the central fault line of American foreign policy.

President John Kennedy's inauguration promise in 1961 that the US would ''pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty'' turned out to be one of the great swindles of the past century.

Liberty be damned. In the 50 years since, successive presidents have funded and encouraged some of the worst tyrants of our time, for as long as they were professed anti-communists and usefully ''our guys''. Diem of South Vietnam, Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Verwoerd in South Africa, Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran and the vile Saudi royal family spring immediately to mind. And Hosni Mubarak, and even Saddam Hussein, for a while. Who could forget the pictures of Ronald Reagan's special envoy, none other than Donald Rumsfeld, embracing Saddam in Baghdad in 1983?

But they do not learn in Washington. As we have seen again now with Egypt, the State Department is ever surprised when it is bitten on the bum by the huddled masses yearning to be free.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/flatearthers-its-time-for-a-cold-shower-20110204-1agt8.html