Never mind the electorate, which planet is Danna on?
| Danna Vale wrote in a recent letter to The Leader that she can represent the voters of Hughes even though she lives in Cook electorate. But new evidence suggests she is not even of this world! |
 |
Yesterday she and three other Coalition members of a parliamentary committee investigating so-called "clean coal" released a dissenting report that denies global warming is even happening on Earth. Where has she been this last decade? Perhaps the report gives us a clue: the authors profess familiarity with the climates of other planets including Mars, Jupiter and Neptune. Is this where Danna has been spending her time?
The report quotes several climate scientists who appear at first to support their viewpoint. However a quick Google of these sources highlights immediate problems. As usual, the quotes are selective, taken out of context and misleading. Just to take the first two scientists quoted:
| The
expert… |
...seems to support them… |
...but wait, there's more! |
|
Yuri Israel, Vice Chairman of the IPCC |
"'There is no proven link
between human activity and global warming." |
The quote is from an article in
that bastion of the free press, the Russian government news service Novosti.
Later in the same piece he curiously adds "Global temperatures will
likely rise by 1.4-5.8 degrees during the next 100 years" and admits
this may flood Bangladesh (pop. 150 million), but not to worry. |
| Dr
Chris Landsea, a hurricane researcher |
He quit the IPCC in disgust due
to what he viewed as the politicisation of his work. |
In an interview with PBS cited
on his Wikipedia page, Landsea said, "we certainly see substantial
warming in the ocean and atmosphere over the last several decades on the
order of a degree Fahrenheit, and I have no doubt a portion of that, at
least, is due to greenhouse warming." |
There are other quotes and a range of arguments in their report that all (well, mostly) look reasonable at first. I didn't check them all, but I'll bet they've all been raised before and convincingly debunked. See for example How to talk to a climate skeptic, or New Scientist, or the other sites listed here.
The bottom line is that although there is indeed still some debate about some details of global warming, and particularly continuous improvement of predictive models, the scientific evidence taken as a whole overwhelmingly suggests we have already warmed the globe with our greenhouse gas emissions by three-quarters of a degree, and this is already affecting the climate. We need to drastically and urgently cut these emissions to avoid very serious climatic destabilisation which will lead to irreversible impacts including mass species extinctions and sea level rise of several metres.
Danna and her mates have just confirmed how hopelessly unfit for this task they are. The best we could say for Danna is she's easily led astray. The problem is, every time public figures like her latch onto and promote the climate denialists' spurious arguments, they waste more time. And time is not on our side.
Jonathan Doig