Dave’s Archives

Any appearance of Andrew Bolt on the ABC's Insiders programme is bound to result in at least one deranged pronouncement on the conspiracy that is climate change. (This is something of a shame, because on other issues discussed on Insiders he does often approach sanity.)

In the closing comments, Bolt had this contribution to make:

The latest results just in a couple of days ago: the world has... the planet has warm... cooled for the last 8 years to normal levels; the land surface measurements cooled for the last 8 years; and sea levels - good heavens, Penny Wong was wrong in that too - that too has cooled over 5 years.

To put this into some perspective, NASA offers the following global temperature data:

"Normal levels" indeed. Bolt gave no indication of where his particular data comes from, and a more comprehensive denial of climate reality (complete with what could be a Freudian slip) would be hard to pack into such a small window of time.

Note - Bolt says that sea "levels" have "cooled". Either cooling or dropping would be a neat trick, since the data shows quite unambiguously that the sea levels are rising, with about half the rise due to thermal expansion. Bolt himself posted a graph on his blog showing the changes to sea levels just days ago, though with the reality-defying annotation "FLAT" (in comic sans, no less) plastered across the last three years (in much the same way you might expect a bright red sign to be cheerfully labelled "blue"). Bolt himself didn't add the annotation; that honour goes to former meteorologist Anthony Watts. Now, because one must always strive for betterment, Bolt has apparently decided that "FLAT" = "cooling", and that 3 years = 5 years. He was reading from notes, so if it was a slip-up it was a very well planned one.

As you can see, the above graph quite handily refutes its own annotation (which was not on the original, just in case you're wondering). One despairs at the futility of debating people who not only fail to notice such an astoundingly obvious trend, but manage to perceive precisely the opposite of what is staring them in the face.

I was also struck by the time frames Bolt was using. The normal denialist claim is that there has been no warming since 1998. Though that one is easily refuted (in no small part because 1998 recorded a temperature spike due to El Niño), it's still a stronger case than for the last 8 years. After all, 2001 looks to have recorded some of the coldest temperatures in the last decade (though it's still in the top 10 warmest years on record).

If I didn't know better, I'd say that Bolt simply printed off some three-year old (because then 1998 would be 8 years ago) piece of denialist propaganda and regurgitated it on-air as "the latest results". That's mere speculation, of course.

For someone who rails so vehemently against global warming "alarmism"*, Andrew Bolt sure seems to be alarmed about hypothetical fatalities attributed to air conditioning failure during blackouts. Bolt states: "Just how many died because power blackouts knocked out their airconditioning is not known." It's not known, of course, because nobody has reported it happening, not because there's some sort of shadowy government conspiracy. By contrast, the World Heath Organisation estimates that about 150,000 excess deaths are already occurring annually in "low-income countries" as a result of climate change. But then that's based on actual research, so we can safely ignore it.

Indeed, the scientific consensus on global warming has been ignored and disputed by any number of media and political hacks. There are lists of the scientific battalions that supposedly dispute anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but most of the people on them are (a) connected to the fossil-fuel industry or funded by some like-minded "think tank", (b) not connected to climate science in any significant fashion, or (c) not actually in denial of AGW at all. For instance, Dr Olafur Ingolfsson (whose credentials I have no particular reason to doubt) merely reassures us that the polar bear may not be in danger of extinction. For that he made it into the US Republicans' list of "Over 400 Prominent Scientists [who] Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007". The Heartland Institute's list of "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares" doesn't give any reasoning at all for the inclusion of any given name, and many of those listed have expressed their outrage.

Al Gore, who in the US now seems to be a piñata for the cynics (as though discrediting him is equivalent to discrediting the entire field), tried to point out that the consensus on AGW is real. In An Inconvenient Truth he cited a metastudy on the subject, which found that none of a sample of 928 climate-related papers had argued against AGW. A newer, more direct survey has since found that 96% of climatologists (actively publishing) agree that temperatures have risen, and 97% believe that human activity is a significant contributing factor. Moreover, the closer you are to the science, the more likely you are to agree with this view. Only 58% of the general public believes that human factors are influencing the climate. However, to argue that there is no scientific consensus is risible. Such claims seem to be based on the views of a few outspoken individuals, amplified by political and corporate interests and parroted by ideologues in the media (who, of course, complain loudly that it's the other way around).

Needless to say, air conditioning failure is a lot more likely if more people are relying on air conditioning.

* Can one accept that anthropogenic global warming is occurring without being contemptibly tagged as an "alarmist"?

The ABC's Q&A programme spent about 30 minutes last night pondering Senator Conroy's mandatory Internet filtering plan... well, idea, because it's increasingly clear that "plan" is too strong a word. Conroy was, frankly, an embarrassment. To be honest, most of the questions put to him were not especially articulate, but Conroy made a mockery of himself. What disturbs me is that he seems to be fully cognisant  of the reality of public opposition, the technical barriers and even the dangers of encroaching on political freedoms, and yet at the same time he has no inkling that it means anything. Sure, ACMA may have blacklisted a dentist's website, among a number of other worrying examples, but somehow that's perfectly alright and acceptable simply because Conroy is able to explain how it happened (something about the Russian mafia, apparently). Forgive me if the idea of a secret blacklist doesn't fill me with confidence. If said blacklist hadn't been leaked recently, such errors would never come to light, and so there would be no pressure to correct them.

Andrew Bolt's remarks on the filter were mostly directed at the Internet libertarian strawman. The argument - not terribly innovative - lays down a few of the worst examples of criminal behaviour and suggests that you can't allow free access to everything. Possibly true, and utterly beside the point. Mandatory Internet filtering is and should be opposed on the grounds that there just isn't a workable mechanism, by which I mean one that is effective while being compatible with basic democratic principles. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what your filtering criteria are. Computers aren't smart enough, humans aren't honest enough and the Internet is just too damn big.

I used to think that left-vs-right was an ideological battle that consumed American thinking far more than Australian thinking. However, having indulged in glimpses of Andrew Bolt's blog and his adversaries at Pure Poison, I'm not sure that we're really any better. Theoretically, "left" and "right" define a spectrum of economic policy: left for socialism, right for capitalism. Somehow these have become nouns of the form "The Left" and "The Right", which are about categorising people. If one is "from" The Left or The Right, one is expected to conform to particular stereotypes. Increasingly, these stereotypes have less to do with economic beliefs and more to do with dogmas that span the whole spectrum of political discourse, and even personality characteristics such as anger and dishonesty.

The terms are almost vacuous, and their use says more about the speaker than anything else. They're born of the same mentality that produces xenophobia and racism. People are placed into groups so that the group can be criticised as one monolithic entity. In extreme cases, the group is made out to be a shadowy, hierarchical organisation, often an extension of a political party.

You are of course expected to take sides - to identify yourself as being a leftist/progressive or rightie/conservative. If you don't want to label yourself, the choice will be made for you. If you've been called a "leftist" on occasion (as I have), you might tend to subconsciously include yourself in that group whenever someone else makes a nebulous stab at "The Left". Thus, having taken such accusations personally, you recoil at them. You may never have deliberately chosen such a label for yourself, and the person making the criticism may not even know of your existence, and yet animosity arises. Such is the insidiousness of politics. Unlike race, there is at least the possibility of choice, but the choice between two simplistic labels brushes aside an enormous spectrum of complex issues.

Racism, however, gets us to the issue of the moment - Andrew Bolt's apparent discovery that agents of the forces of darkness are seeking to discredit him, by attempting to post racist comments on his blog. The implicitly-accused suggest that Bolt is making the whole thing up. Bolt's readership has almost unanimously condemned The Left for this apparent act of treachery, while over at Pure Poison the rebels were flinging it right back at The Right. Pure Poison accuses Bolt's readership of a general tendancy towards racism, while Bolt cryptically refers to the "New Racism of the Left" (possibly trying to coin a new vacuous catchphrase).

It seems to be the height of wit and cunning to take a criticism directed at your group (e.g. racism) and send it back at the other group. There doesn't need to be any supporting argument or evidence. It doesn't even really matter what the criticism is. Your cohort will gleefully pat you on the back for having demonstrated the "hypocrisy" of your opponents. It's all imaginary hypocrisy, but then truth is whatever is said by one of your own. Hypocrisy is the ultimate point-scoring system, which is why so much effort goes into inventing it. It's really just a more sophisticated form of "I know you are, but what am I?"

I thought for a moment about making a tearful confession to Bolt, just to see what would happen, but I'd probably be drowned out in the torrent of pre-existing outrage. (Besides, Bolt seems to write a dozen or more blog entries every day, and probably doesn't really care all that much.)

My approach to the whole thing is this: establish your own beliefs, ignore any attempts to label you, and let others express their beliefs freely without labelling them. It should be possible to debate issues related to economics, society, religion, environmentalism, etc. without resorting to vague and bizarre generalisations of The Left or The Right.