The Queen of Climate Crackpottery

Trigger warning: if your household companions include a cat, dog, canary, goldfish or turtle, this article is not a safe space. I’m writing about Harvard’s distinguished agnatologist Professor Naomi Oreskes (above) and her 2014 warning that global warming would kill your pets in 2023. The warning is in her acclaimed but glum book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Given margins of error in climate science, the pet die-off might be this year instead. Oreskes wrote,

The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners , but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal . … A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment (p9).

Smarter climate alarmists don’t make short-term predictions. They choose a date like 2050 for when the oceans will boil. They’ll be senile or dead by then and can’t be humiliated if the oceans stay chilly.

Top environmentalist Paul Ehrlich forecast in 1971that by 2000 the UK “will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”[1] His 1968 book, Population Bomb, predicted starvation would shrink the US population to 23 million by 1999. Strangely, Oreskes in her book hails Ehrlich as a vindicated futurist. (p3-4 and 56).

The only good news from Naomi is that the IPCC becomes [more] discredited and is disbanded. She replaces it with such alphabet soups as the UNCCEP’s ICCEP which launches IAICEP, which she says is pronounced “ay-yi-yi-sep” (p27).The mission of ay-yi-yi-sep is to sprinkle enough fairy dust aka sulphates in the air to make an anti-sun umbrella and save the planet by 2079.

In September 2014 she was interviewed on the ABC’s Science Show by Dr (honoris causa) Robyn Williams, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, about the pet-deaths. One reader, she explained,

…started crying when the pets die, so I didn’t mean to upset people too much … I was just trying to come up with something that I thought people wouldn’t forget about, and I thought, ‘Well, Americans spend billions of dollars every year taking care of their pets’, and I thought if people’s dogs started dying, maybe then they would sit up and take notice.

 Interviewer Dr Williams[2] was delighted with Oreskes’ pet-panic strategy. He chimed in,

Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things…And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, then it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it.

Oreskes: Well, exactly. It was about bringing it literally home, literally into your home, your family, your pet, the dog or cat that you love who is your faithful and trusted companion.

As I type this, I look down fondly at Natasha, our doomed spaniel, although she is neither faithful nor trustworthy.

Oreskes began her Science Show appearance by reading from her book in sepulchrul tones:

Then, in the northern hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heatwaves scorched the planet [and] led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never seen before.

Naomi’s actually playing down her future horrors, she omits to tell him about the arrival of the Black Death:

Dislocation contributed to the Second Black Death, as a new strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis emerged in Europe and spread to Asia and North America. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed as much as half the population of some parts of Europe; this second Black Death had similar effects. (p30).

Australians will wonder: does Medicare charge extra premiums to cover bubonic plague?

Williams, instead of asking Oreskes what she’s smoking, merely observed that all of the above is “fairly shocking”. He further wondered why it is only Western civilization that collapses, leaving the Chinese in charge. One reason, says Oreskes, is that Chinese civilisation is more durable, and two, that authoritarian regimes are better able to deal with hypothesised climate apocalypses.

Looking back from the future, Oreskes viewed China in the early 2000s as a beacon of carbon enlightenment. China, she said,

…took steps to control its population and convert its economy to non – carbon – based energy sources. These efforts were little noticed and less emulated in the West, in part because Westerners viewed Chinese population control efforts as immoral, and in part because the country’s exceptionally fast economic expansion led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, masking the impact of renewable energy. By 2050 , this impact became clear as China’s emissions began to fall rapidly. Had other nations followed China’s lead, the [grim future] history recounted here might have been very different. (p6).[3]

Another interviewer — a friendly one, actually — played the devil’s advocate:

Interviewer: Just how much do you hate the American way of life? What gives you the intellectual chutzpah to make these kinds of projections?

Oreskes: Our story is a call to protect the American way of life before it’s too late.

I identify with Oreskes, who grew up in New York, because as a lass she was a geologist working on Western Mining Corp’s Olympic project in central Australia. I phoned WMC’s retired boss Hugh Morgan but he couldn’t give me any piquant anecdotes about young Naomi.

Her sojourn Down Under must have been unhappy because she’s forecast that the climate emergency will kill off every Australian man woman and child (all 26 million of us). “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.” (p33). As a resident of Australia’s pagan state of Victoria, I don’t believe in the afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. (Witticism courtesy Woody Allen).

Oreskes dropped geology to co-write that Merchants of Doubt book, painting “climate deniers” as the evil twins of those denying that smoking causes cancer. The book in 2021 was set to music by composer Yvette Jackson, who sees climate doubt as having the

… low, somber insistence of the bass clarinet, skittering flute that cranks up anxiety, sonorous cello to hold things together, and the deep, doubting rumble of double bass.

Listen to that anxious, sonorous cello and more here (fourth video down).

At 65, Naomi’s job title is Harvard Professor of the History of Science — but don’t call, she’s on leave. She co-wrote her civilisational-collapse book with fellow alarmist Erik Conway. Her other collaborators include Pope Francis: she did the intro for his Laudato si’ encyclical in 2015.

 Wikipedia lists only 30 of her honours, including the Stephen H. Schneider Award in 2016 for communicating “extraordinary scientific contributions” to a broad public in a clear and compelling fashion. Schneider (1945-2010) was a top IPCC climate scientist. He urged colleagues there to strike a balance between scaring the pants off the public and being honest about how weak the CO2 evidence really is. Oreskes also scored the 2019 Mary Rabbit Award from the US Geological Society. Her lifetime of bashing denialists is surely worth a million-dollar Nobel.

 The Collapse book is about Western civilisation’s ruin while China saves the planet with its enlightened anti-CO2 measures. She is writing from the future in 2393 when she will be aged 435. Oreskes (as at 2393) is cross because we have refused to build enough windmills to stop at 11degC warming (p32) and eight-metre sea rises (p30). We should not have eaten so many fillet steaks[4] and, personally, I should not have tooled around in my reasonably priced, petrol-powered Hyundai i30 when Teslas were available at $80,000.

Oreskes was talking about Collapse at a Sydney Writers’ Festival when someone in the audience piped up, “Will you write fiction next?” She doesn’t of course view Collapse as fiction: “Speculative? Of course, but the book is extremely fact-based” (p79). And she elaborated to the ABC’s Dr Williams,“Well, it’s all based on solid science. Everything in this book is based on the scientific projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All we did was to add to the social and human aspects to it and to ask the question; what does this really mean in terms of what its potential impacts would be on people and its potential impacts on our institutions of governance?”

Her “science based” technical projection involved an angry summer in 2023 continuing year-round, “taking 500,000 lives worldwide and costing nearly $ 500 billion in losses due to fires , crop failure , and the deaths of livestock and companion animals” (p8) In 2014, how was Naomi (no-one’s perfect) to know that current agricultural output and yields continue smashing records?

The book’s “fact-based” projections have drought and desert ravaging the US in the 2050s:

The US government declared martial law to prevent food riots and looting [similar to 2020s’ mostly-peaceful burning and robbing]. A few years later, the United States announced plans with Canada for the two nations to begin negotiations … to develop an orderly plan for resource-sharing and northward population relocation (p26). 

The talks led to the combined United States of North America. I imagine Texans started adding “eh” to their sentences, as in Why do Canadians say “eh?”? It’s so silly right? Because we want to, eh.

Even at the age of 435 in 2393, Oreskes remains really sore about the Climategate email scandal of 2009 (IPCC climate scientists conspiring to fudge data). She blames Climategate on a “massive campaign” that was “funded primarily by fossil fuel corporations” (p8) — this alleged largesse must have by-passed sceptic bloggers, who still rely on their tip jars. Oreskes remains vigilant to smite deniers:

It will also be crucial not to allow new forms of denial to take hold. We are already seeing examples, such as the false claim that off-shore wind kills whales and that restrictions on gas stoves are the latest excuse by liberals to control our lives and deny our freedom. Scientists will have to work with climate activists to block the spread of such misleading narratives.

She finished her interview with the ABC’s Dr Williams by claiming, improbably, that some readers of  Collapse wished her 80-page book to be longer. She explained,

We didn’t want it to be too depressing, we didn’t want to go on and on and on, like 300 pages of misery, that really wouldn’t be any fun. So we are sort of hoping that the book, despite the fact that it’s a depressing topic, it’s actually we think kind of a fun read.

Apart from our dead kittens, that is.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971. Link broken.

[2] The ABC Ombudsman told me it’s fine for people with honorary doctorates to be called “Dr” in any context.

“The ABC style guide does not form part of the editorial standards and we consider there is nothing materially inaccurate in referring to Ms O’Donoghue as Dr O’Donoghue.” Email from James, Investigations Officer, ABC Ombudsman’s Office, Feb 14, 2024. (The late Ms Donoghue’s Doctorates are honorary).

[3] On the ABC iview’s posting of the Oreskes/Williams interview, the ABC claimed the planet was warming at the top of the IPCC models’ forecasting. I wrote to my friend Kirsten McLiesh, who runs Audience & Consumer Affairs (i.e. the complaints department) pointing out that actual warming was at the bottom of the IPCC models’ range. In those days (2014) the ABC had some integrity and Kirsten wrote back,

“Having been alerted to your complaint, the program acknowledges that the sentence read on the website as an incontrovertible fact and have undertaken to remove it. An Editor’s Note has been added to the page.”

[4] Oreskes, Twitter May 4, 2023: “I’m often asked “What can I do to stop climate change.” That’s a hard question because so much of the change we need is structural, but this new study proves one thing: EAT LESS BEEF. (And now, drum roll, here come the beef industry trolls.)”

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• terenc5Brazen liars, both her and Williams.Log in to Reply
• STJOHNOFGRAFTONOnce upon a time this type of pathological doom and gloomer would have had their digs courtesy the governer’s pleasure at Callan Park. Now, said person is integrated into a straight-jacketed society where she is free to inflict us with her madness. Ironically, Callan Park is now a conservation area and has friends not inmates.Log in to Reply
• DaffyFaced with a bill for a pet’s ultrasound of over $1000, I’m all for pet deaths. I was tempted to ask the vet how much to end the gold-digger’s life, but wife was too near.Log in to Reply
  • DaffyAnd, on smoking, it seems OK to take it up…as death for almost all looms. In fact, as elderliness tangles itself about my knees, I must check with the Cancer Council. Surely they know the age at which taking up cigar smoking will have no statistical effect on life expectancy.Log in to Reply
    • norsaintGood luck to you Daffy if you can afford the occasional lardy-da (apologies to Arfur Daly) these days.
      The ludicrous harpy and our former Attorney General, Nicola Roxon, has put that harmless pleasure beyond the means of most, with her outrageous, never-ending duty increases. The last time I checked, a run of the mill cigar cost $80.
      The egregious feminists don’t like anything which men might find enjoyable.
      It reminds me of the old gag of why woman make love with their eyes closed. (punch line available upon request)Log in to Reply
      • norsaintThat of course should read why “women” make love with their eyes closed.Log in to Reply
• Twyford HallHow amazing that questioning anthropogenic global warming has been set to (alleged) music by a composer. I would bet my superannuation that the composer’s remuneration is taxpayer funded.Log in to Reply
• petroalbionSellers of dog meat in Korea were told by the government to give up the trade. They said OK, we will release all 2 million of the dogs we currently own tomorrow. Government lostLog in to Reply
• David IsaacThanks for digging out another failed prediction of climate doom. Paul Ehrlich’s prognosis for Britain may just’ve been delayed by a few decades but on demographic grounds. Given the repression of its native people and the demise of its native population in its largest cities including London and Birmingham it’s arguable whether England has long ceased to exist. Nominally American, Dr Oreske is a New York Jewess, whose father was also an academic, her mother a school teacher and mother of four. The odds of her politics being left radical based on this information alone are very high. Her brother Michael is a disgraced journalist and executive for leftist outfits, NYT, AP and latterly NPR, who was pinged for sexually harassing junior colleagues in 2017. It comes as no surprise that she views ‘science’ as just another vehicle for radical activism rather than as a sacred quest for truth.Log in to Reply
• norsaintAnd another thing. One could hardly say the “”Prof”” is easy on the eye.Log in to Reply

At the ABC, it’s Always Time for Hare of the Doc

ABC insiders speaking on condition of anonymity say that ABC TV has lined up a 30-minute interview with pop-singer Dr Taylor Swift. The favourites of ABC chair Dr Ita Buttrose are fighting to do the gig. Namely Dr Sarah Ferguson squaring off against Dr Leigh Sales, both having bested Dr Geraldine Doogue. ABC has-beens Dr Ray Martin and Dr Kerry O’Brien are already knocked out of contention. Incoming chair Dr Kim Williams will have final say. Over at Channel 10, Dr Lisa Wilkinson is reportedly still chasing an exclusive with Dr Swift, or failing that, with rapper Dr Kanye West.

The babelicious Dr Swift has a Doctor of Fine Arts(h.c.) from New York University. The above-mentioned talent’s doctorates are also “h.c.” It stands for honoris causa, i.e. honorary. Few at the ABC speak Latin, so you never know who next they’re going to call “Dr”.

I intended this piece to be about my old mate, net-zero spruiker Bill Hare who in his distant youth got a B.Sc.(Hons) degree from Murdoch University. Now he heads up a lavishly funded anti-gas and oil lobby called Climate Analytics.[1] He’s been the go-to climate catastrophist for every ABC reporter since forever. And every time they describe him as “Dr” Bill Hare. This makes him look more quote-worthy than “Mr Bill Hare, B.Sc. (Hons) – Murdoch 1983”.[2] His lawfare against Woodside’s Scarborough gas project also acquires a more sciencey lustre.

The woke Murdoch University in 2008 gave him an Honorary Doctor of Science, saying that “his climate change activism and political acumen have seen him described as ‘the best climate lobbyist in the world’.” (Link broken). Then it told him he could strut his Honorary Ph.D. all over the place, contrary to long-established Murdoch, pan-academic and government protocols. (Don’t let someone with an Honorary Doctorate in Veterinary Science spay your Golden Retriever).

Each time the ABC quotes “Dr Hare”, I whine to its complaints team. They’re over a barrel because the ABC Style Guide says, “Honorary doctorates do not usually confer the Dr title.” In other words ABC policy is against dubbing people “Dr” merely because some university somewhere has robed them in a black bonnet and stripey gown for running a lost dogs’ home or a loser state like Victoria (e.g. Dr Steve Bracks, Dr Ted Baillieu, and Dr Jeff Kennett, with Dan Andrews now panting for his statesmanlike turn). The ABC complaints team always agrees I’m right and alerts the 4,971 staff (as at June 2023) about the style breach. The 4,971 staff pay not the slightest attention and in as little as 24 hours, resume calling him “Dr Hare”. And so the cycle continues, as I document later as your special treat.

In my complaint last week, I saved time by also complaining about 7pm ABCTV flagship news on February 4 describing the late Lowitja O’Donoghue eight times verbally and twice in signage as “Dr O’Donoghue”. I respect her life’s work for remote-Aboriginal progress as much as anyone (except it doesn’t progress), but all her six doctorates are honorary and the ABC chose not to mention that. With Aborigines the ABC is utterly inconsistent. The very same 7pm News item quoted Pat Dodson praising Lowitja, but didn’t call him “Dr Dodson” notwithstanding his honorary doctorates from Melbourne Uni (Laws) and UNSW (Letters).

Yet whenever the ABC mentions Voice co-architect Tom Calma, who has a couple of associate diplomasin social work, it’s always “Dr Calma” this and “Dr Calma” that. Another whom the ABC loved entitling “Dr” was Galarrwuy Yunupingu, famed for his $1400-an-hour helicopter on standby full-time at his waterfront mansion to assist conjugal visits to four wives dispersed around the Gove Peninsular. Yunupingu got his honorary doctorate in laws from Melbourne University in 2015.[3] Check this Stan Grant ABC piece about Dr Yunupingu as “The great champion of the Gumatj people”.

And why does the ABC discriminate against doctorate holders (honorary) like ex-footballer Adam Goodes? If it’s Dr Calma and Dr O’Donoghue, why not Dr Goodes? The same appalling ABC discrimination was applied against their own former grievance specialist Stan Grant, whom they never called “Dr” Grant, and health advocate Dr Pat Anderson and flag designer Dr Harold Thomas.

I try to economise on my complaints to the ABC, but through initial carelessness I overlooked another wrong in that Feb 4 ABC TV item. That led me to add a further complaintlast week, about the ABC positioning Lowitja O’Donoghue at age two as having been officially stolen from her mother’s traditional native camp. She wasn’t, regardless of whether the Aboriginal Industry and the ABC would like her to be. The ABC is associated with at least three leftist gangs purporting to enforce truth and suppress mis- and disinformation from the (conservative) media. The gangs are

♦ Trusted News Initiative: ABC joined this BBC-led global consortium working with Big-Tech to suppress any narrative that conflicts with deep-State messaging on climate-doom, covid vaccines, and Hunter Biden getting a $US5m payoff from a Chinese intelligence-affiliated investment consortium.

♦ Newsguard: Another global censoring operationalso aimed at throttling the flow of advertising to on-line sites that disrupt leftist narratives. Of course it gives the ABC literally a perfect score for trustworthy bias-free reports.

♦ ABC-RMIT Fact Check: Journo Russ Skelton’s fiefdom, buttressed by $670,000 ABC money, where the overwhelming majority of checks are against the Murdoch and similar right-of-centre outlets, while endless porkies from the “progressive” side go through to the keeper. Skelton’s sister entity RMIT FactLab came a gutser over its “Yes” bias on the Referendum.[4]

Will any of these three hold ABCTV flagship news to account over its misinformation about Lowitja’s “stolen” status? And will ABC Complaints Department validate my rightful concern?

I suspect the ABC will insist without evidence that Lowitja was officially stolen, notwithstanding that Lowitja herself told Andrew Bolt she wasn’t stolen but given up by her father.

The 7PM News item began with a clip of Lowitja saying, “We were stolen but we need to move on.” (The “we” might mean herself and siblings or maybe some wider cohort). Presenter Iskhander Razak script-read, “Born in remote South Australia to an Aboriginal mother and a pastoralist father, Dr O’Donoghue and two elder sisters were taken from their parents [plural] when she was just two. She was trained as a domestic worker.” She then says in a clip, “I feel angry about the policy that removed us and also took away our culture, our language and families.”

Commentator Andrew Bolt has quoted acquaintances and a relative that her white father in fact dumped her and three siblings at Colebrook mission, where two sisters gave her the education that enabled her sterling career.  Bolt interviewed her in 2001:

(My father) didn’t want to be straddled with five kids,” the former Australian of the Year said, sobbing. “I haven’t forgiven him… “I don’t like the word ‘stolen’ and it’s perhaps true that I’ve used the word loosely at times… I would see myself as a removed child, and not necessarily stolen.” Asked whether it would be better to state clearly that she wasn’t a member of the stolen generation, Dr O’Donoghue said: “I am prepared to make that concession.

While she later accused Bolt of mischievously distorting the situation, I can’t find her claiming that he quoted her words inaccurately. An authoritative transcript of her own words in 1994, when she was 62, is here

Were your older sisters also the children of Tom O’Donoghue?

… the indications are that my father had a long standing relationship with my mother and there were five children by that relationship.

And yet he did nothing to prevent you being taken away?

No, but … because it’s difficult for me to really confirm what the situation was but my understanding was that he had a … a wife and family in Adelaide, so I guess one could understand that he really was living a double life and wouldn’t want … wouldn’t have wanted for his family in the city to know that he had five half-caste children.[5]

Is it possible also that he thought it was for the best?

Well, yes, it could have well have been. It could have been a combination of both really, because obviously he wasn’t going to be staying around for that longand then, of course, the other mystery is, of course, whether in fact half-caste children were all that welcome in the … in, you know, as … within the traditions.

Hence 7pm News is wrong or misleading in saying she was “taken” (i.e. unwillingly taken or stolen) from her parents [plural]. Correct would be along the lines of, “She was given up with two sisters by their father to missionaries, probably against the wishes of her mother.”

Getting back now to my original whinge about honorary doctorates, I don’t know of any Australian instances yet of universities giving one to a fake Aborigine. It’s bound to happen as various controversial figures in academia enjoy a high profile and esteem – see Roger Karge’s brilliant website. In Canada Justice Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond notched up 11 Canadian honorary doctorates as the “first person of treaty Indian status to be named to the bench in Saskatchewan.” A tenured professor on $C300,000, she was eventually outed as a “Pretendian” or pretend-Indian, with forebears tracked as entirely European. Her supposed upbringing in a Manitoba home for First Nation kids amid poverty, alcoholism and abuse was actually in Niagara Falls, Ontario. All 11 universities said they were reviewing the doctorates but one had no internal process for revoking one.

As readers’ promised treat re Mr Hare, here’s my ABC updated campaign diary:

April Fool’s Day, 2019: Four Corners transcript refers 13 times to Bill Hare as “Dr” Hare.

April 7, 2019: I complain to the ABC and request corrections. I say the ABC would not refer to comedian Mr Yahoo Serious as “Dr Serious” even though he has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Newcastle University, 1996.

April 11, 2019: Four Corners executive producer Sally Neighbour responds,

I am advised that Bill Hare has an Honorary Doctorate of Science awarded to him in 2008 by Murdoch University for his work on climate change science and policy. Murdoch University itself refers to Bill Hare as ‘Dr’ in some of its publications. 

It is not uncommon practice to refer to people with Honorary Doctorates as ‘Dr’. I understand this is often qualified with the reference (h.c). For the purpose of our program, we did not feel this was necessary as most viewers or readers would not be familiar with the term. I am happy to take your comments onboard should we interview Bill Hare again on Four Corners. I will also convey your comments to Laura Tingle.

May 7, 2019: Michael Slezak on ABC News Analysisinterviews “Dr” Bill Hare.

October 24, 2021: David Speers on Insiders interviews “Dr” Bill Hare.

Nov 5, 2021: RN Breakfast with presenter Sally Sara: “Dr” Bill Hare again

Nov 11, 2021:ABC 7.30: A fawning Leigh Sales achieves six references to “Dr” Hare on one 7.30 episode.

Nov 14, 2021: I complain again to the ABC about “Dr” Hare:

A couple of years ago I complained about your use of “Dr” Hare, and Sally Neighbour informed me the ABC would be more careful about it. Please correct all ABC versions where you call him “Dr” Hare — or at least explain that he has only an honorary doctorate for his lobbying activity.

After 18 days, on Dec 2, 2021, Matt Galvin of ABC News Management replies:

I have referred your concerns to ABC Language, a unit that meet (sic) regularly and advise (sic) ABC staff on correct language usage. They have pointed me to the ABC’s publicly-available style guide…Honorary doctorates do not usually confer the Dr title. 

Considering the above, ABC News agrees that as Bill Hare is the CEO of Climate Analytics, it would have been sufficient in both of these recent instances to introduce him without the ‘Dr’ honorific. Please be assured that both programs will be advised about the correct usage of such references. Thank you for bringing this matter to the ABC’s attention.

So Four Corners and Laura Tingle stuffed up about “Dr” Hare in 2019, the ABC organised a corrective, Leigh Sales et al stuffed it up again and the ABC again conceded fault and applied its corrective to ensure it would be repeated no more. All well and good, the system seemed to be working, albeit with some sand in the gears. But the very day after I received the apology from ABC News Management’s Matt Galvin (Dec 2), the ABC published a new report by reporter Rebecca Turner (Dec 3) touting “Dr” Hare all over again. (corrected version linked). Ms Turner confusingly called him “Bill Hare”, “Mr Bill Hare” and “Dr Hare” all within six paragraphs.

Dr [sic] Hare, who received support from the CCWA [Conservation Council of WA] for the [Woodside] study, said WA did not need Scarborough gas to keep the lights on …”So really on the time scale of a decade or so, we could be 100 per cent renewable in the electricity space by the early 2030s, as are other places.” [Like where, exactly?].

So I file yet another complaint to the ABC on December 7:

Despite being twice advised that the ABC would cease calling Mr Bill Hare of Climate Analytics “Dr” Hare, ABC News has reverted to “Dr Hare” just one day after Matt Galvin (ABC News Management) assured me it wouldn’t happen. Can you please correct that Dec 3 report and take steps to ensure that ABC people cease referring to “Dr” Bill Hare. Thanks. 

Dec 8, 2021: Matt Galvin responds promptly and politely, “Thanks for pointing this out Tony – the correction has been made.”

Instead of a correction, the ABC merely did a ‘stealth edit’.

May 17, 2022: For ABCTV 7pm News, it’s “Dr” Hare all over again.

May 17, 2022: I complain again to my friend, Ms McLiesh, at ABC Audience & Consumer Affairs. Either no response or I’ve mislaid it.

February 6, 2024: “Dr” Hare was back on the ABC on January 22 (link to corrected version), courtesy Darwin reporter Roxanne Fitzgerald. I complain again at about 11am.

Can you please again advise ABC staff that however much they might want to big-up “Dr” Hare in order to big up their narrative of CAGW (catastrophic manmade global warming) he is just a BSc Hons holder and should be referred to as “Mr”. Nor has he sufficient physical science papers to warrant the ABC calling him a “climate scientist”. The appropriate descriptor would be “Climate lobbyist” or “Anti-CO2 emissions lobbyist”.

I then resumed my household chores (sweeping, dusting, tidying), not expecting a reply for a fortnight or more. Imagine my surprise — within two hours Complaints had flicked my beef to ABC Darwin office which emailed me back admitting error and by stealth edits, demoting “Dr” Hare to “Mr” or just plain Bill.

From Emily Sakzewski, Deputy News Editor, NT:

I am emailing in response to your complaint over this ABC News story to let you know the story has been updated to reflect Bill Hare’s correct honorific as Mr, rather than Dr. 

I googled Emily. Without wanting to give the kiss of death to her career, I rate her published work to be well-researched and free of noticeable leftist bias. The ABC’s Darwin office seems not to be woke b/s merchants and is capable of professional journalism, good customer service and sturdy common sense. I wish Emily well and view her as a future candidate for managing director, if David Anderson (on $1.15 million p.a) retires any time during this century.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Climate Analytics was born from the dark-green Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) , which has led the way into Germany’s current energy crisis. PIK has its anti-gas and anti-coal tentacles all over Australia. Climate Analytics’ funders include the UN and EC, the Rockefellers, Greenpeace, Lock the Gate Alliance, the Togo government (indirectly), the Ivory Coast government, Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, ACF, the World Bank, the German and UK governments, Murdoch University (or course), and the Green Climate Fund,

[2] Bill Hare was a Greenpeace International spokesman as “Climate Policy Director” 1992-2002, its “Chief Climate Negotiator” in 2007, and a Greenpeace “legend”. Notwithstanding, he was also a 2007 IPCC lead author and an expert reviewer on two out of three sections of that report, and one of 40 people on the “core writing team” for the big-picture Synthesis Report. He was a lead author for the 2014 report.

[3] MIT and University of Virginia don’t give out honorary degrees. William Barton Rogers, the founder of MIT, said the concept of honorary degrees was “literary almsgiving… of spurious merit and noisy popularity.” 

[4] “[Conservative commentator Peta] Credlin’s claim that the Uluru Statement is a 26-page document and not a one-page document was found to be false information by RMIT FactLab. The finding led to Credlin’s editorial being removed from the platform, infuriating News Corp Australia which threatened legal action against FactLab for allegedly providing “misleading” information under Australian Consumer Law.”

[5] Lowitja further speculated that the missionaries in general there might have won the trust of mothers through supplying stores and “a few goodies”, but she said mothers would still be unwilling to give up children.

The Oliphant in the Room

Tony Thomas

It was a chilly Canberra morning on October 5 last year – the day topped at 12degC. On that morning the Australian Academy of Science re-opened its headquarters at Ian Potter House, after fixing damage from a hailstorm on January 5, 2020. Pedestrians passing by might have noticed wisps of blue smoke rising from the forecourt.

The Academy President, Chennupati Jagadish and chief executive Anna-Maria Arabia welcomed Aunty Violet Sheridan for a smoking ceremony (above) they’d commissioned. The Academy aimed to “cleanse the energy” of those present. What the scientists meant by “cleanse the energy” I’m not sure, it sounds like a soap ad. I thought smoking ceremonies were to drive out bad spirits – that’s what it says here and here and not least, with the authority of the CSIRO[1]:

Smoking Ceremony: The ceremony aims to cleanse the space (of evil spirits) in which the ceremony takes place and to cleanse the participants, who are asked to take in the smoke that comes from the earth to protect them on that Country… People are encouraged to walk through the smoke to cleanse their spirits. 

Aunty Violet set fire to a swatch of eucalyptus leaves held by grandson Noah Allan. She was rugged up in a puffer jacket and wool bonnet, along with an Aboriginal-themed scarf. Noah was in a brown windcheater emblazoned in large yellow letters with the word, “Bloke”. I’m not sure what point he was making (maybe a comment on the 2021 Academy report, page 61, where 12 of 62 Academy staff declined to say if they were man or woman.)[2] He’s studying at ANU after boarding on a scholarship at prestigious Saint Ignatius’ College Riverview, where Tony Abbott and PM Barnaby Joyce went to school. He likes hanging out with Violet: “She’s always coming over and telling me to come watch her do Welcomes and help her out.”

There’s no paucity of Welcomes in Canberra. For example, Aunty Violet did the Welcome on the re-opening of the hail-damaged Shine Dome a few months earlier. At Academy functions, every speaker feels obliged to Acknowledge the Traditional Owners, which irritates when you get five in a morning. Academy President Jagadish even does Acknowledgements in language (Ngunnawal), a popular pastime in ACT high society but of uncertain validity[3]:

Dhawura nguna, dhawura Ngunnawal. Yanggu ngalawiri, dhunimanyin Ngunnawalwari dhawurawari. Nginggada Dindi dhawura Ngunnawalbun yindjumaralidjinyin. 

The Academy’s rationale, involving peak woke, goes like this:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have experienced a long history of exclusion from Australian history books, theAustralian flag [boomerangs wanted?], the Australian anthem[“Australians all”] and, for many years, Australian democracy. This history of dispossession and colonisation lies at the heartof the disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous Australians today [Jacinta Price denies this]. Including recognition … in events, meetings and national symbols is one part of ending the exclusion… By actively giving an acknowledgment you are acknowledging that the land always will be that of the Traditional Custodians. [My emphases].

The Academy pretends that the Welcomes, a bit of theatrics invented by Ernie Dingo and Dr Richard Whalley in Perth in 1976, have been part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures “for thousands of years”. In a pastiche of Polyanna, Disney and La La Land, the Academy goes on

When permission was granted the hosting group would welcome the visitors, offering them safe passage and protection of their spiritual being during the journey. While visitors were provided with a safe passage, they also had to respect the protocols and rules of the land owner group while on their Country. 

The Academy has swallowed this hook, line and sinker from Karen Mundine’s Reconciliation Australia.[4] Any check of the real anthropology turns up rituals such as presenting a group of women for sex usage, penis holdings[5], sweat exchanges and, commonly across Australia, ritual thigh spearings to avenge sorceries by the outsiders. Bess Price of Alice Springs, mother of successful “No” campaigner Jacinta, has bluntly called welcomes and smoking ceremonies “bullshit”.

Talking of “No”, the Academy, like all the professional elites, vainly urged “Yes” for the Voice, sovereignty, treaty and truth-telling. In May 2022 it voted in Tom Calma as an Academy  Fellow, the co-author with Marcia Langton of the Voice final strategy document. It’s hard to imagine the Academy as other than activists on this issue: CEO Anna-Maria Arabia was appointed in 2016 after three years part-time as policy director/principal adviser for then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.  Science policy director Chris Anderson,  appointed in 2019, had been adviser and then chief of staff for six years to Labor Senator, Rudd-Gillard minister and factional warrior Kim Carr.

I’ve been sceptical of the “smoking ceremonies” since I visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC two decades ago and found myself reading about smoking ceremonies of the Navaho or Cherokee (I forget the details). I think the Australian leaves-in-a bucket deal is a pinch from that Museum Mile along the Mall that connects Capitol Hill at one end with the Lincoln memorial at the other. I’ve checked the Wikipedia Australia pageand did find a reference there to an authenticated smoking ceremony – but not for the energy-cleansing purposes imagined by the Academy.

Wikipedia cites a 1906 account to the Royal Society of South Australia by Northern Territory anthropologist, explorer, medico and geologist Herbert Basedow. (The Royal Society UK was parent to our Academy). Basedow’s description of the little-modified culture of the northern coastal tribes is horrific to modern sensibilities, and begins

Personal Mutilations: Female infants are subjected to mutilation by removal of two joints of the right forefinger. In the western tribes the finger is cut off with a stone knife. Elsewhere it is amputated at a later age by binding tightly around the joint a ligature made of cobwebs of a spider that lives in the mangroves. In certain cases the joints are removed by biting, and among the Wogait tribe the amputated segment is buried in an anthill. A singular case came under notice in the Ginmu tribe, where a young girl had her finger imperfectly removed, and upon the mutilated stump a horny growth resembling a diminutive finger nail had appeared…

The ”smoking ceremony” is in Basedow’s section titled “From Girlhood to Womanhood”. It’s a prelude to a pubescent girl’s enforced “marriage” to a mature or elderly man.

The girls of the Larrekiya and Wogait tribes are given away to men at a very early age, although marriage is not fully consummated until after the “smoking ceremony” of the girl – a ceremony which is not attended by the men, although they may witness the proceedings at a distance. The girl, having been decorated, is seized from behind by the old gin who has cared for her and who places her hands upon the novice’s shoulders… The chant suddenly ceases and a new one breaks out, whereupon the old gin delivers three smart blows upon the back of the girl. This procedure is continued for the greater part of a night…. 

The third part of the performance is the smoking of the young gin. Upon a harmless but excessively smoky fire the old gin seats herself with the girl on her lap, both being completely obscured by the dense volumes of smoke. The smoking completed, the novice is led into the bush by the old women, and returns with them to the camp on the same day… A subsequent secret corrobboree of initiation, about which very little is known, takes place several years later.”

Since modern smoking ceremonies could have violent misogynistic origins, I think the Academy should eschew them. Meanwhile, I’m wondering if, in the Academy’s enthusiasm for “truth-telling” as per the Uluru manifesto, it might do some truth-telling of its own over the racist views of its founder and inaugural president (1954-56), Sir Mark Oliphant? The Academy is big on bagging colonial oppressors of Aborigines, so why whitewash Oliphant, as it does here and here? Of course, I’m not advocating smashing of any Oliphant busts or statuary, as per Oxford radicals’ “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, or Hobart’s planned removal of its olden-day Premier William Crowther. I’ll leave that civic work to the ABC’s Julia Baird — toppling statues thrills her heart.

Here’s some nitty-gritty about the Academy’s founder – but trigger warning and no safe space for Shine Dome denizens. The story is complex and it’s necessary to give a preamble.[6]

After Oliphant (left) retired from the Academy, SA Premier Don Dunstan in 1971 appointed him State Governor. They soon fell out over Oliphant’s strong and outspoken views, such on Dunstan’s relaxing of sex censorship. Oliphant had requested samples of pornography from the simpatico Police Commissioner Harold Salisbury[7] including images of male and female homosexuality. Oliphant asked Dunstan to his office to see and resile from such alleged depravity, but Dunstan after inspection said he merely found pornography boring and abruptly walked out of Government House.

 Oliphant worsened relations by complaining to the Queen about Dunstan and pornography. The breach widened when Oliphant backed Governor-General Kerr for sacking Whitlam in 1975. He even threatened Dunstan that he’d go public in support of Kerr. Dunstan in turn warned Oliphant that he’d get the Queen to sack him.

Oliphant’s pro-Dismissal stance so angered Dunstan that he resolved to appoint as Oliphant’s successor someone who wouldn’t similarly rock the boat – that is, “to neutralise and downgrade the office” and appoint someone “so politically and constitutionally unsophisticated” that he would never challenge the Premier, as Oliphant’s biographers Stewart Cockburn and David Ellyard put it (p317). Dunstan passed over candidates like Justice Roma Mitchell, Don Bradman and litterateur Geoffrey Dutton in favour of Aboriginal pastor and VFL (now AFL) footballer Sir Doug Nicholls. Nicholls (right) could barely read and write – he would struggle to read the Governor’s speech to open Parliament. Oliphant, learning of Dunstan’s scheme, sent Dunstan a 1000-word note of outrage. After claiming his non-racist credentials, Oliphant wrote (p347-9),

PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL:The first problem likely to be faced by an Aborigine as Governor would be the natural assumption by all other Aborigines that what is his is theirs. The House may well be filled to overflowing by his relatives and tribesmen to whom by custom and duty, he cannot say no. The results could be chaos, inability to find or keep domestic staff, and even loss of valuables because of the “sharing” habits of his people. The Queen is due to spend about a week here in March 1977. If, as in 1963, she lives on the Royal yacht, there may be no problems. If she stays at Government House there could be many…There will be those who construe the proposed appointment as fresh evidence that you wish to downgrade the role and significant of the Governor, even further than you did when I was appointed…

Oliphant cited Lois [also Lowitja] O’Donoghue[8]on her difficulties as an Aboriginal maintaining dual ties to family and the Aboriginal Affairs Department. where she worked. He also cited experiences of white adoptive parents who found their Aboriginal adoptees at puberty reverting to tribal culture. “There is something inherent in the personality of the Aborigine which makes it difficult for him [sic] to adapt fully to the ways of the white man,” Oliphant wrote.

He suggested Nicholls’ education at Cummerajunga mission or camp was insufficient and dubbed Nicholl’s Church of Christ as a fundamentalist religion incompatible with most South Australians’ ethos.

If he should not succeed, his failure could become a setback for Aboriginal advancement … Mr [Charles] Perkins was not successful as a public servant [9]… To appoint a member of a relatively small minority as Governor would win the applause of some, but it could damage your Government and the Labor Party in the eyes of many who have supported you … The reaction of many who support Labor would be one of dismay if you appear to make radical changes in the representation of the Monarchy in South Australia. 

The people of South Australia are almost all decent and kindly. There would be few who would demonstrate against an Aborigine as Governor, and public comment by the media would be muted. Resentment would be expressed in other ways, and would be directed against the Government.

Dunstan gave Oliphant a stiff reply marked “SECRET AND PERSONAL”, including

I appreciate your concern about the problems of tribal Aborigines. However, Sir Douglas Nicholls comes from a group of Aborigines long detribalised. From my experience of his social work amongst Aborigines he is well aware of the need for firmness in any situation where he is living in a largely European community, and some Aborigines might try to take advantage of his position in the community on the basis of tribal notions which are inapplicable in the circumstances. I am sure he would have no difficulty with his relatives, and I am sure he could deal with Aborigines who were still retaining tribal associations of their own, although they of course would not have any with him.

While Sir Douglas is a Pastor of the Churches of Christ, I don’t think that he would find difficulty in facing the policies of this Government. I know that there is still racial feeling in the community, but I think it is necessary constantly to war against it, and I feel the acceptance by the Queen of Sir Douglas Nicholls as her representative would help us in that respect.”

Oliphant was personally courteous to Sir Douglas and Lady Nicholls, even having them stay with him privately at Government House pre-appointment to help them learn the ropes.

The Canberra Times, like Oliphant, expressed concern that members of Nicholls’ family might set up camp on the grounds of Government House. In the event, Sir Douglas had a stroke a month after appointment. Thereafter he held only one official function – hosting Queen Elizabeth at Government House – before stepping down after 150 days in office on grounds of ill-health.

The Academy wants its Fellows and staff to celebrate NAIDOC Week, National Sorry Day, National Reconciliation Week, “Survival Day” (once known as Australia Day, January 26), Close the Gap Day, and at least one UN Indigenous day. I’m surprised they ever get any work done. However, they could well add one more: “White Oliphant Sorry-Business Day”.

If I seem a tad jaundiced about the Academy, it’s because it has led the push here for net zero (by 2035 not 2050 for heaven’s sake), windmills, hideous transmission lines, pricey electric cars and censorship of any climate opposition. Victorian consumers’ electricity prices are set to rise by up to 31 per cent this fiscal year, after double-digit rises last year, and that’s in a state sitting on vast and cheap resources of brown coal.

If the Academy would just stick to Aborigine-worship and smoking ceremonies, we’d all be lots better off.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] CSIRO deleted this page but it is resurfaced via Wayback Machine.

[2] By 2022 the number had fallen to two.

[3] “Not all (or possibly any) of the Aboriginal languages used in welcome to country cere-monies, however, can be said to reflect unchanged similarities with languages spoken before whites came to Australia. Some can only claim weak links to Aboriginal languages recorded soon after colonisation. As an extreme case, like many Aboriginal groups who have sustained the prolonged and devastating effects of colonisation, Darug descendants have lost virtually all knowledge of Darug language as it was spoken by pre-contact Darug ancestors …   Some Darug descendants always conduct part of the welcome to country in their own version of what they call Darug language. As a language, however, it is not understood either by the audience or the speakers themselves.

Rather than a language proper, this is a recently invented verbal ritual affirming Darug identity. It has been developed without the help or support of white linguists or anthropologists (and in some instances in spite of derision from these sources)… and is hence more of a dramatic ritual performance than a language.” — ethnographer Kristina Everett, “Welcome to Country –Not.” Oceania, Mar., 2009, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Mar., 2009), pp. 53-64. My emphasis.

[4] The Academy took out a “Reflect” Reconciliation Action Plan 2019-2022 with Karen Mundine, and is now working up an application for a more stringent Elevate Plan to “challenge and inspire us to be part of real change in Australia”. Most Australians, judging by the Referendum, might not want such an Academy-led “real change”.

[5] Berndt, Professor Ronald, and Berndt, Catherine, 1999, p176. The World of the first Australians : Aboriginal Traditional Life Past and Present. Aboriginal Studies Centre.

[6] Stewart Cockburn and David Ellyard, Oliphant, Axiom Books Adelaide 1981 p 314-19.

[7] Dunstan sacked Salisbury in 1978 over allegedly misleading the government about what was in Special Branch files. The files included material about Oliphant himself. Oliphant, as ex-Governor, blasted Dunstan and defended Salisbury in a polemic to the Adelaide Advertiser, contrary to all Vice-Regal protocols. He wrote, “I believe all South Australians who are not criminals will share my pride in what he [Salisbury] has achieved and my indignation over his dismissal.” P321-32. This letter “exploded like a political nuclear bomb in the Dunstan camp” and was a factor in Dunstan’s “ill-health” resignation 14 months later.

[8] Ms O’Donoghue, a Yankunytjatjara woman, became the first Aborigine to qualify as nurse and sister at Royal Adelaide Hospital. She fought for Aboriginal legal rights and was appointed Regional Director of the SA Aboriginal Affairs Department, the first woman to hold such a position federally. In 1990 she became inaugural chair of ATSIC and in 1992 the first Aboriginal to address the UN General Assembly. Although co-patron of the Stolen Generations Alliance, in 2001 she admitted to Andrew Bolt that she wasn’t actually “stolen” after all, but was given away by her father: 

“(My father) didn’t want to be straddled with five kids,” the former Australian of the Year said, sobbing. “I haven’t forgiven him … “I don’t like the word ‘stolen’ and it’s perhaps true that I’ve used the word loosely at times… I would see myself as a removed child, and not necessarily stolen.” Asked whether it would be better to state clearly that she wasn’t a member of the stolen generation, Dr O’Donoghue said: “I am prepared to make that concession.”

[9] Perkins claimed to be of the “Stolen Generations” but this was false. In 2000 he referred to Prime Minister Howard as a “racist” and a “dog” and urged British tourists not to come to the Sydney Olympics, warning that buildings and cars would be burnt by protesters. “It’s burn, baby, burn from now on. Anything can happen,” he said.

How Science is Done These Days

There’s nothing new about mainstream climate scientists conspiring to bury papers that throw doubt on catastrophic global warming. The Climategate leaks showed co-compiler of the HadCRUT global temperature series Dr Phil Jones emailing Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, July 8, 2004:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! 

Thanks to a science whistle-blower, there’s now documentation of a current exercise as bad as that captured in the Jones-Mann correspondence. This new and horrid saga – again involving Dr Mann – sets out to deplatform and destroy a peer-endorsed published paper by four Italian scientists. Their paper in European Physical Journal Plus is titled A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming and documents that extreme weather and related disasters are not generally increasing, contrary to the catastrophists feeding misinformation to the Guardian/ABC axis and other compliant media.

The witch-hunt has Australian elements. Last September, The Australian’s environment writer, Graham Lloyd, highlighted the paper (paywalled) and its conclusion that the “extreme events emergency” was overblown. Sky News Australia, which twice reported the study, picked up more than 400,000 views and thousands of comments.

The green-left Guardian countered with a hit-pieceby in-house cataastrophist Graham Readfearn featuring professors Lisa Alexander and Steve Sherwood, both of NSW University. They alleged cherry-picking and misquoting. Their main specific complaint was that the Italians’ paper had drawn on the 2013 5^th IPCC Report rather than the recent 6^thReport. (The Italians say they submitted the paper before the 6^th Report emerged).

The Guardian’s fuss caught the attention of Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Marlowe Hood, who modestly styles himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet”and “Herald of the Anthropocene”. He penned his own diatribe for The Australian (paywalled but also here) against the Italians’ paper. Jumping the gun on any editorial inquiry, AFP branded the study “faulty” and “fundamentally flawed”, involving “discredited assertions” and “grossly manipulated data”. This abuse was normal since AFP and The Guardian are leaders of the Covering Climate Now (CCN) coalition of some 500 media outlets with reach to a 2 billion audience. These outlets signed the CCN pledge to hype catastrophism and rebut and censor any scepticism about our planet’s forecast fiery fate.

The whistle-blowers’ documents reveal how this media pile-on – as distinct from reasoned scientific complaint — led the journal’s owner, Springer, to demand “action”. Springer’s aim was to force the editor to publish at least an erratum and, preferably, retract it altogether, restoring climate right-think.

The publishers have now decided on the retraction and the axe will fall any day now. But the process was ratbaggery in place of the normal rigorous and honourable protocols. Meanwhile, unabashed Italian authors Alimonti and Mariani successfully published last week an updated version of their paper, also peer reviewed and in a different scientific journal.

Chapter and verse on the controversy is available at The Honest Broker blog of Dr Roger J. Pielke Jr., a world-leading expert in monetary loss trends from extreme events.

Noted climatologist Dr Judith Curry tweeted,

Reprehensible behavior by journal editors in retracting a widely read climate paper (80,000 downloads) over politically inconvenient conclusions. Journal editors asked me to adjudicate, and my findings were in favor of the author. 

The controversy turns on how the IPCC 6^th Report is interpreted, as it seems to place two bob each-way on trends in extremes. In all fairness, you can read a detailed argument here by an advocate for the paper’s retraction. But even Andy Revkin, a leading US journalist of warmist persuasion, has explained,

Despite headlines and spin, it’s still tough to disentangle global warming and natural variability in long-term heat wave patterns in the United States. That might seem surprising but was a clear conclusion of both the last U.S. National Climate Assessment and IPCC reports.

I’ll now background the Italian defendants in this politicised fracas. They enjoy prestigious reputations, but that doesn’t mean, of course, that they’re right.

♦ Professor Gianluca Alimonti, Milan University, and senior researcher, Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics. Many of his papers involve work on the 7000-tonne ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He lists 300+ publications and presentations.

♦ Renato Angelo Ricci, Padova University, Padua. He’s worked with Legnaro National Laboratories, one of the four major research centers of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics(INFN).^[1]He’s of such prestige that INFN dedicated to him its tenth annual Varenna Conference on nuclear reaction mechanisms.[1] The corrupted Wikipedia Italydismisses him as a climate sceptic.

♦ Luigi Mariani, Milan University, also of INFN. He’s with the Lombard Museum of Agricultural History and has published 137 papers.

♦ Franco Prodi, National Academy of Science, Verona and Italian National Research Council – Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. 193 publications, 2300 citations: “Main fields of interest are physics of clouds and precipitation, hail and precipitation growth, aerosol physics, atmospheric radiation, severe storm studies and radar-meteorological investigations, satellite meteorology and nowcasting [very short term weather forecasting].”

The Guardian noted that three of the four Italians had signed a “no emergency” sceptic declaration last year, as if that disqualified them from proper research. The Guardian didn’t mention that the same declaration, with its 1600 signatories, was led by two Nobel Laureates in Physics, John Clauser (2022) and Ivar Giaever (1973).[2]

The comments of Michael “Hockeystick” Mann, of Pennsylvania University, about Alimonti and Ricci are illuminating. He described their journal article as

another example of scientists from totally unrelated fields coming in and naively applying inappropriate methods to data they don’t understand. Either the consensus of the world’s climate experts that climate change is causing a very clear increase in many types of weather extremes is wrong, or a couple of nuclear physics dudes in Italy are wrong.

Mann himself is a connoisseur of wrong (and self-evidently in need of remedial courtesy classes). His notorious 1999 Hockeystick paper purportedly proved unprecedented 20th century global heat. His 1000-year graph was used as a corporate logo by the IPCC in its 2001 Third Report[3], which subsequently downplayed it to near-invisibility in its Fourth Report six years later.

Mann had committed the scientific no-go of furtively patching measured global temperatures from 1961 to his proxy-reconstructed temperature graph derived from tree ring sampling.[4] This was done, in the Climategate words of Dr Phil Jones (Nov 16, 1999) to “hide the decline” of the 20th century proxy trend, which threatened to render Mann’s entire temperature reconstruction spurious.[5]

Australia’s top catastrophist is Macquarie University’s Distinguished Professor of Biology Lesley Hughes, whose specialty is entomology e.g.   ant-tended butterfly ejaculations, though more recently she’s been publishing on Lethal consequences: climate change impacts on the Great Barrier Reef. (It’s had record coral cover for the past two years). Her Climate Council colleague and dud prophet Tim Flannery is a mammologist.

The Italians’ desk review spends 20 pages arguing from 82 relevant papers. Their English is well expressed though the syntax is slightly unusual. It’s their conclusions (below) that have generated such recursive fury[6] among the anointed climate crowd:

From the Second World War, our societies have progressed enormously, reaching levels of well-being (health, nutrition, healthiness of the places of life and work, etc.) that previous generations had not even remotely imagined. Today, we are called to continue on the path of progress respecting the constraints of economic, social and environmental sustainability with the severity dictated by the fact that the planet is about to reach 10 billion inhabitants in 2050, increasingly urbanized. 

Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilization. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects. 

Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context, even more negative following the COVID emergency. This does not mean we should do nothing about climate change: we should work to minimize our impact on the planet and to minimize air and water pollution. Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events. 

Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy, agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions. How the climate of the twenty- first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us. 

We need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, and that climate change is not the only problem that the world is facing. The objective should be to improve human well-being in the twenty-first century, while protecting the environment as much as we can and it would be a nonsense not to do so: it would be like not taking care of the house where we were born and raised. 

While a tad sentimental, it’s not over the top compared with say, the IPCC’s UN head Antonio Guterres announcing last month that we’re now suffering “global boiling”. And the late Professor Will Steffen, who steered Australian federal climate policy for two decades, alerted the Royal Society that climate change might well end the Homo Sapiens species.[7]

The Guardian’s attack piece quoted Professor Lisa Alexander, a UNSW rainfall-extreme specialist, saying that, contrary to the paper’s “selective and biased” claims, “there is definitely an increase in precipitation extremes” and it’s “attributed to human activity”. The paper had “totally misrepresented” her own papers’ findings, she said. She wanted the paper rejected or heavily revised.

So far so trenchant, but when you look up one of her two co-authored papers cited by the Italians, you discover that it messed up its Figures 2,3,4,5,7,8 and 9 – which is all but three of its ten Figures.[8] The journal had to run a corresponding erratum and update. An unkind critic might mention pots calling kettles black. Incidentally, Alexander’s UNSW team, led by Andy Pitman (famed for his inadvertent candour that “warming doesn’t cause droughts”) attracted a giant ARC taxpayer grant of $32,134,273, no less. Her other paper, with no corrections, was supported by an ARC grant of only $356,402.

In both papers, Professor Alexander commendably stresses the massive data uncertainties in her field of rainfall extremes, caused by unreliable rain recording, missing data across swathes of entire continents, and too-short records. As she warned,

Despite our best efforts, there are still parts of the world where data are sparse or the temporal coverage is inadequate for a data set designed for long-term monitoring … Efforts are underway to augment current global collections of data to improve the data available for all users.

As for allegedly misrepresenting her work, I don’t see it. In the Italian paper’s first reference, it accepts her conclusion about rain generally increasing.[9] In the second reference, the Italians show concern – as she does — about data quality for extreme downpours. (The Italians mention inter alia that bugs often climb into the gauges and their corpses upset the mechanism).

AFP’s Marlowe in his hit piece quotes Richard Betts (UK Met Office) bagging the Italians. In a masterpiece of bitchy innuendo the AFP snarked, “Betts stopped short of calling for withdrawal, drawing a distinction between cherry-picking data and outright fraud.”

Other critics quoted were Friedericke Otto, of UK’s Grantham Institute, along with Stefan Rahmstorf from the dark-green Postdam Institute. Otto complained the Italians were writing “in bad faith” — whatever that means. Rahmstorf’s gripe was that the research was published in a physics journal rather than a climate one (the latter, of course, 97 per cent captured by the catastrophe crowd as peer reviewers). “I do not know this journal, but if it is a self-respecting one it should withdraw the article,” Rahmstorf said. Otto agreed, demanding that it be withdrawn “loudly and publicly”, presumably to scapegoat the authors. An Exeter University professor said he wouldn’t go that far, fearing bad publicity about censorship – a good point.

Now for the whistleblower’s documentation:

September 29, 2022. Christian Caron of Springer Nature and the editorial manager of the Italian Physical Society, Barbara Ancarani (why her?) contacts Alimonti et al. to let them know that, based on the two media stories, an investigation had been opened of their paper. She cc’d the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Beatrice Fraboni:

We are sure you and your co-authors are already aware of the public dispute this has generated. Included in these reports are numerous concerns of scientists who are considered highly expert in this subject. As a result of these circumstances it is now necessary that the journal carry out an investigation to assess the validity of these concerns, in line with good practice when concerns of this type are brought to a journal. An editorial note on the homepage of the above mentioned article will be added stating:

‘Readers are alerted that the conclusions reported in this manuscript are currently under dispute. The journal is investigating the issue.’

September 30, 2022. Fraboni, co-chief-editor, contacts the associate editor responsible for handling the review process of Alimonti et al., Jozef Ongena.

“. . . we are facing some issues with a paper in your area. The publishers have asked the Editors to take action.”

Ongena immediately responds:

The article has undergone the usual peer review. There should be no blame and shame… Peer reviewing is the common practice. That there is a discussion seems not abnormal and seems a very healthy thing…I would invite the colleagues that have objections to send in their objections and to pass them on to the authors. To start a discussion in the press as they already did is certainly worse than publishing a critical paper. They could later also be invited to publish a comment. We should as a journal not refrain or be afraid from a scientific discussion, but it should be in a correct way.

October 4, 2022. Author Alimonti:

Dear Dr. Caron, after confronting [sic] with the other authors, we believe a possible correct way to criticize a scientific paper would be to write a detailed summary about what is supposed to be not correct and complete it with references; in other words a paper with precise counter arguments or at least a detailed report…

…the authors of the criticized paper may give detailed answers and the journal may decide further steps. Have Springer or [the journal] been somehow formally contacted with a detailed counter analysis? If so, please forward us any comment so that we can properly answer; if not, we believe that considering “under discussion” a scientific paper that underwent a peer review process just on the basis of interviews appeared on online newspapers or blogs, even if authoritative, is not what a scientific method requires…

…Prof. Prodi, a distinguished climatologist, not just “a nuclear physics dude”, reminds me that he also served as Editor of Springer for many years: criticizing him as author would be a critic[ism] to Springer in selecting reviewers and editors. The Publisher should defend its scientific integrity in a resolute way, in order not to lose prestige itself, by moving at the request of newspapers or by denying its role.”

Co-chief-editor Fabroni initially appears to have accepted this proposal.

October 9, 2022: After having received various feedbacks we have decided to contact the colleagues who expressed concern on the paper to provide a scientific comment that we will then send out to independent reviewers. If and when the Comment will be approved by them, we will share it with the authors so that they will be able to address the issues raised. Also their reply will be peer-reviewed.

None of the eight critics (including UNSW’s Alexander and Sherwood) come good with considered rebuttals. However, the investigation proceeds.

November 17, 2022. Alimonti emails Fabroni to ask for an update on the investigation. Fabroni responds

The reply has been drafted with the assistance of the Springer Research Integrity Department, after carefully taking into consideration the feedbacks received from the colleagues who criticised the paper in the media. Thank you very much for your patience – we have analyzed the case now in-depth. While we acknowledge that the media coverage has certainly made the case temporarily bigger than necessary, it has also uncovered a clear weakness of your paper that we believe must eventually be addressed.

The “clear weakness” is the failure to reference the IPCC Sixth Report, which the authors say was not published when they submitted their article. The Italians were given an ultimatum to prepare an “erratum”.

1/ You will submit an Erratum taking the final, published version of AR6 into account, where the above criticism is explicitly addressed and any conclusion that needs to be revised will be detailed. This Erratum paper, where we expect ample references to the published AR6, will be thoroughly assessed by also involving scientists from the cited parts of AR6. The Erratum has to be submitted before Dec 31st, 2022.

2/ If you decide not to submit such an Erratum or the Erratum is not submitted by the above deadline, the journal will publish an Editorial where we summarize our findings, very much as outlined above and the present Editorial Note on your article will be changed to a permanent Editorial Expression of Concern that will refer to this Editorial.

November 23, 2022. Alimonti writes, quoting Springer guidelines, that it should be an “Addendum” not an “Erratum”. They lodge it and it goes out to four reviewers, with a fifth as “adjudicator”. The reviewers are 3:1 in favour of publishing the Italians’ addendum, but for some reason the Adjudicator is forwarded only one favourable review (which says the piece is quite consistent with IPCC 6^th) and one review damning it. That review includes, strangely,

Especially considering that typical readers of EPJP [Physics] journal are not climate experts, I think editors should seriously consider the implications of the possible publication of this addendum. (emphasis added).

So much for science integrity. The third reviewer wrote:

The original article is a straightforward recitation of credible, key data about several types of extreme weather events. I find nothing selective, biased, or misleading in what they present. While there’s hardly anything written that isn’t well-known to experts, it’s useful for non-experts to see the underlying data, which are most often obscure in the IPCC reports. . .

The addendum is an on-point discussion of the extent to which the original paper agrees with the IPCC on three types of extremes. The document is up to professional standards -specific, detailed, and with citations.

Reviewer 4 wrote:

The most important contribution of the authors is to look further back into the climate record (including early 20th century), when many types of extreme events were comparable to today. The paper doesn’t specifically focus on the attribution (cause) of any trend (or lack thereof).

I don’t see any grounds for criticizing this work. Further, most of their conclusions are supported by the IPCC AR6 WG1.

 The Adjudicator exceeds his/her terms of reference by bagging the original paper, as distinct from the draft addendum, calling for its retraction and, therefore, the binning of any proposed addendum.

July 13, 2023. Editor Fabroni advises handling-editor Ongena that the paper will be retracted in full, citing the Adjudicator’s view.

After an in-depth consultation with the publishers we came to the conclusion that a retraction is inevitable, a decision fully backed by the publishers.

In my opinion, no reputable science journal, let alone top publisher Springer Nature, should be concerned for one second about big-shots moaning in the media about a non-conformist climate paper. But follow the money: Springer’s revenue is solidly from the left-captured academic sector.

As top UN official Melissa Fleming put it last September about climate, “We own the science, and we think that the world should know it.” Her unspoken sub-text, relevant to the censorship of Professor Alimonti, “Rock the boat and you’ll regret it.”

I’ll borrow Mark Steyn’s book title and say this is all “a disgrace to the profession”.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 on-line from Connor Court here

[1] “Prof. Ricci was alumnus of one of the most prestigious University Institutions in Italy, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and after graduation completed his studies under Louis De Broglie and Frederic Joliot-Curie. He introduced in Italy the experimental study of nuclear spectroscopy… He was one of the leaders of the experiments made at CERN with the antiproton beams and started there the relativistic heavy ion physics. Not less important has been his activity as Administrator of Science, as President of Italian and European Physical Societies, as Director of Legnaro National Laboratories, as Vice-President of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chairman of many other important Institutions and Committees.”

[2] There were 166 Australian signatories, mainly professionals rather than academics, and including myself.

[3] The “hockey stick” conveniently erased the awkward Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age from the record, which could then show 1000 years of stability followed by a 20thC uptick from CO2 emissions.

[4] See Steyn, Mark. “A Disgrace to the Profession” Stockade Books. Kindle Edition. From P37.

[5] UEA’s Phil Jones: “I’ve just completed Mike’s [Michael Mann’s] Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Keith Briffa’s] to hide the decline.”

[6] “Recursive” just means “repeated”. The term “recursive fury” became a meme from the title of a bizarre climate paper by psychologist Dr Stephen Lewandowsy which his editors had to retract .

[7] “The ultimate drivers of the Anthropocene if they continue unabated through this century, may well threaten the viability of contemporary civilization and perhaps even the future existence of Homo sapiens.” Will Steffen, et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (2011): p862.

[8] “Erratum: In the originally published version of this article the uncertainty range in panel c of Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 was incorrect. In all cases the uncertainties were shown for the full dataset rather than the subset from which the time series have been calculated… the equivalent panels have been updated in the supplementary information. There is no change to the conclusions drawn in the paper.”

[9] Alimonti: “Global observational datasets indicate an increase in total annual precipitation which appears at first sight consistent with the increase in global temperatures and the consequent increase in precipitable water stored in the atmospheric reservoir…the diagram in Fig. 4 shows that global rainfall is increasing since about 1970.”

The Dirty Old Man of Climate Science

• 20th July 2023
•  Comments (8)

Tony Thomas

Charles Dickens in Bleak House excoriated the English legal system for its expensive delays. His novel tracks the generations-long inheritance dispute of Jarndyce & Jarndyce. It ends only when the entire estate is consumed by the lawyers’ fees. Somewhat like Dickens, I’ve been following an obscure sexual harassment case in New Delhi for the past ten years, a case which finalised a fortnight ago. It’s one less thing on my mind, although a decade is just a sliver compared with Jarndyce & Jarndyce.

This New Delhi saga was so protracted that the harasser died three years ago, but his family kept the appeal going.  His victim was a junior researcher in her late 20s when her boss, in his mid-70s, started grabbing and importuning her, finally sabotaging her job over her refusals. She fought on in courts for vindication of honour and to ensure that her harasser, alive or dead, should be held accountable.

Before I name him, I’ll segue to some history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This IPCC, a UN subsidiary, is very influential. Its ramblings about global warming in 2100 inspired Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to embark on what the CBA estimates to be a $3 trillion net-zero-emissions dash by 2050. Counting the zeroes (with difficulty), it amounts to $120,000 per head or nearly a half million per household. Mr Albanese’s program (which was backed by purported conservative PM Morrison) is necessarily to

♦ Demolish our once-cheap and reliable coal and gas-fired electricity grid

♦ Cover the landscape, so beloved by Australian outback movies, with windmills and solar arrays along with at least 10,000km of high-voltage power lines.[1]

♦ Force every Australian out of petrol and diesel cars and trucks and into electric models

♦ End all discretionary air travel including overseas holidays and tourism (except by private jet) and

♦ Wreck the Australian meat, livestock and cereal industries in favour of emissions-friendly vege dishes drizzled with grilled grasshoppers.

One might assume this IPCC must be a body of impeccable standing and total respect for scientific findings, including UAH satellites recording no global warming for the past nine years. For 13 sparkling years, from 2002 to 2015, the IPCC was championed by its chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. He was of such repute and all-round climatoidal magnificence that 20 universities showered him with honours — including the University of NSW, which bestowed in 2008 its Honorary Doctorate in Science. The IPCC has been at work for 35 years so Dr Pachauri’s 13-year term equates to 37 per cent  of its existence.

Other Australian universities competed to fawn on him, overlooking that his earned doctorate was from a combined Industrial Engineering/Economics course (North Carolina State University, currently ranked 72^nd in the USA) rather than any high-falutin’ climate expertise. Deakin University in Victoria, wowed by what it called “one of the world’s leading experts on climate change” and its “great coup” in securing his patronage, even bestowed on him a Nobel Prize. As one Deakin luminary put it:

Dr Pachauri’s gentle and unnassuming (sic) demeanour is testament to his life’s work: it seems only appropriate that one must assume such a persona when acting as something of a figurehead for sustainable futures.[2]

The IPCC chair’s other honours included “The Green Crusader Award” (Mumbai); Aztec Eagle (Mexico); White Rose of Finland; and Order of the Rising Sun – Gold and Silver Star (Japan).

NOW it’s time for the big reveal: who was that grabber and tormenter of young women condemned by Indian courts this month? You guessed it, the late Dr Pachauri.

The climate crowd asserts that Pachauri’s priapic ways had nothing to do with his IPCC work. But they overlook Pachauri’s chairing of the 37^th IPCC plenary in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013, for example. It was attended by 229 politicians from 92 countries, including a team from Australia, who imagined Dr Pachauri was serious about the planetary peril of global warming.[3] But instead of fretting about greenhouse gas control,[4] the IPCC’s chairman was firing off come-hither notes under his desk to the outraged young woman assistant from his think-tank TERI. One message read, “Here I am sitting and chairing an IPCC meeting and surreptitiously sending you messages. I hope that tells you of my feelings for you.” Turning a blind eye, his PR flacks issued this doozy of a release saying Dr Pachauri

opened the session on Monday morning noting the need to view climate change in the larger context, including its impacts on future generations and the planet, and emphasizing the IPCC’s role in mobilizing the world’s best scientific talent and bringing climate change to the public’s attention. He stressed that the IPCC’s work is more relevant, robust and reliable than ever to policy makers.(My emphases above and throughout).

The conference, despite the boss’s libidinous distraction, went on to ratify two greenhouse gas inventory protocols, and start “initial discussions on mapping the future of the IPCC”. 

Dr Pachauri combined 13 years of chairing the IPCC with writing fiction, described as somewhere between smutty romance (Times of India) and soft porn, as in his signature work Return To Almora. His alter ego was called Sanjay, a world-leading climate scientist. The sex scenes led to mockery by bloggers. When Sanjay found that “the excitement got the better of him” before he could join a queue copulating with the village tart, bloggers suggested he needed to “hide the decline”. Pachauri rejected the soft-porn label, and I’d agree that half a dozen sex scenes, such as a bride being forcibly buggered by her husband on their wedding night, are incidental to the eco-friendly but soporific plot of 402 pages.[5] It’s the narcissism that got me down: “He decided to champion public causes and to expose and fight injustice and deceit”. Author and protagonist are way too close: The barely fictional Sanjay even checks in to a “smart suite” at Pachauri’s own address at India Habitat Centre, tries to hose down the “personality cult” from his fame as a seer of temperatures, and agonises about the melting Himalayan glaciers.

That Himalayas meme was a nonsense in the 2007 IPCC report.[6] Far from apologising, Pachauri had used the fake Himalaya news to corruptly solicit millions in climate aid for his TERI think tank. In 2008 he appointed Syed Hasnain, who was most responsible for the Himalaya howlers, to TERI as a “Professor and Distinguished Fellow”. In 2009 Pachauri creamed $US3.9 million from the EU in glacier-research money for TERI. He almost got $US500,000 from the Carnegie Foundation for glacier-melt studies, but the Foundation smelt a rat and withheld the promised money.[7]

The fake Himalaya scare earned the IPCC a scathing audit report by the InterAcademy Council (top-tier national science academies). In vain it urged Pachauri to hand his central post on the world climate stage to someone else. Pachauri stuck around for a further five years, until February 2015, when he was clobbered by the sex scandal.[8]

When the scandal became public, I emailed the UNSW media team in mid-2015: “Is the UNSW taking any steps now to review or revoke Dr Pachauri’s honorary doctorate?” The university’s Denise Knight emailed back, reasonably enough: “As the matter is before the courts it is inappropriate for us to reach conclusions or take action at this stage.” I prophesised at the time, “It is good that UNSW is tracking the Delhi court case and will at least contemplate the first-ever revocation of an honorary UNSW doctorate in the event that Pachauri is formally convicted as a sleazebag.” This week, in light of the Delhi ruling, I therefore emailed again: “Is UNSW happy for the late Dr Pachauri to remain a DSc (honorary) of UNSW, despite his conviction for despicable treatment of a female employee, or will UNSW examine whether to revoke that honour?”

After all, I thought, UNSW’s ethical guidelinesinclude

Staff and affiliates are required to:

♦ treat students, staff and affiliates with respect

♦ ensure they do not engage in unlawful discrimination, harassment and sexual harassment

♦ not allow personal relationships to affect professional relationships

♦ ensure they do not engage in workplace bullying.

Dr Pachauri Hon D.Sc (UNSW) practised the opposite. UNSW has replied to my query, saying,

UNSW Sydney is reviewing the honorary doctorate conferred on the late Dr Rajendra Pachauri. 

What an excellent response! After this over-long preamble it’s time to deal with the Indian court’s dismissal of the Pachauri family appeal.  

“Maya” (not her real name[9]), then 29 while the married Pachauri was 74, had the courage to initially report Pachauri to the three-person complaints committee of his TERI think-tank. The trio interviewed 30 witnesses for the woman, and 19 for Pachauri. Another four women employees came out of the closet saying he harassed them over a span of many years. One wrote,

When he saw my resignation letter, he threatened: ‘From the airport to the University you are headed to, I have friends at every step. Let’s see if you manage to leave the country.’

 The complaints committee on May 19, 2015, recommended — without result — disciplinary action against its own director-general, plus compensation for Maya for medical expenses over stress. [10] Pachauri then appealed to the Industrial Court, claiming her accusations were “frivolous and malicious.” He died on February 20, 2020, having kept the case stalled for five years. Four Pachauri relatives then continued the appeal saga but the court’s Ajay Goel, presiding, ruled for Maya last July 3.[11] She deposed[12]

I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behavior and actions. I get frequent panic attacks due to the constant harassment and being made to feel like an object of vulgar desire from this man, who is old enough to be my grandfather.

Till [February 2015] I was extremely scared of reporting the behaviour of Dr. Pachauri, as he is the head of the organization for which I work and I did not know who I could turn to for help. I have tried to ignore and brush aside a lot of offensive behaviour from Dr. Pachauri as I was very scared of losing my reputation and employment if I complained to anyone. I request you to register my complaint against Dr. Pachauri and bring him to justice.

Maya then went to police because, after filing the internal complaint, she was given no protection, being expected to continue reporting to Pachauri on a daily basis. Pachauri told the coppers that the young woman was merely working off grudges over a poor performance assessment.[13] He further claimed he was being targeted by vested interests (What? The fossil- fuel lobby was drafting his love porn)?

He also claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy by cyber hackers out to destroy his reputation as the world’s climate chief. Some subordinate, he insisted, had his password and spent 14 months composing and sending love-lorn messages to Maya – without Pachauri ever noticing. As one Indian paper put it, maybe he would next blame space aliens.

In detail, Maya said that barely a week after joining TERI, he was pestering her with the first of hundreds of late-night texts and day-time grabbings. “Please you are not to grab me and or kiss me,” she begged.

Pachauri: Perhaps, you regard a physical relationship as a matter of expediency and convenience. Well I don’t, and certainly not with your body which I worship, as you should have found out by not. Even when I ‘grabbed your body’ I had my left hand over your right breast. Did I make even the slightest attempt to hold it in my hand or fondle you there?”

 Maya, October 1, 9.38pm: I never said you were so repulsive. I came all the way just to keep my word and do [what] I best do – talk genuinely. As a woman and a 21st century woman I deserve the right to say that you kindly should not try [to] hold me close or kiss me.

Pachauri, October 1, 10:12 pm: And just to prove to you how much I love you, I shall go on a fast after the cricket match tomorrow. I will break the fast only when you believe I love you with sincerity and unfathomable depth.

Pachauri, 10:28 pm: All right! I’ve got the message. I wish you would see the difference between something tender and loving and something crass and vulgar. You obviously don’t! So I shall slink away and withdraw! Farewell my sweet. But I insist on the fast just to hear you say that you believe I really love you.

Pachauri, November 14, 2013: Its 4.30 am now, and I should get a couple of hours of sleep. Around you for now, but not for long and still deeply in love. 

Pachauri, February 25, 2014: I think the next time we are alone together, I would cut myself and write in my own blood a pledge that I would provide sincerity and exclusivity to an extent that even you would not be able to anticipate and believe. I really do not know how else to convince you than to write such a pledge in my own blood. I find every gesture, every smile, every touch of yours as a boon from heaven.

Her last straw was Pachauri’s demand in December 2014 for her sit next to him in business-class international – with obvious intentions. Six months earlier on a plane he had passed her this hand-written note:

I dreamt last night that I did the preliminaries of making love to you, but woke up at the critical moment.

The second time, when she insisted on an economy seat, he messaged:

You should reflect on the massive insult you heaped on me by indicating that I was so toxic that you would prefer not to sit next to me on the plane. If that be the case there is no room for any interaction between us. To me that act of yours represented the ultimate in haughtiness, arrogance and insulting behaviour. If you had any human sensitivity you would have realised what you have done, and possibly apologised. You are welcome to remain a paid guest of TERI. I really would not burden you with any work in future.

The New Delhi cops, which initially hit him with sex crimes worth seven years’ jail, began running dead on the case. One local court even instanced police abandoning an interview “in view of his advanced age” — which hadn’t stopped him running the IPCC.

Pachauri was a liar about his personal life, and even so in sworn court testimony — Delhi High Court Judge K. Ramamoorthy found in a grubby money case in 1996 (long pre-dating the Maya case) that Pachauri and his two TERI co-directors “have suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits.” Within a year of this judicial condemnation, the Asian group in the corrupt UN voted Pachauri into the IPCC as their vice-chair, and in 2002 the dictator-led majority of governments voted him in as IPCC chair.

 But did he continue lying from from his IPCC pulpit? Too right he did! Below, part of the transcript of Pachauri’s testimony to a North Carolina legislative committee:

The IPCC … mobilises the best experts and scientists from all over the world and we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.

Pachauri was 5587 times wrong, because 5587 was the number of non-peer-reviewed or “grey-lit” citations in the IPCC’s 2007 assessment report — an astonishing 30 per cent of all 18,531 citations, as ethical Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise discovered after crowd-sourcing the huge research effort involved. The grey-lit included press releases from Greenpeace and WWF, not to mention a “first version of a draft”. The IPCC team even used grey-lit in preference to unwelcome peer-reviewed findings. Every so-called “climate scientist” involved with the IPCC knew Pachauri was mouthing garbage about his peer-review claim. Not one of those science carpet-baggers called him out: mustn’t sully the cause, guys! Next time you hear Tim Flannery, Anthony Albanese or the increasingly ridiculous Chris Bowen demanding that we “respect the science”, keep those cowardly boffins’ silence in mind.

What a dangerous farce this climate-apocalypse story is. At the risk of an ad hominem, the chap running the IPCC for most of this century, and honoured by our university big-wigs, was a Harvey Weinstein-style brute judicially condemned even years after his expiry. But congrats to UNSW for its review of the brute’s honorary doctorate.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com

[1] Actually wind turbines generate nothing during multi-day wind droughts across the Eastern States, as everyone knows but our politicians and the experts at Tim Flannery’s Climate Council.

[2] Deakin was fully aware of Pachauri’s agenda to use global warming as a tool to shift billions or trillions from the First World to Third World kleptocracies. It quoted him approvingly:

Dr Pachauri has said previously that the West needs to make major structural and policy changes in the way it goes about economic development – wealth needs to be shifted from the developed to the developing nations.

[3] Our top man there was Anthony Swirepik of DIICCSRTE or Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education

Lead authors there from down-under were Daniel Alongi of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and Rob Sturgiss, who is described as “passionate about promoting the role of the IPCC in development of national greenhouse emissions inventory reporting frameworks”.

[4] “The two Methodology Reports under consideration in Batumi are the 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories : Wetlands (Wetlands Supplement) and the 2013 Revised Supplementary Methods and Good Practice Guidance Arising from the Kyoto Protocol (KP Supplement).”

[5] A woman is being driven to a motel by Sanjay after he has fondled her breasts – “which he just could not let go of” – while “inadvertently sounding the car horn at the same time.” But his conquests are impressed: “Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sandy, you are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’

[6] Even without the IPCC errors, the melting Himalayas story is more farce than science. There are long-term data for at most about thirty of the 10,000 Himalayan glaciers; swathes of the region, apart from being uncomfortable, are off-limits for military reasons; and in the whole of the Himalayas, there was by 2010 only one automated temperature-recording station.

[7] Pachauri (wearing his TERI hat, certainly not his Jane Austen bonnet) added: “It is universally acknowledged that glaciers are melting because of climate change.”

[8] The audit found “significant shortcomings in each [i.e. every] major step of IPCC’s assessment process.” And it admitted that “public confidence in climate science has waned”. The Australian Academy of Science made no public mention this IAC audit other than a couple of  anodyne lines in its annual report seven months later, notwithstanding that the Academy’s ex-president Kurt Lambeck one of the two monitors overseeing the audit report.

[9] Maya is not a sceptic concerning climate-change orthodoxy.

[10] The respondents also suggested that Pachauri organised his underlings to make intimidatory visits to the trio’s homes late at night.

[11] The judge found that Pachauri’s sex campaign was “not at all appreciated by complainant, who rightly sought legal shelter … He should have been setting example in the institution but to the contrary, he had rather violated the dignity of the woman by committing sexual harassment which cannot be ignored by the court and cannot be endorsed. So the arguments of appellant are not tenable…Appeal is dismissed being without any merits.”

[12] Owing to some complexity of the India’s Sexual Harassment Act 2013, I can’t quote directly from some sections of Judge Goel’s judgement. Hence I have linked some email passages to external (non-judgement) sources, particularly the splendid work of Donna Laframboise in Canada.

[13] Some links to my original Indian sources are now broken through effluxion of time.

The Sooking Simpletons of Climate Coverage

Tony Thomas

Climate journalists are confessing they need psychological counselling: reporting on the climate’s supposed death-spiral is damaging their mental stability. As one Stanford academic puts it, “This is quite similar to what happens with investigators of international crimes, human trafficking, rape, abuse and people who’ve been tortured. I think very seriously that that needs to be paralleled in environmental sciences and environmental journalism, because it’s incredibly taxing.”

Try seeing life through these reporters’ eyes. Rainy? “That’s an unprecedented climate-fuelled rain bomb”. Not rainy? “The Science tells us that climate-fuelled droughts are the new normal.”

For those who write daily about the climate’s crisis/emergency/breakdown/collapse (I use here The Guardian’s style book), extra grief must arise when their doom-laden predictions do not come to pass. The smart ones now shun short-term forecasts and report earnestly on disasters due in 2050 or 2100.

Climate journalists’ grief includes the hip-pocket variety, where their cash-strapped bosses decide the climate round is the easiest to ditch. Those reporters get re-assigned to mundane reporting or, even worse, pushed from salaried to freelancer status. No wonder Associated Press grabbed a $US8 million payola last year from leftist billionnaires to boost its climate coverage.

Europe’s climate correspondents are suffering too. For a statement from the heart by a typically traumatised environment reporter, you can’t go past veteran US climate scribe and eco-socialist Eric Holthaus, who now also runs a meteorology business. ‘I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night,” he explained in 2018.

I can’t remember how long this has been happening, but it’s been quite a while, and it’s only getting worse. I confess: I need help… I’ve spent most of the past year alternating between soul-crushing despair and headstrong hope…  For now at least, the good days are enough to keep me going … But there are also days when I’m paralyzed. 

Over the past several months, I’ve stopped talking about climate change with my parents, my wife, and my sister in order to avoid heated dialogue about what I think is the most important issue in the world. Instead, I’ve privately sought out personal advice from other scientists and journalists, and often commiserated with strangers. …. I know that I need to preserve my own well-being to continue to fight for the planet.

In 2013 Holthaus made a splash in mainstream media over his pledge, “Vows: Why I’m never flying again – goodbye to all that”, with a pic of himself “boarding my last flight”. As both a pilot and frequent flyer, he notched up 75,000 air-miles in the previous year. He had just dipped into the 2013 IPCC report – which he called “a death warrant written in stark, black-and-white data.” In tears, he phoned his wife from San Francisco Airport, saying, “If anything is to change, it will have to come from individuals taking ownership of the problem themselves … Individual gestures, repeated by millions of people, could make a huge difference.” He also vowed not to have any children, for the same CO2 reason: “no children, happy to go extinct.”

However, his zeal apparently waned and without any media publicity he mentioned seven years later (at 20min30sec) that he was taking one or two round-trip USA-Amsterdam flights a year for family reasons. Meanwhile he’d fathered a boy.

Wolfgang Blau is a veteran woke media executive (Guardian, of course, and Zeit Online) and former president (International) and COO of lifestyle magazine empire Conde Nast. Two years ago he co-founded with Reuters the Oxford Climate Journalism Network to coach climate journalists and provide them with their necessary misinformation.[1]The Network has been funded by about £450,000 a year from the net-zero-promoting European Climate Foundation with its 280 staff   and the Laudes Foundation. Blau wants just about every media articleto stress global warming, including sport, food, travel, fashion, health, culture, gardening, real estate, technology and personal finance, “to mention a few,” he said. “It [climate] changes everything.”  In a long speech, he said,

When it comes to the mental health of climate journalists, though, there is a cultural element to consider: In general, the news industry has quite a lot of institutional knowledge about how to protect the mental health of its war and crisis reporters who are about to or have already witnessed horrible events. Not as much is known, though, about the health effects it can have on journalists to work on climate change full-time or also to feel marginalised or simply not understood in their own newsrooms, regarding the seriousness of the climate situation.

I had the privilege of getting invited into the meetings of various newly-founded self-help networks of climate journalists in different European countries. In all of these meetings, I was surprised by the degree to which these journalists expressed their need for a peer group that would also provide them with the emotional support their own news organisations were not giving them, even if this meant sharing knowledge with your direct competitors.

Some climate reporters stress out when their editors and readers fail to pay attention to their work because of “subtle mental and emotional constructs” such as denial and avoidance. Blau explains, “I have seen journalists pointing fingers at their own readers or viewers after they did not engage with their climate journalism as much as these journalists thought their audience should have … Denial needs to be addressed with empathy, precision and a degree of patience.”

Blau, who is also a climate adviser to the UN, cites favourably Agence France Presse (AFP), which is “beginning to adjust to the climate reality … in their news selection.” AFP, with 1700 reporters globally, has literally signed the pledge of the Covering Climate Now global group to hype climate alarm and suppress news involving “denialism”. He also wants climate reporters to add “solutions” to their stories so readers won’t despair and switch off. He doesn’t spell out any “solution” to China and India ramping up their reliable coal-fired energy.

Blau even worries that his minions have been toosuccessful:

A related sentiment of despair or disenfranchisement of younger people also came through in the ‘European Moments’ study by Professor Timothy Garton Ash. In this representative study, 53 per cent of young Europeans across 27 EU nations and the UK between the ages of 16 and 29 agree or somewhat agree with the idea that authoritarian states are better equipped than democracies to tackle the climate crisis, a finding that should worry any news organisation that defines its role as informing a democratic public sphere.

Blau wants newsrooms’ ethics code expanded to stop cynical colleagues accusing their climate colleagues of being activists, just because they keep bleating about the (mythical) climate “emergency”. He cautions: “Journalists should not speak pejoratively of ‘activism’ because past activists gave us the vote, freedom of speech and press freedom.”

He describes how newsrooms have become hellscapes with climate reporters jostling with their non-climate colleagues for by-lines. One climate journalist told Blau: “I have the full support from my chief editor. I have even been given a budget increase. My problem is now the foreign editor who doesn’t give me access to our foreign bureaus when I need them because my stories — supposedly — are never as urgent as other breaking news stories — and my other and bigger problem are the news desk editors who don’t give my story a prime time slot or never quite promote it on social media at the right time of day because they think it won’t perform well”.

Meanwhile academics frown as they draft points-earning research papers about stressed-out journos, most commonly citing the well-known associations between journalists and alcohol. One such is Dr Britt Wray of Stanford[2] writing “about climate change, the mental health crisis it is predicted to induce and how climate reporters can cope with the difficulties of the beat.” She writes:

One [journalist] was talking about the three young kids that she has, and she’s starting to face up to new thoughts that they’re not going to get to live out a fully expected human lifetime, according to what she’d normally taken for granted. And she just looks at them and feels hopeless… 

[Climate journalists] also ask about how to reframe despair. “Do I have to prepare to be able to deal with that kind of grief in a situation that I can’t at all control?” They are looking for psychological coping tools to not just spiral around having brought kids into the world, but to shift to thoughts of, ‘What can I do to support them to develop the grit that’s needed to endure the future that they’re inheriting?’…Journalists can benefit from being educated on ways to soothe their nervous systems in moments of high emotional drama, stress or teetering on burnout. This is where contemplative/meditative practices can be super helpful.

I mentioned earlier the sinister media influencer Covering Climate Now (CCN). It happens that CCN’s own executives are also losing it mentally from their tireless efforts to warp the West’s climate reporting. Mark Hertsgaard, CCN’s executive director, is quoted,

We risk burning ourselves out if we don’t take care of ourselves and take care of one another… In the spirit of full disclosure, let me begin by confessing that my colleagues at Covering Climate Now and I are as in need of help on this front as anyone.

And we felt like we just had to step up to those [issues] so we pushed onwards until our own exhaustion finally made us look in the mirror and say, ‘Dude, you need help.’

He sympathised with climate reporters “seeing climate problems as overwhelming and urgent, carrying the burden of knowledge that society as a whole is either unable or unwilling to face. It’s really those people who are so passionate and committed to their work that tend to have a higher risk of burnout when the organization is set up to not give resources in time for it.”

His panellist Brian Kahn, managing editor of Eartherat Gizmodo Media explains:

Kahn: There are people dying, suffering, climate change is 100% bad. But sometimes a way to cope with it is to find either that dark humor or just something to help break up the real down-the- dumps darkest thoughts that you have, and find ways to push through and report the stories that really matter.

Hertsgaard: “One of my big frustrations is when there’s a new story that clearly has a climate angle, but climate is not or barely included in the story. How do you work with colleagues who just don’t get it or with editors refuse to do it?… In the midst of all that, how do we deal with the fact that many managers still assume 150% productivity and focus and all of that at all times despite the fact that internally, you’re dealing with climate despair and knowing too much about the climate emergency?”

Kahn: So, I think I’ve been lucky enough to work in newsrooms where … people want to do more climate reporting. So, I’ve been lucky enough to be approached by other editors at our sites, other writers wanting to actually contribute to climate and do more on that front, which is really wonderful to see.

Against recalcitrant editors, Kahn suggests climate reporters operate like “climate ambassadors”, politely urging them to include more hype, rather than “using the stick” against them: “Hey, you didn’t cover this. What the heck?” Hertsgaard suggests going over their head to their superiors – “of course, there’s risks to that as well.”

I haven’t found much about Australian climate journalists’ health and equanimity, but it must be stressful for them to read how, for example, the UAH (University of Alabama, Huntsville) satellite readingsnow show no Australian warming for the past 11 years. The NASA satellites provide complete cover of our continent, unlike the BoM’s thin scatter of land-based readouts.  And the UAH data is transparent, unlike the BoM’s series which is subject to concealments from FOI and mystery upward adjustments. Plus, all the Aussie climate journos’  wailing about the Great Barrier Reef’s demise is now outed as retailers of utter nonsense.

Take the ABC’s national science and environment reporter, Michael Slezak. In his previous job with The Guardian (or course), he won the United Nations’ Association Climate Reporting Award in 2017 for a giant 5300-word piece bewailing the imminent climate-caused loss of the Great Barrier Reef  –“A catastrophe laid bare … smell of death on the reef…”.[3]

Mike’s dilemma is how to hand back the award and return any cash component to the sponsors, since data last August from the Australian Institute of Marine Science shows the Reef has burgeoned to record coral cover. Contrast this with what Slezak wrote seven years ago: “Bleaching caused by climate change has killed almost a quarter of its coral this year and many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest.”

He fretted about “murder on the reef” by carbon emissions and global warming: “little chance of full recovery within the next 10 years” (it’s recovered already); “catastrophic” loss; “extreme ecosystem meltdown”; “utter devastation”; “half the coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef has been lost – and that’s before the mass bleaching this year is taken into account” and “We may have already made its death inevitable.” As in that 1975 movie Jaws, he unmasked the Reef’s supposed guilty parties:

It’s clear that a cabal of climate change deniers, worried tourism operators, and a conservative government have tried to whitewash the environmental disaster unfolding over the Great Barrier Reef.

It’s much the same with Nick O’Malley, national environment and climate editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. I loved the drama of his contribution,

How heat became the ‘silent killer’ stalking Australia … heat already kills far more Australians than all other extreme weather events combined. The death toll is only set to grow.

What? A table in The Lancet estimating Australian deaths from hot weather versus cold weather found cold deaths were 6.5 per cent of mortality vs only 0.5 per cent from heat. That is, cold is 13 times more deadly than heat.[4] Another study put cold at six times deadlier. Data from the UK Office for National Statistics shows that during the past 20 years of warming temperatures, 509,555 fewer people died in the UK as a result of cold temperatures. Bravo, global warming. But who can even imagine the stress such data must cause climate reporter O’Malley?

It’s ironic that the world’s climate journos, advocating for the destruction of the world’s fossil-fuel energy, turn to jelly when they notice some pushback on their social media accounts. Says Wolfgang Blau,

I have spoken with a few climate journalists who told me there were considering leaving climate journalism again as they felt worn down or left alone by their newsroom in defending themselves against climate trolls…For newsroom managers and social media editors, it is important to not view all trolling or outright hate speech against their journalists across all topics as one and the same phenomenon. To discredit climate journalism is a key part of orchestrated climate disinformation campaigns that oftentimes are very well funded. [5]

Sadly, Blau doesn’t clarify how and by whom sceptics’ writings are “orchestrated”, and how we can apply for our cheques from fossil-fuel tycoons.  

I noticed a newsletter reporter, Emily Atkins, who goes in for “climate accountability journalism” writing a shocker[6], “In defence of politicising hurricanes – there’s nothing wrong with tying unfolding tragedies to climate change”. She got well-deserved pushback, causing her promptly to “mute her feed”.    Another climate journalist, Nate Johnson, 44, of Grist, stressed out so much last year about the uselessness of his reporting that he took up a new career as a van-based electrician. “If I was at the right age during World War II, I probably would have enlisted. And now the great challenge of our time isn’t Nazi Germany, it’s climate change … And being an electrician feels like a useful way to enlist…”

In public-esteem polling, journalists typically run third-last. In Australia, the latest  Readers’ Digest pollput us second-last, just ahead of politicians.   Climate journalists? Don’t even ask.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com

[1] Graham Lloyd, writer for Murdoch’s The Australian, is among the tiny number of the mainstream’s fair and rigorous climate correspondents.

[2] Dr Wray is described as the “Lead of the Special Initiative of the Chair on Climate Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Stanford Medicine.” She opines, “Negative environmental change is becoming more widespread, and people are feeling a variety of negative feelings: terror, grief, anxiety, dread, worry, concern, rage, fear — all these things that are actually very reasonable because our life support systems are being attacked and undone.”

[3] “The Guardian’s use of powerful photographs, video, data visualisations and strong interactives made for stunning journalism. Slezak’s reporting on the devastation climate change has wreaked on the Reefhas held the Australian government to account, and led the world in raising the profile of the issue to one that leads news bulletins internationally.”

[4] The large-scale study published in 2015 involved 384 locations in 13 countries. The Australian data was deaths from 1988 to 2009.

[5] Strangely, examples given of “disinformation”include that “renewable energy can’t work” (especially during wind droughts) and “the ice isn’t melting” (Arctic sea ice has stabilised in the past decade and the Antarctic has shown no warming for 70 years and sea ice has modestly expanded).

[6] Atkins wrote, “Democratic candidates who represent Americans affected by these historic weather events have a unique opportunity to adapt to this new reality, and highlight the consequences of climate denial on voters’ lives. Republicans might call them insensitive. But voters deserve lawmakers who would rather protect them from disasters than protect them from the truth.”

he Obliging Presstitutes of Climate ‘Journalism’

• 20th May 2023
•  Comments (2)

Tony Thomas

Luckily, those journalists who’ve specialised in climate and net-zero nuttery have a global Big Brother to train them, “tackle disinformation” and supply daily titbits to print and inspire. More than 15,000 environment/climate reporters from 180 countries are subscribed to the Earth Journalism Network, run by a staff of about 30 (a dozen full-time plus project staff). It also boasts thousands of journos accessing EJN on social media.  

EJN is funded by dozens of foundations – including woke billionaire entities such as the Hewletts and Packards and Rockefeller Brothers, along with official sugar-daddies like the European Commission, UN aid agencies and the US, UK and Swedish governments.

The network was founded in 2004 by the Internews global charity with its charter to strengthen human rights and trust in the media – especially in the Third World. Curiously, Internews originated in San Francisco 1982 to build good relationships between youth, the media and politicians in the US and in the Soviet Union, perhaps overlooking that everyone on the Brezhnev side would be managed by the KGB.

 Internews’ five-year plan is to mobilise journos, techies, lawyers, artists, advocates, and “storytellers” so that “Together, we will build healthy information environments in more than 100 countries across the globe.” (p9). It runs a sister relationship with Internews Network US. Combined, the alliance claims to be “among the two or three largest, if not the largest organisation, working in the media, information and development sub-sector.” (p23).[1]

EJN Executive Director is journo James Fahn, who is also global director of the parent Internews Environmental Programs. He doubles as a journalism post-grad lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. His staff have a significant Australian input, with one assistant, Signi Livingstone-Peters, for example, previously doing PR for Australia’s left/authoritarian Academy of Science. Mr Fahn’s own journalism could benefit from fact-checking. Only last month he co-wrote about Pakistan (my emphasis),

How does a journalist cover events on the ground when a third of a country’s land territory is flooded? They say that journalists write the first draft of history, and there is no bigger story in the 21^st century than the climate crisis … Members of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) have been proving the power of local journalism.

This is stirring stuff, but it’s also undiluted hogwash for Fahn to claim Pakistan was a third under water. See below from the state-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ombudsman after the national broadcaster made the same claim last October:

As a result of your complaint, ABC Online has removed the reference “putting one-third of the country underwater” from the story … As you pointed out, it is suggested that somewhere between 10%-12% of Pakistan was flooded. We are satisfied that this amendment resolves your complaint. — Loren Ferrel, ABC Ombudsman’s Office. 

EJN is jostling with many other bad actors to woo the Third World’s media. As one interviewee cited in EJN material remarked,

This may be an increasingly critical need as other foreign funders with potential ulterior motives such as placing country propaganda in the media [as distinct from climate propaganda], are starting to provide funding to media outlets in low- and middle-income countries. (p71)

A case study in how EJN manipulates the media can be found in its briefings for South African journalists. It briefs them with a supposed fact sheet headed, A Journalist’s Guide to Covering Net Zero in South Africa… Getting better at reporting it.” This pathetic tipsheet can be contrasted with today’s reality in that benighted country. Here’s extracts from EJN:

The South African media landscape has plenty of room to improve coverage on South Africa’s journey to net zero in the context of climate change risks and opportunities. 

Often, journalists fail to unpack the risks of inaction on climate change (like reducing emissions) or the solutions to fix it while focusing on the economic risks of a move away from coal in the short term…

After pages of such clap-trap, EJN provides its client journos with “suggested story themes”. 

♦ What risks will South Africa face if it fails to transition to a low carbon economy by 2050? In contrast, what benefits will the country enjoy from aligning its climate commitments to its developmental agenda? 

♦ How is the climate change bill poised to solidify South Africa’s commitment towards reaching net zero? 

♦ How are big polluters in South Africa using the carbon market to offset their emissions elsewhere – and how effective are these measures in reducing their actual carbon footprint? 

♦ Are domestic finance institutions aligning with the goals of the Paris Agreement and how can South Africa’s sectoral targets and carbon budgets assist in legislating this? 

Here’s what’s actually happening in South Africa today.

South Africa a decade ago became the world’s guinea pig for transitioning to renewables. From independence in 1994, ANC inherited an almost wholly coal-fired electricity system but which soon became uneconomic and dependent on Western aid. Then, in 2013-17,  the World Bank halted funding of coal plants and fossil fuel extraction, forcing South Africa towards renewables. The promise-anything Ramaphosa government told the world in 2020 it was moving to net-zero by 2050. The World Bank last November helpfully loaned $US500 million to help South Africa decommission its coal plants. But with billions spent on 50 wind and solar projects since 2010, the country’s share of renewables has barely shifted, with wind now at 2 per cent, solar at 1.3 per cent, and coal still at 89 per cent. Meanwhile, GDP per capita has sunk 12-15 per cent since 2010.

Last year the lowest-income section of the population suffered grievously from 205 days of rolling, without-notice blackouts in blocks of four hours and without notice. This year’s outages have denied grid power to most homes and businesses for up to ten hours a day, all this while diesel for business’s generators is becoming unaffordable. To May 9, South Africans have spent 27 per cent of the year without power, compared to 9.5 per cent during 2022. The ANC, now at electoral risk, is reconsidering coal investments.

Such is the South African “just and equitable transition” to renewables, “leaving no one behind” as EJN rhapsodises.[2]

EJN money really talks. When EJN offered grants to 20 Third World reporters to attend Egypt’s COP27 Summit last year, it had to turn away 500 applicants. “For each new powerful climate-related story that is produced, many others never actually get reported,” EJN lamented. “Investing in local news may not seem like the most obvious solution to the climate crisis, but it is a key piece of the puzzle. Without independent information, both the dangers of and the solutions to the climate crisis may never be fully understood.”

EJN’s sophisticated influencers train environmental reporters, particularly from the Third World, and provide them with prefabricated stories. This remit includes genuine environmental stories such as illegal logging, fresh water needs and ocean pollution, but the main focus is to spread anti-fossil-fuel messaging. For example, it cites one Pakistani journo client doing a project, “Transforming journalism into activism and policy change”. (p33).

It finances the journos to attend workshops and gives them and their editors money for writing, producing and distributing stories favourable to leftist narratives. Money to editors is tagged “to shore up their environmental coverage.” (p7).

Other cash handouts have bankrolled 500+ Fellowships financing journos to report at UN and NGO conferences. Currently, for example, EJN is offering 25 environment journos in the Mekong region a three-day workshop junket to Chiang Mai, Thailand to schmooz with NGOs and a chance for 16 of them afterwards to pitch a story for a $US1500 EJN grant.

EJN boasts of “training” 15,000 journaliststhus directly generating 15,000-plus stories plus a tail of further stories from its acolytes. Close to 11,000 journos have put up their hand for EJN money, nearly 1000 of them successfully. It doesn’t cite the money total but mentions it’s given out more than $US3 million in “sub-grants” alone. It knows that stories with high-quality graphics are the most persuasive, and has helped set up ten regional platforms to help journos bolster their stories with illustrations.

 An EJN graphic says 1.83 per cent of its 15,000 journos are Australian-registered, which suggests quite a large number in our small pool. An odd detail is that the Australian cohort breaks down into 53 per cent women, 15 per cent men and 32 per cent who “consider themselves of another gender”. Such a high representation of multi-genders among Australian environmental journos, although commendably inclusive, seems so unusual that I checked the ratio in other regions, with the following results: Germany – a whopping 53 per cent claiming “another gender”, with only 8 per cent “men” and 40 per cent “women”; France had 50per cent “another gender”, 40 per cent “women” and 10 per cent “men”. In the US, a much lower 11 per cent were “another gender” compared with 60 per cent “women” and 29 per cent “men”.[3]

Looking at the EJN payment handouts is one thing; but how successful is all this in seducing journalists to idolise renewables? EJN has helpfully posted an impact study on-line, showing that once it bankrolls journalists, close to 80 per cent go on to improve their earnings and careers (e.g. freelance fees/job-promotions). EJN quizzed four media outlets after handing them cash, but only one said it was financially sustainable; the other three merely said they’d become a bit more sustainable. (These Third World groups tend to be precarious).

EJN money definitely helped journos pitch better climate stories to their bosses and score a higher success rate on pitches, along with prizes from like-minded green sponsors for their stories. The journos chorused that EJN money had helped them achieve their goals of persuading readers – in their words, “policy and action related to climate change, biodiversity and the environment”.[4] Some used the money to complete expensive projects like anti-corruption investigations, which led to worthwhile reactions by governments.

In one case study, a Filipino journo “Jhesset E” — got a string of EJN grants and workshops for stories. Those included one that “supported partnerships between non-governmental organizations and journalists to cover climate change” and another “about reporting on climate change through a gender lens”. This involved her interviewing women suffering after storms and floods etc which, of course, were attributed – sans evidence –  to “climate change”.

The blockbuster case study involved an EJN client journo from Bangadesh identified as “Illius S”, who was talent-spotted at a three-day EJN workshop on “climate justice” and other non-sequiturs:

His passion for climate reporting took off from there … Following the workshop, Illius received several fellowships and story grants from EJN, which he credited with helping him make the transition to working as a full-time climate journalist.

The enthused Illius came good with a story about climate change causing the cultural loss of babies’ names in Bengal’s coastal villages. According to Illius, babies used to be named after parents’ income source, e.g. “Probal” (coral) and “Shukti” (oyster). But climate change had poisoned the corals and oysters so the villagers’ jobs ended and so did the babies’ names. “Using this unique perspective, Illius has continued to be a prolific climate journalist in Bangladesh,” said the EJN proudly.

However, the EJN’s and Internews’ commendable impact study later by scrutineer Dr Cathy Shuttconcluded in essence that (a) Illius’ super-story of climate baby-names was tripe, and (b) Illius wasn’t even a coherent journo and (c) he seemed to be criminalising the half-starved villagers for poaching and smuggling sea critters.[5] P142-3. Eschewing tact, Shutt found

This report certainly has huge areas to improve further…Thus, in this report, the use of ‘climate change’ make no sense and adds no value.

The critique gobsmacked the EJN gurus, who in response blustered about climate change and ocean “acidification” definitely hurting poor little molluscs. The reviewers suggested EJN actually look up some science, because “there is no evidence of such cases in Bangladesh.” Again, EJN blustered but the reviewers opened a new front by saying that despite Illius bewailing climate causing seafront job losses, “it turns out that employment opportunities accelerated in the region for many reasons” including lucrative street trading in drugs.

In a delightful conclusion, the reviewers found that the basic story of climate wiping out names of Bangladeshi babies was not just tripe but,  according to Illius, had been pushed by a lecturer at the original EJN workshop. That same lecturer, when asked, claimed he said the opposite. A literature search then suggested the baby names were religious-based not vocational.[6]

Illius had claimed to EJN that his story had galvanised local authorities and been picked up by the national Bangladeshi media. This was also fact-checked by Dr Shutt, who concluded it was doubtful. His story supposedly appeared in a national outlet called the Business Standard ,which few had heard of and wasn’t mentioned even in a list of 504 national rags. While the Business Standard’s Facebook page had 162,145 followers, Illius’ story earned only six ‘likes’. EJN responded that Business Standard was a “new” outlet.

The world of journalism seethes with well-funded third-party institutions operating night and day to ensure journos stay on-message about alleged climate perils. EJN is just one story in a much larger saga of the way truth is sold down the river when journos are bought and paid for.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com

[1][1] Internews Europe, a UK-based charity with 48 staff, budgeted for pds18.3m spending ($A34m) last year. It puts about 30% of its energies into EJN and the environment.

[2] EJN has appointed 15 South African journos among its Fellows.

[3] Another possibility is that the EJN data is nonsense – which doesn’t inspire confidence in EJN.

[4] “This trend is especially significant when compared to respondents from the Asia-Pacific region, 85% of whom stated that their financial opportunities have improved.” P25

[5] Dr Shutt: “In short, a livelihood group was empathised at the beginning of the story and vilified at the end for maintaining a livelihood which is declared illegal for more than two decades, even before the climate change discourse surfaced and popularised in public and policy domain… I found this claim very inappropriate from the ethical standard of journalism and moral bearing. This is very well recognised that people who collect oysters on the coast are extremely poor and do not have much choice. Therefore, in no professional standard, it sounds appropriate to make such vulnerable group victim of one’s novel work. I think this is our moral duty to protect our informants and vulnerable people.” (EJN Editor’s note: There has been much internal discussion over who the reporter was referring to when using words like “smuggler,” and we did not have time to verify whether it was gang leaders or the poor, marginalized collectors.) 

[6] Keeping my local angle going, the study remarked, “The Cultural Atlas (IES, 2020) also recognises this fact for Bangladesh immigrants in Australia.”

Why We See So Many Horrid Little Activists

Who’s the most important educator of Australian schoolkids? The learned amongst us might nominate my fellow-(ex)journo Derek Scott, CEO of Melbourne’s Haileybury College and current chair of ACARA (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority). Nah, not him.

My nomination is Jason Kimberley, whose dad, Craig Kimberley, sold the Just Jeans empire for $64 million in 2001. Jason’s 2008 brainchild, Cool Australia, is all about teaching kids to love the environment [1] and get with the anti-emissions program. But Jason’s own entertainments seem to have a giant carbon footprint – his Cool biography skites about travelling “throughout the globe”, climbing Mt Aconcagua (23,000ft), man-hauling sledges in Antarctica, walking Denali and kayaking Prince William Sound in Alaska for a month, trekking up Mt Everest and dogsledding in the Yukon.

Whatever, here’s Cool Australia’s impact on your kids and grandkids.

♦ Cool’s free on-line lessons for schoolteachers to download are used by 9000 schools, or  92 per cent of all schools.

♦ 3.3 million kids last year engaged with the materials. Cool claims that since it started in 2008, it’s helped educate 16 million kids (2022 annual report, p2)

♦ Cool claims 205,000 “members” – i.e. teachers, but with a sprinkling of 20,000 parents/home-schoolers.

♦ The teachers downloaded and taught Cool’s lessons 340,000 times last year. Two million lessons have been downloaded since inception.

♦ Cool claims that each lesson teachers download is shared with two other teachers and used in more than two classes.

♦ Cool gets all this done on an annual budget of a mere $2 million and 13 full-time-equivalent staff – including education contractors. For Cool, the cost per student is a mere half of one cent.

♦ Teachers love Cool’s pre-fabricated lessons because nearly half the teachers are teaching outside their expertise and three-quarters complain of unmanageable workloads.

♦ Cool’s ambition is for 1 million members (teachers, basically) enrolled by 2025, and 100 million kids educated by 2030. No, I haven’t added too many zeros. (Annual Report, p12)

So it’s clear that state education departments and private-sector schools have farmed out a good deal of education to Jason’s little team. Cool’s lessons cover the whole spectrum of school topics, and Cool’s design team ensure that every lesson they create is mapped to the official curricula. In other words, teachers can download the written and video material, set up the lesson and tick the box for teaching-job-accomplished.

Tony Thomas will co-launch Peter O’Brien’s THE INDIGENOUS VOICE TO PARLIAMENT? THE NO CASE (Connor Court), at Il Gambero restaurant, 166 Lygon Street, Carlton, Thursday May 11, 6pm-8.30pm. To accept ($6), click here.

Cool’s reason for existence is green-left-wokism. All the non-environmental lessons are a useful “extra”. For example, I’ve written about one of Cool’s lessons inciting kids to remain seated during the national anthem because of its colonialist-oppression aspects. Kids do a ‘swot’ analysis to justify staying seated. Cool offers no contrary argument.

Cool has partnered with green-left film-maker Damon Gameau to promote his films 2040 (92mins) and Regenerating Australia (17mins) with their absurd plot-lines based in the year 2040 and 2030 respectively. In those years all green policies are implemented and all are an unalloyed success in saving the planet from CO2 hell. The movie closes with rapturous music and vision of youngsters of all colors and creeds dancing through a forest to celebrate low CO2 levels. One 20-something gal in a white frock grows from her shoulder-blades giant butterfly wings that actually flap. This might well be the cheesiest movie clip ever made or even imaginable.

Cool offers no fewer than 31 lessons on 2040 plus 12 for at-home use, and for Regenerating, about 10 lessons. Teachers and fans have force-fed 2040 to 1.5 million students and downloaded 2 million copies of Cool’s notes on 2040. So far Regenerating has been fed to 37,000 students and schools have created 2500 “action plans” based on it.

A teacher who screens or takes kids to see a screening of 2040 loses at least half a day’s serious teaching. Far from the leftist education authorities being concerned about indoctrination, we can safely assume they would see that as a bonus. After all, “Sustainability” is one of those three cross-curricula priorities, thanks to Labor’s then-education minister Julia Gillard and the “Melbourne Declaration” of December 2008. The “progressive” politicians and teachers’ unions, of course, endorse and promote Cool. Conservative politicians have never – to my knowledge – pushed back against it. They become their own pall-bearers as new cohorts of kids are brainwashed through the 13-year school system to voting age.

The half of all parents who lean conservative don’t enter the equation. Their kids come home spouting mantras about human-caused catastrophic global warming and how society can be transformed to net-zero emissions. Parents probably retain a vague idea that teachers are looking after their darlings’ best interest. They have no idea how the teachers have stepped back from the coalface (sorry, front-line) to let Cool’s zealots take over with their prefabricated lessons.

I’ve tracked Cool over the years, for example see here and here and here. I took a further look last week when preparing a short speech for the Carlton launch of Dr Mark Lopez’s new book, School Sucks(Connor Court). The talk gathers material on half a dozen leftist third-party institutions enjoying unfettered on-line rights to kids in the classrooms – access a transcript of the talk here. The fresh material from Cool rather threw me, with its naked green slant and palpable errors. Moreover Cool seems never to prune its old, stale material. Masses of it date from more than a decade ago – tired stuff then and trebly so when accessed by teachers today.

To take a random example, there’s a lesson for eight-year-olds about the Arctic and Antarctic. Apart from the supplied text, there’s a video of know-nothing teachers coaching the kids to regurgitate Cool’s messages. The cited data stops at 2008. The text says an increase of 0.5degC at the equator “would mean an increase of as much as 4-6 degrees at the poles [plural]”. Whatever might be happening in the Arctic, the Antarctic is making monkeys out of the global warming brigade’s theorising – it hasn’t warmed in 70 years despite a steady rise in atmospheric CO2, and that’s not even a controversial statement. Kids aren’t told about that, of course. Instead, Cool implies that “changing these patterns will affect our economy, people, crops, water supplies and pretty much everything we do.” Jason Kimberley himself stars in the video, claiming that “our continued burning of coil oil and gas is now having a direct effect on these frozen worlds.”

The film cuts to a teacher showing loss of Arctic sea ice for the decade to 2008 – which happened to be a low point followed by stability for the past decade. Eight-year-olds absorb the message, with a boy repeating back to the teacher that fossil fuel emissions and belching cows are hurting the poles, and a girl grieving that “if we lose the sea ice the animals will lose their homes and what they live on.”

Cool’s aim is not just to indoctrinate but to turn kids into horrid little activists. The video shows these eight-year-olds writing complaints to state and federal energy and resources ministers about emissions, and preparing two-minute-hates against fossil fuels for student radio. The kids say they want adults to cut down of fuels and driving cars around — an idea not entirely without merit, as  last week I was cursing the parental traffic jams at the local school gates.

To complete the Soviet-style brainwashing, girls clap along to a song they created for the class:

[inaudible] melting ice, I wonder how they sleep at night.
Global warming is so sad,
Ice is melting really bad.
People want to mine the ice:
Oil and gas has a price. 

To the strains of triumphant music, Jason Kimberley re-appears to harangue kids,

“We are mucking around with our planet’s thermostat by changing the balance of nature [cut to picture of  power station belching steam]…Will we continue to destroy or can we learn to change? The choice is ours!”

Cool, of course, gives kids an adoring treatment of would-be Aborigine Bruce Pascoe and his dodgy histories.[2]

Cool’s “Fact Sheets” present loaded and dubious material. One example is,

Fact Sheet: Angry Summer: Extreme Rainfall. All-time daily rainfall records for January. This presents the information that, in 2013 (note the staleness), a dozen east-coast hamlets such as Mundubbera (pop 1200), Monto (1100), Moogerah (250), and Old Koreelah (pop 800) had experienced record rain (weather “records” always pop up somewhere about something.) Cool’s intent is to demonstrate global warming’s ill effects. But the BoM report from which Cool takes the records, merely says the record rains stemmed from “the former tropical cyclone Oswald tracking southwards along a track just inland from the Queensland coast.” In a map in the same May 2013 document, the BoM clearly shows equivalent areas further inland at the same time suffering record or near-record low rainfall. (p7). This one-way “Fact Sheet” is an amateurish attempt by Cool to give schoolkids climate evidence based on one tropical cyclone’s unusual path.

Another stale “Fact Sheet” boosts China for its renewable energy expansion. It lauds China’s 7GW of installed solar and 63GW of installed windpower capacity as at 2012, without mentioning renewables (including hydro) represented only 8.5 per cent of China’s primary energy sources that year. A decade later (2021) fossil fuels were still providing 85 per cent of China’s energy. Cool is certainly not going to tell our schoolkids that the coal power capacity China began building in 2022 was six times as much as the rest of the world combined. 

What really dropped my jaw, though, was Cool’s “Fact Sheet” on renewables. Its claims include

♦ Coal power plants are not very energy efficient and on average only 30-40% of the chemical energy in coal is converted to useful energy. The rest is lost as heat in the conversion process.

This is bizarre. Engineering has taken the thermal efficiency of modern coal plants close to the theoretical maximum. It’s an argument for coal power, not against it.

♦The alternative is renewable energy sources. These produce energy using natural resources that are constantly replaced and never run out.

Victoria’s brown coal reserves are sufficient for another 1000 years power generation.  Who cares if they run out in year 3123?[3]

♦ The amount of energy received from the sun in one hour could power the entire world for a year.

So what? That doesn’t make solar-panel energy cheap, clean or reliable 24/7.

♦ The best part about solar energy is that it creates almost no pollution — some pollution may be generated in building and transporting the solar panels.

Note that Cool makes no mention of horrific and polluting third-world mineral extraction for panels, the Chinese manufacturing near-monopoly, or future problems disposing of millions of toxic panels.

♦Every 24 hours, wind generates enough energy to produce roughly 35x more electricity than humanity uses each day. However, only 8 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation in 2019-20 came from wind power. 

For the good reasons that wind power is intermittent, requires vast tracts of land for its low-density energy, and is only viable after massive taxpayer and consumer subsidies. Further, the material pretends that wind’s intermittency is no problem

♦ Wind is not constant and doesn’t blow in the same place all the time (although there will always be wind somewhere and it will never run out, making it a truly renewable source of energy). If the wind turbines are spread far enough they can be always capturing the wind energy and putting it into the grid. 

Real fact: wind droughts are normal across the Eastern States grid and can last several days – way beyond any offset from any conceivable battery storage. It is hard to know if the Cool writers are knowingly misleading kids or merely believe their own nonsense.[4]

♦The trouble with wind energy has nothing to do with energy creation itself, but everything to do with the look of wind turbines.

What childish nonsense!

♦ Some people have a problem with them, and this has prevented a number of wind farms being constructed in Australia and other parts of the world. 

But thousands of subsidised wind farms have been built regardless of objectors.

♦ There is a very low chance that wind turbines can harm birds or bats flying through them.

Go ask Greens’ icon Bob Brown in Tasmania about bird-mincing turbine plans for Robbins Island.

Weirdly, Cool disparages emission-free hydro power because the power availability varies with rain levels. But Cool has no problem with solar power varying to zero at night, or wind power varying every ten minutes.

♦ Also, constructing the dams and diverting the rivers … can lead to environmental damage, both through the construction of the dam and also through reduced water flows to the natural environment.

So let’s litter the environment with wind turbines instead!

Nuclear: Cool tells kids to rule it out, despite zero-emissions, because it’s costly to build [so what, that’s for the market to decide], creates a nuclear waste problem [which the French and Western world have dealt with for more than half a century], and is a nuclear weapon risk [ditto]. It also lamely cites accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, (with no fatalities and only ambiguous evidence of any radioactivity harms) and the outdated, Soviet-era, graphite moderated Chernobyl (1986).

Further fact-checking Cool material that teachers stuff down the throats of kids from age of five is just too depressing. In a democracy those with power are supposed to be accountable. But to whom are these leftist institutions intruding into our classrooms accountable?

_________________________

[1] “Jason identified the need to provide our current and future generations with relevant and engaging information about the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental. Our education system was identified as the most important and effective medium for connecting real-world education with kids.”

[2] “Step 2. Now explain to students that they will be watching a clip featuring Bruce Pascoe. Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man … In 2014 he published a book called Dark Emu which documents and argues “for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing – behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag” (source: Dark Emu, 2018).

Bruce Pascoe – keynote clip (https://youtu.be/UEMeruNEtWY)

Consider inviting students to share their reflections on this clip…

Step 3. Once complete, display the following quotes from Bruce from this clip on the board (also available on the Student Worksheet)…”

For students: “You could create one of the following to communicate your ideas [about Pascoe]:

• Written persuasive piece
• Oral persuasive piece
• Mind-map (with annotations in full sentences)”

[3] Australia’s total coal is sufficient for 1200 years.

[4] Rafe Champion, Spectator, Nov 9, 2022: “The [AEMO] records can be interrogated to the depth and duration of all the wind droughts from 2010 to the latest serious episode which lasted over 40 hours through the 7th, 8th, and 9th of August.”

Dead Wrong, Fanatical and Fully Funded

• 28th April 2023
•  Comments (7)

Tony Thomas

Amid these days of woke ascendancy, I received an uplifting email at the weekend from Melbourne-based ginger group Climate for Change (C4C), confiding that it’s gone phut. All paid staff are out of a job by mid-May.

Its volunteers — for some years an army of 300 — have spent the past decade inveigling citizens to Tupperware-style home parties where “Facilitators” show scary climate videos and steer invitees towards climate activism.[1] It’s poetic that Tupperware itself has reached its use-by date.

Climate for Change was the brainchild of Katerina Gaita, daughter of Melbourne University philosopher Raymond Gaita. She’s a case study in savvy activism transforming the community with intricate and effective webs of influence. Young Katerina departed the leafy piles of Gardenvale to dwell amid the polyglot tribes of Footscray, Seddon and Kingsville in Melbourne’s west. She has confessed,

In 2007, after reading the book Climate Code Red, it hit me like a ton of bricks. For six months, I was just incapacitated. I walked down the street crying, not knowing what to do. 

An Al Gore trainee/disciple, she elaborated to the ABC on her round-the-clock meltdown:

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and finding my cheeks were wet, I guess it is the same as any grief; there’s a strange loneliness that comes from being amongst other people who aren’t feeling the same grief that you are.

For consolation, she should get together with the ANU’s IPCC lachrymose lead-author Dr Joelle Gergis. As far as green tears go, it would be Victoria Falls meets Niagara.

Climate Code Red was co-authored in 2008 by David Spratt and Philip Sutton. I tangled politely with David a decade ago when he was urging us at a Moonee Valley Council talk to tip out the state’s sort-of-conservative Premier Denis Napthine — odd since councils are meant to be non-partisan (see Ratepayers & Ratbaggery).

The ABC chronicled Katarina’s “many approaches to tackling climate change, from living green herself, to running a green cleaning business and teaching people how to clean green.” She came to see that electoral work was more powerful, serving as the CEO of C4C from 2014-21 before segueing into canvassing to get the Liberal’s Tim Wilson ejected from his Melbourne seat of Goldstein at last year’s federal election. She coordinated the search by “Voices of Goldstein” for a rival candidate. With the ex-ABC’s Zoe Daniels in the bag, Katerina helped run 1400 volunteers. They knocked on 44,000 local doors over ten weeks, evaporating Tim Wilson’s 7.8% margin via a 3% swing to Labor and getting Daniels elected as a Teal independent.

Katerina is now membership developer for the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network (AEGN). Chief among its backers are Computershare founder Chris Morris, rich-listed in March at $1.2 billion, and his daughter, Hayley. On its board is the Teals’ funding svengali Simon Holmes a Court, who mobilised $13 million for their campaigns. Another supporter is omnipresent multi-millionaire Robert Purves and his Purves Environmental Fund. AEGN itself acts as a catalyst among funders, itself running on a budget of only $1.4m, a mere five FTE staff and half a dozen volunteers. AEGN’s Vision includes stopping new and existing fossil fuel projects in favour of “clean renewable energy”. How will the lights stay on during wind droughts? Don’t you worry about that!

I’ll get back to the above-mentioned Climate Code Red book after some more on Brunswick-based Climate for Change, of which, as it happens, I am a proud member.

Since inception, C4C’s paid staff have see-sawed between one and seven full-time equivalents. Volunteers were close to 300 a year from 2018-21, tumbling to 20 last year. During eight years it raised a handsome $1.04m in funding drives, $740,000 in donations  and received $370,000  in grants (does that mean from taxpayers?), in a total income of about $2.7m. Sadly, it blew its dough on staff in the past three years, racking up $123,000 in losses and reducing net assets to a meagre $71,000.

Co-CEOs Jane Stabb — pronouns: she/her — of Naarm (once known as “Melbourne”) and Lena Herrera Piekarski — she/her — of Kulin country’s Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung, informed me sadly but “with warmth and gratitude” that as a small organisation C4C had been directly hit by “the current economic crisis and inflation”. (That’s a Labor Treasurer for you). So, they continue, they had to make the hard decision to axe all permanent staff, including themselves, and continue their “amazing work” with an all-volunteer cast and board.

Here’s the demographics of C4C :

♦ Main income over the years came from annual six-figure crowd-funding.

♦ It has trained more than 460 Facilitators

♦ Staff costs per trained Facilitator were from $500-1000; with $50-100 staff cost per attendee.

♦ Something over 11,500 hosted attendees by now in Victoria and Qld. Most were female (65%) and betweeen18 and 35 years of age. About 60% were parents.

♦ Attendees who “strongly agreed” to vote for climate candidates doubled from 40% to 80% after the Conversations.

♦ During the 2019 federal election, nearly 40% of attendees went on to help Australian Conservation Foundation with its green electioneering.

 ♦ Melbourne work was concentrated in the often-dubbed People’s Republics around Brunswick/Northcote.

♦ “Without any targeted campaign from C4C, Facilitators responded to a high demand for Conversations in and around the Brunswick electorate in 2018. In the 11 months leading up to the [2018 State] election, 55 Conversations were held there reaching more than 480 people. In the seat of Brunswick there was a 2.7% swing to the candidate with the strongest climate policies. The candidate won the seat by a margin of just over 500 votes.”

♦ Nearly half attendees of one Facilitator increased their pestering of MPs. One young woman was quoted,

“I’m going to get in touch with my MP and I’m going to get my whole family to do it too.” And there were tears in her eyes as she said this, but there was steel in her voice.”

♦ As an attendee told C4C: “I feel more confident taking action and calling out climate denialists.”

♦ At least one attendee – a business man –  turned vegan.

 I’ve been inspired as C4C supporter to host a “Climate C.A.F.E. ‘Climate Action For Everyone’ session!”

I’m assured my event will “create real change on the systems we live in”. I’m to invite my trusting but “confused and overwhelmed” friends. I provide the party pies and booze, C4C sends along their climate salesperson. I’m to invent a tale about what inspired me to seek destruction of Australia’s electricity system – people are swayed not by facts but by heart-warming stories, C4C says.

For CAFÉ homework, I’ve downloaded C4C’s 10-page “Conversation Guide”, which coaches me “to help stop climate change”. I’m warned that “pressuring people into actions they’re not ready for can backfire.” Like all good salespeople, I qualify my audience as alarmed, alert, concerned, cautious or whatever, tailoring C4C’s scripts for each. If someone’s “disengaged”, I should say, “I’ve read about what will happen to the cost of living if this drought continues”.

Drought, what drought?

C4C writes, “What if my conversation is with someone who denies climate change is real, or who becomes angry?” I mustn’t waste my time and emotional energy on those creatures, “who could make you feel awful and send you backwards in your relationships”.

As part of my C4C education about First Nations cultures, I’m also encouraged by C4C to swot up on Bruce Pascoe’s “impeccable” Dark Emu pre-history, and I can “Learn to write an Acknowledgement of Country. (Cost included).” Sounds fun. 

What of the Climate Code Red book that jellified poor Katerina Gaita?

It references what the official climate crowd was predicting in 2008, and every single proposition, with 2023 hindsight, has proven wrong, stupid and ridiculous. The equivalent climate crowd today, from the IPCC down, is making the same predictions of catastrophes (e.g. UN Secretary-General Guterres:  “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”). You can safely bet your children’s lives that by 2033, today’s predictions will turn out equally wrong, stupid and ridiculous. But, meanwhile, Australian governments, state and federal, are vandalising the electricity grid and turning us into political and economic satraps of energy-rich China.

The 2008 book cited Spratt as community campaigner for the “peace movement” (unlike the rest of us who support the war movement). He wanted each of us to get a personal CO2 ration, involving surveillance and controls that would make Stalin, the Stasi and Xi Jin-Ping look moderate. Family carbon rationing would “guarantee that the national greenhouse emissions budget is achieved”:

“An authority independent of government , like the Reserve Bank , would set up a national greenhouse – emissions budget each year . The amount of emissions would be decreased each year , through a series of downward steps to zero , in accordance with a rapid transition plan . 

Because households in Australia are directly responsible for about one – quarter of emissions ( generated principally by household energy use and private travel ) , one – quarter of the carbon budget would be made available free of charge to each citizen as an equal ‘ carbon credit ’ ( or ration ) , via an electronic swipe ‘ carbon card ’ . The card would be used to draw on an individual carbon – credit balance each time household gas and electricity , petrol , and air tickets were paid for … If a person lacked the greenhouse – emissions credits to cover a purchase they could buy credit at the point of sale.”(p244-5)

My personal view of Spratt’s plan aligns with Orwell’s in his 1984: “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

Clearly the book was a game-changer in its day. Other lady law graduates like Katerina must have staggered down working-class streets for six months in tearful incapacitation after reaching page 14 about Arctic ice:

In 2006 , former Australian of the Year , palaeontologist , and climate – change activist Tim Flannery suggested that ‘at the trajectory set by the new rate of melt , however , there will be no Arctic icecap in the next five to fifteen years.’ 

On Flannery’s forecast for 2011-21 the sea-ice up there now would barely chill a can of Fanta. Actually, the sea ice has been stable for the past decade and Arctic minimum summer ice last September was 4.67 million square kilometers. [2]  Flannery has been Chief Councillor at his sciencey Climate Council since 2014, which specialises in similar doom-crying.

Here are other Sutton/Pratt scenarios as at 2008:

♦ Even with 25-40% emission cuts, by 2020 we would still be facing “catastrophic environmental damage”. (252)

♦ Climate is creating an urgent need for “a global governance framework” surpassing the nation states. (Spratt might be presaging the World Economic Forum or at least our governance by the corrupt UN.) Foreword, location 109.

♦ “By 2050, the ocean will be so acidic that current US water-quality standards would have to categorise it as industrial waste .” (59).

♦ “We have already entered an era of dangerous climate change. If left unchecked, the dynamics and inertia of our social and economic systems will sweep us on to ever more dangerous change and then, most likely within a decade [i.e. by 2018], to an era of catastrophic climate change.” (145). Fact check: the UAH satellites, further scientifically validated last month, show no global warming for more than eight years and no Australian warming for nearly 11 years.

♦ Sea level rise of five metres by 2095 – that’s above my roofline and way above the IPCC’s namby-pamby guess of under one metre. (36) Climate expert James Hansen forecast we had “as little as a decade” ie to 2018, to avoid meltdown of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. (27)

♦ Say goodbye shortly to the Great Barrier Reef, “now facing extinction” after 60-95% bleaching in 2002. “This is the case with most coral reefs around the world.” (90). Fact check: The GBR coral is now at record extent. That makes at least 21 years of “experts” dooming the GBR. Global coral reefs are also doing fine, thank you.[3]

♦ Breakthrough technology would see a 35km x 35km array  of solar collectors “producing enough electricity to meet Australia’s total power needs”. (201). Huh?

♦ A “peak oil” crisis was imminent, with a Queensland government task force’s report finding “overwhelming evidence” that oil output would reach an “absolute peak” before 2017. (147) Thus citizens would be beset by “a multi-issue crisis of sustainability that incorporates food, water, peak oil, and global warming.” Actual oil production in the US now makes nonsense of theorised “peaks”. Ditto world production.

♦ “In the US , it was expected that a 1 degree rise would result in California and the Great Plains states becoming subject to mega – droughts and desertification : a new and permanent ‘ dust bowl ’ , similar to those seen between 1000 and 1300 AD during the Medieval Warm Period , when devastating , epic droughts hit the plains , and whole Native American populations collapsed . This predicted drying is also occurring.” (90). Fact check: the US is now 1degC warmer than pre-industrial. Things nonetheless seem OK.

♦ Climate change in 2008 meant that “our world is already at the point of failing to cope”, with famine outbreaks amounting to a “climate change mega-disaster”. (89). Fact check: Food yields continue to rise and real wheat rice and sugar prices to fall (at least until the Ukraine war started).

♦ Just make stuff up, the book suggests.

We need stories not just of heroes living in the future, and making desperate, perhaps futile, last-ditch attempts to head off a disaster in the face of imminent doom, but of a world in which climate turnaround is achieved, despite distractions, inertia, and vested interests in the here-and-now — an interesting challenge for sustainability strategists, writers, and movie-makers. (236-7).

Unabashed by his 2008 forecasting failures, Spratt a month ago was claiming that the UN’s net-zero push for 2050 was dangerously conservative – “an appalling gamble with existential risk…paleoclimatology teaches that in the long run each one degree of warming will raise the oceans by 10-20 metres.” [Ouch].

It was exactly Spratt’s cup-of-tea when UN secretary-general Guterres’ warned two months ago that rising seas threatened “mass exodus on a biblical scale.” Bring back Moses!

While climate influencers seem a weird mob, never under-estimate their ability to stitch us all up politically.

 Tony Thomas will co-launch Peter O’Brien’s new book THE INDIGENOUS VOICE TO PARLIAMENT? THE NO CASE (Connor Court), at Il Gambero restaurant, 166 Lygon Street, Carlton, Thursday May 11, 6pm-8.30pm. To accept ($6), click here.

[1] C4C: “Our approach is based on social research that explains that people process information – make sense of it, make decisions about it and take actions around it – through conversations with people they trust. This is how social change happens. Our flagship program, Climate Conversations, uses the Tupperware® party plan model to facilitate discussions about climate change in people’s homes, among friends. This model of engagement is unique within the climate movement and has proven extraordinarily effective in engaging new audiences at both depth and scale.”

[2] Spratt also quotes US sonar data from submarines foretelling no Artic ice by 2013 (p14), and he even suggests an ice-free Arctic at 2009 (p16).

[3] Spratt 2008 quotes a doozy from woke ANU types: “Waters around the Great Barrier Reef are also acidifying at a higher – than – expected rate . Ecosystem collapse caused by acidification will likely reduce marine biomass and , therefore , the capacity of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide . Professor Malcolm McCulloch of the Australian National University says that , contrary to previous predictions , this acidification is now taking place over decades , rather than centuries : ‘ [ T]he new data on the Great Barrier Reef suggests the effects are even greater than forecast . ’ p59

On Climate, the Media is the Massage

• 4th April 2023
•  Comments (3)

Tony Thomas

I’m not making this up, but Leslie Hughes, star scientist at Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, has been running catastropharian climate courses for hairdressers, whom she coaches to harangue clients about those awful coal, oil and gas emissions. Although her basic expertise is in stick insects and ant-tended butterfly ejaculations, Macquarie University’s Distinguished Professor also wants to tune the global climate for a better Year 2100, which is where the 400 ladies-who-lather come in. While snipping and combing and colouring, they are to convince customers that the Council’s goal of net-zero by 2035 is definitely not at all insane. Clients might even emerge with a teal tint to their shag cuts.

I can imagine Hughes instructing: “Climate Minister Chris Bowen wants us to put in 22,000 solar panels a day for the next eight years (60 million all up) plus forty 7MW wind turbines every month. That’s just to reach his namby-pamby target of cutting emissions 43% by 2030. We at Tim’s Council want Chris to double that. We’re demanding a 75% cut, and, of course, net zero by 2035 – never mind 2050. So let’s make that [she scribbles on an envelope] 40,000 solar panels a day (120m all up) and three 7MW turbines every day[1], and by 2030 your kids won’t even know what droughts and flooding rain were like!”

I’m not being unkind. Hughes herself created the Council’s hairy-chested targets in conjunction with the late Professor Will Steffen, who was extreme in his catastrophism.[2]  Poor fellow my country.

The Council’s 2022 annual report boasts of its “drumbeat” of climate calamity, citing the planting of more than 22,000 stories in the media last year intended to influence “millions” of Australians. That’s 800 items a week obligingly regurgitated by stenographers identifying as journalists, plus a further 20,000 media items “supported” via third-party climate enthusiasts.[3]  The Council not only spoon-feeds alarmism to reporters, it actually trains them with union help to propagate the narrative: in 2022, it

teamed up with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, to provide expert advice to journalists nationwide on accurately and responsibly reporting on the climate [supposed] crisis.

The engine room of the  Council is its Climate Media Centre. It likes to keep its dark arts there under wraps: You won’t see the Climate Media Centre mentioned in the media, but you will have heard the voices of the dozens of everyday Australians we support”  and “You won’t read about the Climate Media Centre in the news.” (Annual Report 20-21 p30),  

These days the Council’ has 50 staff – including close to 20 media spinners[4] . The Council succeeds not just with regular media (including sports pages) but offshoots like Marie Claire, Women’s Weekly, and TV’s The Project and Sunrise.

The often-sceptical Murdoch stable swallows the Council’s guff too. One Council report got 500 recycles, not just in the ABC (of course) but in 37 News Corp publications including The Daily Telegraph and WIN News. (AR 21, p25). In 2021, some 23 Council proxies “featured across national News Corp titles as part of their Mission Zero initiative to ‘put Australia on a path to net zero’.”

At the Council’s 2013 inception, Flannery pledged it would not go in for politics: “We won’t be running any political campaigns, we won’t be running any agendas.” Really? More than a year before the 2022 poll, the Council’s strategists mobilised their 500,000-plus grassroots supporters and began detailed work “to shift the dial ahead of the election” (AR 22  p8) and unseat Morrison’s “denialists”:

We set ourselves up to drive change in this moment by bringing together special internal teams focused on political engagement, supporter activation, public engagement in key electorates, and shaping the national story through media action.

When the mainstream media initially proved loath to sufficiently politicise the 2019 bushfires, the Council swung its Emergency Leaders for Climate Action – firefighters and first reponders – into the fray.

Through its media interventions, ELCA shut down the argument that we should not discuss climate change during a crisis and made clear that the Federal Government was warned of the risks of catastrophic bushfires and failed to act. ELCA’s media prominence cut through the political noise and firmly articulated the fact that worsening extreme weather events, including the devastating bushfires of last summer, are being aggravated by climate change, which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

The Council even gloats about its success in getting the sort of media coverage it likes:

Significantly, journalists are now clearly and easily making these links by themselves, without background briefings or prompting, demonstrating that these ideas have been well socialised and accepted.

The Council used the so-called climate-fuelled floods as another political gimmick:

As well as releasing our flood report, we identified 10 key electorates for special focus. We worked proactively in these communities to socialise information about climate risks and impacts, spark conversations about climate solutions and support candidates with issues briefs and research resources.

When PM Morrison told the UN that Australia was doing its fair share on emission cuts, the Council’s photogenic CEO Amanda McKenzie went for Media Gold, accusing Morrison of talking “colossal bull****”. That insult

was featured across ABC News, SBS and news.com.au among others … Due to this heightened media attention, the Prime Minister was forced to respond, blaming activists and the media for misleading Australians. Thanks to the media moment we created, ABC’s Media Watchdedicated a segment to the story… 

Here’s a link to that Media Watch segment. Watch it and wince as the national broadcaster makes a mockery of its chartered obligation to eschew bias as compere Paul Barry rounds up five climate-activist academics and presents them as “impartial experts”.

The Council widely distributed its “Climate Crap Checker” to voters, pretending that the following cogent statements are “crap” and referring electors to the hysterically green/left Guardian for verification:

♦ “Gas is cleaner than coal”

♦ “Coal and gas power keep prices low”

♦ “Renewables will cost jobs” 

♦ “Renewables don’t work when sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow” and

♦ “What Australia does on climate change won’t make any difference.”

As reward for service, Labor’s climate minister Chris Bowen asked the Emergency Leaders to attend his first public meeting after swearing-in and then ran a joint press conference alongside ELCA about how climate change is “supercharging extreme weather” – it isn’t.

Post-election, a typically brutal Council project last December was to push-poll Australian flood and fire survivors about their mental health. It reaped 500 self-selected tales of sufferings to plant as “climate health disaster” media stories. Here’s a typical push-polling question, delivered to vulnerable parents:

Do you feel worried or anxious about climate change driving more frequent disasters? 

Typical answers: 

♦ “My children are scared for their future, they most likely won’t have children of their own, as they don’t feel it is a safe place any more.” 

♦ “I wish there was greater understanding of the looming climate crisis we are all facing – suspect we are so close to the tipping point and I’m grieving for the future our grandchildren face.” [5]

Many respondents – already Council supporters – came good with desired messages, such as:

The Federal Government [needs] to get real on climate – especially not to approve any more fossil fuel projects, which science is screaming out is the main driver of the increasing extreme weather events occurring all over Australia and the world.”

The report concludes,

The mental health burden of climate change on young people appears strongly exacerbated by well-founded fears that their governments are taking insufficient action to protect their future. 

Let’s turn now to how the Council finances its 50-strong team. I suspect through Big Green donors, an informal coalition who years ago did a “friendly takeover” of the Australian environmental movement. The Council directors are certainly not short of a quid. The new chair is Carol Schwarz, daughter of retailing royalty Marc and Eva Besen. The Australianrich-listed the Besens No 49 this month at $2.45 billion.

Last year, Council total income of $8.3 million was split about 50-50 from its little and big-ticket donors. Since 2014, Council income rose modestly by 5-10 per cent a year. But filings at the Charities Commission reveal two mystery jumps in donations: up $2.1 million (63%) in 2020, and another $1.9 million (34%) in 2022. The Council’s 2019 donor windfall seems more than it knew what to do with:

This was a significant increase from the previous financial year … This funding will be allocated to a number of projects over the next two financial years.

It names donors above the petty amount of $10,000. In 2022 who should be adding financial muscle to the Council’s war against fossil fuels but the heirs to the Standard Oil cartel, originally run by John D. Rockefeller, whose ruthlessly-gained personal wealth ran to one per cent of America’s then GDP. His heirs have arrived at the Council via New York’s “Climate Emergency Collaboration Group, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors”. The Rockefeller collaboration is among “six of the largest climate funders in the international space” and is also backed by Ikea and the Hewletts of Hewlett Packard.

For local financial clout, the biggest name among donors is the Morris Family Foundation. Computershare founder Chris Morris was rich-listed 112^th last month at $1.19 billion. The family’s tourism, resorts, aviation and hotel portfoliounhappily suggest a rather large carbon footprint. That will have to go by net-zero time.[6]  Another Council funder is wotif.com founder, Guardian Australia funder, Greens backer and anti-Murdoch activist Graeme Wood.[7]

Also named is the ACME Foundation of Jeff and Julie Wicks. It has assets of  $34 million and has dished out at least $11 million to climate activists as the Wicks strive to erase their fortune via virtue signalling.

Councillor/scientist David Karoly said the quiet bit out loud to the Australian Financial Review last October: “The ability to make money while simultaneously solving climate change can be an appealing proposition to people with deep pockets.”

The Climate Council’s directors include Kirsty Gold, wife of private-equity-fund tycoon Peter Gold, who has $2.5 billion invested  for clients of Archer Capital. The Golds “invest capital in projects that accelerate climate solutions. The couple have also teamed up with other private green wealth investors to find solutions.”

Kirsty campaigned in an aqua T-shirt to help Zali Steggall unseat ex-PM Tony Abbot in Warringah in 2019, according to the SMH.

♦ Director Simon Corbell is CEO and Chair of the Clean Energy Investor Group, “representing institutional investors with wind and solar assets worth $9 billion across the national electricity market.” (Corbell used to be Labor’s deputy leader of the ACT Parliament).

♦ Councillor Greg Bourne, ex-CEO of WWF Australia, is Chair of Granville Harbour Operations Wind Farm near Zeehan in Tasmania, with 31 turbines reaching to a height of 200 metres.  

♦ Councillor and former director Martijn Wilder is founder and CEO of Pollination, “a global climate change investment and advisory firm” and president of WWF Australia.

♦ One-time Rich-Lister (1999: $87m) Ray Purves was on the Council board till 2021. For 20 years Purves Environmental Foundation has sprayed millions to climate-activist groups.[8] Noted Purves’ flops have been Earth Hour and bankrolling Tim Flannery’s polemic “We are the Weather Makers” (2006).[9] Try Chapter 21, The End of Civilisation?:

Could the day ever come when the taps run dry, when power, food or fuel is no longer available in many of the world’s cities?… If humans keep doing things the same way for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilisation due to climate change is inevitable.

To my relief, Flannery suggested that “people will persist in smaller, more robust communities such as villages and farms.” We’re half-way to 2050 already, I’d better take a break to plant some maize.

Amanda McKenzie, Council CEO since 2013 inception, takes only a modest pay, sharing $496,000 with 22 other “key management personnel”. Council directors take no fees, but councillors, it seems, do, a fee-for-service practice dating from six months after inception.

Now let’s check out activities.

The Council’s Climate Media Centre has put more than 200 “trusted voices” through media training courses in 2021 alone. (AR 21, p29). Shoe-horned in as climate urgers are farmers, vets, surfers, “renters”, AFL players, small business people, Aboriginal identifiers and even “students and their parents” (move over, Thunbergs and daughter Greta). As the Council puts it,

Well- known sporting heroes, such as former Wallabies player, David Pocock, swimming star, Bronte Campbell and Australian cricket [Captain], Pat Cummins, asked Australians to go for gold on climate change … reaching Australian media once thought impossible.

The Media Centre helps its green pals and mayors in Gladstone, Hunter Valley and Latrobe to neutralise unease and discord about job losses by attempting to persuade local workers to love renewables.  Its crew consists largely of ex-journos, including founder and boss Dinah Arndt, self-described as a “reformed” journo. They  skite about persuading journos to add phrases like “climate-fuelled” when they lodge copy about any weather upset, and they warn journos to spurn what they brand “climate denialist” sources. As you might expect, the Lismore floods were sheer hell for residents of that often-inundated, low-lying town, but manna for the Centre:

The digital team produced an emotional video with Lismore flood survivors driving home the point: this is climate change. Then Climate Media Centre team member Emma Hannigan used her broadcast reporting skills to create a series of videos from ‘on the ground’ in northern NSW flood affected communities.

The Council secured more than 1000 media hits “and helped to cumulatively shift the discourse from no discussion around climate change at the onset of the disaster, to flooding being explicitly linked to climate as coverage progressed.” (AR 22, p8).

The Council sprints to issue media-friendly long reports on whatever is topical. These also go out “as educational resources in schools and universities across the country.” For a typical Council report on sport, “we worked with athletes with lived experience of climate impacts – such as playing games during heatwaves.”  Apparently sport is impossible in hot countries, which will come as news to the Subcontinent’s cricketers and Brazilian soccer teams. The media cited this sport report 575 times. To clinch its argument, the Council warned of 50degC days in Melbourne by 2040, when CEO Amanda McKenzie will be about 57 and doubtless still forecasting fossil-fuelled doom.

By coincidence, I was looking at Bureau of Meteorology temperature raw data for Melbourne since 1856 (three-day heatwaves) and the trend is a mere 0.27degC per century. On the BoM’s creepily-adjusted ACORN series since 1910, the Melbourne trend is still only 0.83degC per century.[10]Melbourne at 50degC in 2040? Why not go the whole hog and forecast 60 degrees?

When running the Youth Climate Coalition in 2008, Ms McKenzie forecast,

Melting is occurring so rapidly in the Arctic that we can now expect that there will be no summer ice by 2013, 100 years earlier than scientists had previously predicted – we have already changed the map of the world.” 

You don’t say, Amanda. Arctic minimum summer ice last September was 4.67 million square kilometers.

The Media Centre’s main thrust just lately has been to discredit gas-fuelled electricity, organising yet another “drumbeat of media coverage” to shut down gas exploration (already perversely shut down in Victoria). The Council wants to frighten householders into swapping their gas cooktops and ducted heating for electrics. To “combat misinformation”, the Media Centre crows of having “trained many Australians on how to speak publicly about their opposition to the gas industry’s expansion, and has briefed journalists to bring them up to speed on the many dangers of gas.”

The Council undercut its crusade against cooktops by admitting in some fine print that the payback period for converting appliances to gas is 12 years in Melbourne, 16 years in Sydney and a vast 19 years in Perth, using high-end appliances. Thus, as a Perth boy, I wouldn’t be financially ahead of the game before 2043.[11] Mind you, it had to admit its health-scare evidence was feeble:

Evidence of negative health impacts [from gas] in Australia is emerging, and while independent research … from here is limited, this is consistent with overseas studies [which themselves are much debunked].”

The Council is also gunning for your petrol car, blameable for “more than 60 per cent of Australia’s transport pollution”. The Council wants to bundle us into electric cars and buses, or mosey along bike lanes and footpaths. While not (yet) advocating coercion, the Council hopes to kill your car by lobbying for ever-tougher Fuel Efficiency Standards.

The Council mini-me’s push its messaging from multiple directions.

♦ The before-mentioned Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA) has 40 emergency workers using their credibility to lobby all levels of government, while “facilitating countless media moments”. The Council actually counted ELCA’s “countless” media mentions, citing 78,000 from the 2019-20 fire season alone. (AR 20, p16). ELCA people might be good at their emergency jobs, but their expertise doesn’t extend to the merits of reconfiguring Australia’s electricity grid and net-zero CO2 by 2035 or 2050. The Emergency Leaders also scamper around the UN’s useless COP conferences parading Australia’s fires and floods survivors as icons for the world media.

♦ Another Council success is its “Cities Power Partnership”, with about 175 councils, shires, cities and capitals signing up to push climate follies onto ratepayers. The Climate Council spends 10 per cent of its budget coaching these green-captured entities, leveraging into 69 per cent of the Australian population. These councils are now replete with “climate emergency declarations” and multiple “Sustainability Officers” on six-figure pay. The Climate Council can readily mobilise 17 local mayors to lament climate’s alleged role in the floods and fires (605 media hits). It has also packaged all ten Hunter Valley shires to spruik anti-emissions on the coalfields.

The Council claims credibility with the media through its supposed accuracy and sciencey output. I had hardly started the Council’s latest annual report before finding this discrepancy (p5): “…the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documented the devastating consequences of accelerated climate change in its Sixth Assessment report, labelling this a ‘code red for humanity’.” It’s fantasy to suggest the 2049-page Sixth Report (Working Group 1) or even the politician-written 33-page Summary   includes or “documents” any reference by scientists to a “code red for humanity”. That lurid phrase was hype from the UN’s secretary-general Antonio Guterres, who was president of the Socialist Internationale from 1999-05. His actual text continued,

The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable… And the decade-old promise to mobilize $[US]100 billion annually to support mitigation and adaptation in developing countries must be met.

Just last month Guterres came up with, “The climate time-bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity.” [12]  An actual climate scientist, Judith Curry, author of about 175 papers on atmospheric variables, condemns such “bumper sticker science” but it’s good enough for the Council to wave at its flock of tame journos.

I smelt another rat on the annual report’s p24: “Heat waves kill more Australians each year than all other extreme weather events combined.” Au contraire! a table in The Lancet estimating Australian deaths from hot weather versus cold weather found cold deaths were 6.5 per cent of mortality vs only 0.5 per ent from heat. That is, cold is 13 times more deadly than heat.[13] Another study put cold at six times deadlier. The Council went on to brag about how it had (mis)educated journalists to link climate to deadly heatwaves, “putting pressure on governments.” The Council won’t tell you that global weather deaths have actually plummeted 99 per cent during the past century’s warming.

I went looking for evidence for the Council’s over-riding message about bad weather being “climate-fuelled”. Even in its “Supercharged Climate” report last year, its “evidence” is just hand-waving about lots of recent weather disasters (Reminder to the Council: weather disasters also happened in the past). In 2011 the IPCC published its rigorous study on weather extremes and CO2. It found so much natural variability in the data that conclusions might not emerge for 20-30 years, ie 2031-41, it said. The CO2 might even be reducing weather extremes, it added.[14]

The IPCC’s latest Working Group 1 report, as distinct from political “Summaries” and the Council’s hype, found human influence on weather as follows: Heatwaves, yes: heavy rain, yes; flooding, no; meteorological/hydrological drought, no; ecological/agricultural drought, yes; tropical cyclones, no; winter storms, no; thunderstorms, no; tornados, no; hail, no; lightning, no; extreme winds, no; fire weather, yes.

Surprisingly, the Climate Council admits some fine print in its mental health report (p31) that “the influence of climate change on a single weather event can be difficult to isolate… climate change’s influence on Australian rainfall variability is more geographically and seasonally complex, and difficult to simulate in both global and regional climate models…”

Like other green spruikers and posturing academics, the Council has beclowned itself with doom-crying about Barrier Reef damage, which it has variously called dire, catastrophic, and irreversible. It forecast bleaching every year from 2044 leading to loss of the Reef and other shallow reefs worldwide. The GBR today is enjoying record coral cover and globally, coral reefs are stable. Other junk is everywhere in Council material, like the Council pretending Australian agriculture is in climate peril.[15]  Can’t they read?

Flannery’s anti-emissions team jetted for 228,510 kilometres last year “necessary to deliver some crucial elements of our strategy”. They squared the circle of virtue by purchasing carbon credits. But … but … only this month the Council lauded a Griffith University boffin for blasting offsets as crooked, dangerous and useless. Obviously, the Council will be swearing off jet travel from now on.

Tony Thomas’  will launch Mark Lawson’s new book, Dark Ages- the looming destruction of the Australian power grid (Connor Court), at Il Gambero restaurant, 166 Lygon Street, Carlton, noon to 2pm on Friday, April 28. The launch talks will be over pasta and wine ($30). To accept, email tthomas061@gmail.com

[1] The advanced turbines now being installed at the Macintyre wind farm, Qld.,  are only 5.7MW each.

• [2] Steffen: “The ultimate drivers of the Anthropocene if they continue unabated through this century, may well threaten the viability of contemporary civilization and perhaps even the future existence of Homo sapiens.”

[3] The Climate Council describes itself as “a beating heart for hope, optimism and enthusiasm”, I assume until the lights flicker out.

[4] Total staff in 2021-22 were 47, an 18% increase in an era of general media stringency.

[5] The Council has never mentioned the UAH satellite temperature data that now show no global warming for eight years and no Australian warming for almost 11 years. That’s a “climate crisis”?

[6] “The Morris Family Foundation supports the work of the Climate Council in Queensland to change the narrative on climate action and get past the polarisation that has hampered climate action for over a decade.”

[7] Apparently mis-listed as “Graeme Woods Foundation.” My emailed query to the foundation went unanswered.

[8] His fortune derived from the DCA health group and other ventures.

[9] Purves:  “I don’t think many Australians realize how significant ‘The Weather Makers’ was globally. It achieved real leverage in the climate change debate.”

[10] The one-day and five-day heatwave trends are little different.

[11] For cheap appliances, the paybacks are 8, 13 and 15 years respectively.

[12] And most laughably of all, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

[13] The large-scale study published in 2015 involved 384 locations in 13 countries. The Australian data was deaths from 1988 to 2009.

[14] “Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain”. P9

[15] Council: “Speak to farmers who can explain or show you firsthand how their farms and livestock – and the food they grow for us – is under threat.” Sure, it’s under threat from the Greens Party but not from climate.

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• rod.stuartThanks for the complrehensive rundown Tony.
  I had no idea of the extent that the mental illness “Delusional Disorder” had invaded this lunatic religion and this bunch of savage idiots in particular. It has been a veritable gold mine for the likes of Flannery. What a pity that that works such as that of van Wijngaarden and Happer is not as widely read as the insane crap emanating from the climate asylum.
  https://co2coalition.org/publications/van-wijngaarden-and-happer-radiative-transfer-paper-for-five-greenhouse-gases-explained/Delusional disorder is a mental illness in which a person has delusions, but with no accompanying prominent hallucinations, thought disorder, mood disorder, or significant flattening of affect.
  Delusions are a specific symptom of psychosis. Delusions can be bizarre or non-bizarre in content; non-bizarre delusions are fixed false beliefs that involve situations that could occur in real life, such as being harmed or poisoned.
  Apart from their delusion or delusions, people with delusional disorder may continue to socialize and function in a normal manner and their behavior does not necessarily generally seem odd. However, the preoccupation with delusional ideas can be disruptive to their overall lives.Log in to Reply
• DougD“The Council even gloats about its success in getting the sort of media coverage it likes: Significantly, journalists are now clearly and easily making these links by themselves, without background briefings or prompting, demonstrating that these ideas have been well socialised and accepted.” Instead of talking about journalists being well socialised, it would be more honest to describe them in the language of penology as being now institutionalised. But honesty and climate catastrophism are mutually exclusive concepts.Log in to Reply
• STJOHNOFGRAFTONI’m a climate denier. For me, that means climate does not exist in reality. Weather exists. It’s a simple concept and is what’s happening now and can be experienced in the here and now via our five senses. You can’t do that with climate because climate is an abstract idea of what might happen in the future or what happened in the past. Weather forecasts aren’t about weather either. They are about prediction based on modelling. Weather is independent of prediction. Weather is what’s happening now. Right now where I am it’s hot and sunny, wheras rain has been predicted for over a week. That’s misinformation based on dumb models, not weather.Log in to Reply