Penny Whetton was once Peter and a nob catastropharian at the error-prone IPCC, where his shtick was global calamity. Now that she is on the gay-marriage bandwagon, the national broadcaster came calling to bolster its pro-SSM coverage with the view of a Stockholm laureate. He wasn’t and she isn’t
About climate change, the ABC displays pitiful ignorance. Holding its tax-fed reporters and producers to account is about as productive as chiding toddlers for wet nappies.
Still, someone needs to supply some elementary instruction and it might as well be me, although I was planning to wash to dog this morning.
Through yesterday (Sunday) the ABC news site was burbling about Melbourne climate scientist Penny Whetton as a “Nobel Prize winner” a la Albert Einstein and our locals such as Macfarlane Burnett, Peter Doherty and Brian Schmidt.[1] [2]
The story was actually focused on Whetton’s legal same-sex marriage to Greens federal senator Janet Rice. When they married 31 years ago, Whetton was the male and the couple now have two adult sons. Whetton transitioned to female, while two females continued in what they say is their loving and legal marriage. All well and gender-good, albeit a tad confusing.
On the flagship 7pm TV news last night, reporter Elias Clure (should that be “Clureless”?) intoned, “Senator Rice and Miss Whetton, a Nobel Prize recipient, are one of the few same sex couples in a legally binding marriage…”
The ABC film crew then cut to a certificate on the couple’s wall, with a replica of the official Nobel picture and screed. The clip moved to a close-up to show the text reading, “Presented to PENNY WHETTON for contributing to the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE for 2007 to the IPCC.”[3]
The certificate is signed by the IPCC’s then-chair (2002-15), the porn-novel author and alleged (very) dirty old man Rajendra Pachauri. Now 77, he resigned abruptly in February, 2015, when accused by a 29-year-old female subordinate of an 18-month sexual harassment onslaught.[4] The Whetton certificate is counter-signed by the IPCC’s then-secretary, Ms Renate Christ. It’s a rare example of the ABC taking Christ’s words seriously.
The Peace Prize also has been awarded to the corrupt and murderous late billionaire Yasser Arafat (1994)[5] and the tottering and terror-traumatised European Union (2012)[6].
The Peace Prize in 2007 went jointly to electricity-guzzling CO2 hypocrite Al Gore[7] and the IPCC itself for pumping out fake climate-catastrophe warnings (the IPCC’s climate models continue to over-forecast actual warming by two to three times).
IPCC Chair Pachauri wrote on October 16, 2007, to the hundreds of lead authors of the IPCC’s 2007 report saying that they could all now call themselves Nobel laureates:
“I have been stunned in a pleasant way with the news of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for the IPCC. This makes each of you Nobel Laureates and it is my privilege to acknowledge this honour on your behalf.”
Among the patsies who fell for Pachauri’s hype were our own CSIRO and Monash University, neither of which thought to check Pachauri’s claim with the Nobel secretariat in Oslo. Deakin Univerisity’s vice-chancellor, Jane den Hollander, awarded Nobel Prize status to Pachauri himself. Penny Whetton, then leading the CSIRO’s Climate Change Impact and Risks group, joined the 2007 self-congratulation at the Nobel for herself and her colleagues.[8]
Pachauri hot-footed to the local Snap-Print and ran off personalized Nobel certificates for posting to thousands of contributors to the IPCC since its foundation in 1988, including reviewers, panelists, technical geeks and bureaucrats. For what it’s worth, a Jewish historical society has estimated Australia’s 2007 “Nobellists” alone at 100 to 200 climate careerists.
These certificates have the unimpeachable authenticity of a Zimbabwean 100 billion dollar note, or of the incessant forecasts since 1988 of an ice-free Arctic (current sea ice extent: about 8 million square kilometres).
The epitome of such pomposity is world-leading climate alarmist Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, who in an affidavit accused his detractors of the brand-new crime of “personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient.”[9]
Certificate recipients include those, I suppose, who fantasised in the Fourth Report (2007) that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2035 and leave billions on the Subcontinent bereft of fresh water.[10] A top member of the IPCC cabal, Kevin Trenberth, emailed his pals that Christmas: “Season’s greetings to all my fellow Nobel Laureates, even if we did not get to go to Oslo.”[11]
This posturing about “Nobels” got so all-pervasive that someone (I assume the Nobel’s secretariat in Oslo) read the riot act to the IPCC. This forced the IPCC in October 2012 to tell its Nobel-winning myriads to back-off:
“The prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner.” (My emphasis).
Understandably, this IPCC missive was not signed by Pachauri, who had falsely lent his authority to the original fake-Nobel proliferation. The IPCC has also warned,
“No individual, no matter what their involvement with the IPCC, can pass themselves off an a Nobel Laureate. Not even Dr Rajendra Pachauri is an individual laureate.”[12]
No wonder Oslo was worried. If pseudo-scientists on the IPCC could claim Nobel Laureate status because the IPCC got the Peace Prize, then every one of the 500 million citizens of the European Union is also a Nobel laureates (via the EU’s 2012 Peace Prize).
I have previously urged the IPCC to issue a recall notice for its Nobel certificates, as these bits of paper continue to befuddle the media innocents at the ABC and elsewhere. Penny Whetton could replace the blank spot on her wall with an equivalent poster, say, of mermaids frolicking with dolphins in a coral wonderland.
Tony Thomas won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his book of Quadrant essays last year, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print. Purchase it here.
[1] Through a stealth edit, the news item today now calls Whetton “a renowned climatologist”.
[2] SBS also treats Whetton as a Nobel laureate
[3] IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
[4] New Delhi police ever since have been trying to get him into court to answer their charges of molestation, stalking, sexual harassment and criminal intimidation. If convicted, he could spend seven years in jail.
[5] Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize parchment is now held by Hamas gunmen, who grabbed it when looting his house a decade ago.
[6] The EU’s prize was “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. Europe is such a peaceful place these days, just ask any culturally enriched London train passenger. In the case of Australia, the measures mentioned are inducing world-topping electricity prices and the odd blackout.
[7] The swimming pool at one of Gore’ mansions consumes as much electricity for heating as six normal houses in total.
[8] The eight “Nobellists” celebrated by the CSIRO on October 16, 2007 were Penny Whetton, Kevin Hennessy, Roger Jones, Ian Watterson, Barrie Pittock, Bryson Bates, Nathan Bindoff, and Mark Howden.
[9] Mann’s “Hockey Stick” paleoclimate study of 1999 was adopted by the IPCC in 2001 as its landmark justification that current warming is unprecedented in 1000 years, but thereafter became one of the most debunked studies in climate history. Two decades later Mann is still fighting court orders to disclose his underlying data.
[10] This furphy, based purely on a magazine’s scuttle-butt, passed through all IPCC review processes and later led to nine “erratas”, even conceding dud arithmetic.
[11] Trenberth wrote the all-time classic Climategate email:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
[12] The Punch (5 February, 2010)
