Green Affected Bandwagon fully loaded
| 17 November 2009
I'm sure it's not the fact that the world hasn't actually warmed since 2001 that's making so many people tell pollsters they now think this new warming faith is a scam.
No, I suspect that what's really turning people off are the characters who have scrambled on to this colossal green bandwagon. Thousands of alarmists, cranks, totalitarians, carpetbaggers, hypocrites and salvation seekers are now wailing that we're doomed, unless you pray to Gaia and hand over a little something. Like your savings.
And, boy, haven't you seen a lot of such folk bob up in these last weeks before next month's United Nations Copenhagen summit on global warming - the summit the European Union says is our "last chance" to save the world.
Alert and alarmed readers have over the past two weeks scoured news items to submit the names of the most unbelievable of all these bandwagon warmists - the ones who have done best to make us doubt their cause most.
With pleasure I've gone through these dozens of nominations, and can today name the winners of November's "Alarmist of the month" awards.
Alarmist of the month (overall champion)
Step forward Tim Flannery - again - thanks to a last-minute entry from Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.
Wong this week named Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, head of her latest scare-'em-stupid front - the Coast and Climate Change Council, which newspapers told us would be "protecting Australia's much-loved coastline from climate change".
How did he get this job? Well, it surely can't be because he's an expert in coastal geography, oceanography, urban planning, government or even climatology.
He's actually a mammal expert, but this author of The Future Eaters has one qualification that cannot be questioned: he's the country's leading global warming scaremonger.
For instance, he's warned that thanks to global warming Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide could all be out of drinking water by ... last summer, if not a year or two earlier.
So Flannery's first report as our new coast watcher should be a corker, demanding as a bare minimum the evacuation of our coastal cities.
After all, Flannery has warned that "there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis" because of warming, and that an "eight-storey building by a beach" could have "waves lapping its roof".
Hypocrite of the month
Professor Clive Hamilton, now the Greens' candidate for the Victorian seat vacated by former Treasurer Peter Costello, wins for blind persistence. Observe.
Hamilton complains: "The Right has jettisoned science in favour of deeper beliefs."
But this same Hamilton preaches: "So I think where we're going is to begin to see a Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi, which will transform our attitudes to it away from an instrumentalist one, towards an attitude of greater reverence."
Again. Hamilton complains: "Climate change is the most important arena for the long-running culture war of the neo-conservatives. In pursuit of their goals they have tapped into primitive fears."
But this same Hamilton preaches: "I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor."
This week he showed what he meant, claiming if "climate deniers" won, then "hundreds of millions of mostly impoverished people ... would die".
This made these "deniers" - he named me - not just "more dangerous" than Holocaust deniers, but over time "more iniquitous" and "morally worse".
If fact, he threatens a "suspension of democratic processes" to deal with such opposition. So give that man the prize ... while we're still allowed.
Authoritarian of the month
Wrong! Not Hamilton, but the Queensland Government, which last week became the first state to make it a crime to sell your house without first doing a great green audit of its global warming gassiness.
Home owners will now be fined by carbon cops if they put their house on the market without filling out a form to calculate its energy and water efficiency.
Here's just one of the 56 questions they must answer: "Approximate kg of greenhouse gas emissions from annual household electricity use = A x 1.045."
Scare-monger of the month Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, for claiming global warming will wipe out farming by heating the southern states to the temperature of, say, Queensland, which as you know is now barren.
"You know what will destroy agriculture?" she snapped.
"If we allow climate change to continue unabated ... 97 per cent reduction in agriculture by the year 2100 or thereabouts."
The temperature last century rose (mostly naturally) by 0.7 degrees. Are people now eating more or less?
Carpetbagger of the month
The United Nations wins by billions.
It's asking Australia to sign a treaty in Copenhagen next month that in its draft commits all rich countries to pay 0.7 per cent of their GDP each year - which for Australia means handing over $7 billion a year as our "carbon debt".
This is cash that the UN, infamous for its oil-for-food corruption scandal, will pass on to countries such as China, minus handling fees, to help them cope with global warming. Or something.
What makes this demand so brazen is that the UN has repeatedly asked for this same 0.7 per cent of our wealth - but each time with a different excuse.
In 1970, the UN called on rich countries such as Australia to give
0.7 per cent of their wealth to the Third World - minus those handling fees- to ensure "human dignity".
In 2002, it called on rich countries such as Australia to hand over that
0.7 per cent for "development" and to "protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth's ecosystem".
In 2004, the UN called on us to pay that 0.7 per cent to ensure "collective security" and a "more secure world".
IN 2005, the UN told us to hand over that 0.7 per cent to ensure "millennium development goals" and fight poverty.
No go again. So the UN is going for broke at Copenhagen, demanding once more that 0.7 per cent from us, but this time to prevent "serious adverse effects of climate change". To save the world.
And this time your Prime Minister says we'll pay a "fair share". It worked!
Crank of the month
A three-way tie, in this always crowded category.
This month we have Britain's Waste and Resources Action Programme, which said we must fight global warming by renting clothes, not buying these planet killers.
Joining it are the three Australians of the Climate Justice Fast who have twice featured on the ABC's AM program for threatening to starve themselves if the world didn't hand over $160 billion at Copenhagen to "stop" climate change.
Add to them sculptor Antony Gormley, the 1994 Turner Prize winner, who this week advised: "Dispense with your socks ... This is a time of global warming. Through our feet we can begin to feel it."
So there are the winners for November, and ... stop! Oh, no! I've misread my calendar. There's still two weeks of the month to go.
How time flies when you're wading through a padded room of hysterics.
And how your patience with all that screaming, demanding, begging and crying booga-booga dries up like a puddle in just another old-fashioned Australian heatwave.
Oops, did I say heatwave? Dear God, there they go again.
