Steffen: AGW and LIES.
by NCTCS Secretary Anthony Cox
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Montage Image: Dallydom Pix (copyright used with permission) |
Professor Will Steffen is part of the road show which is the
Climate Commission. This is a government funded talk-fest which travels around
telling people that the world is going to end.
It is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury‘s
Something Wicked This Way Comes;
certainly Steffen is ‘dark’ about humanity’s
prospects. Tom Quirk and John
Mclean have both written accounts of evenings spent under the spell of
the Climate Commission. Their accounts make the events sound like revivalist
meetings with doom and gloom being offered unless the ‘snake-oil’ on sale is
taken by the sinning masses.
The Climate Commission reminds me of those men who use to stand on
street corners and prophesise Biblical sourced catastrophes. This is probably
because the AGW concept is very like the Eden myth; a time of natural harmony
until Mankind upsets the applecart by taking knowledge in the form of using
fossil fuels and polluting pristine nature. Steffen and ilk are the equivalent
of stern faced priests issuing repent edicts.
Flannery is Steffen’s fellow spruiker. Flannery is a joke; a joke
at the expense of the Australian public with his failed predictions for which
he gets $180,000 PA, his sponsorship by Panasonic, his
support of dud green
energy projects which have sucked up $90 million of taxpayers’ money, his love
affair with Gaia, whatever that is, his rabbiting
on about sea level rise while maintaining a week-ender by the sea which seems
to have upset the locals and various ‘shock-jocks’ and more predictions
of all sorts of problems for the punters in the Western Suburbs, which is
a long way from the sea and Flannery’s week-ender. (Ed: See also Flannery's Failed Fable - LINK)
In short Flannery is a public nuisance; a very expensive public
nuisance.
Is the fashionably stubbled Steffen any better? He is better
credentialed than Flannery with degrees and a PhD related to AGW. But he is
prone to fanciful notions such as the Anthropocene, which, with
its negative connotations, would seem to contradict the Gaia prophecy Flannery
is fond of making.
Steffen is also fond of
litigating against humanity for its crimes against nature; like
Flannery Steffen appears to approve of the crime of Ecocide, which
Flannery describes as: “the heedless or deliberate destruction of the environment”. This is seriously weird and pretentious.
It is pretentious because it assumes that humanity is powerful
enough to destroy ‘nature’; it is weird because it assumes that since humanity
has interfered with nature that now humanity is responsible for preventing any
further change in nature.
It is also pathological in a misanthropic way which leads to
an assumption that nature would be better off without humanity. I wonder
where Steffen and Flannery stand on that continuum between wanting to litigate
Ecocide against humanity, worship Gaia and wanting humanity to be extinct.
Steffen also shares Flannery’s prognosticatory sleight of hand
skills. But like Flannery, Steffen is also found wanting in terms of what he has
said before. In a recent article Steffen
used the Black Saturday fires in Victoria to illustrate how bad AGW is and how
worse it is going to become. However, as Bolt noted, in an earlier
interview Steffen had stated that the fires and the Victorian drought were not
due to AGW.
This goes beyond wanting to have your cake and eat it too; if this
sort of contradiction were done in a court under oath it would be perjury. Why
isn’t Steffen taken to task for such outrageous contradictions? For the same
reason Flannery isn’t.
In the same article in which Steffen possibly perjured himself
about a connection between extreme weather, bushfires and AGW he also advocates
Sweden as alternative to the fossil fuel economy of Australia.
This comparison with Sweden is not in the ‘out and out-lying’
category as the fire connection is but it neatly showcases a couple of other
forms of lying which we have come to expect from the advocates of AGW.
In his panegyric about Sweden Steffen asserts that Australia can,
like Sweden, rely on renewable energy to transition away from fossil energy.
Steffen neglects to mention that Sweden has only been able to do this by
investing heavily in Nuclear and Hydro energy, 2 forms of non-fossil fuel which
the Greens are steadfastly opposed to, as
Professor Davidson points out.
This is lying by omission.
Professor
Davidson notes other truth discrepancies in Steffen’s comparison with
Sweden; for instance Steffen notes that Sweden has economically outperformed
the G7 nations and that Australia should again follow in Sweden’s example. This
lie is the lie of cherry-picking, a mainstay of AGW science; cherry-picking is
where you pick data which supports your position while ignoring relevant data
which doesn’t. The relevant data which Steffen ignores here is that while
Sweden outperformed the G7 nations, most of which are basket-cases, Australia
outperformed Sweden by some margin. Why would Australia want to emulate a
nation which is doing worse than us?
Professor
Davidson continues by looking at Steffen’s dismissal of the “myth” that:
taking vigorous action on climate change will damage or slow the economy. Quite the opposite seems to be the case.
In fact the evidence is at best neutral for Steffen’s dismissal and,
when other nations are looked at, adverse. Spain for example, more than any
other nation in Europe, has invested in typical green energy such as wind and
solar; Spain’s CO2 emissions have remained steady but it is now the economic
pauper of Europe with 24%
unemployment and all the other attendant economic woes.
This form of lie is the ½ truth or in pure political terms, spin.
Steffen is a propagandist, an alarmist who is prepared to tell
lies and exaggerate to promote his theology. This is the basis of the AGW
message; all the leading exponents of AGW do it; Kofi Annan, Nobel
prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, the grand-daddy of AGW scientists,
Hansen with his invocation
of Venus on Earth as the inevitable result of AGW; and who
can forget Hansen’s
little ‘trick’ when he gave his 1988 speech to members of congress about
warming when the air conditioner wasn’t working; perhaps
Hansen was already aware of research which shows that people
believe AGW when it is warm and don’t when it is not.
The template for exaggerating and lying by the AGW believers was
described by the late Professor Steven Schneider:
On the one hand, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but...which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs, and buts."On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.
We know that this is done automatically by AGW scientists because the
emails have revealed the lacuna between what these scientists say publically and what they say
privately.
To say one thing publically and another privately is hypocrisy;
hypocrisy is another form of lying.
Steffen doesn’t feature prominently in the email exchanges but he is mentioned in dispatches and
from early in the piece.
Steffen is part of the AGW furniture; he does “scary scenarios”,
contradicts himself and assiduously promotes the AGW narrative. People forget
that this narrative has been adjudicated upon, in a real court, unlike the
pretend court Steffen has played in. That court was the English High Court where
Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth was taken to hearing by an irate parent. The court’s
findings were remarkable. By agreement the parties assumed AGW was real and
narrowed the litigation to whether the consequences of AGW, as depicted in
Gore’s film were real.
The court found that all 11 core consequences of AGW claimed by Gore to
exist were either
exaggerated or unrelated to AGW. In short the film was largely based on lies.
AGW is an issue which is based on exaggerations, hypocrisy,
scare-mongering, failed predictions, in short lying. To a lesser or greater
extent all its leading exponents use these tactics to promote the cause.
Steffen is one of those leading exponents.
Thank you for publishing Tony Cox’s excellent article re Steffen being a leading CAGW propagandist.
ReplyDeleteSteffen honed his skills at the behest of Dr Simon Niemeyer in an infamous so-called "Deliberative Forum" conducted at ANU at the end of May 2010.
In this so-called forum Steffen was the principal proponent of deceitful fabrications about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Steffen's Goebbels-like presentation, in which he told huge lies designed to scare the audience and have them succumb to fear of the consequences of CAGW, so infuriated one savvy participant that he left after one day of the lies and hitch hiked back home.
This was a blatant use of the Delphi technique in which Niemeyer as Master of Ceremonies manipulated the programme to see how effective it might be in turning everyday Australians away from logic and towards unfounded fear.
The Deliberative Forum was straight out of George Orwell’s “1984”.
There is little doubt that the modus operandi employed by the Climate Commission was based on the Deliberative Forum.
As Orwell wrote in that book “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
The person who left the Deliberative Forum was an Orwellian revolutionary.
I look forward with relish to the day that Steffen is hauled before a Royal Commission and cross-examined on his failure to behave in ways that we expect of ethical scientists.