Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Janet Albrechtsen, Tony Abbott, and the commentariat are the ones to blame ...



(Above: the Queen in Trinidad and Tobago. Oh dear, so kind of her).

Pray, be upstanding and be silent for a message from the Queen. Yes, that includes you, Tony Abbott:

... on this, the eve of the UN Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, the Commonwealth has an opportunity to lead once more. The threat to our environment is not a new concern. But it is now a global challenge which will continue to affect the security and stability of millions for years to come. Many of those affected are among the most vulnerable, and many of the people least well able to withstand the adverse effects of Climate Change live in the Commonwealth.

Please be seated, and go about your normal business. And god save the Queen.

What I most love about the current debate, involving climate change, and revolving around Tony Abbott replacing Malcolm Turnbull, is the newly considered tone of the commentariat columnists doing their duty by god, the Liberal party, the Queen, the country, and the unwashed masses.

Only a day old in the new reign - the king is dead, long live the king - and here's Janet Albrechtsen in Turnbull tolls own death knell:

There are plenty of people who understand that Australia will have to be part of a global agreement on climate change.

But is Albrechtsen amongst those people, or is she a believer that the Copenhagen talks are the start of a world government, an international leftist conspiracy worthy of Nick Minchin? Here she is in October on team Monckton with Beware the UN's Copenhagen plot:

Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty.

Even after Monckton’s speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don’t need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true.


Of course it is dear:

So I read the draft treaty. The word government appears on page 18. Monckton says: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen any transnational treaty referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a government. But it’s the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected government that are so frightening.”

Would you be part of a global climate change agreement if you considered it the hoax of the century? Or the start of a frightening world government?

Here's Albrechtsen in November with Seeing through hoax of the century, doing the usual thing of pretending she's a scientist by quoting the works of sceptics and reviving memories of the Y2K event, as if somehow that was relevant (why not quote the Piltdown hoax, if we're dealing with hoaxes?):

Deja vu? Preparing for the deluge of rising sea levels, we were treated to footage last week from parliamentary question time starring Julia Gillard and her gumboots. Appropriately she was followed on ABC1 by Bananas in Pyjamas. Could man-made climate change turn out to be the greatest hoax of the present century? Certainly, ordinary people are beginning to ask questions.

Like the Y2K 'hoax', natch.

But wait, in a style worthy of the obsessive fear mongering monomaniacal style of Tim Blair, there's more, as in The unreasoning fearmongers:

Those who predict the end of the world, those such as Al Gore who tell us sea levels will rise by six metres in by 2100, those such as Tim Flannery who say it’s now or never, telling us we have about 20 years to act on climate change or else place our future at risk of apocalyptic droughts, floods, war and famine. Here are the fear-mongers.

Because you see Ian Plimer is the cheese-maker, as Albrechtsen celebrated his arrival on the scene some time ago:

There may well be errors in Plimer’s book of 503 pages and 2311 footnotes but to cast his book aside as an unworthy contribution to this debate tells you something about the stifling consensus and what Plimer rightly calls the “demonisation of dissent” on this critical issue ...

Critics have been fast and furious in their reaction to Plimer’s book. Robert Manne said The Australian had made a “grave intellectual, political and moral” mistake by including Plimer in the climate change debate. Michael Ashley, a professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW, described Plimer’s arguments as “nonsense”, “flawed and illogical.” On ABC Lateline Business, journalist Ticky Fullerton suggested he was “a greenhouse heretic”. “Is this scepticism genuine or is it about economic self-interest?” she asked. Funny how journalists fail to ask such questions or employ such overblown language when they interview those who represent the climate change orthodoxy. (original column seems to have disappeared, perhaps Chairman Rupert's first step in quarantining and isolating his digital content, but discussed here).


Funny how Ian Plimer employs such overblown language when debating climate change:

In my book Telling lies for God, there was a section on debate tactics of the creationists. The parallels are uncanny. Just for my own peace of mind, can you please assure me that you are not a young Earth creationist? (here)

Never mind. Because Albrechtsen and the like, within and without the party, is the real problem Tony Abbott will have to deal with, not to mention is own inner duality, when it comes to constructing a dialogue on climate change.

The window for talk of delay until after Copenhagen, a talk feast curiously designed strictly to bolster Chairman Rudd's ego, is very short (only a loon in the very small pond known as the antipodes can scribble such gibberish, but hey, it's our own loon pond, and we're proud of it).

You see, Copenhagen will be over by December 18th, just in time for our war on Xmas.

And at that point, the Liberal party will have to come up with a policy, a policy it has failed to design over the years - well at least ever since it decided that the ETS it designed and took to the electorate in 2007, and then saw snaffled by the Labor party, was no longer a viable policy.

Tony Abbott and his team will have to move from the notion that climate change science is absolute crap, to having a new solution to climate change - in a few short months. Except and unless of course, maybe it's the hoax of the century, a left wing conspiracy, or the first step to world government. And except he doesn't have the first clue as to what a policy to address that perspective might be. How can a schizophrenic sort out his inner conflicting demons? How can you move from absolute crap to a sensible policy solution to an urgent issue?

Perhaps by wearing the kind of bells and ribbons we will tear off our Xmas tree and throw into the street as we try to prosecute our war on Xmas? Glad rags of a kind.

Or perhaps Santa Claus will climb down the chimney and deliver a climate change policy in accord with the Queen's address at CHOGM, urging a stand on climate change, (here), just the sort of challenge we'd expect a devout monarchist like Tony Abbott to take up in a trice (not to mention his love of the talking tampon, bonnie Prince Chuck)?

Well here's the dissembling Abbott:

According to Newspoll and Galaxy, most Australians, while concerned about climate change, are against rushing into an ETS before it's clear what the rest of world is doing after the Copenhagen conference.

The effect of climate change is important, but so is the effect of climate change policy. (here)


Well yes but that rhetorical stance is good for a month. After that you have to have a climate change policy. Will it be to do nothing, or to do a little, or will it involve proposing an impost?

Will it be pie in the sky by and by, because there's nothing to worry about in the hoax of the century, or will it offer a magic pudding, whereby Australia, the largest carbon emitter per capita on the planet, can keep going its merry way without doing a thing?

Albrechtsen spends as good deal of time blaming John Howard, Peter Costello, and Malcolm Turnbull himself for his decline and fall, in what she considers a "Shakespearean-like tragedy, thereby proving she doesn't have a clue about what a Shakespearean-like tragedy might be.

Truth to tell, Albrechtsen and the rest of the commentariat commentators who've happily jugged along with Monckton, Plimer and the like, now have created a profound dilemma for the Liberal party, which is neatly split down the middle between the Minchinites who think climate change is just a hoax and a vast left-wing conspiracy, and those who think there might be something to the science.

Coming up with a solution to that policy impasse was beyond Malcolm Turnbull.

Well good luck with that Tony Abbott, but as each of the sceptics, or lick spittle sceptic fellow travellers, trots up to offer their congratulations - be it Paul Sheehan, Janet Albrechtsen, or Tim Blair - Abbott now has a couple of months to devise a strategy which will embrace both sides of the climate change coin. Talk about a challenge worthy of a schizophrenic.

Yep, good luck with all of that ... you better get a policy son, you're gonna need a real good one ...

I got legs I can walk
All the way down the dirt track
I fell down
I got up
I turned around then
I walked back
I walked to the sea
I stood there, looked for a sign
It took time
But it came
I added up and took
What was mine

Better get a lawyer son
Better get a real good one
Don't drop the soap
Don't smoke no dope
Get yourself a lawyer son
Your gonna need a good one
To getcha outa this one



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