State Of Fear

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ONLY YESTERDAY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/global-warming/the-climate-change-smokescreen/2008/08/01/1217097533885.html?page=3

When the tobacco industry was feeling the heat from scientists who showed smoking caused cancer, it took decisive action, engaging in a decades-long public relations campaign to undermine the medical research and discredit the scientists.

The aim was not to prove tobacco harmless but to cast doubt on the science. In the space provided by doubt, billions of dollars in sales could continue. Delay and doubt were crucial products of its PR campaign...

here are at least three other reasons the oil companies' PR campaign has had success for climate change deniers. First, the implications of the science are frightening. Shifting to renewable energy will be costly and disruptive. Second, doubt is an easy product to sell. Climate denial tells us what we all secretly want to hear. Third, science is portrayed as political orthodoxy rather than objective knowledge, a curiously postmodern argument.

The tide slowly turned on tobacco denial and the science finally was accepted. Some people still choose to smoke and some pay a price for it.

But climate is different. There are no "smoke-free areas" on the planet. Climate denial may turn out to be the world's most deadly PR campaign.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/global-warming/despite-sceptics-noise-scientific-consensus-is-growing/2008/08/01/1217097533889.html

Anyone keeping up with current affairs could be forgiven for thinking scientists are riven with doubt over climate change. Climate sceptics have enjoyed a resurgence as the federal Coalition danced around the introduction of carbon trading and heavy-polluting industries began an intensive lobbying effort to convince the Federal Government of their special needs.

The Page Research Centre, a think tank associated with the Nationals, last week hosted a forum that concluded that the science behind global warming was shaky. Backbench MPs in both major parties have reportedly questioned the science on which the Federal Government's recent green paper is based.

The noise has been loudest on the internet, where websites give voice to people who believe scientists are suppressing evidence to protect their careers.

Unfortunately for the sceptics, and for everyone else, the evidence for human-induced climate change is stronger than ever. Scientists the Herald spoke to were candid in their assessment that there was little room for doubt that global warming is happening and that the only changes in the past few months have been political changes.

"It looks as though the population believes climate change is serious and there seems to be momentum behind the issue, and there are some people who don't like that," says Chris Mitchell, head of the CSIRO's Climate, Weather and Ocean Prediction group. "There are still plenty of creationists around, and there are people who believe tobacco is not linked to serious health effects, and so there are still people who choose to ignore or doubt the amount of evidence for climate change."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24115370-11949,00.html

EXPENSIVE strategies to cut greenhouse emissions, such as Australia's proposed trading scheme, will do practically nothing to reduce the impact of climate change, and the money would be better used to address malnutrition, disease and the rights of women in developing countries, according to a review by leading economists.

The Copenhagen Consensus Centre co-ordinated by Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg has ranked the pursuit of deep cuts in emissions by countries such as Australia and Europe as one of the least-effective ways of advancing global welfare.

The findings contradict the analysis by Ross Garnaut and Nicholas Stern, who argue that the high cost of mitigating greenhouse gases now is much less than the risk of inaction on climate change.

In prioritising how best to spend $75billion over the next four years to deliver the greatest good to mankind, a panel of eight economists, including five Nobel laureates, did not feature any climate change spending among their 13 priority projects.

The highest priority was to supplement the diet of children in developing countries with vitamin A and zinc, followed by a successful negotiation of the stalled Doha Round of trade talks, which would deliver between $6-$8trillion a year by 2100.



If in the heart of darkness, if in encroaching pain, if he had longed so often for another solution, for peace, calm, happiness, days when everything worked and he wasn't wracked with a sense of ruin. It was all over so quickly. The human wrecks were propped up in their hospital beds, and he was only a heart beat away from them, fighting impending ill health, heart attacks. Indeed his heart raced and he held his breath, and he knew it was all over, all was lost. This was his head, manufacturing doom laden scenarios like a hyper-efficient, whirling machine.

But was all lost? Was the sad parade of lost friends that populated his dreams really fair and reasonable, really the truth? The sun came up and Sydney, with its cold clear winter days, cycled through another day, the harbour festooned with glistening portholes, little frames to God, to universe, to a universal consciousness. He was a mere mortal, but always the infinite had played through his soul, always he was ready for a greater battle. Festoned with entities? Beneath the chaos was a decent soul, just another person struggling to get through the day. All would be lost, in that colourful head, when they stopped brathing and his career came to an end.

When the soldier said: it's time sir, and opened the tent door. The desert outside had alwyas been there, part of his internal landscape. The beauty of the sand dunes, ravishing as they were in the cool desert mornings, was enough to justify his many travels. If only he had someone to share these insights with, these appalling beauties. But there was no one. He hadn't re-partnered, out of the chaos and the sickenss of so many past relationships, so much animal lust.

He was being called to greater things. The ideas churned through his brain unbidden. He wanted to be brave. He wanted to leave a legacy, a story line someone else of his sensitivies could understand. Thinking in pictures. There were so few of them. When they met and realised they thought alike; that was an astonishing blessing. He hadn't even realised for years that most people didn't think in pictures, and couldn't imagine the empty halls, the strings of thoughts, mere words, that occupied most people's thinking processes.

All the time, as he sat there listening to other people's stories, fragments of his own came crowding in. The crashed car, almost crumpled in half, completely upside down. Those little Mazda bubble cars he could never look at again without horror. His daughter hanging upside down from her child's seat crying. No sign of their son, not one. Upside down and disoriented, the doors useless, crushed, for a moment they couldn't even work out how to get out of the car. Son gone. Crushed under the car. That's what they thought, their bodies wracked in withdrawal, the only reason they had been on this muddy remote country road in the first place.

He crawled out through the back seat, desperately worried, about to find the body of his three-year-old son crushed under the car. And there, the nicest sight he had ever seen in his life, was his gorgeous little boy two hundred yards further down the road, crying, blood streaming from his head. How he had escaped the wreckage he would never know. It was as if God had reached down and said: it's not your time, not yet. And he ran towards him, down that desert road, and hugged him desperately, wiping the blood that was streaming from his forehead.

And amazingly enough, they all lived to tell the tale. And he thought of this, as he listened to tales of other people's minor obsessions. And shuddered. He knew how close death really was.



http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/757/39129

In climate change discussions, trolls are a plague, and not just on the Internet. Arguably one of the world’s worst climate trolls is international media baron Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of Foxtel, the Australian, and major newspapers in all Australian state capitals.

“What’s this?”, you say. “Didn’t Murdoch go green a while back?”

The story is well known: in July 2006, Murdoch gathered executives and journalists of his News Corporation at a retreat in California and had former US vice-president Al Gore show them his film An Inconvenient Truth. Since then, Newscorp organs in most countries have provided cautious, mainstream reporting and commentary on climate change issues.

But not in Australia, and certainly not in the pages of the Australian. After Murdoch’s conversion, Clive Hamilton remarks in his 2007 book Scorcher, the Australian remained “virtually alone among major newspapers around the world in maintaining its denialist stance on climate change”.

By 2007, Hamilton observes, the Australian had: “… run a virulently anti-greenhouse line for years, especially after Chris Mitchell took over as editor-in-chief in 2002. Mitchell was notorious among environmentalists in Queensland for his fanatical anti-green views while editor of the Courier-Mail, the Murdoch paper that monopolises Brisbane.”

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23965902-421,00.html

AUSTRALIA would be the world's biggest loser if it signed up to international trading of carbon permits under a Kyoto-based system of targets and timetables, according to new economic modelling released yesterday.

Research by Australian National University economist Warwick McKibbin pre-empts the Garnaut review's draft advice to the Rudd Government expected to favour international trade in permits as a crucial tool to help manage the impact of reducing greenhouse emissions.

Ross Garnaut has been a strong advocate for Australia opening up its proposed emissions trading scheme to other countries so it can access cheaper permits from developing countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

However, the new modelling by Professor McKibbin, a Reserve Bank board director, predicts Australia would suffer significantly greater economic losses than other countries under this approach because of the detrimental impact on carbon-intense exports.

The research claims the losses would come from actions taken by Australia's big trading partners, who would cut imports, irrespective of the domestic price of greenhouse permits.

Professor McKibbin said the European emissions trading model was still under review, had not taken off globally and linking to it meant Australia would just import the highest carbon prices in the world.

"We end up with much bigger losses from the effects of other people's polices on our exports than the losses from putting a carbon price on our domestic economy," Professor McKibbin told The Australian. "A global system of arbitrary caps could force some of these economies to contract significantly, and that will hurt our economy, for no gain.

"If the world went to cap and trade, I think Australia would be much worse off than if we had each country running a national system with a common price."

http://www.worldontheweb.com/2008/07/31/cool-it-on-global-warming-and-anti-global-warming/

Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, author of Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, says that we all need to think a little more dispassionately about climate change.

We should take action on climate change, but we need to be realistic. The U.K has arguably engaged in the most aggressive rhetoric about climate change. Since the Labour government promised in 1997 to cut emissions by a further 15 percent by 2010, emissions have increased 3 percent. American emissions during the Clinton/Gore administration increased 28 percent.

And he reminds us of some other inconvenient truths, like how sea levels have risen a foot in the last century, but that didn’t seem to ruin too many days at the beach, and how rising sea levels in the future won’t bring calamity. Or how the use of fossil fuels to grow more vegetables has increased nutrition and thus decreased cancer rates. He offers a few more counterintuitive insights, but I suggest his books for a broader and more balanced approach to the issue.