David Penberthy: Scientifically bereft climate denying cultists are a bigger risk to Australia than Extinction Rebellion protesters
People who believe in climate change are better educated than those who don’t, which is why climate denying cultists like to pretend the dreadlocked protesters are the insane ones, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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Here’s a cheery question for a Friday morning: Is the world going to come to an end as a result of climate change?
The world, at least as we know it, would come to an end sooner than would be the case if the more radical prescriptions of Extinction Rebellion were adopted as government policy.
Air travel, motor cars, mining, agriculture, factories — even farting cows — would all be in the crosshairs to ensure the planet reaches net zero emissions by 2025.
But here’s the thing — the world will definitely come to an end if the scientifically bereft views of climate-change sceptics are allowed to dominate or infect public policy.
Over the past week, the rattier members of Extinction Rebellion have created a target-rich environment for those who would ridicule climate-change adherents as a bunch of apocalyptic nut-jobs.
Certainly, one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while is that English bloke who chained himself to a hearse in London and, as the police were trying to untether him and whack him into a paddy wagon, started weeping uncontrollably while holding a photo of his two toddlers, saying he was just trying to save the planet because he loved his kids.
Blokes like this — and agitated youngsters such as the hysterical Greta Thunberg — help create a lazy perception that all this protesting is nothing more than the public workings of an obsessive cult.
It is the other cult that interests me. It is a cult in the true sense of the word, in that it has absolutely nothing to do with science, indeed is openly hostile and derisive towards science.
This cult has everything to do with a gaggle of self-styled iconoclasts cherrypicking or ignoring research to suit its own agenda. That agenda is framed around doing absolutely nothing about the reality of climate change.
And amid the Nutbush dancing in the middle of intersections and the excruciating street theatre at “Die-Ins” in our city malls, I am still left with one question: Who is more ignorant — the bloke dangling from a harness under Brisbane’s Story bridge or the newspaper columnist, conservative politician or self-centred industrialist, who, with no scientific basis at all, would recklessly assert that this whole climate change thing is nonsense?
If you have even a passing interest in and knowledge of mainstream science, you would know that sea levels are rising more than they have been historically, ice is melting faster than it has been, that the oceans are getting warmer.
Yet we have a bunch of people, barely any with a skerrick of scientific training, who arrogantly posture as knowing more than the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and David Attenborough combined.
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It suits them to target the crackpots lying on the streets because the overwhelming majority of people who believe in climate change are smart and well-educated and believe in listening to those who know best.
He might have ended up being a dud prime minister, but Malcolm Turnbull was 100 per cent correct this week when he talked of the corrosive influence of Tony Abbott on environment policy in federal politics this week.
I would throw the Greens into the mix there, too, as we are now approaching the 10-year anniversary of a great failed moment in public policy, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which would have passed if not for the pigheadedness of the Greens in arguing it didn’t go far enough. We could have put a price on carbon; instead, a decade on, we are having the same debilitating arguments.
On Abbott, though, he’s the classic example of the climate change sceptic who brings nothing in the way of standing to the debate. The two greatest influences on his career development were his time in a seminary, a profession of fantasists, and his time as a journo, the chosen career of the dilettante.
And speaking of fantasists, what about his good friend, Cardinal George Pell?
I still recall his side-splitting column in The Sunday Telegraph where Pell, the great empiricist that he is, said he was yet to be convinced of the evidence on climate change. He’s perfectly happy with the Immaculate Conception, though.
The unpleasantness that informs the sceptics was on full display only yesterday with the scorn being directed at the former head of our defence forces, retired Admiral Chris Barrie, who warned in a speech on Wednesday that Australia faces a potentially unmanageable security crisis within the next 30 years because of climate change-induced mass migrations.
He said the melting of the Himalayan glacier, which scientists predict will shrink by at least a third if temperatures rise by 1.5C, would create “a very high risk” that freshwater would not be available for hundreds of millions of people.
By repeating this scientific fact, Barrie was smashed by the usual suspects. It’s absurd because, in a geopolitical sense, you can already see the strategic interests of Australia being affected by our climate change policies in the Pacific region.
The hostile reception our PM Scott Morrison received on his recent meeting with Pacific leaders was fuelled by the perception (and reality) that Australia is not doing enough on climate change.
These Pacific nations have a real dog in the fight on this question, quite simply because some of them will end up underwater. If Australia is seen as not pulling its weight, it loses any moral authority in the region over its greatest strategic competitor, China, which is already using the soft diplomacy of aid to cuddle up to nations such as Vanuatu.
All of these things are intertwined, and require thought, yet it’s easier, I guess, to dismiss someone such as Admiral Barrie as a virtue-signalling try-hard who wants to impress the trendies.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to start lying on roads or dancing the Madison. I just reckon I know where the real crackpots are.
