Piers Akerman: Press Council adjudication against Plimer article does not mean he was wrong
The Australian Press Council’s recent ruling against an article by eminent author and Emeritus Professor Ian Plimer embraced global warming insanity instead of exploring the accuracy of his claims, writes Piers Akerman.
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The Australian Press Council is a woke joke. Two years ago, after 12 months of wrangling, the APC managed to oust GetUp! then-deputy chairman Carla McGrath from the council because of her clear and obvious conflict of interest.
McGrath is now the chairman of the noxious protest group.
When she was removed in August 2018, the council issued a statement that said: “As McGrath chose not to resign either from the Press Council or as an officer of GetUp!, the council further resolved to take steps in accordance with its constitution to remove her as a public member.”
The APC chairman Neville Stevens, who defended McGrath to the end, said it was a difficult decision, especially as McGrath was a respected member of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. Stevens should have resigned too.
Diversity isn’t about race — it’s about experience and character.
McGrath’s thinking was in line with the majority of the council and unfortunately remains so — as demonstrated by a recent adjudication against The Australian newspaper concerning an opinion piece by the eminent author and Emeritus Professor Ian Plimer that was published last November.
Plimer wrote there that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims”.
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The article also referred to “fraudulent changing of past weather records” and “unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting”, as well as “the ignoring of data that shows Pacific Islands and the Maldives are growing rather than being inundated”.
Rather than explore the accuracy of these statements, the council chose to embrace global warmist insanity and find that the Bureau of Meteorology had not changed weather records and that the word “unsubstantiated” should not have been used to describe the claims that polar ice is melting.
In fact, the BoM deleted what was long regarded as the hottest day recorded in Australia — Bourke’s 125°F (51.7°C) on January 3, 1909, and falsely claimed this was likely to have been some sort of “observational error”, as no other official weather stations recorded high temperatures on that day.
However, that indefatigable seeker of the truth, Liberal MP Craig Kelly, scoured through records at the Australian National Archive and found the log for the weather station at Brewarrina, the nearest official weather station to Bourke, and confirmed that a temperature of 50.6°C (123°F) was recorded at Brewarrina for Sunday, January 3, 1909, totally contradicting the BoM’s claim.
Plimer’s principal argument, however, was that trace gases do not drive climate change — and merely asserting he’s wrong is not to disprove him.
One of the scientists relied on to criticise Plimer even concedes that when it comes to seeing both rising temperatures and rising concentrations of carbon dioxide that “correlation doesn’t prove that one causes the other”.
NASA data suggests atmospheric carbon dioxide content was higher than at present when four of the past ice ages started.
As for the much-touted view that Pacific Islands are being drowned by rising oceans, even the ABC’s fact checkers have admitted this is wrong.
And, finally, in relation to polar ice, Plimer’s opinion is supported by other experts such as Dr Ronan Connolly and his father, Dr Michael Connolly, who have concluded that after recalibrating the pre-satellite data, it now transpires that Arctic sea ice has alternated between periods of retreat and growth. The satellite record coincidentally began at the end of one of the sea ice growth periods. This has led to people mistakenly thinking the post-1978 sea ice retreat is unusual.
Plimer’s opinion that there are “unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting” is supported by evidence — and that means the APC adjudication is absurdly wrong and misleading and should be withdrawn.
Greta Thunberg, the unchallenged teenage leader of the global insanity and heroine of the radical Extinction Rebellion and schoolyard tantrums, famously tearfully choked out the cry: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
She might have been talking about the APC’s approach to real journalism.