Roll up, roll up for the battle of the bandwagons, flip-flopping soon in a town near you

AND when Tim Flannery's sorted climate change, let's make him the commissioner for whaling.

Tim Flannery on ABC's Lateline on Thursday:

These sceptics, some of them, have actually been travelling in kind of bandwagons around the Australian countryside convincing people that climate science is fraudulent.

Tony Jones: Will you be travelling in a bandwagon to the same locations trying to convince people that those sceptics got it wrong?

Flannery: We're definitely going to be visiting regions and we are going to be engaging with people.

Flannery sceptic Clive Hamilton in Crikey, February 5, 2009:

Flannery has been flip-flopping on solutions to climate change since The Weather Makers appeared in December 2005. The effect of Flannery's frequent contradictory public interventions on climate change has been to confuse those who look to him for guidance.

Tim's Good Food Guide. The Future Eaters (2002):

If it is possible to harvest for example, 10 mountain pygmy-possums (Burramys parvus) or 10 southern right whales (Balaena glacialis) per year, why should we not do it? Is it more moral to kill and consume a whale, without cost to the environment, than to live as a vegetarian in Australia, destroying seven kilograms of irreplaceable soil, for each kilogram of bread?

The Daily Telegraph, January 2, 2008:

"In terms of sustainability, you can't be sure that the Japanese whaling is entirely unsustainable," Professor Flannery told The Daily Telegraph. "It's hard to imagine that the whaling would lead to a new decline in population."

Uh-oh . . . ABC Radio AM yesterday:

Tony Eastley: Australia's human rights record is about to come under international scrutiny. The ABC has learned the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights intends visiting Australia to raise a number of issues which include the treatment of refugees and indigenous Australians.

No show . . . AFP, December 6, 2010:

An exiled Chinese dissident representing Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo's family criticised the UN rights chief for declining to attend a ceremony for the laureate, charging she was bowing to pressure from Beijing. Yang Jianli harshly criticised United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay's decision not to attend Friday's award ceremony in Oslo, hinting she and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon should resign if they did not dare stand up to the Chinese regime.

Pillay's office in Geneva insisted she could not attend the award ceremony because of a clash with another event for World Human Rights Day. "Reject is the wrong word. She is hosting a major event here," Pillay's spokesman, Rupert Colville, told AFP.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Elizabeth Farrelly in The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday:

Dr Vandana Shiva, physicist, philosopher, activist and winner of last year's Sydney Peace Prize, links more than 200,000 Indian farmer suicides to Monsanto's introduction of GM cottonseed in the early 1990s. With 90 per cent of India's cotton now transgenic, it is a phenomenon that campaigners, including the Prince of Wales, have branded the "GM genocide".

The Guardian newspaper on November 5, 2008:

Suicides among Indian farmers have not increased as a result of the introduction of GM crops, according to a large scientific study. The new analysis suggests that, if anything, suicides among farmers have been decreasing since the introduction of GM cotton by Monsanto in 2002. "It is not only inaccurate, but simply wrong to blame the use of Bt cotton as the primary cause of farmer suicides in India," said the report from the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC. . . . It also found that the adoption of pest-resistant Bt cotton varieties had led to massive increases in yield and a 40 per cent decrease in pesticide use.