Articles Tagged "Christopher Pearson"

WHEN historians come to deliver their judgments of the Rudd and Gillard governments, even the most partisan of them will be constrained to acknowledge the series of ironic reversals that brought both leaders undone

In April last year Julia Gillard and her deputy, Wayne Swan, persuaded Kevin Rudd to abandon his commitment to action on climate change. This year a motley collection of independents and Greens persuaded Gillard to break an election promise and commit her government to introducing a carbon tax and, eventually, an emissions trading scheme.

Insofar as Rudd can be said to be a conviction politician, his rhetoric suggests that he believed in human-induced global warming. I think we can take it as read that Gillard and Swan weren't true believers and their argument to him about the need to stop crusading on the issue was entirely based on considerations of realpolitik.

Admittedly the Climategate emails scandal in November 2009 had begun a rapid erosion of public confidence in the supposedly settled science. However, few observers doubt that had Labor called a double dissolution in February or March, when it was still comfortably ahead in the polls, with Tony Abbott only recently installed in the leadership, Rudd would have won comfortably and would in all probability still be prime minister.

Garth Paltridge was a chief research scientist with the CSIRO’s division of atmospheric research before becoming the director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and chief executive of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre. His latest sceptical contribution to the debate on the dangers of carbon dioxide is a book, endearingly titled The Climate Caper.

Paltridge gives a crisp summary of the physics and economics of climate change, but I want to focus here on his account of the new green religion. “Perhaps the most interesting question in all this business is how it can be that the scientific community has become so over-the-top in support of its own propaganda about the seriousness and certainty of upcoming drastic climate change. Scientists after all are supposed to be unbiased in their assessment of a problem and are expected to tell it as it is. Over the centuries they have built up the capital of their reputation on just that supposition. And for the last couple of decades they have put that capital very publicly on the line in support of a cause which, to say the least, is overhung by an enormous amount of doubt. So how is it that the rest of the scientific community, uncomfortable as it is with both the science of global warming and the way its politics is being played, continues to let the reputation of science in general be put at considerable risk because of the way the dangers of climate change are being vastly oversold?”