Top Advisor To Australian Gov't Says Climate Change is a UN Conspiracy

An anonymous reader writes: Maurice Newman, the top business advisor to conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, today published an opinion piece (paywalled) in which he claims, "It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models ... have been found ... to be in error." He goes on to write "This is not about facts or logic. It's about a new world order under the control of the UN." While Newman's 'skeptical' views have long been on record, it's unclear when he came to believe in this vast global conspiracy. Last year, the Abbott government removed Australia's Emissions Trading Scheme, and recently gave $4 million in funding to contrarian Bjorn Lomberg, while cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from science across the country.

Comments

Deniers

[msobkow]

Deniers will apparently just claim that "95%" of science is bogus if it disagrees with their pre-determined world view, causing cognitive dissonance.

How much you want to bet this lunatic is also a rabid fundamentalist following some ancient texts?

Re:Deniers

[Yoda222]

We should then ask Englert and Higgs to give back their Nobel price? If I remember correctly, their initial paper did not even proposed a mass for the boson. The firsts experiments later only concluded that its mass, if it exists, was "not below 18 MeV/c. This kind of statement is so inaccurate [18MeV/c to infinity, quite a large uncertainty] that it's not science, by your logic?

Re:Deniers

[cusco]

Take the better models. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Venus. They work. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Mars. They work. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Earth ten million years BCE. They work. Are the models "proven" to be 100% accurate? No, of course not. Are they shown to be accurate with >90% reliability? Yep.

Now take those models and apply them with the variables appropriate to Earth in 100 years with current rates of anthropogenic emissions. The result is something catastrophic for our current model of civilization. Of course the only way to know for sure if the model is 100% accurate is to wait around a century and see if reality deviates noticeably from the model, so I guess we'd best twiddle our thumbs for a few generations.

Re:Deniers

[cryptolemur]

Since all the institutes puslishing their version of the temperature records have published the very specifics of why, how and where they have "manipulated" the records, you could start with those. If you choose instead to follow a newspaper columnist who has been caught making stuff up time oafter time, you're free to do so. Just don't pretend that you try to be objective. After all, the "alleged adjustments" are well understood and written out clearly, from the very beginning of the publishing of the temperature data. There's nothing nefarious going on, quite the contrary. In the offert of making the temperature data consinstent and comparable, that is. Mr. Booker's continous efforts to smear science and scientists, on the other hand, seem at least to me be something else than honest.

Re: Deniers

[ClickOnThis]

Yes. The Earth has recently been shown to not be sphere-shaped (it's more of an oblate spheroid), so if you have data that shows it's actually a sphere that would indeed need a citation.

Strictly speaking, it's not even an oblate spheroid, but very slightly pear-shaped.

For more details, read this excellent essay by Isaac Asimov.

Re:Deniers

[ClickOnThis]

Science does not claim to know the truth, but it is indisputably the best way we have to pursue the truth.

Re:Deniers

[riverat1]

And nowadays, the divergence between climate models and climate is very large after just a decade or two.

You may call the divergence large but it is still within the published uncertainty ranges of the model output. Until temperatures get outside of that range and remain outside of that range it's impossible to say the climate models are wrong.

Re:troll

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a (in my opinion) intriguing difference between what the books of the Bible say, and what is taught about them in fundamentalist churches. The disparity is actually very large. But the fundamentalist tendency to reject the facts, even about their own Bible, is truly amazing.

Here, for example, are some fun, readily-proven, facts about what the Bible says:

The word "Trinity" (a core theological concept to Fundamentalism) does not occur in the Bible ever, in any translation. The verses from which this concept is inferred are both scant and sketchy.

The "Holy Spirit" is a mistranslation of "Holy Breath," and in the Greek texts it is *never* referred-to as a person (the words used can equally well mean "it"). The translation to English of "He" is very dubious.

The word "Lucifer" (another core theological concept) doesn't occur *at all* in most translations of the Bible. It should not; it is a Latin word, which doesn't make sense in an English Bible. The relevant text was written in Hebrew, and is a prophesy about the fall of a clearly-identified human king (this is obvious to anyone who reads the whole chapter rather than two verses taken out of context). The popular English translation of "Morning Star" is particularly interesting, since in the book of Revelations, Jesus directly states "I am the Morning Star." Figure THAT out!

Jesus, being famous (in part) for establishing the doctrine of Hell in Christian theology, never once uttered the word "Hell". Aramaic, the language he spoke, didn't even have such a word. He did spend some time making metaphorical references to the valley of Gehenna, which Jerusalem used as the city dump, and which was later mistranslated as "hell" by very dubious logic.

So, the most foundational and distinguishing characteristics of Christian theology aren't even in the Bible...one must translate it strangely and make strange inferences on top of that to arrive at something sort of like what mainstream Christianity teaches.

This group also loves to insist that the Bible never contradicts itself, despite the fact that it clearly does in numerous places. They have a neat trick for resolving these contradictions....whenever two verses seem to say opposite things, one is "interpreted in the context of the other," such that one verse is seen as not really saying what it plainly says. Once you change what a verse says to what you think it actually means, then the contradiction is resolved. For example:

1 Timothy 4:10 "...we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially those who believe."

It does not say "who only saves believers." It clearly says the opposite....until you change it to resolve a contradiction.

I'll stop now. Flame on.