Lying : the preferred denier behavior

Written By: - Date published: 3:45 pm, September 22nd, 2019 - 26 comments
Categories: australian politics, climate change, Donald Trump, Environment, International, politicans, science - Tags: , , , , , ,

In a striking example of the typical climate change denier, the “Australian Young Coal Coalition” released a photo bemoaning the mess left by friday’s climate change strike rally in Hyde Park. Pity that it was a lying fake.

Being put out by climate change deniers, of course it was just a lie. That is all they ever do.

They re-shared a photo of the mess left behind by a impromptu hemp meeting back in April (looks like you don’t clean up if you are stoned). That in itself had already known have been attributed incorrectly to a previous climate change protest.

Not only do deniers lie, but this exercise demonstrates their other three characteristics – they are stupid, not very creative, and act more like parrots than intelligent beings.

From reddit – photo on left up by ‘AYCC’, one on the right is the Royal Parks pointing out the previous fakery

But consider the other bits of implicit lying that went on. The tiny wee coal coalition, started in 2015 and consisting of a facebook page just happen to have the initials of “AYCC”.  Just like the vastly larger and actually popular Australian Youth Climate Coalition who have been been campaigning since 2009, most recently against the Adani coal mine and the fracking in Northern Territories. At a educated guess, somewhere I’d say there was a coal industry coal PR person involved in the formation of this ‘youth coal coalition’ facebook page.

But this kind of clumsy lying isn’t just amongst the 30 something pseudo-kids in the PR industry. It is all the way through the denier industry from the heads of state like Donald Trump or Scott Morrison to the deluded trolls that have been trying to argue about it here for the last 12 years. They are all of a piece. Too dumb to bother to learn the basic science, too corrupt and immoral refuse the money of the carbon industry, and acting like parrots on speed repeating their obviously fake lines.

For instance this amusing piece at common dreams takes a shot at analysing just how many factual errors Donald Trump makes.

“They’re really at the leading edge of coal technology,” Trump said of Australia.

“Clean coal. Clean coal we call it,” Trump added, referring to something that does not really exist. 

The U.S. president went on to suggest that in terms of dangers to coal workers, Australia had “rectified that 100 percent,” though miners in the country continue to suffer from debilitating mine dust-related diseaes.

Speaking from the Oval Office next to the Australian leader, Trump praised Australia for extracting its minerals and apparent digging capabilities.

“Coal as an example—you’re a leader in safety in coal digging and we’ve actually studied it because we’re doing a lot of coal and you almost have no—you know, you used to have a thing called black lung disease and in Australia you almost don’t have it anymore,” said Trump. “You got all of the dust down and they become wet mines basically.”

“What you’ve been able to do with the environment having to do with taking minerals out of the ground, including—and especially because you know you’re leading in coal—your record is so good in terms of illnesses from digging better than anybody in the world,” Trump said.

Of course this last point can be looked up in seconds. You don’t have to wait for the vapid presenters on Fox News to look it up for you like Donald Trump does every day.

Top on the google lookup list “Black lung advocates say 20 Queenslanders diagnosed with coal dust diseases in a fortnight“. The Queensland State government disagreed, they said only 2 cases had been diagnosed in that week. Most of the article is a disagreements about diagnosis. 

From federal safe work site 

The mining industry has made significant improvements in health and safety over the last decade, reducing the incidence rates of both fatalities and serious injuries. However, the mining industry still has one of the highest rates of fatalities of any industry.

  • In the 12 years to 2015, the fatality rate in the mining industry decreased by 65% from 12.4 worker fatalities per 100 000 workers in 2003, to 4.4 in 2015. The mining industry still has the third highest fatality rate of any industry with an average of 9 workers dying each year.

It also has one of the worst records in Australian industry for both severe injuries and for endemic job related disease. But you’d have to look into the state records to find that out. From the outside of aussie, how such things are measured seems to largely depend on the amount of graft going into politicians pockets. Which is probably why the Liberal/National government keeps resisting forming a body to deal with it. 

But as the common dreams article ended.

Despite the country’s rising emissions and evidence of the climate crisis, Morrison—who once brought in a piece of coal to parliament and shouted “Don’t be afraid!”—has pursued a coal agenda.

In a statement last month, Greenpeace head of Pacific Joseph Moeono-Kolio, said, “The biggest driver of climate change is coal, and the Morrison government remains obsessed with it.”

Hundreds of thousands of students in Australia that took part in the Global Climate Strike on Friday made clear they want change.

It has been a long road towards having the kinds of widespread movements. When I was doing my BSc in Earth Sciences around 1980, the effect of the CO2 was just a theory with a trickle of evidence to indicate that it was credible. That was nearly 40 years ago. The evidence only ever got stronger, the time to significiant change reduced, and the effects expected kept getting worse.

My feelings about the subsequent actions to deal with the emerging evidence about climate change is just the same as Dave Lowe who set up Baring Head observatory in 1972.

“Dave Lowe found measurable proof of climate change 50 years ago – he’s watched in horror ever since“

I still find it incredible to watch the few remaining  climate change deniers try to argue the case, almost invariably putting up links to denier sites who that specialise in lying about the science. The behaviour that always annoyed me the most was when self-professed ‘moral’ people will happily lie about the conclusions on science papers by reframing the title of the paper. I always got the impression that they never read past the title as even the excerpts conflicted with their reframing. 

I’ll leave with this with some excerpts from the Stuff article on Dave Lowe, and a few parting comments.

On measurement technique for CO2.

It was perfect. At the right time, Baring Head gets air currents directly from Antarctica, an incredible undisturbed run through hundreds of kilometres of the Southern Ocean.

“What we got was incredible. Right from the outset you could see that we had struck gold.”

The first they learned was that Baring Head always measured a few ppm behind Mauna Loa. The majority of emissions are produced in the northern hemisphere, this showed that it took time for those gases to spread to the south. 

They also found that Baring Head didn’t show the same huge seasonal swings as the Mauna Loa readings. The huge continents of vegetation in the northern hemisphere were impacting the Hawaiian readings, but the measurements in the South Pacific, surrounded by ocean, were far more stable.

But the most important thing was that the measurements at Baring Head proved that Mauna Loa wasn’t an anomaly. In both the south and the north, the carbon in the atmosphere was slowly rising. 

And talking on the source of the extra CO2.

Lowe and other international researchers found that while total CO2 in the air was increasing, the percentage of Carbon-13 isotopes compared to Carbon-12 was decreasing. 

That proved that the additional CO2 in the atmosphere was coming from the burning of fossil fuels by humans, not anything else. 

“That’s the smoking gun. You can get every sceptic blue in the face but that’s just open and shut evidence that this extra CO2 came from humans,” he says. 

“Unequivocal, no doubt.”

That was proof, settled science. But the battle to convince the public of his findings was only just beginning

And on deniers.

In hindsight, the conservative approach of the scientific community probably held progress back for a number of years, he says.

“As a scientists, we thought, ‘No, you don’t jump up and down and scream, we’re not activists.’ Losing our credibility was the big issue.

“It was a totally different time. If only I knew then what I know now … Now it’s different, many of us are out there doing stuff. We have to, this is an emergency.”

Full-blown arguments with climate change deniers have been a common occurrence in Lowe’s life. His voice bristles with frustration when the topic comes up. 

“It’s better now, but it was hard yards. I’d be yelled at by people. It used to be constant shouting matches with sceptics.

“[Scientists] deal in data and facts and graphs and numbers, it’s really hard to get through with that. In my lifetime I’ve given hundreds of climate change talks and you’re always up against it with this distrust.”

Nothing grinds his gears more than scientists in the 1980s and 1990s who deliberately spread mistruths about climate change while on the payrolls of oil companies, like Fred Singer and others profiled in the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt. 

“I just think … the bastard, how dare he not look at the facts. That makes me angry, people who deliberately go out and falsify what’s going on.” 

Exactly, and there are a lot of people like that.

For me, Dave Lowe is someone I can look to for an inspiration. Someone with a real morality and a sense of duty who has persevered with it through an awful lot of denigration. 

Beats the hell out of the moralistic liars like ScoMo and his pedophilic excusing religious mentor, Trump,  and some unknown coal company PR person swiping the initials of a kids group and replaying old fake allegations.

But I also like that the kids are starting to surprise me. They did well with the worldwide climate change strike and it has a feeling of being more of a focused movement than one year PR wonders like the occupy movement. It may have come late and on the edge of significiant shifts in extreme weather patterns. But it does make me more hopeful that there is a growing momentum to change.

I suspect that it is far too late to do more than to just blunt the edge for these kids’ grandchildren. It is going to be extremely messy dealing with the CO2 over the next few centuries simply because the global climate system is so laggy. Almost all of the CO2 and extra heat from the residual atmospheric changes goes directly into the ocean currents, to be released decades or even centuries later.

Right now I suspect we’re just starting to see the some of the effects from the first half of last century – and that was a period with relatively low (compared to now) generation of waste combustion gases.

26 comments on “Lying : the preferred denier behavior ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Exkiwiforces 1
    22 September 2019 at 4:19 pm

    Thanks for the heads up on this AYCC as I’ve never heard of them before, nor their of activities IRT fracking in the NT.

    I’ve just spent almost 6 days flighting fires in and around rural Darwin area, but mainly in the in Dundee area since last Sunday. Where we seen fire conditions that we thought we would never see in the Northern NT which are so common in the Eastern, Southern States in Oz, or my from own experience in NZ with Nth Canterbury Branch of the DoC High Country Fire Team in the 90’s.

    Would like to grab a bunch of these muppets and take them out to see the damage from the 3 major fire events around Rural Darwin that happened last week on Friday the 13th to Thursday and explained to them. That us volunteers who are unpaid clock up an average of 130hrs (I was nudging around the 110hrs) on the fire line and in most cases in a grass fire unit by themselves of in my driving the tankers or medium attack trucks as today’s generation won’t volunteer unless there is something in return.

    • lprent 1.1
      22 September 2019 at 4:38 pm

      I’ve just spent almost 6 days flighting fires in and around rural Darwin area…

      It is going to get worse for a long time (at least a few hundred years) before it starts to get better. It won't be every year, but the frequency and scale of extreme weather will increase over the decades.

      That us volunteers who are unpaid clock up an average of 130hrs (I was nudging around the 110hrs) on the fire line and in most cases in a grass fire unit by themselves of in my driving the tankers or medium attack trucks as today’s generation won’t volunteer unless there is something in return.

      That is going to be the problem. You can do this as a volunteer if it happens infrequently. But as the frequency goes up, then that becomes not viable. The same thing happens with urban systems like storm water or sewage. When a '100 year' downpour starts to happen every decade, you can't just handle the repeated flooding the same way (thinking of brisbane last year now).

      Rural and semi-rural areas don't have the wherewithall to put in large commitments of backup structures like a standing fireforce or even paying for volunteers.

      Urban areas do, but the sheer number of people who could be affected means that the systems put in for 50 years have to be damn near gold-plated at the start to handle the conditions that are going to be present at the end.

      There is going to have to be a lot of cost going into it to provide the infrastructure to deal to weather, fire and floods a lot earlier – especially in continental areas.I have to say that hilly large islands like NZ are starting to look pretty good bets for the future now.

      Currently the only effective feedback system worth mentioning has been insurance rates. Emission trading systems simply haven’t been worth the paper they are written on (except to grifters of course). None of them work. Taxation systems get grafted into uselessness.

      I really don’t see it changing except from mass movements and probably the threat of using hemp for a non-pleasing political purpose.

  2. Andre 2
    22 September 2019 at 5:24 pm

    Something I find intensely depressing about the denier embrace of coal and other fossil fuels is that we simply don't need fossil fuels. We just don't. I can't think of a single land-based energy use that couldn't electrify. Shipping, medium-and-long-haul aviation will be a lot harder to electrify, but shipping could use nukes and there's enough biofuels being produced worldwide already to prove aviation could be supplied from biofuel.

    Just to illustrate with a couple of examples, steelmaking is often cited as absolutely dependent on coal. But it's not, electrolytic steelmaking is possible. It might even be cheaper than using coal, but all the installed infrastructure is coal-based.

    Concrete production is often cited as absolutely dependent on coal. But it only uses coal for process heat, and that process heat could come from renewable electricity. Further into the future, portland cement might even be produced electrochemically, eliminating the need for massive amounts of heat.

    Modern society is not technologically dependent on fossil fuels. We're just continuing to use them because we're too lazy, timid, unimaginative, misinformed or whatever to make the change to zero-carbon alternatives. It's not even economics, getting serious about making the change would be a massive economic boost from all the work needed. The only losers would be the entrenched fossil-fuel interests.

    • lprent 2.1
      22 September 2019 at 5:59 pm

      Concrete production is often cited as absolutely dependent on coal. But it only uses coal for process heat, and that process heat could come from renewable electricity.

      I'd be more worried about the burning to get the lime for concrete. That is what throws off the majority of CO2.

      The cement industry is one of the two largest producers of carbon dioxide (CO2), creating up to 8% of worldwide man-made emissions of this gas, of which 50% is from the chemical process and 40% from burning fuel.

      And specifically

      Cement manufacture contributes greenhouse gases both directly through the production of carbon dioxide when calcium carbonate is thermally decomposed, producing lime and carbon dioxide…

      The fuel might be removed at a cost. But there aren't that many good alternatives for a formable rock like concrete – if you think through the alternatives in the wikipedia article – none of them look very viable.

      • Andre 2.1.1
        22 September 2019 at 6:29 pm

        Burning coal to get the lime is the process heat part of it, which could come from zero-ghg electricity. It's just the heat that's required, not any of the chemical reactions that happen during coal combustion. This heat could be electrical, or hell, could even by concentrated solar.

        In this way, it's different to coal used in steelmaking or the carbon anodes used in aluminium production, where the energy released by the carbon reacting with oxygen supplies a significant part of the energy required to strip the oxygen from the metal oxide being reduced.

        Going a bit further, the calcination process where the calcium carbonate is heated to thermally decompose into lime and carbon dioxide could be done in a closed chamber and the CO2 easily captured (no costly separation process needed) and stored (slightly less easily done, but there's already plenty of CO2 getting injected underground where it stays).

        Then, if the heat comes from zero-GHG electricity, and the calcination CO2 captured and stored, concrete production would become net-negative CO2. Because concrete actually reabsorbs CO2 during its lifetime.

        We don't need alternatives to concrete for some kind of formable rock. The concrete technology we already have right now could be transformed from a large damaging emitter into a small absorbing mitigator just by giving the producers the right incentives to change to non-emitting energy supply, and to capture and store the emissions from the chemical reactions that must occur to produce cement.

        • lprent 2.1.1.1
          22 September 2019 at 8:17 pm

          The heating isn't really the issue.

          You can in theory replace its generation from several sources – climatech has some of them. I rather think that the biomass one is overrated – usual issues. Nuclear sounds just farfetched – how exactly do you transfer the heat. Cogeneration with waste plants sounds promising – the temps requires are about the right level and the higher density waste gases provide the transfer mechanism.

          But if you are capturing the gases off the calcite anyway for a viable sequestration, then it simply doesn’t matter if you add the fuel exhaust gases into that as well. So just concentrate on the CO2 from the calcite and its sequestration – which is where the problem lies.

          The binding strength and in particular its fast binding strength comes from breaking down various minerals of calcite at high temperatures is the primary problem.

          …but there's already plenty of CO2 getting injected underground where it stays…

          Now there is a foolishly optimistic statement if I ever read one. I don't think that there is a single geologist who'd take a bet on ground injected gases staying if they had to stake their gonads on it.

          So far I haven't heard of any historic oil or gas field that has ever been pressurised that hasn't leaked nearly immediately and wasn't close to flat within decades after injection stopped. It is easy to measure. All you have to do is to leave pressure sensors in place. It'd be big news if one did. But draining an oil or gas field has to date inevitably destroyed it as a gas tight earthquake proof container.

          There have been some moderate short-term results in non-fracked recent fields where the pressurisation was carefully controlled. But you probably have to just wait for a decent earthquake at the right depth. So in 50-100 years we might have a better idea if it will work in practice.

          If you look at the number of potential empty fields around that prove to have drained long ago, you understand why. The earth moves and the optimistic drillers lose their licenses when they drill a dry field.

          There are literally no working examples of humans being able to reliably store gases underground safely for even historic periods, let alone the kinds of time that we'd have to store cement CO2. The oil and gas fields that we have been tapping are just the freakish statistical accidents.

          But the consequences of an immense burp of stored gases from a sequestration field in the wake of earthquake are a statistical certainty within decades. It'd be safer to keep emitting slowly than lose a lot of gas in a single event if you look at the track record on CO2 emitting volcanoes – which would be the nearest analogy.

          And that is just the start. Have you been around cement works? Those immense hot drums or beds, largely open to the atmosphere to vent the generated gases and heat. Most of the heat put in is to start the process on very large quantities of calcite. But much of the energy used to create cement is actually for the processing of raw calcite and the grinding of the sintered lime at the end.

          And as far as I'm aware no-one has ever used a non-fuel source like electricity to cook the calcite. I'm having issues even trying to even conceive of a mechanism to do it. Metals you can do by various kinds of induction. But something as inert as calcite would require a hell of a current and would probably lead to dealing with dangerous as liquid calcium metal.

          There are other ways, for instance, traditional shaft calciners could be enclosed. You'd have to use some kind of fuelled gas system at the hot point to get a even transfer of heat. The heat rises to blow off the water.

          But there are issues. With calcite, once it hits calcining temps, then a lot of the reactions are exothermic. Heat release gets to be a problem. They'd have to design a whole new technique to even try to capture the gases whilst handling the extra heat.

          It'd probably involve reverting to pre-industrial job sizes. It also would cause issues with the bloody complex systems uses to get the precise cement gradings and composition control.

          etc… Plus always remember that cement is a structural material. It'd probably take a *long* time (over human timescales) to test the resulting materials.

          For me, cement and concrete has always been the worst issue for climate change. The oil and gas eventually gets too expensive and other methods will catch on. I still can't see a good way to either get concrete without too much CO2 or a viable substitute for our formable rock.

          • Andre 2.1.1.1.1
            24 September 2019 at 8:33 pm

            Ok, put the sequestration of CO2 in the "yet to be achieved" basket. Although, in the context of the growing realisation that if we want to avoid incredibly unpleasant consequences we're going to have to figure out how to pull massive quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, even putting it underground for a few decades or centuries before it leaks back out still buys a bit of time and breathing space.

            When it comes to electric heating of the calcite, the calcination and sintering process has some similarities and temperatures to induration of iron ore into pellets. There's been some development of massive 900kW plasma torches to replace fossil fuels for heating. Admittedly, a cement kiln will need an order of magnitude or more scale-up from that, and I've no idea what the technical obstacles might be for that scale up (if I had to speculate, electrode life and cooling).

            In any case, as long as the required electricity is still likely to come from coal or gas (at 40% or 60% best case thermal efficiency), it would be a step backwards to swap fossil fuel burn for process heat (with 80% + thermal efficiency) for fossil fuel fired electricity.

            Nukes just won't happen, they just don't get to high enough temps except in bombs. But biomass may play a small role. Apparently a lot of the heat transfer to the clinker happens radiatively, so powdered coal is preferred over gas for cement production, because of the glowing particles. So if a swap to massive plasma torches happens, it may still be beneficial to include some burnable material like rice husks into the gas stream leaving the plasma torches.

            The milling and grinding the clinker into cement powder is mechanical work being done at roomish temperature. Chances are that's already being done electrically in a lot of cement plants. The emissions attributed to this step would be from the coal fired power station generating that electricity.

    • Lucy 2.2
      23 September 2019 at 7:51 am

      "Modern society is not technologically dependent on fossil fuels. We're just continuing to use them because we're too lazy, timid, unimaginative, misinformed or whatever to make the change to zero-carbon alternatives"

      Unfortunately non fossil fuel alternatives are expensive and limited. An EV is twice the price of a normal car with less services and range. Also they rely on electricity which requires a coal generator when the less reliable renewables are not working.

      The concept of changing our shipping fleets to nuclear is horrifying – many ships crews currently live under slave like conditions and you would add the possibility of radiation contamination to their misery (or maybe you think the ship owners would suddenly improve conditions). We (the general population) are not adverse to alternatives but there is no incentives for the rich to change as fossil fuels give them money and power and until that changes nothing else changes.

      • lprent 2.2.1
        24 September 2019 at 12:38 pm

        Unfortunately non fossil fuel alternatives are expensive and limited.

        Depends what you need the transport for. In my case I transitioned to a e-bike at the starting at end of 2017. These days that is what I use exclusively for commuting.

        Used to drive to work – but it really was such a pain-in-the-arse. Took hours each day. Getting rear-ended on the bridge by a dickhead talking to his female passenger didn't help. Spent thousands each year on a car – mostly for the benefit of my employer.

        Shifted to bussing and started to take jobs on the bus routes. Nice place to read and moderate – but I was getting seriously annoyed with changing buses. Still cost a thousand dollars or so per year.

        I set my radius limit to work at 5km nearly 9 years. Tended to drive or walk. That dropped my car usage down to a tank about every 6 weeks and seriously increased my 'spare' time. The walking stopped about 6 years ago after the pad between my right foot big toe and foot bone wore out.

        But it also allowed me to shift to ebike when their cost dropped and the cycleways started to seriously get put in. Dropped the car and the parking last year. Now I tend to ride everywhere unless I'm getting groceries or with going somewhere with my partner.

        Way way cheaper than a car, cheaper than even the parking, and it is way cheaper than a gym. I spend some money on wet weather gear – so I get great wet weather and hi-vis gear.

        But I stay on cycle ways so the motorists get less of a chance to try to kill me.

        My partner started working from home a few years ago. Her 1992 Toyota gets filled every few months. The insurance costs, WOF and rego are massively higher than the running cost and maintenance. But not enough so that it is buying a new old vehicle or just hiring cars.

        We'll buy a EV when the price drops or the car conks out or the Toyota can't handle a double bike rack. Probably get her a e-bike before then so we can go 'walking' together.

        Now obviously this isn't likely to work if you have kids. But if you're a couple or on your own look at commuting distance, the cycle paths and a ebike. Relatively cheap. fairly painless (I'm 120kgs, 60yo, had a heart attack in 2011, and ride up Grafton Gully each work day)

  3. joe90 3
    22 September 2019 at 5:36 pm

    Deniers in wingnut circles have doubled down on bullying 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg and labeled her and her parents as satanic, antifa thugs.

    Bonus points for Soros, Gore, Bono, and Frankie the pope references, too.

    http://archive.li/e7cL9

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1175442382373969921.html

  4. Incognito 4
    22 September 2019 at 7:15 pm

    Good strong post!

    Dave Lowe changed into Rob Lowe, twice, and the famous actor even made it into the tags of the post.

  5. Anne 5
    22 September 2019 at 7:18 pm

    Not only do deniers lie, but this exercise demonstrates their other three characteristics – they are stupid, not very creative, and act more like parrots than intelligent beings.

    In other words they are dumb people who vote for dumb politicians who, in turn, appoint dumb people to run their administrations/governments for them.

  6. PhilA 6
    23 September 2019 at 8:03 am

    As a New Zealander I'm quite attached to Kea; Kaka; and Kakapo. As such I don't apreciate the attacks on Parrots in this article which I consider to be unnecessary and possibly indicative of a disregard for non human life by the author.

    • Gabby 6.1
      23 September 2019 at 8:25 am

      So you're a New Zealander then filet.

    • lprent 6.2
      23 September 2019 at 8:41 am

      Look while our denier trolls are capable of speaking (albeit usually with meaningless lines that they heard from somewhere – probably obscene), they do not resemble our native parrots.

      None of our native parrots will deign to do something as crass as to repeat the lines of others. They are too dignified to speak. I will not deign to dignify the obvious rejoinder – that they cannot speak as their beaks are full of window rubber. If you happen to park some convenient natural resources next to their beaks, then that is just what you should expect – along with the evil side eye.

      I was of course pointing out the comparision of deniers to the inferior parrots from offshore who like all humans has only immigrated here recently within the last 1000 years. Not my irritating neighbours

      Yours sincerely,

      Sharpbeak Wormhunter Kiwi.

  7. cleangreen 7
    23 September 2019 at 8:06 am

    Thanks for the heads up for this weeks Climate Action Emergency conference in New York, so we hope the politicians read this, as they cast their vote in UN this week. Edited (shortened) press release for Climate change week.

    https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/fiveyear-period-ending-2019-set-to-be-hottest-on-record/news-story/895e9c2239979888a2089a1311976c9f Latest 23/9/19 ‘Australian newscorp’

    [this comment got held up in Spam. Probably too many links. Way too much cut and paste as well, and I couldn’t easily tell what was going on so I’ve deleted it. Commenting here requires people to be selective in what they quote, to back up or illustrate something they are saying. – weka]

    • weka 7.1
      23 September 2019 at 3:33 pm

      mod note for you CG

      • greywarshark 7.1.1
        23 September 2019 at 4:29 pm

        Could lprent or someone knowledgable help with advice on putting links up. Cleangreen has got a great long one there as I did also but couldn't bring it down to a few 'live' words. My example is here in this https://thestandard.org.nz/the-climate-action-momentum/#comment-1656954 comment.

        We need to have instructions on how to do our our links now. I am still following the original info in the FAQs for Visible Text but it doesn't seem to work now the system has been reconfigured.

        Incidentally cleangreen if you see this, if you have a paragraph you want to paste and it has links in it you don't want, you can highlight the whole piece where the links are, press the link button which will bring up a window asking for an url, you put a dash in the space and press ok. That should bring up the next link removal window and you click on that. That means that you don't have to remove links individually.

  8. BCE 8
    23 September 2019 at 12:05 pm

    I also read the article on Dave Lowe on the weekend (in the hard copy of the Taranaki Daily News as well as on Stuff) and immediately came to the conclusion that this man deserves a knighthood.

  9. greywarshark 9
    23 September 2019 at 12:15 pm

    Looking on google I read one of the ads on the page. This ad has got it all – sly denier-pretender with buttons for your favourite obsession.

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