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.
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.
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.
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