I have to keep reminding myself, “..this is not The Onion”.
After 16 years of NO WARMING, Lord Christopher Monckton returns to Australia and NZ for a speaking tour late January – April 2013
Tour Title: “Carbon tax, climate scam, Agenda 21: can democracy survive all three? Lord Monckton does due diligence”.
See that deep purple in the middle of this acne-red weather report from Down Under? That right there represents 129.2° F or 54 °C — it’s a brand-new shade that the Australian bureau of meteorology was forced to add to its heat index because their country is, you know, kind of on fire. “The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau’s model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees,” David Jones, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring and prediction unit, told The Sydney Morning Herald, which notes that the previous record high was 50.7°C (123°F), recorded in 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport in the southern part of Australia — right around where the new shades of hot are showing up today
Having delighted his US supporters by going “full birther” – becoming a leading voice for the “Obama birth certificate” conspiracy theorists that now wield power in the US republican party, Lord Monckton, the intellectual leader of the global warming denial movement, appears to be expanding his reach beyond what Perth native Stephen Lewandowsky calls “the monarchist prostate crowd”, into even more rarified realms of nutter-dom.
PASTOR Daniel Nalliah, president of the fringe political party Rise Up Australia, has what you might politely describe as some fairly interesting views on matters of science, the climate, abortion and religious tolerance.
In the pulpit-driven eyes of Melbourne’s Pastor Nalliah, humans didn’t appear on Earth until 6000 years ago, when his god put us there. That same god was also behind Australia’s most devastating bushfires, but only because laws are in place to allow abortion.
But more of all this later, because Pastor Danny has announced the name of the man to give the keynote speech at the official launch of his Rise Up Australia political party.
Lord Monckton’s three-month-long speaking tour of Australia starts at the end of this month. The country is currently experiencing its worst heatwave in recorded history with high temperature records tumbling and homes and property burning from bushfires.
Bureau of Meteorology climate expert David Jones told the Sydney Morning Herald the unprecedented heatwave was on the back of a long-term warming trend and climate change would serve up more extremes in the future.
So why Lord Monckton? Well, he and Pastor Danny are old friends. In January 2012, Nalliah and his Christian evangelical Catch the Fire ministry hosted Lord Monckton for a lecture as part of his nationwide speaking tour that year – one which was prefaced by a scandal surrounding Monckton’s use of Nazi swastikas.
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If all this doesn’t sound incendiary enough, then Pastor Nalliah’s views on the cause of deadly bushfires are among his most offensive views. During the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, when 173 people were killed and hundreds were injured, Nalliah claimed the devastation was all down to God, who had removed his “conditional protection” of Victoria because of the state’s abortion laws
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And what of climate change, the rising trend in global temperatures and emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and other human activities? This is all conveniently immaterial because, as Pastor Nalliah went on to explain: “The fact is God is in charge of climate for 6000 years… we cannot change the climate.”
Lord Monckton returns to Australia in a month’s time for his third national speaking tour. Previous tours have been supported by one of the world’s richest women, coal and iron ore mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and also by a mining industry association.
Of course, as the whole solar system is heating up, I guess human activity is responsible for that too. I can’t stand puritanical one-sided arguments that fail to debate the entire scenaio – sure, we shouldn’t be doing what we are to our fragile eco-systems, but, hey, wake up, we didn’t do it to the whole solar system did we? Still, I suppose there’s the Mars Rover and …………..
Re: “sure, we shouldn’t be doing what we are to our fragile eco-systems, but, hey, wake up, we didn’t do it to the whole solar system did we?”
Phil, I do not thank you for introducing an irrelevant straw man arguement into the conversation. You’re argument is specious and wrong-headed.
At issue is the planet we are going to be leaving the people who will be inhabiting it in a century or two.
Sure, if you are a Republican you cynically argue IBGYBG, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” so let’s squander the planet’s resources to maximize the satisfaction of our greed today.
If you’re a Democrat you’re likely to be following a demagogue to hell.
http://www.occupybendor.org/news.php?1662
My point is that there is abundant evidence that we are wrecking the planet. Look at ocean dead zones. Look at the failure of cultured oysters to spawn due to ocean acidification. Look at crops that fail because of droughts and unnatural heat intensified by Man’s stupid tweaking of the atmospheric CO2. Look at the grotesque amounts of methane that escapes from fracking operations. Look at what 2 meters of sea level rise is going to do to London, Venice, New Orleans, New York, etc. and come to your senses.
We aren’t attempting to live and breath on Europa or Mars. But we sure as hell have proof that in the past 30 years the productivity of phytoplankton has gone down 40%. Why does this matter? Because phythoplankton creates 50% of the oxygen you need to live, Phil. And if you can’t breathe, you can’t write inane off-the-wall comments about the weather on Jupiter. And maybe that would be a good thing.