The climate change movement wants “a new world order under the control of the (United Nations),” and is “opposed to capitalism and freedom,” according to the Australian prime minister’s chief business adviser, Maurice Newman.
Newman argued in a May 8 Australian opinion article that while the climate-change movement presents itself “as an independent, spontaneous consensus of concerned scientists, politicians and citizens,” its “real agenda is concentrated political authority.”
Newman also claims “they [climate-change activists] have captured the UN and are extremely well funded. They have a hugely powerful ally in the White House. They have successfully enlisted compliant academics and an obedient and gullible mainstream media to push the scriptures regardless of evidence.”
Australia’s federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, distanced himself from these comments in an interview on Friday.
“It’s not been something that I’ve expressed, it’s not something that I would express.”
Newman’s article also drew condemnation from the opposition Labor party’s environment spokesperson, Mark Butler, at a media conference.
“I’ve never been particularly clear why Maurice Newman holds the position he does hold given how central climate change is to the future economic prosperity of Australia.”
Butler added, “As the senior business adviser, what Maurice Newman said in the Australian newspaper this morning is no different to the sorts of things he’s been saying for years about this incredibly important policy.”
Newman has a history of controversial statements regarding climate change.
These kinds of comments would be laughable if he didn’t have the prime minister’s ear
In a 2010 speech to senior Australian Broadcasting Corporation staff members, Newman, then chairman of ABC, attacked the media for “uncritical group-think” on climate-change issues.
Newman also wrote a number of controversial opinion articles in 2014 targeting the climate-change movement.
In a January column, Newman claimed “the climate-change establishment” is solely focused on “exploiting the masses and extracting more money.” He concluded that the “theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution.”
In August, Newman argued the world is cooling, not warming. Newman’s article drew the ire of many academics and politicians, including Butler who said, “These kinds of comments would be laughable if he didn’t have the prime minister’s ear.”
Newman has held his advisory role to Prime Minister Tony Abbott since 2013.
A range of groups have criticized Abbott for his perceived inaction on environmental issues, as well as his decision to appoint a self-identifying climate-change “skeptic” in 2014 to review Australia’s renewable energy target.
In 2009, Abbott described climate-change science as “crap.”
Comment from Enouranois
The fact that Tony Abbott and his climate advisor are clowns does not mean that there is not an element of truth in SOME of their claims. If there were not they could not be so impassioned about them. Under way at this moment, to culminate at the Climate Summit in Paris at the end of this year, is a campaign to legitimate geoengineering, and specifically solar radiation management, i.e. the distribution of aerosols in the upper atmosphere to diminish levels of incoming sunlight.
Here is the IPCC engaged in precisely this in Melbourne, in response to a question from the audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtbRDAwjaNM
Friends of the Earth is opposed to this project: http://www.foe.org/news/news-releases/2015-02-geoengineering-unjust-unproven-and-risky
This is not what Abbott and Newman are hyperventilating about. But they do have a grievance with the IPCC, which they accuse of making a mockery of scientific method. One does not need to be a climate change sceptic to agree with this assessment. The exposés of the climate change sceptics contain a significant proportion of fact, along with the ideology. They could not be effective if they did not.
For a start none of the data of the IPCC takes into account the massive effects of decades of climate engineering. This is not one of the accusations of the climate change sceptics, but it is sufficient grounds to justify a single-issue campaign allying critics of solar radiation management with critics of IPCC methodology and claims to scientific status.
Divide-and-rule is an age-old method for preserving the domination of unaccountable power. Today it exacerbates the divisions between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and between Ukrainians and Russians. It is doing the same in the climate debate: one lobby is fed certain half truths. The other lobby is fed the opposite half truths and they are left to fight each other, facilitating the real business, which is climate engineering to produce extreme phenomena that can then be attributed to “Mother Nature”.
From: Hugh Steadman
Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2015 7:42 AM
Actually, I haven’t read a single ‘exposure of a climate change sceptic’ which I find convincing – much as I yearn to do so.
If, as here claimed, geoengineering is being done by one nation without international agreement, it would be contrary to international law. Not only that, but done secretly, one cannot but fear that it would be inadequately managed and could lead to some disastrous and irretrievable overdoses!
Successful and well-managed geoengineering might end up as the only solution and that would, or (if it actually works to some degree) possibly might be, better than letting the current lack of policy run out to its logical-end game of an un-, or barely, habitable planet.
There are two facts which I regard as incontrovertible.
Firstly, a rapid change of the climate is, or appears to be, taking place at a pace that is likely to endanger life on Earth. Whether it is, or is not, actually happening, the evidence is sufficient, given the extreme nature of the risk involved, to demand action according to the precautionary principle.
Secondly, no solution, whether geo-engineering or by alterations to economic behaviour, is feasible without coordinated international agreement.
My conclusion is that we have to put in place the mechanism by which such international cooperation can become effectual.
This is a blog on the subject – which I posted today. http://www.khakispecs.com/?p=848
Comment from Enouranois
Dane Wigington isn’t a climate change sceptic but he is opposed to solar radiation management on the grounds that it is exacerbating, not mitigating, global warming.
The public relations campaigns (1) that support an extension of emissions trading to aviation and (2) that promote solar radiation management, are contradictory. The former claim that jet emissions contribute to global warming. The latter claim that jet emissions can mitigate global warming) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX52VTYTAj0 (minutes 2.30 to 7.06). The conclusion is inescapable that this kind of “science” is in the service of immediate, and conflicting, political agendas. What is lost is rationality. People one regards as sane begin to defend the indefensible.
On the subject of the IPCC, Donna Laframboise’s “The Delinquent Teenager” is full of right-wing ideology that few on this list will probably find edifying, but it also contains what are almost certainly facts about the IPCC that do not deserve to be overlooked.
Closer to us, this rave from Berkeley is confused, but it is justified: http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2014-11-14/article/42701
Voices much more worth listening to than Tony Abbott and/or his advisors are being kept out of the debate, and kept out using very low-level, in fact disgraceful, methods.
If solar radiation management (and the numerous black projects for which it undoubtedly serves as a cover) comes to be legitimated, this will not be because of any scientific legitimacy it may possess. It will have been legitimated through the same methods that nuclear weapons and nuclear power have been “legitimated”, to the extent that they have been. SRM is the brainchild of Freeman Dyson, and was later adopted by Edward Teller: both central personages in nuclear weapons development and both climate change sceptics.
Even ostensibly radical critics of geoengineering projects such as Naomi Klein seem destined for leadership of a future toothless anti-geoengineering movement modelled on today’s toothless anti-nuclear movement.