Mood:
spaceyTopic: big media
Tim Blair, or TB as we prefer being a noxious debilitating illness requiring antibiotic treatment, has all week to work up his Saturday rottweiler column in the Saturday Daily Telegraph as here
usually attacking enviornmentalism and anything more centre left than Genghis Khan.
And today is no exception. And Will Bailey is the stirling policy intellect amongst the panoply of characters in the West Wing tv series with a passing spectacled resemblance to TB. Hence the $2 wannabe reference in the headline.
Joshua Malina as Will Bailey
As we like to say the News Ltd Smelly is more cartoon book than reflection of truth, a looney tunes exercise. If this is understood one can even grow to enjoy such sophistry from one as TB.
His constant mock scorn of world's best climate change science reminds us of the nay sayers for quite a few years challenging the double helix in DNA. The 100 year history of anti science creationism against the unifying theory of Evolution (talk about crack pot yankee museums). Or Big Tobacco trading in doubt in the face of decades of medical science on cancer.
Not for nothing does TB refer in satirical projection to "burns on the bathroom sink, possibly from [hotel] tenants putting aside cigarettes while brushing their teeth'. Too much information TB, we don't need to know your autobiographical habits! [Yes we did laugh at the line which is something I suppose.]
Suffice to say Tim Blair has no scientific credentials and would be horrified to be so burdened. He prefers creationist style denial just like the troglodyte Exclusive Brethren nutcases over robust, diverse, increasingly developed climate change science literature.
He's the sophist sop to rednecks everywhere too cowardly to confront the huge folly and extremism of their own lifelong anti ecological philosophies. On the content of his article itself TB ignores the well accepted utility of trend line in annual temperature measures - just like electoral polling really. Not one or other individual metric but the trend.
TB prefers selective nitpicking around new data on apparently very hot year 1938. Which is why we have pictured a bag of frozen veg - pour into a pan on high heat, some of it is icy, some of it damn hot, contemporaneously (just like our planet actually), but most of it popping and whizzing on the flame (in the interim phase) at extremes of temperature until in the end it's all a black charred smoking mess. Unless you turn it down or off.
Are we in the the interim variability phase of climate change under conditions of increased energy inputs and entropy like frozen veg on a hot pan? That question is way too complex for pea brain Tim (and his readers which sadly are all too many) stuck somewhere between a luke warm bit of carrot and corn in a pan going to hell but thinking all is well. But the expert chefs/climate experts, prima donnas no doubt, are increasingly sure the heat is coming given given all the noise in the pan. In other words don't just read one silly/bad newspaper columnist with an ignorant view and do avoid rottweilers in the park this weekend:
Postscript #1
Ditto this today more resembling a trend but as with most of these attacks the pro scientist refutations tend to be devastating, just a matter of time really Cold, hard facts take the heat out of some hot claims What's more revealing is the tag team aspect to the timing in the Fairfax press from the Right commentariat.
What they and maybe some readers don't realise is that such as James Hansen of NASA Goddard Institute have opinon writers in 50 states of the USA and then European Countries to prioritise before they get to hokey Australia at the *rse end of the world, as some wit put it a long time ago. And it's that time lag in refutation, much like allegory of The Lie that gets half way round the world before Truth gets it's shoes on, that pays the corporate welfare seeking wage of shriekers like Blair and Duffy.
But only just, or else Rupert Murdoch who accepts the real risks of global warming is a dummy, and that is a very big call and against all common sense as he moves his digs ... into the Wall Street Journal no less.
Postscript #2 20th August 2007
Sure enough Dr James Hansen Of NASA in his nerdy scientific excellence has addressed the melodrama with his view the theoretical integrity behind climate change is completely unaffected by the look of things here in a PDF document, via Crikey.com.au today: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074.pdf?source=cmailer
