Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Climate Change and Media Watch

It is hard to figure out what to make of Media Watch's attack on Andrew Bolt's writings on climate change.

It seems to me that this focus on the first of Bolt's claimed ten errors isn't really in the proper Medi Watch territory of highlighting the careless or practised plagiraism, or the careless or practised misuse of information. It seems to me territory over which reasonable minds could differ and does realy plays to those who label Media Watch as a modern day commie conspiracy (or words to that effect).

On the actual matter of greenhouse/global warming, I recall an AUstralia and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Canberra in 1975 where I first heard the theory of greenhouse from scientists promoting nuclear power. I believed it then as I believe it now, but not that nuclear is the answer.

As I've already posted here the Gore movie is full of unnecessary dramatisation that weakens rather than strengthens the argument.

One of the latest "sceptic" argument is that we don't need to worry about greenhouse - it is just like the Y2K problem, lots of hype - but the world didn't end then. Problem is that because of all the hype every computer program on the planet was scrubbed looking for bits of code that would fail because of the date problem. No one ever did the stocktake afterwards but most companies did find one that if they had all triggered unsuspectingly on the one day could have had cataclysmic consequences.

That for me is the lesson on climate change - how hard is it to say we should get on and fix the emissions problem because the outcome if the scientists are right is SO bad, and when it is incontrovertibly clear there will be nothing we can do.

No comments: