Australia's Victorian government creates seminar to "deal with denialism"

Paul Holper (CSIRO) will present on ways to approach climate change denialism in a Victorian context.

I just returned from this seminar, renamed “An analysis of the Climate Change debate.”
It was no such thing, and it was extraordianary for what was not said. No mention of…
– The hockey stick debate
– Climategate or glaciergate etc
– Other factor influencing climate change except CO2 and Methane.
– No mention of a non-human sources of CO2 or methane (methane not rising now due to patching soviet pipes)
– No discussion of mechanism of warming except that of CO2/Methane as greenhouse gas.
– No discussion of any of the arguments put by sceptics
– No polar bears
The main graphic feature was a global surface temp map animation time series from 1880s to 2006 showing huge red areas spread across the top of the page – massively distorted by the map projection.
A new line seems to be:
The science is simple, it was discovered by Arrhenius 100 year ago
(But the science is also complex and that is the problem of communication with the public.)
It looks like poor old Tyndall has been dropped for Arrhenius – perhaps because Tyndall emphasised the role of water vapour.
The guy introducing the talk admitted that his career and investments are tied to AGW – he is a director of a carbon offset company.
The speaker, Paul Holper, gave his background as a teacher, and it did feel like a highschool lecture. Someone asked whether he should show how the scientists came to their conclusions. He said folks are usually only interested in the results. I cut in – but the sceptics are – and isnt the problem [as he had stated] that the people are listening to the sceptics?
It is hard to called the mood of the audience, but there was a polite but distinctly sceptical tone to about 1/2 the questions. I am not saying by this that the questioners were sceptics – but that they were sceptical. These questions were unconfortable, especially because they regarded what that should have been addressed in this talk, ie, dealing with denialism/scepticism. In otherwords the talk was pitched badly. By this questioning it was clear the attempt at a whitewash had failed. I haven’t been to anything much like this before but the guys on stage look troubled by the lack of unanimous gushing approval.