Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Sky News, one of Australia’s most popular news services, just gave climate skeptic and geologist Ian Plimer an honest opportunity to explain what is wrong with Australia’s climate obsessed energy policies.
It’s ‘not possible’ to have cheap, reliable energy and reduce emissions
Geologist Ian Plimer told The Outsiders that Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg had caught himself ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when it comes to the government’s energy policies. Mr Plimer said it wasn’t possible for the energy market to provide cheap and reliable energy, but also reduce emissions. It comes after several Liberal backbenchers formed a ginger group to promote the idea of the government subsidising a new coal fired power plant to be build on the existing Hazelwood power station.
Original interview: https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_5770588618001
A few excerpts from the interview below;
I noticed the interview because it was being played on a continuous loop on a Sky News channel.
A few years ago an interview like this on mainstream media news TV would have been unthinkable, but Climate skeptics seem to be getting more friendly media attention lately, frequently with reporters openly laughing at the ridiculous claims promoted by climate alarmists.
Good to see the media being rational about this. And odd how persuasive the climate change marketing has been in spite of significant failings of climate science. As pointed out in past posts on WUWT, the key issue of climate sensitivity, without which no AGW an exist, remains unsettled. It is an amazing marketing success story that they can sell the dangers of the climate sensitivity parameter without actually coming up with a climate sensitivity parameter.
Some statistics issues in empirical (observational) climate sensitivity research.
Your comments appreciated.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3162520
The one theme that emerges from the repeated failings of all the climate catastrophist predictions is that CO2 is not the ‘climate control knob’. Never has been & never will be. From this we deduce that the GHE is bunk, false, so another explanation for how our atmosphere creates near surface T must be sought, one where the physical law of ’cause’ can also be observed on other planets, not just hypothesised.
The continuing failure for the klimate scientists to explain the PETM (a very warm warming period shortly after the Dinosaur Killer struck about 55MYA (Million Years Ago) should have a good heads up. It’s also been … amusing.
They keep looking for, but not finding, the huge bursts of CO2 they are so sure were necessary to make that warming. However, Shaviv’s Shaviv’s Cosmic Ray Theory from Spiral Arm crossings as the Solar System orbits the galactic centre, does a pretty good job.
“Good to see the media being rational about this”. That’s all very well but it’s Sky news. I follow Sky news as an antidote to the ABC and SBS. When I tell my friends at the pub that I read Sky news they laugh and say you must be a Donald Trump supporter then, fake right wing news etc.
To paraphrase in Australia Sky news is not held in high regard.
Find another pub. I know people who don’t like Sky, but I also know a lot of people who don’t like the ABC.
To take further insights, you apparently accept those debasements towards sky news.
Especially odd, since Trump is well on his way to full vindication and only the progressive left rags and the grocery aisle rumor rags are big into that stuff known as “fake news”.
Plus, Steyer, Soros, Podesta and a few other progressive elitist billionaires have been linked to staging and publishing “fake right wing news”, paid biased internet bullies, meeting disruptions and riots, antifa, occupy, etc. etc.
Which is why Trump’s approval ratings are climbing steadily, while civilian trust in mass media are plummeting. CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, NYTimes, WashPo, etc, themselves are directly raising the fortunes of Fox News and Breitbart by their adolescent rants, fake news, and irresponsible stories.
What is known is that one can not trust anything major media publishes; ergo, trust the news sources that do not ambulance chase every lurid claim and rumor.
One guess as to which news sources are fully on board the
global warming,climate disruption, carbon caused climate change scam.Your response to friends at the pubs should be long loud laughter! Not succumbing to peer pressure.
Fear not guys, when it comes to AGW I certainly don’t succumb, I go on the attack.
Everything will come to its end eventually. Even the greatest mass delusion of all time.
The greatest mass delusion of all time is religion and that has persisted for thousands of years so don’t hold your breath on this one
The difference between a cult and a religion is about 500 years, climate cult has a long way to go. Like all bubbles, it takes a lot of hot air to keep it afloat, of which there is plenty, for now. It will probably not pop, but gradually deflate as the disparity between what we are told and what we actually measure grows, until it becomes completely untenable to just about everyone. Unlike the pseudoscience of eugenics, which was disrupted by the defeat of Nazism and the social scars left by the terror of the Holocaust, climate cult will probably peter out and become the preserve of nutters, like alien crop circle believers, despite crop circle makers actually fessing up to their deeds. Unfortunately the consequence of this will be that the guilty will get off largely scot free and never get called to accout for their corruption, taking their taxpayer handouts in the form of subsidies, university pensions etc. By then there will be another cause celebre that demands that taxpayers stump up for another scam.
It is possible, provided you use nuclear power and are sensible about risk management.
As far as I know Plimer has only ever been invited onto this quite popular “Outsiders” show, aired live on SNC, Sunday morning’s from 9am (since 2017). “The Outsiders” are the very antithesis of the ABC’s “Insiders” which is also aired live on Sunday mornings, but unlike the Insiders it’s one of the few current affairs shows that’s not Neo-Marxist Left, and presents a thoroughly Conservative opinion, delighting in a weekly commentary of “Lefty Lunacy”. Unfortunately it’s by subscription only, but it’s definitely a refreshing change from the ABC’s endless Leftist propaganda, Trump derangement and nearly all fake news. Plimer needs no introduction of course. Not only is he highly intelligent and knowledgeable he’s also a fantastic speaker and communicator.
I’m afraid I’ve done Professor Plimer no favours – I’ve been lending my copy out.
Plimer’s book “Heaven and Earth” single-handedly educated me about the fallacy of “global warming”. I have recommended that book to many seeking the truth about our climate. His sense of humor is first rate!
This is the first I’ve seen him speak.
Plimer did a great job of putting modern climate observations into a geological context.
Ore-gonE Left
April 16, 2018 at 2:13 am
Yes, it’s a great resource.
Plimer is one of the best after-dinner speakers I’ve ever heard. We had him do a talk for the NZ Skeptics Society back in the 1980’s in Dunedin and he went through the evolution of the universe, formation of ore deposits and life on the planet in about 1 1/2 hours. Wonderfully enlightening and inspiring and all done off the cuff.
One of my favorite books on the subject. Professor Plimer’s book “Not for Greens” Is another education and covers the subject in this interview very well.
Precisely because nuclear can do it is why they hate it.
It can continue to “Lift us out of peasantry and into a middle class” as Mr Plimer points out.
Natural gas is clean and was loved by the Greens when it was scarce and expensive. In the US, as natural gas has become the Left’s new target once it became plentiful and inexpensive relative to other sources. For example, the recent WUWT article describing the Left wanting to put a methane monitoring satellite in orbit to gen-up pseudoscience scare stories on NG. NG in the US has become the new target for the neo-Marxists masquerading as climate campaigners.
And the anti-nuclear Greens intention is to keep nuclear unaffordable with regulatory hurdles and roadblocks.
A middle class demands real democracy. A middle class demands to control its governing political structures. A middle class is enabled by inexpensive reliable energy sources that provide economic growth and geographic mobility.
The real lunatic Greens, the ones yelling the loudest want peasantry. Peasants can be politcally suppressed and controlled.
Remember Paul Ehrlich’s comment on nuclear power, that having cheap and abundant energy would be like “giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
Tom – that’s the issue. Like Ehrlich, most Greens have agreed that there are too many people on Earth. That is pure baloney. It is this large mass of humanity that demand – and get – things like GPS, 75+” UHD TVs, smart phones, cell towers almost everywhere, cheap computers, awesome gaming machines, fast travel to anywhere in the world, lasik, plastic surgery, 150+ mph road legal autos, etc. Without that customer base, those things would never have been developed. Not only were there not enough visionaries, but there wouldn’t have been enough capital to develop those miracles of modern life.
Do any of us want to go back to the squalor and dangers that even the wealthy were subjected to 100 years ago? But Erhlich believes the Earth can only sustain no more than 2 billion people. That would not be sufficient population to maintain all the gizmos stated above, let alone develop more. A lot of smart people don’t seem to understand how much mental capital is required to develop and maintain those capabilities.
That’s why someone like Obama felt he could just dictate future fleet mileage. Not enough STEM to recognize where all that capability came from – and how much it cost.
Politicians disgust me. At least Trump understands economics – not from a scholarly POV, but from personal experience. And that means he has considerable insight into what it takes to develop and maintain… ANYTHING!
Mental capital is the most precious commodity our society has, and people like Erhlich don’t recognize that. With that lack of understanding, nothing they say is worth listening to.
best news ive heard in ages!
I got our library to put heaven n earth on the shelves and it was a damned fine tome well written and resourced.
as for his media absence, curiously he was THE popular ABC talk to guy for some years even winning “eureka awarrds’ at least twice im aware of from them for best science books
then he dared speak up…against the warmist insanity on an ABC science show one day with R williams the perennial pest..err host
and that….was all i t took for him to then be pillored ignored and dismissed and deprecated at every opportunity by said host and the minions of his.
too many so called science reporters hold a great opinion of them selves, and are given too much power to abuse, while they themselves might have done some science related studies but sure dont make the grade as having worked in or being actually anything but paid talking heads.
I strongly suspect that they have people who are responsible for promoting particular topics.
The Canadian Broadcorping Castration outed itself. One of its employees was getting flack from the non-straight community. The CBC interviewed him on air so his good work shepherding non-straight issues in the organization could be highlighted. So, it was obvious that he was being paid to make sure that non-straight issues made it onto every program, no matter how inappropriate, and no matter how obvious.
The CBC has four issues which it pushes: non-straight, non-European, systemic discrimination, and global warming.
Because it is using public money to pay people to promote particular content within the organization, the CBC has tipped over into propaganda. I have no doubt that the ABC is the same.
I’m not surprised. Were it NPR, BBC, CBC, ABC, or basically any Western public broadcasting company, they all have been hijacked by ‘positive’ discrimination.
It is not positive more than results of HIV test.
an, a, the. Good you don’t have ein, eine, einer, einen, eines, einem, der, die, das, dem, den and des.
Thanks for your description of CBC. I have barely glanced towards them for years because of their obviously biased and partial reporting but may have to follow them a little closer for laughs.
The trouble with Canadian news sources is that all the majors are becoming alike with only minor differences in partiality and that a very large portion of the so-called reporting is actually only editorially approved opinion.
Sadly, the better sources are usually what was once thought of as tabloids or small local newspapers and radio broadcasters, unaffiliated of course.
I no longer give any credibility to a science story until I can identify the source study, scientist, opinion, or whatever and evaluate it or them.
Often, you will find the source is some grade school quality research or a crank scientist known for making outrageous statements.
What is seldom omitted from the reporting is the arbitrary money phrase blaming climate change.
Yes, ABC in Aus is exactly that. There isn’t a national nightly 7pm news bulletin that’s not without a pc “good news” story or 3. If it’s not a story about a successful trans-gender mechanic in Alice Springs it’s about a middle eastern refugee woman who’s just completed a masters degree in engineering while working nights in a laundromat or a 711. Of course it goes without saying that barely a night passes without also mentioning a terrible ‘climate change’ weather event or an unfolding disaster somewhere on the planet. And just in case you missed those terrible tweets from Donald Trump…………..
As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, that’s our ABC.
Effectively addressing the role of CBC and other media sources in creating cult-like behaviour patterns in people, who lack critical thinking skills and are thus vulnerable to the propaganda, is crucial. It’s happening in classrooms as well.
This has to stop in Canada.
Plimer, it should be noted. also took on the creationists, using his own money in a court case. A genuine sceptic.
And lost, you should add.
He didn’t choose the best judge for the issue, his opponents did. A sad outcome, to be sure.
I predict a government raid on Sky News offices to combat Fake News which news that doesn’t fit the narrative.
Or YouTube banning them?
This may seem like a minor issue, but in terms of the public debate, it’s one of the most important issues in this post–there is no such thing as a “climate skeptic” or a “climate denier.” Nobody is skeptical that there is a climate. There are no “climate change deniers.” Nobody denies that the climate changes.
The term is “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming,” or CAGW.
The issue is not, does the climate change? The issue is not, is the planet getting warmer? The issue is, is human behavior affecting the climate to a degree that is dangerous, even threatening to the future of humanity, thus justifying vast sacrifices on the part of humans to stop it?
This is not academic. The very question of what constitutes evidence and what does the evidence tell us turns on how we talk about it and the side that controls the terms of the debate has a huge advantage. Do not simply grant your opponent the power to decide how YOU talk about it. You may as well go into battle while half your army is on weekend furlough.
+ (How do I type an ‘infinity’ symbol?) You are absolutely right, Mr. Maguire! The scientific debate was pretty much over shortly after it started. The Warmists lost that battle, but have not lost the war. In fact, they have won in many areas by waging a masterful psychological PR battle over power centers: politicians and bureaucrats. They have taken advantage of the symbiotic nature of government, the media and the scientific industrial complex, to generate a largely fictitious story of impending doom. They cannot defend this story with comprehensive, traditional scientific methods. They don’t have to. They only have to demonize their critics. We have been losing battles mainly because we have not taken out their big guns, which are ad hominem attacks and appeals to an imaginary authority.
Since we are dealing with an unholy alliance between the government, the media and the scientific industrial complex, it is difficult to undermine the ‘authority meme’, although it should be battled at every turn. They are more vulnerable around their personal attacks. When someone accuses me of being a denialist or climate skeptic, I say that is funny coming from a racist homophobe.
If we allow ourselves to be demonized by accepting a derogatory moniker, nothing we say after that matters, no matter how brilliant our argument is. As CAGW skeptics, we want to talk about the science because we win with that. But no one will listen to use unless we first win the PR battle.
How do you embed the infinity symbol:
easy: type in ∞ and the browser will interpret it as ∞
ampersand to mark it as a special character, infin for the symbol and semi-colon to close it:
Whie it is not possible at the moment, there is a technology that can deliver zero emissions cheaper than any fossil fuel, andthat technology is molten salt small modular reactors. Look for them in the next 5 years
Uranium is itself a fossil fuel. Fossilized Starstuff. It will eventually run out.
So will the ‘fossil fuel’ in the sun!
Mainstream media is giving more attention to climate skeptics because they know conflict promotes public interest, giving the media both attention and ability to sell more advertising. It has little to do with their convictions.
The MSM can see the writing on the wall and want to get out ahead of the collapsing CAGW behemoth, to avoid being crushed underneath it.
Of course, mainstream media content should have nothing to do with their convictions – news should be news. If convictions play apart, then you are an opinion journal, not a news broadcaster. That probably never was the case, even if it ever was the ideal.
More the fact of skyrocketing power prices at the same time the punters were told it would all be cheap from Gaia. Something does not compute and the natives are increasingly restless so even the MSM have to face up to that reality. It was always the lunar prescriptions that would bring the CAGW mob undone.
donb…Conflict is interesting, but nothing promotes public interest like disasters. The warmests are selling impending doom, so they will always have the media’s preference, at least until the doom doesn’t happen, then the media will turn on them like rabid squirrel monkeys.
So true. Climate change is a term without a real meaning. It really defines nothing, has no definition of time, scope, or even what the change might be. It is a phrase that can’t be argued against and is only now terribly misleading because of a pervasive association with global warming or more specifically dangerous global warming. it plays on the ever-present human fear of change or the unknown.
Wars and regime change interventions have been raging in the Middle East for decades over routing and control of incredibly valuable oil/gas pipelines.
Yet here is an Australian state sitting on huge reserves of gas and denying it. Something is rotten in the state of Victoria.
NT might be having second thoughts as the honey pot dries up-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/company-news/nt-gas-fracking-ban-could-be-lifted/ar-AAvVGtd
Au energy retailers make a killing from the domestic market.
They have low to nil interest in manufacturers.
Late last year we wrote to the Gov asking for assistance to overcome the electricity cartel impasse.
The Gov (full of ignorance) suggested we contact a consultant to increase our energy efficiency.
We’re World leaders in efficient process heating (closed-loop modulated infrared with waste heat-recovery etc).
The two machines recently built for installation in Melbourne will now be installed in China where electricity is reasonably priced allowing us to compete in the World market.
Alas, it was not on mainstream media. The Outsiders program is anything but the PC inspired garbage that appears on mainstream. The audience size is nothing like the that which MSM attracts. For a start, you have to pay for the content.
It is a shame / disgrace that MSM would not have him on for a fair discussion of climate. If Q & A had him on, they would use every trick in the book to prevent him from speaking at appropriate times and bring out adjusted (ie cooked) temperature graphs like they did to Senator Malcolm Roberts.
Thus, it is up to us to read Ian’s books and wake up the delusional propaganda believers that they have been fed propaganda. Heaven and earth and the latest book – the climate delusion and the great energy ripoff have all the information you need to demolish the arguments of the lefties. That is if they will actually listen.
The latest book is actually very easy to read, especially considering the content. It is like Ian is talking to you in your lounge in a matter-of-fact conversational style with charts in one hand (he doesn’t need notes) and a cold beer in the other.
Three years ago, I was talking to a leftie in his mid sixties about what a fraud the climate consensus was when he bleated out the old sound bite- “97%..” The guy asked for proof, which I was able to rattle off on the spot- questions, sample sizes, results and statistical manipulations. Like a child caught with their hands in the cookie jar, the guy closed his eyes, put his hands over his ears and went la-la-la-la….Probably thinks he won the argument because he refused to listen to the cold, hard facts.
I know one thing for sure, if he does go on Q&A, I will be the first to sign up for the studio audience.
Look at Plimer absolutely school Monbiot here:
He reminds me of Trump in the way that he tells it like it is and directly answers each question with his razor sharp mind. No misdirection here!
Dont be taken in by this example. The ‘outsiders’ program that held this interview is a very conservative program. Sky news is a pay-tv channel and with only 30% penetration into the Australian market, its not well watched. It also suffers from an indentity crisis, the channel is owned by newscorp, yet I have seen countless CNN & Washington Post ‘analysts’ on the channel. Dont get me wrong, its good that these skeptics get some air time, they just dont show this stuff where it can have maximum effect. Also difficult to do this when the MSM wont give any airtime to anyone that opposes the group think.
DONT WORRY OLD FATHER TIME WILL BE ON THE SKEPTICS SIDE OF THE ARGUMENT