The wind has shifted.
George Negus' pathetically soft interview about climate change with Lord Nicholas Stern on SBS has produced an interesting reaction even from SBS's own viewers.
Most are outraged about Negus' fawning over Stern and his inability to ask a single hard question.
He finishes the interview with this typically trite and shallow observation: Why do I get the idea that Lord Stern just might have been trying to tell us to grow up - politically, that is.
Here's a question that Negus could have asked, if he had been arsed enough to do some research:
Why did Stern use a social discount rate of only around 2% in finding that the costs of doing nothing now would be greater than acting now, when he knows full well that the accepted figure should have been around 4%?
Why, despite devoting not a few words in his review to the importance of the social discount rate, did he not mention in the review the rate he used? (People had to badger Her Majesty's Treasury to get the figure - so much for a supposedly "independent" review!)
What is is about climate change boosters and hiding stuff? Whether it's Stern or the Hockey Stick's Michael Mann, is the reason they act like they have something to hide the fact that they do have something to hide?
(Well, in the case of Michael Mann it turned out he did definitely have something hide.)
Now, Back to Senator Steve Fielding.
He's recently returned from a conference of sceptics in Washington and he's got some questions for Senator Penny Wong.
He hasn't made up his mind yet, but at least, unlike George Negus, he does appear to have an open mind.
