My God, did anyone see A Current Affair tonight?!

I didn't, because it's tabloid rubbish I never watch, but I think I missed another gust of wind from the developing sea change that is coming in. So as an exercise in grappling with the Zeitgeist, you should watch it too! (See below.) A mainstream media report on climate change that begins in the usual fashion - file footage that would make you think that somehow that droughts, fires and floods were unusual in Australia and that it must all be due to the glooball warmening. But then it goes absolutely weird. It actually has three people casting doubt on man-made global warming, not so as to set them up for a contrived hatchet job like the ABC would, but rather just lets them say what they have to say. One of the three is the world renowned botanist and environmentalist David Bellamy. This would not have happened even just a year ago. Following on from the weekend's astounding revelations about the goings on at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, the times are a changing. The Bolter has the details: The most interesting thing about tonight’s A Current Affair item isn’t what the interviewees say - with all due respect to my colleague Terry McCrann. It’s that A Current Affair interviews three people about global warming and the emissions trading scheme, all of whom agree the public is being duped without the reporter or presenter suggesting these people are speaking anything other than plain sense. The public sentiment is shifting fast. Where would it be now had the Liberals studied the science - and dared to oppose? Meanwhile, scientists dare say what the Liberals do not: ONE of North Queensland’s top marine physicists has accused fellow scientists of exaggerating the threat that climate change poses to the Great Barrier Reef… James Cook University’s Prof Peter Ridd said global warming could actually be good for the Reef. And he accused scientists of “pushing particular lines” in a bid to save their jobs and keep their funding flowing. “There’s a lot of money at stake here,” Prof Ridd said.... “There’s large organisations in science who are pushing particular lines and ... the other side of the argument is not being heard.” And add to that the admission this week of professional alarmist Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers: When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate...We just don’t understand the way the whole system works… See, these people work with models, computer modelling. So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend. What a Liberal party could have done with such material this week had it determined to oppose this hoax fix to a dubious scare that even Flannery admits isn’t panning out as predicted.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous