On Monday night, the country breathed a sigh of relief as radio broadcaster Alan Jones told us that it’s fine. There’s no such thing as climate change.
“What is climate change?” the 76-year-old rhetorically asked the Q&A audience. “Young people are highly intelligent. They have many platforms from which they can (glean) their information and knowledge. I wonder whether they’re being told all the facts in relation to this.”
Political reporter at The Australian, Alice Workman, buried her head in her hands on the panel beside him.
“Oh my God…” she said, listening to one of the most influential media personalities in the country deny we’re encountering any kind of environmental crisis.
That’s when Jones resorted to his percentages, reciting how much carbon dioxide is created by humans, and by Australia specifically – which to him, personally, isn’t enough to justify changing anything.
Alan Jones on Q&A on Monday night. Post continues below.
Imagine.
Imagine believing you are right and everybody else is wrong.
Imagine thinking you know more than not just one climate scientist, but all the climate scientists. Combined. You! One, single man, with no qualifications in the field.
It is difficult to fully comprehend the arrogance of that position.
Jones thinks he knows more than climate scientists, who have spent their entire lives studying global warming, travelling all over the world, analysing the numbers and putting together peer-reviewed papers.
What could possibly be in it for them? What advantage could there be in finding that the planet is facing an unimaginable crisis; that we must rethink all our industries and the very structure of modern life?
Who are the winners? Who benefits from such a conclusion?
Climate change is not a scientific opinion. It is a scientific consensus, come to by tens of thousands of separate studies, all over the world. At least 97 per cent of scientists agree that global warming is happening, and is human caused.
Based on all the research, last night, it was far more likely that Jones himself would be struck by lightning in front of a live studio audience, than for us to ever discover that the words coming out of his mouth were at all true.
They are the odds we’re playing with.
He might as well have argued that smoking does not cause cancer, or that exercise and eating well have no bearing on our health.
What a different world we might live in, if we listened to the people who had the most information, rather than those with the loudest voices.
Top Comments
it's intriguing that nobody yet has has viewed this issue holistically.Consider a statistic or two. When I was born the population of the earth had taken 100,000 years or so to reach 2.5 billion folks. In the space of my lifetime yes that's right it's now approaching 8 billion so an increase of 5 billion in seventy years. Result! vast swathes of oxygen producing forest cut down to provide food and housing, vast volumes of fossil fuels dug up to provide them with electricity,motor cars,washing machines and single use plastic water bottles and so on so the problem is far greater than merely global warming it's really just a side effect of a much larger issue. If we continue reproducing at such a rate ...in the life time of my grandchildren the earth will be unsustainable for life which of course will be Mother Earth's solution to the problem... wipe us out, renovate the joint and start again.
If we go looking for the answer to why the population has exploded we find that the scientific community have contributed in large part to this situation and should thus from a moral stand point shoulder some of the responsibility.
Science has given us vaccination, the rediscovery of penicillin and the overriding current attitude that death is the enemy and life should be prolonged beyond reasonable expectation rather than a perfectly natural conclusion to life as well as most of the methods we use to produce carbon dioxide . So scientists and politicians (and to a lesser extent all of us) time to step up with some solutions rather than band aids and hollow rhetoric.
you go to 100 oncologists. 97 say you have lung cancer from your smoking while the other three who get paid to spruik homeopathy crap say its just normal fluctuations of an aging lung take this and it will be fine. who will you trust ?
yes joydie its 97% of climate scientists not of all scientists.
the majority of the three percent are sell outs to RW media and or get 'donations' from mining orgs
Equally the other 97% get paid as long as they say there’s a problem.
I’ll listen to any of them who can successfully run their climate change model against historical data and get a match, but so far none of their models work, which means they aren’t right.
Science is not like voting for Australian Idol, majority doesn’t matter, truth matters, else we’d be asserting the sun revolves around the earth still, ulcers are caused by stress, not bacteria and smoking is alternatively good or bad for you depending on the time period.
Perhaps you should spend some time with scientists in a scientific environment. There’s no such thing as a ‘match’ between models and observations; if there was it would be regarded as highly suspicious because there is too much chaos and noise in the earths system. What we do is model what we know, based on a physical understanding, and project what happens under certain scenarios. Climate scientists don’t have contracts that give them pay on the condition they follow a certain line, they follow evidence. If someone could definitively prove climate change is not a threat, there’s a lot more money to be had for them than the rest of us!
of course they get paid but climate science doesnt pay much unlike those who sell out to vested interests in killing the planet for as much money they can get. try looking through nasa climate change portal for facts/evidence or go to npcc and read through the thousands upon thousands of peer reviewed stuff that those sell outs couldnt pass if they tried (and they dont. guess why ?) if theyre still doing it for such shitty pay to save the world and keep passing peer review as they do theyre obviously on to something. but i reckon youre too 'i know better' than to actually look at the real evidence and come to an informed understanding, arent you ?
Since climate change work doesn’t pay much at all, can you point me to Al Gores gofundme page? I’d like to help the struggling guy out after I make sure all the recipients of billions of dollars each month in renewable subsidies are ok.