Tag Archives: Climate Change

When you wish

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Once upon a time the question about life elsewhere in the universe was complicated by lack of basic information. From the time we knew that we lived in a galaxy and there were 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and that there were 200 billion other galaxies (so that’s, um, 80,000 billion billion stars as far as the telescope eye can see), it seemed likely that there would be many possibilities of life elsewhere.

But the unknown part of the equation was the number of stars which had planets. Then, recently, we began finding planets around other stars, but they were all uninhabitable gas giants, like our Jupiter and Saturn. Then smaller planets began to be seen as observations improved. Then smaller planets at right distance (the Goldilocks Zone – not too hot, not too cold) from stars. Now calculations show that on average every star has one or more planets. Billions of billions of stars – billions of billions of planets.

So now, almost overnight it seems, we know there are essentially infinite numbers of planets. What percentage could life have evolved on? Half? Quarter? Even if only 1% had the kinds of conditions that enabled life to emerge here we are still talking billions of occupied planets. And once you have life the Darwinian equations – variation + selection = adaptation; adaptation + isolation = evolution – mean that all kinds of interesting organisms are out there. Chances of high intelligence evolving? Very good, it has evolved many different times here.

It’s all just a matter of very high numbers and chance. Always was, but we didn’t know how high the numbers were before. Now we do there is no question but that there is a lot of life out there, and a lot of intelligent beings.

So, where are they? Well, a long way away. And unless physics is a lot odder than we think there aren’t going to be student exchanges or tourism between here and there and right over there. Certainly not before the dominant intelligent people here wreck this habitable planet (a long long way from the next one) by being unable to control their own CO2 emissions. I’m guessing there are other beings in the universe (Dolphin beings, or Octopus beings, or Crow beings, or Pig beings) who consider getting CO2 levels down as a definition of intelligence.

But hey – looking up at all the stars and thinking it’s a big lonely universe? So 2011. Now look up and picture all shapes and sizes of intelligent beings looking back at you from all directions. There, that feels better doesn’t it? But I wish there was more intelligence here too.

World turned upside down

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by politics • Tags: , , , , ,

When I was young, a year or two ago, the world seemed a somewhat predictable place. You knew, each New Year’s Eve, what you would be doing, as school year followed predictable school year. You knew what family would be doing, as they lived daily lives, worked at long-term jobs. The country seemed predictable, Robert Menzies having been appointed prime minister for life, or a century, whichever was longer. The world, apart from the odd event, was predictably broken up into east and west, north and south, with an iron curtain set literally in concrete, and Nelson Mandela in prison for life or 100 years.

But suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, things fell apart. I greet each year with trepidation, wondering what nasty thing is going to leap out of woodshed. And the country seems gripped with the same fear, often though about things so trivial they evaporate in the cold light of a new day. The media constantly searches for new sensations, and our politics has left the Westminster System in the dustbin of history.

Around the world there are wars, revolutions, economic uncertainty, a return to the anti-science dark ages, and a return to refugees fleeing terror in all directions. And, most frightening of all, the very Earth itself, once seemingly so stable and supportive, is warming and changing as we watch.

If I was indeed a child now I would look around me and wonder why, and wonder what was going to happen next. Not much certainty for generation Z as we tiptoe with trepidation further into a new and frightening century. No wonder teenagers are making whoopee, and making mistakes, in what looks like a repeat of the youth culture between the two world wars.

So all of us let’s make a New Year Resolution to contribute what we can to making the world a better place in 2012. With 7 billion of us how hard can it be? Everyone has different skills, different concerns, different interests, different ways of making a difference at home and abroad.

So a happy New Year to all, and Hey! Be careful out there.

Government for Dummies

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by Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

It is not just the media which aims at the lowest common denominator these days, and not just politicians (notably Abbott), but government itself.

The stupidity and ignorance of the limits placed on wind farms by the new Victorian and NSW governments is only exceeded by the stupidity and ignorance of the people whose “opinions” they are responding to. Both in turn exceeded by the cynicism and viciousness of the people manipulating the useful idiots.

Whether it’s water in the Murray, prescribed forest burning, smart meters, speed cameras, cattle in high country, phone towers, sharks, and now wind farms, whatever the complex issue requiring research, analysis, specialist scientific knowledge, and a modicum of common sense, governments instead rely on the yobbo in the street informed only by shock jocks, think tanks, religious nutters, and astroturfers, working on behalf of vested interests.

The planet is in great peril, we need great wisdom to stave off disaster. At a time like this why would political leaders seek the advice of the most stupid in society?

Government of the dummies, by the dummies, for the dummies.

Gaiathan

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by Environment • Tags: , , , , , , ,

The idea of the human body as metaphor is not new. Thomas Hobbes in “Leviathan” (1651) invented an ideal commonwealth “ruled by a sovereign power responsible for protecting the security of the commonwealth and granted absolute authority to ensure the common defense. In his introduction, Hobbes describes this commonwealth as an “artificial person” and as a body politic that mimics the human body. The frontispiece to the first edition of Leviathan, which Hobbes helped design, portrays the commonwealth as a gigantic human form built out of the bodies of its citizens.”

Last century Lovelock came up with the metaphor (though he didn’t see it as metaphor) of “Gaia” – the whole planet as a kind of self-regulating ecosystem. Some truth in that as in most things, but it became something of a monster eating its Frankenstein later.

But various circumstances got me thinking about the idea again recently. Came up with (as I realised in retrospect) a kind of combination of Hobbes and Lovelock – Gaiathan.

The human body (as all animal bodies) is a beautifully functioning machine – self-regulating, dealing with disease and injury, growing, compensating for changing conditions, reproducing, and so on. So are the ecosystems of this little planet we call home. Very close parallels. One species explodes in numbers, another increases to prey on it and bring it back to normal. Disasters of fire or flood set in train succession sequences, individual organism repair mechanisms. Climate changes, species compositions change in response. A prey species evolves defence or escape mechanisms, a predator evolves counter measures. A tree exudes chemicals, or physically excludes rival trees; when it dies others fill its place. A species is almost wiped out by pest or disease, survivors evolve resistance, species recovers.

So ecosystems live on, change with stability, just like a growing human body. But with the human body events can damage the stability. A massive wound; major bone break; poor nutrition; lack of trace elements; a new strain of disease; too much alcohol, nicotine and other drugs; environmental extremes, and so on, can all set the body on a downward spiral to death. Defences and self-regulation mechanisms overwhelmed.

Same with ecosystems. Change ecosystems by overhunting, or clearing, or dumping poisons, or splitting up, or introducing exotic species, or extracting too much water, or setting up noise and light sources, and the resulting imbalances may well prevent ecosystems recovering from, say a storm.

All pretty obvious, although the analogy seems not to occur to developers and politicians and farmers and miners, who assume that any amount of damage short of nuclear annihilation is of no concern at all.

But there is another part of the body-planet analogy that has only occurred to me, because of circumstances, lately. These days the medical profession has a panoply of tools available to tackle any medical problem known to humanity. Surgically and pharmacologically doctors are ready to swing into action as soon as you put your hand up to say “not waving, drowning”.

Before you can say “Ah” you can be infused with toxic chemicals, have a stomach full of pills, have bits of body removed or modified, have radioactivity administered externally or internally, get nutritional substances, have electronic and mechanical devices fitted into various parts of body to perform functions, get extra blood, be put into chambers with extreme conditions of oxygen or pressure or temperature.

All well and good. All often in fact bloody brilliant and at least life altering if not indeed life saving. Trouble is the law of unintended side effects. Take steroids as part of cancer treatment, bugger up your stomach; take aspirin for heart, bleed freely; replace hip, poison your muscles.

And then, and then. Have additional medicines or operations to fix first lot of side effects, develop new ones. Try to correct those in turn and something else goes down tubes. By the time you finish you are taking bucketfulls of pills, have a body full of modifications, and are much much sicker than you were when you began the whole thing.

Same in the ecosystem. The foresters and farmers and politicians who confidently announce some intervention to fix an ecological problem (up to and including climate change) are heading certainly for unintended consequences. Burn or thin forests, clear mangroves, introduce “biological controls”, reintroduce species from zoos, shoot predators, recreate extinct species, replant trees, add nest boxes, spray water into air or iron into oceans, and you may fix one thing while setting in train terrible consequences in other aspects of the ecology. Try to fix those and something else goes wrong. Things fall apart.

Take home message? Better to be healthy in first place, look after body and ecosystem, than trying to repair damage later. Like throwing a malfunctioning clock against wall, you are very unlikely to improve things.

Radioactive rat in wood shed

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , , , , ,

As soon as the sale of uranium by Australia to India was subject to criticism the other day the nuclear boosters swung into action to praise the decision as helping India to a low carbon future.

Try to criticise that then you hippy greeny new world order gauleiters, see how far you get.

It’s a variant on the Lomborg gambit – how dare you try to fix the climate as long as one child goes hungry in Bangladesh or Tuvalu. Which is in turn a variant on the “eat up all your peas there are starving children in China who would fall upon your plate like ravening wolves” approach of my grandmother to encouraging eating your vegetables.

Or, perhaps an even closer analogy, Lomborg is the Gerald Ford of economics, unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. But I digress.

It all seems very altruistic, this desire to give every Indian an airconditioner and let them cool the world. Thank goodness for these good people you say to yourself; cometh the hour cometh the nuclear spruiker.

But then it occurs to you that you never used to hear anything from these people about the way the cavalry in radiation suits was riding to the rescue of a warming planet. Indeed, although it is, just, possible I am maligning them, the people telling us to eat our radioactive omega4 are the kind of people you would find in a country pub, or city tv station, explaining carefully that CO2 was good for you and that the warming stopped in 1998.

So pardon my suspicious mind. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist but I have a sneaking suspicion there is something nasty in the wood shed. For the last ten years or more the fossil fuel industry has been funding a massive disinformation campaign, and lobbying, and buying politicians, and misleading unions, and propagandising against renewable energy, and setting up astroturf groups, in order to prevent action to reduce CO2 output and therefore their massive profits.

OK, clear, obvious, no doubt about what was going on.  Cui Bono (cherchez la femme in French) guides you every time. Coal and oil and gas producers going in hobnailed boots and all, nuclear industry sitting on sidelines, nothing to gain by taking part.

Except, except, I now wonder if they have been beavering away in the background helping their non-renewable cousins make hay while the media sun shines. After all, the longer any action can be delayed (and the Durban talks are now talking about talking about stuff in 2015, another 5 years lost), the more the nuclear industry can present itself as the rich uncle to the rescue. The only hope of saving the planet.

Ten years ago they were dead in the water of the cooling ponds. Nobody wanted a bar of them. Now, even in spite of Fukushima (!), they are again clamouring for a seat at the head of the energy table. Quick, quick, too late for anything else, only nuclear, that clean green energy, can save us now.

Call me cynical, suspicious, if you like, but I smell a radioactive rat. Cold comfort.

Dig for victory

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

In world war two the British had a slogan “dig for victory”. It was aimed at getting people growing their own food and all over the country lawns were ripped up, roses removed, and potatoes and other vegetables planted. The logic was that Britain was involved in the “Battle of the Atlantic” where German U Boats were sinking many cargo ships, and it was harder and harder to ship essential things like oil and materials for building Spitfires, and shipping food was more and more difficult. So, grow your own. Much the same encouragement in Australia I think, and after the war people continued to grow their own. Every household had a fruit tree or two (all different so you could exchange) and we all had potatoes, silver beet, what have you.

But then supermarkets arrived an it was far easier to get your vegetables wrapped in plastic on demand, with little effort except wheeling a shopping trolley, and gradually the backyard vegetable garden died out along with bicycles and wood stoves. The old world was dead, long live the new world.

The other day I bought a “raised garden bed” kit (the actual “soil” in the garden being rock, so that carrots grow upside down in it). Not alone it seems. There are many different manufacturers making all kinds of designs and sizes, and gardening magazines, and nurseries and hardware shops, are full of them. The backyard vegetable garden is back it seems. Back for a number of reasons.

Concerns about chemicals used on and to grow commercial vegetable crops; concerns about GM food; dissatisfaction with the small range of commercially profitable varieties used; dissatisfaction with foods stored for a long time; a sense of achievement in going outside and bringing dinner in from your own garden.

But there are more general reasons why this movement is a good thing. Shipping food huge distances may not run the risk of sinking by UBoat any more but it does result in considerable greenhouse gas production, and must be reduced. It will in any case become more expensive as energy costs increase. Secondly, as we have seen last week, the mass production of many commercial vegetables has been subsidised not just by cheap energy but by unsustainable water use. As the battles are fought to try to restore some life to the Murray Darling River the days of massive over use of cheap water will come to an end, and with it the growing of huge crops of fruit and vegetables in semi desert areas.

‘Dig for Victory”? Not in its original sense, but dig for sustainability certainly. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some carrots to plant, some spinach to harvest. The vegetable garden my grandparents had is reborn, everything old is new again.

For mine

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , ,

I once nearly bought a small farm in what had been a minor gold-mining area in the nineteenth century. The miners had dug deep but narrow pits, presumably found a grain or two of gold, stopped digging because they were too deep, and then moved to the next spot and dug a new hole. When even the grains of gold ran out they abandoned the field – leaving all their holes. One hundred and fifty years later the holes were still there, hidden by weeds or shrubs, forming natural pit traps. Most had animal bones in the bottom. I didn’t buy, picturing my animals, or visitors, or indeed myself, pitching down a hole one day and breaking necks. The lethal leftovers from a mining operation of which nothing was required except counting the gold nuggets.

Asbestos mines didn’t always leave holes in the ground but did leave spoil heaps of asbestos waste, uncovered, untreated in any way. Children once played on the asbestos piles as they do today in India with little environmental concern as they picked up ticking cellular time bombs. Years later those children and their parents began dying of a horrible lung cancer when those bombs went off.

“Making good” after mining seems to be a thing of the past. Mining for coal, iron ore, and silver lead zinc all leave both dirty big holes on the ground, old spoil heaps, and toxic dust blowing everywhere, including on to schoolchildren’s playgrounds and lunches. Coal mining now pushes under river beds with bad results, and the new coal seam gas drilling and “fracking” pollutes soil and rivers and water tables in rich farm land. In Japan mothers take geiger counters to the shops to try to find vegetables that are not radioactive after the Fukushima nuclear accident, and the mining of uranium back in Australia frequently causes concern about pollution of land and water. Apparently oblivious to such concerns the government has just announced more uranium mining and sales to India in addition to the other export markets.

All mining leaves some sort of toxic time bombs (perhaps even actual ones in the case of uranium) and we need to stop being so blase about it. Does anyone really need to be told twice that CSG drilling in prime farming land is a suicidal process for our future well-being?

And CSG coal mining leave another toxic legacy. Not quite so obvious, being colourless and odourless (though not weightless). Carbon dioxide, as we all now know, is heating this planet up at a frightening rate.

Digging stuff up faster and faster that pollutes farming land and changes the climate for the worse?

Think we are in a hole and digging deeper.

Fit to print

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Much talk about the Australian media inquiry lately, and the inquiry into Murdoch’s activities in Britain. Calls for regulation on the one hand, outraged reaction about government control of a free press on the other. Fairfax Media chairman Roger Corbett said limits on media would be a ‘terrible mistake’. The Right emerged blinking from Think Tank bunkers and shock jock foxholes to announce that any limitations on, nay, any questions about, the media would lead to North Korea and Nazism and Green one world government.

Even the Left was a bit hesitant to be labelled as fascists who wanted to control the media for their own evil ends, and rushed about saying that they didn’t want media regulation oh my goodness gracious no, Rupert forbid. Even someone who has seen more than most of the media’s arseholery, Jonathan Holmes, exposing major and minor media transgressions every week, rushed online to say that of course we didn’t want regulation, oh my goodness etc, but if the Murdoch Press could find it in its heart to indulge in just a little bit of possible self-regulation we could all sleep soundly in our beds again.

The editor of The Guardian, the paper that broke the stories about phone hacking and the impenetrable Murdoch defences, chimed in to talk about some regulation but only to do with privacy and defamation.

But there were some who recognised that there was more rotten in the state of media than the occasional bit of privacy intrusion however unpalatable that might be. Glenn Greenwald, for example noted that “the media’s reaction to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement highlighted how mainstream media journalists had become part of the elite class … journalists had traditionally been people outside of power who acted as watchdogs to aid the powerless, but that mainstream journalists now identified with the powerful.”

But with all due respect to Scourge of the Right Greenwald, the situation seems to me much worse than that. Journalist have become not just servants, but collaborators with power. Indeed further they no longer carry out their role of reporting and illuminating the programs and policies of others, but are players in the political and social game themselves, pushing their own ideology and agenda. That has thrown our political system into imbalance, because the media are not only players but own the means of dissemination of information, control what they will permit other players to say to the public. The only comparable situation was the medieval christian church.

I am sure if you have paid any attention at all in the last few years you can identify many media policies. They are designed either to directly benefit their corporate friends or to create a culture in which those corporations can thrive. Here are just a few off the top of my head:

Media agendas -
Reduce taxes to a point at which you can drown govt in bath tub
Keep all criminals in jail forever
Hunt pedophiles constantly
Kill all sharks after privatising the protection
Dispute all judges decisions
Public schools are rubbish
Public hospitals are rubbish
Religion is good
All opinion polls favour conservative parties, one way or another
Dump speed cameras
Monarchy is good, royals are special
Miracles happen
Psychics are real, so are ghosts
Aust police never do anything wrong. Except occasional rotten apple
Demonstrations from the Right represent voice of the people.
Demonstrations by Left – scum, obstructing traffic, lock them up
No taxes, ever
Unionists are evil and should be sent to convict colony
All strikes are bad and should be banned
Billionaires are great people – hard work got them there.
Poker machines are good, alcohol too.
Refugees are really bad. Except very rich ones who come on private jets.
Left of centre parties must never be allowed to be elected.
If Left of centre party is elected in spite of media set out to destroy them quickly
The poor are scum
The Greens are scum
No conservation measure for environment is ever justified
Zoos are good
Spare the rod spoil the child
The last public servant should be strangled with entrails of last unionist
Police never use enough force on demonstrators
There can never be too many police. Or soldiers.
No measure of performance of a society is relevant except the stock market
Farmers know best.
Every group in society except corporations acts out of self-interest. Especially scientists
Feminists are such funny little girls. Feminism is so twentieth century.
If violence, humiliation and misery attract viewers let’s have more of it.
If it’s legal we advertise it.
Australia only fights Just Wars. Especially alongside America.
Anything that might reduce their advertising profits results in a Nanny State
Climate change certainly isn’t happening and here’s a shock jock to prove it
Balance? Of course we are balanced – on the Right. Left wing views so Twentieth Century

Feel free to add as many others as you like.

This agenda is the reason we need to try to return the media to its original role in society.

Heaven knows this won’t be easy. May be impossible. Normally I would call for regulation, strong regulation, and it may come to that. But like the rest of you I don’t want to see governments of any political colour controlling the press in their own interest, we know where that leads (well, no, not North Korea, but cover-ups of bad behaviour by governments). Nor do I want to see bureaucrats with no knowledge of media trying to direct activities of people who do. On the other hand wishy-washy “self-regulation” of the kind we have now allows the most egregious examples of bad media behaviour to thrive.

I think there needs to be an independent, truly independent (perhaps with a board nominated/elected by the major political parties and the major media outlets), “Press Council” style body but with the power (transparently) to make determinations, impose fines, publicise bad behaviour, demand redress or change, prevent concentration of ownership.

Fundamentally you need (1) an ownership diversity mechanism (2) a “fairness” and balance doctrine in some form, (3) a return to a clear distinction between news and “opinion”, (4) some measure of truth in reporting (and advertising), (5) clear labelling of vested interests and institutional homes of commentators, (6) some protection for privacy and against libel, and (7) a complaints mechanism with teeth. Then see how it goes and review at regular intervals.

Someone noted the other day that one of the commercial TV “current affairs” programs had become a cancerous growth on the media. I reckon the media as a whole has become a cancerous growth on our democracy, and some kind of therapy is needed to reduce its malignancy. Not pleasant, cancer therapy, but it will do them, and us, a lot of good.

Bag Gladstone

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Look every so often you come across something so mind-numbingly insane, so off-the-planet crazy, that you think you have wandered into a National Party conference by mistake, and in this case I probably have. Warning – some sporadic bad language may follow.

There was this state in Australia, see, a kind of a magical place. Had everything – mountains, sweeping plains, rich volcanic and alluvial soils, endless grasslands, tropical forests, more biodiversity than you could poke a shotgun at. You could run healthy cattle in huge numbers, and grow crops ranging from cool temperate grapes and vegetables to tropical fruits like bananas and mangoes.

And then, and then, it had a long coastline in tropical waters. Rainforest grew down to white sandy beaches, rivers fed by tropical rains flowed to the sea, mangroves grew in estuaries and on coasts. And the sea. Sparkling blue, warm, with astonishing diversity of marine life, especially since under the waters was the world’s biggest coral reef, and above the waters a chain of thousands of tropical islands. The seas provided abundant fish and crustaceans and molluscs, all healthy and unpolluted.

So people clamoured to buy the agricultural and marine food products from the state. And many more clamoured to visit the natural wonders of ocean, reef, forest and outback. Enjoying a lifestyle, if only briefly, found nowhere else on the planet, and looking in awe at the natural animal and plant wonders of sea and land.

Too good to be true? That’s what the developers and miners and corporations and their political friends thought. Queensland politicians. Bet you’d guessed that already. No point in distinguishing what kind of Qld politicians because it makes no difference at all.

Anyway these bastards got together and decided they didn’t want the state that had been provided to them by hundreds of millions of years of evolution and an incredibly lucky accident of geography. Decided they could care less about a lifestyle for its inhabitants that was the envy of the world, most of whom wanted to visit to sample it. Decided that although they and their friends had made millions out of showing off their lovely state and selling its excellent food products, this wasn’t good enough. Decided that if they wanted to make billions, and they did, they would need to start digging up and drilling for some rather nasty stuff that had lain underground for hundreds of millions of years. Dig it up quick, flog it off, get money. Simple equation.

Just two small flaws in this otherwise excellent cunning plan. Getting this ghastly stuff out from underground tended to pollute the farming country – soil, rivers, aquifers. And shipping it overseas meant shipping it down to the coast, into harbours, on to ships, and out through the amazing reef.

But none of the people who were going to become very rich, or their political enablers, gave, and here I resort to alliteration, a flying fuck about the flaws. In fact it seemed that the more damage they could cause the better – one in the eye for all those do-good hippies, and farmers and tourist operators and fishermen. Men? None of them real men. Not like miners and shippers and developers. Men so tough they were prepared to destroy a whole state and a 2000km long coral reef and millions of years of evolution and millions of years of ecosystem development just to prove their toughness. Only to be outdone in toughness by the politicians who thought the destruction wasn’t happening fast enough.

And here we are. Rich farming land being wrecked. Rivers, estuaries, bays being dredged, mangroves removed, ports enlarged, toxic waste dumped near reefs, massive increase in shipping, oil spills, animal collisions, dying fish and dugongs. From the south of the state through Gladstone (now focus of massive destruction) all the way up to Bathurst Bay (Bathurst Bay – if that doesn’t signal what is wrong nothing does). Ongoing and increasing damage to the marine ecosystem and the reef itself, already under great threat as climate change impacts the oceans through heat and acidity. Ongoing and increasing damage to terrestrial biodiversity, already under threat from rising temperatures and increasing storms through climate change.

But wait, there’s more. And this is the icing on the cake, the flag in the National Party lapel. This is the part that has me screaming at the tv “What the fuck do you people think you are doing? Yes Anna, that includes you.”

The nasty stuff they are digging up, drilling for, shipping off overseas? Carbon that when burnt will greatly worsen the climate change already affecting this state. You following me? Wrecking the state in order to send off stuff that will wreck the state even more, in a process the term “vicious cycle” could have been invented for.

I’d suggest that we should take Queensland away from the Queenslanders. Except, and this is where my story turns from anger to sadness, the other states are just as bad.

Miracle climate cure!

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by Climate Change, Media • Tags: , , , , , , ,

A comparison between public perception (and I use the term loosely) of climate science and other sciences has been made in various ways from time to time, but is worth making again.

You are sitting in on a case management conference in the oncology area of a hospital, with all the specialists, nurses, medical technicians present. They are discussing your case, going through the various cycles of chemotherapy and the results of tests. Just then a janitor wanders in, listens for a moment, then says to you “you don’t want to listen to all that crap, these people don’t know what they are talking about, my granny swore by deadly nightshade, rubbed on the legs. Did it all her life and never developed lymphoma.” Do you say (a) “that sounds really interesting, do you have some, I will give it a try”, or (b) “go away you idiot, what the hell would you, or your granny, know about it”?

Or say you have wandered in to a lecture by Australia’s latest Nobel Prize winner. You listen to him talk about galaxies, and the size and age of the universe, and dark matter, and red shift, and expansion and when he asks if there are any questions you put up your hand. “This is rubbish Professor Schmidt” you say “I was listening to Ray Jones on the radio the other day and he said the universe is much smaller than you say, and is contracting not expanding. Said it was common sense because it looked just the same as it did when he was a boy. Said you scientists got paid more money, got prizes and stuff, if you made the universe seem bigger than it is. That true Professor?”

Or perhaps you visit a farmer friend. She explains how she has been developing her pasture. Careful analyses of soil and grasses for trace elements; analysis of soil structure, organic content, invertebrate species; study of which plant varieties will do best; reintroduction of native plant species; provision of structures to encourage birds; computer models developed for efficient grazing regimes. When she has finished you say (a) that sounds great I assume you are working with the CSIRO and the local pasture people or (b) you shouldn’t bother with any of that rubbish, I read somewhere all you have to do is fill an old cow horn with manure and bury it on a full moon and your pastures will be fine?

Well, I don’t need to go on do I. Anyone who has read any blog or newspaper article related to climate change will recognise the analogies in some of the responses above. Indeed just the other night leading Australian denialist Alan Jones used number 2. I make the analogy here not just to point out the idiocy of climate change denier – that is like shooting fish in a barrel – but to make a more general point.

The examples given are not chosen to be crazy things that people would never say in contexts other than climate science, although there is certainly some truth in that. People seem happy to live in a modern world created by science, accept that scientific experts know far more than they do. Except in the areas of climate science and evolution (this is not a coincidence – areas where those implacable things called facts come up against ideologies held in an iron grip).

Rather I have chosen examples where people can and do make such remarks in other areas of science. The nutters with “cancer cures” are well known (and have caused many deaths when they fool people). The nutters who believe the world is 6 thousand years old because the bible says so (it doesn’t of course, but even if it did …). The people who bury cow’s horns or dowse for water. All well known.

But unlike the nutters in the climate change blogs and letters and demonstrating outside parliament or the bureau of meteorology, the nutters in other fields of scientific endeavour are recognised to be nutters and are treated as such by the media. They are generally scorned, laughed at, treated as little humorous fillers in between cute babies and piano-playing cats, although every so often a tv network will pick up on a “miracle cancer cure” story when ratings are flagging.

But the media, and the public in general distinguish between the body of scientific knowledge which has propelled us out of the Dark Ages and into the Knowledge Ages of the 21st century, and the occasional wing nut with delusions of grandeur, and, well, delusions in general. No one, least of all the media, thinks that any of this rubbish, as entertaining as it might be, actually overturns any of the individual scientific disciplines, let alone the whole glorious superstructure of science that these disciplines combine to form (strengthening each other in the process).

Except when it comes to climate science. Then every shock jock, retired engineer, Joe the truckdriver, old surfer, who “thinks it a scam” or says “it’s the Sun” or observes that “plants use CO2″, or says the sea looks the same to him, is given the status of a second coming of Galileo. Any piece of mindless opinion based on the self-interested meme of the day from oil company fronts is treated as overturning the results of the measurement and analysis by tens of thousands of scientists in virtually every scientific discipline (climate science is a multi-disciplinary effort). Not just overturning some particular piece of analysis, but overturning physics, chemistry, palaeontology, astronomy, ecology, oceanography, and the rest. Overturning in fact, Science itself.

Day after day Frank the shock jock and Joe the truckdriver manage to negate 500 years of scientific research with unfounded opinions. According to the media.

Now why would that be, do you think?