ADVANCE AUSTRALIAN OSTRICHES

 Dr Karl says:

The myth that an ostrich will stick its head in the sand, in an effort to hide, may have begun with that great Roman thinker, Pliny the Elder (23-79AD). His real name was Gaius Plinius Secundus. Pliny was a man of intense curiosity about the world around him. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote about him, “He began to work long before daybreak. He read nothing without making extracts; he used even to say that there was no book so bad as not to contain something of value. In the country it was only the time when he was actually in his bath that was exempted from study. When travelling, as though freed from every other care, he devoted himself to study alone. In short, he deemed all time wasted that was not employed in study.”

https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/11/02/1777947.htm 

'If I can't see the approaching lion, it follows that he won't be able to see me. Worth a try, surely.' 

I wonder how many ostriches had to learn the folly of that; the hard way. In any case, it is pretty-well passe today, but with one notable exception. I refer of course, to the Ostrich School of Climatology, with one online office at https://www.advanceaustralia.org.au/5pointplan 

All the above is occasioned by my receipt in the mail of a friendly circular from one Matthew Sheahan, Executive Director of an outfit calling itself ADVANCE AUSTRALIA your voice for a fair go. This wonderful document is a 'battle plan'; an advance shot in the election war to come.  After a couple of motherhood statements in points 1 and 2, it gets onto point 3: "Expose the elites for what they really are - a mob of radical politicians and bureaucrats, and especially the Greens who are out of touch with the majority of Australians like you. Radicals who are pushing lies like the 'climate change' agenda that is crippling businesses and pushing up energy prices."

To this friendly epistle I replied as follows:

Dear Mathew,

I have your message 'From Matthew to you'. It arrived in the mail today. From that I have your above email address, info@advanceaustralia.org.au .

Part of your 'pre-election battle plan' is to oppose "radical politicians and bureaucrats, and especially the Greens who are out of touch with the majority of Australians like you. [Me? Who said?] Radicals who are pushing lies like the 'climate change' agenda that is crippling businesses and pushing up energy prices."

Assertions one way or another about climate change and the human role in it are easily made and denied. But I draw your attention to the fact that nearly 200 scientific organisations worldwide, including The Royal Society, the AAAS and Australia's own CSIRO, all endorse the proposition of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming.) And when I last checked at  https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/climate-of-the-nation-climate-change-concern-hits-82/ I read the following:

The 2020 Climate of the Nation report, to be launched by The Hon. Matt Kean MP, the NSW Minister for Energy and Environment, finds that:

 After the devastating Black Summer bushfires, eight in ten Australians (82%) are concerned that climate change will result in more bushfires, up from 76% in 2019

Vast majority of Australians (83%) want coal-fired power stations to be phased out

Only 12% of Australians prefer investment in gas to power Australia’s economic recovery, while the majority of Australians (59%) prefer investment in renewables as a pathway for economic recovery

Australians overestimate gas industry employment by a factor of 40x, believing, on average, that 8.2% of the workforce is in fossil gas mining when the reality is it represents just 0.2% of the Australian workforce

Seven in ten Australians (71%) want Australia to be a global leader in finding solutions to climate change, a jump of 9 percentage points from 2019

More than two in three Australians (68%) believe Australia should have a national target for net-zero emissions by 2050, including majority support across Coalition voters (59%), Labor voters (81%), Greens voters (90%), Other voters (65%).

In the unlikely event of the global warming denialists like yourself turning out to be right, be assured that I will be the first to cheer. However, I am most reluctant to bet the lives of my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and beyond on the short-term interests of the coal industry and its shills. Meanwhile, I welcome public and private investment in renewables, (hydro, pumped hydro, solar and wind) which are doing such damage to the profitability of yesterday's coal-fired power setup in Australia. See for example https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/climate-of-the-nation-climate-change-concern-hits-82/

It would appear that Australia has, thanks to its sunny and dry climate, a great future as an exporter of solar power-produced energy in the form of ammonia to SE Asia and the world, with solar-produced electricity to follow in due course via undersea cables. "Effectively enabling us to produce renewable green energy at oil and gas scale, and transport the energy freely wherever the markets need it across the world." That quote from the (choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!*) ABC at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-10/renewable-energy-hub-ditches-asian-cable-for-ammonia/12862916

(My own roof is something of a solar energy collector, with its 20 solar electricity panels being about to be joined by a solar hot water array.) And in any case, the fossil-carbon deposits we have left (around 50% of what was there before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1750s) would in my view be best kept in reserve for such uses as plastics, steel-making, synthetic rubber and road tar, for which there are no readily-available substitutes. (The whole of Australian agriculture and horticulture, with which I have a bit of familiarity, now depends heavily on plastic tanks and polythene pipe.) 

Otherwise, our descendants will finish up driving vehicles with wooden wheels and steel tyres over cobbled roads, cursing our profligate generation every inch of the way.

Finally, your anti-science AGW-denialist position puts you into the historical company of such luminaries as British PM Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s, who was in denial that Nazism constituted a menace to Western Civilisation. He tried to deal with the rising power of Nazi Germany through appeasement, and failed. (But to his credit, he did not get any financial reward through his policies; unlike the fossil-carbon lobbyists of today.) 

I contend that the said antiscientific AGW-denialist lobby is our modern counterpart to the appeasers of the1930s. Fortunately, Britain at the time had one leader equal to the task of taking them on. Today, we have Churchills by the trainload.

Yours,

Ian MacDougall