Steve Fielding's intelligence in doubt

True, you only weaken your case if you mock the opposition but Senator Steve Fielding's trip to the US to find out about climate change puts his intelligence in acute doubt. It seems he went for his information to The Heartland Institute which is paid by the tobacco industry to deny that cigarettes cause cancer and by fossil fuel industries to deny climate change.

His 'news' that solar flares were the cause of global warming has been discredited for years, as he could have learned from five minutes of Google search.

Matthew England, joint Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, clarifies Senator Fielding's misconceptions in The SMH today:

The cosmic ray effect was shown to be negligible several years ago, while solar forcing declined over the last quarter of the 20th century at a time when temperatures shot up rapidly.

We are also seeing winters warm more rapidly than summers, and nights warm more rapidly than days, the opposite of what would be the case if the sun were driving the change.

A bunch of letters hit the papers defending our Steve, but they all talked about the Heartland Institute's other sources of funding and similarly tangential distractions. None addressed the faulty science he was peddling.

Dumb and dumber

Not to be fazed by all this logic being thrown at him, Fielding retreated to the fallback position of the factually bereft and came out with the next line of the denial script, saying that anyway, even if the science is right, it would be suicidal for Australia to "Go it alone". Er, Steve, do a bit of basic reading about what other countries are doing and the targets they are setting. We are already a decade behind.

Climate change sceptics get busted over and again peddling trash, indicating that they have no valid arguments. Meanwhile the new coal loader at Newcastle is being built several metres above sea level. How ironic -- and hypocritical.