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THIS POST IS A TRANSCRIPT AND REVIEW OF THE ALLEN JONES CLIMATE CHANGE LECTURE ON SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA 11 FEB 2020 [LINK]  . IT IS PRESENTED IN TWO PARTS. PART-1 IS A TRANSCRIPT OF OF THE LECTURE. PART-2 IS A COMMENTARY ON SOME OF THE TOPICS COVERED IN THE LECTURE 

PART-1: EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE ALLEN JONES LECTURE

(1) All Australians should be disturbed by the direction in which the climate debate is heading. You can’t move or read or speak without everything being climate change. And there aren’t too many who are prepared to stand up against what is often uninformed, poorly researched, and in many cases factually inaccurate arguments in defense of the climate change imperative. {Remember? It used to be global warming? And when the planet didn’t warm, it’s now called climate change}. It has reached a point of hysteria. It is pumped out in the classroom in schools and universities, in the media, and in corporate boardrooms. It is the new phony religion.

(2) The Dorothea MacKellar poem “My Country” is something everyone talks about in the context of climate change; but this poem was written when Dorothea was 19 years old in the year 1904. She wrote then about a sunburnt country and drought and flooding rain. And a pitiless blue sky and “When sick at heart, around us, We see the cattle die – But then the grey clouds gather, And we can bless again The drumming of an army, The steady, soaking rain. This is 1904! and a poetic expression of the cyclical nature of weather – drought, flooding rain, cattle dying in what she called “a willful lavish land”. The juxtaposition of the adjectives is important. It is a country that is willful on the one hand and lavish on the other. In 1904 there was no global warming, no coal fired power stations. {The full text of the poem is included below}.

(3) Chris Kenny is one of the few people prepared to step into the ring. He has written previously that since November 2019 to the middle of January 2020, the phrase “climate change” was used more often in the media than the words disaster or devastation. The phrase “climate change” was mentioned across the media almost 900,000 times. This propaganda on steroids. And then there’s the word “unprecedented“. Chris pointed out that it was used in the media almost 200,000 times in two months.

(4) I tried today in the Sydney Daily Telegraph four days ago on page 13 to provide some perspective on all of this 4 days ago. Far from being unprecedented 4 days ago, and far from being what former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had called “utterly without precedence in our history“, of course these are the words of the forgettable Malcolm Turnbull about whom Peter and I have discussed his contradictions and hypocrisy on the issue of coal fired power plants. The utterances of Turnbull this week shows a revenge mentality against the political party that got rid of him.

(5) Here is Turnbull on bushfires, quote:  “This is the inevitable consequence of global warming. These bushfires are utterly without precedent in our history and the effect of Australia’s image abroad has been profound”. Well, if you prosecute on truths abroad, you are likely to damage Australia’s image. As I pointed out many times during Turnbull’s term as Prime Minister, in March 2018, the beautiful little community of Tathra on the South Coast of New South Wales was appallingly affected by bushfires for two days with 69 houses and 30 cabins destroyed and 39 houses damaged. The likely cause was not climate change but the failure of the electricity infrastructure. The Greens attribute the Tathra fire to climate change. Mr Turbull’s position was “I am disappointed that the Greens would try to politicize an event like this. You can’t attribute any particular event, whether it is flood or fire, or drought or storm, to climate change“. Yet on February 5, 2020, he had determined that the bushfires of 2019-2020 were “the inevitable consequence of global warming” because “these bushfires are utterly without precedent in our history“. 

(6)  This kind of illogic and hypocrisy is the proof of the real underlying truth that in climate change activism, the relevant details of the data and the circumstances are less important than the need to use them in raising a climate change alarm in terms of the data. Surprisingly, this strategy works because if the alarm is scary enough the underlying details are overlooked by the masses. The effectiveness of words like “unprecedented” in this strategy appears to be the key to its success.

THE BLACK SATURDAY FIRES OF 2008

(7)  It has been 11 years since fires broke out on Black Saturday across Victoria fanned by gusty winds and high temperature. It was not called “Black Saturday” for nothing. 450,000 hectares were burned, 173 people died, 414 were injured, and 2,029 houses were destroyed. Yet, the former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that the 2019-2020 bushfires are “utterly without precedence in our history. No one can deny the immense tragedy of the 2019-2020 bushfires but as Chris Kenny has written in the Australian, “Climate politics in this country is so wacky that informed adults ought to just scoff at them and move on”.

(8)  The real experts on the subject of bushfires will tell you over and over again that you can’t have a fire without fuel. The trial of innocent Australians is the failure to take on the Greens and do something about hazard reduction as seen in the failure to clean and clear the forest floor. Chris Kenny summed it up splendidly this weekend and good on him for not giving up. The lady here with me tonight doesn’t give up. She too writes splendidly on weekends (more on that later). Chris Kenny said simply and emphatically that “The climate debate has turned hysterical and ugly. (Australian Prime Minister)) Scott Morrison must defeat this madness. Climate politics in this country is so wacky that informed adults ought to scoff at them and move on. It’s hard in the face of saturation climate change propaganda but the battle must be joined. This hysteria and new phony religion must be addressed and it must be beaten.

(9) Some of the Viewer comments on Youtube:   John Bolton: If you give the government more of your money, the climate will change. That’s the insanity they are pushing. Even more insane… the people who believe it.  Ivanwain The recent fires destroyed 46 million acres. Unprecedented? The fires of 1974 destroyed 290 million.  Trevor Arthurson: Climate Scientist Tim Flannery said none of the rain will go into the dams. On the 10th of December in Moree climate scientists from the BOM told politicians that there would be no significant rainfall ‘til May. Reality has proved them WRONG.  Jack Russell  The Left spent decades demanding that Religious instruction be dropped from schools. Now we know why. They were preparing the ground to push their own religion: Climate Change.  Elazar de Lusignan M.  Current “NEWS,” doesn’t report the weather, they fabricate it. Fake “NEWS” and obfuscation, has become systemic. Real NEWS, is inconvenient.  40aterules   Amen….and those so called scientists that attempt to back it up are the ones with cushy high paying jobs with money that is derived from the money nations are guilt tripped into giving them your money!  Matthew Burke  Finally some people that make some damn sense. I’m sick of this climate change hoax.  Aussie Pom Scientist find if they’re after funding and their submission doesn’t include the magic words “climate change” then they don’t get any funding. Their submission may have nothing to do with climate whatsoever but if they include those two words then the funding is forthcoming. Politicians are just too afraid to tell the truth for it will affect their popularity polls and they’d be massacred by the main stream media who they fear the most.  Tracy Holliday  They will cling to it forever, it is their bread and butter in taxes, and their biggest weapon against the elected people’s choice.  bill hanna  The sky’s falling – give money…Carbon Credits , The Banker gangsters (Rothschilds) World TAX for Dummies.  OUTRAGED Aussie  Climate change is a hoax follow the money and learn the truth.  andrew rowe  follow the money  John Smith  I need to pay more taxes to an unelected bureaucracy to make the weather change  Steve Mercer  I’ve been around for 54 years, mostly in the UK. I’ve seen freezing winters where it was a struggle to get even a pick axe in the ground. I’ve seen mild and wet winters where the ground is sodden. I’ve seen deep snow and I’ve seen no snow. I’ve seen summers where we’ve had hardly any rain and a hosepipe ban. Seagulls lying dead on the beach because of the heat and drowned because they can’t get lift. I’ve seen summers where holidays were crap because of the rain. My shorts didn’t see the light of day, the barby left unused. My sunnies left in the case. Every single one of those 54 years were different and the years I have left will be different as well. Climate has always changed, always will. Not one socialist lunatic, or cowardly “go with the crowd” politician or CEO will change that. More people need to wake up to the fact that we are being manipulated into thinking that handing over our freedom of thought and action will make our lives better. So called climate emergency is being used as a tool to make few people more powerful and the majority subservient. Kids, don’t be sheep. Do your own research, think for yourselves and don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to be looked after because the “hierarchy” knows best.  BMyVision  – Fires are caused by “….a failure to clean and clear the forest floor.” California, same policy…same resulting fires.  T DoubleU  climate change is a mental illness    Benjamin Falzon  Back in 1904 schools thought the Children the facts, but in 2020 they are teaching the children loads of crap.

PART-2: COMMENTS ON THE ALLEN JONES LECTURE

To the powerful and insightful lecture by Mr. Jones against climate activism I would like to add the following notes about the nature, the history, and what I believe are the the roots, of this movement back in the environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s in the USA.

(1) The commonly held belief is that the issue is climate change and that therefore, the debate is about the details and the science of climate change and about its fearful impacts such as bushfires, extreme weather, ice melt, sea level rise, and ocean acidification. Here I present the case against this assumption and propose that the climate affair of our time is best understood not in terms of climate change but in terms of climate action. My thesis is that Climate Action is the underlying movement for which climate change serves only as the rationale and the motivation.

(2) Climate action is an expression of anti fossil fuel activism.  Anti fossil fuel activism is best understood in terms of the 1960s and 1970s anti smog, anti pollution, and anti oil spill movement that had won the pollution war and had assumed that they had won the war against fossil fuels such that thereafter, beginning in the late 1970s, an energy revolution took hold. Renewable energy innovations held out the promise of the end of fossil fuels and the pollution they cause simply by the availability of a better product in the market for energy.  An energy movement to renewable sources of “natural energy” such as wind, solar, hydro, tidal, and geothermal took hold and grew rapidly with forecasts  of a renewable energy revolution and the end of fossil fuels. The hills along the highway from Berkeley to Sacramento California became dotted with huge wind turbines.

(3) At the same time, the so called “peak oil” and “end oil” forecasts of the coming depletion of fossil fuel resources began to appear in the news simultaneously with the Club of Rome report of the imminent depletion of the essential resources that sustain the industrial economy. These forecasts, along with energy crises created by the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and the uprising against the Shah of Iran in 1979, had created a crisis in the fossil fuel industry and a perceived weakness in the industry and a search for alternatives to fossil fuels.

(4) The combination of pollution and oil spill issues and the energy crises of the 1970s created a feeling among consumers, energy analysts, and energy activists alike that fossil fuels were on the way out. It was thought to be axiomatic, particularly so among the anti pollution & anti fossil fuel activists, that the clean energy alternatives that were then being developed and implemented would be our energy future. It seemed certain then that the days of our fossil fueled economy were numbered and that a new age of renewable energy was dawning .

(5) It was in this setting and in the context of an exciting anticipation of an energy technology revolution that would end the age of fossil fuels, that the climate change issue was inserted into the energy dialog with a modernized and significantly revised version of Callendar 1938 [LINK] , the world’s first anthropogenic global warming and climate change (AGW) paper. {Footnote#1: A common criticism of AGW climate science is that the name was changed from global warming to climate change when warming became harder to prove is not correct as both terms have been used since Callendar 1938}.  {Footnote#2: the claim by climate science of an earlier origin of climate change science with Svante Arrhenius(1896) contains a fatal logical flaw [LINK] }. The Callendar paper [LINK]  notes that temperature data in Britain and parts of Europe on average showed a rising trend from 1900 to 1938 and that over the same period atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured in various parts of Europe had also gone up during a time when the industrial revolution was burning fossil fuels and exhausting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In his paper he related these events in a causation sequence where observed changes in atmospheric composition are attributed to fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy and the observed warming in surface temperature is attributed to changes in atmospheric composition specifically with respect to the heat trapping effect of carbon dioxide that was known at the time principally from the works of Tyndal and others [LINK] . A relevant feature of the Callendar paper is that it contained no fear of warming and no call to climate action against fossil fuels. The warming then was a welcome relief from the hardship of the Little Ice Age that had created extreme hardships in Europe [LINK] . Callendar had also pointed out the agricultural benefits of higher atmospheric CO2 concentration in terms of a driver for much needed photosynthesis.

(6)  The Callendar paper was well received and a few papers followed in this line of research by Revelle and others but both the paper and the theory of a warming trend driven by fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy lost credibility and popularity when the 38-year warming noted by Callendar ended in the 1940s and the world entered a 30-year cooling trend that created widespread fear of a return to the horrors of the Little Ice Age [LINK] . The AGW idea thus lay dormant until the cooling ended in late 1970s and until the trend had returned to warming  such that by the early 1980s a strong warming trend could be identified from the depths of the cooling in the 1950s to the early years of the warming in the 1980s.

(7)  This warming event and the landmark paper and Congressional Testimony by James Hansen [LINK] were the trigger that created the modern version of fear based AGW activism against fossil fuels that we see today when the United Nations, invoked its newly created role as global environmental regulator by way of the UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program) and its claim to success of its Montreal Protocol that successfully implemented a global ban on ozone depleting substances and thus claimed to have solved the projected global devastation of human caused OZONE depletion [LINK] . This claim to success is shown to be illusory on a related post [LINK] . However, the UN was successful in presenting itself as a global environmental protection agency that had saved the world from ozone depletion.

(8) Fresh from its apparent success in stopping human caused ozone depletion with the Montreal Protocol, the UN took on the AGW climate change issue as laid out in the Hansen Congressional Testimony, as the new global environmental crisis for the UNEP to solve. The UN then decided to replicate the Montreal Protocol in terms of climate change in the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol (aka UNFCCC) failed. The UN bureaucrats could not appreciate the enormous difference between changing refrigerants and overhauling the world’s energy infrastructure. The end of fossil fuels that seemed to be in sight had suddenly vanished from view.

(9)  In response, the UN bureaucrats concocted a bureaucratic plan to achieve the Montreal Protocol success in the Kyoto Protocol/UNFCCC by holding a series of meetings of the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol (UNFCCC) . These meetings called “Conference of Parties” (i.e. Parties to the Kyoto Protocol UNFCCC), or COP, not only failed to implement the the Kyoto Protocol/UNFCCC, but provided sufficient evidence to all observers that the COP meetings were farcical and that the UN would be unable to replicate its Montreal Protocol success in the Kyoto Protocol/UNFCCC. This realization dashed all hopes that this process will achieve the desired goal of overhauling the global energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels although COP after COP continued to be held.

(10)  I propose here that it was this realization, that the UN, with its UNFCCC and COP meetings, is unable to rid the world of fossil fuels with climate action plans that made the movers and shakers of anti fossil fuel activism realize that the Kyoto Protocol/UNFCCC battle against fossil fuels had been lost. It is thus that a Plan-B became necessary – a plan of intensive and extensive global fear based activism against fossil fuels and to keep ratcheting up the fear of fossil fuels until climate action against fossil fuels is achieved. This is the state of climate change today. The individuals, organizations, and funding that animates this activism plan are not known but there are many guesses and propositions on the table [LINK] and it is known that the fear based anti fossil fuel activism program is well organized and orchestrated by its unknown prime movers [LINK] . The movement not only employs street protesters, child activists, the media, and high profile spokespersons, but also climate scientists found on the internet and in public meetings and events, promoting the fear of climate change as a scientific truth. The need to continually ratchet up the fear level and the language of fear is understood in this context and seen in this related post [LINK] .

(11)  FOOTNOTE:  The activists identified in the Allen Jones video include the media, the government, and outright climate activists such as street protesters listed on the “climate movement” website [LINK] ; and it is suggested that to free society from this tyranny we must fight back against this group of people. As we all surely know, this movement is neither as spontaneous nor as original as many might assume. For example, unruly and uneducated protest mobs and young teenage girls lecturing world leaders on climate change and the needed climate action are not the source of the activism or the science they preach. They are puppets of the real actors. I believe that the issue of the architects of this movement behind the scene and its funding are complex and mostly unknown that is unlikely to be affected by attacking their agents and puppets. 

THE DOROTHEA MACKELLAR THE POEM

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror The wide brown land for me! A stark white ring-barked forest All tragic to the moon, The sapphire-misted mountains, The hot gold hush of noon. Green tangle of the brushes, Where lithe lianas coil, And orchids deck the tree-tops And ferns the warm dark soil. Core of my heart, my country! Her pitiless blue sky, When sick at heart, around us, We see the cattle die – But then the grey clouds gather, And we can bless again The drumming of an army, The steady, soaking rain. Core of my heart, my country! Land of the Rainbow Gold, For flood and fire and famine, She pays us back threefold Over the thirsty paddocks, Watch, after many days, The filmy veil of greenness That thickens as we gaze. An opal-hearted country, A willful, lavish land – All you who have not loved her, You will not understand -Though earth holds many splendors, Wherever I may die, I know to what brown country My homing thoughts will fly.