Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 16, 2009

Fielding the Hard Questions on Climate Change (Part 2)

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IN the Australian Parliament, or more particularly the Australian Senate, the vote of one senator may be important for the passage of the government’s cap and trade legislation, also known as the emission trading scheme.   

Senator Steve Fielding recently returned from ‘The Third International Climate Change Conference’ in Washington indicating that he was unconvinced carbon dioxide was driving global warming and that he would like to meet with the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, to ask a few questions.   The Australian media immediately tried to brand him a ‘sceptic’, but Senator Fielding has continually denied that he is a sceptic, just that he has an obligation to get to the bottom of a couple of issues before he votes on the important legislation.

Senator Wong organised to meet with him and Australia’s chief scientist Penny Sackett.  The meeting apparently took place yesterday and Senator Fielding apparently brought along some other scientists including some so-called sceptics.  

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Defining the Sceptics (Part 2)

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A true sceptic, following in the path of British biologist Thomas Huxley, is a truth seeker.*  A true sceptic will place their search for the truth above all else.  

As such a true sceptic will usually be an outsider, because the masses like to agree and are rarely too concerned with the truth.

Indeed if we accept, as Mr Huxley explained, that the brains of apes and humans are fundamentally similar it is not surprising that most Homo sapiens value belonging and status above the truth.   

Indeed explaining why someone in a position of authority is wrong, rarely aids survival or improves status in a communal society (ape or human).  

Of course, politics and values are important, even if they rarely have anything to do with the pursuit of the truth.   [Read more…] about Defining the Sceptics (Part 2)

Wheat Crops and Sunspots

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“IT is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.

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