David Suzuki drives me crazy
Miranda Devine – Wednesday, September 25, 2013 (7:48am)
The Daily Telegraph
DAVID Suzuki’s appearance on the ABC flagship program Q&A spelled the death of any credibility left in the fag end of the climate alarm movement. The affable climate alarmist is described by his acolytes in the Australian media as “iconic scientist and thinker”. He is really the Canadian Tim Flannery, with an expertise in insects rather than mammals.
At 77, Suzuki describes himself modestly as an “elder”. But his performance indicates he only has mastered the age bit of the equation, more than the wisdom.
On his latest ABC-feted trip to Australia he’s described Tony Abbott’s election mandate to axe Flannery’s Climate Commission and remove the carbon tax as “criminal negligence”.
In an opinion piece last week, he airily claimed the Great Barrier Reef “could” shrink to one quarter of its 1986 size in the next ten years, because runaway global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of cyclones, despite evidence to the contrary. But on Monday night’s fawningly titled “an Audience with David Suzuki”, he showed himself to be astonishingly uninformed about the science he proclaims on, from climate to the dreaded genetically modified crops.
When tackled on his reef cyclone furphy by IPCC expert reviewer and environmental engineer Stewart Franks, he rolled over: “I have to admit, that that was suggested to me by an Australian, and it is true, I mean, it may be a mistake. I don’t know.”
When a scientist in the audience defended working on genetically modified bananas to counter Vitamin A deficiency so that poor Ugandans don’t go blind or worse,” Suzuki said: “what’s the rush?”. Just a few dead and blind Africans, I guess. By the end, even Q&A’s greenie host Tony Jones looked sheepish.
“Corporations are not people”, opined Suzuki at one point, prompting a twitter spurt of ridicule such as “clouds are not unicorns”. Suzuki was sunk on the first question put to him by Bill Koutalianos of the Climate Skeptics Party, asking why man-made global warming advocates refuse to acknowledge that global temperatures have remained relatively flat for 15 years.
“Where are you getting your information” Suzuki asked. Koutalianos cited the major temperature data sets used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Suzuki burbled about “cherry picking” facts. “There may be a climate sceptic down in Huntsville, Alabama, who has taken the data and come to that conclusion.”
Umm, no.
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is out this week and no doubt will package up the latest climate science in the usual alarmist language. But the inconvenient fact remains that real world observations since 1998 have defied climate models which predicted catastrophic global warming. AR5 is expected to concede this fact, even if prominent eco-alarmists ignore it: the world’s average surface temperature has not increased for 15 years, despite increased human emissions of carbon dioxide.
In other words, the computer models which predicted drastic global warming, on assumptions of the atmosphere’s extreme sensitivity to carbon dioxide, were wrong. Which is not unprecedented. Computer models are not magic boxes of wisdom. They are a powerful tool for simulating the future but they are only as good as their human-designed assumptions and their human-collected data inputs.
Eventually scientists will emerge from the muck of politics and ideology to explain why the predictions were wrong. In the meantime, we should be free from the imperative to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on vast green bureaucracies and schemes to reduce carbon emissions which just damage Australia’s economy and outlaw the cheap coal-powered electricity which used to be our competitive advantage.
With the Greens vote plummeting from 13 percent in 2010 to 8.6 percent this election, a catastrophic drop of more than one third, it’s clear the Australian public is coming to appreciate the danger of eco-zealotry.
Suzuki has a beatific smile and endearing manner, but he is not an elder or a sage of science. He is an environmental extremist, a relic of the 1970s. He may not wear the bandana and John Lennon glasses of his youth but inside still beats the heart of an anti-capitalist hippy.
A piece of footage doing the rounds of social media this week shows a young Suzuki in 1972 sitting cross legged on the ground, describing humans as “maggots” that “defecate all over the environment”.
Almost half a century later, nothing much has changed. Asked if he still wanted to jail politicians for “denying what you call the science of climate change”, Suzuki said: “You bet.. it is a crime against future generations and there ought to be a legal position of intergenerational crime and I think there is criminal negligence.”
What about reckless endangerment of the economy with fairy stories from eco-pseuds. Is that a crime?
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