"Swindle" - too Little, too Late?

David Tiley at Barista raises an interesting question in a post on The Great Global Warming Swindle:

I’ve been told by loyal ABC staff that “the debate is over” about Holocaust denial and no-one seriously supports it. So how do we decide when the climate debate is over? When I began to suggest that there is no trained consensus against Global Warming any more, I was told the Prime Minister didn’t believe in it.

Hmmm … that reflects his bob-each-way duplicity, in which he is dragged reluctantly to accept it but his government has actively funded anti GW programs for at least five years. He supports a Greenhouse Office, for crying out loud. (my emphasis)

One obvious thought that has a brief moment to cross your mind in the short pause between the two paragraphs is that John Howard is no climate scientist. It's unlikely that he believes that the Earth is flat, but if he did, his opinion wouldn't count for much if you were looking for a trained consensus on the shape of the Earth, its place in the solar system and all that jazz. So why should it matter to the ABC that the Prime Minister doesn't believe in global warming if his opinion is flat-out wrong?

From all the reading I've done on the subject, it appears that the debate over global warming in the scientific community is over - there's just too much evidence that global warming is happening and that the major cause is all the carbon dioxide we've put back into the atmosphere through a couple of centuries of burning fossil fuels while, at the same time, removing large parts of the ecosystem that take the stuff back out of the atmosphere. The existence of an Australian Greenhouse Office, the fact that John Howard finally shifted from "it ain't happening", via "we aren't going to stuff up the economy for a theory" to "clean coal and nuclear energy is the answer" are indications that the debate is over in politics.

The only place the debate does survive is in Newstralia, the parallel world inhabited by the punditariat of News Limited, News Limited bloggers and their fans in the blogosphere What are we hearing from that quarter?

Tim Blair is so burnt out on the subject global warming that he's writing complete nonsense, like this article in the Daily Terror (hat tip to John Surname at Grodscorp and this post, where Tim declares that he prefers the theory that global warming is caused by extra-terrestrials microwaving the Earth to anything Al Gore has to say on American politics. Does Tim actually believe that global warming is caused by a giant space alien who can balance a microwave oven on one hand and the Earth on another? Well, the theory gets us off the hook, so it must be worth taking a look at.

The prolific Andrew Bolt got a column and a later post out of the ABC's decision to screen The Great Global Warming Swindle before he got swept up by the deluge of bile that News pumped out on Therese Rein. His last post on Global Warming for the weekend was this weak effort - no new facts, no argument, just a quick snark at Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US Congress for flying to Europe to discuss, among other things, global warming.

Some debate, eh? Seems to me that it really is over and science won. It's not exactly a victory for the Left though - there are still a few Leftists around who think global warming is a vast, global conspiracy against the working class. Even Tim and Andrew will recognise that for a delusion - how can an anti-capitalist conspiracy be a conspiracy atgainst the working class at the same time.

Whoops - maybe I shouldn't have said that. The buggers might get together and come to some bi-partisan agreement on the subject. That could be a real bugger to deal with.