Politics

BJORN AGAIN SCEPTICS 

Hell seemingly hath no fury like a climate alarmist aroused.

That seems to be the message coming from the Abbott Government’s decision, last month, to set up a climate change centre at the University of Western Australia (UWA), courtesy of a four million dollar grant.

The proposed Australian Consensus Centre has produced anything but that and the massive stink is because is because controversial Danish born author Bjorn Lomberg is the recipient of the funding.

The usual Green-Left suspects railed at the decision. For the former Greens leader Christine Milne it ‘was an insult to every climate scientist in Australia,’ while Tim Flannery said it was “an ideological attempt to deceive the Australian public.” In addition, an on-line petition has more than 6000 signatures raised by born-again guardians of the legacy of Pope Urban VIII, attacking a new Galilean heretic who dares to disturb orthodoxy!

Still, it was enough for UWA to run up the white flag and surrender to the mob, rejecting the money, and the centre, on the 8th May. Nor is it the first time this has happened. Lord Monckton was similarly deemed persona non grata by UWA for his views on climate issues.

Lomborg’s ‘crime’ is not that he is a climate change denier but rather that he downgrades the issue by saying, “I don’t think climate change is the most pressing issue in the world.” That alone condemns him with the new Inquisitors.

Lomborg seeks to challenge people to think, supposedly what universities are for, yet these are the very centres that charge him with the new heretic label, ‘climate contrarian,’ and demand that he be kept off campus ‘in the name of science.’

No wonder Brendan O’Neil, Editor of Spiked, said there is a palpable religious feel to the denunciations. ‘Once we had in the name of the Lord,’ he wrote, but now dissenters are stilled by the Golden Calf of Science. O’Neil said the new secularist masters ‘ brings to mind dark intolerant episodes from history’ when questioners like John Wycliffe, the Morning Star of the Reformation, was hounded out of Oxford University for ‘riling church elders.’  Indeed, and it could be said some academics of today are the ‘spiritual’ heirs of the mob who supported Barabbas.

Clearly UWA vice chancellor Paul Johnson plays the role of the new Pontius Pilate with his craven surrender to academic cowards and as Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne rightly noted, “what a sad day when staff at a university silences a dissenting voice rather than test their ideas in debate.”

One academic not impressed with the treatment handed out to Lomborg is Colorado professor of Environmental Studies Roger Pielke Jr.

Although sometimes an opponent, including on a panel debate, the American praised Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Scientist as being ‘incredibly useful in the classroom.’

Pielke warned, in what should also be observed by homophiles and Islamophiles, that debate should never be closed down, or shutout, simply because of hostility to a particular view or person.

Bill Gates described Lomborg as “data driven, and always worth listening to” while The Economist magazine described the Copenhagen Consensus Centre as an ‘outstanding visionary idea’ and deserving of global coverage.

True enough. As the Copenhagen Consensus has shown, solutions to a wide range of problems are considered after looking at what experts in the particular area have to say. These problems are evaluated by a panel of economists and subjected to budgetary constraint. A pecking order of projects is listed.

The Copenhagen Consensus 2008 listed reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in last place (30^th) on the list of major problems, therein the problem with those who cherish this cause as the most important issue facing the globe.

Unlike Lomborg, those academics at UWA are incapable of rising to the challenge.

 In 2004 Time listed Lomborg as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. As journalist Andrew Bolt asked, would anyone from UWA make the top 100 Australian list?

Minister Pyne will now look for another venue to host the Consensus Centre but that may not be in Perth, thanks to the antics of the new heretics known as ‘climate spoilers.’