Auntie’s climate debate

Wednesday, 10th March 2010

Mobiles, jumbo jets and the internet have still not killed off the tyranny of distance — at least not at ABC headquarters.

Mobiles, jumbo jets and the internet have still not killed off the tyranny of distance — at least not at ABC headquarters. For while opinion polls around the world show a declining belief in the alarmist faith that human activity is dangerously cooking the planet, at Auntie it’s business as usual. To this taxpayer-funded institution, the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph has not been disproven, Al Gore’s films have not been demonstrated to be riddled with errors (even as their maker is poised to become the world’s first climate change billionaire), and the only crime involved in the ‘Climategate’ emails was their alleged hacking, and not the wildly politicised science they revealed.

Even when the ABC tries to present a balanced debate, the result is ham-handed. This might be because, as Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes suggested in a recent opinion piece defending the broadcaster against charges of bias on the issue, the ABC thinks that there’s no functional difference between questioning anthropogenic global warming and believing in creationism. To put it another way, if you ‘question the science’, you may as well believe Jesus preached to dinosaurs.

Who can forget the embarrassing spectacle of the ABC having to hold what amounted to a counselling session for viewers after it was pressured into airing a British documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, in 2007? Or more recently the five-part rant by Clive Hamilton on ABC’s new opinion site, The Drum, complaining that ‘think tanks, oil money and black ops’ were behind the rise of scepticism. It is telling that those who question apocalyptic climate narratives are generally dismissed if they do not hold multiple science doctorates, yet a ‘Professor of Public Ethics’ such as Dr Hamilton is given complete credence when it comes to the end of the world.

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