Adam Morton, The Age's hysterical propaganda merchant

Propaganda merchant

I could hardly be bothered reading this, let alone posting on it, since Fairfax made up its mind on climate change years ago, but The Age cannot be allowed to get away with this rubbish scot free. Morton has a catalogue of alarmist environmental reports in The Age stretching back as far as the eye can see, and he excels himself today with his breathless account of “The Deadly Decade”, blaming climate change for everything from the Victorian bushfires to the floods in Pakistan. Firstly, Morton tugs at the heart strings with a climate scientist wracked with guilt and remorse:

Neville Nicholls is a climate scientist. He has long believed his role was research, not advocacy. But when he woke on the morning following Black Saturday, turned on his TV and caught his breath after witnessing the shocking aerial footage of what was once Marysville, he instinctively blamed himself.

“My initial thought was: is this my fault? Has this happened because I haven’t been out there saying that this stuff is going to have catastrophic consequences for us?” he recalls. “It is the first time I have ever been shaken from my belief that I shouldn’t be an advocate on climate change.”

Sure, because there aren’t any advocates for climate change, are there? The public are completely in the dark (if you choose to ignore Al Gore, James Hansen, and thousands of other shills for the cause that clog up the newspapers and the airwaves every day of the year). Morton then claims that climate and weather can’t be linked, but then proceeds to do just that:

It has been said so often that it should be well known by now: no extreme event can be definitively blamed on the surge in atmospheric greenhouse gases since industrialisation. But when events closely replicate what dozens of climate models have predicted will come, neither can they and climate change be divorced.

The 13 members of Climate Scientists Australia believe February 7, 2009, was such a case: 46.4 degrees in Melbourne — not just the city’s hottest day on record, but more than 3 degrees warmer than February’s previous maximum.

Except it wasn’t, as ACM reported back in February 2009:

First, Melbourne did in fact have a hotter day before, four years before the Bureau of Meteorology started officially recording temperatures.

As the Argus newspaper reported at the time, the temperature on February 6, 1851, soared to 47.2C, helping to superheat the fires that then roared across 10 times more land than was burned last week.

And despite claims that global warming is now heating this land like never before, Victoria’s highest recorded temperature is still the 50.7C measured in Mildura 103 years ago.

Morton then tries to link the Victorian bushfires to climate change, a particularly desperate path, since the commission which investigated that tragic event found that it had nothing to do with “climate change” at all, but with a lack of proper management:

In the October edition of the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society, Nicholls summarised: “A quantitative analysis leaves no doubt that the combination of weather conditions leading up to Black Saturday, and on the day, had not been observed previously in the 150 years of Melbourne instrumental weather data.”

The commission, though, found neither the day nor the fires were unprecedented, accepting oral evidence from land and fuel management experts that the Black Saturday fires were not a shift from what had come before.

Nicholls, one of several scientists to lodge a submission with the commission linking the fires with human-induced climate change, was surprised. “I think a focus on the fact that we had not previously seen such extreme fire weather and climate conditions is important,” he says.

Well the commission didn’t think so. But that conclusion doesn’t fit with Morton’s alarmist agenda, so he continues to link the bushfires to climate change to plug the cause – maybe the commission was funded by Big Oil? And of course, no article would be complete without blaming extreme cold on global warming as well:

There is significant evidence to suggest that global warming is responsible for the extreme northern winters of the past two years. An increase in air pressure in the Arctic atmosphere caused by warmer heat coming off a relatively ice-free ocean is pushing cold air south.

There is no “evidence” at all, of course – just spurious outputs from this week’s favourite dodgy climate model, thereby justifying any weather conditions as signs of “global warming”. An unfalsifiable hypothesis isn’t science, by the way.

Then there is the usual parroting of the IPCC line [credibility shot to pieces], rising sea levels [same rate as the last 7000 years], Arctic ice declines [no mention of Antarctic ice increases]. This isn’t journalism but propaganda, and the conclusion fits the mould perfectly, cheerleading Australia’s pointless efforts to “tackle climate change”:

What are the hopes of a global solution to this diabolical problem? A recent prognosis by the Paris-based International Energy Agency found the national targets submitted under last year’s loose Copenhagen Accord would put the world on a path of 3.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century. Even if you assume that countries introduce policies to back their international promises — Australia and the US, to name just two, currently have no way of meeting their targets — few scientists or policymakers expect the temperature rise to be kept within 2 degrees, the goal agreed under the UN process.

In Australia, next year will see a concerted effort from Labor, the Greens and significant parts of the business community to introduce a carbon price — most likely a tax that could evolve into carbon trading. If they succeed, attention is likely to turn to the challenge that has just begun to enter the public debate but will increasingly arise over the next decade: adapting to unavoidable change.

“Adapting to unavoidable change” – that’s the first and only sensible sentence in the entire article.

Read it here – and that’s the last post on Morton or any other Fairfax journo for the foreseeable future. Life is too short.