Speaking to a liberal think tank in Sydney on November 6, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared that “dangerous” global warming skeptics are “holding the world to ransom” with global “fear campaigns” that could derail the climate change agreement at Copenhagen.
“Australian PM warns ‘skeptics’ could derail climate talks,” declared the headline to an Agence France-Presse report in Spacedaily.com. The Australian newspaper, The Age, announced the Prime Minister’s outburst with this headline: “Rudd blames climate sceptics for global sabotage.”
Here’s an excerpt from the AFP account:
Powerful climate change skeptics were “holding the world to ransom”, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Friday as he warned of fear campaigns designed to derail global talks.
Rudd said naysayers were active in every country as the world approached the United Nations’ climate summit in Copenhagen in December.
“They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests,” he said.
“As we approach Copenhagen, these three groups of climate skeptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom,” Rudd told a gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
Rudd, a left-wing Labor leader, campaigned on an extreme environmental platform in 2007. According to Rudd, opponents of the UN climate change treaty are busy doing the following: “Provoking fear campaigns in every country they can; blocking or delaying domestic legislation in every country they can; with the objective of slowing and if possible destroying the momentum towards a global deal on climate change.”
That’s rich! Alarmists like Kevin Rudd and Al Gore have been screaming that man-made global warming is going to cause the end of the world — melting ice caps, rising oceans, deluged coastal cities, the extinction of polar bears and other species, increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes, droughts, famine, pestilence, etc. — yet the Rudd-Gore alarmist camp claim that scientists, politicians and regular folk who don’t buy their hysterical alarmism and don’t embrace the draconian global controls they propose are the ones who are spreading fear.
Rudd repeats the charge that alarmists regularly level at climate realists: They are “deniers,” a transparent attempt to smear them with the “denier” label that is reserved for Nazi Holocaust deniers. And, another frequent charge: They are well-funded puppets of corporate interests.
“Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored,” Rudd said. “They are well resourced and well represented by political conservatives in many, many countries.” These nefarious “deniers” are threatening to upset the entire UN program for planetary salvation. According to Rudd, “the danger they pose is this: by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all.”
Marc Morano at Climate Depot offers a point-by-point rebuttal to Rudd’s claims. The full text of Rudd’s speech is available here. Here’s an excerpt of the Climate Depot rebuttal:
Rudd Claim: Skeptics are “powerful enough to threaten a deal on global climate change both in Copenhagen and beyond.”
Climate Depot Response: Yes, skepticism, the foundation of science, is and always has been strong enough to derail lavishly funded and politically motivated science based on wildly speculative climate model “predictions” and distortions of past climate records. A “scientifically meaningless” domestic carbon trading or international treaties will not impact global climate in any detectable ways, but will have huge human impacts.
Rudd Claim: Skeptics “constitute a powerful global force for inaction.”
Climate Depot Response: On the contrary, skeptics constitute a powerful force for scientific truth and morality based vibrant energy expansion to the developing world’s poor. To the extent that we can prevent “scientifically meaningless” climate treaties and regulations from passing, then yes, we plead guilty to promoting “inaction.” As former Thatcher science advisor Lord Christopher Monckton has said: “Climate change is a non-problem. The right answer to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
Rudd Claim: “Climate skeptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom.”
Climate Depot Response: Reality check Mr. Rudd. Science, economics and reality are holding man-made global warming fear promoters like Rudd to ransom. It must be frustrating Mr. Rudd to have once believed you could hoodwink the people of your nation and the world to believe in climate fears and your purely symbolic “solutions.” Polling data from the U.S., the UK, Canada and your Australia show the public growing more skeptical. (See: Polls: ‘More Americans believe in haunted houses than man-made global warming’ – 37% vs. 36% ) The only “ransom” involved in this debate is the financial demands placed on countries to redistribute money based on collapsing climate fears. See: Reparations: Africa seeks climate change cash…demands billions in compensation for ‘damage caused by global warming’ & Global Carbon Tax Urged at UN Climate Conference & ‘Controlling climate? More like controlling humans’: Beware of ‘unprecedented transfer of wealth, power and control to domestic and global governance.’
Photo of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd: AP Images
