Freshly extruded Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has challenged the Prime Minister to debate him over the Government’s response to next week’s looming asteroid impact, saying that the science isn’t in on whether the planet’s collision with the 90 kilometre-wide clump of frozen iron, nickel and basalt will be nearly as apocalyptic as the Intergovernmental Panel on the Impending Asteroid Apocalypse is predicting.
While the Prime Minister pointed to his referral of the most recent emergency findings of the Federal Government’s Emergency Crisis Response Sub Committee to the Steering Committee of the National Crisis Coordinating Reference Group as evidence of how seriously his government took the threat of asteroid-related global extinction, Mr Abbott insisted that although he accepted there would be ”some impact” from the asteroid impact it remained to be seen whether this would be any more serious than ”the large number of other things that routinely bump into the earth from time to time, indeed every day”.
“Logs, quite big logs and branches, fall out of trees and directly impact the surface of the earth all the time,” said Mr Abbott. “People drops things, really very heavy things on occasion, and they almost always hit the earth in exactly the same way this so called asteroid is supposed to, that is, you know, vertically … and yet we don’t run around saying the sky is falling or imposing great big new taxes on the people of Australia.”
Arguing that it would be madness to saddle the economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in extra taxes before the asteroid even arrived and the extent of the impact and apocalypse was actually known, Mr Abbott unveiled the Coalition’s new position which he described as a “very prudent wait-and-see approach”.
The centre piece of his strategy was to respond to any possible asteroid impact without raising taxes or doing anything.
“While some scientists have been predicting the seas will rise up in five mile-high tsunamis, others have said the killer waves might only be two miles high,” Mr Abbott cautioned. “And when you have that sort of disagreement and then you get those leaked emails from that British university which openly questioned whether everyone would die immediately or a little bit later, well, you’ll excuse me if I regard all this end of the world stuff as a little hysterical and certainly not settled.”
Denying that he was an asteroid impact-denier, like his Minister for Denying Asteroid Impacts, Senator Minchin, Mr Abbott said that there were many people of good faith who remained sceptical about whether the impact would mean the end of all life as we know it, or simply the end of civilisation as we know it and they deserved to have their views debated too.
Unfortunately, according to the Government’s Minister for the End of the World, Senator Penny Wong, with the Coalition filibuster in the Senate likely to string out debate on the asteroid impact until well after the asteroid impacts next week, it is unlikely Mr Abbott will realise his desire to debate those views after all.
This beautiful spoof — in case you hadn’t guessed; after all, it’s close enough to be true — was written by John Birmingham (AKA Blunt Instrument) for the Sydney Morning Herald and deserves to be reposted because Tony Abbott is one of the most dangerous kind of sceptics. Without going into the background of his position too much; to the more radical of us in the environmental / ecological space, he actually comes across as a useful ally: by opposing a measure that toadys up to industry and allows traded emissions to masquerade as emissions cuts, he has done the right thing.
Then you look again and find he is using a scattergun approach to climate science, while also taking utterly discredited writers like Ian Plimer at face value:
If you look at Roman times, grapes grew up against Hadrian’s Wall – medieval times they grew crops in Greenland. In the 1700s they had ice fairs on the Thames. So the world has been significantly hotter, significantly colder than it is now. We’ve coped.
As I said, it is quite concerning but we have to remember that these are computer models and we also have to accept that there is… there are certainly some reputable scientists, Tony, who don’t accept that the most important element in climate change, to the extent that it’s occurring, is man-made carbon dioxide.
Well, look, if man-made CO2 was quite the villain that many of these people say it is, why hasn’t there just been a steady increase starting in 1750, and moving in a linear way up the graph.
These three quotes from the same interview demonstrate, in order, that (a) Tony Abbott is reading from the same song-sheet as the real old-school deniers, like Fred Singer; (b) he is trying to suggest that there is significant disagreement within the climate science community; and (c) he hasn’t a clue how natural climatic systems work at all. In other words, he appears to not have an original thought in his head and is thus extremely manipulatable. In a nation that really needs to take radical action to undermine the power of the fossil fuel and other industrial interests, Tony Abbot is rapidly becoming a potent player — acting the part of “confuser” quite brilliantly.
The industrialists must be grinning all the way to the bank / coal mine / clearcut.
