Hide: global warming is good for you!

Continuing on from the last post, yet another right-wing nutbar…

Rodney Hide. Following on from his insane accusations that the EPMU is racist (true), Hide goes beyond climate change denial in a speech to the ACT Upper South Regional Conference (hat-tip: Hot Topic, where Gareth Renowden dissects the wilful ignorance):

“A warmer climate with more CO2 in the atmosphere is an unambiguous benefit to New Zealand and to the world. I don’t know what we are scared of. A New Zealand that was one or two degrees warmer would be a better place to live and better environment for agriculture. The same is true for CO2. We pump the stuff into our greenhouses to stimulate plant growth. It’s the number one nutrient with carbon through photosynthesis being the source of all life.”

Um, Rodney, it’s not being one or two degrees warmer in New Zealand that concerns so many scientists. It’s the effects on the global climate, ecological systems, and other places. You know, stuff like permafrost melting, unprecedented Arctic sea ice melts, the acidification of oceans…

Advertisement

Heather Roy green, as in naive

Heather Roy asks in her weekly diary:

“The real issue should have been: do we need an Emission Trading Scheme at all? Science and commonsense seem to have been placed on the back burner but they should certainly have been the basis of sensible decision-making.”

She then proceeds to give us a little lesson about climate change, and why there’s really nothing to worry about. Gareth Renowden pinpoints the loopiness in his post at Hot Topic.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, things are getting worse in the Arctic, and a new study published in the Proceedings of National Academy Of Sciences (pdf 765KB) shows that:

“… hemispheric-scale warmth of the past decade for the [northern hemisphere] is likely anomalous in the context of not just the past 1,000 years, as suggested in previous work, but longer. This conclusion appears to hold for at least the past 1,300 years…” (Hat-tip: Hot Topic.)

Yep, it finds that the last decade was the warmest for at least 1,300 years. That’s including the Medieval Warm Period.

Still, nothing to worry about, says our Heather, who states:

” I do not fully subscribe to the mainstream view, for which the science is inconclusive … “

Update: Gareth has also posted on Hide’s ignorance about climate change science.

Herald attack on EPMU goes all out

The Tabloid on Sunday is tragic. It can only be a deliberate attempt to sink the EPMU and the Labour Party. From this morning’s unbelievably biased piece on Shawn Tan’s employment dispute with his employer:

“He also claims if he was standing for the Labour party, he would still have his job.”

This is factually incorrect, and the Herald must surely know that. Tan has not lost his job. He has been suspended while his empoyer investigates a breach of his collective employment agreement.

But this is not the first time the Herald has distorted the truth in its pursuit of the EPMU. Thursday’s editorial was a masterclass in presenting unfounded supposition as fact.

The Herald’s antipathy to the union takes a sinster edge in John Drinnan’s Thursday column:

“But [the employment dispute, which Drinnan terms a “row”] illustrates what Little acknowledges is a tension between the EPMU – working actively for re-election of Labour – and journalist members who are required to be independent but are pilloried for belonging to a Labour-affiliated union.

“The EPMU insists that journalist membership fees are kept separate from calculations contributing to its affiliation payments to Labour and is changing rules for other members to define whether their membership is counted in contributions to Labour and the Greens.

“But as the election season ramps up, journalists have to face criticism they are in an organisation that is on the frontline backing one party.”

Arrant nonsense. The biggest irony is that this attack on the journalists’ freedom to join a union of their own chosing comes from an employer which purports to be defending Tan’s right to stand for Parliament (whatever the operational consequences for his employer and regardless of the contractual provisions of his employment).

Why the Herald’s dogged attacks on the EPMU? Well, are newspaper employers the world over currently trying to reduce their wage bills? Has the Herald been consistently attacking Labour and its allies over the past year?

I’m thinking that there’s enough obvious lying and carelessness with the facts here for a complaint to the Press Council.