Don’t Believe The Australian on Climate

It’s hard to belive that horriffic reporting like this example in the newspaper, The Australian, still exists.

It speaks of the heat wave we’re presently experiencing across New South Wales (in fact, I’m shirtless as I write this), but the reporters just couldn’t help themselves and threw in a little dig a climate change:

David Evans, a former adviser to the Australian Greenhouse Office, the precursor to the Department of Climate Change, said that although events such as those of January 1939 were too localised to draw implications on global warming, the 70 years since these maximums were reached was enough to “make you sceptical”.

“The debate has changed,” he said. He predicted that by 2010, the only people who would believe in global warming would be “those who have a financial interest in it, the politically correct and those who believe in big government. Everyone else will think it’s a load of rubbish.”

Note the ‘expert’ they’ve quoted, David Evans. But… he’s no expert.

There are so many excellent high profile, and accessible, climate scientists in Australia, and overseas, it’s fantastically disappointing that The Australian would call on a non-expert sceptic for a piece on record temperatures.

But wait, they do get opinion from the other side:

Many climate scientists disagree. National Climate Centre head David Jones said the fact the maximum temperatures were set so long ago in no way disproved global warming. He said 1939 was a freak once-in-a-century event.

That’s 35 words on the consensus science, compared to 100 from a lay sceptic.

Plus… peak (and trough, for that matter) temperatures say little about climate change; climate is a wildly dynamic system. It’s averages over long stretches of time – even one year figures are a blip in the scales of climate change.

I’ve read objectionable material in The Oz before, but I’m going to not only actively avoid it from now on, but encourage others to do likewise.