Climate change, pah!

The winter nights are long and dark in Canberra. The politicians are out of cheese and peanuts and getting fractious. Notes are being passed around and there's far too much giggling down the back.

We're all bored to tears of alcopops, global warming and Peter Costello and his endless attention-seeking squirming and mugging. What the Australian media needs is a Story. A good, solid story with popular appeal. Cos Kev's an Aussie battler. Yet clearly the Australian public need more convincing than watching Mr Rudd explaining in perfect Mandarin to baffled Chinese bureacrats in the need for a 'pale-coloured or just' suck of something called a Sav.

What the media needs is a story about a ute. And then, when we get one, the entire news cycle breaks down.

Call me old fashioned, but I don't give a shit about Kevin's ute. For me, the government should be concerned with global warming and the economy. But no, one dodgy ute story and the real news topples into a gaggle of giggling journos.

It turns out, in fact, that there is some real news. Steve Fielding, the "Family First" senator, is effectively holding up the vote on the CPRS. Last night, the ABC crossed live to Canberra to Mr Fielding, who said:

"I've met with the government's Chief Scientist, and I am simply not convinced of the link between carbon emissions and global warming"

Typical. The day that someone has ALL the sets of hand-puppets out of the parliamentary library will always be the day the Christian nutjobs need something explained to them.

The thing is, Mr Fielding is right, there is a lot of conjecture about the details of global warming, and it's hard to delineate the precise effect of each unit of carbon on global temperature. This is because....it's the world. The world is Big. And very confusing. Ergo; Christians.

Last year, I worked on a research station on the Great Barrier Reef. It was very peaceful, not least of which because of the conspicous shortage of Family First Senators, who, having never actually seen the Great Barrier Reef, thankfully do not believe it exists.

It was there that I met my first climate change denier:

Our island had one hill. It's the same hill that Captain Cook climbed in desperation, after being successively thwarted by the Great Barrier Reef. Cook climbed to the top, surveyed his options, climbed down again and promptly sailed straight into a reef.

It's a lovely view though.

There's a small clearing at the beginning of the track, where we came upon a large, leaking Melbournian, collapsed in a terse opera of bulbous nose and armpit. Like Cook, he'd arrived at the island via glorified yacht. Unlike Cook, he didn't make it to the top of the mountain. We stopped to ask if he needed an operation and chatty and seamanlike banter followed. He asked about the research station on the island. We informed him that much of the station's research examines climate change.

Mr Melbourne drew his porsine, flaccid self up to the full height of his elbows and proudly declared that he was a "sceptic".

Climate change scepticism is a conceit I arrogantly attribute to some older people, who grew up in a time before the internet, before the means to critique patently silly ideas was widely available.

You see, the upside of the internet is that all ideas get an airing.

The downside, of course, is that all ideas get an airing.

This means there is room for conspiracy on the small scale, for instance, that the home-birth movement was set in motion by carpet-layers. However, large scale conspiracies tend to fall over. Like, say, communism. In other words, silly ideas proliferate on the small scale, but fail to reach consensus writ large.

So when heaps and heaps and HEAPS of people find themselves party to a broad-based, diverse agreement about something, it's generally got merit. To wit; climate change.

I wondered, as I surveyed this sweating sceptic, that perhaps his doubt is a good thing. After all, once a discourse reaches a degree of veracity it immediately begins to attract a proliferation of cranks, convinced of a left-wing bias, and a deep mistrust of vegetarians. Global warming sceptics, for instance, claim that many scientists are simply acquiesing to the orthodoxy, to fatten up their research grants, as if they wouldn't be making more money designing smaller stents for obese Melbournians.

I did enquire as to Mr Melbournian's sources. The Sun-Herald, apparently. Who knew the Sun-Herald had articles about something other than one-armed, bearded ladies giving birth to pot-plants?

All that said, here's one of the best websites about climate change. It's written by scientists - you know them, they're the ones who are selfishly applying for research grants that look like an invoice for the Australian Olympic team but with all the zeros smudged off.

http://www.realclimate.org/

I'm adding it to the sidebar so it can be ignored by a wider audience than it is currently.