I’ve had my say on KennyGate, as have a good many other people (to my new cadre of hate-mailers, sorry for not posting all your anonymous spleen. Life’s a bitch, eh? Give my regards to Elvis). Meanwhile, a regular correspondent, Coilin MacLochlainn, sent in a highly original take , which I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I did. Over to you, Coilin…
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Let’s imagine that Pat Kenny is feeling a bit off colour and decides to visit a psychoanalyst.
Dr Thelme Datruth-Y’Boyo is a bright young thing from Darfur who happens to read a certain column that appears in the Irish Times every Thursday. Her parents and siblings are starving because of drought brought on by climate change and the resulting war in Darfur. She gives John O’Shea of GOAL most of her savings but knows that the war won’t end until the real problem, climate change, is tackled. (more…)
Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a broadcaster scorned. After my recent adventures with RTE’s Pat Kenny, it was only a matter of time before the veteran broadcaster would try to even the score for what he no doubt perceived as slights to the notion that he is capable of being unbiased, objective and responsible on the issue of climate change.
The COP15 gig commences next Monday in Copenhagen, with the great and the good from science, politics and policymaking gathering from the five continents for the world’s most important climate conference since the Rio Summit in 1992. Pat Kenny’s parody of pre-Copenhagen “coverage” involved bringing on a discredited Australian mining industry hack on as an “expert” to challenge the dreadful scientific consensus that Kenny, in the great tradition of Don Quixote, is determined to unseat.
In these dark November days, as parts of Ireland lie submerged after a virtually stormless deluge, it’s natural to want to look for some positive news. Images of tens of thousands of people using the public sector strike on Tuesday (many of them public servants themselves) to head over the border for ‘bargains’ in Northern Ireland is a tangible reminder of how narrow self-interest and the prospect – real or imaginary – of a bargain quickly part us from our senses.
Ireland is currently spending almost €500m a week more than our national income. This is disastrously unsustainable, but rather than seeing an outbreak of the Blitz Spirit, instead our response is an atomised mé fein-ism. Those thousands of cars streaming into Newry are hastening the demise of their neighbours’ businesses. (more…)
Around seven years ago, I read a history of the planet in the 20th century, entitled ‘Something New Under The Sun‘, by Georgetown University professor, JR McNeill. The book examined the biosphere, slice by slice, and concluded that, whatever else, the 20th century should be seen as a historical once-off.
The 21st century, he noted, would have to be profoundly different – either humanity learns to live within limits (of resources and carbon emissions), or the entire system would crash, with the profoundest of consequences for life on Earth. This book had a major influence on my decision to get involved in writing and campaigning on climate and environmental topics. (more…)
Earlier today, at a very well attended press conference in Leinster House, the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Climate Change and Energy released their report, ‘The case for a climate change law’.
Committee rapporteur, Liz McManus likened the position we now find ourselves in and the scale of what is required to address it as being “like a war effort”. This, from the Opposition, is extremely encouraging. McManus has for the last year or so, given the distinct impression that she realises this is no phoney war. In that regard, she remains in a small minority within Dáil Eireann.
I’d like to believe the numbers are growing, but with the scant, patchy and highly erratic way the media in general continues to cover this issue (with more scare stories about how we “can’t afford” to do anything, or contributions from the it’s-all-a-scam circus) doesn’t lead to any excessive optimism. (more…)
One of my earliest posts on this blog, on December 12, 2007, was headed ‘There is no Plan B‘. The headline was taken from a quote from the then new Australian PM, Kevin Rudd to delegates at the UN climate conference in Bali.
The line re-emerged earlier today, when British PM, Gordon Brown said in London: “This is the moment. Now is the time. For the planet there is no plan B”. He outlined a catastrophic scenario of heatwaves, flooding and droughts if an ambitious new deal is not secured in Copenhagen in December. (more…)
Fintan O’Toole is, for my money, the most insightful commentator on Irish life, and has been for years. Like any of the rest of us, he has his hobby horses, and I’ve often been disappointed that he rarely turns his intellect to the rich grounds of the sustainability/climate/environmental catastrophe that’s now unfolding.
On Nama, he’s been superb. Were it not for the intervention of two of Fine Gael’s eminence grises, in the forms of Garrett Fitzgerald and Alan Dukes, I’m pretty sure the anti-Nama arguments, so forcefully articulated by O’Toole, would have prevailed. As it was, while naturally the Greens are getting it in the neck, in fact two ageing FGrs sealed its fate. The Greens pissed O’Toole off on Nama, and, thanks to John Gormley’s gormless travel arrangements, O’Toole has hit them in their ethics, where it really, really hurts. (more…)
The term Anthropocene was coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen a decade ago to describe the new ‘Era of Man’, a distinct geological epoch shaped almost entirely by our actions and impacts. “The Anthropocence has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest – and the last”, wrote Bob Holmes in the current edition of New Scientist in an intriguing article that rolls the clock forward to see how Earth would cope in the era after Man.
Mass extinctions are already well advanced, so much so that scientists have already designated the current era as the Sixth Extiction – since these measures cover close to a billion years, Extinction eras are rare indeed, the last being the event 65 million years ago that did for the dinosaurs and ultimately created the wiggle room for our ancient ancestors, the early mammals, to get a toe-hold. (more…)
I was in the city centre on Friday night, just as the polls were preparing to close, and happened upon the hugely impressive illuminated Liberty Hall (hard to miss, in fact, and far and away the most dramatic installation the city has seen since poor Lord Nelson got blown off his perch in 1966).
Below is some footage I recorded with my trusty iPhone video:
By 10.30pm on Friday, the bush telegraph was rattling furiously with news from Fine Gael’s exit poll indicating a thumping 2:1 Yes vote. And by the 11am news bulletins on Saturday, it was clear that Lisbon was done and dusted. (more…)
Despite there being no shortage of hard news to cover right now, RTE’s Prime Time last night took a curious detour to air clips from a propaganda film, Not Evil, Just Wrong, made by two Irish filmmakers. It is, for want of a kinder way of putting this, bullshit par excellence, a bizarre neo-con mix of clichés about freedom, faux concern for ‘poor people’ and undying worship at the altar of bare-knuckle capitalism as the only way to organise world affairs. In short, a narrow, ugly little project.
Yet here we were, just after the main news bulletin, being served up such tripe as: “I don’t think it would be a bad thing for this earth to warm up”. This dense nugget of stupidity comes courtesy of one Patrick Moore, described in caption as ‘founding member of Greenpeace’. Assuming this is the case, I can only assume Moore has long since been drummed out of that organisation, a body which is only too well aware of the calamitous effects of a warming Earth.
The McAleer propaganda film fingers the campaign against DDT as ‘proof’ that these eco types are secretly plotting the deaths of millions of Africans from malaria. To listen to the hand-picked loons interviewed in this mockumentary, you would be left with the impression that DDT is the vapour squeezed from fresh rose petals. It is in fact a ‘persistent organic pollutant’. It has a half-life of 2-5 years. It accumulates in the food web, and concentrates in apex predators, such as eagles and other birds. DDT undoubtedly has its uses in tackling malaria but to suggest that it is benign and poses no health hazards is total bull.
And that’s about as good as this little film gets. The narrator intones: “Al Gore still supports (Rachel) Carson’s discredited claims about the compound…he is now also campaigning against fossil fuels with the same enthusiasm”. Good point, except that (i) Carson’s claims, in her book ‘Silent Spring‘ have never been discredited and (ii) global warming has nothing to do with DDT, no matter how many times these idiots try to smear-by-association.
McAleer appeared in studio to ‘debate’ his film with Dr Kieran Hickey of NUI Galway. Hickey played a blinder, patiently unravelling the web of lies and half-truths and laying its “fundamental flaws” bare. He opened with a damming three-point demolition of the film, pointing out how it had cherry-picked its facts (and contributors) while ignoring the strong consensus view of literally thousands of professional climate scientists, notably via the IPCC’s 20 years of analysis and its four major Assessments Reports.
McAleer again trotted out his bizarre line that the IPCC report had somehow been hijacked by the “many people in the IPCC” that he suggests don’t agree with its findings. Who these people are, what their objections are, we are left none the wiser. The report, by some mysterious osmosis, turns from hard science into what McAleer calls an “alarmist mantra” (I had my fun back in August in a live debate with McAleer on Today FM with Anton Savage).
He then quickly steers off into back to talking about DDT, and warnings that “it’s going to cause cancer, it’s going to kill us all, kill the birds…the result was 50 million women and children died in Africa from a spike in malaria”. No men, Phelim, just women and children. Is that an onion in your top pocket as your eyes begin to well up?
What’s the link with DDT and climate change exactly? “It’s a consensus, like the consensus about BSE, about killer bees…we’ve had these scares before”. Aaaaaah, yes, now I remember the Intergovernmental Panel on Killer Bees (IPKB?) and it’s alarmist report that we’re all doomed. Kieran Hickey interjected mid-rant to point out that the reason BSE was no longer a major threat to public health is precisely that it was taken seriously, the scientists told us feeding animal brains to other animals, and then eating those animals was just asking for trouble – so we stopped doing it.
In McAleer-land, if the fire brigade is called and manages to stop your house burning down, then there can’t have been a fire in the first place. The ‘debate’ descended into pure farce when Hickey challenged McAleer: “let’s talk about climate change”, to which the suddenly modest McAleer replied: “let’s NOT talk about climate change”. A bemused Miriam O’Callaghan intervened, reminding McAleer that this was in fact the reason he was in studio to begin with!
To cover his retreat, McAleer slung out a red herring about the difference between ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, as if it mattered. Apparently McAleer’s geography teacher back in the 1970s told his class that we were entering a new Ice Age, as presumably reported by the Intergovernmetal Panel of Geography Teachers (IPGT). Ha! So there!
So what’s really behind all these mendacious scientists telling us a pack of lies about global warming? “I think there’s a lot of anti-capitalism, anti-development people behind this global warming hysteria”, said McAleer, a self-appointed spokesman for “the poor people in the world”, who he reckons desperately need global climate collapse brought on by out of control fossil fuel burning to lift them out of poverty – and into the abyss.
Nowhere does McAleer point out that over 90% of all fossil fuel burning to date has been done by us in the developed world, with the direct, tangible and highly damaging brunt of our actions already falling on the world’s poor.
When someone prefaces a statement to you by saying: “with the greatest respect…”, it’s a sure sign they think you’re talking rubbish, and so Miriam O’Callaghan brought McAleer back in to give him a kicking about his utter lack of qualifications for the task he purports to address in his mockumentary. His razor-sharp riposte is that “…but Al Gore’s not a scientist, in fact Al Gore interviews no scientist in An Inconvenient Truth and he wins a Nobel prize…our film has scientists from both sides of the argument”.
He wraps up by trying to smear environmentalists as being the new colonialists, trying to hold back people in developing countries from achieving prosperity. Miriam O’Callaghan’s growing frustration at McAleer’s tortured logic surfaced when she told him: “you’re almost making two different points”. Kieran Hickey scored the final punch when simply asking McAleer why he didn’t just make a film about DDT (given the gaping level of his ignorance on even the most basic science behind climate change).
I think I have the answer: DDT isn’t a bandwagon. Masquerading as a ‘climate sceptic’ gets third rate filmmakers like this onto prime time television – literally, something that would never happen had he restricted his film making to an area in which he is competent (whatever that might be). The meeja loves a good argy bargy, and while I was horrified to see such a spoofer get this kind of publicity, he did remind me a little of P. Flynn on that famous Late Late Show many years ago, where the public saw clean through the gloss to the character beneath.
The so-called climate sceptic camp is getting critically depleted of spokespeople who can even pass for competent. Maybe this is indeed the best way of calling them out.
The TV license currently costs €160 a year. That money allows RTE to deliver its public service commitment, including expensive programming such as Prime Time that, were cost and crude ratings the only consideration, might be ditched in favour of more Failte Towers.
The 100% commercial TV3 gives a clearer picture of what purely pay TV gets you – wall-to-wall US and Australian soaps during the day and imported soft porn later in the evening (still, at least they can’t be blamed for Failte Towers). (more…)
