With Flames Literally At The Edge Of Canberra, More Lies Are All The Deniers & Hack Politicians Have

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Memory of that cartoon provoked an old, nihilistic laugh to echo in my throat at a confluence of climate events this week, 20 careless years later. Dear world, three months after they began, the Australian fires are not out. Today, ash is raining in our nation’s capital, orange flames stare over the mountains behind Canberra. Scientific consensus, affirmed by Australia’s exhausted fire chiefs, is that the fires are effects of the anthropogenic climate crisis. And yet even as the fires roar at the physical gates of power, on Sunday the conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, of the Murdoch press, published an insistence that climate change is “overall, a good thing”. The only thing missing from this new cartoon is the lipstick.

Bolt’s claim actually represents some intellectual evolution on the issue. It wasn’t so long ago that global scientific consensus on the reality of climate change amounted to naught but an “end-of-the-world religion” to him. He’s hardly the only conservative megaphone that’s been braying to disrupt meaningful political action on climate change these last, wasted, crucial decades. He is, however, a useful local avatar to illustrate the history of both the denialist campaign, and how encroaching reality is obliging the adaptation of its messaging.

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This is the decades-long frame into which Bolt and his comrades slip. A non-scientist himself, Bolt’s analysis more or less always conforms to a pattern perfected worldwide; locate an isolated item of contradictory, impenetrable data and insist its existence proves climate science is a shibboleth of untruth, misquote a credible scientist, quote a non-credible one, and insist all climate activists are unhinged loons. How bleak it is now, with Canberra burning, to revisit Bolt’s comments of 2006, when he was the subject of a Media Watch investigation of his selective misstatements on climate data. “Some people believe that bushfires may get worse in the future because of man-made global warming,” announced Media Watch, “Andrew Bolt isn’t one of them.” By 2009, so tight was the grip of denialism over the discourse, if not the facts, that Bolt felt confident enough to declare “this mad global warming scare could at last be over”.

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What to make of Bolt’s most recent concession to the reality of actual climate change is what his insistent “good thing, overall” messaging reveals of the new political reality facing the conservative movement. Unlike an election result that can be willed into existence through sheer force of persuasion, the planet is not actually persuadable. The ideological resistance among conservatives to address the source of climate crisis is so powerful, so historically entrenched, that flames literally surround the city in which the conservative Australian prime minister himself has announced that “resilience and adaptation” amid the fires will substitute for climate mitigation, prevention, action to make them stop. On cue, the megaphones insist this nightmare will be good for us. Take it from one of the selectively misquoted credible scientists: global heating is not heralding a new agricultural prosperity, these forces are causing forests to burn, not to bloom. They can’t offer solutions. The propaganda of a new denial is all they’ve got.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/30/now-that-climate-change-is-irrefutable-denialists-like-andrew-bolt-insist-it-will-be-good-for-us