Lies of the climate commission: Part 16 "bald faced liars"

Professor Roger Pielke Jnr has a piece on the commission's latest effort to misrepresent the science of climate change. As Andrew Bolt says: time they were sacked. Perhaps the public can also be refunded their ridiculous salaries.

Read the whole article at Roger's blog, some excerpts below.

Thou Shall Not Critique the Australian Climate Commission

Badly misrepresent? At no point do Crompton and McAneney ever "assert that the Commission wrongly used insurance losses in the Angry Summer report." Sorry, but this is a bald-faced lie from the Commission. Crompton and McAneney accurately state that the report refers to the "significant impacts of extreme weather on property" during the "angry summer." You can see a tweet below from the Commission which refers uncritically to another recent piece at The Conversation, one that is chock full of scientific inaccuracies. Apparently being completely wrong did not merit a press release, but I digress.

The statement by Will Steffen, a scientist speaking for the government in his official capacity on the climate commission, beggars belief -- "opportunistic and unbecoming of a research institution." The comment, which explicitly makes reference to the university as a whole, brings to mind the time that Richard Nixon demanded that all funding for MIT be cut of because he didn't like its politics.

There is actually nothing more becoming of a research institution than researchers willing to engage the public with the results of their scientific research. In democracies, it is OK to crtiique government -- in fact, governance is improved through such critique. There is nothing more offensive than a government that attacks researchers for the temerity to offer legitimate critique. In the US, we saw how the Bush Administration learned that lesson the hard way. It looks like the Climate Commission hasn't taken note.