The influence of president-elect Donald Trump’s attack on “elites” is taking hold in the Australian parliament, with the Coalition attacking “latte-sipping” opponents of coal mining and joining enthusiastically in a debate questioning climate science in the Senate.
Malcolm Roberts
One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts held a press conference on November 7 to release a 42-page document that claims the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology corrupted climate data and that global warming is an international Jewish banking conspiracy to gain global control through environmentalism.
Climate science denialists will often fool people, and sometimes themselves, by cherrypicking the bits of evidence they think fit their argument.
At other times, they’ll construct elaborate conspiracy theories about human-caused climate change being a front for a New World Order, with the United Nations as the Illuminati.
But often, they just get things badly, horribly, terribly and embarrassingly wrong.
Some would have seen One Nation Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts' performance on ABC's Q&A on August 15.
He went hammer and tong repeating ad nauseum that academics are doctoring the science, that the major science bodies are corrupt and that the science on climate change is anything but settled.
Here is one small excerpt from his exchange with British physicist Brian Cox:
Roberts: “I'm saying ... two things. First of all, that the [climate] data has been corrupted and we know that the 1930s were warmer than today.”