Last Post: AYCC are tools and muppets

As promised at the outset, this site is shutting down.
It’s been simply delightful adding denialist nutjobs to the ‘send to spam’ list. I love how they spew bile and then claim to be the injured party. I love thinking about the conversations they will be having with their children/grandchildren in 20 years time…

Anyhow. This below is an email that those buffoons at the Australian Youth Climate “Coalition” have been sending out to try to get people along to their ‘powershit’ event in Brisbane. And how are climate activists supposed to get there? Oh, they’re to fly… I defy you to make that up. Or this –

Dear xxx,

You’€™re an incredibly smart and ridiculously talented young person who will probably rule the world some day. You don’t normally do conferences – because, let’s be honest, most of them are dull and pointless and your time is precious.

But then you hear about something potentially quite cool: an opportunity to hang out with other attractive, intelligent, hilarious people just like you. People who read about what’s going on in the world. People with awesome dance moves. People who aren’t naive enough to expect our current leaders to wake up and smell the catastrophe they’re creating for our generation, unless we make them solve it.

You buy your ticket, go to this event – and it goes beyond all your expectations.

You hear from cool speakers like Dick Smith, Christine Milne and that amazing young girl who sailed around the world on her own. You get to talk to them afterwards, furthering your fabulous future career as you make connections that money can’t buy. You go to workshops run by the heads of the top non-profits in the country, like Change.Org and GetUp. You participate in an insanely fun media stunt that makes headlines around the country.

You meet that handsome boy or girl of your dreams. Seriously. Did you know 43% of Power Shift participants met their current life partner at Power Shift?

And you realise two things: that you are powerful, and you are not alone. That there are way more young people in Australia who love life and care about climate change than you could have ever thought possible, and that when you all get together, you really can change the world.

You come home, barely believing that you nearly didn’t go in the first place, brimming with new-found skills, connections and confidence. And you decide you don’t have to wait any longer. You’€™re ready to lead, not follow.

It all happened because today, you decide to click here and buy your Power Shift ticket, right before normal tickets close in 48 hours.

Part conference. Part festival. 100% life-changing awesomeness or we’ll alter the space-time continuum to send you back in time to before you read this email, and hire Leonardo DiCaprio to enter your subconscious via your dreams to encourage you just to press ‘delete’€™ instead. But we have a feeling that won’t be necessary.

Power Shift. Sat 15th – Mon 17th October. Brisbane. Check it out today before normal tickets end in 48 hours.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you,

The AYCC team

P.S. Why now? Why today? Because from Friday the normal price closes, and you’ll have to pay $100 per person, or $90 per person for a group of 5 or more. Check it out now.

Now that I’ve wiped the vomit and tears of despair off my keyboard. I have only this to say: “Shit-for-brainses. Yeah, you – you’re trying WAY too hard. You’re an embarrasment.”

Side-splitting denialist nutjobbery

Got this comment on my “Climate Change is a hoax perpretrated by Tim Flannery” video. Oh my.

“What a completely IGNORANT INSIPID Analistic mindfkr
The FACT that Australia is 1100 Kms FURTHER NORTH than it was 150 yrs ago just may have something to do with all this Climate change BS. The EAST COAST of Canada is ALSO 1100 Kms (as of 2011) further SOUTH genius which is WHY all of the snow and ice is melting ON THAT SIDE ONLY

The ROSS IceShelf is 1100 kms further north than it should be which is why it is also breaking up. DO a GOOGLE search for “North Pole Moving towards Siberia” 1+1=2 “

Circus next Wednesday & must-read Guy Pearse article

According to the Fin, the Government is introducing the carbon tax legislation next Tuesday, with slanging match (sorry, “informed parliamentary debate”) on the Wednesday, but no vote until mid-October.
Well, this will be edifying.
I reckon someone should put together a “bingo card” of all the phrases that will be used (“great big tax on everything,” “the Australian people,” “secure investment” etc etc).

But given that all the big NGOs (except FoE) are bought and paid for, and behind the carbon tax as “the best deal in town,” they aren’t going to do that. I refer to the totally must-read article by Guy Pearse in the September Monthly…

Cool cartoon site – Calamaties of Nature

Have just found this rather cool site, Calamaties of Nature.

Here is a recent cartoon of theirs.

And cue denialists being sententious about argumentum ad popularem or whatever.

Volcanoes and Denialists: The Ominous Parallels

And those parallels are…
*They’re usually quite old, with molten rage seeping through their cracks
*They’re quite unpredictable, even if you’re watching what you are doing
*They throw off far more heat than light
*You could crack a toe or worse on their solidified sludge
*In the short-term, they should only be fatal to the very unlucky or the very slow-witted
*However, they can bring what could be a relatively straightforward journey to a juddering halt.
*The media have a major lavafair with them.

Youtube: Volcanoes and denialists

The latest video…

Youtube: Gish Gallop in 72 seconds

A gallop through the ‘Gish Gallop’, without any suggestions about how to tackle it. It’s a debating technique involving, well, spouting so much bollocks that your opponent can’t ever tear down each bit. It’s kind of a distributed denial of service attack on the audience’s brains…

Sept 29 event on climate change with Penny Wong and Prof Mike Young

This is a cut and paste from The Environment Institute.

We are pleased to announce that Minister Penny Wong and Professor Mike Young – along with a panel of three more South Australian leaders – are participating in a free public forum on the complex and ‘wicked’ problem of climate change.

Currently, we struggle to get our climate change discussion past immediate hip-pocket lines. In our public debates it is difficult to talk about the sort of future we want for ourselves, our families, our communities, Australia and globally.

This forum will tackle the issue head on. What type of leadership is required? What does it take to create and manage significant and complex change? And could it be that we’re actually seeing a lot of this leadership but missing the wood for the trees?

The forum is not a debate on the science of climate change. We have more than enough knowledge about human impact to act. However, given most people in our community accept the science but the debate about how best to act can seem viciously polarised and stuck, what should our leaders do?

Book now! This will be a very popular event and there are limited places despite the selected venue.

We hope to see you Thursday, 29 September, 6-7:30pm at the Masonic Hall, 254 North Terrace, Adelaide.
This event is being held as a partnership between the Environment Institute and the Leaders Institute of South Australia.

Sept 24 “Moving Planet” protests/advocacy

In an exciting development on the South Australian climate action scene, a range of groups have united to campaign for Australia’s first concentrated solar thermal power plants in Port Augusta, about four hours north of Adelaide….

The Moving Planet working group in Adelaide aims to put concentrated solar thermal at the forefront of the discussion with a series of banner drops, stalls, displays, doorknocks and speak outs in Adelaide and Port Augusta.

There will also be a Reclaim the Grid street parade through Adelaide on September 24, featuring a moving solar thermal tower and mirror array.

[For more information or to get involved in the Moving Planet campaign in South Australia phone Daniel on 0423 865 632.]

As reported in Green Left Weekly (cue tedious trolling from tedious trolls about ‘watermelons.’)

The Science of Why We Don’t Believe the Science

Chris Mooney, and American journo, starts his article “The science of why we don’t believe the science” thus

“A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.

lots of interesting stuff in between that beginning and this last para from the first page –

we all understand these mechanisms when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If I don’t want to believe that my spouse is being unfaithful, or that my child is a bully, I can go to great lengths to explain away behavior that seems obvious to everybody else—everybody who isn’t too emotionally invested to accept it, anyway. That’s not to suggest that we aren’t also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It’s just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one’s sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.