Aussie Alarmists in a sweat over heat wave

Peter Hannam the Carbon Economy Editor of the near-defunct Sydney Moaning Herald leads the fray of fellow alarmists crying doom and gloom over the Aussie heat wave. Of course as the SMH goes down the gurgler he will have no problem with employment with the tremendous demand for carbon economy editors across the country . The BOM created international interest for alarmists by creating a new temperature color for above 50 deg C to be denoted as purple areas. Of course coloured maps were not available in the pre climate nitwit era of 1923 when temperatures actually did exceed 50 deg C or when Marble Bar set a new world record for 160 days over the 37.8 deg C or 100 deg F level. Stupid people in that era just thought that that was just very hot weather and did not know they could have stopped it by building a few more windmills.
This week the bureau drew international attention after it added extra colour to its forecast charts to extend the range to 54 degrees. Temperatures in the 50-52 will be shown as a deep purple while regions will be marked a bright pink should they land in the unprecedented 52-54 range.

Sorry Judge I was upset about Global Warming so I robbed a bank!

Not content with one article on the subject we have a second ratbag article justifying an activist posting faulty stock-market data and causing major problems ostensibly to raise global warming awareness . This advocacy of an attack on the stock exchange borders on the criminal and would not be printed by a responsible paper which didn't have nitwits for editors.The author Katherine Wilson achieved notoriety in 2009 when she managed to get a bogus article published in Quadrant magazine so this article should not surprise anyone.She calls this crime "creative subversion" and has no sympathy for the mums and dads who lost money over the hoax.

Those who listened could hardly be described as victims. Given this, hoaxes of this kind should not be criminalised. Historically, these kind of pranks have served to disrupt cultural conceits and hold truth to power. They have given citizens a public voice. They are part of the Australian tradition of pranks and other creative acts of civil disobedience since white settlement that have helped shape this country's laws and culture. So renowned is Australia for these forms of culture-jamming, that it has spawned its own genre of documentary literature - most recently Simon Caterson's Hoax Nation, Iain McIntyre's How to Make Trouble and Influence People, Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow's Radical Melbourne books, and Melissa Katsoulis' Telling Tales.

As a nation, we value these acts of creative subversion not just because they are funny, but because they are necessary.

 I don't know what the maximum penalty for Moylan's "prank" is but I hope he gets it though it will not repay the losses of those mums and dads who believed the fake media release. It is idiotic of the author to claim that if a crime is ideologically driven then the perpetrator should not be punished.If  causing millions of dollars of losses is OK what criminal "prank" is not OK and where do we draw the line? Do we have a separate set of laws for left-wing activists that do not apply to ordinary people? Is " I was upset about Global Warming" to be used as a defence for crimes?