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.
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Sorry Judge I was upset about Global Warming so I robbed a bank! |
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?
Carbon dioxide is no blanket. The "blanket" is produced by non-radiative diffusion processes primarily involving nitrogen and oxygen at the surface-atmosphere boundary. If the only consideration were the effect of water vapour and carbon dioxide you'd be sleeping under a handkerchief.
Discover "The 21st Century New Paradigm in Climate Change Science" (on the Principia Scientific International website) and discover what real physics has now proved, completely negating any significant relevance of the old 20th Century radiative greenhouse concept.
No back radiation caused the Earth's surface to be 288K (or the Venus surface to be over 730K) all on its own, somehow multiplying the Sun's energy. What did cause it was the temperature distribution brought about by diffusion of kinetic energy in a gravitational field, and this process continues to maintain surface temperatures as atmospheres absorb direct incident Solar radiation, the only possible radiation that can keep them at the observed temperatures. For more detail read “Planetary Surface Temperatures. A Discussion of Alternative Mechanisms” published by PSI in November 2012, as well as this week's article mentioned above.
Doug Cotton
Sydney