Article by Eric Worrell
Joëlle Gergis, whose erroneous hockey stick climate document was shockingly retracted in 2012, has accused Australian politicians of using “subterfuge” to cover up climate policy failures.
Joel Gergis
Exposing the net-zero climate fantasyDenial is a funny thing. We have to find a cunning way to try to tolerate high levels of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when faced with the reality that our thoughts and actions are contradictory. We have to somehow rationalize the way we deceive ourselves. in words seinfeldGeorge Costanza: “It's not a lie if you believe it.”
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The fact is that Australia is still not on track to meet its statutory target of reducing emissions by 43% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Coal and natural gas. The safeguard mechanism is Australia's signature climate policy, allowing the largest industrial polluters to purchase carbon credits to balance their impact on the environment and achieve “net zero” emissions. Scientific and legal experts have criticized Australia's carbon offsetting program as being of low integrity: people receive carbon credits for not clearing forests that will never be cleared, for planting trees that already exist, and for planting forests in places that will never be able to sustain them in the long term. Come and see. rather than requiring serious polluters actually To reduce the vast amounts of carbon they pump into the atmosphere for free, they can offset their emissions by planting a few trees. This is the fatal flaw in the logic of net zero: whatever the rationale for continuing to extract fossil fuels, true zero is the only way we can truly escape the catastrophe of our planet.
This deception, which uses the land sector to conceal negligible reductions in overall emissions, allows the government to claim that Australia's emissions have fallen by 28.2% since 2005. Emissions from the transport, electricity and other sectors fell only 1.8%.
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Find out more: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/09/28/exusing-net-zeros-climate-delusions#mtr
Jergis and I agreed on something this time around, at least in terms of land use shenanigans. There appears to be a number of questionable practices, some of which have been exposed by the WUWT, in balancing the books on emissions reduction claims using the so-called enhanced capacity of land to absorb carbon dioxide.
Australia is particularly prone to bushfires, so any attempts to accumulate carbon biomass in dry woodlands are scuppered whenever fires sweep through the region. The apparent policy of allowing dry, flammable plant debris to accumulate in poorly managed Australian woodlands, rather than regular low-intensity burns, makes fires more intense when they occur.
As for the rest of the Jergis climate belief systemI believe a little healthy skepticism is appropriate. Just look at her reaction when flaws are discovered in her scientific work.
Gergis's 2012 paper (eventually retracted) was shredded by Steve McIntyre. Rather than admitting that she had made errors by mischaracterizing and mishandling the data used in her analysis, she attempted to argue that it was irrelevant and smear those who objected to her methodological errors as amateurs—“… just for the sake of it. To clarify, there are Text error describing agent selection method Rather than the flaws in the entire analysis suggested by amateur climate skeptic bloggers. …”.
This didn't stop in 2012, Gergis published another paper in 2016, which was again refuted by Steve McIntyre in McIntyre's article Joelle Gergis, Data Torturer. McIntyre even suggested that Jergis use a form of “hidden decay.”
Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes big ones. The right thing to do, in my opinion, is to show a bit of grace and accept right away that she's stuffed – it resolves the issue quickly and cleanly. However, arrogantly dismissing the person who pointed out the error as an “amateur”, trying to claim that these “errors” were just a matter of wording, and then clearly making similar errors in later papers, let's just say I don't blame her for her climate Warning and sleepless nights.
Relevant
