This week Australians face an emergency so catastrophic that we have not yet imagined a name for it. It is so unprecedented that the Bureau of Meteorology has had to invent a new category for it. The 50 to 52 degrees air mass over Australia is the hottest on record, and worldwide, 2013 is predicted to be the hottest recorded.

With bushfires raging and lives and property lost, you might think that people who seek to put the prevention of such environmental catastrophes on the public agenda would be applauded. Instead, they are criminalised.

On Tuesday activist Jonathan Moylan was spectacularly successful in getting the issue of prevention on our newspapers' front pages. Moylan pulled off an elegant hoax. By issuing a fake media release saying ANZ had pulled its $1.2 billion loan from Whitehaven Coal mines on ethical grounds, he disrupted markets and invited public scrutiny of an industry that is driving the climate change that has led to a new category of emergency.

If letters pages and social media are any indication, there is widespread support for Moylan's hoax. At the parliamentary level, Greens senator Christine Milne has applauded his actions as being ''part of a long and proud history of civil disobedience, potentially breaking the law, to highlight something wrong''. But officially, instead of being hailed as a hero, Moylan has been labelled an extremist. In concert with the current trend to criminalise protest of all kind, he faces the prospect of jail and crippling fines. ASIC has already seized his laptop and phone.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-hoax-we-had-to-have-20130110-2cix8.html#ixzz2Hbp2R6IQ

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As always, stand up to be counted and you'll likely be shot down

Bob Brown 
Published: January 11, 2013 - 6:33AM

THE mining industry urged the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, to scrap funding to the Environmental Defenders Office - months later, the state government did just that.
Documents released under freedom of information laws show the NSW Minerals Council and the Australian Coal Association lobbied the Premier to cancel the EDO's $2.5 million annual public subsidy.
The government announced last month it had pulled the plug on the legal centre by redirecting money to Legal Aid and forbidding state funding for agencies ''providing legal advice to activists and lobby groups'' - the EDO's core business.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/miners-lobbied-ofarrell-to-pull-the-plug-on-legal-centre-20130110-2cixj.html#ixzz2Hd9rsUTk

Always keen for an opportunity to display their lack of knowledge, our conservative politicians,  havemore than once obliged by speaking out. This time, the generally amiable, but ineffective and dull-witted National Party leader, Warren Truss, has rushed to decry the Prime Minister’s linking of our current weather predicament with climate change as ‘simplistic’. Climate experts have been quick to dismiss hisignorance of the facts. One of these, Professor David Karoly, has prepared a report for the Climate Commission entitled ‘Off the Charts’.

Its key messages are:

• The length, extent and severity of the current heatwave are unprecedented in the measurement record.
• Although Australia has always had heatwaves, hot days and bushfires, climate change is increasing the risk of more frequent and longer heatwaves and more extreme hot days, as well as exacerbating bushfire conditions.
• Climate change has contributed to making the current extreme heat conditions and bushfires worse.
• Good community understanding of climate change risks is critical to ensure we take appropriate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to put measures in place to prepare for, and respond to, extreme weather.

But is Truss listening? Is Australia listening?

Right into the middle of all this comes the hoax perpetrated by climate activist Jonathan Moylan.

Whitehaven Coal has received NSW State Government permission to proceed with developing one of the world’s largest coal mines at Maules Creek near Gunnedah in New South Wales. One of the backers of this environmentally disastrous project is the ANZ Bank, which proposes to put $1.2 billion into the development.

Moylan emailed a fake press release purporting to be from the ANZ Bank to journalists announcing that the ANZ was about to withdraw its money from the project. The contact details supplied on the fake media release were Moylan’s so had any of the journalists bothered to check, they would have found themselves in touch with a climate activist rather than the ANZ Bank and that would have been the end of the matter.

But the geniuses of the Australian financial press didn’t bother, instead falling over themselves to rush to their blogs and websites with the news. The immediate result of this, according to Ben Cubby and Peter Ker writing for The Age, was as follows:

The company’s price dropped about 8.8 per cent and Whitehaven was put into a trading halt. It resumed trading in the afternoon after news of the hoax spread, and shares closed at $3.50, just 2¢ lower than Friday’s closing price.

Who then is responsible for any losses incurred by Whitehaven investors — Jonathan Moylan or the brain dead financial journalists who didn’t think to check their sources?

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/hoaxer-moylan-and-joining-the-dots-on-global-warming/

for a long time, journalism has been the touting office for press releases and "public relations"... That the jounos did not check the facts shows how LAZY or stupid they are... It is a necessity for the press to check ALL references — though on climate change (global warming) they don't have the patience to study COMPLEX scientific papers so they go for the easy shot using the emotional bind that tells nothing but stir the issue in unnecessary contrtroversy,

According to Liberal frontbencher Eric Abetz, the Australian Greens Party is the “epitome of extremism”. Talk about the pot calling the kettle extremist.

Abetz was inspired to his alliterative epithet because a couple of Greens Senators, notably party leader Christine Milne, refused to condemn the anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan, over a hoax which — for about 90 minutes, until it was discovered — decreased the value of Whitehaven Coal by more than $300 million on Monday.

It was the simplest of hoaxes. Moylan dummied up a press release, purporting to be from the ANZ Bank, saying it had withdrawn a $1.2 billion loan for a new coal mine.

(The trick, we might add, would not have had its effect if members of the financial media had bothered to check the veracity of Moylan’s fake press release before publishing stories.)

Milne described the hoax as being part of “a long and proud history of civil disobedience” in Australia.

This was, when you parse it, a pretty mild endorsement, more a statement of the bleeding obvious, really.

More importantly, Milne specifically denied any foreknowledge of the hoax. She also said “nobody is above the law”. She went on to draw the links between coal mining and climate change, and to question the ethics of those involved in mining or the funding of mining.

You can hear her whole argument, in context, here.

To be fair, we should note that another Greens Senator went further, in a tweet congratulating Moylan for “exposing ANZ investment in coal mines”.

But again, there is no evidence of direct involvement of the Greens party in the stunt.

But to Eric Abetz, this made the Greens “extremists” with “communist connections”.

“With the Greens,” he said, “it is always a case of the ends justifying the means.”

This all prompts a couple of observations.

First, Eric Abetz should know a thing or two about hoaxes. He was the man who first produced, in a Parliamentary estimates committee, an email — subsequently proven a forgery — which purported to show then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had received mates’ rates on a car in return for favours to a Brisbane car dealer.

The source of the information was one Godwin Grech, a Treasury official identified by other members of the Coalition as its “mole” inside the department who channelled information to them.

Abetz was the conduit by which this libel made its way into Hansard. Which puts him rather closer to the scene of the crime than the Greens in the ANZ press release hoax.

Second, there is the broader issue of Liberal Party spies in the bureaucracy, digging dirt on the government, contrary to all notions of public service neutrality. Sounds a lot like the means justifying the ends, does it not?

The Grech affair ultimately played a role in losing Malcolm Turnbull the Liberal leadership, not that it would have upset Abetz a whole lot.

The Senator, you see, was an implacable opponent of the introduction of a carbon-emissions trading scheme, which Turnbull favoured.

Turnbull, an intelligent, informed and rational person, believes human-caused climate change is a real and huge problem, which requires action.

Abetz, like perhaps a quarter to a third of Coalition MPs and Senators (by the estimate of a Coalition source who is in a position to know), is a climate-change sceptic.

How these people can remain unconvinced is a mystery. Of course, one of the hallmarks of extremism is its resistance to rational argument, its insistence on belief in the face of the evidence.

And with climate change, the evidence is overwhelming. Christine Milne, in the interview cited above, noted Australia has just experienced its two hottest days ever.

But an even more startling factoid appeared in The New York Times of January 8, in a story reporting that 2012 was, by one full degree Fahrenheit, the hottest year ever in the United States.

“Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985,” it reported.

Got that? Nobody. In the world.

And here in Australia we have two major political groups: the Coalition parties which don’t know whether they believe in climate change or not, and the Labor Party, which pays lip service to the need to do something but is intent on extracting more fossil fuels as fast as possible.

And then there are the Greens, who accept there is a crisis, and actually have the temerity to suggest it is unethical to mine ever-increasing amounts of the stuff which is causing the crisis.

Is this extremist? Or just logical?

Extremism: So Hot Right Now