The Great GW Swindle

I just love a controversy and tonight is gonna be full of it!

Just so you know, I don't really know where I stand on GW. I'm not a scientist (though funnily enough I work in a lab) so I feel that I don't know enough to make a concrete judgement, but I'm willing to deploy the precautionary principle and be mind full of my habits. If I had to choose between denial or belief, I'd say that so far I've found the case for man made GW stronger than that against. But what's really interesting about the whole GW debate is the politics.

Conservatives appear to hate the very suggestion that unfettered consumerism may have such a large flaw, therefore they're reaching for every shred of evidence they can find in order to deny it. Some on the Left, on the other hand, have resorted to doomsday scenarios and what seem to be gross exaggerations at times as they discover a new calling in rallying against this enormous perceived hole in capitalism. It's a shame it had to be polarised in this way but in hindsight, obvious.

The Age today ran two pieces, one for and one against, in preparation for tonight's viewing and I think they demonstrated why I'm more inclined to believe. Ian Simmonds is a believer and as you can read, he deals with the errors and does so effectively.

Then on the other side we have Ian Plimer and unfortunately we get too much rant and too little facts:

'TONIGHT'S airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle and the associated discussion on ABC TV should be a hoot. The ABC has structured the panel to try to get their preferred political position aired. The panel composition will minimise scientific discussion. It contains journalists, political pressure groups and those who will make a quid out of frightening us witless.
Three scientists with a more rational view to the doomsday hype were invited to appear on the panel and have now been uninvited as they do not dance to the drumbeat of disaster. There is a VIP section of the audience with loopy-left greens and social commentators. We have the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS), which was in such a hurry to publish a critique of The Great Global Warming Swindle that it contains schoolboy howlers and a lack of logic intertwined with politics.'

If you're gonna debate this subject, you just can't start in this way. He lost me at 'loopy-left greens'. Culture war lingo is such a turn off.

UPDATE:

Unfortunately for Ian Plimer it appears that none of his predictions came true. The ABC neither structured the panel to denounce scepticism, nor stacked the audience with loopy-left greens. In fact, the audience was stacked with the opposite denomination who piped up with many a wild eyed accusation. And if we really think about it, the whole two hours was at least three quarters consumed with scepticism from the one hour doco, to the sceptical claims made by some on the panel and in the audience. The usual din seem merely upset that they were effectively rebuked on every point. This isn't bias, it's just sad.