AN Australian Federal MP is planning to join some of the world’s noisiest deniers of the science of climate change at a conference in Las Vegas in a few weeks time.
George Christensen, the National Party member for Dawson in the coal-friendly state of Queensland, will be hanging around the Mandelay Bay Resort with a rag-tag bunch of mostly long-retired academics and well paid think-tank associates for the Heartland Institute conference, starting on 7 July.
The Heartland Institute, funded over the years by fossil fuel corporations and conservative philanthropists, is itself one of America’s loudest climate science denial organisations. This will be the organisation’s ninth gathering of climate sceptics, denialists and fossil fuel apologists.
In Parliament in February, Christensen downplayed a spate of “so-called record heat waves” by saying other parts of the globe had experienced “record cold”. In fact, according to the US National Climate Data Center, January 2014 was the globe’s fourth hottest since records began in 1880 and was the “347th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average”.
So where does Christensen get his ideas about climate change from?
One revealing document is Christensen’s Parliamentary expenses report from 2012 listing 11 climate change and environmental policy books bought by his office.
Titles include
The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World's Top Climate Scientists by Roy Spencer; The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With 'Climate Change' Turning Out To Be
The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History by Christopher Booker and
Killing The Earth To Save It: How Environmentalists Are Ruining The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Jobs by James Delingpole.
Six of the books were bought two months before Christensen was appointed by the then opposition to sit on a key committee to examine carbon price legislation.
Christensen’s office also bought 25 copies of Australian sceptic and mining entrepreneur Professor Ian Plimer’s book
How To Get Expelled From School: A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters. During the two-day Las Vegas conference, Christensen is scheduled to join Patrick Michaels, of the Cato Institute and the author of another of those books, to present some awards.
Christensen is also listed to sit down with fellow Australians for a panel session on the “global warming debate in Australia”.
Christensen will be joined by one of his own constituents, Dr Bob Carter, a “science policy advisor” for the Melbourne-based climate science denialist think tank the
Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).
Another panel member joining Christensen is Jennifer Marohasy, a former senior fellow with the IPA.
Marohasy is currently a research fellow at Central Queensland University — a post funded by the “B. Macfie Family Foundation”.
Bryant Macfie is a Perth-based philanthropist and climate science sceptic. In 2009 the university accepted $195,000 from Macfie and in 2012 the CQU annual report said he had renewed his “significant support”.
In 2008, Macfie made a $350,000 gift to another university – the University of Queensland – that was facilitated by the IPA and criticised by some UQ academics.
When making the donation, Macfie claimed science had been damaged by “environmental activism” and wrote, “the crucifix has been replaced by the wind turbine”.