Folk proselytising online who would generally trust their GP with prescriptions, treatment and referrals, dismissed any insistence that COVID-19 was real and could kill.
One online know-all debunked the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ advice with ‘and who the hell are they?’.
He was asked to look up at the RACGP certificate on his GP’s wall next time he visited and understand that such a certificate is what authorises his quack to practice medicine, not the seven years at university.
Last week’s report from the World Meteorological Organisation on climate change sobers the issue too much to find humour.
2023 saw every major weather record broken.
What more do denialists want?
If Brian Cox is not enough, Jane Goodall as well, Noam Chomsky, the late Carl Sagan and the ABC’s Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, then what is?
If you won’t listen to Attenborough, then who will you listen to?
I have met many wise farmers who understand the science of climate change because ultimately agriculture will be affected significantly.
The complexity of plant disease, for example, looks like becoming a dog’s breakfast as pathogens of grains such as wheat can evolve faster under higher CO₂ and higher temperatures.
I saw this first-hand at CSIRO’s controlled environment facility and applied it to a rather doom-and-gloom model before colleagues took it further while I upped my Prozac.
Other crops will respond differently: tomatoes becoming more disease resistant while zucchinis and broccoli will suffer, delighting children everywhere.
In summary, the WMO reports that 2023 was the warmest year to date, with record levels of greenhouse gases, ocean heat, sea levels, Antarctic ice reduction and glacier shrinkage with a slew of floods, wildfires and heatwaves thrown in.
Evidence is the key word here, and when deniers start to question methods of measuring (ignoring worldwide consistency), dismiss any modelling (it’s used in medicine, finance and demography with little issue), think it’s a left wing conspiracy (no one ever sidled up to me with a little red book) and insist volcanoes warm the atmosphere more (they actually cool it), then they need to start searching in Google Scholar instead of the Facebook algorithm which knows exactly what they’re after.
And sends them more.
Five hundred words in and I have not mentioned ‘belief’.
One doesn’t believe or not believe in climate change; you either understand it or you don’t, and if you don’t, then ask yourself why.
If science lessons were spent peeling glue from your fingers, then stay out of the discussion as much as you would for one on a cure for cancer.
Or else scrutinise the numbers behind the very few academics who deny, and if you can’t, read the work of those who can.
A spontaneous comedy sketch unfolded two ski seasons ago in the car park atop Mt Buffalo, where the ski lifts are long gone, the ghostly towers leaning over a continually shrinking snowfield.
A gentleman gets out of his car after a 30-year absence and could not believe his eyes.
“Where is everything?” he asked.
I explained.
Then, after moaning about a lost year of salary because he refused to get vaccinated (of course), he then challenged my explanation for his dashed childhood memories.
“I bet you’re a belie—”
“Belief doesn’t come into it, mate,” and so it started but I soon bit my tongue.
“But look at the hole in the ozone layer,” he spun, “they reckoned that was a problem but now it isn’t — what happened there?”
“They fixed it. They listened.”
But his rant of climate denial finally ended with “well I don’t believe in it” and then he turned back toward the relic towers.
“And I don’t believe this!”
Make up your mind.
Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.
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