Judith Sloan has decided to name our Minister for Climate Change and Energy, ‘B1’. I prefer to think of Chris Bowen as a joker, because if he is not a joker, he is delusional. And that would make Senator McKim doubly delusional considering the outbursts we witnessed from him last week.

My belief in their delusion has been confirmed in my mind by reading Steven E Koonin’s book Unsettled: what the climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters. The book is replete with case studies about how science is being used and dramatically misused. It is the latter that has formed a pattern in our current public debate on climate.

Koonin explains the process that normally happens between when the science is being done and when we get to hear about it. He describes it as the ‘long game of telephone that starts with the research literature and runs through the assessment reports to the summaries of the assessment reports and on to the media coverage’.

Koonin realised this when he was asked to ‘stress test’ the literature about climate change. He was ‘not only surprised, but ‘shaken’ by what he found. At each point along the telephone game, there was dilution, obfuscation, or denial of what the science did and did not know. That means, as far as I can tell, that by the time the media got hold of the reports about the assessment of the science based on the actual scientific literature, it was a mess – but it was a targeted mess designed to fit the alarmist narrative.

Here are some results he found that contradict the meta-story in the media:

• Humans have a growing but small warming influence.
• The multitude of climate models disagree with or even contradict each other.
• Government and UN press reports do not accurately reflect the reports themselves.

One of the founders of Green Peace, Patrick Moore, has catalogued other ‘fake, invisible catastrophes and threats of doom’ in his book (of that name). He also gives detailed descriptions of the fuller science on topics such as the Great Barrier Reef (and why Dr Peter Ridd was correct), why the CO2 alarmists are wrong, the polar bear fear of extinction, and many other fearful environmental stories that have become disconnected from reality. As an example of the dangers of computer modelling as tools for predicting the future, he notes: ‘The authors of this paper [about polar bears] are once more using a computer model as if it can actually predict the future. It’s time to call the alarmists out on this.’

Does our Minister for Climate Change and Energy read this stuff? If not, do his advisors? Worse still, on what grounds does the Labor government condemn so many Australians to hardship from his unrealistic energy agenda? Why does this federal leadership on energy make life harder for the most vulnerable of society? Why does this government prattle on about aged care while taking healthy options (like heating) from them? Are the Labor Party and its nest of advisors unaware of the basic science that deaths due to increased cold are much more frequent for the vulnerable than warmer climes? Do they understand that during the last warming period the Earth flourished in the Northern Hemisphere? Has it escaped them that the greening of the planet is doing better with whatever mild warming is occurring?

How does the Minister avoid the logic of Ian Plimer, Bjorn Lomberg, or Michael Shellenberger? Where are the public, informed debates about these very public contradictions within the science? Why haven’t journalists, or the Opposition, peppered him with this alternative assessment by Koonin?

…the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.

I really like how Claire Lehmann summarised this in her recent articles in The Australian. She outlined exactly how the telephone game happened. She notes, ‘GenCost’s modelling applies to hypothetical power prices from 2030 onwards – assuming all the infrastructure the Albanese government is currently investing in need not be accounted for. Is Chris Bowen aware of this? Has anybody told him?’

Lehmann proceeded to list questions that Bowen should be asked about his sources on which to make his claims about ‘the cheapest source of energy’.

But Bowen will not answer these questions. On that I am certain. Why? Because this scenario is the same as one through which we have just recently lived – Covid. Were we allowed to openly pursue the uncertainties in the science then? No. Were we allowed to talk publicly about our concerns? Not really, if we wanted to keep our jobs or social media accounts. Was our freedom about how to live, including how to earn our income and how we could spend our money, curtailed? Yes. Was the future generation being penalised for the acrimonious actions of fear-mongering and controlling elites? Yes. Were any of those elites making millions, if not billions of dollars from the misfortune of others? Yes.

And that is exactly what we are experiencing now in Australia, again. Senator Matt Canavan is correct in calling for a Royal Commission into how we managed Covid.

I claim that we need a Royal Commission into our response to climate science, now, while our economy and freedoms still have some semblance of democratic civility left in them. Without such a strong corrective, environmental alarmism continues to be a platform from the sneering elites in politics, business, and education to cancel the thoughts and freedoms of others.

Will we get such a review at this time? No – the B1 Joker appears to lack the capacity to understand these life-changing dynamics of his portfolio. And if the capacity is not there, he cannot have any will to change his approach even in the face of overwhelming public frustration.

Will anyone else?