If bullshit were rain, then Australia’s bushfires would be doused in an instant by the tidal wave of effluent pouring out of legacy media and social media alike. Much of the most egregious verbal sewage is spewing from the mouthpieces of the green-left, but the right aren’t immune, either, unfortunately.
Take for instance, the response to this report from 7News in Australia.
Police are now working on the premise arson is to blame for much of the devastation caused this bushfire season. A strike force will investigate whether blazes were deliberately lit, and bring those responsible to justice.
facebook.com/7NEWSsydney
This is true. There have been hundreds of arrests for arson, including in some of the areas most devastated by fire.
Unfortunately, Paul Joseph Watson takes this fact and runs just a little too far with it.
Authorities in Australia are working on the premise that arsonists and lightning strikes are to blame for bushfires that have devastated numerous areas of the country, not “climate change” as many global warming alarmists have claimed.
In fact, the police are saying nothing here about climate change. They are simply saying that arsonists are to blame for actually igniting many fires. Whether or not climate change created the conditions that made so much of the country a tinderbox is not something that the police have addressed at all. Certainly, several scientists (including some well situated within the anthropogenic climate change camp, such as Prof. Andy Pitman), have discredited claims that the fires can be blamed on climate change.
But, as Watson rightly observes, that hasn’t stopped many on the green-left from shooting their fool mouths off.
Despite the fact that bushfires are not uncommon in Australia, the severity of the damage led numerous climate change alarmists to blame the disaster on man-made global warming.
Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders blamed those who were “delaying action on climate change” for “the blood-red sky and unbreathable air in Australia because of raging forest fires.”
However, according to those tasked with investigating the fires, climate change has nothing to do with it.
But, they haven’t said that at all. Whether or not it’s true, Jones is drawing a bow too far.
Other causes for the fires include lightning strikes and a natural weather phenomenon called Dipole, again neither of which have anything to do with man-made climate change.
summit.news/2020/01/03/australian-police-say-arsonists-lightning-to-blame-for-bushfires-not-climate-change/
What Watson is referring to here is the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). Like El Niño in the Pacific, the IOD is a natural phenomenon – but one which some claim is being exacerbated or made more frequent by the current period of climate change. There is indeed some evidence that “positive” IODs (which are bad news for Australia) may be becoming more frequent and coinciding more often with El Niño events.
That, of course, does not mean that human activity is responsible. But it’s certainly not nothing to do with climate change.
In many ways, Watson is probably right: so-called “green tape” (in conjunction with a rare, but naturally-occurring mega-drought), is most likely the proximate cause of the unusual scale and ferocity of these fires, while arsonists are directly responsible for igniting many of them. Just don’t go attributing to “authorities” things that they didn’t actually say.
As Nietzsche said, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”. Just because the legacy media is lying through its teeth doesn’t mean new media can be any more careless with facts.
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