From Climate Scepticism

By TONY THOMAS

The Age’s masthead: Independent. Always.

It’s mortifying to see Patrick Elligett slip on a banana skin and get carted off to Casualty. Metaphorically, I mean. He’s been editor of The Age since February and doing a good job, mostly.

First, let me declare an interest: I’ve been a loyal subscriber to The Age for a fortnight. Elligett persuaded me to pony up the $2 a week in his well-composed weekly emails about how he runs the paper. I wrote for The Age under editors Graham Perkin, Les Carlyon and Greg Taylor in the 1970s and as long as I live I feel blessed to have been part of the Age family.

But this essay isn’t about my fond memories. It is about Elligett accepting Greenpeace’s largesse and hospitality and subsequently publishing Greenpeace-subsidised claptrap, which is rather unfortunate for The Age’s cred.

First, I’ll describe how the newspaper — with Sydney Morning Herald in tow — partnered with Greenpeace in a stunt hyping the negligible rise in sea level — blamed on climate change, of course — at the little island of Kioa in Fiji’s north-east group. Second, I’ll suggest why, despite The Age’s reporting, indigenous Fiji women (‘iTaukei’) rate net-zero-emissions below top priority, given the appalling violence they suffer at the hands (and feet and weapons) of their menfolk. Third, I’ll document Greenpeace’s hypocrisy, a mission as unsporting a pastime as shooting fish in a barrel. Throughout I’ll tackle at least some of the misinformation in the Kioa feature by senior Age writer and environment roundsperson Miki Perkins[1], who needs to check more science papers.

Greenpeace’s goal is to further bleed the West’s resources via the corrupt UN’s pledge at Egypt’s COP27 to establish climate “loss and damage” payments. This money – yet to materialise – will inevitably be stolen and squandered by corrupt Third World basketcases. The suggestion is that  annual climate ‘losses’ will amount to $US565 billion by 2050, so on compo we’re not talking peanuts. 

Greenpeace is promoting the hype of the regional meeting at Kioa about un-named states (but certainly not China) being scolded by the International Court of Justice for their alleged climate misdeeds. Fiji citing ‘justice’ in any context is a bit rich given its track record of military coups, police thuggery and the arrests of nine opposition politicians (including two ex-prime ministers) two years ago. As Greenpeace puts it,

Greenpeace Australia Pacific will continue to escalate key demands within the Kioa Declaration in recognition of Australia’s position as a global laggard on climate and a major contributor to the climate crisis — that means no new coal, oil and gas approvals and no more fossil fuel subsidies.

The Age’s junket involved Greenpeace and Perkins jointly scrabbling for “human interest” testimonies to illustrate the islanders purported climate woes. Perkins quotes Greenpeace lawyer Katrina Bullock at Kioa:

We feel that it’s important to take human rights stories from the Pacific to the court and remind the court why it matters. One of the things I’ve learnt as a lawyer is that facts and figures are important, but what moves hearts and minds is stories.

Perkins’ Age piece appeared on August 14, with ripper pics by Age photographer Eddie Jim. In coy terms, Perkins’ piece acknowledged that

The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald travelled to Kioa with assistance from Greenpeace

and also

Greenpeace facilitated travel to Kioa for this masthead.

Greenpeace has deep pockets for  subsidising sympathetic sorts to its photo ops and gabfests. A snapshot of Greenpeace Australia includes $26.6 million from donations and bequests in 2022, of which 34 per cent ($8.9m) was consumed by fund-raisers clipping the ticket and other costs (see note 3). Half the revenue is from cashed-up foundations and big-lick bequests (p6). The four top Greenpeace execs share unequally $1.1m for their pay packets. They run 80 full- and part-time staff.

I was about to email Ms Perkins about Greenpeace’s vague “assistance” and “facilitation” when she popped up with another Greenpeace-friendly piece on August 20 headed, “Ever wondered what it’s like to sail on Greenpeace’s iconic Rainbow Warrior?”. A few paras down, she writes,

This masthead [Age and Sydney Morning Herald] was invited aboard the Rainbow Warrior for two nights, travelling 145 nautical miles from Suva, Fiji, to one of the country’s remote islands, Kioa – where a significant climate meeting is being held. (Greenpeace funded our travel to join the ship).

On the back of an envelope, I guessed $1000 a night for Perkins and Age snapper Eddie Jim for two nights, equals $4000. Plus, say, $1500 for two return flights. That could be five grand deducted from the  The Age’s “Independent. Always.”

The trip to Kioa wasn’t just a Phuket-style junket, with the lucky journo returning the favour of free travel by praising some or other resort’s daiquiris and fluffy towels. This Fiji exercise was the Rainbow Warrior political crew doing their fatwa against fossil fuel-dependent Australia’s prosperity. Next thing, might The Age send reporters on trips subsidised by Extinction Rebellion (I assume Editor Elligett would draw the line at ISIS  subsidies)?

“Esther Tulupe’s story is likely to be one of those presented to the UN,” writes Perkins.  As for Kioa’s alleged loss and damage from alleged rising seas,  Perkins was able to cite the risk to Mrs Tulupe’s semi-derelict beach shack, along with 100 coconut palms and “75 square metres of coastline” since the 1990s. What? Seventy-five square metres is not even a quarter of a basketball court (420sm). Perkins writes regardless,

Tulupe’s fears are shared by people across the Pacific region. They are on the frontlines of the stark, heartbreaking reality of the climate crisis, from Fiji to Kiribati, and Tuvalu to Samoa.

Editor Elligett’s August 18 newsletter praised Eddie Jim’s “awesome” photography, saying it 

helped bring to life a beautiful piece of writing by our environment reporter Miki Perkins on the urgent and existential fight against climate change being faced by our Pacific neighbours. It is an important piece of public interest journalism that should not be ignored by Australians. [OK I won’t]. With photography and writing like that, and the kind of thorough original reporting you will only find at The Age, I don’t think it will be…

Once I send these words to our newsletter editor Jane Hutchinson, I turn my mind to checking the final edits of our most important pieces of public interest journalism. This is, in fact, the highlight of my week….

 And what a privilege it is to scrutinise the work of the country’s best journalists. It is this time of the week I feel most grateful for their work and most proud of their contribution to our state and our country. I have overused the term “masters of their craft” already in this note, but can you blame me? I’m surrounded by them…” (my emphases).[3]

I’ve never before critiqued the output of a press photographer but here it’s unavoidable. Eddie Jim’s role was to handsomely and memorably decorate Miki’s prose – like a Dublin monk illuminating the Book of Kells. In this quest I think Eddie went overboard – literally. Check his snap of Kioa grandpa Lotomau Fiafia doing a wading-out photo op.

Did Rainbow Warrior dry-clean Eddie’s safari suit? I’d agree with Elligett that Eddie’s symbolism, composition, colour and glow-lighting are genius-level. The BBC used to do knee-high photos, but neck-high takes it to a new level. The Age caption:

Lotomau was born on the island in 1952 and has seen erosion of the shoreline in the past decades. He stands in the water roughly where the shoreline used to be when he was young.

The sea laps Lotomau’s leaf-fronded neck as he holds up his grandson’s head. They both look pained and indignant. Eddie (or an Age sub-editor) explains that some 60 years earlier grandpa would have been on terra firma, but climate-fuelled sea rise has created this deplorable wetness. So Kioa ostensibly suffers sea rise – along with the broader Pacific — at the rate of some 2.2 metres per century.[4]

Actually, there’s been no detected sea rise around Fiji — as distinct from beach erosion. For Tuvalu sea rise, enjoy these BoM graphs. And seas globally since 1923 have risen by about the length of your hand.  Your beach house, and likely that of Mrs Tulupe, will linger a while yet.

A distinguished oceanographer, the late Nils-Axel Moerner, six years ago studied Fiji sea levels for the UN’s COP23 in Bonn. Fiji’s two tide gauges, on Viti Levu, are so badly sited as to be useless. Moerner instead used beach geology to estimate sea level change at the adjacent Yasawa Islands. His findings: no current sea rise, and sea level actually 75cm lower than 500 years ago “as evidenced by shore morphology, dead corals up to 15 cm above LTL [low tide level], and dead notches.”[5][6]

Multiple studies by Professor Paul Kench’s team at Auckland University have documented the Pacific island increases in surface area, one study concluding, “There is no evidence of large-scale reduction in island area despite the upward trend in sea level.” (p12). And from a 2018 Kench study:

Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%), despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls … Results challenge perceptions of island loss, showing islands are dynamic features that will persist as sites for habitation over the next century.

Virginie Duvat of University of la Rochelle, France, studied 30 Indo-Pacific atolls with 709 islands and found no atoll shrank and 89 per cent of the islands were stable or growing: “Over the past decades to century, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization by sea-level rise.” When the ABC’s Fran Kelly interviewed Anote Tong, an ex-president (2003-16) of Kiribati, Fran expected alarmism but instead got this,

 I’ve always been very frank and honest to say I don’t see the sea level rising, It may not be the rise in sea level that would be the most immediate problem. I think the change in the weather pattern is more likely to be the more immediate and it has already happened… I’ve always been coming from the science. We’re talking in terms of what the science is saying.

Sea rise for 13 island states can be seen here, on page 28, courtesy the BoM.[7] The sea rise at Vanuatu, sponsor of the UN loss-and-damages hullaballoo, has been sweet damn-all.

So much for Eddie’s water-staged drama of Grandpa Lotomau.  Perkins’ also inserted a drive-by reference to worsening of Kioa’s “intense storms” – I assume she means cyclones. When I did my day trip into Vanuatu off a cruise boat pre-COVID, we were shown a big hollow tree where islanders for centuries had survived cyclones. The impact of cyclones might now appear worse because of bigger populations.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology does annual “outlooks” for South and Western Pacific tropical cyclones. Over the course of the past 12 years just two years’ cyclone outlooks (2022-23 and 2016) were above average, one (2015) was below average, another (2010) was mixed, and the rest were about average. The latest IPCC 6^th report finds in regard to tropical cyclones no detected increase and no attribution to global warming. Miki Perkins also fretted about Antarctic ice-driven sea rise but that’s another furphy.[8]

The news hook for The Age feature was the setting up at Kioa of a special climate fund for Pacific islanders, chaired by Joseph Sikulu, an executive of Pacific Climate Warriors and the Pacific director of 350.org, a global posse of anti-emission fanatics. Sikulu’s biography describes him as a Tongan queer person of colour raised in Darug country or “ ‘Western Sydney’ as it is known today.” [9] Who’s to fund this fund? You and me, obviously.

AS MENTIONED earlier, my guess is that Fijian women are more concerned about being bashed than 1degC of warming in the past century – to a supposed average temperature of around 14degC. The domestic violence has attracted international condemnation, as have Fiji’s regular miliary coups.

In 2013 the Fijian Women’s Crisis Centre published results of its violence survey of 3035 women aged 18-65. The study related to 189,000 relevant women. It was funded by Australian Government aid agencies and assisted by the Fiji Statistics Bureau, used WHO methodology. This report said it significantly under-estimates the violence.

♦ Every day in Fiji, 43 women are injured by their spouse or partner – but only a half a dozen disclose to medicos the true cause (p10).

♦ On average, assaulted women suffer three types of attack – 68% punched, 44% kicked, 20% hit or threatened with a weapon, and 10% deliberately choked or burnt – half of those suffering two to five chokings or burnings in a year (P2) A third of the women victims were assaulted two to five times in a year. (p3).

♦ Almost every day, a woman is attacked so badly she is disabled.

♦ Every day, partners knock ten women unconscious.

♦ Every day, partners break bones of five women  

♦ Every day, five women suffer internal injuries

♦ Every day, a partner inflicts burns on a woman

♦ Every day, three men break their partners’ teeth

♦ Every day, blows cause 29 women to get their eardrums broken or eyes harmed (all these from p10)

♦ One in seven women has been beaten during a pregnancy. One in three of those women were punched or kicked in the stomach, causing elevated rates of miscarriage. These figures are among the worst rates recorded worldwide (p3, p9).

♦ About a third of women who were assaulted said the assault was followed by rape, forced sex or degrading or humiliating sex acts. Nearly half of those were raped 2-5 times in that year, and half were raped more often. (p3).

♦ Each day, 16 women require external health aid for their injuries, but few of them get it (p10)

♦ Of women suffering the violence, one in three has contemplated suicide and one in 11 has attempt suicide (p9).

♦ Nearly one in three women report concurrently suffering four or more types of coercive spouse practices (e.g. against talking to friends) and more than one in four say their savings and income are snatched and mis-spent (p2).

♦ Fiji has the fourth-highest rates of domestic violence over a woman’s lifetime (physical and/or sexual, and emotional), compared with 20 other countries that used the same survey method. (p6).

These violence figures are averaged across Fiji. In the eastern zone they are considered among the world’s worst. Results in the northern division, which includes Kioa, are worse than overall (p5-6).

The Age decorated Perkins’ feature with a candid tagline Environmental Activism. When you click, you get another Age-published story (August 4) about Greenpeace. This time its lovable protestors were invading the manor house of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in North Yorkshire. Sunak had just announced Britain’s major retreat from its “Net Zero” trajectory, approving hundreds of new North Sea oil licences “while the world is burning”, as Greenpeace histrionically put it. The protestors scaled Sunak’s roof and squatted for five hours, unfurling “No New Oil” and draping walls in funereal fabric. Sunak and his wife, Akshata, and their daughters, Anoushka and Krishna, were not in. England’s constabulary stood around, although the stunt might equally have involved bomb-carrying terrorists. Plod did manage to book five perpetrators. One backbencher complained,

 MPs and their families have enough to worry about with their security without extremist groups and their spoilt activists pulling stunts like this at their homes to promote their unrealistic, extravagant demands and student union-level politics.

About the same day that editor Elligett published this Greenpeace home-invasion story, his newspaper was bedding down with Greenpeace locally to bolster, in a subsidised way, the lobbyists’ Kioa stunt.

And in The Age’s daisy-chain of anti-emissions coverage, its UK story was accompanied by an opinion piece from a contributor, the WA Today journo/sub-editor Mark Naglazas: “Change of climate: Will today’s activist villains be tomorrow’s heroes?” Naglazas defended the 6.45am stunt by four Disrupt Burrup Hub activists at the City Beach home of Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill. This protest, as the ABC finally admitted, was accompanied by an ABCTV team. Naglazas opined in a glorious non-sequitur:

Just this week, UN boss Antonio Guterres declared the ‘the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived’. Surely a group that has shown no taste for violence staging a stunt outside the home of the boss of a major fossil fuel company is small potatoes? (My emphases).

I don’t know about the Burrup Hub protesters and violence (they are now the subject of restraining orders), but Greenpeace has never shrunk from law-breaking. In 2011 , for example, four Greenpeace miscreants broke into a CSIRO genetically-modified wheat trial in Ginninderra, Canberra, and destroyed a half-hectare crop with their weed-trimmers. The trial was wheat for better nutrition and bowel health. Condoning the break-in, Shane Rattenbury, a Canberra Greens MLA (and formerly with Greenpeace) — admitted Greenpeace had a track record of breaking the law. Cosmos journalist Wilson da Silva, unimpressed, said Greenpeace had “lost its way”, degenerating into a “sad, dogmatic, reactionary phalanx of anti-science zealots who care not for evidence, but for publicity”.

Greenpeace also campaigns against anti-rickets “Golden Rice” , which offsets the Vitamin A deficiencies harming 190 million Third World children under the age of five. Half a million go blind annually. More than 150 Nobel laureates have asked Greenpeace to drop its anti-GM misinformation.

Apologies for this digression, or was it a digression? Now back to The Age’s Kioa piece, headed “Fighting, not sinking: The Pacific plea for Australian climate action.” In another of Eddie’s nice pics, their Rainbow Warrior taxi is haloed by the rising (or setting) sun.

Perkins didn’t mention that when the wind dropped the 840-tonne tall ship switched to its 1900HP horsepower Caterpillar C3512 diesel-electric powerplant, fed by a 110,000 litre tank of diesel.[10] [11] It manoeuvres via a 150HP diesel-powered bow thruster. The ship (below in Suva Harbour) also sports a helicopter pad.

Talking of diesel, in 2017 Greenpeace activists seized a car-carrier ship at Sheerness Port, Kent, to stop thousands of “toxic” Volkswagen diesel cars entering the UK – diesel being so bad for the planet. And in 2020 Rainbow Warrior 3 blocked  tanker traffic at the Preem oil refinery at Brofjorden. I assume the Warrior first topped up its own 110,000 litre tank. (I like this old pic of an BP roadtanker backing up to refuel Greenpeace’s predecessor Rainbow Warrior 2).

Among that Warrior 2’s campaigns was protesting Bangladesh shipbreakers cutting up old ships literally on the beach, with half-starved labourers sending oil, sludge, asbestos and plastics seawards. “The shoreline is one long trash heap,” as one visitor noted.

But guess where Rainbow Warrior II got scrapped? On a Bangladeshi beach, chopped up by the same scrawny laborers. Here’s how: Greenpeace in 2011 passed the clapped-out ship to the Bangladeshi charity Friendship for use as a floating hospital. The Friendship documentary, A Boat for Bangladesh , was then nominated for an Ocean Film award.

In 2018 Greenpeace approved Friendship’s deal to sell the vessel to a Bangladeshi beach-scrapping yard. The delighted breaker then used the Greenpeace decision to tout its “green” and “responsible” beach business. One comment: “Sounds like the ship’s more Green pieces than Greenpeace’s.”

Exposed by Germany’s Spiegel, Greenpeace tried to buy the ship back but recoiled at the price. Failing to suppress the scandal, especially in big-donor Germany, Greenpeace in November agreed the scrapping was

in a way that does not live up to the standards we set ourselves and campaigned with our allies to have adopted across the world.

We should have consulted our partners … we did not. No excuse.

Nobody was fired at Greenpeace, itself the last to forgive corporate offences and first to demand their punishment and subsequent reparations. The Greenpeace-friendly media, including The Age, ignored the revelations.

In 2014 the aptly-named Pascal Husting, Greenpeace’s international program director, was sprung for years of fortnightly 360km flights between Luxembourg and Amsterdam to work. Never mind Greenpeace claims that short-hauls are “ten times worse than taking the train”.[12]

That’s enough fish shot in this Age/Greenpeace barrel. My dilemma: renew my $2 subscription in September for Mr Elligett’s sake?

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

.[1] “Miki Perkins is a senior writer at The Age. She produces agenda-setting journalism about climate change, the environment and social issues. She also writes fiction, and is working on a novel. Miki lives in Naarm/Melbourne on Wurundjeri land.”

[3] SMH chief climate persuader Nick O’Malley also emailed me August 23 about Miki Perkins’ illustrated account of the “existential” and “incredibly unjust” climate threat to the Kioans.

[4] Eddie makes no suggestion the land is sinking

[5] Re Yasawas: “ There is a total absence of data supporting the notion of a present sea level rise; on the contrary all available facts indicate present sea level stability. On the centennial timescale, there was a +70 cm high level in the 16th and 17th centuries, a -50 cm low in the 18th century and a stability (with some oscillations) in the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries. This is almost identical to the sea level change documented in the Maldives, Bangladesh and Goa (India).”

[6] Mimura and Nunn talk about modest Fiji sea rise of 15cm per century but they are merely extrapolating from a tide gauge at Oahu, Hawaii.

[7] The noticeable sea rise for Samoa is actually land subsistence

[8] Perkins: “Rapid global warming is melting vast swaths of ice at the poles.” NOAA: “Right now, Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise can be measured in millimeters. On the Antarctic Peninsula, where ice shelf collapses have led to measurable glacier acceleration, the effect on sea level is currently just a tenth of a millimeter—about the width of a human hair.”

[9] Sikulu “is an Environmental, Cultural and Queer activist finding his strength in the cross section of these communities from people who like him are fighting to shift the narrative the world has on Queer people of colour.”

[10] Greenpeace fibbing as usual: “The 57.9m-long ship uses wind energy instead of fossil fuels.”

[11] Some technical specs for Rainbow Warrior 3 say its engine is a Volvo Penta D65A MT (1850 HP). Sorting this out is above my pay grade.

[12] Greenpeace chief scientist Dr Doug Parr agreed Husting’s compulsive jet-setting was “a mistake” that “should never have happened”. France is now forcing former air short-haul commuters to take trains.