Canadian climate science denialist Patrick Moore is at the beginning of a tour around Australia speaking to audiences across theย country.
But hereโs aย warning.
If you do find yourself in the audience and donโt want to be compared to the โTalibanโ then donโt even think about walking out inย protest.
Less than two weeks before flying to Australia, Moore spoke on the campus of Amherst College inย Massachusetts.
When members of the collegeโs environmental group decided they had heard enough and walked, Moore said they had a โTalibanย mindsetโ.
When he was later asked to apologise, a report in the Amherst College student newspaper says Moore instead chose to double-down on hisย remark.
โFifty people walk out, and I say thatโs a pretty Taliban thing to do,โ Moore is reported to have said, characterizing the behavior of the young students to that of the fundamentalist regime that massacred thousands and committed brutal repression ofย women.
Who is Patrickย Moore?
Moore has no scientific credibility on climate change and has never published a scientific paper on theย issue.
Yet Moore claims there is โno scientific proofโ that humans are causing global warming and that โthrowing bones on the groundโ would have a better predictive ability than most climateย models.
His opinion on the science runs against all the major national science academies in the world and about 97 per cent of all the peer reviewed studies on climate change carried out since the earlyย 1990s.
In his Amherst talk, it is reported that Moore asked rhetorically who would โnot want to be on an ice-freeย planetโ?
Good question. According to a study published in a Royal Society journal, global sea level was about 60 metres higher than today when the Earth was virtually ice-free about 35 million yearsย ago.
Galileoย Movement
Mooreโs trip to Australia has been financed through the climate science denial organisation the Galileo Movement.
The trip came about despite what has to be one of the least successful web-based crowd funding campaigns inย history.
The Galileo Movement launched its campaign on the crowd funding site Indiegogo on 5 August with a goal of raising $50,000 (archived here).ย Perks were offered to any donors feeling especially generous, including signed copies of Patrick Mooreโs book, t-shirts and a one-hour visit from the man himself for a $1000 corporateย donation.
By the time the campaign closed on October 4, only one single donation had been made through the site, raising the grand total ofย $25.
The Galileo Movement also attempted to use the social media tool Thunderclap to create a social media buzz around Mooreโs trip.ย The group needed 100 Twitter supporters to activate the โThunderclapโ but managed justย 31.
Despite this and Mooreโs lack of credibility, the tour goes ahead with events in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Hobart, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast. Moore has been given favourable coverage in popular rural newspaper The Land and the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Australian.
Moore is almost always described as a co-founder of Greenpeace, despite Greenpeace itself contesting that he wasnโt a co-founder. Moore did hold senior positions at Greenpeace, but left there almost 30 yearsย ago.
A former Greenpeace colleague and actual co-founder of Greenpeace International, Rex Weyler, wrote: โMoore has served as a corporate public relations consultant far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace, and he has never worked as aย scientist.โ
Mediaย coverage
In The Australian, the report repeated as fact a claim from the Galileo Movementโs own publicity that Moore had been a crew member of the famous Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior boat at the time it was bombed by the French government in July 1985 (I checked this with Greenpeace who told me Moore was not a member of the Rainbow Warrior crew and was not on the boat when the two bombs exploded โ killing a photographer and sinking the ship โ but was on the New Zealand mainland for a Greenpeace board meeting that was scheduled around thatย time).
An archive of Mooreโs CV shows his work for corporations and organisations in logging, pulp and paper and mining. He has also been an advocate for the nuclear energyย industry.
Neither The Australian nor The Land newspaper mentioned Mooreโs corporate links or explained Mooreโs lack of genuine expertise. In The Land, the headline suggested Moore was the โMan in the middle on climateโ when in fact, Moore is a man out on the fringes with a conspiracy that human-caused climate change is the work of a โpowerful convergence of elitesโ who want to control energy policy or chase government grantย money.
Moore was also given airtime on Sky News in a โdebateโ on the โRicho + Jonesโย programme.
Co-presenter Alan Jones, a popular Sydney radio talkback host, is a patron of the Galileo Movement.
The Galileo Movement has previously helped to finance and organise (thanks during one tour to a donation from mining magnate and Australiaโs richest person Gina Rinehart) tours of Australia by British climate science denialist Lord Christopher Monckton.
Mooreโs characterization of studentsโ right to protest as resembling โthe Talibanโ has echoes of the time Monckton called young environmentalists the โHitler youthโ and compared an Australian government policy advisor on climate change to a Nazi.
The Galileo Movement claims to stand for โopen and free discussion of major scientific issuesโ โ the โHitler youthโ or the โTalibanโ need notย apply.
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