Politics of climate change in Australia

It’s been a busy few weeks in the media. Hilary Clinton and her climate change envoy met with officials in China, Obama says that the upcoming climate bill is needed to ‘save our planet’, the ‘danger threat’ of global warming was increased, Dr Hansen took the final leap from scientist to activist, and NASA’s newly launched carbon tracking satellite came to an abrupt end as it crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

However, nothing seems to beat news from home soil. In a week where the Australian government announced the emissions trading scheme (which plans to reduce emissions by 5 to 15 per cent before 2020) is full steam ahead, Australian Liberal Member of Parliament Dr Dennis Jensen (a well known climate skeptic, who holds a PhD in the physics of ceramics) managed to violate Godwin’s law by pointing to Adolf Hitler as a classic example of how scientists (and therefore climate change) can be wrong.

“Albert Einstein was very much criticised by Hitler, and Hitler actually had a group of 100 top scientists in Germany write a book called 100 scientists against Einstein,” Dr Jensen told reporters in Canberra.

“Einstein was asked: ‘Doesn’t it bother you Dr Einstein that you’ve got so many scientists against you?’

“And he said: `It doesn’t take 100 scientists to prove me wrong, it takes a single fact’.”

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