Climate Science Denialist Patrick Moore Tours Australia After Comparing Students to the Taliban

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Canadian climate science denialist Patrick Moore is at the beginning of a tour around Australia speaking to audiences across theย country.

But hereโ€™s aย warning.

If you do find yourself in the audience and donโ€™t want to be compared to the โ€œTalibanโ€ then donโ€™t 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 collegeโ€™s environmental group decided they had heard enough and walked, Moore said they had a โ€œTalibanย 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.

โ€œFifty people walk out, and I say thatโ€™s 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 โ€œno scientific proofโ€ that humans are causing global warming and that โ€œthrowing 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 โ€œnot 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

Mooreโ€™s 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 Mooreโ€™s 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 Mooreโ€™s trip.ย  The group needed 100 Twitter supporters to activate the โ€œThunderclapโ€ but managed justย 31.

Despite this and Mooreโ€™s 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 wasnโ€™t 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: โ€œMoore 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 Movementโ€™s 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 Mooreโ€™s 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 Mooreโ€™s corporate links or explained Mooreโ€™s lack of genuine expertise. In The Land, the headline suggested Moore was the โ€œMan 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 โ€œpowerful convergence of elitesโ€ who want to control energy policy or chase government grantย money.

Moore was also given airtime on Sky News in a โ€œdebateโ€ on the โ€œRicho + Jonesโ€ย 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 Australiaโ€™s richest person Gina Rinehart) tours of Australia by British climate science denialist Lord Christopher Monckton.

Mooreโ€™s characterization of studentsโ€™ right to protest as resembling โ€œthe Talibanโ€ has echoes of the time Monckton called young environmentalists the โ€œHitler youthโ€ and compared an Australian government policy advisor on climate change to a Nazi.

The Galileo Movement claims to stand for โ€œopen and free discussion of major scientific issuesโ€ โ€” the โ€œHitler youthโ€ or the โ€œTalibanโ€ need notย apply.

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