A topic so hot it burns
As my old blog Hot Topic disappears from the web, I reflect a little on times past
The old buffer pulls his overstuffed armchair a little closer to the log fire, tugs thoughtfully at what passes for a greying beard, and looks down into his wine glass. The heady scent of fine Waipara pinot noir wafts up towards his red-veined nose, is grabbed by a passing inhalation and begins to toy with his olfactory apparatus. Are there hints of flowers, some berries perhaps? He sighs, takes a sip, relishes the salty crunch of the crimson fluid and begins to expound his interminable reminiscences of the good old days when there was still hope.
I remember, he begins as he always does. I remember when you had to hand draw weather maps with HB pencils and take temperature readings from a white wooden box, and you wouldn’t be taken seriously if you couldn’t remember your Foxtrots from your Tangos. I remember the winter of ‘63, when the snow lady thick on the ground and you could skate across the Bristol Channel to France. It was the year of The Beatles, it was the year of the Stones, a year after Juliet Foxtrot Kilo.
His memory is fallible, his geography worse. It might be the wine.
It was the winter of ‘06, I think, when I first had the idea to write a book about global warming and the future of New Zealand. I’d been jousting with climate deniers on the interwebs, trying to correct their curiously distorted understanding of climate science. Daft buggers didn’t know their greenhouse effect from a hot house cucumber, but were happy to witter long and loud that climate wasn’t changing, and even if it was, it wasn’t our fault. And there was Ken Ring. Oh dear, Ken Ring.
Which came first, the book or the blog? Did I write the book in order to justify running the blog? Did I do it all because of a few deluded deniers? Perhaps. But those were different times, when newspapers and TV treated the fact of warming as debatable, when there were very few reporters on the climate beat. Editors were happy to run op-eds by people denying the reality of an urgent problem. I thought a blog might provide some pushback to facile denialism. At the same time, it could provide the detailed coverage of the climate news and science that was so lacking in what we now call mainstream media, and provide a place for discussion.
In the end, the blog came first. After I’d sent the final manuscript of Hot Topic off to my editor, I set about learning Wordpress. AUT Media, my publisher, designed and hosted the web site. The first post appeared in April 2007, and I was soon publishing almost daily.
That urgency tailed off as the years went by, but in the first five or six years it was a rare week that didn't see at least two or three posts. The blog began to attract guest writers. One in particular, the estimable Bryan Walker - or Quasimodo, as Ian Wishart dubbed him - took it on himself to be our book reviewer, and from 2008 to 2015 there was no more complete repository of climate book reviews than our little blog. I’ve never made any money out of either book or blog, but there was a period in the early 2010s when affiliate payments from on-line booksellers - entirely thanks to Bryan’s hard work - covered its hosting costs.
Time takes a sip of wine, puts it in his mouth. He pulls on a finger. The beard gets another tug.
The Listener Affair (April 2008)
It takes an age to build an audience on the internet, especially if nobody has any idea you’re there. The readership numbers grew fairly steadily in the first year, but then I got wind of a story (hi Dave!). The details are all a bit inside baseball at this remove, but The Listener took exception to a piece I’d written and unleashed their lawyers late on a Friday afternoon. Not being made of money, I caved immediately and removed the article, and published a fulsome and largely inaccurate apology drafted by their lawyers. The end result? We lost in order to win. The outrage around the NZ blogosphere that one of their own should be sued by a media company ensured that our readership doubled.
Shortly afterwards AUT got cold feet about being involved with such a controversial blog, and I took over sole publishing responsibility. I’ve been paying ever since…
Somethin’ Stupid (May 2009)
One of my blogging affectations was to use song titles as headlines whenever possible. There was only one possible choice when it came to my review of Ian Wishart’s compendium of climate denial, Air Con. It’s fair to say that I let rip:
Not having read any Wishart before, I was expecting something racy, pacey and persuasive. Air Con is none of these things. It’s a crude mishmash of crank propaganda, wild and intemperate accusations against the people the author defines as the enemy, and displays a marked lack of any “investigation” worth the name. It’s not even well written.
Within minutes, I became Wishart’s enemy number one. Naive old me had no idea what that might mean, but I soon found out. He unleashed a blizzard of blog posts designed to demonstrate how much more he knew about climate science and how mistaken I was. Behind the scenes, he issued a threat to sue. This time I ignored the bluster, and concentrated on what became - from my perspective, at least - a very entertaining exchange. He seemed happy to score lots of own goals. A decent manager would have suggested he address himself to the other end of the pitch. But in the end he moved on and life became quieter - for a while.
Sciblogs (Sept 2009)
When the newly-established Science Media Centre decided to pull together a collection of NZ-based science blogs, I was delighted to be asked to be one of the first members. It was a great community of NZ-based scientists and science writers, and HT was syndicated there throughout Sciblogs existence (it was shut down recently). Some of them have even gone on to fame and, er, not exactly fortune on a scientist’s wages. Hi Siouxie!
The Climate Show (Oct 2010)
As blog readership continued to climb, I got a fairly steady stream of requests for interviews from the media - but one bloke kept coming back for more. Glenn Williams, the breakfast host at KiwiFM, had a keen interest in climate matters, and in late 2010 floated the idea that we might do a podcast with pictures. The Climate Show was born shortly afterwards, and quickly evolved to have a third host in the estimable John Cook of Skeptical Science. Most of the episodes are still available on Youtube, but we had some great guests: Jim Hansen, Naomi Oreskes, Kevin Trenberth, Peter Gleick, Jason Box and many others. We got to 30 shows in all, but logistics and technology began to get in the way when Mr Williams and his better half relocated to London. Glenn and Jen are now living in their idea of hipster heaven: sarf east London, running a couple of shops that sell only craft beer, hot sauce and black vinyl.
“Is this bus going to Clapham?”
“Only if they’re very good, sir.”
They’re very good I’m told. Hi Glenn!
Rodney Hide
How are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, but Rodney Hide’s transmutation from a populist right wing MP and ballroom dancer espousing “smart green” policies, to a vociferous climate denier against any and all sensible emissions reductions coincided with a large donation to ACT by wealthy sculpture fan Alan Gibbs - a monied player in international climate denial circles, just prior to the 2008 election. Hot Topic broke that story the following year.
Rodney went on to become the apparent Parliamentary spokesperson for NZ’s tiny coterie of climate deniers, and I had a lot of fun pointing out the error of his ways, as well as the sources of his funding. It would have been amusing, if Hide hadn’t effectively given the Key government the excuse to unpick the outgoing Labour government’s imperfect but at least carefully considered and reasonably comprehensive emissions policies.
We lost 10 years. We will pay a steep price for that inaction.
Nowadays Rodney can be found on anti-woke right wing talk site The Platform spruiking anti-vaxxers. Tell it not in Gath, but do follow the money…
(He also provided me with one of my favourite musical headlines: Everyone’s Got Something To Hide, Except For Me And My Rodney).
The Potty Peer
If I had invented a character calling himself Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, and given him even half of the traits so tellingly hinted at by his Wikipedia entry, nobody would have believed me. But exist he does, and loud were his protests against climate science and scientists. Notional writs flew, complaints were sent to universities. All to no avail.
A lesser writer might have accepted defeat, decided that the potty peer was BP - Beyond Parody1- but not me. The only way to make writing about him more interesting than banging your head against a brick wall of motivated ignorance was to give him a fictional come-uppance. Which I did, no fewer than seven times.
The conceit was to treat the Viscount as a pompous loud mouthed twit2, based very loosely on the character of Sir Henry At Rawlinson End as created by the late great Viv Stanshall, and to give him a manservant called old Scrotum (the wrinkled retainer). Many were his adventures, but they all ended with him being abducted by vicious beasts or climate scientists. Lots of in-jokes for the climate literate, slapstick for the less well endowed.
The next post here will be an example.
In one respect, however, he taught me a lot. About Greenland and the study of its ice sheets. Which led me to an extended series of posts debunking a retired US geologist who didn’t know what BP stood for. Let no-one tell you that it was warmer in Greenland a few thousand years ago. It wasn’t.
The money machine
If I made one mistake in Hot Topic the book, it was to assume that climate scepticism was no longer tenable in the face of the evidence. I gravely underestimated the extent to which climate denial was about politics and world view. It never had anything to do with science, that was just window dressing. It was possible to argue about details - it still is - but the big picture hasn’t changed in the last 30 years.
My wishful thinking, that rational human beings would accept the scientific evidence and instead argue about what should be done, ran aground on the rocks of a carefully curated international campaign. Funded largely from the USA, helped along by wealthy ideologues in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, a small but highly motivated group did whatever they could to deny reality and delay actions.
Thanks to painstaking work by John Mashey in California (hi John!), I was able to uncover financial payments from a lobby group in the US to NZ’s denialist cabal, the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition. Money also flowed from the US to Australia, and probably the UK, with the objective of creating a group of organisations that would work together on a campaign to derail emissions reductions. Fossil fuel interests and local benefactors helped them along.
Using tactics honed by the tobacco lobby, doubt was the international message. Debates were demanded, media were persuaded (sometimes bullied) to put “both sides” of the issue. The local deniers couldn’t do much to influence me, being just one man in a Waipara farmhouse, but they did give Sciblogs, the Science Media Centre and the Royal Society of NZ3 a hard time about some of my posts.
Times change, however. The global news is full of dramatic extreme weather events. It’s hard to be a credible sceptic when the world’s burning and drowning. They haven’t gone away, though they might be quieter than of old. Their legacy surrounds us.
All the tactics of climate denial are on display in the activities of the far-right in NZ - and in the US and UK. Climate denial is an article of faith for the extremist right. Once you have created a narrative where the facts don’t matter, you can create bubbles of distorted reality on Facebook, Telegram and all the apparatus of modern social media. And those bubbles can be huge - just look at Trump’s America, or Johnson’s post-Brexit Britain.
The last post:
The old codger, that shambling truffle muncher, who lived the climate wars when there was fighting to be had, reaches for a log to put on the fire. The bottle of wine’s finished. “Florrie!” he yells irritably, “bring me another bottle of Entre Deux Legs”.
Life goes on, for the time being, and a tune pops into his head. Sing along with him now:
Wake up you sleepy head
Put on some clothes
Shake up your bed
Put another log on the fire for me
I've made some breakfast and coffee
Look out my window and what do I see
A crack in the sky
And a hand reaching down to me
All the nightmares came today
And it looks as though they're here to stay
As that great Irish comedian Dave Allen used to end every show: May your God go with you.
The Pretty Things: Thanks to Bryan, Cindy, Glenn, John Cook, Doug, Simon, the Jims Renwick and Salinger, Peter Griffin and the SMC team, and all our guest contributors and interviewees. More than anything, my thanks to the climate science community around the world for all their help and patience over the life of the blog, and beyond.
A more or less complete archive of ten years of Hot Topic is available here, at the National Library of New Zealand’s National Digital Heritage Archive.
Not Before Present, which as any earth science fule know, is by definition 1950.
Not a great stretch, it must be admitted
Funders of the SMC, and therefore Sciblogs.
End of an era. Sigh. Still miss the Climate Show with you and Glenn. Hi, Glenn!