Fact-proof screens up!

Pauline Hanson has been rightly ridiculed for using a healthy section of the Great Barrier Reef, 1,000 kilometers south of where bleaching is occurring, to show that climate change is a fabrication. Yet many of her followers welcomed the comments.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has been ridiculed for visiting a healthy section of the Great Barrier Reef while denying the effects of climate change. Senator Hanson and other One Nation senators donned wetsuits, snorkels and masks for a tour of the reef in a show of support for Queensland’s tourism industry. Senator Hanson disputed claims from the world’s leading scientists that the reef experienced its worst ever bleaching event in 2016. She said the publicity surrounding bleaching events was hurting the tourism industry. “If you actually go deeper, 12-20 metres deeper in the ocean, the reefs there are in pristine condition,” she said. “And they’re growing all the time.” Senator Hanson is also not convinced that global warming contributed to this year’s bleaching event that wiped out about 22 per cent of the reef’s coral. “We can’t have these lies put across by people with their own agendas,” she said. But the section of reef they visited was off the coast of Rockhampton in central Queensland, about 1,000 kilometres south from where a serious bleaching event occurred near Lizard Island.

ABC News 25 November 2016

Please, let’s not let the new “American and British disease” infect our healthy Australian skepticism and regard for facts. We are better than this.

We in Australia are at a crossroads. Populist, nationalist, isolationist and anti-immigration movements are in the ascendant in the UK and the USA. Many of the things that their leaders say aren’t backed up by the facts but that doesn’t daunt their legions of ‘true believers’. We can let those movements infect us in Australia or we can take some leadership in a world where the US and the UK are shrinking into themselves.

The world is nowhere near perfect – but ignoring the facts and the process of reasoning is not going to make it any better. What about it Aussies?

“Alone of all the races on earth, they seem to be free from the ‘Grass is Greener on the other side of the fence’ syndrome, and roundly proclaim that Australia is, in fact, the other side of that fence.” ― Douglas Adams

Still true?