Media coverage given to serial climate denying pest Sen. Malcolm Roberts
“Campaign of intimidation” One of the academics on the receiving end of Roberts complaints, John Cook, of the University of Queensland, told DeSmog:
Beneath the public attacks on climate science, scientists are also subject to a more insidious campaign of intimidation, otherwise known as the subterranean war on science. This takes the form of complaints to universities to get scientists fired, complaints to journals to get papers retracted and FOIrequests to pick through scientists’ emails.
Sen. Malcolm Roberts: Climate denier, conspiracy nut and serial pest, Independent Australia DeSmog Blog 15 August 2016 One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts has spent countless hours harassing scientists, researchers and politicians with rantings about climate change conspiracy theories. DeSmogBlog‘s Graham Readfearnreports.
MALCOLM ROBERTS is a former Australian mining consultant who thinks the United Nations is using the “scam” of human-caused climate change as a cover story while it builds an all-powerful world government.
He’s also just been elected as an Australian Senator.
Roberts will sit in Australia’s upper house as a member of the far-right One Nation party that wants to ban Muslim immigration and investigate climate scientists for “fraud and corruption”.
Since his election, Roberts has been given blanket coverage in the Australian media, with high profile interviews on flagship shows on the publicly funded ABC.
Even the BBC has written about Roberts, with a headline: ‘Australia senator Malcolm Roberts calls climate change a UN conspiracy.’
At every opportunity, Roberts, a former coalface miner, has claimed there is “no empirical evidence” to show that carbon dioxide from burning the coal that he used to dig up affects the climate.
As climate science denial goes, Roberts’ position is as far to the fringe as you can go, mixing conspiracy theories with outright rejection of the conclusions of science academies and institutions across the world that humans are causing climate change.
Australian Nobel science winner Professor Peter Doherty told me that despite Roberts’ apparent confidence that he is right and the world’s learned academies are wrong, the Senator has “no understanding of how science works”.
Harassment of climate scientists
Much of the media coverage has concentrated on Roberts’ UN conspiracy theories and his views on international banking families, hinting at anti-Semitic conspiracy theories…..
Roberts has spent the last seven or eight years working as the project manager of the Galileo Movement — a climate science denial group launched in 2011.
But over that period, as well as developing his talking points and writing verbose reports, he has been writing complaint letters and emails to journalists, politicians and the institutions where climate scientists work.
His unrelenting harassment of climate scientists and academics working on climate change over several years (he would call it doing due diligence) is worth documenting because it points to the kind of activities Roberts might get up to now that he has been elected.
Roberts has written letter after letter — email after email — to the bosses of some of Australia’s best known scientists, often copying in long lists of politicians, fellow denialists and journalists. Roberts has posted all his correspondence on his website……..
“Campaign of intimidation”
One of the academics on the receiving end of Roberts complaints, John Cook, of the University of Queensland, told DeSmog:
Beneath the public attacks on climate science, scientists are also subject to a more insidious campaign of intimidation, otherwise known as the subterranean war on science. This takes the form of complaints to universities to get scientists fired, complaints to journals to get papers retracted and FOIrequests to pick through scientists’ emails.
Malcolm Roberts was prolific in emailing complaints to The University of Queensland about my research and our course on climate science denial. As a researcher studying denialist attacks on science, I used the experience as a teachable moment – recording a video about the nature of attacks on science as well as interviewing the world’s leading scientists who described their own experiences of harassment which were eerily similar to my own experiences.
It’s crucially important that we shine daylight on this kind of behaviour. The public, universities and academic journals need to understand the techniques denialists employ to impinge on scientists’ academic freedom, in order to reduce their damaging impact on science.
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