In an opinion piece published in the Melbourne Age (11 April 2007) the Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs, John Roskam,  suggested that the ABC was not doing its job in holding received wisdom up to critical scrutiny.

He wrote:

For example, man-made climate change is now as good as an accepted fact. The community and all political parties believe that dramatic reductions in emissions are necessary to combat the threat of a warming planet. There would be few better issues than this on which the ABC could contest the prevailing orthodoxy. In relation to climate change, though, this is unlikely to happen. The point is that the ABC picks and chooses the issues on which it will challenge public opinion.
 

But surely when Mr Roskam wrote this he knew that the ABC program Counterpoint had already run an opinion piece that directly challenged the global warming orthodoxy.  Mr Roskam knew this, or should have known this, because the opinion piece was broadcast on the ABC some  months earlier by Dr Jennifer Marohasy, who is a member of Mr Roskam’s staff at the Institute of Public Affairs.

In that program Dr Marohasy described Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” as “simplistic, horrific, technically flawed and politically naïve”.  The transcript of her opinion piece, broadcast on 2 October 2006, is available here.

Indeed, this was not Dr Marohasy's first appearance on Counterpoint.  She is a Senior Fellow with the IPA's Environmental Unit,  she was on Counterpoint no less than eight times in the last twelve months.

But wait, there’s more.  On another four occasions this year Counterpoint has broadcast sympathetic interviews with critics of the current scientific orthodoxy about global warming.

5 February 2007.  Interviews with two critics of the Stern Report, Ian Castles (ANU) and David Henderson (Westminster Business School, London).  Transcript.

2 April 2007.   Interview with Emeritus Professor Garth Partridge (University of Tasmania), a self described global warming skeptic .  Professor Partridge claims that climate change researchers who take money from governments may have compromised themselves.  He says that most scientists who are skeptical of global warming are now retired, because universities and governments are reluctant to employ global warming skeptics. Audio.

9 April 2007.  Interview with Paul S. Boyer,  American author who claims that many environmentalists have succumbed to an "apocalyptic world view" derived from a fundamentalist reading of the bible which has led them to believe that global warming is proof that the end of the world is nigh and Armageddon is approaching. Transcript.

9 April 2007.  Interview with gardening guru Don Burke, now Chairman of the Australian Environment Foundation,  an organisation which, in his words, is "disgruntled with the normal environmental groups".  Burke says that there is a "fair amount of thuggery" by a lot of green groups, who, while they might mean well, have a "a lot of religious intensity" and a powerful "voting block".  According to Burke some of their advocacy has led to "farmers being pushed off the land." Audio.

If Mr Roskam is not deliberately misleading his readers, he has at the very least failed to conduct an elementary search for “climate change” or “global warming” in the ABC web  site.  We could expect better from the chief executive of a generously funded think tank with academic pretensions (The IPA’s senior staff are described as “fellows”).

Darce Cassidy April 2007