Australia's One Nation under climate science denial - The Guardian

Link to video: Stephanie Banister: 'I don't oppose Islam as a country'

Oh, how the world laughed at Stephanie Banister – the extreme right wing Australian election candidate who told a TV interviewer that Islam was a country.

Wasn't it just side-splitting to hear the 27-year-old One Nation hopeful get her Qu-ran's mixed up with her harams?

What fun to hear her re-write the Jewish faithful as a congregation of Jesus-followers?  You could have knocked me down with a kippah.

The Queenslander claimed she was a victim of selective editing from the television network Channel Seven, which aired the interview. She's since pulled out of the election race.

But virtually every major news outlet in the developed world covered Banister's gaffs.

After twisting its satirical knife every which way, US television political comedy The Daily Show suggested Banister had set "a new low watermark for electoral ignorance".

But after reading her party's stance on climate change, I beg to differ.

One Nation appears to have gone shopping to the Climate Science Denial Mart and come back with the whole deli counter of debunked talking points.

"What's really behind all the global warming hoopla," One Nation's website asks.

"Power.  It's the same old Marxist/Communist/Fascist collectivist shtick, dressed up in new clothes. Global warming is all about a power grab by a wealthy elite and their collectivist sycophants — using the (United Nations) as a cover and tool."

Elsewhere, One Nation accuses the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO of engaging in the corruption of science.

Much of the material is near identical to that offered by the climate science denial organisation the Galileo Movement, whose patron – Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones – says human-caused climate change is a hoax and the science is "witchcraft".

One Nation New South Wales Senate candidate Pauline Hanson even cites the Galileo Movement's project leader Malcolm Roberts, asking readers to check out a document which Sydney Morning Herald environment editor Ben Cubby has described as a "pile of horse shit".

Now, while you probably wouldn't expect the Christian Democrats to jumble its religious lexicon, the party is as equally clueless as One Nation about the current state of climate science.

According to the Christian Democrats, there are "equally reputable scientists" who say that climate change "is not, and never was driven by CO2 levels".

This ignores a recent study, co-authored by fellow The Guardian environment blogger Dana Nuccitelli, about 97 per cent of scientific studies on climate change in the last 20 years all agree that global warming is caused by humans. It also ignores all the major science academies in the developed world.

The CDP says it is "agnostic" about human caused climate change, which is a bit like saying you're an agnostic about the laws of physics.

Definitely not an agnostic, but rather an all-out worshipper of anti-science, is the Christian fundamentalist Rise Up Australia Party, led by a Melbourne Pastor who thinks humans have only been on earth for 6,000 years. Rise Up Australia also drafted in UK Independence Party figure Lord Christopher Monckton earlier for a pre-election push.

Key minor parties in Queensland – Katter's Australia Party and Palmer United Party – have also chosen to put debunked fringe ideas above sound science.

Katter's Australia Party says: "The scientific case is not made out and nor is there empirical evidence connecting carbon emissions to global warming - the argument is simply not sustainable."

The Palmer United Party doesn't say anything about climate change aside from saying it wants a national commission to investigate the "carbon issue" but its leader, billionaire miner Clive Palmer, is a climate science sceptic.

Palmer tried to play-down the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by telling an ABC television audience that "97 per cent of carbon dioxide is from natural sources" – as if this was somehow relevant.

One Nation also does this sweet little climate denial two-step that tries to suggest that carbon dioxide is both inconsequential but also powerful enough to be the life force of the planet.

Pauline Hanson writes: "Carbon dioxide is Nature's invisible, tasteless, odourless trace gas essential to all life on Earth."

Perhaps she's been reading the same talking points as Opposition leader Tony Abbott, who earlier this year dog whistled to the climate denial crowd when he described emissions trading as "a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one."

Abbott has said in the past that he thinks climate science is "crap" but has also said he thinks it does contribute to climate change.

But Abbott's Liberal Party is riddled with representatives scornful of the risks of burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels annually to load the atmosphere with that all-powerful (but also trace gas) carbon dioxide.

In Queensland, the state party's rank and file members voted last year in favour of a motion to ban the teaching of climate science in schools.

The motion was proposed by a party member who claims to have debunked the greenhouse theory using just two fish boxes and a roll of cling film in an experiment he cooked up in his kitchen.

Maybe it's time to quote some wise words from that former One Nation candidate and religious philosopher Stephanie Banister.

"Everyone in the world has a lot to learn about day to day stuff. Everything in life is just about learning."

View the original article here

'Teddy bear'; carnivore emerges from the mists of Ecuador - The Guardian

Link to video: Olinguito: the newly discovered mammal

A small, wide-eyed beast with luxuriant orange fur has been identified as a new species more than 100 years after it first went on display in the world's museums.

The discovery brings to an end one of the longest zoological cases of mistaken identity and establishes the "olinguito" (which rhymes with mojito) as the first new carnivore recorded in the western hemisphere for 35 years.

The animal – which has been described as a cross between a teddy bear and a house cat – had been displayed in museums around the globe and exhibited at numerous US zoos for decades without scientists grasping that it had been mislabelled.

One adult female, named Ringerl, was kept at Louisville zoo in the 1960s, but was moved to Tucson zoo, to the Smithsonian's National zoo, and to the Bronx zoo after keepers repeatedly failed in their attempts to breed the animal. The reason for that failure is now clear: it was a different species to the mates on offer.

The true identity of the overlooked beast only emerged after Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, launched a 10-year investigation into an obscure group of raccoon-like mammals called olingos. What began with a drawer-full of remains ended with a nighttime trek through the cloud forests of Ecuador, where scientists photographed the creature living in the trees.

"If you look up olingos in a book today, pretty much everyone says we don't know quite how many species there are, what their ranges are, and which are endangered. I set out to resolve all that, I wanted to put olingos on the map," Helgen told the Guardian.

"But in the process of trying to do that, and because we were the first group in generations to look closely at his part of the carnivore family tree, we revealed this incredible and beautiful animal that everyone had overlooked," he said.

The moment of realisation came when Helgen was going through skins and skulls of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago. "I pulled out a drawer and there were these brilliant, beautiful orange-red pelts with long flowing fur. It was nothing like olingo fur. I then looked at the skulls and the shape was very different. I wondered, 'is this a mammal that's been missed by every other zoologist?' It turns out that it was," he said.

The animal had been mistaken for an olingo because of some broad similarities, but these turned out to be superficial. Helgen's animal was different on almost every measure: it was smaller, much furrier, had a shorter tail, different teeth, and smaller ears. "We are not talking about splitting hairs. If you saw the two animals side by side you would wonder how they could ever be confused," Helgen said.

Convinced they had a new species on their hands, Helgen's team arranged an expedition to the cloud forests of the Andes, where similar creatures had come from. Trekking at night through the dense vegetation, and accompanied by a chorus of frogs and crickets, they spotted other nocturnal beasts in the beams of their headtorches: kinkajous and porcupines.

"Eventually, there it was, an olinguito. We got it in the beam, running around, jumping from tree to tree, but getting close enough so that when it turned and looked into the beam we knew exactly what it was," he said.

The olinguito is a carnivore, but the term has two meanings in biology. The most familiar is an animal that eats meat, but the other is any animal that belongs to the order Carnivora, which includes cats, dogs, tigers, bears and others. They are not all meat eaters, and the olinguito mostly eats fruit.

Working with local museums, the team later extracted DNA from animals on display and confirmed that some were olinguitos, a previously unknown relative of the olingo. They have since confirmed there are at least four sub-species of the animals.

The DNA evidence took the scientists back to the Smithsonian Institution. There they found that scientific databases already contained olinguito DNA that had been wrongly labelled as olingo. It also led them to tissues from a Colombian olinguito held in storage at the museum. They belonged to Ringerl, the unfortunate female that toured US zoos.

"We tracked down Ringerl's keeper and asked why she moved her around so much. She said 'we couldn't get her to breed with any of the olingos.' This animal wasn't fussy, it just wasn't the same species. It would have been impossible. It was a glorious case of mistaken identity," said Helgen.

The name olinguito means small or adorable olingo, but writing in the journal ZooKeys, the team give the animal a formal scientific name too, Bassaricyon neblina. The species name, neblina, means "fog" or "mist" in Spanish, a nod to the cloud forests where the animal lives. But it also means obscured. "That's exactly what the olinguito has been," Helgen said. "Lost in the fog."

View the original article here