When Australia’s conservative commentariat lose the plot, wow do they really lose it.

The spark was the University of Western Australia’s decision to back out of a deal to host a research centre fronted by climate science contrarian Bjørn Lomborg and paid for with $4m of taxpayer cash.

First to don the water skis for the shark jump was the education minster, Christopher Pyne, who vowed that he would find a new home for Lomborg’s questionable methodology.

“You can be certain it will happen,” said Pyne, before revealing that he had apparently been on the phone to “freedom of speech” and word had come back.

“Freedom of speech demands that it does,” declared Pyne (hashtag facepalm).

Many in Australia’s stable of conservative thinkers were so incensed by the decision of UWA’s vice chancellor, Paul Johnson, that the only balm to sooth their fiery rage was to quickly over-write 700 words for a Rupert Murdoch newspaper.

This was Australia’s very own “Scopes Monkey Trial” … a “disgrace to universities”… a “grotesque betrayal of the tradition of free thought” … a “craven surrender to the mob”. And that was just News Corp’s climate science mangler-in-chief, Andrew Bolt

Henry Ergas, a columnist in the Australian, quoted the likes of Aristotle and Daniel Defoe to conclude “that we can speak the truth only when we can say how things really are. If our universities can’t, they don’t deserve to exist.”

The university had been “captured by the forces of unreason”, wrote Nick Cater, executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, a think tank officially associated with the Liberal Party.

Former Institute of Public Affairs fellow Tim Wilson, now a Human Rights Commissioner, accused the university of engaging in a form of “soft censorship”.

The Australian National University academic Will Grant pointed out that indeed universities did engage in soft censorship all the time. “It’s called learning”, wrote Grant.

Perhaps the best indicator of the level of collective indignation was how everyone was so blinded by rage they forgot to anoint the episode with the customary ‘gate’ suffix.

I mean, what’s not to like about Lomborgate, chaps?

Lomborg himself said he had been the victim of “toxic politics, ad hominen attacks and premature judgment” before penning a column in the Murdoch-owned Wall St. Journal.

Under the headline “The Honor Of Being Mugged By Climate Sensors”, Lomborg wrote that “opponents of free debate are celebrating”.

“A small but loud group of opponents deliberately ignored the Copenhagen Consensus’s endorsement of smart climate policies,” wrote Lomborg.

So why did Lomborg’s appointment attract such opposition in the first place?

Lomborg does accept that climate change is a problem, but over the years his think tank has placed the issue well down a list of priorities.

As I wrote on Planet Oz before UWA made its decision, Lomborg’s methods fail to properly capture the costs of climate change impacts and presume there will be no catastrophic impacts.

Yes, Lomborg has emerged in recent months as an advocate for getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies, but he is particularly late to this issue. The likes of the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the G20 group have been suggesting this action for at least six years, probably more.

Remembering too that Lomborg has been a vocal opponent of renewable energy subsidies for much longer.

Lomborg is not an academic, but runs a think tank based in the US where much of its funding is hidden. The extent of his academia is an unpaid adjunct professor position at the Copenhagen Business School, which runs out in May next year.

There have been many, many critics of the work Lomborg does outside his Consensus Center think tank, much of which is published in newspaper columns.

He has been accused of cherry-picking data and ignoring climate science findings that challenge his own positions.

Yet he is a hero among conservatives and many climate science denialists.

Lomborg also says the world’s poorest, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, need fossil fuels to drag themselves out of their “energy poverty”.

In Brisbane last year, Lomborg cited projections from the IEA that fossil fuels were going to boom in the developing world, but did not mention that the IEA also said that those projections were in line with global warming in Africa of upwards of between three and six degrees.

For a more rounded view of why UWA academics were uncomfortable about the Lomborg deal, you just need to watch the videos of the staff meetings between them and UWA VC Johnson.

Graham K. Brown, UWA’s professor of international development, also went through Lomborg’s methods in painstaking detail on his blog and found them largely wanting.

Brown wrote: “I hope that these posts go some way towards demonstrating that concern over Lomborg’s credentials is not mere ideology but the outcome of serious engagement with his output, on his own terms.”

The idea that UWA’s decision is an attack on free speech belies the fact that Lomborg actually gave a speech at the university back in March.

Conservatives and climate science deniers desperately want to make a martyr out of Lomborg, claiming he has been the victim of zealotry and a mob of raging climate campaigners.

What really happened is that too many academics found Lomborg’s methods wanting and his historic views on climate change to be offensive.

At UWA and elsewhere, academics, students and campaigners exercised their academic freedom and their freedom of speech to voice their concerns.

The question now is, will any other leading university be willing to take Lomborg on?



