Climate Alarmist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg Advocates Groupthink

B.P. Terpstra

“Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is Director of the Global Change Institute. He is an active research scientist working on coral reef ecosystems and environmental change, for which he receives Australian Research Council support,” boasts his bio.

I’m not sure what “global change” means, to be frank, or what an “active research scientist” is. I do know what an activist research scientist looks like, however. His name is Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.

In “The Conversation” a website dedicated to promoting Labor-first groupthink (my wild guess) the “active research scientist” actively attacks critical thinkers from his (my second guess) high-energy office. Hoegh-Guldberg preaches:  

The science tells us that exceeding 2°C in average global temperature will largely exceed the thermal tolerance of corals today. It is already happening. Rolling mass bleaching events, unknown to science before 1979, are increasing in frequency and severity.

This simple set of linkages demonstrates the risk that climate change generally places on natural ecosystems.

It is supported by hundreds of papers and highly experienced and published experts from oceanography, climate science and marine biology.

Why is it then that commentators in the media such as Andrew Bolt and Jamie Walker consistently take a different view and posit, either directly or indirectly, that all those leading experts are fraudulent, dishonest or at best shoddy scientists?

It’s classic groupthink. “The science tells us” through “hundreds of papers” (thanks to deforestation) all we need to know! Alas, the good scientist never lists his hundreds of papers, or even explains why quantity necessarily equals quality, an absurd groupthink argument.

Incidentally, Bolt has praised and questioned scientists, but I digress. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is trying to set up a false argument: The all-powerful and all-knowing scientists are being questioned by unwashed commentators, and you must pick teams.

Here he is again, appealing to authority, in the groupthink tradition:

Let’s take Andrew Bolt. Andrew has been vociferous in his claim that scientists like me are alarmists, even deliberately deceptive.

He wraps us all up in the same blanket: me, Flannery and Garnaut. Quite an honour really, given the eminence of my co-accused.

Apparently, we do it because we are mad, we do it because we are on the take, and we do it because we are zealots!

Of course, cashed-up Flannery, for one, has a history of false prophecies. The “active research scientist” only needs to actively check Sydney’s dams.