Thirty five years ago, on this day, November 29, 1988, Australian members of parliament have a grip and grin photo opportunity to show how much They Care about the greenhouse issue. See this from the Canberra Times.
Parliamentarians of all political persuasions were encouraged to test the Wets and the Dries yesterday. But in this case the Wets and Dries were more in the realm of science than politics.
The Wets and Dries Testing Unit forms part of a display on climatic change held at Parliament House by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and opened yesterday by the Minister for Science, Barry Jones.
The display covers climate change and greenhouse-effect research being carried out by the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian National University as well as the Commission for the Future.
Mr Jones encouraged his colleagues to take a hands-on approach to the equipment the better to understand Australia’s field work.
He said that if Australia were to deal effectively with potential problems resulting from the greenhouse effect it would have to work carefully with all international bodies. Australia should also work closely with neighbouring regions such as the Pacific Islands, which faced annihilation if nothing were done.”
Wednesday 30 November 1988 Canberra Times page 22
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 351.7ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that a few days after Bob Hawke had opened the Science Centre, here was his science Minister Barry Jones trying to get politicians from both Labor and Liberals and Nationals to have “hands-on experience” of climate change at an event in Canberra. In 1988 everyone was running around being concerned about climate (we called it ‘the Greenhouse Effect’ back then), or saying they were.
What I think we can learn from this
This sort of photo op jamboree serves multiple purposes. You can tell when you organise these things who turns up and who doesn’t, who sends her apologies, who doesn’t bother how engaged they are. Those turning up will want to get their photo in the newspaper, so that they can say to concerned constituents or “Yes, I recently attended X.”
Journalists get cheap/reliable copy. Everyone’s a winner!
What happened next
The follow-on to the Greenhouse Project didn’t get funded. And so a separate entity Greenhouse Action Australia had to be founded. Jones lost his ministerial seat in factional infighting in 1990. And these sorts of jamborees became less doable after 1990, because it’s old news and because Liberals decided that they didn’t really want to try to capture green votes having failed to do so in 1990. Back to the betrayal, myth, Dolchstoss etc.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.