I'M OFFENDED BY THE VIEWS OF PETER WILLIAMS

Peter Williams : Telling porkies about climate change.

Some views are far more damaging than the religious views of Israel Folau. Let's talk about the climate change denialism of Magic Talk host Peter Williams.

ISRAEL FOLAU'S CHIEF OFFENCE was not his dreary and predictable Christian fundamentalist views but rather that he chose to air those views in public after previously being warned by Rugby Australia not to do it again. So Folau chose to do it again and, predictably, he has had his rather lucrative financial contract terminated by Rugby Australia. This seems to have come as somewhat of surprise to Folau who is intent on taking his former employer to court. And the whole affair has been entangled with issues surrounding 'freedom of speech'.

Which is a pile of steaming cow dung. No one is stopping Folau expressing his views. Its simply that Rugby Australia don't want to be associated with them - which is also their right.

But now his wife, Maria, has been dragged into the steaming cow dung. Her sin is that she supported her husband by helping him to set up a GoFundMe page and which was subsequently pulled down by GoFundMe. She has also retweeted her husband's complaint that he is being discriminated against for expressing his religious views.

However ANZ, which sponsors the Silver Ferns, has felt compelled to comment that 'we do not support the views of Silver Fern Maria Folau and have made our views known to her employer Netball NZ.'

While Maria might well support her hubby's views in private, no one can be sure what her views are because she hasn't actually expressed any of them in the public domain. So Netball New Zealand is correct when it says that she has not breached any of its protocols. Maria is a netball player. I gather she’s a very good netball player. Can’t we just leave it at that?

Apparently not.

Its been amazing - and disheartening - that this whole affair has dominated the media for several days. While the increasingly clickbait media might be attracted to the story because it involves two high profile sporting personalities, its hardly of major political and social concern that Israel Folau thinks that 'drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists,idolaters ' are all going to Hell. 

There's lot more useful things to get offended about than Folau's barking mad fundamentalist views. Me, I've been offended recently by former TVNZ newsreader Peter Williams using his morning show on Magic Talk as a platform to deny the reality of climate change. Yesterday and today he has been busy denying that sea levels are rising and that our coastlines are threatened.

He has also scoffed at the findings of the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (IPCC). This exhaustive report has warned that we have no more than twelve years to decisively combat climate change  before we reach the point of no return. Some argue that the IPCC report is too optimistic.

Rather than using his advantageous position in the mainstream media to warn of the looming existential danger, Williams has effectively charged the IPCC of producing a work of fiction. Writing on the Magic Talk website Williams blusters than the IPCC report is simply a way to impose new taxes. He writes:

'This of course is all just doomsday stuff we know that it is designed to extract more taxes from us. The reality is no IPCC model have yet been validated, while temperatures have actually dropped by 0.3 degrees on average since 2016 and are now the same temperatures that they were in 2002.'

But Williams is lying. He's either lying accidentally because he's ignorant of the facts or he's lying by design, filtering the facts to suit his own views. Either way, he's still telling porkies.

Maria Folau

Yes, there has  been a slight drop in temperatures but what Williams doesn't say that is that the recent drop is due to the impact of El Nino. The Washington Post observed last year:

"The current cooling episode is mostly the result of a reversal of waters in the Tropical Pacific, which can modulate global temperature. Since the Pacific Ocean is our largest global body of water, what it does makes a big difference on global climate. A similar reversal followed the super El Niño in the late ’90s — 1998 was the hottest year on record at the time in part because of the warm El Niño water pushing global temperatures over the brink. Earth went from having one of the strongest El Niño events on record (very warm waters in the central Tropical Pacific) to a few years of cooler waters, thanks to a La Niña period."

While natural processes like El Nino will have an impact, the overall trend in global temperatures  is still upwards. And it is the result of an economic system in which 100 companies are responsible for some 71 percent of all carbon emissions. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have been identified as among the chief offenders since 1988.

While we might rightly deride Williams for his denial of climate change his denialism is also charged with a dangerous political cynicism which has seen him not only deny the reality of climate change but cast aspersions on folk trying to avert a life-threatening ecological disaster. Listen to Williams and you will hear him muttering about 'lefties' and 'Greenies' and 'ideological campaigns'.

l am offended that people like Peter Williams can enjoy a media platform to sow scepticism and doubts about a real threat to our very survival as a species. It is somewhat ironic that while Mediaworks can spend an inordinate amount of time on a sideshow like Israel Folau, it has within its ranks some rather more dangerous people pumping out lies and disinformation - climate change deniers like Peter Williams and Sean Plunket, whose afternoon show follows that of Williams.