The celebrity physicist Brian Cox came prepared to the ABC’s Q&A on Monday night with graphs, ready to counter claims by his co-panellist, the climate denier and Australian senator-elect Malcolm Roberts.
Roberts, one of four senators elected from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, took the first opportunity to espouse long-refuted climate-denialist claims, including that warming stopped more than 20 years ago, starting the so-called “hiatus” or “pause”.
But Cox produced a graph of global surface temperatures of the past century and immediately debunked the myth, pointing out it is a misunderstanding caused by looking at a small sample, starting from an unusually warm year two decades ago.
Cox didn’t stop there. “Also, secondly, I’ve brought another graph. It is correlated with that, which is the graph that shows the CO2 emissions parts per million in.”
Viewers on Twitter joined in. When Roberts argued that sea level rises had been “entirely natural and normal”, a number of people posted graphs showing the steep rises.
Roberts repeatedly said he wanted to see “the empirical data”. But when the data appeared to refute what he said, he argued that scientists had conspired to manipulate it.
“The data has been corrupted,” he said at one point, arguing that Nasa and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology had manipulated data to make warming look unusual. That led to questioning about whether he was sceptical that Nasa landed people on the moon, which Roberts denied.
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