The "Good Lie"...

...is a lie that may be necessary or excusable to advance a greater cause. Thus, Phil Jones of Climategate infamy felt obligated to use a "good lie" to "hide the decline". History abounds with thousands of other examples. A storm of controversy is brewing on Twitter and elsewhere about the professional conduct of Johann Hari, the Left-wing Independent columnist and winner of the Orwell Prize for journalism. (A paradox, as Orwell saw the truth when most of his literary colleagues colluded with lies. See masthead above.) Hari has been using printed excerpts as verbatim oral quotes - a "cut and paste" journalism that has aroused his critics ...Now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”. The idea of a “good lie” is a dramatically Orwellian device, designed to deceive and to patronise. A lie is a lie, whether your intention is to convince people that Saddam is evil and must be bombed or that Gideon Levy is a brainy and decent bloke. Lying to communicate a “vital message”, a liberal and profound “truth”, is no better than lying in order to justify a war or a law’n'order crackdown or whatever. That more journalists cannot see this, that many of them have instead allowed their personal friendship with Hari to cloud what they think of this affair, is depressing. Why would anyone take seriously the reporting or commentary of people who believe it is acceptable to massage and refashion the facts in the name of telling “The Truth”?...why indeed ? And we surely see this every day with unquestioning media acceptance of the green political movement and its bedrock foundation of green lies. Are greenpeace and green politicians really "pro-environment" ? Or shouldn't they more accurately be termed anti-capitalist ? How grotesque it appears then, that the Orwell prize for journalism ( "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” ) may have been so mis-directed.

A question of morality...

...the green left like to portray themselves as caring and compassionate. They like to think that they have a "social conscience". Alleviating the suffering of the poor and disadvantaged is presumably the focus of social justice, so, as Bjorn Lomborg observes...

...we should focus on the smartest solutions to the problems that the world faces, whether we're dealing with climate change, communicable diseases, malnutrition, agricultural subsidies, or anything else...

John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize adds...

...what is the economic and human price, (of dealing with climate change) and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?
My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit "global warming."
Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me...

...and to award-winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who recently said...“Congress has been getting bad intelligence...Congress has been badly misinformed about the so-called science that supports the claim that increasing CO2 levels will bring about catastrophic climate change,” Happer called the movement to promote man-made global warming fears a “climate change cult” and noted that “zealots” promoting climate fears “are actually extremely ignorant...the idea that Congress can stop climate change would be just hilarious if the actions they propose were not so damaging to the American people and even more [damaging] to the poorer people of the world...”more here...

...and it seems perfectly clear to a growing army of global warming sceptics, that catastrophic CO2 induced climate change is a political fantasy and the great social justice issue of our age.

Correction and Clarification...This from The NZ Herald this morning...

"A pulled quote in Thursday's paper, attributed to Sir David King, former UK chief scientist, that 'GM...has been adopted across the whole of Africa, with devastating consequences,' was incorrect. Sir David's actual remark was that it was the Western world's move towards organic farming and away from GM that was having such a disastrous effect.

Two points...Sir David King has pointed again to the truth of Denis Dutton's 2005 claim that the despicable green political movement worldwide has the blood of innocents on its hands, and;
WTF is happening in our newspapers when such blatant misrepresentation and lying simply is noted as a "correction and clarification"? The general public quite rightly hold journalists in low esteem, ranking them with used car salesmen and politicians, turning away from the main stream media simply because of lies like this. I wonder if anybody at the source of the lie (where was the quote "pulled" from?) likely to lose their job ?
I doubt it...f***ing bastards liars, ratbags...