A Western Australian comedian, Matt Hayden, has finally confessed that he had been pretending to be, between stand-up gigs, a deranged believer in the debunked, pseudo-scientific conjecture of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Under his assumed identity of “Prof. Clive Hamilton”, Mr. Hayden finessed a professorship of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics; he also persuaded the previous federal government to appoint him to the board of the Climate Change Authority; he is the founder and former Executive Director of the The Australia Institute; and he was even appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for “service to public debate and policy development, particularly in the fields of climate change, sustainability and societal trends”.
Mr. Hayden admitted that, for the last fifteen years, he had made increasing sillier statements in support of neurotic, totalitarian responses to the non-problem of global warming in the hope that the escalating idiocy of his statements—rising in alarmist hysteria as the supposedly dangerous rise of a posited “average global temperature” actually slowed to a stop—would make the gullible believers of that foolish, conjecture rethink their adherence to an irrational, misanthropic, neo-Luddite, neo-Malthusian, catastropharian cult.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “even my most ridiculous, sarcastic and, frankly, immoral utterances have been reported as sensible comments by our sloppy, fawning, unthinking journalists. No matter how over the top I spewed idiocy—such as, for example, when I suggested that all who doubt the most alarmist claims of global-warming doom should have ‘denier’ tattooed on their foreheads, or that scientists who correctly explain that science has never depended on a consensus should be executed, or that anyone who opposes my corrupt colleagues must be a paid stooge of a wicked cabal of deliberately destructive oil companies—the unprofessional, bootlicking morons in the mainstream media have just lapped up my extremist, hypocritical crap and demanded more. I’ve had enough of feigning such stupidity. It’s been a lark (and a very profitable one) but, sadly, too few people in the media can spot satirical parody.”
Mr. Hayden apologised both to the people deceived by his ruse and to the taxpayers whom the arrogant “Prof. Hamilton” has been defrauding as well as calumniating for so long.
Mr. Hayden apologised both to the people deceived by his ruse and to the taxpayers whom the arrogant “Prof. Hamilton” has been defrauding as well as calumniating for so long.
