There’s a rib-tickling clown show going on between the ABC, from Leigh Sales down, and the WA Museum Boola Bardip. Murdoch University, in pink polka-dot pants, is also prancing around the podium. They’re all competing to inflate the credentials of Perth-based climate zealot Mr Bill Hare.

It’s not a trivial contest. Hare founded and runs the lavishly-funded and Greenpeace-linked Climate Analytics lobby, endlessly quoted by the ABC and other left media to buttress their anti-capitalist CO2 narrative.[i] Climate Analytics was born from the dark-green Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) , which has led the way into Germany’s current energy crisis. Hare is a long-standing PIK “visiting scientist”. [ii] PIK has its anti-gas and anti-coal tentacles all over Australia including the ANU and Melbourne University, where Analytics co-founder Malte Meinshausen is an associate professor, perhaps now an orphan since the university’s pro-chancellor Mark Hargreaves axed his home at the Marxist “Sustainable Society Institute” last Monday as unsustainable. (Hargreaves said it was “a difficult decision”. I can’t see why). Let us hope would-be Aborigine Bruce Pascoe’s professorship in “indigenous agriculture” might be next for the chop.

Bill Hare is a spruiker in the green lawfare in WA against Woodside’s plan to build the $16.5 billion Scarborough gas project – let’s kiss the North-West gas jobs and exports goodbye, it’s not as though Australia’s got any economic problems. Hare’s outfit wants an end to Australia’s thermal coal exports by 2030 and gas production ceasing soon after. Back from COP Glasgow, he gloats about COP26 forming “a new coalition, led by Denmark and Costa Rica, known as the Beyond Gas and Oil Alliance. Sooner rather than later, we can expect it to come for Australia’s fast-expanding LNG export industry.”

So let’s see what the clown fight is about:

♦ WA Museum Boola Bardip contends that Hare is a Nobel Laureate, a brother-scientist to the likes of the fairly clever Albert Einstein and Adelaide’s penicillin pioneer Howard Florey. Moreover, he’s a “world-leading” home-grown climate science “superstar” and “Master Mind” who has the key to the survival of the human race (I’m not making this up).

♦ For years the ABC has depicted Hare (about 65) as a “physicist” Ph.D.[iii] His actual pinnacle was a B.Sc.Hons (Murdoch) in 1982 when he was about 26.[iv]

♦ The woke Murdoch University was so thrilled with Hare’s climate spiel that in 2008 it gave him an Honorary Doctor of Science, citing, among other things, “his climate change activism and political acumen have seen him described as ‘the best climate lobbyist in the world’.” Then it told him he could strut his Honorary Ph.D. all over the place, contrary to long-established Murdoch, pan-academic and government protocols.[v] [vi](Don’t let someone with an Honorary Doctorate in Veterinary Science spay your Labradoodle puppy).

I’ll first cover the nonsense emanating from WA Museum Boola Bardip, which had a $400m re-birtha year ago that included its interesting new name (it means “many stories”, we’re told). Then I’ll describe the ABC’s decade-long love affair with Hare despite my forlorn counter-attacks — I win the battle each time but continue to lose the war. Finally, I’ll profile Mr Hare, doing my best to remain my charitable self.

THE Museum Boola Bardip saga began three months ago, when it decided to run a “carefully curated” speaker program of climate-hysteric speakers. The show was billed re-assuringly as ‘A safe place for compelling conversations’.  (It doesn’t sound “safe” to me, with topics like “ Politics of the Precipice”, “Rediscovering Hope” and “End Game/Adaption, Regeneration & Strategies for Survival”). The museum loves to talk the talk:

“Our vision — to be an excellent and vibrant museum service, valued and used by all Western Australians and admired and visited by the world … We will be creative, resourceful, imaginative, innovative, agile and entrepreneurial; we will be commercially astute, embrace change and aspire to excellence in all that we do.”

Pity that the museum’s not astute enough to differentiate B.Sc(Hons) versus the Nobel Prize. Here’s how the museum spruiked its public event in September (emphasis added):

A Call to Climate Action

The Master Mind…

Dr Bill Hare is a career climate scientist and world-leading climate policy expert with over thirty years of experience in the science, impacts and policy responses to climate change. He is a Nobel laureate, adjunct Professor of Energy at Murdoch University and co-founder of the global science-based think tank Climate Analytics, playing an active role in the development of the international climate regime through the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement.

So why isn’t he a household name? [What a perspicacious question!].

The third instalment in the Tipping Point series is a unique opportunity to hear this homegrown superstar in the climate science arena recount his story and share his expert opinions on the urgent action necessary for our survival.

The museum, as “community educator”, inspired others to rush to interview its inspirational Nobelist, presented by “passionate dedicated [and gullible] volunteers”. On September 8, the day before the museum beclowned itself, RTR’s Fiona Bartholomaeus “kicked off with a robust chat between Nobel Laureate and policymaker Dr. Bill Hare” to share his “cutting-edge strategies for responding to the current crisis.”

I had a good listen to his 15-minute spiel and was surprised he did not clarify that he hasn’t won a Nobel Prize and that his PhD is honorary.[vii]

The museum advertised to sell tickets for its September 9 talk by ersatz Nobelist Hare at $18 each. To ascertain whether this contravenes truth-in-advertising law, I queried ACCC headquarters, which referred me to WA Consumer Protection which does the local compliance and enforcing. The WA body responded,

The Australian Consumer Law (WA) (ACL) provides a number of guarantees for goods and services purchased within Australia. The ACL prohibits business from engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct during the course of providing a service to a consumer. The ACL does apply to the Crown and Crown agencies, but they must be acting in trade and commerce. This means that the activity itself must occur within a business context. A singular transaction is unlikely to constitute a business context. A government entity that is undertaking a purely governmental or regulatory activity, such as the performance of a statutory function, would not be considered to be carrying on a business. A number of other considerations are also relevant.

The Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety Consumer Protection Division (Consumer Protection) is responsible for administering the ACL in Western Australia. In order to have this matter properly assessed for consideration under the ACL, a complaint would need to be submitted. More information about submitting a complaint is available on our website:

 The Western Australian Ombudsman can consider complaints concerning public authorities such as State Government agencies. The Ombudsman can be contacted on (08) 9220 7550 or via its website.

WA Museum Boola Bardip didn’t deliberately mislead the public about Mr Hare (although ignorance is no excuse in law) and the incident was a one-off.  So I’ll merely give them a caution and recommend they refund all the $18 tickets they sold.

Anyway, how come the WA Museum conferred the Nobel Prize on Mr Hare? Most likely, Boola Bardip fell for the three-card trick organised by late IPPC chair (2002-15), perjurer and lascivious owner of a pair of infamously roving hands Rajendra Pachauri. In 2007 the IPCC per se got half a Nobel Peace Prize. The porn-novelist Pachauri, in an interval between cruel harassments of his think-tank’s female employees with demands for sex –including at the 37^th IPCC plenary in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013 — told all the thousands of IPCC report compilers that they were each a Nobel Laureate.[viii] The Nobel authorities in Oslo slapped down Pachauri and said without equivocation that the IPCC won the Peace Prize, but none of its individual contributors was allowed to claim Laureate status. That didn’t stop the CSIRO types and 100-200 other Australian IPCC contributors flashing the Nobel Prize certificates that Pachauri handed out. Those scrolls have the same value as Zimbabwean $50 trillion notes.[ix] Top climate scientists continued to take their certificates seriously, such as America’s Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, who in an affidavit accused his detractors of the brand-new crime of “personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient.”[x] The Nobel secretariat in October 2012 told its Nobel-winning myriad claimants to back off:

“The prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner… No individual, no matter what their involvement with the IPCC, can pass themselves off as a Nobel Laureate. Not even Dr Rajendra Pachauri is an individual laureate.”

I have previously urged the IPCC to issue a recall notice for its Nobel certificates, as these bits of paper might continue to befuddle the naive, such as Boola Bardip, the ABC and other woke scribblers. In any case, this is not a Nobel Prize but the Nobel “Peace” Prize, an annual political gesture from Oslo that has gone to the likes of billion-dollar thief/terrorist Yasser Arafat (1994), and to President Obama in 2009 for making pretty speeches.

This brings me now to the ABC and its “Dr” Hare. My campaign diary reads:

November 17, 2006: the ABC introduces Hare as “Greenpeace adviser”.

May 4, 2007: ABC’s (now deceased) Mark Colvin in the same breath says Bill Hare is both a lead author for the IPCC 2007 Report and IPCC synthesis writer, “while on paid leave from Greenpeace International, where he worked as director of climate policy from July 1992.”

So the ABC found nothing remarkable in a Greenpeace activist on Greenpeace salary playing key roles in drafting the supposedly scientifically-neutral IPCC report.[xi]

31 Oct 2007: The ABC again interviews Hare who is wearing his Greenpeace hat. He is introduced as “from Greenpeace International”.

12 March 2008: “Kerry O’Brien discusses global warming with Dr Bill Hare.” (Hare wasn’t conferred even with his honorary doctorate until March 17 but he would have been notified earlier).

March 13, 2008: Another ABC reference to “Dr” Hare, four days before his investiture.

 December 10, 2011 and December 3, 2012: More grovelling ABC interviews with “Dr” Hare.

October 8, 2018: Laura Tingle interviews “Dr” Hareon Leigh Sales’ 7.30.

April Fool’s Day, 2019: Four Corners transcript refers 13 times to Bill Hare as “Dr” Hare.

April 7, 2019: I complain to the ABC and request corrections. I say the ABC would not refer to comedian Mr Yahoo Serious as “Dr Serious” even though he has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Newcastle University, 1996. (Others are TV chat-show hostess and ex-Dolly editor “Dr of Letters Lisa Wilkinson” via Wollongong University and disillusioned Age cartoonist “Dr Michael Leunig”, three-fold endoctored via Latrobe, Griffith and ACU.

April 11, 2019: Four Corners executive producer Sally Neighbour responds,

“I am advised that Bill Hare has an Honorary Doctorate of Science awarded to him in 2008 by Murdoch University for his work on climate change science and policy. Murdoch University itself refers to Bill Hare as ‘Dr’ in some of its publications. 

It is not uncommon practice to refer to people with Honorary Doctorates as ‘Dr’. I understand this is often qualified with the reference (h.c). For the purpose of our program, we did not feel this was necessary as most viewers or readers would not be familiar with the term. I am happy to take your comments onboard should we interview Bill Hare again on Four Corners. I will also convey your comments to Laura Tingle.”

May 7, 2019: Michael Slezak on ABC News Analysis interviews “Dr” Bill Hare.

October 24, 2021: David Speers on Insidersinterviews “Dr” Bill Hare.

Nov 5, 2021: RN Breakfast with Sally Sara: “Dr” Bill Hare again

Nov 11, 2021: ABC 730: A fawning Leigh Sales achieves six references to “Dr” Hare on one 7.30 program.

Nov 14, 2021: I complain again to the ABC about “Dr” Hare:

It is particularly egregious to refer to him in his science capacity as “Dr” Hare. A couple of years ago I complained about your use of “Dr” Hare and Sally Neighbour informed me the ABC would be more careful about it. Please correct all ABC versions where you call him “Dr” Hare — or at least explain that he has only an honorary doctorate for his lobbying activity.

After 18 days, on Dec 2, 2021, Matt Galvin of ABC News Management replies:

I have referred your concerns to ABC Language, a unit that meet (sic) regularly and advise (sic) ABC staff on correct language usage. They have pointed me to the ABC’s publicly-available style guide…

To get to the surprise ending of this piece, click for the original HERE