Politics

Please Enjoy ‘The Weekly’ Destroying Alan Jones’ Attempt To Explain Climate Change Using Rice

"If you do insist on using rice to understand climate change, let's do it properly"

The Weekly

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Last week on Sky News, extreme genius Alan Jones teamed up with Peta Credlin and attempted to explain why Australia shouldn’t bother to act on climate change, using a key scientific tool: a bag of rice. According to Jones, Australia’s emissions are but a single grain of rice in the 1.75 kilo bag of rice he wasted to represent the atmosphere, therefore climate change is a “hoax”.

Normally we wouldn’t bother giving Jones’ views oxygen (represented here as quinoa), but the good folks over at The Weekly have cleverly utilised their own rice to point out the flaws in Jones’ model, and it’s pretty delightful viewing.

“Sky News’ great show Cooking the Planet with Alan & Peta isn’t alone — Australians are constantly being told that our contribution to global emissions is too small for us to do anything to help,” host Charlie Pickering points out. “But if you do insist on using rice to understand climate change, let’s do it properly”.

He goes on to roast “Alan and Peta’s Science Project” as if it’s a Year Six school assignment, pointing out that Australia is just one of many countries that only contribute a tiny chunk (or grain of rice) to global emissions, and those grains of rice add up.

More to the point, Pickering considers the character of Australia’s grain of rice, which some legend has managed to dress in a rice-sized Akubra and an Australian flag cape. “Now, I could sit here and tell you that if everyone adopted Australia’s approach it could lead to a catastrophic three degrees of warming, or that the Prime Minister admitted just last week that our current carbon emissions are still going up, but instead I want to talk about this one grain of rice: Australia” he said.

“Yes we’re just one grain of rice, but we’ve always been just one grain of rice. In World War Two we made up just 2 percent of the Western Allies fighting overseas, but we didn’t decide not to fight because we were too small to make a difference. We took pride in doing our part because the consequences of doing nothing were unthinkable.”

You can watch the full segment below: