The intellectual quality of Barnaby on climate change

I enjoyed Jane Cadzow's retrospective on the years she has spent writing profiles of well know personalities for the Fairfax Weekend Magazine.   (Her paragraphs about Warwick Capper are especially amusing.)

But her description of what it was like talking to Barnaby Joyce in 2011 about climate change show the dire lack of intellectual rigour we see in so much of this Abbott government:

Joyce, now the federal agriculture minister, talked non-stop, though not always in complete sentences. As we sped along a south-east Queensland highway one morning, he laid out his case against evidence that global warming was caused by carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity. "I'm going to just pour bullshit on that," he told me, "and just say, well, I just, you know, I, and okay now I'll go beyond that ..."

I waited until he paused for breath, then suggested that even if there weren't conclusive proof of man-made climate change, it might be sensible to reduce our emissions. Why not err on the side of caution?

"Erring on the side of caution means we should drop a bomb on Tehran," he replied.

"Does it?" I asked doubtfully. "Well, you know," he said, "because there's a possibility that they're developing a nuclear weapon."

Now, I think everyone finds Barnaby likeable at a personal level (very down to earth and self deprecating much of the time) and, surprisingly, he has been actively telling some other Right wingers around the place to stop with the "Australia can be the food bowl of Asia" overblown rhetoric.  But seriously, it's clear he takes his climate science from Professor Andrew Bolt, as so many in this government do.