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In Brief: The oceans are not acidic, and will not become acidic in the foreseeable future. Many of the fears and alarming scenarios are based on models. Many scary headlines are based on studies of extreme pH values beyond the range of anything realistic.
Incredibly, hundreds of studies show that for pH changes that we are likely to encounter in the next 100 years, there is arguably a net benefit to underwater life if the oceans became a little less alkaline.
Alarming fears about unrealistic ocean pH’s
“Some ocean pH’s studied were so extreme they are only seen on Star Trek”
Studies of how marine life copes with less alkaline conditions include many experiments with water at pH values in a range beyond anything that is likely on planet Earth — they go beyond the bounds of what’s possible. There are estimates that the pH of the ocean has shifted about 0.1 pH unit in the last 200 years, yet some studies consider the effects of water that is shifted by 2 or even 4 entire pH units. Four pH units means 10,000 fold change in the concentration of hydrogen ions). That’s a shift so […]
Just so you know, at some point soon we will get the first site upgrade in three years, and … (drum roll)… nested comments! There will be a few other improvements too, but largely things will look similar. It has been a couple of months of work, behind the scenes, to upgrade my sometimes quixotic CSS code.
But if the site goes down, or you are not able to add comments for a while in the next few days, it is probably maintenance.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Jo
7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Bolt loses and so do all whites, aboriginals, and every citizen of Australia.
News: The ABC
Andrew Bolt has been found guilty of causing “offense”.
Journalist and political commentator Andrew Bolt has been found guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act over two articles he wrote in 2009.
Bolt was being sued in the Federal Court by nine Aboriginal people including former ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark, academic Professor Larissa Behrendt, activist Pat Eatock, photographer Bindi Cole, author Anita Heiss, health worker Leeanne Enoch, native title expert Graham Atkinson, academic Wayne Atkinson, and lawyer Mark McMillan.
I now know that I can’t speak freely on some topics, even if I thought what I said — uncovering unspoken truths or awkward facts — would help that minority group. Aboriginal people face many challenges. How can their lot be helped by shutting down discussion?
If drawing attention to problems, to try and find a solution “offends” some Aboriginal people, by law, now it must not be spoken. Aboriginal people who struggle are thus more likely to continue to suffer if the answer to their pain involves speaking some truth that doesn’t make 100% of them happy. What a curse to bestow upon any […]
Submission on the clean energy bill
On behalf of all rational people in Australia, I object to the “Clean Energy Bill” because it is rank national insanity.
Namely: It’s too large compared to the rest of the world; it’s guaranteed by laws of science to make us poorer; it’s based on a religious dissertation put out by an unaudited foreign committee — and won’t make a jot of difference to the environment (except to encourage bird-blending whale-killing wind-farms and distract us from real environmental problems).
It’s too big
Australians will pay $391 each in the first year — compared $1.50 each for citizens of the EU, and that’s the cumulative total spread over the last five years. Really. And despite that pathetically small per capita charge, 900 scientific peer reviewed papers and 31,500 scientists agree that even the people of the EU have paid too much.
It’s guaranteed to make us poorer
Please explain to us again how we will get richer by using energy sources that are two to ten times more expensive? Australia gets 94% […]
Every Australian ought to read the Ergas article in The Australian. For non-Australians, it’s a case-study of just how thin and fragile all our democracies are. The government was elected NOT to do this. The Treasury are paid to provide their modeling and assumptions to the Australian people but they won’t. The Labor Party is planning to put in the crippling legislation that can’t be unwound, even if 99% of Australians wanted it to be.
No, this is not a master plan to destroy the country, it’s just filthy ambition — to rule at all costs, the nation be damned. The ALP doesn’t particularly want to sacrifice itself over the Carbon Tax, but in clawing for every tiny election advantage (No, you can’t campaign to remove the toxic tax!) they are resorting to breaking unspoken principles of western democracies and revealing something they normally hide in their darkest recesses: their naked disdain for the citizens. It’s the end result of crumbling standards of ethics in parts of the public service, and a lack of intellectual debate within the Labor Party.
A mortally wounded, weak government, is a dangerous creature.
Where would we be without The Australian?
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Lies, deception and […]
I am annoyed with Ian for coming up with a brilliant book title, and I can’t steal it. All the same, I am looking forward to reading it. You can order the book now for its release in November.
Actually, the serious point here is that I am getting reports from parents of students at environmental “science” courses at university level and at high schools, who are not allowed to question their masters without a payback. This is the perfect thread for those discussions of how our education system is being influenced by activists. — Jo
how to get expelled from school $29.95
A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters
Ian Plimer Foreword by Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic
RELEASED DATE: November 2011
PRE-ORDER TODAY AND HAVE YOUR COPY PERSONALLY SIGNED BY IAN PLIMER
Download an order form
Are pupils, parents and the public being fed political propaganda on climate change? Now is your chance to find out. Professor Plimer gives 101 simple questions with answers for you to ask teachers, activists, journalists and politicians. The climate industry adjusts the temperature record and withholds raw data, computer codes and […]
The Labor Party claim they think science is important:
”We can’t let this debate be waylaid by people who don’t accept the science,” Ms Gillard said in May.
Yet, when Dr Dennis Jensen wanted to table peer reviewed papers on the Parliamentary record this week, Kate Ellis refused to allow it. Jensen is the only PhD scientist in the Australian Parliament and the papers are directly relevant to the policy under discussion.
The ALP will accept an unaudited foreign committee report, whole, without question, but not scientific evidence from an elected Australian representative. Who are the climate science deniers? Is it the same team that calls people mindless denigrating names?
Ms Gillard said in Parliament in March that Mr Abbott should admit he was ”a climate change denier”
The Labor Party denies the science
From Dennis Jensen’s press release about the censorship:
“I approached Minister Ellis, about tabling some of the scientific evidence I was about to use in my speech”, Dr Jensen said. “The Minister refused without reason my simple request for honest and evidence based parliamentary debate.”
“It seems the Labor Party is unwilling to […]
Dr David Evans lays out four crucial pieces of evidence, and calls for a debate with Prof Andrew Pitman. But the evidence is so unarguably strong for skeptics, we know that the name-calling-team-who-want-our-money will do anything to avoid a public debate. If the evidence is “overwhelming” why are they so unwilling to explain it? — Jo
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Submission to the Inquiry into Carbon Tax Pricing Mechanisms
Dr David Evans
20 September 2011
Dr David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, and part-time to the Department of Climate Change from 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University.
Global warming has become a scam. Let me explain how it works.
It has superficial plausibility. Yes, global warming is occurring. Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and levels are rising. And yes, every molecule of carbon dioxide we emit causes some global warming.
Many non-scientists think that proves the case, but it doesn’t. In particular, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that carbon dioxide is merely […]
Emails are flying, submissions are flooding in. It’s a nation in uproar. The implications of what Henry Ergas wrote are setting off a wave of fear and anger. People are using words like “sickening”, “shocking” and describing Gillard’s actions as “vindictive” and a “treacherous spoiler”, and using the word treason. There’s a plea: “God help us!”
Here’s a few samples of what has been CC’d to me.
UPDATE: I should have added that I put the first email up to show just how deep the sense of betrayal runs. I don’t think Gillards actions represent a grand well thought out plot. This is scrabbling desperation to notch up a “success” (the country be damned). Even she advised Rudd to give up the ETS. A weak government is the most dangerous kind.
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Dear John,
Please drop everything and listen to this:
Professor Henry Ergas reveals the hidden deadly dangers in the Carbon Tax legislation to Alan Jones.
The vindictive implications for Australia are worse than horrendous.
Listen here and be shocked to the core.
The shameful and treacherous group (loosely described as the […]
by Color CS
You know, the one comforting thing about the insanity going on in the UK is that Australia doesn’t seem quite so basket-case, suicidally silly. Actually that’s not really true, both countries are barking mad, but thanks to David Cameron its a little less lonely at the loony farm. Democractic dementia has company.
Exhibit A:
In 2008 Ministers were aiming to generate 20 per cent of the country’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. Professor MacKay explained back then, that to reach that, they would have to put wind farms over the entirety of Wales. How did the governing class respond? By 2011, the UK Coalition took that crazy renewable target and doubled it.
Exhibit B:
— Two thirds of Britain’s turbines are fully or partly owned by foreign businesses.
— Total subsidies paid to these non-UK owned farms is £523 million.
— The subsidies paid to local folk are handy for Dukes and whatnot, and those who have large estates (especially ones they don’t live on) who can pick up the £20,000 a year in subsidies — milked from people who don’t have large estates and are […]
Try the absurd Methane Madness if you haven’t already! Discuss how the big Gore event came and went with barely a trace, and marks the fall of the man who set alight much of the Greenhouse Extravaganza. Or there’s the coolest UK summer in 20 years… wiping out masses of blue butterflies. (Where is the Green angst: “Stop the cooling trend — Save the Butterfly — Donate a sunspot?”).
More importantly, the US CO2 regulation on hold indefinitely.
Or discuss something else 🙂
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
If the current egregious insanity makes you angry, join us on Sunday at Langley Park. If you have No Confidence in the current Australian Government. Let them know! It doesn’t have to be this way.
ELECTION NOW! RALLY THIS SUNDAY, 18th SEPT 2 PM
LANGLEY PARK on the PERTH FORESHORE (Terrace Rd near Hill St)
MC’d by 6PR’s HOWARD SATTLER
David Evans and I will be there. Hope you can come too and bring all your friends.. – Jo
Read more for the details….
5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Too frightening for words. Henry Ergas has a bone-chilling warning.
It takes time to get a feel for how spectacularly insidious the Australian carbon tax could be.
Firstly there’s the anti-democratic nature of it: apparently Gillard is doing things that are considered utterly beyond the pale in other nations. Ergas suggests that by granting “property rights” she is threatening to make the cost of removing her legislation all but insurmountable. (For all the world, it appears she’s determined to stop the opposition offering the people the choice to remove the carbon tax. Could it be, that for the sake of an advantage in the next election campaign she’s tossing the country down the nearest black hole?)
Secondly, the Australian Carbon Tax is a freakishly large sacrificial offering: Australians will be hit for $391 for every man, woman and child, and that’s just the first year (according to the government estimates). Compare this to the EU. There in the land-of-exploding-economies, each good citizen has had to fork out the vast grand sum of (wait for it) … one dollar fifty cents each (yes, $1.50). And, it gets worse, (how do you satirize this?) — that’s the cumulative total since the EU […]
On The Conversation Matthew Bailes, Pro Vice Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology, is feeling sympathetic towards those poor climate scientists who have to deal with daily criticism, but he doesn’t seem to know much about how climate science works. I’d like to help him out, but don’t think the Conversation team would let me add my comments into his article, so I’ve done that here, responding to Bailes:
“Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections. Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science.”
Verified?”#$%^!! Sorry, what’s that? No one in the official world of climate science has mentioned “verification” since the mid 1990’s. Shhh. In climate science they verify the observations first: when they fit the models, then they know the equipment worked. 😉
“Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings.”
No qualifications? Psst, Ivar has a Nobel Prize (and … in Physics). I know Nobels […]
Ominously, the embryonic markers of solar cycle 25 are three years late and are nowhere to be seen. Scientists are asking if this could be the start of another Maunder-type Minimum. (The bummer with that, being that during those 70 quiet years the world slipped into the Little Ice Age; animals froze in barns, people starved, disease raged… see The brutal cold of the Maunder Minimum and the Great Irish Frost for some light entertainment.)
If it were going to happen, we ought to start preparing now, right? You know, take precautions, “buy insurance”, figure out if CO2 actually does any useful warming (and if so, pump more of it into our atmosphere). You know it makes sense…
Seriously, if the cold is coming, we really ought to pay attention. — Jo
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From the press release today (June 14):
Major Drop in Solar Activity Predicted
“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results. “But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.”
Normally cycles […]
No one from the big scare campaign is even pretending that this is about the science anymore. It’s just tribal name-calling, voo-doo dolls and poo jokes from preschool.
Al Gore hopes he has reality on his side. But the reality is the relentless slide of the polls. It’s the crashed Chicago Climate Exchange, the kaput green jobs. It’s the long list of countries who are are shaking themselves free of the eco-shackles. The apostles of a bygone cult are reduced to saying that warming causes cooling, death, disease and even prostitution in Ghana. The babbling last players standing are talking about saving the world from aliens. Sadly, those are not the nutters, no, they’re the ones from NASA.
The NASA crew worry that the aliens who have been blind to the last 60 years of I love Lucy beamed out to space, have instead been transfixed by a trace gas composition change from 0.028% to 0.039% on the third rock from the sun in a distant galaxy. I’m scared now, not of the aliens, but of our collapsing collective IQ. This is modern public debate (and from the team that got the man on the moon.)
7 […]
There is a lot to discuss at the moment. I’ll leave it in the hands of the able commentators 🙂
4.3 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Another big La Nina could mean another cold winter for the Northern USA, and another wet flooding summer with potentially nasty cyclones for Eastern Australia (and the rest of the Eastern Pacific nations). La Ninas even affect the Indian Monsoon Season. If only we could predict them accurately.
Frank Lansner on HideTheDecline has noticed that one set of models (NCEP/CFS) is predicting a large La Nina brewing, while most of the others are still forecasting “neutral” conditions. The NCEP/CFS models were more accurate last year. If they are right now, we could be in for a large La Nina. On the other hand, Australia’s Bureau of Met is predicting only that “La Nina remains possible in 2011”.
Guest Post: Frank Lansner
Another Large La Nina Imminent?
For months the NCEP/CFS has been predicting a stronger second La Nina dip. Prior to the last La Nina, the NCEP/CFS was much better at predicting the La Nina — and personally I feel confident with the NCEP/CFS Prediction. It does seem to suggest that a La Nina will be upon us in a very short while. If so, global cooling is likely to shift into a faster gear.
Cooler water is appearing […]
The truth about “death threats”
The death threats scare that was widely publicized in June 2011 turned out to be opportunistic hyperbole based on a five year old letter, one unverified remark at an event a year ago, and recycled old boorish emails. Yet the shameless propaganda machine continues to repeat the baseless claim without admitting that it was a transparent attempt to score sympathy points.
Why can they get away with it? Because media outlets like The Canberra Times won’t apologize for printing such vacuous unsubstantiated claims, and they won’t correct the record. And Catalyst (which soaked in the one-sided hyperbole with Science Under Seige last night) won’t do enough “investigation” to get the story straight.
The facts on the “death-threats”:
The only “death-threat letter” the ANU could name in June 2011 was five years old. (It was posted in 2006 or 2007.) Even that was not serious enough to officially report to the Australian Federal Police. (Issuing a death threat is a criminal act punishable with a 10 year sentence in the ACT.) The other threat the ANU could “confirm” was a year old off-hand remark by an unknown person at a university function. Other reports of […]
Brilliant. The country-and-western economic thesis. It’ll catch on. So much for those Keynsian doctorates.
Ray Stevens, composer, comedian, singer. 🙂
We’re printing money
Obama Money
Let’s do what the government does, it works for them, it might work for us, so I forgot my ethics and morals and swallowed my pride We took out every credit card we could get and took out the maximum debt
5.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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