If he wins, Abbot vows to kill the Carbon Tax from Day One: admire the details

From the Liberal Party site June 29th 2012 the details we hope to see unfold. The thought makes the arrival of The-Tax-On-Everything this Sunday easier to bear… savour the anticipation, and hope we don’t have to wait too long.

Abbott vows he will dissolve the Parliament if the voters choose “No Carbon Tax” (again) and the Labor party denies them their choice. Could they? Would they? Is it possible the Labor Party might knock back the legislation to remove That Tax?

The Coalitions Plan to Abolish the Carbon Tax

As soon as an election is called, the Coalition will take immediate and concrete steps to repeal the Carbon Tax.

Repealing the Carbon Tax will ease cost of living pressures on families, help small business and restore confidence to the economy.

On the day the election is called, I will write to the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to make it clear that, if elected, the first priority of a Coalition Government will be the repeal of the Carbon Tax.

Within the spirit of the Caretaker conventions, I will also formally request the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to desist […]

My reply to Dr Paul Bain — on rational deniers and gullible believers

UPDATE: Dr Paul Bain has replied to say that pressing work commitments mean he cannot respond to this until next week. We look forward to that, and I will make sure it is available for readers here (should Dr Bain permit). – Jo

———————————————————————————-

Dear Dr Paul Bain,

Thank you for replying (and so promptly). I do sincerely appreciate it. Apologies for my tardiness.

I do still think I can help you with your research. Indeed, in more ways than you realize.

You describe in your Bain et al letter in Nature, that the number of deniers is growing despite “enormous effort”. There is a policy problem. I absolutely agree. No one is having any success getting deniers to believe in anthropogenic climate change. Could it be that they don’t understand deniers at all?

Let’s go through the points in your email reply to me, then the bigger implications.

First and foremost – obviously you did not provide evidence to back up your assumption that the “existence” of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is real. That doesn’t mean it does not exist, but I’ll get back to this. It is the key and only real point.

Secondly, you may regret the […]

Carbon Tax protest CATA – July 1 — Sydney and Melbourne

CATA have organised a protest

ELECTION NOW!; WE’VE HAD ENOUGH RALLY 10 out of 10 based on 24 ratings […]

Don’t miss Donna Laframboise in Australia – Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth

Donna Laframboise — author of the ground-breaking book “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert” and writer of the NoFrakkingConsensus Blog — is finally coming to Australia. I’ve booked. Have you?

Donna has been a key player, researching the way the IPCC works with an experienced eye of a real journalist (how rare). Her book scored media attention around the world as it documented how the so-called experts at the IPCC had often not even finished their PhD’s.

“In 1994, Kovats was one of only 21 people in the entire world selected to work on the first IPCC chapter that examined how climate change might affect human health. She was 25 years old. Her first academic paper wouldn’t be published for another three years. It would be six years before she’d even begin her doctoral studies and 16 years before she’d graduate.”

She described how WWF affiliates are lead authors and involved in two thirds of the IPCC’s 44 Chapters. She organized the citizens audit of the 18,000 odd references in the last IPCC report. The 40 volunteers checked every reference to see which were peer reviewed, and found that a staggering […]

Get a Cartoon Carbon Tax Poster to protest! It’s free :-)

The Galileo Movement are offering to send out 1 – 5 cartoon posters to you to coincide with that Tax-on-Everything that starts this Sunday. To order, email Galileomovement AT gmail.com. Let’s help the people of Australia understand just why we will be paying billions.

The Galileo Movement are looking for 100 people to donate $5 each to cover the costs of printing and posting. I like this idea. I’ve ordered and donated. Do join in.

The Galileo Movement suggest posting this on shops and business in their local area and displaying it on windows or notice boards — anywhere it will be seen.

I like it… 😀

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

A special big thank you to artist Steve Hunter who has allowed The Galileo Movement to use his illustration. Click here to visit Steve’s website. (He’s good!) [Try here if that first link stops working, his site is moving.]

You can download copies and print them yourself:

9.2 out of 10 based on 45 ratings […]

Uses for “Carbon-Tax” compensation that are not what Ms Gillard had in mind

I’m humbled and delighted. People are finding all kinds of creative ways to use that carbon tax compensation. (Thank you!) Gillards naked vote buying bribe is a step too low for conscientious hard working Australians. Here Geoffrey Houston wrote to let the Prime Minister know (and CC’d me):

Dear Ms Gillard,

This note is to thank you for my Clean Energy Advance of $350, which arrived in my bank account yesterday. As a self funded retiree, extremely concerned for Australia’s future, it will certainly come in handy in the fight against your government’s destructive policies.

I have disbursed it as follows:

· $100 donation to the IPA, an organization working to defend free speech against the efforts of the Greens helped by your government and to reveal the futility and underlying deceipt of your carbon (dioxide) tax.

· $100 donation to the Liberal Party to support the fight led by Tony Abbott to win the next election and remove the carbon (dioxide) tax.

· $100 donation to Joanne Nova whose web site is a resource for all who wish to understand the science which refutes the alarmist claims […]

Disaster! Denialism makes it to Brazil. (Skepticism spreads :-) )

Desmogblog mark yet another day in the Diary of How the Skeptics Won. They thought they had Brazil sewn up, but now realize with dismay that skeptics are getting heard (funny how the truth spreads). Brazil with the 6th biggest economy in the world and 200 million people is “influential”.

Chris Mooney, of DeSmog, shows us his prowess in predictions. Did he see this wave of skepticism coming? Shock me, No!

Last year, I wrote about how journalists in developing nations were doing a better job of covering climate change, largely because denial hadn’t really taken root in many of these countries. In particular, I singled out Brazil for praise: According to a study by James Painter of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and his colleagues, Brazil’s major papers contained the least climate skepticism in all of the 6 major nations surveyed (U.S., UK, China, France, India, Brazil).

So it is with much dismay that I report to you that, in conjunction with the Rio+20 conference, climate denial is making a strong showing in Brazil.

Memo to Chris: See what happens when you rely on the mainstream media? (They are […]

Has North Victoria cooled, and is that the ghost of a solar cycle signal we see?

UPDATED AGAIN #4 — Now with Vukcevics Hale cycle graph of Echuca. and #3 David Archibalds suggestion of the Hale Cycle at work. #2 with Willis Eschenbach’s graph and my thoughts, (see below)

Ian Bryce sent me a striking graph (or two). Looking at the original raw data from Echuca Victoria shows a dramatic cooling trend of nearly half a degree since 1900, and rather than being a siting anomaly, it’s repeated in two towns about 100km away.

Curiously he also finds peaks in the maximums at Echuca that look for all the world like they match the solar cycle. Is it a fluke, or could it be real? If it’s real, what conditions make the solar sun-spot cycle so apparent in Echuca — where its maximum temperatures seemingly peak with each second solar cycle. Can anyone find this signal in other places? — Jo

 

The area is inland Northern Victoria

Has there been Global Warming or Global Cooling in Echuca

Guest post: Ian Bryce

I have spent about 37 years working with processing tomatoes in the Goulburn Valley in Australia, and the last 25 years or so, with research into growing and processing canning tomatoes. Since 1984, […]

Rio secrets? They were hiding their failure – (I’m hopeful) Marc Morano cheers on behalf of the poor.

News coming in suggests Rio was a junket to nowhere. I’m still waiting for Monckton to go through the fine print. Is there a sting?

Still it’s not hard to feel happy. 🙂

The Telegraph says: “Washout”

It was so bad, even the cheer squad were shocked:

The organisers behind the 1992 Earth Summit, which this week’s meeting commemorated, were shocked and took the extraordinary step of denouncing the agreement in front of key UN officials at a private dinner of the conference’s great and good. Maurice Strong, who ran the previous summit, called it a “weak” collection of “pious generalities”, while former Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland – whose report gave rise to the 1992 meeting – said governments had “forgotten about the environment”. And Nick Clegg, who led the British delegation, revealed that the Government felt the result fell so far below expectations that it had considered “pulling the plug” on the whole thing.

It was so bad, the crowd even hints at the End of the UN. (Crack that champers!).

…as one top international official privately put it to me: “The UN could not survive many more meetings like this.” […]

Rio: The Political freeloaders hide — but is it their failure or their plans they don’t want you to see?

I wrote yesterday about the unprecedented way the UN was locking out anyone at Rio that was not part of an official government delegation. More than ever before, the UN is not even pretending to to serve the people of the world. Even the facade is gone. The rules have changed since Monckton, Watts Up and the internet spoiled the party at Durban.

All the heroic NGO’s have been blocked from the negotiations (as well as those evil free market libertarians). They are only there for the theatrics. The real action goes on behind closed doors, in what Monckton calls a “concrete bunker”.

 

Lord Monckton Reports From Rio, via SPPI

The global coming together is not united. It’s separate conferences for the VIP’s and the riff-raff now. There’s a tent city darkly called “The People’s Congress” — which used to be near the main plenary sessions hall, but has been moved miles away. (Who needs “The People?”).

“Then the non-government organizations have been “corralled in the filthy, soulless, crumbling Rio Centro conference center, where hundreds of armed, sharp-suited UN goons kept them determinedly away.”

“Thirdly, to symbolize the total separation of the governing class from […]

Chiefio (E.M.Smith) responds to Bain et al

In the comments here: E.M.Smith (Chiefio) responded to Paul Bain and then posted it on his own site. It’s very popular (thank you Michael!)

Response to Paul Bain

Dear Paul Bain:

First off, thank you for responding.

FWIW, I am a hard core skeptic. I’m the “target” of your analysis. As such, what folks like me think ought to be particularly important to you. So a bit of history on me and climate change.

I first came to the AGW issue thinking “Gee, this looks important, I ought to learn more about it.” At the Skeptic sites (like WUWT) I had generally kind acceptance and explanation of where I had parts missing from my understanding of the “issues” about AGW and where it was “gone wrong”. At “Believer” sites (an curiously appropriate term as it has all the hallmarks of a religious belief) I would ask simple and innocent questions and largely get derision in return. Simply asking “But doesn’t CO2 have a log limit on absorption effects that we have passed?” or worse, saying “But this article (on skeptic site) seems to have a valid issue.” would bring “Attack the messenger” responses. That, for me, was the first and […]

Rio – 50,000 people flock to a flop – but that is success in its own right

According to Greenpeace its an “epic fail”. WWF says its a “colossal failure”, and it’s so bad, Oxfam want to start all over again. That news may sound good to the free citizens of the West, but that’s only because we aim so low.

They may not get as much as they aim for, but they will still get what they came for.

Rio 2012: How big is this junket?

[It is] “billed as the biggest UN event ever organised. This time, 15,000 soldiers and police are guarding about 130 heads of state and government, as well as ministers and diplomats from 180 countries and at least 50,000 others.”

The Guardian

So 50,000 people got a trip to Rio. They may want world peace, free energy, and control over your light bulbs, your car, and your wallet, but most of them still got an expenses paid ticket to the Olympics of Global Bureaucracy. In the end they may say they are disappointed, but in reality they still scored one heck of a free lunch. And this is the point. As long as the masses are not saying that they want their money back, the show […]

Defining “denier”. Is it English or Newspeak?

This week Nature Climate Change published the Bain et al letter about ways to “promote pro-environmental action in climate change deniers”. How does Nature define this group? They imply that deniers deny science, but can the researchers, editors or reviewers name any peer reviewed paper with empirical evidence that the deniers deny? Surely this whole paper is not based on a name-calling assumption, a confusion about an illusory sub-species, Homo sapiens denier? Could Nature now be the Journal of UnScience? We shall see…

I have written to ask the lead researcher Dr Paul Bain:

 

Dear Dr Paul Bain,

Right now, it’s almost my life’s work to communicate the empirical evidence on anthropogenic climate change.

I can help you with your research on deniers. I have studied the mental condition of denial most carefully. There is a simple key to converting the convictions of people in this debate, and I have seen it work hundreds of times. Indeed, my own convictions that lasted 17 years were turned around in a few days. I can help you. It would be much simpler than you think.

Firstly, to save time and money we […]

Rupert Wyndham’s excellent prose to Bishop Langrish (the 26 ethical flaws of propagandists)

No one says it quite like Rupert. Reprinted with permission, thank you. Read, enjoy the vivid panoply,

— Jo

My favourite extract — the 26 ethical flaws of propagandists

(For the full letter and context go straight to the post below – apologies to Rupert for discontinuous edits)

Climate change major risks: Such as? There is not one shred of empirical evidence for your assertion. There is, of course, an ocean of mendacious and fraudulent computer modelling by people with vast vested interests in promoting the scam.

You state that you do not underestimate my ‘strength of feeling on this important issue’. With respect, you are well wide of the mark. I have no strong feelings about climate change. Climate change is fact of life and, in that sense, is a banality. I do, however, have a prejudice against blatant chicanery and outright knavery.

Neither is this, anyway, a scientific issue. The science is clear. There have been and are no untoward changes in global climate outside those which flow from natural variability. There have been no recent climatic phenomena, which do not have numerous precedents. CO2 has nothing to do with […]

On those recent site troubles….

Sorry the site was down twice yesterday. We are still figuring out what happened. It’s probably innocent, but we won’t know for sure until we’ve gone through the logs which are monstrous.

I suspect that restoring all 100k comments (lost to data corruption after the transfer of my blog) may have set the traffic over the limit with recaching from many automated spider bots and what-not’s that needed to update all 824 pages and 100,000 comments at once. The log files of the action on my site the last few days are huge, so it will be some time to sort out what happened. I gather the servers may have thought they were under attack and shut down.

When trouble strikes the site, check out my Twitter account for info. Don’t forget to follow @JoanneNova.

So why did I move the site in May?

Last year we did get a denial of service attack in June. We decided with that and the increasing costs, we needed to move the site to cheaper, more secure US servers. That move, and all the traffic went very smoothly, but cost more than $6000 over the year. And even on the cheaper servers, the […]

Threat of ANAO Audit means Australia’s BOM throws out temperature set, starts again, gets same results

Joanne Nova and Ken Stewart

A team of independent auditors, bloggers and scientists went through the the BOM “High Quality” (HQ) dataset and found significant errors, omissions and inexplicable adjustments. The team and Senator Cory Bernardi put in a Parliamentary request to get our Australian National Audit Office to reassess the BOM records. In response, the BOM, clearly afraid of getting audited, and still not providing all the data, code and explanations that were needed, decided to toss out the old so called High Quality (HQ) record, and start again. The old HQ increased the trends by 40% nationally, and 70% in the cities.

So goodbye “HQ”, hello “ACORN”. End result? Much the same.

That meant the ANAO could avoid an audit, since the BOM had changed data-sets, the point of auditing the old set was moot.

For me, this version is so much worse than the previous one. In the HQ data set the errors could have been inadvertent, but now we’ve pointed out the flaws, there can be no excuses for getting it wrong. Instead of fixing the flaws (and thanking the volunteers), it’s almost as if they’ve gone out of their way […]

The UN defines “climate change” as being man-made: Orwell could not have done it better

George Orwell, Photo: Wikipedia

Sloppy language works for cheats and charlatans. In the search for the truth only accurate language will do. Orwell understood the power of language to change the way we think, indeed to fence off some possible options completely.

Roger Pielke Snr put out a call today asking for precise definitions and protesting about the misuse of the term “climate change”. But when did this nonsensical term start? Where else, but with the UN.

All the way back on May 9th 1992, UN defined “climate change” as man-made. See The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (paragraph 6):

“Climate change is defined by the Convention as “change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (article 1 (2)).”

In other words, there is no “climate change” without humans because there cannot be, and by extension, the climate did not change, could not have, for the 4.5 billion years before 1880 when the first coal powered electricity station was fired up.

Such nonsense is what international treaties are made of. […]

Ineptocracy — the word du jour

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) –

A system of government where the least capable to lead

are elected by the least capable of producing, and where

the members of society least likely to sustain themselves

or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for

by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of

producers.

Thanks to treeman today (and before that Brice, Rupert, and Speedy who said: Ineptocracy — See also “Swan Song”).

Merci. ‘Tis a gem. If it is not in the Oxford now, it will be…

 

It could be that an ineptocracy is the inevitable end point of democracy……

…..

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. […]

How Green is Your Bankster? Bank of America spends $50 billion to save the world.

Bank of America Pledges $50 Billion to Combat Climate Change

The unholy alliance between bankers and government is on naked display.

It’s the black hole in the kitchen: huge, obvious, and silent. And boy does it suck. As Climate Depot points out, Bank of America got a $45 billion bailout from the government during the global financial crisis. Now it’s promising $50 billion to “address Climate Change”. How Green is your Bankster?

It’s a feeding frenzy:

The bank’s new initiative includes lending, equipment finance, capital markets and advisory activity and carbon finance, as well as advice and investment help.

Bank of America will focus on promoting energy efficiency; renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydropower; lower-carbon transportation like electric and hybrid vehicles; and water and waste treatment and disposal initiatives. [Capitalgr]

They already spend nearly $20bn on climate and did it four years ahead of schedule. So why not $5obn?

The company has spent $17.9 billion toward its initial pledge, including $8.4 billion for energy efficiency activities, including low-cost loans and grants for retrofitting low-income neighborhoods for energy efficiency. It spent $5 billon on renewable energy projects, including helping the San Jose Unified […]

Gone Feudal: Oregon State Uni (OSU) sack and target skeptics (and their children)

In an extremely worrying development, we can add Nick Drapela’s name to the list of skeptics fired for the heresy of speaking out. This email from Gordon Fulks came around today, and I want to spread the message. I have written before about the scientist of upstanding integrity and action that is Art Robinson — When he ran for Congress, three of his children doing PhD’s were targeted at OSU. The details of Joshua, Bethany and Matthews work are described on the Oregon State Outrage blog. These exemplary students were close to finishing their work towards PhD degrees in nuclear engineering when all three suddenly faced major obstacles and the likelihood of losing all their work to date. (See the Outrage blog for updates). But the outrageous behaviour continues. Legal action may not be the answer (In Robinson’s case the Uni apparently wants them to sue, so it will be obliged to have “no comment” while OSU would get taxpayer funds to extend the case at length.) What we need is facebook, twitter, letters and emails – a campaign to let the State of Oregon (and especially university donors) know their university has regressed to a feudal religious […]