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Don’t underestimate the Brexit effect. The landscape is shifting.
The Paris agreement just became less likely. The UK Dept of the environment will submerge, and Boris Johnson, the outspoken skeptic and Brexit figurehead, has been promoted to foreign minister.
James Delingpole says: Britain’s New Prime Minister Drives A Stake Through The Heart Of The Green Vampire
Britain no longer has“the greenest government ever.” This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.
Five years ago, could we imagine an “infamous climate denier” like Boris rewarded in any Western Government? There were closet skeptics in the cabinet, but that’s not the same. In Australia, Tony Abbott once said climate change was “crap” and somehow still managed to become PM, but once he was, his official line was the permitted global warming story. ( He pandered, but in the most sensible possible way. And because he did not flagrantly add to the climate slush fund they still called him a “denier” but he rarely said anything openly skeptical.).
To have Boris in such an […]
Geniuses at Rice made a breakthrough and discovered that Christianity reduces the “negative” effect of being a conservative. Conservatives, see, are less likely to buy things that are “pro-environment”. The academic mindset assumes this is a personality flaw. Instead it’s an attribute. The environmental movement has a record of hurting the poor, razing forests, and destroying family businesses. There is a reason “environmentalist” has come to be a dirty word.
Supersize that condescension:
Obviously the true evil people are the people who watch Fox.
“Put more colorfully, Americans who are watching Fox News instead of attending church on Sunday morning appear to be particularly uninterested in buying with the environment in mind,” said Ecklund, who is also director of Rice’s Religion and Public Life Program. “It would stand to reason that those who participate in their houses of worship and who tend to be more engaged in civic life may have less time to be exposed to such media and therefore be less likely to follow the politicized conservative ‘line’ with respect to the environment.”
So, both Christians and conservatives are dump people who are fooled by Fox. But Christians are a bit more useful, not because they […]
UPDATED: See below for Stephen McIntyre’s response, with details of emails showing that Joelle Gergis did not independently discover the problem but learnt of it from Climate Audit.
The Gergis hockeystick was heralded in the media for a week in 2012 before it was cut apart online and months later, quietly withdrawn. Headlines raved that Australia was having the “hottest years in the millennium”. As I said at the time, it was all silly beyond belief — the whole study relied on two bunches of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand to tell us that the greater continental area was 0.09°C warmer now than it was in 1000AD. If trees in yonder Tassie can tell the whole continental temperature to a tenth of a degree, who needs thermometers (especially the kind which need 2 degree corrections)? Why does the BOM bother today?
Part II of this sorry paper has arrived under this auspicious headline at The Conversation:
“How a single word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking and blog backlash”
Still hurts eh?
Look out. The Scientific Saints have arrived!
According to Joelle Gergis, skeptics found just “one typo”, and in Gergis’ own […]
John Ioannidis paints a picture of a vast hive of researchers all pushed to publish short papers that are mostly a waste of time. The design is bad, the results useless (even when meta-collated with other badly designed studies). Basically, humankind is pouring blood, sweat and tears into spinning wheels in medicine — just paper churn. Most papers will never help a patient.
Ioannidis wants rigor – full registration before the study, full transparency afterwards, fewer studies over all, but with better design. Astonishingly, fully 85% of what is spent on clinical trials is wasted. It’s really a pretty big scandal, given that lives are on the line. I can’t see the media or pollies joining the dots. Imagine how many quality life-years are being burnt at the stake of the self-feeding Science-PR-Industry.
And this is clinical medical research, where standards are higher than in many other scientific areas and where there are easily defined terms of success unlike “blue sky” studies. Ioannidis doesn’t say it directly, but his description of the effect current funding has (which is almost all government based) almost guarantees that researchers will be wasting time in the paper churn — fast, short papers of little […]
We knew it was going to happen sometime. Shorten has conceded defeat. Turnbull stays on as a weakened PM.
It’s a Delcon win
For Defcons / Delcons this outcome was close to as good as it gets. How could an unfunded, disorganized group vote for “not Turnbull” without handing the government to a Labor-Green group? Individual voters can’t vote for a “hung weak government”. For a whole glorious week Turnbull has been tortured with calls for his resignation with his faults laid out bare. Several Turnbull supporters were targeted and removed. The antithesis of the hard left (Pauline Hanson) has gained a voice. The Nationals grew stronger and the Liberals were punished.
All this, despite the mainstream media barely mentioning Delcons, and hardly ever interviewing minor party candidates (except for Greens). This result was achieved despite GetUP running a $3m dollar campaign* in exactly the opposite direction targeting Abbott supporters.
Sinclair Davidson (and many in the pro-Turnbull camp) are declaring that Abbott would have lost, but they use polls from a year ago, or polls about a man who didn’t campaign to be PM. And we all know how reliable polls are. Turnbull nearly lost the election because he wouldn’t […]
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7.7 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
The price of carbon permits makes them useless. Governments have issued too many permits, and also put in competing programs to reduce CO2 emissions. The collective Green Gravy train is fracturing and now even frustrated carbon traders are pointing out that parts of the save-the-world-program make no sense.
Tough to Keep the World From Warming When Carbon Is This Cheap
“Some of the renewable-energy subsidies are stupidly, insanely expensive per ton of carbon dioxide saved,” said Louis Redshaw, who has his own emissions-trading company, Redshaw Advisors Ltd. in London, and was previously head of carbon at Barclays Plc. “Politicians are not only failing to deliver a comprehensive carbon price for the economy, they are busy undermining them where they exist.”
The price of carbon is destined to achieve its true value — nothing. The only reason it hasn’t done that already is thanks to governments changing the rules to keep it alive.
Carbon trading is still a big merry-go-round even if it’s going nowhere:
Today, there are 38 countries, cities, states and provinces using pricing systems in an attempt to put a lid on greenhouse gases, according to the World Bank.
July 10th, 2016 | Tags: Carbon Market | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
During the last ice age (and others before it) temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere would abruptly swing up and down by a hefty 3 – 6°C every 1,500 years or so. A new study using isotopes on the sea floor rather provocatively suggests that the Atlantic ocean circulation was to blame. Apparently it slowed almost to halt, and before the surface water cooled. It seems that when the Atlantic currents slow too far they stop bringing warmer water north from the equator and Southern Hemisphere, and thus the north ices over. During these super-cold periods the ice sheets spread down and cover much of North America, (and real estate in Australia costs a motza). Massive icebergs break off and drift, but apparently things took a lot longer to get cold in the Southern Hemisphere, and the north and south possibly got a bit out of whack cooling and warming in opposite phases. The researcher used the word “bipolar”.
The $64 trillion dollar question is if ocean currents cause climate change, what causes the ocean currents? The researchers don’t know. (Seems kind of important). Things stabilized out in the last 10,000 warm years. It looks like the wild swings don’t occur […]
Journalists are still wondering what happened
“How did we get it wrong?” asks Matthew Knott.
The post election dissection is a study in how a fishbowl of left-leaning journalists totally missed what was important to most of Australia. Maybe the ABC or Fairfax might want to employ a conservative?
Journalists talked, and nobody cared
The journalists said the Coalition would win. They analyzed their movements seat-by-marginal-seat, mapping the flights, wallowed in hours of same-sex marriage debate, asked what happened to climate change, and debated whether the big-spending deficits had killed off Labor’s chances. Every nuance of the soapie called Turnbull-v-Abbott was discussed — did Turnbull snub him by listing former PM’s and not Abbott? Did Abbott grin, or grimace? Navel gazers opined that the Brexit shock would push even more people to the conservative side, it will be “a defining moment of the campaign” they said — as if UK trade agreements with Germany would a/ disappear, or b/ rank in the top sixty things Australia voters cared about. And Leigh Sales asked every candidate whether each leader would still be their leader next week. As if any politician would ever reply “no” the week before an election.
The media […]
It can’t last, but today in Australia we still have no government. Smile!
I’m enjoying this, brief, best possible outcome. I didn’t want either side to win, and they haven’t. Give us more. :- )
Latest Tally: Libs 72 — Labor 66. Others 5. Undecided 7.
Of the undecideds — five seats are leaning to Labor, two to the Liberals. But the Liberals need four more seats to hold a majority. (Turnbull may be the new Gillard.) Counting is still only at the 80% mark in these crucial last seats, and things are close — one is only “leading” by 150 votes or so out of 80,000. This could go on all week.
Two months ago, I estimated there were at least a million votes that “don’t matter”, but there turned out to be nearly twice as many — 1.7 million Delcon / Defcon type voters out of 12 million. These are people who voted for a conservative candidate outside of the Liberal party. That’s a force that needs galvanizing…
Cory Bernardi invites people to join The Australian Conservatives –– a grassroots movement (not a political party):
“If you believe in limited government, traditional […]
Remarkably, a US Court found a completely sensible, obvious answer (and it only took two and half years) — government agency heads can’t hide their work emails on a personal computer. (Life could get tough for Hillary.)
Thank the CEI:
The DC Circuit court today ruled that agency records including “departmental emails on an account in another domain” must be searched or produced in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. In the FOIA case brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) against the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) over OSTP Director John Holdren’s use of non-official email accounts for work-related emails, the DC Circuit overturned a district court ruling, and remanded that case back to the district court for further proceedings.
Imagine if tax invoices, receipts, and other bank accounts could be stored in “my other car” and not available for the IRS?
For the sake of the environment, people need to be able to see the emails of the people supposedly looking after it.
9.1 out of 10 based on 37 ratings […]
The outlandish policy:
[One Nation] wants the teaching of climate science in schools to be based on “the scientific method of scepticism”.
It’s hard to overstate how disastrous this would be to the indoctrination program. Life on Earth depends on hiding alternate views from impressionable minds. Students should continue to be taught that scientists are of one-mind, or they may grow up to think scientists are supposed to be skeptical, instead of gullible.
How did it come to this?
Malcolm Roberts
The man responsible for this travesty is Malcolm Roberts who most skeptics will have come across as Project Leader for the Galileo Movement. He has been in the trenches of the climate debate for years in Australia, and he’s the second name on the One Nation ticket in Queensland for the Senate. He has been remarkably tenacious. The man has drive and energy. (See for yourself at his site.) He also has a BE (Honours in Mining) and an MBA from the Uni of Chicago Booth School of Business.
The Turnbull coup converted the Liberals to a center left party, leaving a galactic vacuum in Australia on the right. Pauline Hansen did so well, getting 1.2 […]
The fifth biggest economy in the world suddenly frees itself from worlds biggest bureaucratic basket case, and everyone else is knocking at the door?.
Daily Mail: Countries are lining up to enter trade talks with Britain in the wake of the decision to leave the European Union, it was claimed last night.
American politicians are clamouring for an agreement, while talks could soon begin with Australia, South Korea and India.
Otherwise, Brexit is a disaster. Indeed it is so unthinkable, half the pundits are still thinking up reasons why it might not happen. Today uncertainty is what Tony Blair wants, and for as long as possible — “Let’s keep the options open” he says, as he thinks up a list of excuses to ignore a Yes:No vote, like an opinion poll. “People can change their minds” he points out. And they do, which is why we elect governments then throw them out two weeks later when their polls fall below 50%.
On the Twelth Day of Brexit the excuses are hitting the Orwellian-Turbo-Booster: If Britain leaves the EU it will lose sovereign control says some guy in Ireland. Black is white. Up is down. And […]
It was no accident that Turnbull turned out to be a lousy campaigner. He stood for things the people didn’t want, so he couldn’t mention his “successes” nor point at Labor’s big failures.
Andrew Bolt wonders why Turnbull didn’t run the carbon tax scare, which worked so well for Tony Abbott:
If only Turnbull had followed another critical tip from the shrewd Hunt, to hit Labor with an attack on his planned electricity tax – a new carbon tax. As Labor’s Mediscare has proved, the electorate is highly sensitive to threats to the household budget after several years now of living standards not rising. An attack on Labor’s electricity tax could have been decisive, but that was one more piece of good advice Turnbull ignored.
It was not about good advice. Turnbull couldn’t run the carbon tax scare — because he and Greg Hunt had bought a carbon tax in themselves — the hypocrites would be exposed. Worse, it would remind the electorate of what they voted for so emphatically in 2013 — a mandate to get rid of a carbon tax.
The last time the Coalition could campaign on getting rid of that great big carbon tax […]
…. nearly forgot this was a weekend. : -)
7.4 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
The Tally updates have just stopped for tonight, but things have shifted in the last hour. Welcome to holidayville-Australia, no one is going to count votes tomorrow. Bizarrely, they’re not even counting on Monday either — (that must be a misprint?)
Apparently we can pay double-triple-overtime for people to work til 2am on a Saturday, but then we all need two days off.
*UPDATE: The delay is probably due to waiting for postal votes to come in. Because of Australia’s preference system, preferences can’t be allocated until all the votes are in. h/t Analitik
Delcons mattered
Turnbull has taken a historic win in 2013 and converted it into a historic mash. Abbott knew what he stood for and carried a lot of people with him. Turnbull stood for nothing-much and communicated that exactly.
Everyone except Bill Shorten said Turnbull was likely to win, tracking to win, or has “won”. Andrew Bolt thought this win was likely to be so weak, so pathetic, even a minority-hobbled-government, that Turnbull should resign. But based on these newer numbers, it might be Shorten doing the minority government thing. Check it out: the magic number is 76 seats — and while 77 […]
The place to get results: ABC Federal Election 2016
Federal Election Results list (Seat by Seat)
See also Twitter #ausvotes and also #ausdecides2016
For Foreigners watching — Australia has 150 Seats in the House of Reps. The party with 76 gets to choose the PM and form Government. The SENATE or UPPER HOUSE has 76 members — 12 for each State and 2 for the NT and ACT. This election is rare in that all the Senate seats are up for grabs, normally we elect half each time, but this is a “double dissolution” election. That hasn’t happened for 40 years. There are 15 million voters, and voting is compulsory.
Almost all the newspaper and poll predictions were for a Turnbull (Liberal Coalition) win.
8pm: Lib 57 seats. Labor 58 seats. Booths closed everywhere now. Oakshott predicted to fail. Xenophon team look like they have a House seat (MAYO) 32% counted.
7:50pm Eden Monaro (Bellwether seat that has always gone with the government — appears to be going to Labor. Will it break the pattern, or is it a sign to come? Hendy was very pro Turnbull, so […]
It’s not Independence Day for Australia, just “Independent’s Day”. Anyone but the majors…
Election Tomorrow: How-to-vote suggestions for climate skeptics
CarbonSense have posted a list of dedicated skeptics in Australian politics
HOUSE
David Archibald, Australian Liberty Alliance candidate for Curtin in WA George Christensen, LNP Candidate for Dawson in Queensland Dr Dennis Jensen MP, Independent Candidate for Tangney, WA
SENATE
David Leyonhjelm, Liberal Democrats for NSW Bob Day, Family First for SA “No more windfarms” John Madigan, Manufacturing and Farming Party Malcolm Roberts, No 2 on ticket for Pauline Hanson in Queensland Dr Mark Imisides, Christian Democrats, WA.
Rafe Campion recommends the http://ConservativeRevolt.wix.com/HowToVote .
My method is to choose your local candidate carefully, based on individuals not parties. Know your candidates. I lean Delcon. Like John Stone who links to the list of Turncoats. There is no small government major party any more. Shorten would be more-terrible in the short run, but we might get a good opposition and a decent Senate. (Blessed are the Gridlocked, whose MP’s cannot pass laws.) In the long run Turnbull could stop us getting both good government and a good opposition. In the short run, the dire option of another Labor-Green government with some […]
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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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