Put this together for mate who’s getting hitched next week…
Ah, Sweet Mystery…
If you ever speak with Justin, there’s a good chance you’ll converse,
The esoteric secrets of the wider universe;
Like electron spin and gamma rays, and nucleonic flux,
And the subatomic quarks, we get, from subatomic ducks.
While out there in the cosmos, he knows and he can see,
The length and breadth and depth, of this wondrous galaxy;
These and more he’s seen and done, and still there’s lots of stuff,
He can’t begin to start to know, but for him, it’s not enough.
‘Cos no matter what he knows, and understands, of things which lie above,
It’s just a cold and lonely universe, if it’s all bereft of love;
For when we’re placed upon this earth, we are placed upon it whole,
A complex, fragile creature, made of heart and mind and soul,
Thus there’s more to life than theory, played out within the mind,
[Which is pure incarceration, of the solitary kind;]
No! Just as the eagle, when he soars, must first forget the ground,
We rise above our lowly selves, when we join with those around.
And when we join with someone special, to whom our soul is bared,
Then we find enough is plenty, as long as it is shared;
Thus the miser lives in misery, despite his ample wealth,
But when you sprinkle round the happiness, you spill some on yourself!
So Justin’s had a change of heart, and turned his fertile mind,
To engage with this enigma, of the friendly, female kind,
It’s an old and ancient mystery, and as the poet wrote,
She hasn’t been unravelled yet, excuse me as I quote:
“Now a woman, she’s a woman, I’ve fixed that for a cert;
They’re just as like as rows of peas from hat to hem of skirt.
And then, you find, they’re all so different, when all is said and done,
The more you know of all of them, the less you know of one.Ӡ
And so this poem closes off, as we end this little piece:
Ladies and gents, please raise a glass; May wonders never cease!
I did undergrad and postgrad at JCU so this makes me extra sick.
A) JCU now have a “Climate Change” department, how putrid, and;
B) I thought the tropics were defined by the angle of the Earth’s axis. I know it is probably the silly journalist making the error but then again…
G’day Tim,all in this article and a lot more was covered on the Glenn Beck program that used to run on foxnews.Week after week more stories and scams and nothing ever denied,obama just did a juliar act,a victim of nasty people.
Al Gore spent 2 days in -Australia running a traing course for Climate Change Leaders.
Apparently they were to learn;
During the training, you’ll learn from Al Gore and a group of world-class scientists, strategists, communicators, and technical specialists about the science of climate change and how to connect with people across the region at the most personal level.
You’ll hear how we can rapidly reduce our contributions to global emissions at a local and national level to set us on a better course.
And you’ll also develop skills to engage those around you and bring about lasting change using storytelling, public speaking, social media networking, and media engagement.
Storytelling seems appropriate. I am expecting a lot of that from the comrades.
Regrettably my experiences over the weekend make me feel that we are gradually loosing the battle for rational thinking and objectivity over Climate Change.
Don’t give up. Sometimes ( to use a cliché ) it is darkest before the dawn.
I have been reading up recently on the beginning of the Evolution debate in the UK. The whole establishment, Royals, Church, Universities, the Royal Society and a number of leading scientists were against the theory. Richard Owen was a very well known and able scientist, and not above some underhand dealings. Despite this opposition, within 2 years the whole situation had changed. The RS had 3 evolutionists successively as Presidents, (some) Churches, Universities and schools were converted, and Parliament was supportive. Owen went from hero to outcast. Even the Museum of Natural History which he founded now has a statue of Charles Darwin looking down the main gallery.
For all their talk the Warmists have lost the debate. Germany was for many years a bastion of support, but in the last year the main stream press have turned against them, the public is sick and tired of electricity rice rises, and coal fired plants are being built as fast as they can. IN Reality, only the UK, France and Sweden are supporting green initiatives, and the UK is looking like turning away soon.
Obama won’t get his ideas in place once the Nov. results come in. China was never willing. Nor Russia. Sth. Korea, Japan, India, Sth. Africa, Canada and Australia are no longer in favour of “climate action”. It is a lot of desperate talk by people suddenly realising that the Titanic Idea isn’t carrying enough lifeboats.
When your mantra is spend spend spend the governments that favour this approach to buying votes saw a climate tax as an easy way to increase their tax revenue without calling it a tax to pay for their spending.
it was the big bad climate change which has given them the excuse to create a tax that wasn’t their fault (no really it was all that bad CO2 wot dun it) to allow them to continue spending and buy votes.
Turns out with all the pain of tax increases through green initiatives and global cooling (you can adjust the temperature record all you like but when people are cold from the weather its hard to keep telling them they are warm) people just aren’t swallowing the story any more.
” my experiences over the weekend make me feel that we are gradually losing the battle for rational thinking and objectivity over Climate Change.”
No way, there are always people on the make , running these conferences which are attended by the gullible and bored and insecure, who get a feeling of self -importance from conferencing with ” like-minded” people.
Some people seem to spend a large part of their lives in “conferencing”, never realising that they are being taken for fools. It’s a great little racket.
No surprises to find that the Al goracle is knee-deep in it.
What we have here is a terrorist training school, in which impressionable young people are committing themselves to a nobel cause which they perceive to have global consequences.
They are not on the make. They are intelligent, committed but misguided people who will convert a lot of people simply because of their enthusiasm. (Al Gore might be on the make. I don’t include him).
My weekend experiences were in fact because I spoke to a number of people I know who, lacking the interest to make their own investigations have bought in to the whole Climate Change meme, including the 97% consensus, increases bad weather and all the rest.
Consequently I think the warmists are winning at the moment.
I know it can get you down Peter, been there done that, now apply the facts that your making assumptions on a small sample group that you encountered, are of like minds or education, mix in similar circles and like most people will turn to groupthink as a safety precaution when given the choice.
Also consider when these believers are being directly effected financially and have even a hint of quality of life reduced for little more than a belief then you will see them turn quicker than lager turns to piss.
What we have here is a terrorist training school, in which impressionable young people are committing themselves to a nobel cause which they perceive to have global consequences.
A terrorist training school . . . or just a useful idiot school? 😉
Or just another bunch of green wankers that want to impress other green wankers by dropping Al Gore.
The lot of them put together wouldn’t make half a terrorist because they are too weak willed… and those two guys up the back just want to crack onto the chicks.
READ IT ALL AND WEEP FOR THE STATE OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING:
29 June: UK Daily Mail: David Rose: BBC spends £500k to ask 33,000 Asians 5,000 miles from UK what they think of climate change: Corporation savaged for ‘astonishing’ campaign survey on global warming
BBC under fire after spending hundreds of thousands on survey in Asia
Taxpayers’ money used to ask 33,000 people their views on climate change
More than £500,000 spent by little-known BBC Media Action for survey
It was immediately condemned yesterday as a flagrant abuse of the Corporation’s rules on impartiality and ‘a spectacular waste of money’ by a top academic expert.
Every year, BBC Media Action gets £22.2 million from the taxpayer via the Foreign Office and Department for International Development…
The report ends with advice, apparently written for climate activists: ‘Do not talk about scientific or technical abstractions. Talk about the problems they face in their daily lives… Speak in language that makes sense to people in terms of how they experience climate change.’…
BBC Media Action has a £40 million annual budget, and the proportion not funded by the taxpayer is paid by the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US government… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673654/BBC-spends-500k-ask-33-000-Asians-5-000-miles-UK-think-climate-change-Corporation-savaged-astonishing-campaign-survey-global-warming.html
btw if i hear bbc gushing over driverless cars one more time, i will definitely shut them out altogether, as i have pretty much done with abc. yesterday, some tech geek when asked about them told the beeb it’s pie in the sky & won’t happen for years, so why talk about it.
NVP is considered an active area because carbon dioxide is released from the Earth’s mantle.
Scaper,how can christine and the gangreens allow this to happen.Maybe they could be useful after all and throw their bodies into breaches,kinda like one big Butt plug.
btw i should have added that what bbc gushes about is the widespead, general use of driverless cars. i’m not talking about the technology itself.
give thanx i voted informal. ***still pushing that CEFC is “profitable”. who can provide any evidence of that? how to get it corrected, if it is not true?
28 June: Fairfax Brisbane Times: Kim Stephens: Clive Palmer holds court with thousands at Fairfax Festival
Fresh from a high profile week in Canberra Clive Palmer, the billionaire mining magnate turned politician, now reconfiguring himself as the people’s champion, was most certainly the champion of his people at his Sunshine Coast resort.
The Member for Fairfax invited 100,000 of his constituents to the Coolum estate for his inaugural Fairfax Festival weekend and by Saturday afternoon about 5000 had accepted the invitation…
“Australia has less than one per cent of the total share of world carbon, we delude ourselves if we think we are going to change the world,” he said on Saturday.
“What we can do is set up a framework that leads the world.”
He also announced his senators would block the government’s plans to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and potentially wind back the Renewable Energy Target.
***On Saturday he reasoned the CEFC was a “profitable company”, while Prime Minister Tony Abbott should seek endorsement of plans to wind back the RET at the next election.
“If there is to be a review there’s plenty of time to change after next election,” he said…
“Vice President Gore flew to Canberra to see me because he was impressed about our ideas and what we wanted to do for our people.
“He didn’t come and see Bill Shorten, he didn’t come and see Tony Abbot, he didn’t go to the House of Reps and he didn’t go to the Senate.
“He knew, like I did, the most important bit.”… http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/clive-palmer-holds-court-with-thousands-at-fairfax-festival-20140628-zspkg.html
***CLIVE PALMER – PLEASE PROVIDE EVIDENCE CEFC IS PROFITABLE. this is all about the vanity of celebrity:
28 June: Guardian: Lenore Taylor: Clive Palmer shifts ground on climate policy: now it’s the economy
PUP leader says Al Gore told him other countries with trading schemes were likely to impose tariffs on imported goods
Clive Palmer has repositioned his party’s shift on climate change policy as an economic decision rather than a response to global warming, just days after appearing on a podium beside climate crusader and former US vice-president Al Gore.
Palmer now says his support for an emissions trading scheme sometime in the future is because Gore told him that other countries with trading schemes were likely to impose tariffs on imported goods.
“That is something I wanted to explain to the Australian people … regardless of your position on climate change that is the reality of life,” he said.
“You will have to have an ETS or otherwise you won’t be able to do international trade … that is why we did it. We didn’t want the Australian people to be disadvantaged.”.
***Similarly he said the Palmer United party had decided to vote against the government’s plan to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation “not on the basis of what it was doing” but because it was “making a profit and employing thousands of people around the country”…
Palmer also returned to the arguments he used when he was sceptical about human-induced climate change. He said his personal understanding of the science of climate change was that mankind’s activities since the 1850s meant it was now contributing 3% rather than 2% of all the carbon in the atmosphere. That meant “nature” was still contributing 97%.
“My view is, if that is true … what we need to do is look at what nature is contributing. That is contrary to what most climate change people. So that is where my difference comes in.”
And he said his party had decided to vote against changes to the renewable energy target because the government had gone to the election promising not to change it, and governments should keep their promises…
Asked by Guardian Australia why he had changed his own election policy, which was to make the renewable energy target voluntary – effectively rendering it meaningless – he said that policy had been “developed further”. The party now wanted the RET to stay unchanged until the next election, due in 2016. “It may well be voluntary after 2016, it may not exist after 2016,” he said…
(WHAT IS THIS PARA?) The PUP senator-elect Dio Wang told Guardian Australia he did not accept the idea of global warming caused by humans. Palmer said Gore had “made his comments independently of me”.
While tariff barriers have been talked about during international climate talks, no country imposes them or has concrete plans to do so…
Palmer has said he will try to introduce a new emissions trading scheme with the price set at zero until other countries take action, but this is almost certain to be defeated in the lower house. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/28/clive-palmer-shifts-ground-on-climate-policy-now-its-the-economy
“You see, as far as they’re concerned, they own the developing world. They’ve taken on the onerous task of speaking for it in the corridors of power. It’s the new-age version of the white man’s burden, their pet and everyone in it should be oh so grateful for all the love and virtuous attention they lavish on it, but those people better be careful not to abuse all that love or they’ll be given a sharp reminder.”
The really strange thing is that I was doing hit and runs on the search engine the other day, I can’t even remember what I was looking into either, and I ended up on your site reading that exact post. This was on the 28th in the US so definitely prior to your posting here.
It was a very interesting read. It, along with a quick read of your About page, was very informative in telling me where your head is at regarding the material being discussed as well as why. To be honest had I not read the original article where you explain why/when you wrote your About page I probably would have never read your About page.
While I suspect those your post referred to would throw fits screaming that they aren’t like that what I have seen over the years leaves me seeing them much as you so adeptly described in that post. Nicely done.
brisbane times’ kim stephens may write that Palmer invited 100,000 to his “festival”, but there’s no way too many turned up. check this video, hilarious:
VIDEO: Families treated to a day in Palmer’s resort
June 28, 2014: A family fun day at his luxury resort was Clive Palmer’s way of saying thanks for getting him elected to the Australian parliament. But it was also a chance to raise his party’s profile as Queenslanders prepare to go to the polls in Stafford and at the general state election. http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/families-treated-to-a-day-in-palmer-s-resort/x77utt2
I made a point a while back that it might be better to analyse the rate of temperature change rather than anomalies. A sudden change of equipment means that the data for any station is only compromised for that short period of time. As long as the average of the rates from around the world is fairly smooth, then models could be fitted to this (a much tougher test) or the rate data could be shown as a cumulative plot. Like anomalies, it doesn’t matter what the average temperature is at the individual site (still need to be careful as to how these are collated).
I looked at Darwin because of its infamy, using the raw data from GISS. Some missing data was replaced with the long term averages for the month.
A plot of the data from three months and the annual mean is shown here. Firstly, excuse the heading, secondly, July doesn’t show an obvious difference in trends before 1939 and after 1939 so its not clear cut that something unnatural happened. Data from a station commenced in Jan of 1941, data stopped being collected from the post office site on hourly basis in Jan 1942 (change of equipment) which is not surprising because it was bombed the next month.
The next plot is the mean of moving linear regressions for each month over 5 years. It comes out a bit smoother than smoothing with a moving average of the differences. I did the months separately because there is a much larger range of values when calculating a line of best if to all the months together.
Two times the standard deviation from the mean is shown. Only three years come out larger than this (or less than this). The year 1894 was when it was decided that official stations should have Stevenson Screens.. I don’t know if it was installed before this or when data began to be collected from it. The others were 1938 and 1939.
The third plot is a cumulative plot of the rate data before adjusting the three large negative values for 1894, 1938 and 1939 by replacing the outlier with the mean of all values. This method does nothing about UHI effects or other effects that are gradual.
Please excuse a few of the flaws. It was done during coffee and rain breaks and I don’t have time to fix some of the headings.
For example, rather than adding up the temperatures above the local average, add up how much the temperature has changed in the past year for each site. The actual temperature doesn’t matter so when more stations in hotter or colder areas are added, you don’t get an artificial trend. You still have to be careful because the weather patterns change over the century.
The cumulative plot starts at 0, so you don’t get a measure of the global mean, just how its changed over the past century and a bit. You get a smoother plot and all that is important is the change in shape of the curve. You add a constant based on the best estimate of the global mean temperature to see how that has changed.
Sorry. Not that a good reply. Getting the trend from the individual sites and collating them should be the same as collating the temperatures and then getting a trend. With crappy data, the former should give smoother trends and you simple toss out an outlier if something strange happened (the equivalent of offsetting the rest of the temperature data).
Secondly, there are two tests of a model. Is it in the right ball park and does it predict the trend correctly. The latter is why the pause is important.
Vic the odd century or so ago, science collected every scrap of data available from outposts explorers and all sailing ships to come to the conclusion that the world average was 14.7C at 1013 Mb at the time it was degrees F and inches of mercury. That said the standard was applied and even now is the datum for the standard output power of a jet engine. The take off power is calculated from this datum for temp, height of airfield and runway length for your take off weight. I was surprised recently to see on of the main data sets telling us anomalies, then right at the end saying the world has warmed and their data is telling them that the world is now 14.54C. Just telling us what they believe the world temperature is would put paid to all their BS.
As above, when you do a cumulative plot you have to use an estimate of what the starting temperature is. You get how much its changed in 100 years. If its turns out that its dropped 0.16°c, I think that we will all be happy.
Some of you may recall that last weeks thread was dominated by Philip Shehan, starting with his wonderful OLS 15 year trends calculated from GISTEMP data. In fact there are 306 comments and 118 instances of “Philip Shehan“.
In replying to his initial comment I said that claimed that GISTEMP figures showed a warming bias over other data sets like HADCRUT. In reply Philip Shehan did a “woodfortrees” graph that shows considerable conformity.
The answer to who was right was that we both were. I used 2011 data, and Phillip Shenan used current data. The reasons for the divergence I posted at
There are two major reasons for the divergence in the data sets in 2011.
1. For the early C20th warming (about 1910-1944) GISTEMP reported two-thirds the warming of HADCRUT3. GISTEMP now has pretty much the same warming as HADCRUT4.
2. For the period 1998-2010 in 2011 GISTEMP reported a warming rate very similar to the period 1976-1998. It now reports a drop to half the rate. In other words, there was a pause in warming, but the experts at NASA could not detect it.
The upshot is that in 2011 GISTEMP were reporting that the 1976-2010 warming phase 120% greater than the early twentieth century warming. Now it reports that the equivalent ratio as just 20% greater. GISTEMP now tells a completely different story about the CO2 effect from just three years ago.
Two issues with Philip Shehan’s 15 year trends are
1. They do not really capture the trends in the data.
2. They slope of the 15 year OLS lines is sensitive to shifting the period by one year. For instance from 1999-2013 to 1998-2012.
I replicated Philip Shehan’s data (or a least tried to – he does not use J-D years) on a graph, along with shifting the periods a year backwards. Compare these slopes to the 5 year centered moving average curve in light blue. Most notably, linear lines do not capture turning points or step changes, such as happened in 1944 and 1998.
Graph is here.
The basic data has been adjusted to show some correlation with the rise in CO2; e.g. on one set I looked at, NASA removed any warming before 1964 (same as 1850) so the rise that occurred between 1850 and 2012 was now occurring from 1964 to 2012.
Philip Shehan (according to him his real name) will never admit that there is anything wrong with the data. He then cherry picks his starting year and plots the corrupt data to “prove” his conclusion (as you point out). When challenged expect the following
No answer to your points
A change of graph cited as proving he is right.
A reference to some article in Skepticalscience.
A claim that he used some other data source e.g. the satellite figures, followed by the accusation that we are impugning the honesty of the compilers
A outburst about you using Ad Homs against him.
I lost my temper once and wondered whether he had actually been employed as a PhD qualified scientist. Even that wasn’t answered, so I am still wondering. But I won’t be bothering even reading his crap anymore, and I suggest you ignore him too.
Thanks for the comment. What was most useful about examining Philip Shehan’s comments was comparing and contrasting the NASA and HADCRUT data now with that of three years ago. You comment about NASA removing warming pre-1964 seems to have been partly reversed. The data now tells a completely different story. Given clear biases in compiling the data, the real story is probably more damming to the global warming theory.
In management accountancy (where I used to work) there is an onus to gain a “true and fair view” of the figures, then to highlight where the figures contradict the narrative that you would like to present. In a business, that it is where sales fall short or costs exceed the budget. Highlighting and understanding why enables action to be taken. In climatology it is the opposite. Unfortunately, Philip Shehan is very much in the mainstream when it comes to compiling and understanding the data.
One thing I’ll say of Philip Shehan is that in the previous ‘Weekend Thread’, at the prompting of Vic Gallus, he persuaded a disciple of ‘SkepticalScience’ (SKS), KR to comment here, which was interesting.
Typically, although Philip previously asserted that he had decadal expertise in statistics and lambasted some of us here that we should go away and study same, when KR elaborated what seems to be a unique approach in design of the error margin tool in SKS, Philip admitted that he did not understand the technicalities, despite being a devotee of it. Nevertheless, Philip still insists that SKS regular Kevin C (Kevin Cowtan) the designer of the SKS tool IS correct! Oddly, I can only Google-find a Kevin Cowtan at University of York, Chemistry Department, who has worked on crystallography modelling/statistics, and who seems to be the chap, but nothing to suggest that he is known in the statistics literature.
KR has apparently retired from last week’s thread, and dismissed more modern approaches put to him for when there is wide scatter in time-series data. And, and, no…..I’ll stop there.
Additionally though, there has been silence on my following comment quoted in part:
“…There is also an interesting article by Steve McIntyre ‘Behind the SKS Curtain’ that discusses some naughtiness at SkepticalScience, primarily with Cowtan and Way, but also others such as Cook and Nuccitelli, and more: http://climateaudit.org/2013/11/20/behind-the-sks-curtain/
An interesting discussion is where the highly respected statistician Ian Jolliffe was seriously misrepresented.”
(KR was enthusiastic about a controversial paper by Cowtan and Way but I’ve crossed out Cowtan in the re-quote because it was more about Way).
Philip Shehan has variously claimed his credentials including a PhD in biological molecular magnetic resonance or something hyper-impressive like that. What is odd is that it seems that no institution was involved. Perhaps he is embarrassed that it was at U of Queensland or Western Australia, or JKU, and does not wish to declare it?
BTW I’ve informed him earlier that I find discussion with him to be of no value.
Vic,
I’m sorry to hear that, and it was I understand long before the modern nonsense around John Cook, Lewandowski, Ove Høegh-Guldberg and whatnot too!
30 June: Herald Sun: Andrew Bolt: Clive Palmer and Al Gore become convenient allies
Gore is a co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, which manages and advises on green investments of the kind Gore’s climate scaremongering helps whip up.
Among the businesses it “participates” in is Australia’s $1 trillion Investor Group on Climate Change, which comprises Goldman Sachs and many of our bigger super funds.
Those funds invest big in renewable energy and are scared the Government will soon slash or scrap the Renewable Energy Target, which forces electricity suppliers to use more expensive wind and solar power.
IGCC has protested that “changes to the RET scheme could undermine the value returns on investments made to date” and “we do not favour any changes”.
But the Government resents the RET for costing the average household around $56 a year by 2020 — money that goes to green carpetbaggers without doing any good to the climate… http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/clive-palmer-and-al-gore-become-convenient-allies/story-fni0ffxg-1226971201707
Investor Group on Climate Change: Who are we?
Current members of IGCC, listed below, represent total funds under management of approximately $1 trillion…INCLUDES:
Australian Super
Cbus
Christian Super
Generation Investment Management LLP
Goldman Sachs
Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation
Merrill Lynch
Mirvac
Morgan Stanley
Local Government Super
The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia Limited (ASFA)
UniSuper
VicSuper http://www.igcc.org.au/who_are_we
Nov 2013: TheSustainabilityReport: IGCC welcomes CCA draft report on emissions targets
The Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) welcomes the “pragmatic assessment” of the Climate Change Authority (CCA) draft report, but says it raises questions of how Australia will achieve higher emissions reductions… http://www.thesustainabilityreport.com.au/igcc-welcomes-cca-draft-report-on-emissions-targets/4424/
Palmer happy to have people’s Super funds pay for CAGW policies, but obviously has his eyes on the Super funds prize for himself, as well!
30 June: Herald Sun: Clive Palmer’s vision for Victorian industry
by Jessica Marszalek and Michelle Ainsworth
The mining magnate turned federal MP has revealed his plan to turn the Latrobe Valley into a minerals processing hub, allowing Australia to cash in on its resources for even higher prices and address soaring unemployment…
Speaking at a weekend festival held at his Queensland golf resort, the PUP leader told the Herald Sun he wants to see copper, nickel and steel shipped from other states into Victoria to be processed.
“We want Victoria to be the economic powerhouse of the country, the industrial heartland,” he said…
***He said ports, infrastructure, roads and hi-tech manufacturing plants should be built with investment from superannuation funds… http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/clive-palmers-vision-for-victorian-industry/story-fni0fit3-1226971412228
despite the CAGW myth unravelling at a rapid pace, the politicians plough on:
30 June: SMH: Lisa Cox: Clive Palmer denies division in Palmer United Party over renewable energy target
The Fairfax MP says incoming Palmer United Party senator Jacqui Lambie will “always go along with the team” despite her calls for Tasmanian businesses to be exempt from the target…
“Everyone will be voting in accordance with our statement with Al Gore,” Mr Palmer said on Monday.
“Every senator can make calls for their state – the Liberals do it all the time, and Labor.
“They’ve got the right to say that.
“It’s her statement, that’s what she thinks but that’s not how the party has decided to vote.
“She’ll always go along with the team.”…
Mr Palmer’s comments come amid a push from 25 Coalition backbenchers to have aluminium smelters exempted from the renewable energy target entirely…
The current target of 41,000 GwH by 2020 would represent about 27 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation because of a decline in electricity usage in recent years.
“The smelting industry is forecasting an $80 million cut to it by 2017 because of the RET,” Mr Tehan said…
“This isn’t about abandoning the RET,” Mr Tehan said.
“This is about what they call the true 2020 position and as part of the change and exemption for the aluminium smelting sector.” http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/clive-palmer-denies-division-in-palmer-united-party-over-renewable-energy-target-20140630-3b2rr.html
any ETS is a con, Xenaphon:
30 June: Mackay Dailly Mercury: Rae Wilson: Senator Xenaphon says Clive Palmer’s ETS a ‘con’
But he said what Mr Palmer was proposing would start at some indeterminable time in the future, suggesting it could be anything from five years to 30 years before it started, and at an undetermined price.
“There is no set time because it’s so conditional on other countries adopting an ETS,” he said.
“For that reason I think it’s a con.
“There’s nothing there.”… http://www.dailymercury.com.au/news/Senator-Xenaphon-has-called-Clives-ETS-a-con/2303385/
28 June: UK Telegraph: Emily Gosden: Green energy cost hits record high as expensive turbines built at sea
Annual bill for consumers to subsidise renewable technologies has soared to more than £2.5bn as more plants are built and the cost for each unit of electricity rises
The cost of generating green electricity has hit a record high as subsidies are handed to expensive offshore wind farms and household solar panels, new figures show.
The annual bill for consumers to subsidise renewable technologies has soared to more than £2.5bn as more turbines are built and households install panels on their roofs.
But new figures show that the average cost for each unit of green electricity has also increased, hitting a record high of £66.97 per MWh in 2012-13, the most recent period for which figures are available.
The figure was a rise from £54.26 the year before, despite pledges from ministers to bear down on the costs of green energy.
The increase reflects the drive to build wind turbines at sea, which receive roughly twice as much subsidy as those built onshore, where wind farms have proved increasingly controversial…
Subsidies paid to energy companies for this kind of large-scale project reached £2bn, from £1.5bn a year before.
The new figures also reflect the rush by tens of thousands of households to install solar panels on their roofs at generous subsidy levels before ministers cut support in March 2012. The bill for this kind of small-scale subsidy leapt to £500m in 2012-13, from £150m the year before.
Dr John Constable, director of Renewable Energy Foundation, a UK charity that has long been critical of the costs of the renewables targets, said: “DECC is subsidising renewables to meet arbitrary and over-ambitious EU targets, so it was inevitable that we would move rapidly up the cost curve once the ‘cheaper’ opportunities had either been fully developed like landfill gas or exceeded the limits of public acceptability like onshore wind.”
He added: “Subsidy costs are now spiralling out of control – the annual burn is about £3bn a year and rising fast. There still is a good case for experimenting with renewables, but building so much capacity when the whole sector is still fundamentally uneconomic is bound to end in tears.”…
A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “As we move closer to achieving the government’s renewables target it is inevitable we will start using more expensive forms of renewable energy such as offshore wind, which can be deployed at far greater scale than other renewable technologies. By supporting these technologies now we are driving down their costs. (GOES ON TO PREDICT THIS WILL LOWER ELECTRICITY BILLS AT SOME FUTURE DATE) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10931986/Green-energy-cost-hits-record-high-as-expensive-turbines-built-at-sea.html
Diesel is now a “green” source in the UK. It’s the only way they will get through a very cold winter now they’ve shut down so many conventional plants.
30 June: SMH: Alister Doyle/Reuters: Emperor penguins slide towards endangered list
Oslo: Global warming will cut Antarctica’s 600,000-strong emperor penguin population by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which the birds breed becomes less secure, according to a new study.
***The report urges governments to list the birds as endangered, even though populations in 45 known colonies were likely to rise slightly by 2050 before declining…
“It’s not happy news for the emperor penguin,” said Hal Caswell of the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a co-author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change…
The impact of climate change on penguins gets less attention than the effect on polar bears, which are often portrayed by scientists as victims of man-made warming and shrinking ice at the other end of the planet.
***Despite rising global temperatures, sea ice around Antarctica has expanded in recent winters… http://www.smh.com.au/world/emperor-penguins-slide-towards-endangered-list-20140630-zsqbr.html
30 June: SMH: Alicia Chang/AP: NASA to fight global warming from space
Climate change scientists welcomed the latest flight attempt…
“We don’t have time to waste. We need solutions now,” said Elisabeth Holland, a professor of climate change at the University of South Pacific in Fiji who helped write the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report… http://www.smh.com.au/world/nasa-to-fight-global-warming-from-space-20140630-zsqc1.html
30 June: ABC Breakfast: Stop The Presses: The decline of Fairfax
Ben Hills, a former investigative journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has written an insider’s account of the decline of Fairfax.
Once one of Australia’s most successful media organisations, some fear it’s now in a death spiral as readers desert the printed newspaper, journalists are retrenched, and management struggles to make enough money from its news websites. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/stop-the-presses-the-decline-of-fairfax/5558890
former Irish Times journo, Smyth, knows everything about us:
29 June: Financial Times: Jamie Smyth in Sydney: Australia risks isolation among G20 by scrapping carbon tax
Tony Abbott has had little to celebrate since becoming Australia’s prime minister because of his plummeting approval ratings and a hostile senate…
The (carbon) tax is blamed by Mr Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition for raising electricity prices and endangering Australia’s A$60bn coal industry. Mr Abbott’s promise to prioritise economic growth over environmental protection struck a chord with a disillusioned public…
Barack Obama last month proposed cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 30 per cent by 2030, from 2005 levels. China, the world’s biggest polluter, is piloting carbon emissions trading schemes in a sign it may be willing to join a push for a global deal to curb emissions at next year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Tim Stephens, associate law professor at the University of Sydney, said: “By scrapping carbon pricing Australia risks isolation at future climate change negotiations as it will not be able to prove to others it will be able to cut its own emissions.”…
Diplomats say he has resisted US efforts to place climate change high on the G20 leaders’ summit agenda to be held in Brisbane in November…
A recent poll by the Lowy Institute showed that after six years of declining public concern about climate change, the trend had reversed with 45 per cent of people saying it is a “serious and pressing problem”.
“The climate change debate is fraught with danger for Abbott,” said Ian McAllister, professor of politics at the Australian National University. “Our surveys show people believe the science.” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7dfca9c4-fe06-11e3-bd0e-00144feab7de.html
Opinion piece at WSJ, unattributed:
29 June: WSJ: The Carbon Regulation Bubble
Hank Paulson endorses a carbon tax. But is he right this time?
The climate change industry always needs a fresh angle, and the latest is that carbon emissions are an economic threat akin to mortgage-backed securities before the financial panic. The analogy comes from Hank Paulson —and if he has spotted a bubble this time, we guess one out of two is an improvement on zero out of one…
With the travelling billionaire wilburys of Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, the former Treasury Secretary put out a 197-page study last week that predicts the costs of a warming catastrophe. Their “Risky Business” project is meant to awaken the green conscience of business leaders, and President Obama’s endorsement was inevitable: Even George W. Bush’s money man agrees…
The report reads like a prospectus, except with years of “investments” in fossil fuels returning damage across industries and regions…
“Risky Business” endorses a carbon tax, and that option really does share something with subprime loans and exotic financial instruments: Choosing to ration carbon today is a bet about the future—and one likely to end no better…
The world saw modest warming over the 20th century but temperatures have plateaued over the last 15 years or so, a pause the climate models did not predict and cannot explain…
There will always be inherent scientific uncertainty regarding a phenomenon as dynamic and complex as the Earth’s climate, but the climateers admit to no uncertainty other than that the apocalypse might be worse…
Turning over the U.S. economy to the green central planners may expose the country to even greater climate harms, to the extent that their ministrations impede economic progress. A wealthier future society will be better able to adapt and mitigate harm over time if Mr. Paulson’s side of the bet is right…
Speculators like Mr. Paulson are actually inflating a climate regulation bubble—and the real danger isn’t that the problem is too big to manage. It’s their supposed solution. http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-carbon-regulation-bubble-1404081396
while CAGW gatekeepr MSM ignored Steven Goddard’s revelations, some MSM have not:
27 June: UK Daily Mail: David Martosko: Obama mocks GOP global warming skeptics and says they ‘pretend’ they ‘can’t read’ – but ignores new claims that the US has been COOLING since the 1930s
The president spoke to a partisan audience of environmental activists on Wednesday night in Washington
He claimed GOP lawmakers believe global warming is real but won’t admit it because they’re afraid of ‘a bunch fringe elements’ in their own party
‘They ducked the question and said “Hey, I’m not a scientist”,’ Obama joked
Obama ignored new evidence that American scientists have been altering climate data for years
The US Historical Climatology Network has been adjusting its records by replacing temperatures with data fabricated by computer models
As he tries to rally public support around new White House rules aimed at coal-burning power plants, however, the president hasn’t yet addressed a brewing scandal in the scientific community.
Global warming specialists inside the scientific community are buzzing about revelations first made Friday, which show how the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official graph of historical U.S. surface temperatures records has been quietly altered for years.
Government scientists, it is alleged, have been tweaking some of the world’s most oft-cited climate records by replacing actual temperature readings in the United States, Iceland and Australia with hypothetical numbers derived from computer models…
The damning graphs published on the ‘Real Science’ blog by Steven Goddard, the nom de plume of a self-described ‘lifelong environmentalist’ with graduate-level scientific credentials…
They are also tripped up by the changing list of temperature measurement stations, Goddard writes, as more estimates are used instead of real readings: ‘As rural stations are lost, the infilling process contaminates them with warmer urban stations.’
This, he says, is how the U.S. government has claimed the earth has been steadily warming by 3 degrees Celsius per century, while the actual measurements indicate that the planet has been cooling since the 1930s.
Obama, however, steered clear of science on Wednesday and accused Republicans of ignoring global-warming evidence for political advantage… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2671146/Obama-mocks-GOP-global-warming-skeptics-says-pretend-read-ignores-new-claims-US-COOLING-1930s.html
27 June: Detroit News: Frank Beckmann: Climate alarmists won’t save economy
Faced with an economic report that was about to show a 2.9 percent drop in gross domestic product (GDP, a key economic indicator), President Barack Obama and his band of gloomy climate scaremongers introduced us to a new one — climate change is now a threat to the U.S. economy…
This should come as good news.
At last, we’re safe from the bigger concerns that the planet is being destroyed by our use of SUVs, air conditioning and jet travel.
Saving a planet that is irreparably damaged — as the alarmists have told us has happened because we haven’t addressed the dangers of CO2 emissions in time — is such a big job, even for the wizards of smart in the church of environmental religion, but saving the economy? Now that’s a possibility…
This latest initiative, called “The Risky Business Project,” uses all the usual ruses employed by the imaginative alarmist crowd, more frequent heavy storms, rising sea levels, melting arctic ice caps, and, of course, catastrophic temperature increases.
You can talk to them all day about the reductions in heavy storms over more than a decade, the lack of sea level rise, the actual increase of Arctic ice cover, and the 17-year hiatus in global temperature rise, but they won’t want to hear it.
You can point out, as Steven Goddard did at his website called Real Science, that alarmists have fraudulently changed the temperature data from years past to falsely show a more recent warming trend — the real numbers show the 1930s as the warmest years in the U.S. — and Obama, et al, cover their ears…
In addition to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — yep, the guy who forced banks to accept TARP loans even if they didn’t want them — the Risky Business group includes none other than Tom Steyer, the billionaire California environmental activist who’s buying up Democratic party candidates wherever he can…
But as is the case with the so-called scientists who warn of cataclysmic climate change, one need only follow the money to determine the true motives of the alarmists….
In Steyer’s case, he and his former hedge fund company are invested in a firm that is competing with the Keystone pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil.
Yes, Steyer has been involved in all sorts of fossil fuel investments to make his fortune and he now seeks to grow it through destruction of the traditional fuel industry and government subsidy for his new favorite green projects and investments, all with the help of Peters and other politicians he supports… http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140627/OPINION01/306270020
27 June: Carroll County Times: Michael Zimmer: Ground climate change debate in facts
Some news reports from around the world, and some columns from various sources have caught my eye recently on the subject of climate change, or global warming if one prefers that term…
A column that drew my attention was from Christopher Booker writing for the London Telegraph June 21…
Booker expressed amazement at the part “played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data.”
He cited as “another damning example” the information uncovered by Steven Goddard’s science blog.
Goddard purports to reveal “adjustments” to the temperature records of U.S. surface temperatures by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Goddard believes NOAA has substituted actual temperature data with “data fabricated by computer models.”
Goddard compared currently published temperature graphs with those based on temperatures measured at that time. The results seem to indicate a downgrade of earlier temperatures and exaggeration of more recent decades.
Booker concludes that global warming notions should not be looked on as science, “but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberration of group psychology.”… http://www.carrollcountytimes.com/columnists/opinion/mike_zimmer/michael-zimmer-ground-climate-change-debate-in-facts/article_65188aa7-0bf1-5db6-9661-91619281c2d3.html
however, i can’t resist posting this snarky piece of nonsense in the UK Mirror. love the use of “we” and “us”:
24 June: UK Mirror: Conrad Quilty-Harper: Did NOAA “fiddle” global warming data? Nah
Debunking the latest manufactured controversy about global warming data.
To Steven Goddard, Christopher Booker, James Delingpole, Matt Drudge and the rest of the “climate change”-isn’t-real brigade, this is a deadly sin and proves that NASA and NOAA are committing Orwellian thought crimes with the data.
To the rest of ***us, it’s scientists doing science, and the mere fact that ***we have to explain it makes ***us depressed… http://ampp3d.mirror.co.uk/2014/06/24/did-noaa-fiddle-global-warming-data-nah/
“a leading indicator of some other effect coming from the Sun after a delay of 11 years or so”. What is the basis for this?
If the simple conclusion is that there is a delay between solar activity and global temperature, this is expected but what is this idea of a second effect?
You would expect that solar activity was the prime driver of temperature anyway on this hot ball of molten rock with a skin the thickness of a balloon. A delay between irradiance and temperature would be quite expected. If it matched the solar cycle, that may be a rough coincidence or an oscillation excited in a complex oscillating feedback systems driven by the first cycle.
Consider that most of the world is covered in water 4km deep which captures 2/3 of the incident sunlight and this huge mass has to heat up, a huge buffer. Air is 1/400th of the mass (1 atmosphere per 10 metres), so the air temperature in the long term is determined by the water temperature and the sunlight goes straight into the water, regardless of CO2. Further, as the water warms slowly, it releases CO2 and 98% of all CO2 is in the water. This is controlled by Henry’s law and the CO2 elevator bring up new dissolved and compressed CO2 rapidly from the depths, regardless of water currents.
As Dr. Murry Selby demonstrated so clearly, while there is no correlation between temperature and CO2, there is an almost perfect match between CO2 and the integral of temperature. For the first statement, he was fired and no one has considered the second result. However the integral of immediate temperature is total irradiance which to first order would give you total energy in and thus the increase in water temperature which in turn gives you the CO2 amplified x 50. (98% is in the ocean)
So what may have been demonstrated is nothing more than the expected delay between water heating and irradiance. To propose there is some other, unknown effect coming from the sun seems unfounded and unnecessary. Fundamentally though, such Fourier analysis will probably pick up basic oscillations or harmonics in any complex system. That these would be driven by the sun is no suprise. However if the sun harmonic actually matched a physical process in balance, it could be disastrous. Clearly it does not and we get a faint echo of the driving cycle, nothing more. However that alone can change our weather noticeably when tiny parts of one degree are so significant to the IPCC.
30 June: Reuters: Ben Garside: ‘Back door’ climate fix to supplant EU emission goals
As European leaders wrangle over energy and climate goals for 2030, Brussels officials are already pushing through a bill that effectively locks in deeper greenhouse gas cuts while potentially pushing up power bills for households and heavy industries.
European Union leaders are in talks over whether to set a 40 percent cut in carbon emissions compared with 1990 levels, extending a 2020 goal to cut emissions by 20 percent under 1990 levels.
They are wary about costs and some favor a weaker 35 percent goal unless an ambitious global agreement to tackle climate change is struck in late 2015…
The ETS forces over 12,000 power plants, factories and airlines to surrender a carbon permit for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.
But it is failing to drive investment in cleaner technologies amid the build-up of a 2.2 billion permit surplus – more than a year’s worth – pushing permit prices to around 5.50 euros ($7.50) per tonne from above 30 euros six years ago.
Billed as a technical fix for Europe’s ailing ETS, analysts say the reserve will have far-reaching implications that far outweigh any tweaks to the overall 2030 target level, which leaders have pledged to agree on by October but made little headway on during discussions last week…
“It’s climate ambition through the back door. It seems to be an easier thing for people to swallow than upping the emission target,” said Trevor Sikorski, a London-based analyst at Energy Aspects. He said installing the reserve rather than adjusting the overall emission target was “simply undemocratic.”… http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/30/us-eu-carbon-reform-idUSKBN0F52HG20140630
Yonniestone –
what an extraordinary attack on a sitting PM by Gore. how desperate is he?
no question in Gore’s mind that Clive Palmer “has a sense of social justice, he has a keen sense of right and wrong”. WTF?
1 July: News Ltd: Clive Palmer faces arrest unless he can explain in court how he spent $12 million
CLIVE Palmer could face arrest unless he fronts a secret arbitration hearing with chequebook stubs that show how he spent $12m that a Chinese company has accused him of taking during last year’s election campaign.
Sino Iron yesterday swamped the Queensland Supreme Court with 15 applications, including a personal subpoena for the federal politician, demanding he produce butts for two cheques numbered 2046 and 2073…
Sino has also subpoenaed Media Circus Pty Ltd, from Brisbane, which ran advertising and produced campaign material for the Palmer United Party in 2013… http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/clive-palmer-faces-arrest-unless-he-can-explain-in-court-how-he-spent-12-million/story-fnda1bsz-1226972900379
btw i see no ABC or Fairfax coverage whatsoever of Palmer’s latest legal problems. Fairfax will go bankrupt eventually, so who cares what they do, but how does our public broadcaster get away with it?
read all:
1 July: Herald Sun: Terry McCrann: Clive Palmer triggers the warmest scream
TWO sentences neatly and completely capture the total irrationality and sheer, raging religious fervour of the global warming true, true believers.
They both came as deep primeval screams in delayed reaction to Clive Palmer’s climate change twostep with Mr Climate Hysteria himself, the man who used to be the next president of the US, until he found religion and fortune could be combined in very convenient climate untruths, Al Gore.
The initial reaction of true believers was one of almost euphoric rapture. Al and Clive had seemingly united to defeat the Climate Anti-Christ Abbott; Julia Gillard’s carbon tax and Gaia would be saved.
Nowhere was this reaction more extensive or ecstatic than at Climate Central Downunder, The Age. The paper revelled in the Anti-Christ’s coming discomfort…
Let a few more years run out, and apart from even more evidence that the planet, as opposed presumably to Gaia, ain’t warming as predicted, the emptiness of that claim will become almost undeniable.
And in its deepest, most inchoate scream, The Age is telling us that it just can’t bear that prospect… http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/clive-palmer-triggers-the-warmest-scream/story-fni0d8gi-1226972903656?nk=36dc605f223414970d90c210bd84bbb9
meanwhile, Australian Financial Review gives Hank Paulson space, but puts it behind a paywall. they can keep it:
the very MSM that loved Occupy Wall St. (including our own AFR, ABC, Fairfax) now love these guys! it doesn’t get more surreal than that. they can lie through their teeth – no problem:
29 June: CNN: Fmr. U.S. Treasury Secy. Rubin on climate change: “The risk here is catastrophic”
CNN’s FAREED ZAKARIA GPS features an interview with the former U.S. Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, Henry Paulson, and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin…
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: According to an important, dramatic new report, the future could be bleak for most Americans. By mid-century, it says, 23 billion dollars of property will likely be underwater (literally) in Florida alone. Crop yields in the Midwest will probably be down 50 to 70 percent. Americans will likely experience 2 to 3 times as many days with temperatures above 95 degrees as they do today. All this, the report’s authors say, if we don’t do something about climate change now. And the report has serious pedigree…
PAULSON: Well, Fareed, I think there are a lot of fellow Republicans, my fellow Republicans, business leaders and political leaders, that are ready for a serious discussion about the science and the risks that come out of the science…
PAULSON: Yes. What I’ve said about a carbon tax is some people that oppose it are opposing it because they don’t like the government playing a big role. And, you know, the perverse aspect of that is, frankly, those that are resisting taking action now are guaranteeing that the government will be playing a bigger role, because we’re seeing now and we’re going to see an increasing number of natural disasters, Mother Nature acts. We have forest fires, we have floods, we have big storms and storm surges, we have killer tornadoes…
RUBIN: I wouldn’t frame the issue the way you just did, Fareed. If you – if you have the view, which Hank and I both have, that the risk here is catastrophic and catastrophic to life on Earth as we know it – then that’s a risk we cannot take. And once you start with the recognition that this could be catastrophic, then it seems to me, you do a full court press on all fronts…
ZAKARIA: … The Chinese and Indians, by some measures, build one new coal-fired power plant each week. And that’s going to change the climate no matter what happens in the United States. What do you say?
RUBIN: Fareed, I think the answer to that is not complicated. This is a transnational issue that’s going to affect all of our countries. It is of enormous importance to all of us, I think, as I said, a catastrophic risk. And I think that the way the United States can best contribute is, A, get our own house in order. And by getting our own house in order, put ourselves in a much better position to then work with the Chinese and others around the world so that everybody does what they need to do… http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/29/fmr-u-s-treasury-secy-rubin-on-climate-change-the-risk-here-is-catastrophic/
This would be the same Robert Rubin who under Clinton was responsible for egregiously abolishing the Glass- Steagal act (thereby removing the last check and balance in the system that resulted in the current unfettered derivatives speculation threatening the world’s economic stability), also former CEO of Goldman Sachs until he became US Treasury secretary, and who while US Treasury secretary was also simultaneously on the payroll of Citibank to the tune of $100 million – for services rendered no doubt- that Robert Rubin?
And all those CAGW acolytes who in light of above still want to suggest that climate change activism is some kind of altruistic behaviour by the caring and sharing brigade who only want to see an end to 3rd world poverty, I ask- are you complete idiots or what?
u don’t get more pro-Occupy Wall St than Mother Jones, yet witness this love affair with Paulson et al! unbelievable.
30 June: Mother Jones: Chris Mooney: Now Wall Street is Calling For Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen
Knowing that conservatives will never listen to liberals—or to President Obama—on climate change, many well meaning, science-minded people have sought to identify other messengers who might possibly sway the right.
Accordingly, they’ve tried tapping evangelical Christians, former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents, and celebrity politicians like the moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s an astute, psychologically sound theory (“trusted messengers” and all that) and yet, it never seems to work. Why does it never work?…
This weekend on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, two former treasury secretaries, Henry Paulson (a Republican) and Robert Rubin (a Democrat) went on the air to discuss climate change and, in particular, the new “Risky Business” report with which they’re closely affiliated. The report, emerging from a partnership that also includes Michael Bloomberg and the environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, makes the case that climate change will have dire economic costs. On the air, Paulson said point blank that climate inaction entails “radical risk taking.” Rubin added that the risk is “catastrophic.” …
All of this is true and eminently sane…
But here’s the problem: Is Paulson, a Wall Street Republican who says he wants a carbon tax, a “trusted messenger” on the right?…
Which brings us back to the why “it never works” question. Why do trusted messengers never seem to reach the right on climate change?
The answer is that the right is not its old self, and once trusted messengers aren’t trusted any longer.
If this was the United States of 30 years ago, we’d already have a bipartisan consensus on climate change. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/06/hank-paulson-robert-rubin-fareed-zakaria-climate
1 July: ABC The Drum: Greg Foyster: The question greenies are too afraid to discuss
(Greg Foyster is a Melbourne journalist and the author of Changing Gears: A Pedal-Powered Detour from the Rat Race.)
PHOTO CAPTION: (Brisbane climat action protest) Where is the discussion about the unorthodox, radical solutions that may be required?
As the Australian public baulks at even a modest carbon price, climate change activists have set their sights on what is pragmatic and convenient, not what is truly necessary, writes Greg Foyster…
On June 18, the Australian Senate launched an inquiry into “The Abbott Government’s attacks on Australia’s environment, and their effects on our natural heritage and future prosperity”.
Initiated by the Greens, the inquiry lists a litany of grievances: abolishing the Climate Commission and the Biodiversity Fund, attempting to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and carbon price, cutting funding to Environmental Defenders Offices, and attempting to de-list a swathe of forest from the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Areas.
It was an obvious political ploy, and the message was clear: the Coalition is tearing through Australia’s environmental programs like a Hummer bush-bashing in the Daintree…
In 2011, Professor Kevin Anderson, then director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre, co-authored a paper arguing that two degrees represented a threshold not between dangerous and safe, but between dangerous and “extremely dangerous”. NASA’s James Hansen has described the two-degree target as “a prescription for long-term disaster”…
On June 21 and 22, about 300 environmentalists and academics attended the Breakthrough National Climate Restoration Forum in Melbourne to address these very questions and take a sobering look at what mitigating catastrophic warming really entails…
The first session laid out the global emergency we face. Danny Harvey, a geography professor at the University of Toronto, described how two degrees of warming risked 10 to 30 metres of eventual sea level rise, significant dieback of the Amazon, and a near total loss of coral reefs.
Climate analyst David Spratt argued that even the IPCC’s most ambitious carbon budget to stay below the two-degree target has a one-in-three chance of failure. If humanity wants a less than 10 per cent probability of exceeding the two-degree target, he said, then “there is no carbon budget left”…
Brett Parris from Monash University argued the climate record shows a sudden shift between equilibriums. But economists and policy makers are hoping they can manipulate the climate to a point that suits them – two degrees, or even three or four degrees – without knowing where the real threshold lies. “What if there’s no equilibrium between one degree and six degrees of warming?” asked Parris…
That brings us the most radical proposal of all. David Keith, a professor of public policy and applied physics at Harvard, presented a case for climate engineering, a hubristic scheme to cool the planet by spraying sunlight-reflecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere…
As the Abbott Government continues attacking environmental programs and the Australian public baulks at even a modest carbon price, green groups might be reluctant to broach more radical solutions. But if they don’t agitate for what’s truly necessary, as opposed to what’s politically convenient, then who will?
It’s time we had a frank – and frightening – discussion about the catastrophe we’re heading for and the full suite of options available to turn the situation around. Is two degrees too high? Do we need to restructure the economy? Is climate engineering inevitable? These are the climate debates we have to have, and soon. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-01/foyster-the-question-greenies-are-too-afraid-to-discuss/5560738
Sorry for the pun but Foyster has simply foisted his unqualified opinion on a minority that read that Drum website stuff. Unfortunately, the opinions there I imagine are all in the same direction but should be labelled up front as OPINION.
I understand that Malcolm Turnbull is reviewing a report on proposed pruning of ABC and SBS activities. Hopefully it may result in deletion of such awful stuff including for example I would hope the so-called RN ‘Science Show’ and its website. I’ve not read the report and would not like to see deletion of the brilliant digital radio services which I heard is a recommended action. Ho hum.
Steven Goddard’s revelations still not mentioned in any Australian MSM, but space is always found for another round of “denialists” “flat-earthers”. ugly:
1 July: AFR: Phillip Coorey: Lack of public support killed carbon price, Shorten to explain
In a speech to be delivered to the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum in Canberra on Tuesday, Mr Shorten will say that while Labor still believes in an emissions trading scheme, “Labor has to live with our failure to make the case, to take the public with us on the need for action on climate change”…
Mr Shorten says at the 2007 election, both John Howard and Kevin Rudd promised to put a price on carbon and the subsequent debate between Mr Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull was about the details of the scheme.
But within one year of Mr Abbott deposing Mr Turnbull as leader in December 2009, and the Greens voting with the Coalition to defeat Mr Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), “the political climate changed dramatically”.
“Labor found ourselves in a minority government, battling a hung parliament and caught up in a bitter, three-year debate about a carbon tax,” he will say. “Tony Abbott played the politics of division hard – and he won.”
***Subsequently, the debate became one about whether climate change even existed “and the denialists, the flat earthers and the internet trolls have had a field day ever since”.
He says while Labor may not have made a compelling enough case, those in business, academia and the climate movement should examine their own role in helping the CPRS fail.
He says many members of the Greens and the broader environmental movement “lament choosing the purity of impotence over the practical benefits of compromise”… http://www.afr.com/p/national/lack_of_public_support_killed_carbon_VSr4Kqt91AnWa7m5c9T7MI
proof once again – as if it were needed – that it is the entire Australian MSM that pushes the CAGW meme, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary:
1 July: Australian Editorial: Carbon abatement needs a bipartisan policy approach
The Greens, who refused to sign up to Labor’s emissions trading scheme, and Labor, which imposed the world’s most expensive carbon price on the nation, have only themselves to blame if, as seems likely, Australia is left without a meaningful carbon abatement policy…
It is now abundantly clear that the opportunity cost of not pushing ahead with the soft-start cap-and-trade system linked to global action, first envisaged by Howard government adviser Peter Shergold in 2006, has been considerable…
Mr Rudd could not get the necessary support for his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme because it was deemed to lack sufficient ambition.
As a result, the fruit of his dramatic escalation of rhetoric and expectations on climate-change action was firstly the scalp of then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who had tried to negotiate in good faith…
If nothing else, Labor’s self-harm exposed the truth of this newspaper’s claim that the Greens are a protest party unfit for government. For not supporting Mr Rudd’s CPRS, the Greens must wear ultimate responsibility for leaving Australia’s climate change response in tatters…
As Paul Kelly wrote on Saturday, once abolished, resurrection of an emissions trading scheme will be a long, hard, bitter road. This newspaper has been an unwavering supporter of a cap-and-trade system as the most efficient means to achieve substantial cuts in carbon emissions…
Green groups point to US state-based carbon-trading schemes. But even in California, political reality is biting. Last week, 16 Democrat assembly members, a third of their caucus, signed a letter urging California Air Resources Board chairwoman Mary Nichols to delay or redesign the state’s cap-and-trade program. They were “concerned about the impact of the program on constituents”. Against these realities, our economy-wide, $26-a-tonne carbon tax is out of step with the rest of the world. Six years of overshoot on carbon pricing has left Australia’s body politic fatigued. Great political capital and energy have been spent, but the nation has arrived right back where it started. The lesson is carbon abatement policy requires bipartisan support. The minor parties cannot be trusted. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/carbon-abatement-needs-a-bipartisan-policy-approach/story-e6frg71x-1226972867256?nk=503e5b158650872c3656fe64e4714d63
30 June: Fox News: Zev Chafets: Climate change: The moment I became a climate skeptic
I got my first lesson on the subject of climate change more than 10 years ago. My tutor was an internationally famous climate scientist at a major Ivy League university…
In May 2001, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its third report, which got a lot of media attention. I looked through it and realized immediately that I had no chance of understanding the science…
One item got my attention. It said: “Projections based on the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios suggest warming over the 21st Century at a more rapid rate than that experienced for at least the last 10,000 years.”
I called the professor, one of the authors of the report, for a clarification (he remains nameless because we were off the record). “If global warming is caused by man-made emissions,” I asked, “what accounts for the world warming to this same level 10,000 years ago?”
There was a long silence. Then the professor said, “Are you serious?”
I admitted that I was.
The professor loudly informed me that my question was stupid. The panel’s conclusion was indisputable science, arrived at after years of research by a conclave of the world’s leading climate scholars. Who was I to dispute it?
I told him I wasn’t disputing it, just trying to understand how, you know, the world could have been this hot before without the help of human agency.
Maybe this is just a natural climate change like ice ages that once connected continents and warming periods that caused them to drift apart or …
At which point I heard a click. The professor hung up on me. At that exact moment I became a climate skeptic. I may not know anything about science, but I have learned over a long career that when an expert hangs up in the middle of a question, it means that he doesn’t know the answer…
I was reminded of this encounter the other day while reading a Time Magazine cover story titled, “Eat Butter: Scientists labeled fat the enemy. Why they were wrong.” …
According to Time, this was “so embedded in modern medicine and nutrition that it became nearly impossible to challenge the consensus.” Scientific journals refused to publish data challenging this orthodoxy. People who did, like Dr. Robert Atkins, were derided as quacks.
Now that consensus has flipped (Time Magazine doesn’t publish articles outside any current consensus). It may flip again someday as we learn even more about nutrition and health. But for now, the danger of eating fat – once an unshakable tenet of settled science – is out of intellectual fashion. People who have virtuously deprived themselves of t-bones, ice cream and cheesecake are now left with egg on their faces… http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/06/30/climate-change-moment-became-climate-skeptic/
30 June: WaPo: Wonkblog: Roberto A. Ferdman: How much your meat addiction is hurting the planet
The environment doesn’t appreciate our meat obsession.
The average meat-eater in the U.S. is responsible for almost twice as much global warming as the average vegetarian, and close to three times that of the average vegan, according to a study (pdf) published this month in the journal Climatic Change.
The study, which was carried out at Oxford University, surveyed the diets of some 60,000 individuals (more than 2,000 vegans, 15,000 vegetarians, 8,000 fish-eaters, and nearly 30,000 meat-eaters)…
The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that the rest of the world appears to be headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050, largely driven by burgeoning middle classes in the developing world… http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/30/how-much-your-meat-addiction-is-hurting-the-planet/
30 June: Grand Island Independent Nebraska: Cal Thomas: No denying climate change deniers
People who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid known as global warming-climate change are not just “deniers”; we are guilty of a “nihilistic refusal” to address the issue. So says a Washington Post editorial commenting favorably on last week’s Supreme Court ruling that allows the Environmental Protection Agency, under certain limits, to proceed under the Clean Air Act to regulate major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.
The actual nihilists are those who refuse to accept any scientific information that undermines their claim that the globe is warming and humans are responsible for it. Cults are like that…
The London Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, author of “The Real Global Warming Disaster,” writes of climate change denier Steve Goddard’s U.S. blog Real Science, which he says shows “…how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of U.S. surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).” …
He concludes: “The U.S. has actually been cooling since the ‘30s, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on ‘fabricated’ data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”
If that isn’t a smoking gun, what is?…
The global warmers are the ones refusing to discuss, debate or even mention the growing body of science questioning and in increasing instances disproving their theories. They also mostly ignore news of manipulated climate models and the serious concerns of scientists who no longer believe the climate is changing significantly.
Many in the media, including some newspaper editorial pages, refuse to broadcast or print information that challenges and in some cases refutes arguments about global warming, claiming it is “settled science.” It is nothing of the kind, as any open-minded person can see by a simple Google search…
Government is not the final arbiter of truth, yet the global-warming cultists worship at its shrine.
Polls show the public has far greater concerns. An April Gallup Poll affirms previous findings: “…warming has generally ranked last among Americans’ environmental worries each time Gallup has measured them with this question over the years.”
So exactly who are the real nihilists and deniers? http://www.theindependent.com/opinion/columnists/cal-thomas-no-denying-climate-change-deniers/article_994194d6-0097-11e4-aa70-0019bb2963f4.html
so many investigations, so many damning headlines (just do a search), so many jumping ship at Barclays, incl Redshaw!
Former head of Barclays carbon trading launches advisory firm
LONDON, July 1 (Reuters) – Louis Redshaw, the former head of carbon, coal and iron ore trading at Barclays investment bank, has launched a London-based advisory firm to help companies manage their risks stemming from carbon trading. http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.5859277
back in 2007!
2007: NYT: James Canter: Carbon trading: Where greed is green
Seeking to match a desire to make money with his environmental instincts, Louis Redshaw, a former electricity trader, met with five top investment banks to propose trading carbon dioxide. Only one, Barclays Capital, was interested in his proposition.
Three years later, the situation has turned around entirely, and carbon experts like Redshaw, 34, are among the rising stars in the City of London financial district. Managing emissions is one of the fastest-growing segments in financial services, and companies are scrambling for talent. Their goal: a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion, but which could grow to $1 trillion within a decade…
“Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall,” said Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital. But he said that in his current job, unlike some of his previous ones, including a stint as a British power trader at Enron, “I don’t have to compromise on anything when I get out of bed in the morning.”
If greed is suddenly good for the environment, then the seedbed for this vast new financial experiment is London…
Carbon could become “one of the fasting-growing markets ever, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives inside of a decade,” said Chris Leeds, 38, the head of emissions trading at Merrill Lynch in London, who plans to expand his team to five traders from two by the end of this year…
One of the few items distinguishing Redshaw’s row of desks from hundreds of others at Barclays Capital is a picture of an iceberg – an award from an environmental finance publication. The way his team blends in is as it should be, Redshaw said: “Only when you’re among hard-nosed traders do you know that a new commodity has truly arrived.”… http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht-money.4.6234700.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
2 July: SMH: Heath Aston: Al Gore told to avoid Clive Palmer’s environment circus
Al Gore was urged by his US-based advisers to pull out of the Clive Palmer press conference when it became clear the Palmer United Party would not link its support for the abolition of the carbon tax to an immediate move to an emissions trading scheme.
Key figures behind the year’s strangest political alliance have confirmed Mr Palmer was shown legal advice that Australia could easily move directly from a fixed price on carbon to an ETS.
When Mr Palmer could not convince his three incoming senators to place conditions on their support to repeal the carbon tax, Mr Gore’s advisers told him to pull out of a public appearance with Mr Palmer.
”There was no agreement, it had fallen over four times, but Gore overrode the advice he was getting and said ‘if this guy is willing to save the clean energy elements [the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Climate Change Authority] I will stand beside him’,” a source said…
Mr Gore has been heavily criticised for adding legitimacy to an event that was less about action on climate change and more about terminating one of the world’s first attempts to put a price on carbon… http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/al-gore-told-to-avoid-clive-palmers-environment-circus-20140701-3b6l2.html#ixzz36G7z4lq5
after Gore, it’s GetUp!!!
1 July: SMH: Mark Kenny: Christine Milne snub to Clive Palmer has greens on edge
Simmering tensions in the conservation community over the Greens’ response to Abbott government environment policies are threatening to fracture the party’s support base.
At issue is the Greens’ refusal to back a return to inflation-based indexation of federal fuel excise – regarded as “perverse” because the party supports price signals on fossil fuels – and Greens leader Christine Milne’s claimed hostility to Clive Palmer…
Senator Milne has urged Greens members to contact Mr Palmer’s office to complain strongly about the carbon tax demise.
But some renewable energy players are upset their party is undermining the Palmer compromise which they see as a lifeline through the retention of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Climate Change Authority, and protection of the Renewable Energy Target of 20 per cent energy production from green sources by 2020…
The worry is that Mr Palmer’s belated support for keeping the RET and the two other bodies, could change.
”Bagging Clive might feel good, but it doesn’t help lock his votes in for his new position,” they (some renewable energy players) said…
The community-based Solar Citizens organisation has emailed its thousands of members asking them to say thanks to Mr Palmer for saving the RET, the CEFC “green bank”, and the Climate Change Authority…
The progressive(??) public campaign group GetUp! also was highly supportive of the PUP position despite disappointment over the carbon price.
”In short, if our new Senate votes with Palmer, this will mean we can still make significant progress towards a clean energy future that will fund renewable energy projects,” it told supporters. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/christine-milne-snub-to-clive-palmer-has-greens-on-edge-20140630-3b4c4.html
Put this together for mate who’s getting hitched next week…
Ah, Sweet Mystery…
If you ever speak with Justin, there’s a good chance you’ll converse,
The esoteric secrets of the wider universe;
Like electron spin and gamma rays, and nucleonic flux,
And the subatomic quarks, we get, from subatomic ducks.
While out there in the cosmos, he knows and he can see,
The length and breadth and depth, of this wondrous galaxy;
These and more he’s seen and done, and still there’s lots of stuff,
He can’t begin to start to know, but for him, it’s not enough.
‘Cos no matter what he knows, and understands, of things which lie above,
It’s just a cold and lonely universe, if it’s all bereft of love;
For when we’re placed upon this earth, we are placed upon it whole,
A complex, fragile creature, made of heart and mind and soul,
Thus there’s more to life than theory, played out within the mind,
[Which is pure incarceration, of the solitary kind;]
No! Just as the eagle, when he soars, must first forget the ground,
We rise above our lowly selves, when we join with those around.
And when we join with someone special, to whom our soul is bared,
Then we find enough is plenty, as long as it is shared;
Thus the miser lives in misery, despite his ample wealth,
But when you sprinkle round the happiness, you spill some on yourself!
So Justin’s had a change of heart, and turned his fertile mind,
To engage with this enigma, of the friendly, female kind,
It’s an old and ancient mystery, and as the poet wrote,
She hasn’t been unravelled yet, excuse me as I quote:
“Now a woman, she’s a woman, I’ve fixed that for a cert;
They’re just as like as rows of peas from hat to hem of skirt.
And then, you find, they’re all so different, when all is said and done,
The more you know of all of them, the less you know of one.Ӡ
And so this poem closes off, as we end this little piece:
Ladies and gents, please raise a glass; May wonders never cease!
† C.J. Dennis. “Washing Day.”
Who says Sceptics don’t have a soft spot?
Cheers,
Speedy
161
Lovely, Speedy. Hope it goes/went over well.
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That’s great Speedy.
10
Wonderful Speedy – you are so good with words.
Hope you don’t mind my sharing this 🙂
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No worries Janama – thanks!
Cheers,
Speedy
00
I MUST (absolutely MUST) change my Avitar. This is not me at all…
Harpo Marx, maybe?
00
NEWS JUST IN!!!
Climate Change to Move the Earth’s Axis!
http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/aust-tropics-set-to-expand-report/story-e6frfku9-1226971080291
I did undergrad and postgrad at JCU so this makes me extra sick.
A) JCU now have a “Climate Change” department, how putrid, and;
B) I thought the tropics were defined by the angle of the Earth’s axis. I know it is probably the silly journalist making the error but then again…
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Uncorroborated and anonymous, but very interesting. Suggest stay with it till the end.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/shorebank.php
30
Now that, along with this link from the other day, makes perfect sense of the Goracle’s visit to Canberra to offer Palmer a hot tip.
30
G’day Tim,all in this article and a lot more was covered on the Glenn Beck program that used to run on foxnews.Week after week more stories and scams and nothing ever denied,obama just did a juliar act,a victim of nasty people.
20
Al Gore spent 2 days in -Australia running a traing course for Climate Change Leaders.
Apparently they were to learn;
Storytelling seems appropriate. I am expecting a lot of that from the comrades.
Regrettably my experiences over the weekend make me feel that we are gradually loosing the battle for rational thinking and objectivity over Climate Change.
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Peter C:
Don’t give up. Sometimes ( to use a cliché ) it is darkest before the dawn.
I have been reading up recently on the beginning of the Evolution debate in the UK. The whole establishment, Royals, Church, Universities, the Royal Society and a number of leading scientists were against the theory. Richard Owen was a very well known and able scientist, and not above some underhand dealings. Despite this opposition, within 2 years the whole situation had changed. The RS had 3 evolutionists successively as Presidents, (some) Churches, Universities and schools were converted, and Parliament was supportive. Owen went from hero to outcast. Even the Museum of Natural History which he founded now has a statue of Charles Darwin looking down the main gallery.
For all their talk the Warmists have lost the debate. Germany was for many years a bastion of support, but in the last year the main stream press have turned against them, the public is sick and tired of electricity rice rises, and coal fired plants are being built as fast as they can. IN Reality, only the UK, France and Sweden are supporting green initiatives, and the UK is looking like turning away soon.
Obama won’t get his ideas in place once the Nov. results come in. China was never willing. Nor Russia. Sth. Korea, Japan, India, Sth. Africa, Canada and Australia are no longer in favour of “climate action”. It is a lot of desperate talk by people suddenly realising that the Titanic Idea isn’t carrying enough lifeboats.
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Graeme,
When your mantra is spend spend spend the governments that favour this approach to buying votes saw a climate tax as an easy way to increase their tax revenue without calling it a tax to pay for their spending.
it was the big bad climate change which has given them the excuse to create a tax that wasn’t their fault (no really it was all that bad CO2 wot dun it) to allow them to continue spending and buy votes.
Turns out with all the pain of tax increases through green initiatives and global cooling (you can adjust the temperature record all you like but when people are cold from the weather its hard to keep telling them they are warm) people just aren’t swallowing the story any more.
90
When I read that quote I just thought ‘Pass me the sick bucket’.
20
” my experiences over the weekend make me feel that we are gradually losing the battle for rational thinking and objectivity over Climate Change.”
No way, there are always people on the make , running these conferences which are attended by the gullible and bored and insecure, who get a feeling of self -importance from conferencing with ” like-minded” people.
Some people seem to spend a large part of their lives in “conferencing”, never realising that they are being taken for fools. It’s a great little racket.
No surprises to find that the Al goracle is knee-deep in it.
50
Farmerbraun,
What we have here is a terrorist training school, in which impressionable young people are committing themselves to a nobel cause which they perceive to have global consequences.
They are not on the make. They are intelligent, committed but misguided people who will convert a lot of people simply because of their enthusiasm. (Al Gore might be on the make. I don’t include him).
My weekend experiences were in fact because I spoke to a number of people I know who, lacking the interest to make their own investigations have bought in to the whole Climate Change meme, including the 97% consensus, increases bad weather and all the rest.
Consequently I think the warmists are winning at the moment.
70
I know it can get you down Peter, been there done that, now apply the facts that your making assumptions on a small sample group that you encountered, are of like minds or education, mix in similar circles and like most people will turn to groupthink as a safety precaution when given the choice.
Also consider when these believers are being directly effected financially and have even a hint of quality of life reduced for little more than a belief then you will see them turn quicker than lager turns to piss.
70
A terrorist training school . . . or just a useful idiot school? 😉
60
Or just another bunch of green wankers that want to impress other green wankers by dropping Al Gore.
The lot of them put together wouldn’t make half a terrorist because they are too weak willed… and those two guys up the back just want to crack onto the chicks.
30
. . which is the required ingredient when making Climate Change Leaders out of Al Gore Followers.
Ya gotta see the irony in that.
40
Connecting with me isn’t what I’m worried about, it’s their desire to connect with my wallet that concerns me.
10
Another strong indication of Obama’s wisdom and competence…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/28/canada-pulls-the-plug-on-the-u-s-keystone-pipeline-will-send-oil-to-asia/
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Eric
This is an interesting piece on the behind the scenes of Keystone ( from a post on WUWT)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/guest-post-meet-man-who-killed-keystone
30
“Obama’s wisdom and competence…”
Not even a trace of irony Eric 🙂
60
READ IT ALL AND WEEP FOR THE STATE OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING:
29 June: UK Daily Mail: David Rose: BBC spends £500k to ask 33,000 Asians 5,000 miles from UK what they think of climate change: Corporation savaged for ‘astonishing’ campaign survey on global warming
BBC under fire after spending hundreds of thousands on survey in Asia
Taxpayers’ money used to ask 33,000 people their views on climate change
More than £500,000 spent by little-known BBC Media Action for survey
It was immediately condemned yesterday as a flagrant abuse of the Corporation’s rules on impartiality and ‘a spectacular waste of money’ by a top academic expert.
Every year, BBC Media Action gets £22.2 million from the taxpayer via the Foreign Office and Department for International Development…
The report ends with advice, apparently written for climate activists: ‘Do not talk about scientific or technical abstractions. Talk about the problems they face in their daily lives… Speak in language that makes sense to people in terms of how they experience climate change.’…
BBC Media Action has a £40 million annual budget, and the proportion not funded by the taxpayer is paid by the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US government…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673654/BBC-spends-500k-ask-33-000-Asians-5-000-miles-UK-think-climate-change-Corporation-savaged-astonishing-campaign-survey-global-warming.html
btw if i hear bbc gushing over driverless cars one more time, i will definitely shut them out altogether, as i have pretty much done with abc. yesterday, some tech geek when asked about them told the beeb it’s pie in the sky & won’t happen for years, so why talk about it.
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Wait for: “97% of Asian populations agree”
50
Three Previously Unknown Active Volcanoes Discovered in Southeast Australia – And Might Erupt in 10,000 Years
So much more to discover…so much more to be learnt.
Still in the infancy of understanding the Earth systems.
50
NVP is considered an active area because carbon dioxide is released from the Earth’s mantle.
Scaper,how can christine and the gangreens allow this to happen.Maybe they could be useful after all and throw their bodies into breaches,kinda like one big Butt plug.
20
btw i should have added that what bbc gushes about is the widespead, general use of driverless cars. i’m not talking about the technology itself.
give thanx i voted informal. ***still pushing that CEFC is “profitable”. who can provide any evidence of that? how to get it corrected, if it is not true?
28 June: Fairfax Brisbane Times: Kim Stephens: Clive Palmer holds court with thousands at Fairfax Festival
Fresh from a high profile week in Canberra Clive Palmer, the billionaire mining magnate turned politician, now reconfiguring himself as the people’s champion, was most certainly the champion of his people at his Sunshine Coast resort.
The Member for Fairfax invited 100,000 of his constituents to the Coolum estate for his inaugural Fairfax Festival weekend and by Saturday afternoon about 5000 had accepted the invitation…
“Australia has less than one per cent of the total share of world carbon, we delude ourselves if we think we are going to change the world,” he said on Saturday.
“What we can do is set up a framework that leads the world.”
He also announced his senators would block the government’s plans to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and potentially wind back the Renewable Energy Target.
***On Saturday he reasoned the CEFC was a “profitable company”, while Prime Minister Tony Abbott should seek endorsement of plans to wind back the RET at the next election.
“If there is to be a review there’s plenty of time to change after next election,” he said…
“Vice President Gore flew to Canberra to see me because he was impressed about our ideas and what we wanted to do for our people.
“He didn’t come and see Bill Shorten, he didn’t come and see Tony Abbot, he didn’t go to the House of Reps and he didn’t go to the Senate.
“He knew, like I did, the most important bit.”…
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/clive-palmer-holds-court-with-thousands-at-fairfax-festival-20140628-zspkg.html
20
***CLIVE PALMER – PLEASE PROVIDE EVIDENCE CEFC IS PROFITABLE. this is all about the vanity of celebrity:
28 June: Guardian: Lenore Taylor: Clive Palmer shifts ground on climate policy: now it’s the economy
PUP leader says Al Gore told him other countries with trading schemes were likely to impose tariffs on imported goods
Clive Palmer has repositioned his party’s shift on climate change policy as an economic decision rather than a response to global warming, just days after appearing on a podium beside climate crusader and former US vice-president Al Gore.
Palmer now says his support for an emissions trading scheme sometime in the future is because Gore told him that other countries with trading schemes were likely to impose tariffs on imported goods.
“That is something I wanted to explain to the Australian people … regardless of your position on climate change that is the reality of life,” he said.
“You will have to have an ETS or otherwise you won’t be able to do international trade … that is why we did it. We didn’t want the Australian people to be disadvantaged.”.
***Similarly he said the Palmer United party had decided to vote against the government’s plan to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation “not on the basis of what it was doing” but because it was “making a profit and employing thousands of people around the country”…
Palmer also returned to the arguments he used when he was sceptical about human-induced climate change. He said his personal understanding of the science of climate change was that mankind’s activities since the 1850s meant it was now contributing 3% rather than 2% of all the carbon in the atmosphere. That meant “nature” was still contributing 97%.
“My view is, if that is true … what we need to do is look at what nature is contributing. That is contrary to what most climate change people. So that is where my difference comes in.”
And he said his party had decided to vote against changes to the renewable energy target because the government had gone to the election promising not to change it, and governments should keep their promises…
Asked by Guardian Australia why he had changed his own election policy, which was to make the renewable energy target voluntary – effectively rendering it meaningless – he said that policy had been “developed further”. The party now wanted the RET to stay unchanged until the next election, due in 2016. “It may well be voluntary after 2016, it may not exist after 2016,” he said…
(WHAT IS THIS PARA?) The PUP senator-elect Dio Wang told Guardian Australia he did not accept the idea of global warming caused by humans. Palmer said Gore had “made his comments independently of me”.
While tariff barriers have been talked about during international climate talks, no country imposes them or has concrete plans to do so…
Palmer has said he will try to introduce a new emissions trading scheme with the price set at zero until other countries take action, but this is almost certain to be defeated in the lower house.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/28/clive-palmer-shifts-ground-on-climate-policy-now-its-the-economy
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“You see, as far as they’re concerned, they own the developing world. They’ve taken on the onerous task of speaking for it in the corridors of power. It’s the new-age version of the white man’s burden, their pet and everyone in it should be oh so grateful for all the love and virtuous attention they lavish on it, but those people better be careful not to abuse all that love or they’ll be given a sharp reminder.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/why-the-developing-world-hates-environmentalists/
Pointman
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The really strange thing is that I was doing hit and runs on the search engine the other day, I can’t even remember what I was looking into either, and I ended up on your site reading that exact post. This was on the 28th in the US so definitely prior to your posting here.
It was a very interesting read. It, along with a quick read of your About page, was very informative in telling me where your head is at regarding the material being discussed as well as why. To be honest had I not read the original article where you explain why/when you wrote your About page I probably would have never read your About page.
While I suspect those your post referred to would throw fits screaming that they aren’t like that what I have seen over the years leaves me seeing them much as you so adeptly described in that post. Nicely done.
00
brisbane times’ kim stephens may write that Palmer invited 100,000 to his “festival”, but there’s no way too many turned up. check this video, hilarious:
VIDEO: Families treated to a day in Palmer’s resort
June 28, 2014: A family fun day at his luxury resort was Clive Palmer’s way of saying thanks for getting him elected to the Australian parliament. But it was also a chance to raise his party’s profile as Queenslanders prepare to go to the polls in Stafford and at the general state election.
http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/families-treated-to-a-day-in-palmer-s-resort/x77utt2
00
I made a point a while back that it might be better to analyse the rate of temperature change rather than anomalies. A sudden change of equipment means that the data for any station is only compromised for that short period of time. As long as the average of the rates from around the world is fairly smooth, then models could be fitted to this (a much tougher test) or the rate data could be shown as a cumulative plot. Like anomalies, it doesn’t matter what the average temperature is at the individual site (still need to be careful as to how these are collated).
I looked at Darwin because of its infamy, using the raw data from GISS. Some missing data was replaced with the long term averages for the month.
A plot of the data from three months and the annual mean is shown here. Firstly, excuse the heading, secondly, July doesn’t show an obvious difference in trends before 1939 and after 1939 so its not clear cut that something unnatural happened. Data from a station commenced in Jan of 1941, data stopped being collected from the post office site on hourly basis in Jan 1942 (change of equipment) which is not surprising because it was bombed the next month.
The next plot is the mean of moving linear regressions for each month over 5 years. It comes out a bit smoother than smoothing with a moving average of the differences. I did the months separately because there is a much larger range of values when calculating a line of best if to all the months together.
Two times the standard deviation from the mean is shown. Only three years come out larger than this (or less than this). The year 1894 was when it was decided that official stations should have Stevenson Screens.. I don’t know if it was installed before this or when data began to be collected from it. The others were 1938 and 1939.
The third plot is a cumulative plot of the rate data before adjusting the three large negative values for 1894, 1938 and 1939 by replacing the outlier with the mean of all values. This method does nothing about UHI effects or other effects that are gradual.
Please excuse a few of the flaws. It was done during coffee and rain breaks and I don’t have time to fix some of the headings.
40
Not sure if I understand your point exactly Vic.
Perhaps you could explain a bit more.
10
For example, rather than adding up the temperatures above the local average, add up how much the temperature has changed in the past year for each site. The actual temperature doesn’t matter so when more stations in hotter or colder areas are added, you don’t get an artificial trend. You still have to be careful because the weather patterns change over the century.
The cumulative plot starts at 0, so you don’t get a measure of the global mean, just how its changed over the past century and a bit. You get a smoother plot and all that is important is the change in shape of the curve. You add a constant based on the best estimate of the global mean temperature to see how that has changed.
20
Sorry. Not that a good reply. Getting the trend from the individual sites and collating them should be the same as collating the temperatures and then getting a trend. With crappy data, the former should give smoother trends and you simple toss out an outlier if something strange happened (the equivalent of offsetting the rest of the temperature data).
Secondly, there are two tests of a model. Is it in the right ball park and does it predict the trend correctly. The latter is why the pause is important.
00
Vic the odd century or so ago, science collected every scrap of data available from outposts explorers and all sailing ships to come to the conclusion that the world average was 14.7C at 1013 Mb at the time it was degrees F and inches of mercury. That said the standard was applied and even now is the datum for the standard output power of a jet engine. The take off power is calculated from this datum for temp, height of airfield and runway length for your take off weight. I was surprised recently to see on of the main data sets telling us anomalies, then right at the end saying the world has warmed and their data is telling them that the world is now 14.54C. Just telling us what they believe the world temperature is would put paid to all their BS.
50
As above, when you do a cumulative plot you have to use an estimate of what the starting temperature is. You get how much its changed in 100 years. If its turns out that its dropped 0.16°c, I think that we will all be happy.
20
Some of you may recall that last weeks thread was dominated by Philip Shehan, starting with his wonderful OLS 15 year trends calculated from GISTEMP data. In fact there are 306 comments and 118 instances of “Philip Shehan“.
In replying to his initial comment I said that claimed that GISTEMP figures showed a warming bias over other data sets like HADCRUT. In reply Philip Shehan did a “woodfortrees” graph that shows considerable conformity.
The answer to who was right was that we both were. I used 2011 data, and Phillip Shenan used current data. The reasons for the divergence I posted at
NASA corrects errors in the GISTEMP data
There are two major reasons for the divergence in the data sets in 2011.
1. For the early C20th warming (about 1910-1944) GISTEMP reported two-thirds the warming of HADCRUT3. GISTEMP now has pretty much the same warming as HADCRUT4.
2. For the period 1998-2010 in 2011 GISTEMP reported a warming rate very similar to the period 1976-1998. It now reports a drop to half the rate. In other words, there was a pause in warming, but the experts at NASA could not detect it.
The upshot is that in 2011 GISTEMP were reporting that the 1976-2010 warming phase 120% greater than the early twentieth century warming. Now it reports that the equivalent ratio as just 20% greater. GISTEMP now tells a completely different story about the CO2 effect from just three years ago.
60
Two issues with Philip Shehan’s 15 year trends are
1. They do not really capture the trends in the data.
2. They slope of the 15 year OLS lines is sensitive to shifting the period by one year. For instance from 1999-2013 to 1998-2012.
I replicated Philip Shehan’s data (or a least tried to – he does not use J-D years) on a graph, along with shifting the periods a year backwards. Compare these slopes to the 5 year centered moving average curve in light blue. Most notably, linear lines do not capture turning points or step changes, such as happened in 1944 and 1998.
Graph is here.
40
Kevin Marshall:
The basic data has been adjusted to show some correlation with the rise in CO2; e.g. on one set I looked at, NASA removed any warming before 1964 (same as 1850) so the rise that occurred between 1850 and 2012 was now occurring from 1964 to 2012.
Philip Shehan (according to him his real name) will never admit that there is anything wrong with the data. He then cherry picks his starting year and plots the corrupt data to “prove” his conclusion (as you point out). When challenged expect the following
No answer to your points
A change of graph cited as proving he is right.
A reference to some article in Skepticalscience.
A claim that he used some other data source e.g. the satellite figures, followed by the accusation that we are impugning the honesty of the compilers
A outburst about you using Ad Homs against him.
I lost my temper once and wondered whether he had actually been employed as a PhD qualified scientist. Even that wasn’t answered, so I am still wondering. But I won’t be bothering even reading his crap anymore, and I suggest you ignore him too.
50
Greame,
Thanks for the comment. What was most useful about examining Philip Shehan’s comments was comparing and contrasting the NASA and HADCRUT data now with that of three years ago. You comment about NASA removing warming pre-1964 seems to have been partly reversed. The data now tells a completely different story. Given clear biases in compiling the data, the real story is probably more damming to the global warming theory.
In management accountancy (where I used to work) there is an onus to gain a “true and fair view” of the figures, then to highlight where the figures contradict the narrative that you would like to present. In a business, that it is where sales fall short or costs exceed the budget. Highlighting and understanding why enables action to be taken. In climatology it is the opposite. Unfortunately, Philip Shehan is very much in the mainstream when it comes to compiling and understanding the data.
10
Kevin & Graeme No3,
One thing I’ll say of Philip Shehan is that in the previous ‘Weekend Thread’, at the prompting of Vic Gallus, he persuaded a disciple of ‘SkepticalScience’ (SKS), KR to comment here, which was interesting.
Typically, although Philip previously asserted that he had decadal expertise in statistics and lambasted some of us here that we should go away and study same, when KR elaborated what seems to be a unique approach in design of the error margin tool in SKS, Philip admitted that he did not understand the technicalities, despite being a devotee of it. Nevertheless, Philip still insists that SKS regular Kevin C (Kevin Cowtan) the designer of the SKS tool IS correct! Oddly, I can only Google-find a Kevin Cowtan at University of York, Chemistry Department, who has worked on crystallography modelling/statistics, and who seems to be the chap, but nothing to suggest that he is known in the statistics literature.
KR has apparently retired from last week’s thread, and dismissed more modern approaches put to him for when there is wide scatter in time-series data. And, and, no…..I’ll stop there.
Additionally though, there has been silence on my following comment quoted in part:
(KR was enthusiastic about a controversial paper by Cowtan and Way but I’ve crossed out Cowtan in the re-quote because it was more about Way).
40
Graeme No3 @14.1
Philip Shehan has variously claimed his credentials including a PhD in biological molecular magnetic resonance or something hyper-impressive like that. What is odd is that it seems that no institution was involved. Perhaps he is embarrassed that it was at U of Queensland or Western Australia, or JKU, and does not wish to declare it?
BTW I’ve informed him earlier that I find discussion with him to be of no value.
50
It was my uni, University of Sydney.
I replied to KR with this.
20
Vic,
I’m sorry to hear that, and it was I understand long before the modern nonsense around John Cook, Lewandowski, Ove Høegh-Guldberg and whatnot too!
20
30 June: Herald Sun: Andrew Bolt: Clive Palmer and Al Gore become convenient allies
Gore is a co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, which manages and advises on green investments of the kind Gore’s climate scaremongering helps whip up.
Among the businesses it “participates” in is Australia’s $1 trillion Investor Group on Climate Change, which comprises Goldman Sachs and many of our bigger super funds.
Those funds invest big in renewable energy and are scared the Government will soon slash or scrap the Renewable Energy Target, which forces electricity suppliers to use more expensive wind and solar power.
IGCC has protested that “changes to the RET scheme could undermine the value returns on investments made to date” and “we do not favour any changes”.
But the Government resents the RET for costing the average household around $56 a year by 2020 — money that goes to green carpetbaggers without doing any good to the climate…
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/clive-palmer-and-al-gore-become-convenient-allies/story-fni0ffxg-1226971201707
Investor Group on Climate Change: Who are we?
Current members of IGCC, listed below, represent total funds under management of approximately $1 trillion…INCLUDES:
Australian Super
Cbus
Christian Super
Generation Investment Management LLP
Goldman Sachs
Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation
Merrill Lynch
Mirvac
Morgan Stanley
Local Government Super
The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia Limited (ASFA)
UniSuper
VicSuper
http://www.igcc.org.au/who_are_we
Nov 2013: TheSustainabilityReport: IGCC welcomes CCA draft report on emissions targets
The Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) welcomes the “pragmatic assessment” of the Climate Change Authority (CCA) draft report, but says it raises questions of how Australia will achieve higher emissions reductions…
http://www.thesustainabilityreport.com.au/igcc-welcomes-cca-draft-report-on-emissions-targets/4424/
00
Palmer happy to have people’s Super funds pay for CAGW policies, but obviously has his eyes on the Super funds prize for himself, as well!
30 June: Herald Sun: Clive Palmer’s vision for Victorian industry
by Jessica Marszalek and Michelle Ainsworth
The mining magnate turned federal MP has revealed his plan to turn the Latrobe Valley into a minerals processing hub, allowing Australia to cash in on its resources for even higher prices and address soaring unemployment…
Speaking at a weekend festival held at his Queensland golf resort, the PUP leader told the Herald Sun he wants to see copper, nickel and steel shipped from other states into Victoria to be processed.
“We want Victoria to be the economic powerhouse of the country, the industrial heartland,” he said…
***He said ports, infrastructure, roads and hi-tech manufacturing plants should be built with investment from superannuation funds…
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/clive-palmers-vision-for-victorian-industry/story-fni0fit3-1226971412228
if only the public were properly informed.
20
despite the CAGW myth unravelling at a rapid pace, the politicians plough on:
30 June: SMH: Lisa Cox: Clive Palmer denies division in Palmer United Party over renewable energy target
The Fairfax MP says incoming Palmer United Party senator Jacqui Lambie will “always go along with the team” despite her calls for Tasmanian businesses to be exempt from the target…
“Everyone will be voting in accordance with our statement with Al Gore,” Mr Palmer said on Monday.
“Every senator can make calls for their state – the Liberals do it all the time, and Labor.
“They’ve got the right to say that.
“It’s her statement, that’s what she thinks but that’s not how the party has decided to vote.
“She’ll always go along with the team.”…
Mr Palmer’s comments come amid a push from 25 Coalition backbenchers to have aluminium smelters exempted from the renewable energy target entirely…
The current target of 41,000 GwH by 2020 would represent about 27 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation because of a decline in electricity usage in recent years.
“The smelting industry is forecasting an $80 million cut to it by 2017 because of the RET,” Mr Tehan said…
“This isn’t about abandoning the RET,” Mr Tehan said.
“This is about what they call the true 2020 position and as part of the change and exemption for the aluminium smelting sector.”
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/clive-palmer-denies-division-in-palmer-united-party-over-renewable-energy-target-20140630-3b2rr.html
any ETS is a con, Xenaphon:
30 June: Mackay Dailly Mercury: Rae Wilson: Senator Xenaphon says Clive Palmer’s ETS a ‘con’
But he said what Mr Palmer was proposing would start at some indeterminable time in the future, suggesting it could be anything from five years to 30 years before it started, and at an undetermined price.
“There is no set time because it’s so conditional on other countries adopting an ETS,” he said.
“For that reason I think it’s a con.
“There’s nothing there.”…
http://www.dailymercury.com.au/news/Senator-Xenaphon-has-called-Clives-ETS-a-con/2303385/
00
28 June: UK Telegraph: Emily Gosden: Green energy cost hits record high as expensive turbines built at sea
Annual bill for consumers to subsidise renewable technologies has soared to more than £2.5bn as more plants are built and the cost for each unit of electricity rises
The cost of generating green electricity has hit a record high as subsidies are handed to expensive offshore wind farms and household solar panels, new figures show.
The annual bill for consumers to subsidise renewable technologies has soared to more than £2.5bn as more turbines are built and households install panels on their roofs.
But new figures show that the average cost for each unit of green electricity has also increased, hitting a record high of £66.97 per MWh in 2012-13, the most recent period for which figures are available.
The figure was a rise from £54.26 the year before, despite pledges from ministers to bear down on the costs of green energy.
The increase reflects the drive to build wind turbines at sea, which receive roughly twice as much subsidy as those built onshore, where wind farms have proved increasingly controversial…
Subsidies paid to energy companies for this kind of large-scale project reached £2bn, from £1.5bn a year before.
The new figures also reflect the rush by tens of thousands of households to install solar panels on their roofs at generous subsidy levels before ministers cut support in March 2012. The bill for this kind of small-scale subsidy leapt to £500m in 2012-13, from £150m the year before.
Dr John Constable, director of Renewable Energy Foundation, a UK charity that has long been critical of the costs of the renewables targets, said: “DECC is subsidising renewables to meet arbitrary and over-ambitious EU targets, so it was inevitable that we would move rapidly up the cost curve once the ‘cheaper’ opportunities had either been fully developed like landfill gas or exceeded the limits of public acceptability like onshore wind.”
He added: “Subsidy costs are now spiralling out of control – the annual burn is about £3bn a year and rising fast. There still is a good case for experimenting with renewables, but building so much capacity when the whole sector is still fundamentally uneconomic is bound to end in tears.”…
A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “As we move closer to achieving the government’s renewables target it is inevitable we will start using more expensive forms of renewable energy such as offshore wind, which can be deployed at far greater scale than other renewable technologies. By supporting these technologies now we are driving down their costs. (GOES ON TO PREDICT THIS WILL LOWER ELECTRICITY BILLS AT SOME FUTURE DATE)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10931986/Green-energy-cost-hits-record-high-as-expensive-turbines-built-at-sea.html
10
Diesel is now a “green” source in the UK. It’s the only way they will get through a very cold winter now they’ve shut down so many conventional plants.
30
a Fairfax tale:
30 June: SMH: Alister Doyle/Reuters: Emperor penguins slide towards endangered list
Oslo: Global warming will cut Antarctica’s 600,000-strong emperor penguin population by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which the birds breed becomes less secure, according to a new study.
***The report urges governments to list the birds as endangered, even though populations in 45 known colonies were likely to rise slightly by 2050 before declining…
“It’s not happy news for the emperor penguin,” said Hal Caswell of the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a co-author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change…
The impact of climate change on penguins gets less attention than the effect on polar bears, which are often portrayed by scientists as victims of man-made warming and shrinking ice at the other end of the planet.
***Despite rising global temperatures, sea ice around Antarctica has expanded in recent winters…
http://www.smh.com.au/world/emperor-penguins-slide-towards-endangered-list-20140630-zsqbr.html
30 June: SMH: Alicia Chang/AP: NASA to fight global warming from space
Climate change scientists welcomed the latest flight attempt…
“We don’t have time to waste. We need solutions now,” said Elisabeth Holland, a professor of climate change at the University of South Pacific in Fiji who helped write the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report…
http://www.smh.com.au/world/nasa-to-fight-global-warming-from-space-20140630-zsqc1.html
30 June: ABC Breakfast: Stop The Presses: The decline of Fairfax
Ben Hills, a former investigative journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has written an insider’s account of the decline of Fairfax.
Once one of Australia’s most successful media organisations, some fear it’s now in a death spiral as readers desert the printed newspaper, journalists are retrenched, and management struggles to make enough money from its news websites.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/stop-the-presses-the-decline-of-fairfax/5558890
00
former Irish Times journo, Smyth, knows everything about us:
29 June: Financial Times: Jamie Smyth in Sydney: Australia risks isolation among G20 by scrapping carbon tax
Tony Abbott has had little to celebrate since becoming Australia’s prime minister because of his plummeting approval ratings and a hostile senate…
The (carbon) tax is blamed by Mr Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition for raising electricity prices and endangering Australia’s A$60bn coal industry. Mr Abbott’s promise to prioritise economic growth over environmental protection struck a chord with a disillusioned public…
Barack Obama last month proposed cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 30 per cent by 2030, from 2005 levels. China, the world’s biggest polluter, is piloting carbon emissions trading schemes in a sign it may be willing to join a push for a global deal to curb emissions at next year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Tim Stephens, associate law professor at the University of Sydney, said: “By scrapping carbon pricing Australia risks isolation at future climate change negotiations as it will not be able to prove to others it will be able to cut its own emissions.”…
Diplomats say he has resisted US efforts to place climate change high on the G20 leaders’ summit agenda to be held in Brisbane in November…
A recent poll by the Lowy Institute showed that after six years of declining public concern about climate change, the trend had reversed with 45 per cent of people saying it is a “serious and pressing problem”.
“The climate change debate is fraught with danger for Abbott,” said Ian McAllister, professor of politics at the Australian National University. “Our surveys show people believe the science.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7dfca9c4-fe06-11e3-bd0e-00144feab7de.html
Opinion piece at WSJ, unattributed:
29 June: WSJ: The Carbon Regulation Bubble
Hank Paulson endorses a carbon tax. But is he right this time?
The climate change industry always needs a fresh angle, and the latest is that carbon emissions are an economic threat akin to mortgage-backed securities before the financial panic. The analogy comes from Hank Paulson —and if he has spotted a bubble this time, we guess one out of two is an improvement on zero out of one…
With the travelling billionaire wilburys of Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, the former Treasury Secretary put out a 197-page study last week that predicts the costs of a warming catastrophe. Their “Risky Business” project is meant to awaken the green conscience of business leaders, and President Obama’s endorsement was inevitable: Even George W. Bush’s money man agrees…
The report reads like a prospectus, except with years of “investments” in fossil fuels returning damage across industries and regions…
“Risky Business” endorses a carbon tax, and that option really does share something with subprime loans and exotic financial instruments: Choosing to ration carbon today is a bet about the future—and one likely to end no better…
The world saw modest warming over the 20th century but temperatures have plateaued over the last 15 years or so, a pause the climate models did not predict and cannot explain…
There will always be inherent scientific uncertainty regarding a phenomenon as dynamic and complex as the Earth’s climate, but the climateers admit to no uncertainty other than that the apocalypse might be worse…
Turning over the U.S. economy to the green central planners may expose the country to even greater climate harms, to the extent that their ministrations impede economic progress. A wealthier future society will be better able to adapt and mitigate harm over time if Mr. Paulson’s side of the bet is right…
Speculators like Mr. Paulson are actually inflating a climate regulation bubble—and the real danger isn’t that the problem is too big to manage. It’s their supposed solution.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-carbon-regulation-bubble-1404081396
10
while CAGW gatekeepr MSM ignored Steven Goddard’s revelations, some MSM have not:
27 June: UK Daily Mail: David Martosko: Obama mocks GOP global warming skeptics and says they ‘pretend’ they ‘can’t read’ – but ignores new claims that the US has been COOLING since the 1930s
The president spoke to a partisan audience of environmental activists on Wednesday night in Washington
He claimed GOP lawmakers believe global warming is real but won’t admit it because they’re afraid of ‘a bunch fringe elements’ in their own party
‘They ducked the question and said “Hey, I’m not a scientist”,’ Obama joked
Obama ignored new evidence that American scientists have been altering climate data for years
The US Historical Climatology Network has been adjusting its records by replacing temperatures with data fabricated by computer models
As he tries to rally public support around new White House rules aimed at coal-burning power plants, however, the president hasn’t yet addressed a brewing scandal in the scientific community.
Global warming specialists inside the scientific community are buzzing about revelations first made Friday, which show how the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official graph of historical U.S. surface temperatures records has been quietly altered for years.
Government scientists, it is alleged, have been tweaking some of the world’s most oft-cited climate records by replacing actual temperature readings in the United States, Iceland and Australia with hypothetical numbers derived from computer models…
The damning graphs published on the ‘Real Science’ blog by Steven Goddard, the nom de plume of a self-described ‘lifelong environmentalist’ with graduate-level scientific credentials…
They are also tripped up by the changing list of temperature measurement stations, Goddard writes, as more estimates are used instead of real readings: ‘As rural stations are lost, the infilling process contaminates them with warmer urban stations.’
This, he says, is how the U.S. government has claimed the earth has been steadily warming by 3 degrees Celsius per century, while the actual measurements indicate that the planet has been cooling since the 1930s.
Obama, however, steered clear of science on Wednesday and accused Republicans of ignoring global-warming evidence for political advantage…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2671146/Obama-mocks-GOP-global-warming-skeptics-says-pretend-read-ignores-new-claims-US-COOLING-1930s.html
27 June: Detroit News: Frank Beckmann: Climate alarmists won’t save economy
Faced with an economic report that was about to show a 2.9 percent drop in gross domestic product (GDP, a key economic indicator), President Barack Obama and his band of gloomy climate scaremongers introduced us to a new one — climate change is now a threat to the U.S. economy…
This should come as good news.
At last, we’re safe from the bigger concerns that the planet is being destroyed by our use of SUVs, air conditioning and jet travel.
Saving a planet that is irreparably damaged — as the alarmists have told us has happened because we haven’t addressed the dangers of CO2 emissions in time — is such a big job, even for the wizards of smart in the church of environmental religion, but saving the economy? Now that’s a possibility…
This latest initiative, called “The Risky Business Project,” uses all the usual ruses employed by the imaginative alarmist crowd, more frequent heavy storms, rising sea levels, melting arctic ice caps, and, of course, catastrophic temperature increases.
You can talk to them all day about the reductions in heavy storms over more than a decade, the lack of sea level rise, the actual increase of Arctic ice cover, and the 17-year hiatus in global temperature rise, but they won’t want to hear it.
You can point out, as Steven Goddard did at his website called Real Science, that alarmists have fraudulently changed the temperature data from years past to falsely show a more recent warming trend — the real numbers show the 1930s as the warmest years in the U.S. — and Obama, et al, cover their ears…
In addition to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — yep, the guy who forced banks to accept TARP loans even if they didn’t want them — the Risky Business group includes none other than Tom Steyer, the billionaire California environmental activist who’s buying up Democratic party candidates wherever he can…
But as is the case with the so-called scientists who warn of cataclysmic climate change, one need only follow the money to determine the true motives of the alarmists….
In Steyer’s case, he and his former hedge fund company are invested in a firm that is competing with the Keystone pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil.
Yes, Steyer has been involved in all sorts of fossil fuel investments to make his fortune and he now seeks to grow it through destruction of the traditional fuel industry and government subsidy for his new favorite green projects and investments, all with the help of Peters and other politicians he supports…
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140627/OPINION01/306270020
00
27 June: Carroll County Times: Michael Zimmer: Ground climate change debate in facts
Some news reports from around the world, and some columns from various sources have caught my eye recently on the subject of climate change, or global warming if one prefers that term…
A column that drew my attention was from Christopher Booker writing for the London Telegraph June 21…
Booker expressed amazement at the part “played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data.”
He cited as “another damning example” the information uncovered by Steven Goddard’s science blog.
Goddard purports to reveal “adjustments” to the temperature records of U.S. surface temperatures by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Goddard believes NOAA has substituted actual temperature data with “data fabricated by computer models.”
Goddard compared currently published temperature graphs with those based on temperatures measured at that time. The results seem to indicate a downgrade of earlier temperatures and exaggeration of more recent decades.
Booker concludes that global warming notions should not be looked on as science, “but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberration of group psychology.”…
http://www.carrollcountytimes.com/columnists/opinion/mike_zimmer/michael-zimmer-ground-climate-change-debate-in-facts/article_65188aa7-0bf1-5db6-9661-91619281c2d3.html
however, i can’t resist posting this snarky piece of nonsense in the UK Mirror. love the use of “we” and “us”:
24 June: UK Mirror: Conrad Quilty-Harper: Did NOAA “fiddle” global warming data? Nah
Debunking the latest manufactured controversy about global warming data.
To Steven Goddard, Christopher Booker, James Delingpole, Matt Drudge and the rest of the “climate change”-isn’t-real brigade, this is a deadly sin and proves that NASA and NOAA are committing Orwellian thought crimes with the data.
To the rest of ***us, it’s scientists doing science, and the mere fact that ***we have to explain it makes ***us depressed…
http://ampp3d.mirror.co.uk/2014/06/24/did-noaa-fiddle-global-warming-data-nah/
11
“a leading indicator of some other effect coming from the Sun after a delay of 11 years or so”. What is the basis for this?
If the simple conclusion is that there is a delay between solar activity and global temperature, this is expected but what is this idea of a second effect?
You would expect that solar activity was the prime driver of temperature anyway on this hot ball of molten rock with a skin the thickness of a balloon. A delay between irradiance and temperature would be quite expected. If it matched the solar cycle, that may be a rough coincidence or an oscillation excited in a complex oscillating feedback systems driven by the first cycle.
Consider that most of the world is covered in water 4km deep which captures 2/3 of the incident sunlight and this huge mass has to heat up, a huge buffer. Air is 1/400th of the mass (1 atmosphere per 10 metres), so the air temperature in the long term is determined by the water temperature and the sunlight goes straight into the water, regardless of CO2. Further, as the water warms slowly, it releases CO2 and 98% of all CO2 is in the water. This is controlled by Henry’s law and the CO2 elevator bring up new dissolved and compressed CO2 rapidly from the depths, regardless of water currents.
As Dr. Murry Selby demonstrated so clearly, while there is no correlation between temperature and CO2, there is an almost perfect match between CO2 and the integral of temperature. For the first statement, he was fired and no one has considered the second result. However the integral of immediate temperature is total irradiance which to first order would give you total energy in and thus the increase in water temperature which in turn gives you the CO2 amplified x 50. (98% is in the ocean)
So what may have been demonstrated is nothing more than the expected delay between water heating and irradiance. To propose there is some other, unknown effect coming from the sun seems unfounded and unnecessary. Fundamentally though, such Fourier analysis will probably pick up basic oscillations or harmonics in any complex system. That these would be driven by the sun is no suprise. However if the sun harmonic actually matched a physical process in balance, it could be disastrous. Clearly it does not and we get a faint echo of the driving cycle, nothing more. However that alone can change our weather noticeably when tiny parts of one degree are so significant to the IPCC.
00
Want more proof Al Gore is an arrogant POS? how about using the “denier” insult on a country’s leader http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/al-gore-tells-tony-abbott-change-or-get-out-of-the-way/story-fnjwvztl-1226973023400
Sex and travel Gore, SEX AND TRAVEL!
00
european democracy (not) at work:
30 June: Reuters: Ben Garside: ‘Back door’ climate fix to supplant EU emission goals
As European leaders wrangle over energy and climate goals for 2030, Brussels officials are already pushing through a bill that effectively locks in deeper greenhouse gas cuts while potentially pushing up power bills for households and heavy industries.
European Union leaders are in talks over whether to set a 40 percent cut in carbon emissions compared with 1990 levels, extending a 2020 goal to cut emissions by 20 percent under 1990 levels.
They are wary about costs and some favor a weaker 35 percent goal unless an ambitious global agreement to tackle climate change is struck in late 2015…
The ETS forces over 12,000 power plants, factories and airlines to surrender a carbon permit for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.
But it is failing to drive investment in cleaner technologies amid the build-up of a 2.2 billion permit surplus – more than a year’s worth – pushing permit prices to around 5.50 euros ($7.50) per tonne from above 30 euros six years ago.
Billed as a technical fix for Europe’s ailing ETS, analysts say the reserve will have far-reaching implications that far outweigh any tweaks to the overall 2030 target level, which leaders have pledged to agree on by October but made little headway on during discussions last week…
“It’s climate ambition through the back door. It seems to be an easier thing for people to swallow than upping the emission target,” said Trevor Sikorski, a London-based analyst at Energy Aspects. He said installing the reserve rather than adjusting the overall emission target was “simply undemocratic.”…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/30/us-eu-carbon-reform-idUSKBN0F52HG20140630
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Yonniestone –
what an extraordinary attack on a sitting PM by Gore. how desperate is he?
no question in Gore’s mind that Clive Palmer “has a sense of social justice, he has a keen sense of right and wrong”. WTF?
1 July: News Ltd: Clive Palmer faces arrest unless he can explain in court how he spent $12 million
CLIVE Palmer could face arrest unless he fronts a secret arbitration hearing with chequebook stubs that show how he spent $12m that a Chinese company has accused him of taking during last year’s election campaign.
Sino Iron yesterday swamped the Queensland Supreme Court with 15 applications, including a personal subpoena for the federal politician, demanding he produce butts for two cheques numbered 2046 and 2073…
Sino has also subpoenaed Media Circus Pty Ltd, from Brisbane, which ran advertising and produced campaign material for the Palmer United Party in 2013…
http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/clive-palmer-faces-arrest-unless-he-can-explain-in-court-how-he-spent-12-million/story-fnda1bsz-1226972900379
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btw i see no ABC or Fairfax coverage whatsoever of Palmer’s latest legal problems. Fairfax will go bankrupt eventually, so who cares what they do, but how does our public broadcaster get away with it?
read all:
1 July: Herald Sun: Terry McCrann: Clive Palmer triggers the warmest scream
TWO sentences neatly and completely capture the total irrationality and sheer, raging religious fervour of the global warming true, true believers.
They both came as deep primeval screams in delayed reaction to Clive Palmer’s climate change twostep with Mr Climate Hysteria himself, the man who used to be the next president of the US, until he found religion and fortune could be combined in very convenient climate untruths, Al Gore.
The initial reaction of true believers was one of almost euphoric rapture. Al and Clive had seemingly united to defeat the Climate Anti-Christ Abbott; Julia Gillard’s carbon tax and Gaia would be saved.
Nowhere was this reaction more extensive or ecstatic than at Climate Central Downunder, The Age. The paper revelled in the Anti-Christ’s coming discomfort…
Let a few more years run out, and apart from even more evidence that the planet, as opposed presumably to Gaia, ain’t warming as predicted, the emptiness of that claim will become almost undeniable.
And in its deepest, most inchoate scream, The Age is telling us that it just can’t bear that prospect…
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/clive-palmer-triggers-the-warmest-scream/story-fni0d8gi-1226972903656?nk=36dc605f223414970d90c210bd84bbb9
meanwhile, Australian Financial Review gives Hank Paulson space, but puts it behind a paywall. they can keep it:
1 July: AFR: John Kehoe: Climate change ‘bubble’ needs market insurance policy
http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/climate_change_bubble_needs_market_nzBBwC3JXocpDYEB7XabbK
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the very MSM that loved Occupy Wall St. (including our own AFR, ABC, Fairfax) now love these guys! it doesn’t get more surreal than that. they can lie through their teeth – no problem:
29 June: CNN: Fmr. U.S. Treasury Secy. Rubin on climate change: “The risk here is catastrophic”
CNN’s FAREED ZAKARIA GPS features an interview with the former U.S. Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, Henry Paulson, and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin…
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: According to an important, dramatic new report, the future could be bleak for most Americans. By mid-century, it says, 23 billion dollars of property will likely be underwater (literally) in Florida alone. Crop yields in the Midwest will probably be down 50 to 70 percent. Americans will likely experience 2 to 3 times as many days with temperatures above 95 degrees as they do today. All this, the report’s authors say, if we don’t do something about climate change now. And the report has serious pedigree…
PAULSON: Well, Fareed, I think there are a lot of fellow Republicans, my fellow Republicans, business leaders and political leaders, that are ready for a serious discussion about the science and the risks that come out of the science…
PAULSON: Yes. What I’ve said about a carbon tax is some people that oppose it are opposing it because they don’t like the government playing a big role. And, you know, the perverse aspect of that is, frankly, those that are resisting taking action now are guaranteeing that the government will be playing a bigger role, because we’re seeing now and we’re going to see an increasing number of natural disasters, Mother Nature acts. We have forest fires, we have floods, we have big storms and storm surges, we have killer tornadoes…
RUBIN: I wouldn’t frame the issue the way you just did, Fareed. If you – if you have the view, which Hank and I both have, that the risk here is catastrophic and catastrophic to life on Earth as we know it – then that’s a risk we cannot take. And once you start with the recognition that this could be catastrophic, then it seems to me, you do a full court press on all fronts…
ZAKARIA: … The Chinese and Indians, by some measures, build one new coal-fired power plant each week. And that’s going to change the climate no matter what happens in the United States. What do you say?
RUBIN: Fareed, I think the answer to that is not complicated. This is a transnational issue that’s going to affect all of our countries. It is of enormous importance to all of us, I think, as I said, a catastrophic risk. And I think that the way the United States can best contribute is, A, get our own house in order. And by getting our own house in order, put ourselves in a much better position to then work with the Chinese and others around the world so that everybody does what they need to do…
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/29/fmr-u-s-treasury-secy-rubin-on-climate-change-the-risk-here-is-catastrophic/
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This would be the same Robert Rubin who under Clinton was responsible for egregiously abolishing the Glass- Steagal act (thereby removing the last check and balance in the system that resulted in the current unfettered derivatives speculation threatening the world’s economic stability), also former CEO of Goldman Sachs until he became US Treasury secretary, and who while US Treasury secretary was also simultaneously on the payroll of Citibank to the tune of $100 million – for services rendered no doubt- that Robert Rubin?
And all those CAGW acolytes who in light of above still want to suggest that climate change activism is some kind of altruistic behaviour by the caring and sharing brigade who only want to see an end to 3rd world poverty, I ask- are you complete idiots or what?
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u don’t get more pro-Occupy Wall St than Mother Jones, yet witness this love affair with Paulson et al! unbelievable.
30 June: Mother Jones: Chris Mooney: Now Wall Street is Calling For Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen
Knowing that conservatives will never listen to liberals—or to President Obama—on climate change, many well meaning, science-minded people have sought to identify other messengers who might possibly sway the right.
Accordingly, they’ve tried tapping evangelical Christians, former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents, and celebrity politicians like the moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s an astute, psychologically sound theory (“trusted messengers” and all that) and yet, it never seems to work. Why does it never work?…
This weekend on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, two former treasury secretaries, Henry Paulson (a Republican) and Robert Rubin (a Democrat) went on the air to discuss climate change and, in particular, the new “Risky Business” report with which they’re closely affiliated. The report, emerging from a partnership that also includes Michael Bloomberg and the environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, makes the case that climate change will have dire economic costs. On the air, Paulson said point blank that climate inaction entails “radical risk taking.” Rubin added that the risk is “catastrophic.” …
All of this is true and eminently sane…
But here’s the problem: Is Paulson, a Wall Street Republican who says he wants a carbon tax, a “trusted messenger” on the right?…
Which brings us back to the why “it never works” question. Why do trusted messengers never seem to reach the right on climate change?
The answer is that the right is not its old self, and once trusted messengers aren’t trusted any longer.
If this was the United States of 30 years ago, we’d already have a bipartisan consensus on climate change.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/06/hank-paulson-robert-rubin-fareed-zakaria-climate
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taxpayers are paying for this?!
1 July: ABC The Drum: Greg Foyster: The question greenies are too afraid to discuss
(Greg Foyster is a Melbourne journalist and the author of Changing Gears: A Pedal-Powered Detour from the Rat Race.)
PHOTO CAPTION: (Brisbane climat action protest) Where is the discussion about the unorthodox, radical solutions that may be required?
As the Australian public baulks at even a modest carbon price, climate change activists have set their sights on what is pragmatic and convenient, not what is truly necessary, writes Greg Foyster…
On June 18, the Australian Senate launched an inquiry into “The Abbott Government’s attacks on Australia’s environment, and their effects on our natural heritage and future prosperity”.
Initiated by the Greens, the inquiry lists a litany of grievances: abolishing the Climate Commission and the Biodiversity Fund, attempting to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and carbon price, cutting funding to Environmental Defenders Offices, and attempting to de-list a swathe of forest from the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Areas.
It was an obvious political ploy, and the message was clear: the Coalition is tearing through Australia’s environmental programs like a Hummer bush-bashing in the Daintree…
In 2011, Professor Kevin Anderson, then director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre, co-authored a paper arguing that two degrees represented a threshold not between dangerous and safe, but between dangerous and “extremely dangerous”. NASA’s James Hansen has described the two-degree target as “a prescription for long-term disaster”…
On June 21 and 22, about 300 environmentalists and academics attended the Breakthrough National Climate Restoration Forum in Melbourne to address these very questions and take a sobering look at what mitigating catastrophic warming really entails…
The first session laid out the global emergency we face. Danny Harvey, a geography professor at the University of Toronto, described how two degrees of warming risked 10 to 30 metres of eventual sea level rise, significant dieback of the Amazon, and a near total loss of coral reefs.
Climate analyst David Spratt argued that even the IPCC’s most ambitious carbon budget to stay below the two-degree target has a one-in-three chance of failure. If humanity wants a less than 10 per cent probability of exceeding the two-degree target, he said, then “there is no carbon budget left”…
Brett Parris from Monash University argued the climate record shows a sudden shift between equilibriums. But economists and policy makers are hoping they can manipulate the climate to a point that suits them – two degrees, or even three or four degrees – without knowing where the real threshold lies. “What if there’s no equilibrium between one degree and six degrees of warming?” asked Parris…
That brings us the most radical proposal of all. David Keith, a professor of public policy and applied physics at Harvard, presented a case for climate engineering, a hubristic scheme to cool the planet by spraying sunlight-reflecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere…
As the Abbott Government continues attacking environmental programs and the Australian public baulks at even a modest carbon price, green groups might be reluctant to broach more radical solutions. But if they don’t agitate for what’s truly necessary, as opposed to what’s politically convenient, then who will?
It’s time we had a frank – and frightening – discussion about the catastrophe we’re heading for and the full suite of options available to turn the situation around. Is two degrees too high? Do we need to restructure the economy? Is climate engineering inevitable? These are the climate debates we have to have, and soon.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-01/foyster-the-question-greenies-are-too-afraid-to-discuss/5560738
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Pat,
Sorry for the pun but Foyster has simply foisted his unqualified opinion on a minority that read that Drum website stuff. Unfortunately, the opinions there I imagine are all in the same direction but should be labelled up front as OPINION.
I understand that Malcolm Turnbull is reviewing a report on proposed pruning of ABC and SBS activities. Hopefully it may result in deletion of such awful stuff including for example I would hope the so-called RN ‘Science Show’ and its website. I’ve not read the report and would not like to see deletion of the brilliant digital radio services which I heard is a recommended action. Ho hum.
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Steven Goddard’s revelations still not mentioned in any Australian MSM, but space is always found for another round of “denialists” “flat-earthers”. ugly:
1 July: AFR: Phillip Coorey: Lack of public support killed carbon price, Shorten to explain
In a speech to be delivered to the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum in Canberra on Tuesday, Mr Shorten will say that while Labor still believes in an emissions trading scheme, “Labor has to live with our failure to make the case, to take the public with us on the need for action on climate change”…
Mr Shorten says at the 2007 election, both John Howard and Kevin Rudd promised to put a price on carbon and the subsequent debate between Mr Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull was about the details of the scheme.
But within one year of Mr Abbott deposing Mr Turnbull as leader in December 2009, and the Greens voting with the Coalition to defeat Mr Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), “the political climate changed dramatically”.
“Labor found ourselves in a minority government, battling a hung parliament and caught up in a bitter, three-year debate about a carbon tax,” he will say. “Tony Abbott played the politics of division hard – and he won.”
***Subsequently, the debate became one about whether climate change even existed “and the denialists, the flat earthers and the internet trolls have had a field day ever since”.
He says while Labor may not have made a compelling enough case, those in business, academia and the climate movement should examine their own role in helping the CPRS fail.
He says many members of the Greens and the broader environmental movement “lament choosing the purity of impotence over the practical benefits of compromise”…
http://www.afr.com/p/national/lack_of_public_support_killed_carbon_VSr4Kqt91AnWa7m5c9T7MI
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proof once again – as if it were needed – that it is the entire Australian MSM that pushes the CAGW meme, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary:
1 July: Australian Editorial: Carbon abatement needs a bipartisan policy approach
The Greens, who refused to sign up to Labor’s emissions trading scheme, and Labor, which imposed the world’s most expensive carbon price on the nation, have only themselves to blame if, as seems likely, Australia is left without a meaningful carbon abatement policy…
It is now abundantly clear that the opportunity cost of not pushing ahead with the soft-start cap-and-trade system linked to global action, first envisaged by Howard government adviser Peter Shergold in 2006, has been considerable…
Mr Rudd could not get the necessary support for his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme because it was deemed to lack sufficient ambition.
As a result, the fruit of his dramatic escalation of rhetoric and expectations on climate-change action was firstly the scalp of then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who had tried to negotiate in good faith…
If nothing else, Labor’s self-harm exposed the truth of this newspaper’s claim that the Greens are a protest party unfit for government. For not supporting Mr Rudd’s CPRS, the Greens must wear ultimate responsibility for leaving Australia’s climate change response in tatters…
As Paul Kelly wrote on Saturday, once abolished, resurrection of an emissions trading scheme will be a long, hard, bitter road. This newspaper has been an unwavering supporter of a cap-and-trade system as the most efficient means to achieve substantial cuts in carbon emissions…
Green groups point to US state-based carbon-trading schemes. But even in California, political reality is biting. Last week, 16 Democrat assembly members, a third of their caucus, signed a letter urging California Air Resources Board chairwoman Mary Nichols to delay or redesign the state’s cap-and-trade program. They were “concerned about the impact of the program on constituents”. Against these realities, our economy-wide, $26-a-tonne carbon tax is out of step with the rest of the world. Six years of overshoot on carbon pricing has left Australia’s body politic fatigued. Great political capital and energy have been spent, but the nation has arrived right back where it started. The lesson is carbon abatement policy requires bipartisan support. The minor parties cannot be trusted.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/carbon-abatement-needs-a-bipartisan-policy-approach/story-e6frg71x-1226972867256?nk=503e5b158650872c3656fe64e4714d63
even worse than the Australian is Sky News.
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30 June: Fox News: Zev Chafets: Climate change: The moment I became a climate skeptic
I got my first lesson on the subject of climate change more than 10 years ago. My tutor was an internationally famous climate scientist at a major Ivy League university…
In May 2001, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its third report, which got a lot of media attention. I looked through it and realized immediately that I had no chance of understanding the science…
One item got my attention. It said: “Projections based on the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios suggest warming over the 21st Century at a more rapid rate than that experienced for at least the last 10,000 years.”
I called the professor, one of the authors of the report, for a clarification (he remains nameless because we were off the record). “If global warming is caused by man-made emissions,” I asked, “what accounts for the world warming to this same level 10,000 years ago?”
There was a long silence. Then the professor said, “Are you serious?”
I admitted that I was.
The professor loudly informed me that my question was stupid. The panel’s conclusion was indisputable science, arrived at after years of research by a conclave of the world’s leading climate scholars. Who was I to dispute it?
I told him I wasn’t disputing it, just trying to understand how, you know, the world could have been this hot before without the help of human agency.
Maybe this is just a natural climate change like ice ages that once connected continents and warming periods that caused them to drift apart or …
At which point I heard a click. The professor hung up on me. At that exact moment I became a climate skeptic. I may not know anything about science, but I have learned over a long career that when an expert hangs up in the middle of a question, it means that he doesn’t know the answer…
I was reminded of this encounter the other day while reading a Time Magazine cover story titled, “Eat Butter: Scientists labeled fat the enemy. Why they were wrong.” …
According to Time, this was “so embedded in modern medicine and nutrition that it became nearly impossible to challenge the consensus.” Scientific journals refused to publish data challenging this orthodoxy. People who did, like Dr. Robert Atkins, were derided as quacks.
Now that consensus has flipped (Time Magazine doesn’t publish articles outside any current consensus). It may flip again someday as we learn even more about nutrition and health. But for now, the danger of eating fat – once an unshakable tenet of settled science – is out of intellectual fashion. People who have virtuously deprived themselves of t-bones, ice cream and cheesecake are now left with egg on their faces…
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/06/30/climate-change-moment-became-climate-skeptic/
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30 June: WaPo: Wonkblog: Roberto A. Ferdman: How much your meat addiction is hurting the planet
The environment doesn’t appreciate our meat obsession.
The average meat-eater in the U.S. is responsible for almost twice as much global warming as the average vegetarian, and close to three times that of the average vegan, according to a study (pdf) published this month in the journal Climatic Change.
The study, which was carried out at Oxford University, surveyed the diets of some 60,000 individuals (more than 2,000 vegans, 15,000 vegetarians, 8,000 fish-eaters, and nearly 30,000 meat-eaters)…
The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that the rest of the world appears to be headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050, largely driven by burgeoning middle classes in the developing world…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/30/how-much-your-meat-addiction-is-hurting-the-planet/
30 June: Grand Island Independent Nebraska: Cal Thomas: No denying climate change deniers
People who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid known as global warming-climate change are not just “deniers”; we are guilty of a “nihilistic refusal” to address the issue. So says a Washington Post editorial commenting favorably on last week’s Supreme Court ruling that allows the Environmental Protection Agency, under certain limits, to proceed under the Clean Air Act to regulate major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.
The actual nihilists are those who refuse to accept any scientific information that undermines their claim that the globe is warming and humans are responsible for it. Cults are like that…
The London Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, author of “The Real Global Warming Disaster,” writes of climate change denier Steve Goddard’s U.S. blog Real Science, which he says shows “…how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of U.S. surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).” …
He concludes: “The U.S. has actually been cooling since the ‘30s, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on ‘fabricated’ data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”
If that isn’t a smoking gun, what is?…
The global warmers are the ones refusing to discuss, debate or even mention the growing body of science questioning and in increasing instances disproving their theories. They also mostly ignore news of manipulated climate models and the serious concerns of scientists who no longer believe the climate is changing significantly.
Many in the media, including some newspaper editorial pages, refuse to broadcast or print information that challenges and in some cases refutes arguments about global warming, claiming it is “settled science.” It is nothing of the kind, as any open-minded person can see by a simple Google search…
Government is not the final arbiter of truth, yet the global-warming cultists worship at its shrine.
Polls show the public has far greater concerns. An April Gallup Poll affirms previous findings: “…warming has generally ranked last among Americans’ environmental worries each time Gallup has measured them with this question over the years.”
So exactly who are the real nihilists and deniers?
http://www.theindependent.com/opinion/columnists/cal-thomas-no-denying-climate-change-deniers/article_994194d6-0097-11e4-aa70-0019bb2963f4.html
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so many investigations, so many damning headlines (just do a search), so many jumping ship at Barclays, incl Redshaw!
Former head of Barclays carbon trading launches advisory firm
LONDON, July 1 (Reuters) – Louis Redshaw, the former head of carbon, coal and iron ore trading at Barclays investment bank, has launched a London-based advisory firm to help companies manage their risks stemming from carbon trading.
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.5859277
back in 2007!
2007: NYT: James Canter: Carbon trading: Where greed is green
Seeking to match a desire to make money with his environmental instincts, Louis Redshaw, a former electricity trader, met with five top investment banks to propose trading carbon dioxide. Only one, Barclays Capital, was interested in his proposition.
Three years later, the situation has turned around entirely, and carbon experts like Redshaw, 34, are among the rising stars in the City of London financial district. Managing emissions is one of the fastest-growing segments in financial services, and companies are scrambling for talent. Their goal: a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion, but which could grow to $1 trillion within a decade…
“Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall,” said Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital. But he said that in his current job, unlike some of his previous ones, including a stint as a British power trader at Enron, “I don’t have to compromise on anything when I get out of bed in the morning.”
If greed is suddenly good for the environment, then the seedbed for this vast new financial experiment is London…
Carbon could become “one of the fasting-growing markets ever, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives inside of a decade,” said Chris Leeds, 38, the head of emissions trading at Merrill Lynch in London, who plans to expand his team to five traders from two by the end of this year…
One of the few items distinguishing Redshaw’s row of desks from hundreds of others at Barclays Capital is a picture of an iceberg – an award from an environmental finance publication. The way his team blends in is as it should be, Redshaw said: “Only when you’re among hard-nosed traders do you know that a new commodity has truly arrived.”…
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht-money.4.6234700.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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2 July: SMH: Heath Aston: Al Gore told to avoid Clive Palmer’s environment circus
Al Gore was urged by his US-based advisers to pull out of the Clive Palmer press conference when it became clear the Palmer United Party would not link its support for the abolition of the carbon tax to an immediate move to an emissions trading scheme.
Key figures behind the year’s strangest political alliance have confirmed Mr Palmer was shown legal advice that Australia could easily move directly from a fixed price on carbon to an ETS.
When Mr Palmer could not convince his three incoming senators to place conditions on their support to repeal the carbon tax, Mr Gore’s advisers told him to pull out of a public appearance with Mr Palmer.
”There was no agreement, it had fallen over four times, but Gore overrode the advice he was getting and said ‘if this guy is willing to save the clean energy elements [the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Climate Change Authority] I will stand beside him’,” a source said…
Mr Gore has been heavily criticised for adding legitimacy to an event that was less about action on climate change and more about terminating one of the world’s first attempts to put a price on carbon…
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/al-gore-told-to-avoid-clive-palmers-environment-circus-20140701-3b6l2.html#ixzz36G7z4lq5
after Gore, it’s GetUp!!!
1 July: SMH: Mark Kenny: Christine Milne snub to Clive Palmer has greens on edge
Simmering tensions in the conservation community over the Greens’ response to Abbott government environment policies are threatening to fracture the party’s support base.
At issue is the Greens’ refusal to back a return to inflation-based indexation of federal fuel excise – regarded as “perverse” because the party supports price signals on fossil fuels – and Greens leader Christine Milne’s claimed hostility to Clive Palmer…
Senator Milne has urged Greens members to contact Mr Palmer’s office to complain strongly about the carbon tax demise.
But some renewable energy players are upset their party is undermining the Palmer compromise which they see as a lifeline through the retention of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Climate Change Authority, and protection of the Renewable Energy Target of 20 per cent energy production from green sources by 2020…
The worry is that Mr Palmer’s belated support for keeping the RET and the two other bodies, could change.
”Bagging Clive might feel good, but it doesn’t help lock his votes in for his new position,” they (some renewable energy players) said…
The community-based Solar Citizens organisation has emailed its thousands of members asking them to say thanks to Mr Palmer for saving the RET, the CEFC “green bank”, and the Climate Change Authority…
The progressive(??) public campaign group GetUp! also was highly supportive of the PUP position despite disappointment over the carbon price.
”In short, if our new Senate votes with Palmer, this will mean we can still make significant progress towards a clean energy future that will fund renewable energy projects,” it told supporters.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/christine-milne-snub-to-clive-palmer-has-greens-on-edge-20140630-3b4c4.html
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