To a climate scientist, *swearing* equals a Death Threat (no wonder these guys can’t predict the weather)

Wait for it, some death threat emails have been released. Number eight is positively sinister with intent (shield your children):

Now several of the abusive emails have been published on a blog by environmental writer Graham Readfearn, after the scientists agreed to release the poison pen letters.

Number Eight:

“If we see you continue, we will get extremely organised and precise against you. We will not do so if you rightfully argue against our points from a science view. But we will if you choose to stray into attacks on us as people or as a movement. The institution and funders that support you will find the attention concerning.”

God forbid, imagine a member of the public imploring a scientist to argue with science instead of slurs. Well I’ll be!

How chilling does it get?

7.5 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]

Skeptics rule online polls

Either there are a lot more skeptics than believers, or the skeptics are more likely to be on the net.

Some polls you may want to take part in (which are registering around 3 out 4 votes for skeptics).

The Greens are running scared.

7 out of 10 based on 7 ratings […]

Death threats are never OK, but for those without morals they can be a useful PR tool

My sympathies go out to anyone who lives in fear for their life, no matter what their beliefs are about a certain climate theory. I soundly condemn death threats.

Though, as it happens, such a thing is completely out of character for any skeptic I know.

After 50,000 comments on my site, violent thoughts are exceedingly rare, from skeptics anyway. Only a few [skeptics] have even issued vague allusions wishing ill-health on someone. (And these were made not by regulars, but by anonymous “hotmail” commenters; real skeptics, or poseurs perhaps?)

Indeed, the team that makes naked death threats publicly has always been the pro-carbon-tax fans. Think of Greenpeace “we know where you live…“. Think of 10:10, “we will blow up your children”. Joe Romm encourages the idea that skeptics will be strangled in their beds. A blogger at TPM pondered when it would be acceptable to execute climate deniers. Richard Glover, suggests forcibly tattooing skeptics opinions on their bodies’ (though wisely thinks maybe it’s a bit too Nazi creepy). Willis Eschenbach came up with a list of hate-related behavior. There is plenty to pick from.

So when the Canberra Times claims skeptics have been threatening climate scientists, I am, not […]

Let’s say “Yes” to real science

Let’s say “Yes” to real science, the way it’s meant to be, science that relies on measurements from things like thermometers, ice cores, and satellites. Real science is about observations of the real deal, not “simulations” on a computer. 28 million weather balloons, 6000 boreholes, 3000 ocean buoys, and 30 years of satellites tell us that rising CO2 is not much to worry about.

Let say “Yes” to helping the environment by looking at real problems instead of fake ones. Let’s do practical things to stop our soil being eroded, to save our flora and fauna, and to stop real pollutants like soot, ozone and sulfur dioxide. We all know that a tax won’t solve salinity, or change the weather.

Lets say “Yes” to using our tax money wisely. Who are we kidding? Solar panels, windmills and funny light globes are not going to stop droughts, floods and nasty storms. Why put more money into the hands of people who’ve spent around 4 billion dollars putting Chinese solar panels on roofs, and pink batts in houses. We can’t control the weather and we can’t export second hand solar panels. Let’s say NO to pork barrelling, and pink-batts-that-kill, and solar […]

Gina Rinehart asks the business leaders of Australia to stand up against the carbon tax

Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest business leader opposes the carbon tax and asks “Where are the other leaders?”

What’s unseen are the hundreds of business leaders particularly in the top 100, especially the BCA, who say nothing. The only businesses that want an Australian Carbon Tax are the renewable energy brands and, of course, the companies who won’t have to pay it (i.e. our foreign competitors). Plenty of Chinese, Indian and Brazilian companies would surely give a schadenfreude-smile at seeing their Australian competitors hobbled.

Few Australian business leaders are brave enough to say the bleeding obvious, and I’ve mentioned before that many fear retribution. Gina Rinehart has published an article in Australian Resources and Investment this month (see below) daring them to speak up: where are Australia’s business leaders?

Bianca and Gina Rinehart with Lang Hancock in the 1980's.

Rinehart’s position in Australia is a curious one: in 2011 she is clearly top of the rich-list, and is the first woman ever to hold that position. Her father, Lang Hancock, opened the Pilbara but died in 1992 with his estate owing large sums and close to bankruptcy. Rinehart turned those projects around and became the most successful entrepreneur in the […]

On climate change, the wrong choice kills people either way

Here’s a topic close to my heart. Before I became involved in climate change and currencies, my hot topic-of-choice for years was medical research and health. In my honours degree I worked to get a tiny step closer to treating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. When I saw that The Australian Government was threatening to cut medical research, I wanted to put a razor fine point on just what muddy thinking costs us. This article I wrote is published in The Weekend Australian today. We can’t afford to get the decision wrong on climate change. We must fight the battles that matter, not build fortresses against imaginary foes.

Wasting money on climate change betrays sick Joanne Nova From: The Australian May 07, 2011 12:00AM

LOST opportunities are invisible but deadly. On climate change, the call to buy insurance by pricing carbon is a cop-out. Where is the cost-benefit analysis? We’re thinking of axing Australian medical research yet we’re supporting solar panel manufacturers in China. It doesn’t have to be this way.

All the money spent employing green police, subsidizing solar or researching how to pump carbon dioxide underground is money not spent on medical research. Opportunity cost is a killer. […]

A Sign of the Times — Warmenist makes urban dictionary

The struggles for believers of the theory-with-no-observations are getting worse. Once upon a time they used to just ignore skeptics. Now they’re coming to terms with their fall from hallowed “untouchable” status.

The Climate Spectator posted an article Wish I wasn’t a warmenist last week discussing the new urban terminology:

Here’s how the online Urban Dictionary defines a warmenist: “Gullible, scientificially (sic) illiterate, unthinking acolyte and zombie-fired propagandist of the Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming.”

One in the eye, one supposes, for all those academies of science which have declared they accept the science of global warming and man’s role in it. But the definition goes on: “One who takes direct orders from High Priest King of Idiocy, Albert J. Gore. One who puts the “mental” in environmentalism. Historical inheritors of those who believed that King Canute could hold back the tides and that the wolf would eat the moon unless their first-born daughter’s virginity was sacrificed to the local shaman.”

They are even thinking of tossing out Tim Flannery (as gently as possible): “Given the level of national debate, maybe Tim Flannery wasn’t the ideal choice to champion the need to do something about climate change.” As usual when […]

Nearly 80% of Chinese people are skeptics*: world wide poll

Gallup has done a world wide poll, about whether people believe the theory of man-made global warming. Though don’t stake too much money on the results, they only interviewed “approximately 1000 people” (what’s an approximate person?).

*So we’re talking about a survey of about 10 people per country.

The headlines are outrageously ambitious , “most of the human race”, yet having surveyed 111 countries it’s sort of half-way believable (with caveats). What’s striking is that the great man-made global warming theory has left no corner of the globe untouched… 10% of Somaliland believes it fergoodnesssake. (Well OK, so one person said “yes”.)

But it begs a few questions — like how do you phone poll accurately in countries where there are not many phones, and hardly anyone speaks English?

The China statistic is interesting. For all the talk that the world’s largest emitter of CO2 is “speeding to take up renewable energy” it ranks 105th out of 111 countries. “79%” of Chinese people are skeptics (well, more or less).

7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]

Who does the Labor Party represent? Would that be major Financial Houses?

Another leading commentator — this time Michael Stuchbury in The Australian — see the Carbon Tax as a dead dog.

ARE these the signs that Labor’s climate change policy is heading for a second disaster? Big unions and big business are in revolt as the mining boom’s strong dollar squeezes the rest of the trade-exposed economy. Households are up in arms over surging power bills.

And since the shambles of the late 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, Labor hasn’t doused worries that its carbon tax would put Australia in front of the world, a critical risk for a carbon-intensive economy.

This treble of jobs, cost of living and international competitiveness engulfs Julia Gillard and Greg Combet as they attempt to reverse Kevin Rudd’s humiliating 2010 retreat on his emissions trading scheme. It is replete with political and policy failures, some of which are only now becoming evident.

Facing a revolt among steel industry members, Australian Workers Union secretary Paul Howes last week vowed to oppose Labor’s carbon tax if it cost just “a single job”, even with unemployment below 5 per cent. Remember this is Wayne Swan’s union, which was mostly responsible for replacing Rudd with Gillard.

Tim Blair […]

The moment to test what we-are-made-of, is here

UPDATE: Art Robinson says: “It worked,”…’ The university “made some re-arrangements with the campus and replaced a couple of deans and did some special things to help my students.” Joshua received his doctorate and Matthew is on track to getting his, according to Robinson, but Bethany “couldn’t take the heat” and left after receiving her master’s degree.’ OSU claims they didn’t respond to his complaints. It must be a coincidence that all three were targeted, then all three were allowed to continue. Sure.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, as the power of big-government comes under threat the attacks on skeptics and free citizens grow worse than ever. We are all busy, but we cannot let this one get past. Art Robinson is one of us, one of the original skeptics, back when hardly anyone else was. He’s been a key player, dismayed, like the rest of us at the way science was being used for political purposes. Indeed, he was so dismayed, he ran for congress as a Republican last year. Against an allegedly full-on smear campaign from the incumbent Congressman Pete DeFazio, Art managed to get 44% of the votes in a long-held Democrat seat.

Oregon State […]

Billions of dollars sneaks out the door through UN committees

There are billions of dollars of money sneaking out the door of Western Nations and being used to feed the monster bureaucracy, the UNFCCC and its cohort.

In The Carbon Tax that Ate Australia Tony Cox and David Stockwell point out the Australian contributions fly so under the radar (despite being millions of dollars) that even the Australian government seems to have forgotten they agreed to pay them. Greg Combet, the minister for Climate Change promises “every dollar of the Carbon Tax will be given back to the people”:

Every dollar raised by the carbon price will be dedicated to supporting households with any price impacts, and supporting businesses through the transition to a clean energy economy. Because we are a Labor government, we will support the most vulnerable in our community — the people who need help the most.

But Combet in Cancun promised 10% of the Australian carbon tax as a tithe to the UN. (And there’s the $599 million as part of the Fast Start Finance program over three years that is in the pipeline.) So which commitment will the Australian government break? Or, let me guess, in the world of spin, the government can give all […]

Professor points out, it’s a less-than-nobel consensus

Garth Paltridge is an Australian atmospheric physicist with 45 years experience. He worked with CSIRO, the WMO, NOAA, and as Professor and Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies. He has explained why he’s skeptical of the theory of man-made global warming in his book — The Climate Caper: Facts and Fallacies of Global Warming. Here he explains how a scientific “consensus” can be bought. There’s more than one good reason why argument-from-authority is a fallacy. — Jo

A less-than-nobel consensus

Guest Post by Garth Paltridge

We hear that Julia Gillard is happy to have the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Academy of Science on her side while making her arguments for a carbon tax. Well of course she is. She and her predecessor bought them. And bought them but good. Over the last couple of years her Department of Climate Change (the DCC) gave them 27 million dollars in the form of research grants. That pays a fair swag of the salaries of the CSIRO and Bureau climate scientists who make up the majority of all employed climate scientists in Australia.

University climate researchers, while […]

Fairyland economics — Labor invents perpetual money machine

It’s fairy-land economics out there. In a big economic advance, the Labor Party realized that they can solve world poverty: the secret is to take money from the big producers, and hand it to anyone and everyone — it will not only keep our national economy productive and efficient, but millions of people will be richer! Why we didn’t do it 50 years ago!*

Millions to be ‘better off’ under carbon tax

Think of the possibilities! If it works on a national scale, why not go international — how much richer would we all be if we buried our five cheapest sources of energy in a pit under Maralinga, forced everyone to use the sixth, seventh, and eight best sources of energy, AND we took the profits from the most efficient successful operations around the globe (known henceforth as “polluters” (sic)) and gave them to all the world’s poor and needy?

Where do Gillard and Combet think the “Big-Polluters” get their money from? Would it be from:

(a) giant Swiss-bank-accounts held by Nazi war criminals, (b) ancient Saxon wishing wells, or (c) pots at the end of the rainbow?

Do they think the big-polluters pull money out […]

Legal warfare against skeptics: one win, one needs support…

The Big Scare Campaign is desperate, when they can’t win with reason, they can always find a reason to sue and hope to silence their critics. Their deep pockets make them an ominous foe, and the legal battles are running hot. Actions are running against Andrew Bolt, and Tim Ball (see below), and we only just found out, that one was launched against James Delingpole by the East Anglia CRU.

It’s very significant that James Delingpole has won and won well, as James says:

If it sounds like I’m overdoing it, consider this: the PCC’s ruling must be among the first by any quasi-official body anywhere in the world to take the side of a Climate Change sceptic rather than that of the Warmist establishment. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

The Commissions ruling:

In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”. They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews.

Through its correspondence the newspaper had provided some […]

The Tyranny grinds on: Update on the Thompsons

Background: Can a Western Government wipe out an honest business with red tape? (What a naive question…)

Janet and Matt Thompson

Matt and Janet spoke out as skeptics in May 2007 and their life savings and business are now at grave risk as they fight off bankruptcy. What has undone them is not the financial crisis, or any failure of their business, but impossible clauses and conditions. Indeed they were so profitable in 2007 they were turning away business. They’ve broken no laws, are popular with their nearest neighbors, 6000 odour tests showed there was little problem in the town, and the Thompsons complied with every departmental request to manage the farm. Yet licensing changes and new conditions were so onerous, that banks won’t loan money against the license (it’s not much of a licence). Clause A1 means their licence can be whipped away again at any time if they “offend” anyone anywhere or interfere with their “health and comfort”. How do we measure that — Let the loudest complainer win. (If complaints about “comfort” can shut down a business, there go the wind farms…. Why is there one rule for one business, but not for all?) Even […]

Australian Anti-Carbon Tax Protests

We all have better things to do, but when the people who represent us call the greatest plant nutrient “pollution”, and label the volunteers “stooges” while calling their paid hacks “independent”; when they look at a color chart and say yellow is really red (and they call us “deniers”); we know things are running off the rails.

When they ask us to pay billions to change the weather, then we know the quicksand has come. And when even they admit if we succeed beyond our wildest dreams that the results will be too small to measure (how many thousandth of a degree will that be, Julia?) sometimes we just have to do something don’t we?

We can act now or pay the cost for years to come. Each time we let them get away with an untruth they grow stronger. Each time we ignore the Orwellian perversion of our language (Is it carbon (sic) pollution (sic)?), we feed the parasites who want our freedom and our money, and that hurts us, our children and the environment.

The big protests around the country start on Wednesday next week. We want an election first. The tax affects every transaction in the […]

New Here? The “ten second” guide to the world of skeptics

… Almost everything you thought you knew about man made global warming might be a worthless half-truth.

…………….. The evidence shows temperature controls carbon dioxide (you read that correctly). Temperatures rise first, and CO2 follows. Global warming is real, but it started a century (or two) before our emissions. The world is warmer than in 1850, but cooler than 1,000 years ago, 8,000 years ago, 130,000 years ago, and cooler than most of the history of life on Earth. CO2 is called “pollution” but it feeds all plant-life on Earth. Big-Oil paid some skeptics, but Big-Government outspent it 3,500 to 1, and even Big-Oil spent far more on renewables than on “deniers”. Big Greens used to fight big corporates, but now they are big-corporates. The real grassroots movement are the skeptics who take on the lot. ………………

Lastly, Big Bankers want us to trade carbon. Think about that.

The Skeptics Handbook sums up the science (with cartoons)

I used to believe in man-made global warming. Then I found out that there was another side to the story, and I was shocked. The good name of science is […]

Chomsky’s prize hyperbole: GOP win could kill us all

It’s another sign of the ongoing implosion among the carbonistas: the nutter comments come out as reality hits their big dream.

Noam Chomsky — linguistics professor, proves that a professorship doesn’t stop you saying silly things, and manages to spin a “vote for the conservatives” as a ticket to destroy the human race. I mean, how do you raise the stakes (of the spin) from here? What tops that? Perhaps by 2012 we will hear how those wrong votes could be taking out not just homo sapiens and polar bears, but all life on Earth?

As election campaign slogans go I don’t think it will catch on: “Vote for us or everyone dies”…

The dumb-punter-voters are too stupid to make good decisions. Democracy has failed. “Chomsky” ought to choose our leaders. Of course.

Thus the Anointed speaks.

— JN

From Climate Depot and Marc Morano

Noam Chomsky: GOP election amounts to ‘death knell for the human species’

7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

The Vision of The Annointed

Thomas Sowell wrote Vision of the Anointed in 1995, and didn’t mention climate change. Yet such is the insight of the man that what he wrote was prescient, pertinent and 100% applicable 15 years later. Our battle today follows a similar pattern to battles over many other social policies. Sowell discusses The War on Poverty, sex education, affirmative action, discrimination, crime, infant mortality. They’re unrelated to climate science, yet the tactics repeat ad nauseum.

We fight to test policies with empirical evidence through polite discourse, while those who want influence and money have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to muddy the search for truth. The anointed substitute baseless declarations, flawed assumptions, and irrelevant motivations for real arguments.

How many areas of public policy have a genuine, no name-calling, clean cut debate about what works and what doesn’t?

Just like Earth’s atmosphere, it’s the feedbacks that matter.

Self Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

Dangers to society may be mortal without being immediate. Once such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time–and the dogmatism with which the ideas assumptions, and attitudes behind that vision are held.

It’s not that these views are especially evil or […]

Green Hit list: Wasted money and brain power

TWAWKI found something he calls a green hit list.

The “Carbon Capture report” tucks away more meaningless data about you than you could hope to (not) have to read: Factoids you didn’t know existed, don’t want to understand and never cared to compare.

There is so much money sloshing around in The Big Scare Campaign, someone at the University of Illinois has created a massive database with an amazing array of superficial-to-the-point-of-meaningless data. Have you ever wondered what the NewsTone of joannenova.com.au was — and if I told you it to the second decimal place, does that change anything about the weather? Apparently, “0.36” and slightly “green”, whatever that means. The crew-with-too-much-money have created some autobot crawlers (presumably) that check language on tweets and posts and rate it all for polarization, activity, personalization, blah blah and to the nth blah.

Look closely and you can see part of the GNP of the West evaporating. Pfft.

The entry for someone called Joanne Nova is here.

Could this be your tax dollars at work?

I can’t be bothered trying to figure out what these indicators mean. None of it is obvious, the numbers don’t match up with the […]