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Blitzed in the polls, the Australian Labor Party have picked the communist solution — straight from the Soviet rule book of Free Speech. Goskomizdat revived as a kind of Goskoshopfront. It’s more desperate and simplistic band-aid legislation to benefit the ruling class and not the people. Surprisingly, the media seems to be silent on this scandalous attack on free-speech.
The Gillard Government tells us the tax’s effect will be minimal, but they are clearly terrified of the blowback.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been directed to enforce accurate business promotions with a $1.1m dollar fine, and team of 23 “carbon cops”, to stop Australian businesses from posting any signs telling the public how much extra they are paying due to the Carbon Tax, or having a “Pretax sale”. Imagine the travesty of transparently letting customers see a breakdown of their invoice, or of warning customers of price rises to come?
A simple repeated message like the one below can take on a life of its own. (And we all know what animal the crowd will think of if we say: “Don’t think of an elephant”):
Of course, some will wave this away by explaining […]
Excess winter deaths are more than triple the number killed on the road.
Indur Goklany compares average daily deaths for each month in Australia and New Zealand and shows that in both countries (like in much of the rest of the world) there are more deaths in the cooler months.
While climate change legislation aims to make the world cooler, statistics show that the cooler months consistently have higher mortality.
In the unlikely event that legislation might succeed in reducing global temperatures, based on past statistical records, thousands of extra people may die as a result. In study after study, it’s clear that more people die in the colder months than in the rest of the year. The trend applies even in warm countries like Australia.
Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period.
The statistics indicate that:
For the 10-year period, 1998-2007, Australia had excess winter deaths of 6,779 per yr out of a total of 131,613 deaths per yr (avg.) This works out to 5.2% of all deaths per yr (on avg). For the 10-yr period, 1999-2008, NZ […]
RE: Mixed messages on climate ‘vulnerability’. Richard Black, BBC.
AND UPDATED: The Australian reports the leaked IPCC review, AND a radio station just announced it as “IPCC says we don’t know if there is a reason for the carbon tax”. See more below.
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This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists — facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong — are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid.
A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell:
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.
Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years.
[…]
RE: “Sceptic: one inclined to doubt accepted opinions” by Michael Bachelard, The Sunday Age
———————————– For free, and just because I’m a nice person, I’m going to help Michael Bachelard with his science articles.
He’s a Walkley Award winner writing for the two largest “broadsheet” circulation papers in Australia. He knows indigenous issues, politics and industrial relations, so “climate science” was the … er, obvious next step, right?
The Age (and by default, it’s sister The Sydney Morning Herald) decided to pretend to investigate the most burning climate questions the public could offer. But their investigations apparently amounted to phoning up government agents and fans of the policy, and asking them what to write.
It’s titled: Sceptic: one inclined to doubt accepted opinions, but it could have been titled Journalist: one inclined to parrot groupthink
Poor Bachelard is out of his depth in the science trying to answer Stephen Harper and Harry Hostan’s questions. For an investigative journalist he had odd ideas about how to get answers, almost never contacting the people or groups he wrote about directly. Who knows, maybe the servers at Fairfax don’t allow emails out to non-lefties at the moment, because he doesn’t seem to […]
The ocean acidification threat is a big can of worms. I asked Professor Brice Bosnich to help create a quick reference page on the chemistry and was pleased he could find the time to help. Here’s everything you wanted to know about the basics…
He explains what pH means, and points out that:
Ocean pH varies by 0.3 naturally. Claims of acidification since 1750 are based on dubious models and few observations.
There are reasons to assume that marine life will not be overly affected by an increase in ocean acidity due to atmospheric carbon dioxide:
Ocean life evolved and survived far higher levels of CO2 for millions of years in the past. Marine organisms actively create carbonate shells (using energy) which means crustacea, corals and molluscs aren’t automatically prey to pH changes in the same way that say a limestone rock would be. The world’s oceans may have warmed a mere 0.17C since 1955, hardly a significant threat to marine life.
We also find out that acidic water is added to the ocean from rainfall and floods (and he explains why raindrops will always be acidic).
There are more pressing threats. — Jo
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Guest Post by Professor […]
For all those other topics….
6.5 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
Naomi Klein Photo: Mariusz Kubik
Naomi Klein was the wrong person to send to a heavy-weight science conference — in “Capitalism vs Climate” she notices hundreds of details, but they’re all the wrong ones.
Naomi can tell you the colour of the speakers hair, what row they sat in, and the expression on their face — it adds such an authentic flavor to the words, but she’s blind to the details that count. She can explain the atmosphere of the room, but not the atmosphere of the Earth. One of these things matters, and Klein has picked the wrong one.
Her long attack on the Heartland ICCC conference this year is all color and style, and nothing of consequence — the lights are on and no brain is home. Unpack the loquacious pencraft and we wallow in innumerate arguments that confuse cause and effect, peppered with petulant name-calling. She can throw stones, but she can’t count past “one”.
Her aversion to numbers is crippling
Consider how she reduces planetary dynamics to a Yes or No answer. She thinks each skeptical scientist contradicts the next: “Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if […]
Pew Charitable Trusts is an influential “progressive” think-tank with $5 billion in assets. What was the The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has lost the Pew name and funds, and become the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).
Pew used to supply $3.5 million of the center’s current $4.4 million annual budget. Instead, in complete green purity, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Entergy Corp. will be the principal founding sponsors for the new C2ES.
DeSmog immediately denounced them and declared that all of their pronouncements are automatically biased since they are now oil-funded deniers:
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Or maybe not. If Shell had sponsored a skeptic, Desmog would have turned it into a high rotation ritual chant.
9.3 out of 10 based on 58 ratings […]
And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to steal the blood, sweat and toil of the many.
They lied, broke solemn promises, failed to provide evidence, and displayed a singular lack of good-manners. They viciously insulted anyone who disagreed, they hid the models the public were forced to pay for, they gave patrons highly paid jobs to advertize their scheme.
They speak arrant nonsense as if it is the bleeding obvious: telling us that we will grow rich if we use energy that costs more; that coal miners are to blame for heavy rain; that more taxes will bring investors; that we’ll lose jobs if we don’t pay more than we need to for energy; or that 6.98 billion people will follow the 0.02 billion who lead us on the path to the Land of Stupid. They made prophesies that failed time after time, yet speak on, as if only they have the vision to guide us.
The polls show the public would not have elected people who wanted to bring in a Carbon Tax. Yet it is law.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
[…]
This is about what it adds up too: If the carbon tax costs us, say, $10 billion a year (anyone have a better number?) we not only have to pay that, but we might lose another $20 billion a year as well.
As I’ve said before, you can’t compensate the nation. There is no productivity gain, no win, no efficiency improvement. There is no bigger pie if you have to cook with leather.
Treasury likes to pretend that the rest of the world is “joining” in the carbon schemes, and that by 2016, the US, Canada, Japan, Russia, China and India will have changed their minds and legislated a carbon price.
The Minerals Council of Australia wasn’t convinced that was a good plan, and asked the Centre of International Economics to analyze the Treasury modelling on the carbon price. The Treasury wouldn’t let them. (Who do they think owns the models?) Instead the CEI had to do their own modelling.
They are apparently the first to try to figure out what might happen in Australia if the rest of the world doesn’t leap head-first and suicidally into carbon pricing schemes.
The CIE finds losses that are 6 times greater:
That […]
Australia will — bar asteroid impact — get its Carbon Tax on Tuesday.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual in skeptic-world: Wild unheard-of snow started falling early in the US; there’s another story about masses of fossil fuel energy somewhere under Australia, another western nation makes it stark raving clear that it won’t be getting an ETS (Yay for Canada eh), while a different one pulls the pin on solar panel subsidies (Go Britain). The G20 leaders give Julia Gillard the deadly “you are so incredibly brave” speech, and said they aren’t going to follow.
“PM Julia Gillard told by G20: you’re on your own on carbon”
9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
Kudos to John O’Sullivan for finding this story; see the note at the end about the extraordinary response his post on this received.
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Who are the world’s worst “polluters”? According to a new high-spectral-resolution Japanese satellite — it’s developing countries.
Who knew detailed spectroscopic data on Earth’s atmosphere was available to figure out where the CO2 and other greenhouse gases are being produced and absorbed?
In January 2009, a Japanese group launched a satellite “IBUKI” to monitor CO2 and methane spectral bands around the world to establish exactly where the world’s biggest sources and sinks of greenhouse gases were. With climate change being the perilous threat to millions, this data would seem so essential you might wonder why didn’t someone do it before. As it happens, NASA tried — it launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in Feb 2009, which was designed to do exactly the same thing, but it crashed on launch. Oddly, NASA don’t seem to be prioritizing the deadly climate threat, as it will take NASA four years to figure out why the Taurus XL rocket failed and relaunch it.
The results from from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) show that Industrialized nations appear to […]
Another notch on the winners tally board. It’s a mark of the times that one of the most popular, well known and respected science commentators is willing to to put his reputation and effort into laying out such controversial science publicly, pulling no punches and in a potentially hostile environment. Compare this to the obituaries of “global warming” from believers.
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, spoke at an event by the RSA* in Edinburgh. Emails are coming in — it has hit a nerve — and it’s insightful to watch Matt stand in enemy territory, carefully finding common ground with the real scientists in the audience, the seekers of truth, before he launches his attack on the consensus position. According to Bishop Hill (aka Andrew Montford) the speech was well received.
I’ve selected key paragraphs, though ended up with a 2,400 word version. The full 4,000 word version is on Bishop Hill.
David* and I were fortunate enough to have a private lunch with Matt Ridley on his Australian tour, and it was a delight. Days like that are one of rewards for the hours of work unpaid. I usually don’t mention these kind of events — […]
BREAKING: Steven McIntyre reports that “649 Berkeley stations lack information on latitude and longitude, including 145 BOGUS stations. 453 stations lack not only latitude and longitude, but even a name. Many such stations are located in the country “[Missing]“, but a large fraction are located in “United States”. Steve says: “I’m pondering how one goes about calculating spatial autocorrelation between two BOGUS stations with unknown locations.”
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The BEST media hit continues to pump-PR around the world. The Australian repeats the old-fake-news “Climate sceptic Muller won over by warming”. This o-so-manufactured media blitz shows how desperate and shameless the pro-scare team is in their sliding descent. There are no scientists switching from skeptical to alarmist, though thousands are switching the other way.
The sad fact that so many news publications fell for the fakery, without doing a ten minute google, says something about the quality of our news. How is it headline material when someone who was never a skeptic pretends to be “converted” by a result that told us something we all knew anyway (o-look the world is warming)?
The five points every skeptic needs to know about the BEST saga:
1. Muller was […]
A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in May 2009 about how depressingly similar the US problems are to emerging economies he has worked with. It’s a provocative article: The Quiet Coup (a few excerpts posted here).
“Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.”
The Quiet Coup
The problem is oligarchs who overborrow, become too powerful, and gain too much influence:
Click the chart above for a larger view
“Wall Street ran with these opportunities [lightweight regulation, cheap money, securitization, interest rate swaps, and I would add, high frequency trading]. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.
“The great […]
Lucky the BEST* project is here to save us from the lying thermometers of the past. Apparently people in the 1960’s and 1970’s were clever enough to get man on the moon, but too stupid to measure the temperature. Millions of people were fooled into thinking the world was cooling for three decades by erroneous thermometer readings. Who would have guessed?
Back then, everyone was sure that the 1970’s was a lot colder than the 1940’s, as Steven Goddard reminds us:
Newsweek April 1975
See the original Newsweek report at Denis Dutton‘s site.
The Global Bermuda-Triangle Effect: Thermometer Weirding
The performance of global thermometers is baffling. The technology is nearly 300 years old. The first thermometers were produced in 1724 by Daniel Fahrenheit, and by 1742 Anders Celsius had invented its main competitor. This simple, reliable instrument spread throughout the world and worked well. So far so good. But from 1920 we see the first signs of worldwide systematic errors (first too high, and then too low?!).
The strange “Wierding” effect struck both mercury and alcohol thermometers and was most savage between 1945 and 1975. Frank Lansner compared the BEST projects result with his Rural Unadjusted Temperature […]
In the UK, gargantuan (as in wow!#$) amounts of cheap energy were discovered a month ago, yet it seemingly hasn’t changed the political landscape. (Or, then again, maybe it did? I gather no one in the UK government seems to be admitting it, but from afar, it looks like a lot of clunker UK policies have not-coincidentally got the boot in the last month.) Overtly, it’s been the gift no one wanted to open… but possibly a few in power are well aware of what’s under wraps and it is influencing policies?
Back in August 2011, the experts at the The British Geological Survey team thought the country only had 150bn cubic meters of shale gas. Then on Sept 22 a group called Cuadrilla announced that they’d found the odd 5,660 bn cubic metres under Lancashire.
Right about then, a sea-change ought to have come over ministers and corporate leaders in the UK. Here was a get out of jail free card, with lots of cash-cow potential, not to mention 50+ years of gas for the whole nation. It ought to have been time for large parties, champers, and the dumping of the competing energy sources. Instead a month later, […]
I need to do some testing, so odd things may come or go… but hopefully it will all be working properly soon. 🙂
Thanks for your patience, but do keep commenting!
Jo
PS: New star ratings added for blog articles. Thanks for your enthusiastic clicking, but seriously, surely I need to do more than write two lines to earn eight stars!
8.9 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
We want evidence, reason, and well informed opinions from all sides on important topics. Instead we’re coerced into paying for propaganda, character assassination, and the personal views of journalists.
The ABC has been outdoing itself lately. It doesn’t just ignore skeptics, it’s been actively working to denigrate them. No ad hom is too low, no fabrication too far fetched. Could it be complete fiction? Why not? Could it be the most expensive high profile ABC programs, costing tax-payers hundreds of thousands an episode? Yes sir.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a culture. When comedians and scriptwriters live off a diet of dogma at the ABC (it starts with the science unit), why would we be surprised that they’d churn out the same half-truths, deceit, and sloppy reasoning in their fictional work?
The ABC Chairman — Maurice Newman — recently worried about the poor intellectual quality of ABC “investigations” in The Australian, “Ad hominem attacks substitute for logical and evidence-based discourse that would otherwise allow viewers and listeners the opportunity to decide for themselves where they stand on the issues.”
Our billion-dollar ABC is supposed to represent the diverse views of the country:
The ABC editorial policy tells us the ABC […]
Good news: signs are coming in from all over the non-Australian-and-New-Zealand world. Hints of sanity are spreading. Everywhere Green schemes are being slashed, junked and rethought.
I’m heartened. There are reasons to be optimistic, (even if, in the end, the good news was not because politicians got rational, but because the money ran out).
For those that missed it, Delingpole reported the beginning of the October good-news shift with ‘Let’s commit suicide more slowly,’ suggests Osborne.
George Osborne has vowed that the UK will not lead the rest of Europe in its efforts to cut carbon emissions, raising the prospect that the country’s carbon targets could be watered down if the EU does not agree to more ambitious emission reduction goals.
EU referendum reports on the collapse of the UK’s largest Carbon Capture Scheme and what it means for the Green Agenda
It has come to pass that Longannet, the flagship scheme for carbon capture in the UK, has been junked, despite the availability of £1 billion funding from this moronic administration. And since it is the only remaining project in the running for CCS funding, that makes it about thirty months from inception […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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