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Emails are flying, submissions are flooding in. It’s a nation in uproar. The implications of what Henry Ergas wrote are setting off a wave of fear and anger. People are using words like “sickening”, “shocking” and describing Gillard’s actions as “vindictive” and a “treacherous spoiler”, and using the word treason. There’s a plea: “God help us!”
Here’s a few samples of what has been CC’d to me.
UPDATE: I should have added that I put the first email up to show just how deep the sense of betrayal runs. I don’t think Gillards actions represent a grand well thought out plot. This is scrabbling desperation to notch up a “success” (the country be damned). Even she advised Rudd to give up the ETS. A weak government is the most dangerous kind.
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Dear John,
Please drop everything and listen to this:
Professor Henry Ergas reveals the hidden deadly dangers in the Carbon Tax legislation to Alan Jones.
The vindictive implications for Australia are worse than horrendous.
Listen here and be shocked to the core.
The shameful and treacherous group (loosely described as the […]
by Color CS
You know, the one comforting thing about the insanity going on in the UK is that Australia doesn’t seem quite so basket-case, suicidally silly. Actually that’s not really true, both countries are barking mad, but thanks to David Cameron its a little less lonely at the loony farm. Democractic dementia has company.
Exhibit A:
In 2008 Ministers were aiming to generate 20 per cent of the country’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. Professor MacKay explained back then, that to reach that, they would have to put wind farms over the entirety of Wales. How did the governing class respond? By 2011, the UK Coalition took that crazy renewable target and doubled it.
Exhibit B:
— Two thirds of Britain’s turbines are fully or partly owned by foreign businesses.
— Total subsidies paid to these non-UK owned farms is £523 million.
— The subsidies paid to local folk are handy for Dukes and whatnot, and those who have large estates (especially ones they don’t live on) who can pick up the £20,000 a year in subsidies — milked from people who don’t have large estates and are […]
Try the absurd Methane Madness if you haven’t already! Discuss how the big Gore event came and went with barely a trace, and marks the fall of the man who set alight much of the Greenhouse Extravaganza. Or there’s the coolest UK summer in 20 years… wiping out masses of blue butterflies. (Where is the Green angst: “Stop the cooling trend — Save the Butterfly — Donate a sunspot?”).
More importantly, the US CO2 regulation on hold indefinitely.
Or discuss something else 🙂
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
If the current egregious insanity makes you angry, join us on Sunday at Langley Park. If you have No Confidence in the current Australian Government. Let them know! It doesn’t have to be this way.
ELECTION NOW! RALLY THIS SUNDAY, 18th SEPT 2 PM
LANGLEY PARK on the PERTH FORESHORE (Terrace Rd near Hill St)
MC’d by 6PR’s HOWARD SATTLER
David Evans and I will be there. Hope you can come too and bring all your friends.. – Jo
Read more for the details….
5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Too frightening for words. Henry Ergas has a bone-chilling warning.
It takes time to get a feel for how spectacularly insidious the Australian carbon tax could be.
Firstly there’s the anti-democratic nature of it: apparently Gillard is doing things that are considered utterly beyond the pale in other nations. Ergas suggests that by granting “property rights” she is threatening to make the cost of removing her legislation all but insurmountable. (For all the world, it appears she’s determined to stop the opposition offering the people the choice to remove the carbon tax. Could it be, that for the sake of an advantage in the next election campaign she’s tossing the country down the nearest black hole?)
Secondly, the Australian Carbon Tax is a freakishly large sacrificial offering: Australians will be hit for $391 for every man, woman and child, and that’s just the first year (according to the government estimates). Compare this to the EU. There in the land-of-exploding-economies, each good citizen has had to fork out the vast grand sum of (wait for it) … one dollar fifty cents each (yes, $1.50). And, it gets worse, (how do you satirize this?) — that’s the cumulative total since the EU […]
On The Conversation Matthew Bailes, Pro Vice Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology, is feeling sympathetic towards those poor climate scientists who have to deal with daily criticism, but he doesn’t seem to know much about how climate science works. I’d like to help him out, but don’t think the Conversation team would let me add my comments into his article, so I’ve done that here, responding to Bailes:
“Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections. Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science.”
Verified?”#$%^!! Sorry, what’s that? No one in the official world of climate science has mentioned “verification” since the mid 1990’s. Shhh. In climate science they verify the observations first: when they fit the models, then they know the equipment worked. 😉
“Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings.”
No qualifications? Psst, Ivar has a Nobel Prize (and … in Physics). I know Nobels […]
Ominously, the embryonic markers of solar cycle 25 are three years late and are nowhere to be seen. Scientists are asking if this could be the start of another Maunder-type Minimum. (The bummer with that, being that during those 70 quiet years the world slipped into the Little Ice Age; animals froze in barns, people starved, disease raged… see The brutal cold of the Maunder Minimum and the Great Irish Frost for some light entertainment.)
If it were going to happen, we ought to start preparing now, right? You know, take precautions, “buy insurance”, figure out if CO2 actually does any useful warming (and if so, pump more of it into our atmosphere). You know it makes sense…
Seriously, if the cold is coming, we really ought to pay attention. — Jo
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From the press release today (June 14):
Major Drop in Solar Activity Predicted
“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results. “But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.”
Normally cycles […]
No one from the big scare campaign is even pretending that this is about the science anymore. It’s just tribal name-calling, voo-doo dolls and poo jokes from preschool.
Al Gore hopes he has reality on his side. But the reality is the relentless slide of the polls. It’s the crashed Chicago Climate Exchange, the kaput green jobs. It’s the long list of countries who are are shaking themselves free of the eco-shackles. The apostles of a bygone cult are reduced to saying that warming causes cooling, death, disease and even prostitution in Ghana. The babbling last players standing are talking about saving the world from aliens. Sadly, those are not the nutters, no, they’re the ones from NASA.
The NASA crew worry that the aliens who have been blind to the last 60 years of I love Lucy beamed out to space, have instead been transfixed by a trace gas composition change from 0.028% to 0.039% on the third rock from the sun in a distant galaxy. I’m scared now, not of the aliens, but of our collapsing collective IQ. This is modern public debate (and from the team that got the man on the moon.)
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There is a lot to discuss at the moment. I’ll leave it in the hands of the able commentators 🙂
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Another big La Nina could mean another cold winter for the Northern USA, and another wet flooding summer with potentially nasty cyclones for Eastern Australia (and the rest of the Eastern Pacific nations). La Ninas even affect the Indian Monsoon Season. If only we could predict them accurately.
Frank Lansner on HideTheDecline has noticed that one set of models (NCEP/CFS) is predicting a large La Nina brewing, while most of the others are still forecasting “neutral” conditions. The NCEP/CFS models were more accurate last year. If they are right now, we could be in for a large La Nina. On the other hand, Australia’s Bureau of Met is predicting only that “La Nina remains possible in 2011”.
Guest Post: Frank Lansner
Another Large La Nina Imminent?
For months the NCEP/CFS has been predicting a stronger second La Nina dip. Prior to the last La Nina, the NCEP/CFS was much better at predicting the La Nina — and personally I feel confident with the NCEP/CFS Prediction. It does seem to suggest that a La Nina will be upon us in a very short while. If so, global cooling is likely to shift into a faster gear.
Cooler water is appearing […]
The truth about “death threats”
The death threats scare that was widely publicized in June 2011 turned out to be opportunistic hyperbole based on a five year old letter, one unverified remark at an event a year ago, and recycled old boorish emails. Yet the shameless propaganda machine continues to repeat the baseless claim without admitting that it was a transparent attempt to score sympathy points.
Why can they get away with it? Because media outlets like The Canberra Times won’t apologize for printing such vacuous unsubstantiated claims, and they won’t correct the record. And Catalyst (which soaked in the one-sided hyperbole with Science Under Seige last night) won’t do enough “investigation” to get the story straight.
The facts on the “death-threats”:
The only “death-threat letter” the ANU could name in June 2011 was five years old. (It was posted in 2006 or 2007.) Even that was not serious enough to officially report to the Australian Federal Police. (Issuing a death threat is a criminal act punishable with a 10 year sentence in the ACT.) The other threat the ANU could “confirm” was a year old off-hand remark by an unknown person at a university function. Other reports of […]
Brilliant. The country-and-western economic thesis. It’ll catch on. So much for those Keynsian doctorates.
Ray Stevens, composer, comedian, singer. 🙂
We’re printing money
Obama Money
Let’s do what the government does, it works for them, it might work for us, so I forgot my ethics and morals and swallowed my pride We took out every credit card we could get and took out the maximum debt
5.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
You wouldn’t wish a wounded government on any nation. They’re too dangerous.
The timing could hardly be worse. We’re about to force our nation to spend far more on its energy than it has too, while our competitors are decidedly not doing that, and the world faces a economic meltdown of the “generational” type. We’re the last cab off the rank in a race to nowhere and most of the competitors have moved on to other events.
“Far from saving the worker, the ALP have become the unwitting schmucks who screwed the workers to help the banksters”.
In a desperate bid to score a “bounce” in the dismal polls, Gillard is pushing through the carbon legislation next week.
The 15 minutes of fame or a face saving “legacy” will last only until the rest of Australia wakes up to just how monumentally stupid, utterly pointless, and expensive and ineffectual this tax is. And they are waking up. The rise of skepticism in the polls is a one way street, a monotonic increase. No one is shifting into the believer camp.
Only an idiot would think a tax can change the weather.
Far from making skeptics “give up”, […]
Catastrophic killer storms are coming!
‘The Australian Greens say Tropical Cyclone Yasi is a “tragedy of climate change”.’
“DESTRUCTIVE hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita are likely to be more common … Tim Flannery warns.” “These hurricanes have been a catastrophe just waiting to happen.”
…
The IPCC concludes:
“Studies showed … future tropical cyclones would likely become more severe with greater wind speeds and more intense precipitation.” AR4 10.3.6.3 Tropical Cyclones (Hurricanes) pp786
…
Wow, that’s scary! Let’s look at the studies:
“These studies fall into two categories: those with model grid resolutions that only roughly represent some aspects of individual tropical cyclones, and those with model grids of sufficient resolution to reasonably simulate individual tropical cyclones.”
Oh? That’s models, or er… other models?
But where are the observations?
CO2 levels have risen to the highest level in a million years, presumably Hurricanes, Tornadoes and Cyclones are at all time highs, stronger and nastier than […]
An editor has resigned after committing the dastardliest of crimes: He helped publish a skeptical paper in a peer-reviewed journal. God-forbid, imagine a paper being reviewed only by people who have some sympathies with your results? It’s unthinkable. We all know that Nature and Science, for example, dutifully send all the papers by alarmists to at least one skeptical reviewer, and since 97% of 77 climate scientists are alarmists, that means the other two scientists who aren’t, are very busy people. (75 of 77 climate scientists “agree” that the world is going to hell because of CO2). And who knows where they found that third skeptic?
Naturally, lots of journal editors have resigned when they’ve realized that, accidentally, they’ve only sent alarmist papers to alarmist reviewers.
As if we needed reminding about how bizarre, unbalanced, and unscientific is the creed of climate. Normally, if egregious mistakes are found, a paper would be retracted. If “normal” mistakes are found, those who found them could publish something called a “reply”. This resignation appears to be a first. Wagner chucked his job without even so much as phoning Spencer or Braswell, which makes you wonder if it was all a bit convenient.
To […]
For those who want science and not politics, the enormous scientific compendium known as the NIPCC reports has been updated to incorporate new results. There are hundreds of references to peer reviewed research. It is as always, thorough, professional and comprehensive.
The authors of the new NIPCC report conclude that “the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is most likely to be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife.”
To summarize the executive summary:
The models overestimate the warming, don’t include chemical and biological process that may be as important as the physical ones. Plants like CO2, grow faster and the green biomass of the Earth tends to counteract the warming effects of CO2. New evidence shows the Medieval Warm Period was real, global and warmer than the present, while CO2 was 28% lower. The ice is not melting as much as people expected; the seas are not accelerating; there’s no change in rain or river flows that you can blame CO2 on. Life on Earth likes warmth. Amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, lizards, mammals, and even worms do better with a bit of global warming. […]
Well which way is it then?
Last year Professor Andrew Pitman said the science was settled, he was a poor volunteer, and skeptics were rich (which was why they were winning).
…climate scientists are losing the fight with climate sceptics. That the sceptics are so well funded, so well organized, have nothing else to do, they kind of don’t have day jobs, they can put all of their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and this isn’t one of them. All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full scale misinformation campaigns…”
[Source: It was so bad, the ABC broadcast it, twice — Eleanor Hall interviews Andy Pitman. Robin Williams thought it was so “useful” he rebroadcast the same factually incorrect, irrelevant material.]
Tom Nelson caught him telling prospective students in the Adelaide Advertiser that they ought to rush to study climate science so they can get paid well, be political activists, and change our understanding of the climate.
Almost invariably, climate PhDs with a physics […]
HFC-23 is 15,000 times as potent as CO2 in the greenhouse gas stakes. It’s only made by six factories in the whole of Europe.
Given that, you would think that they’d have this one esoteric compound completely tracked, measured to the nth, audited and cross checked, right? After all, how devastating would it be if governments can’t report something as simple as HFC-23 accurately, how could they possibly expect to run a global trading scheme on a gas like CO2, which is not just made in hundreds of factories, but thousands of cities, millions of cars, and billions of animals. Well, if you thought someone somewhere had a handle on those numbers, get ready to be corrected. Not only did people think it was a good idea if countries self-assessed their emissions, but they trusted those countries to accurately report numbers that millions of dollars of payments rested on, and nobody was looking too hard over their shoulder.
Who has been emitting twice as much HFC-23 as they admitted? That would be the whole of Western Europe. Italy, apparently, has snuck out 10 times as much.
So what does a “binding target” mean exactly? Not much. When we can’t measure […]
This was forwarded to me via email.
The modern version of “green” is so tame. When it comes to recycling material, living without disposable goods, and leaving a smaller carbon footprint, the real experts are the long lived people who’ve been there, done that, and did it so much better, so long ago.
Jo
Eco-friendly TV anyone? (via Amberley Working Museum, England). Photo: By Les Chatfield
The Green Thing
The original low carbon lawn mower. Photo: Kallerna
In the line at the supermarket, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
The woman apologized to him and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.” The cashier responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.” He was right — our generation didn’t have The Green Thing in its day.
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soft drink bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. […]
1,410 miles or 2,270 km to go
Fifty cars, trucks and vans, and there were at least four helicopters watching the action as the North Queensland Convoy headed through Charters Towers. Images like these will make the Labor Party break into a sweat.
These pics from the You tube of the aerial shots as the convoy went through Charters Towers.
The Convoy travels through Charters Towers
Over 100 in the convoy in the NT last night! ANNIE HESSE Katherine Times (via Carbon Sense Coalition Blog) 18 Aug, 2011 09:17 AM A Convoy of more than 100 vehicles – including road trains, campervans and utes – rolled into Katherine last night to show their support for the Convoy of no Confidence, a convoy heading to Canberra to raise a voice against recent government decisions.
Rashida Khan, who led a trail of vehicles from Darwin to Katherine yesterday, said she was on her way to Canberra to speak up for “some of the toughest people” she knows, who “have been pushed to the edge by the decision to ban live export”.
Have a look at the convoy passing through Ingham: (H/t Val Malkus). Send in those links!
7 out of 10 […]
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