See the ridiculous application of laws that are supposed to protect the environment. We mock DEC’s use of the word “watercourse”. The Thompsons case and all their pain depends on a paddock being listed as a watercourse. They have in effect lost it all because in a 100 year flood, water from this paddock might possibly reach a salt pan 10 km away. This is not about the environment. This post includes maps of the property and surrounds. By paying attention to the detail of the licences we can see just how powerful the Department of Environment (DEC) is, and how selective it can be. You would think it would be easy to measure 100 m toward a waterway, but how do you define a waterway? You might expect that it would have banks, or that in a 100 year flood the water flowing in the gully might have a chance of reaching a body of water big enough to have a fish. If so, don’t apply for a job at DEC in WA. […]
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September 21st, 2010 | Tags: Big-Government, Thompson (Janet and Matt) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | A sample of recent scientific news from NIPCC * The Glaciers of Greenland were smaller 5000 years ago; * African savanna trees thrive with increases in CO2; * It was hotter in China a thousand years ago, and by a whole degree; * Marine-life-with-shells can’t agree on their favourite CO2 level and * Temperatures make no difference to the 5000 year record of hurricanes. […] September 21st, 2010 | Tags: China, Glaciers, Greenland, Hurricanes, Medieval Warm Period, NIPCC, Ocean Acidification, Plant growth | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | What a mess. The New South Wales State (NSW) Government is one of the most unpopular state governments in the history of Australia. Maybe this gives us a clue why. The latest plan is to please the population by taking an unnecessary statewide carbon abatement scheme and launching it on the whole nation: 7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […] We come across these stories all the time: Those moments when the most well-intended ideas turned out to have a kicker of an outcome. It’s time to start organizing and filing them. Money is a powerful fuel. But, some people think you can inject it into a human ecosystem, and that everyone will keep acting the same. Like people are forgetting the feedbacks…. Here, one legislator describes the outcome of his own work as a “gigantic rort”, and another researcher uses the word blackmail. Meanwhile, two out of three children diagnosed with autism in Queensland are apparently not autistic. 7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […] September 19th, 2010 | Tags: Autism, Unintended Consequences | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Have green government officials targeted a family farm because they are vocal skeptics? This is a family with four young children, who ran a profitable business; they filled in every form and ticked every box. They have broken no laws, and there are no outstanding environmental notices, but yet, they came to Western Australia with their life savings and they are losing everything. After years of government red tape, delays, and impossible requests the bank has given them 4 days to pay up. […] September 18th, 2010 | Tags: Big-Government, Thompson (Janet and Matt) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Nearly 40 years ago, John Holdren (now “science” advisor to Obama) wrote a book with the infamous Ehrlichs. Their “progressive” attack on progress was clear: “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States”. It’s a weird use of the word. But, there is no mistaking “de-develop”: to undo development, to go backwards, to get rid of advances…. […] A comment from Speedy is worth taking up. I fear they will close the survey soon. Don’t miss the chance to let them know how disappointed you are in falling standards of scientific integrity in our major scientific institutions and associations. These groups should be speaking out against unscientific behaviour, illogical announcements, and a lack of empirical evidence in policy proscriptions. These institutions should be serving the public. The survey is for members of Australian Science Associations and members of FASTS. 7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […] If we are winning this war, we would expect to see signs of retreat, and many signs have crossed my desk recently. 1. The EU abandons the Unilateral Kyoto Agreement Reuters 14th Sept. Read between the lines, and hidden amongst the rest: Connie Hedegaard’s comments were delivered alongside a warning that Europe would not automatically sign up again to the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, the main global deal to tackle climate change. Hedegaard said progress looked “very difficult” in the run up to global climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November, and that nobody should expect the EU to sign up to an extension of the Kyoto Protocol unless loopholes are closed and other big players commit. (Thanks to Benny Pieser) 2. Russia and China have never been fooled by the Big Scare Campaign The Russian bets that coal mining will be a good deal for 25 years to come. China agrees. I don’t think either of these countries is thinking seriously about paying a carbon price on top. Chinamining.org 7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […] Ken Stewart has been hard at work again, this time analyzing the Australian urban records. While he expected that the cities and towns would show a larger rise than records in the country due to the Urban Heat Island Effect, what he found was that the raw records showed only a 0.4 degree rise, less than the rural records which went from a raw 0.6 to an adjusted 0.85 (a rise of 40%). What shocked him about the urban records were the adjustments… making the trend a full 70% warmer. The largest adjustments to the raw records are cooling ones in the middle of last century. So 50 years after the measurements were recorded, officials realized they were artificially too high? Hopefully someone who knows can explain why so many thermometers were overestimating temperatures in the first half of the 1900’s. 50 years later? The raw Australian urban temperature records are in blue. The adjusted records in red. Note that temperatures in the middle of last century appear to be adjusted downwards. These are the annual average recordings for all 34 sites. Remember Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring […] September 14th, 2010 | Tags: Adjustments to data, Australian temperatures, BOM, Evidence, Stewart (Ken), Surface Records, Temperature trends | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Clive Hamilton writes again on The ABC Drum It’s a strange, inside-out world. Poor Hamilton seems to suffer from a kind of public form of projection, where he inadvertently lumps skeptics with all his own failures. Everything he claims to be standing for, he unwittingly attacks. Everything he protests about is something he does himself, and in spades. Virtually every point is easily refuted, yet promoted with public money. It’s quite an achievement. Hamilton is anti-science, intolerant, and hypocritical all at once, and his arguments collapse when measured against his own benchmarks. He resorts to name-calling, and rank speculation without basis or substantiation. The ABC betrays its wafer thin intellectual standards and bias by not noticing that Clive barely makes a point that does not dispute itself. Clive protests about the War on Science, but doesn’t realize he is waging it.
The thing that makes the scientific method vastly different to all the other philosophies and methods of acquiring knowledge out there is that evidence always stands above opinion. Yet the very core of Hamilton’s arguments depends on the “Consensus”, and Clive apparently hasn’t […] September 14th, 2010 | Tags: ABC Unleashed (blog), Hamilton (Clive) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | After a Year of Setbacks, U.N. Looks to Take Charge of World’s Agenda The World: It’s part of the United Nations Foxnews It’s a story that just begs to be translated into English. It’s just another naked grab for power disguised as a helping hand. We come in peace, we’d like to run your country. The UN bureaucrats, that no one elected, want to decide what happens to everyone everywhere in the world. They want p o w e r and control (I’m shocked I tell you!) After a year of humiliating setbacks, United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and about 60 of his top lieutenants — the top brass of the entire U.N. system — spent their Labor Day weekend at a remote Austrian Alpine retreat, discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of the world’s agenda. The topics included: — how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit; In charge of the world’s agenda? They want to control our weather, our money, our sources of power (is there anything much left?). Maybe we still get to choose the movies… They really want to award […] Carbon credits: Just another excuse to "print money" … If this was Exxon pushing a PDF promoting skeptical views, it would be on the front page tomorrow. Where are the front page headlines? “Bankers feed scare-mongering report” Instead it’s just Deutsche Bank try to save the world their profit line. Just in case you are missing your daily dose of being spoon fed propaganda by Bankers who want your money, see Climate Spectator Balancing reason and risk, where Deutsche Bank is helping the skeptics by giving us yet another example of just how desperate they are to get carbon trading running. Q: When will the bankers worry about whales? (Ans: When they can trade Humpback Credits.) The good news is we are getting to them, and we are marking the lines they need to jump over. They now admit it looks bad when they denigrate scientists (they finally “get” that they shouldn’t call scientists deniers): Although the scientific community has already addressed the sceptic arguments in some detail, there is still a public perception that scientists have been dismissive of the sceptic viewpoint, Watch how they pretend to care about the science (science-schmaltz), […] September 11th, 2010 | Tags: Bankers, Carbon Credits, Climate Money, Deutsche Bank | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Roger Pielke, Jr. has looked closely at Australia’s ETS targets and helpfully put some numbers into the hypotheticals. With all their subsidies, goodwill and fervent wishes, solar, wind, and geothermal produce just 3% of our energy needs. Fossil fuels produce a whopper 94%. And “energy” on these grand continental scales is measured in quadrillion BTUs which is known as “one quad”. Australians use about 5 quads / year, and to make that we pump out about 400 Mt of carbon dioxide per year. (These kind of big-picture numbers are often hard to find, so I wanted to capture that to keep things in perspective.) … Population growth is a big factor in Australia 8 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […] September 9th, 2010 | Tags: Alternative Energy, Australia's Energy Statistics, Nuclear Energy, Pielke Jnr (Roger), Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Australia, Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear Power, Renewable, Renewables, Solar Power, Wind Power | Print This Post | | UPDATE: Oakeshott and Windsor go with The Labor Party. Why? Because more than anything they want a long stable government. They like both packages from both parties, but the deciding factor appears to be that they think the Coalition would be more likely to call an early election because they’d be more likely to win it. Figure that. They’re admitting the Labor minority government is weaker, and that’s why they’re backing it. Putting long-stable-government over better-government, or more popular-government is pure self-interest. The independents feel they would hold more power in a three-way-split Labor party minority, and that their power would last for longer. And Oakeshott might get a Ministry. (Not that that has anything to do with it…) See Bolt. So the plan now as the world faces the Global Financial Crisis part II is that anyone who disagrees with any government proposal needs to run active campaigns to make sure these two independents know exactly why those proposals are counter to Australia’s interests. Steve Fielding will save us from the-Argentinian-path until July next year. After that… … EARLIER: One of the three independents has announced he will back the conservative coalition. That makes the tally effectively 74:74. […] Clive Hamilton, the Australian “public intellectual”, and failed Greens candidate is a busy man: leave no ad hominem unsaid, no law of logic unbroken. The man has a predictable formula. Rule one: Make an unsubstantiated claim; cast aspersions on all who so much as question it — dig deep for an attempted character assassination if possible; then top it off with feigned moral indignation mixed with grandiose generalizations. It helps to toss in some strawman conspiracies, and confound it with unrelated topics. Rule two: never discuss the evidence. The Australian newspaper: MP’s obligation is to the planet Hamilton was trying to guilt trip and intimidate the independent parliamentarians in Australia (who will probably announce their decision tomorrow about who will form government). Almost everything he says is based on a bluff. The danger of climate change towers over all other influences on the security and health of future generations, yet the Liberal Party and the Nationals are run by people who reject the vast body of scientific evidence that proves it. Can’t one journalist just ask Hamilton to name the scientific paper that we “deniers” deny? Something that shows carbon dioxide has a major effect on our climate (ie. more […] September 7th, 2010 | Tags: Hamilton (Clive), The Australian | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | And a small operational note: I’ve set up an email address support AT joannenova.com.au which goes direct to the fabulous helpful volunteers who moderate. If you see a comment that needs reporting, that’s the email to use. Likewise, if your comment disappears into the spam autofile, you can email the moderators who can set it free. If you email me I may not be able to help for hours. Please bear in mind that your email will go to several busy people who have other real jobs and commitments. Please respect that. Otherwise, this thread is for all those topics that I haven’t written about lately, or for news. Latest comments The latest comments (at this moment) come from 6 different threads, one of which is from a post last December. I think it’s a great thing if people can post on-topic and revive old threads. Thanks to the latest comments page, it means that people have more chance of getting an answer or an audience on old posts. Notes on finding “that post” If you are not familiar with them, my INDEX, ARCHIVES and LATEST 30 COMMENTS pages are all working well. I’m quite proud of them. 🙂 If […] Such is the pressure finally beginning to bear on the IPCC that Pachauri has been forced into the ridiculous position of trying to rescue credibility by contradicting most of their past PR campaign. He’s taken the extraordinary step of admitting they don’t have hard numbers, hey, but it’s all OK because the IPCC is really a government agency to make policy, not to write scientific reports “that don’t see the light of day”. So he’s admitting that the IPCC was all about policy prescriptions all along? And the science was just fudged-up window dressing to provide an excuse? Well, who would have guessed. Hidden beside Pachauri’s declaration that he’s happy about the IAC report, he let slip a corker of a line: Times of India asks: Anything in the UN probe report you completely or partly disagree with? They have talked about quantifying uncertainties. To some extent, we are doing that, though not perfectly. But the issue is that in some cases, you really don’t have a quantitative base by which you can attach a probability or a level of uncertainty that defines things in quantitative terms. And there, let’s not take away the importance of expert judgment. And […] September 4th, 2010 | Tags: IPCC, Pachauri (Rajendra) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Australia – The Sunburnt Country going Green around the Gillards? Will we or won’t we? Each day for nearly two weeks we swing politically… looks like Labor… looks like the Coalition… One side has more seats, then the other; one side has a higher primary count, then the other; the three crucial independents say things that sound like they find the big-spending side of government appealing, then polls show that their electorates all voted conservatively; then the 2-party-preferred vote swings one way, swings back, and swings again, in the end it’s a piddling few thousand votes out of 14 million or so. I’m kind of getting used to not-having-a-government. The Business Council wails repeatedly that business “hates uncertainty”, but I keep thinking that if UFO’s took our elected reps on a 3 year wine-tour of Alpha Centauri, Business would revel in the certainty that no new-fang-dangled-clauses would appear. 7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […] I feel like I keep stating the obvious. A carbon tax is bad because it’s unnecessary and nobody wastes money better than big government, but a carbon trading scheme is worse. The latter is a fake market that feeds corruption and creates it’s own vested industry of financial brokers who profit no matter what the price and no matter who buys or sells (they just need a government mandated scheme that forces businesses to buy and sell), and no matter whether anything useful happens to the environment. Once the financial houses are set (and they are already well advanced) how could this policy ever be unwound? Carbon Tax = bad Carbon Trade = sew raw steaks to your shirt and swim with sharks … … So everyone has a handy pocket list as a reference: Carbon trading is NOT a free market. (In a free market, no one would pay for an atmospheric nullity they can’t use. A carbon trading market is one where the government compels some parties to buy, so it is not free.) It feeds the financial sharks. (Think “ENRON” x 100). Its a magnet […] September 3rd, 2010 | Tags: Climate Money, Tax vs Trade | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Here’s a devout follower telling off his own kind for showing their “faith”. “Beyond Belief” (Climate Spectator) The “believers” have suddenly realized how uncool it is to talk about “beliefs” when it’s supposed to be about science. So the rush is on to post articles warning believers to hide their “faith” and to throw in token comments about evidence instead. Indeed the Real Deniers are scrambling to claim the “name” skeptic that they used to despise. It’s a measure of how far this debate has come. Such was the success of the PR campaign, some skeptics gave up on the term and opted to use “realist”. But the skeptics have been proved right time after time, and the unskeptical scientists have been embarrassed by their own conniving words, mistakes, tricks and lies. The resurgence of the word “skeptic” is rising like a rocket. As I’ve said many times, the opposite of skeptical is gullible. And an unskeptical scientist is an oxymoron. So here’s Paul Gilding in the publication that panders to the climate industry: Climate Spectator, offering the fake guise of a skeptical soul: It’s time for true confessions. I don’t believe in climate science. That’s because I’m a […] August 31st, 2010 | Tags: Climate Spectator, Unskeptical Scientists, Unskeptical Skeptics | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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