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Is it science or is it a marketing machine?This press release with psychedelic art tells us land regions will warm by more than the global average, because oceans are slower to heat. No kidding. They use more broken models to breathlessly talk about being locked in to 1.5 °C rise — “more than preindustrial times”. How scared do we need to be about a 1.5C rise — it’s not just locked in, it’s already here. NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt says so — ” 2016 so far is about 1.5 degrees Celsius ( 2.7 degrees) warmer than pre-industrial times.” Since Gavin is talking “globally” the extra rise over land above and beyond that is not so much programmed in, as pre-baked. The art might be the most original part of the paper.
Let’s redesign those cities:The results of the new study have implications for international discussions of what constitutes safe global temperature thresholds, such as 1.5°C or 2°C of warming since pre-industrial times. The expected extra warming over land will influence how we need to design some cities. Human civilization already lives in towns from -50C to +40C. I reckon we’ll manage a 1.5 degree rise (especially one that’s already happened). Can we cope with -48.5 to +41.5, The UN wants $89 trillion to do it. So give me $88T. I’ll give you a trillion in change. How much redesigning will these warmer cities need anyway? A move from Sydney to Brisbane produces an apocalyptic 4 degrees rise. And we have about a thousand years to accomplish a transformation that big. The inanities just keep coming. It’s like the peer reviewers have missed the last three decades of the climate debate. Here are the two big news flashes. 1. The climate is out of equilibrium (was it ever “in” equilibrium?) The research team found two main reasons behind the result. First, even if it was possible to keep carbon dioxide concentrations fixed at their current 400 parts-per-million concentration levels, then the planet would continue to warm towards new equilibrium higher temperatures. At present, the climate is out of equilibrium, with the oceans drawing down very large amounts of heat from the atmosphere. However this will decline as the planet is bought towards a stable climatic state. 2. Wait for it… Land heats more than ocean. Second, warming rates over land are far higher than those when averaged globally which include temperatures over the oceans. This is a feature observed in meteorological measurements and reproduced across a large suite of climate models. Not just observed in climate models and meteorological measurements, but observed on the nightly news too. Even at primary school. Is this the voice of guilt? Lead author Dr Chris Huntingford from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology said, “It would certainly be inappropriate to create any additional fear over climate change. This paper wins the Trite Science Prize for 2016 —That’s the peer reviewed science paper that tells us what we already know. Keep reading → Aiming for the passionless imaginary center doesn’t work
The next election will be won by the party that manages to reap more than its fair share of the non-Greens minor party voters. They are up for grabs for Liberal or Labor. In the end, around 50% of the Delcons are prepared to put Labor above Liberal in preferences (the nuclear option) — showing how wrong Mark Textor’s theory is that the Liberal base “doesn’t matter” and the Liberals should aim for the centre and can afford to mistreat their base. Another theme I see is that parties need passion — when it’s missing from the base, it sure isn’t coming from the centre. As I said before Turnbull took over, “the passionate support base for the Liberal party will switch to other conservative or libertarian parties.” It was all so obvious. Turnbull had to personally throw in a million dollars to make up for some of the loss in donations. One gratifying surprise is that the naked Mediscare campaign may have helped the Liberals and hurt the Labor Party. More people who named it as “important” were likely to be repelled by the scare. The Labor Party overdid it. The people who were fooled by it were already voting Labor, and some of the people who might have voted Labor saw it as heavyhanded propaganda. The Labor party could have won more Delcons if it had been halfway sensible. Instead they retreated left to “the green centre” and so alienated centre voters. Many Delcons had no choice but to go to a third party. Another surprise — the economy, normally safe ground for the Libs, probably cost them votes. Fully a third of voters still care about the economy above anything else and the Libs hardly won any Labor voters over this time, but lost 3% of the economy-driven-voters who picked them last time (if only they could have run the anti-carbon tax theme eh?). Superannuation, predictably, was a vote repeller away from the Liberals, though was an issue that only mattered for 3.6% of the population. (Presumably most people don’t have enough Super to care — that’s the 401k for US readers, Pension Provision for the UK.) I’d bet the larger cost of the Super Bomb was that those with more Super who were Liberal supporters stopped donating and volunteering to help. Graham Young doesn’t mention that effect, but even if the direct loss of votes was small, the passion causes an indirect loss that is larger. The full analysis of of federal election exit polling by Australian Institute of Progress (AIP) is available at these links:
If you are not already a member of Australian Institute for Progress you can join by clicking here. The Mediscare hype probably worked against the Labor PartyThis is comforting. It was a naked, dishonest effort which involved a lot of people on the street repeating the same false accusation, handing out gimmicky cards, effectively trying to “create” an issue where there was none. In the end it probably swung more people, especially the Delcons, to the Liberals. The Labor Party could have captured more Delcons if it had been just not so damn grubby: Keep reading →
One day when you grow up, children, you too can be a research scientist who writes papers that tells the world something banally obvious — like, say, that natural disasters make conflict more likely. Who, exactly, thought natural disasters brought peace? I don’t think the journalist who wrote this next paragraph asked himself what it means (if anything): Globally, there was a nine per cent coincidence rate between the outbreak of armed conflicts and natural disasters like droughts and heatwaves. But, in countries that were deeply divided along ethnic lines, this rose to about 23 per cent. I suspect it means not much (define “coincident”), but if it did, it implies that globally, 91% of wars don’t coincide with natural disasters. If there is a real message here, it appears to be that ethnic divisions cause wars: Dr Jonathan Donges, who co-wrote the paper about the study, said: “We’ve been surprised by the extent that results for ethnic fractionalised countries stick out, compared to other country features such as conflict history, poverty, or inequality. Keep reading → July 27th, 2016 | Tags: Africa, War | Category: Global Warming, Psychology, war |  Print This Post | | You know it makes sense — air conditioners are as dangerous as suicide bombers. They must be stopped. Next up, refrigerators… Here’s a petition you can support: Do it for the children, for the future. Remove air conditioning from all US State Department property.
WHEREAS, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has suggested that air conditioners are as big a threat as ISIS, and WHEREAS, it is the duty of our elected and appointed government officials to lead by example, Keep reading →
The activist journo’s have overplayed their hand. They are not even trying… “Voters Expect Reporters To Help Clinton Over Trump”[July 21st, 2016] A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters think that when covering a political campaign, most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage. Most (69%) say reporters try to help the candidate they want to win. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure (To see survey question wording, click here.) The media have lost so much influence. They described Brexiteers as loony, selfish and xenophobic, but more than half the country ignored them and voted for Brexit. Similarly, the US media mocked and denigrated Trump supporters, and continually predicted he wouldn’t stay in the race, and wouldn’t make it through the primaries, and yet he did. Poor pundits keep being surprised by the people. The key word in this survey is “try” — everyone knows humans have some kind of bias, but the survey asked “do most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage or do they try to help the candidate they want to win?” Mainstream news has become an advertising forum for big government, but the dumb voters can see through it. Nearly 50% of US voters think the media is biased against Trump. Nearly 20% say it’s against Hillary. Keep reading → … Readers may find this documentary interesting. I doubt the ABC will be running it. This US election matters to so many people around the world. The outcome makes a big difference to climate skeptics. And it’s about so much more than that. How do we beat corruption? Breitbart is hosting the free showing (only for a few hours) for the documentary based on a senior editors book: Clinton Cash UPDATE: Australia is in this too. Both Gillard and Bishop have contributed $500m Australian taxpayer dollars to Clinton charities [and other Democrat power brokers*].Tony Thomas has those details. “Julia Gillard lavished an unprecedented $292 million in taxpayer dollars on the Clinton-dominated Global Partnership for Education, where she was later appointed chair. Imagine the howls if Tony Abbott had underwritten…” See also “The Clintons and Their Corruptocrats” for even more…
The film, based on the New York Times bestselling investigative book Clinton Cash by Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, has sent shockwaves through media. The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, and other Establishment Media have verified and confirmed the book’s explosive revelations about how Hillary Clinton auctioned State Department policies to foreign Clinton Foundation donors and benefactors who then paid Bill Clinton tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees. The first two minutes tell the Clinton’s narrative. Then the documentary compares the message to the actions. In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments. Trumps independent wealth becomes an asset: Tim Kaine [Clintons running mate] Reinforces ‘Crooked’ Hillary’s Weaknesses on Cronyism, Corruption [Breitbart] Trump won the GOP primary by self-funding his campaign and convincing voters that the lobbyists and other big-money donors would never control him like a puppet. And Clinton’s selection of Kaine will allow Trump to run on the same themes in the general election by painting Clinton and Kaine as career politicians who have needed—and used—government their for personal gain. At the GOP convention, Eric Trump, Trump’s son, urged voters to “vote for the one candidate that does not need this job.” UPDATE: The link still works for me, but may not for others. See comments #8 and #9 below. VinceOz and Evo of Gong. h/t Pat. *Correction, thanks to Bob D. The half billion was not just to the Clinton Foundation but to Democrat powerbrokers etc as well. Let’s get those priorities right: Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State. Depends what you mean by “life” I guess. Some like the world 2 degrees cooler, and some prefer to keep their heads. “As we were working together on the challenge of [ISIS] and terrorism,” Kerry said. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we–you–are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.” It’s good to know the US will be well defended against an invasion of badly gassed fridges. Since warming is mostly beneficial this threat is at the Defcon-Toothfairy level. And probably not that high. The extra energy trapped by HFC refrigerant gasses most likely just reroutes and escapes to space through water vapor emissions. Keep reading → July 24th, 2016 | Tags: HFC-23, Satire & Parody | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | It doesn’t have to be this way. The most important price in our economy is set by a bunch of bureaucrats. They are unelected and unaccountable. But your day to day life is affected by their decisions, as well as your ability to buy a house or for your retirement savings to maintain their value. Some people are wiped out by a mere phrase in a memo. There is a deep Soviet style management program at the centre of all Western economies. It’s time we talked about that ogre. Maurice Newman, former chair of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), writes in The Australian about the defining invisible issue which is rarely discussed — our currencies, our central banks: Vladimir Lenin advocated: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” True or not, we seem hellbent on finding out. Dark times are coming: The BIS has rung the alarms. We are warned that the world’s most reckless monetary experiment, which has taken interest rates to the lowest in recorded history, is failing. Central bankers remain silent, not knowing how or when to end what they began, while the political class simply looks on, impotent and mired in its own economic mistakes. This leaves only the market’s invisible and heavy hand to make the required adjustments. What follows will be indiscriminate, unpredictable, socially far-reaching and, politically ugly. Central banks drive the economy at breakneck speedCentral banks keep interest rates artificially low. This pumps up a sick economy, by effectively “printing” money. (Technically, it makes money cheap to borrow into existence creating bank “credit”). This is a gold plated Christmas present for high risk speculators, but it’s taken from people who work for their money. It’s like toxoplasmosis for savers — their savings are silently eaten away by inflation as borrowers outspend them with money they did not earn. Savers have to adopt high risk behaviours to stay afloat and keep their purchasing power from sinking in a river of money. Easy money generates cycles of boom and bust that wipe out life savings. No one can do hourly work for 40 years, then live off the pitiful interest paid on the money saved. Instead everyone has to “invest” and speculate whether they like it or not. And thus do local councilors get eaten by Goldman Sachs traders for breakfast. What kind of culture do we want? Easy credit favours aggressive takeovers, and hostile, predatory market behaviour. Central banks control so many aspects of our lifestyle, yet we can’t vote them out. More bad debt can’t fix a problem created with bad debtWe’re up to the third round of bubbles. The addiction to easy credit has reached the end stage when each injection is almost impotent. Printing money doesn’t create euphoria, or even growth, it just puts off judgement day. Keep reading → July 23rd, 2016 | Tags: Bankers, Fiat Currency, Gold | Category: Economics, Free markets | Print This Post | | The “fastest warming place” on Planet Earth wasn’t warming.A new Antarctic study wipes out 20 years of panic about the West Antarctic Peninsula. All these years while people were crying about penguins, it turns out that the place was cooling rather than warming. Mankind has emitting a third of all its “CO2-pollution” ever from 1998, and there was “no discernible” effect on Antarctica. Indeed, the study quietly finds that even the bigger longer warming that has happened in the last century was not “unprecedented” in the last 2000 years. In the last decade as this cooling trend was happening in the real world — in the media, the same spot was being described as “one of the fastest warming places on Earth”: The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, NBC, 2013 West Antarctic Ice Sheet warming twice earlier estimate, BBC, 2012 And this sort of news has been going on for years. This was “big deal” once-in-2000 year type stuff: UK scientists say parts of Antarctica have recently been warming much faster than most of the rest of the Earth. They believe the warming is probably without parallel for nearly two thousand years. — BBC, 2001 But the news in 2016 was a bit of a bomb, prone to being misinterpreted, so the PR Team was pre-armed with excuses, from the first line of the scientific abstract which pretty much says that the peninsula still was one of the fastest warming places on Earth (if you look at warming from 1950 and ignore the last 20 years the study is studying). Great opening line. The abstract also mentions that the Antarctic peninsula is only 1% of the Antarctic (though no one seems to mention that when it was melting). Further excuses went out in the media (from The Australian and The ABC):
Contort those headlinesSomething funny happens to editors with these types of stories. When Antarctica warms, melts, or loses ice the headlines are short. But when it cools you can feel the editors pain. Here’s the ABC’s catchy headline: Antarctica: One of last century’s fastest warming places is temporarily cooling, scientists find The WashingtonPost came up with this snappy effort: The Antarctic Peninsula has been cooling, but that doesn’t disprove global warming Spin the meaningNo matter how much it cools, it still warming: “We’re certainly not saying that global warming has stopped. On the contrary, we’re highlighting the complexity of climate change.” Complexity is the excuse for all occasions. Better leave it to experts and don’t think cooling means, y’know, cooling. One hot month is man-made but 20 years of regional cooling means nothing. Don’t mention the volcanoesThe edge of the Pacific plate, and a volcanic chain runs under those red dots on the map below. Note where the heating is in the paired other map of Antarctica. Hmm? Is magma hot enough to melt ice… Indeed, one researcher recently described the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”. So glaciers could still be melting down this neck of the woods, but there might be natural causes for that too. Likewise oceans may be warming around here as well, but then I don’t suppose anyone at the BBC or ABC will mention the hot magma underfoot.  … All those past stories that told us manmade emissions were destroying Antarctica — forget them. We don’t know what the cause is:Lead author, Professor John Turner of British Antarctic Survey says: ‘The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most challenging places on Earth on which to identify the causes of decade-to-decade temperature changes.’ Now they tell us. Indeed, apparently researchers can’t say that human-caused climate change was doing anything to the Antarctic: Prof Nerilie Abram, at the Australian National University, said: “For a remote place like Antarctica, where climate measurements are especially short and those year-to-year swings in climate are very large, our records really aren’t long enough yet to see the full picture of human-caused climate change.” Shame they didn’t mention that twenty years ago. Perhaps they could speak up about the researchers who are making a fuss about other noisy, short data series? Like these ones: Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn. It’s important never to be surprisedScientists get shocked, astonished and amazed at events that are not even as bad as their models predicted. But when things are the opposite of what the models said, these are completely… expected: Prof Andrew Shepherd, at the University of Leeds, said: “It’s completely unsurprising that in any long-term temperature record there will be a decade of measurements that buck the trend. There are few scientists left who believe that atmospheric warming will be the main cause of Antarctic [ice] instability over the next century. The warming that models projected, — Ruairi REFERENCE
Let’s not mince words. The new President of the Philippines, Jose Duterte, says he won’t sign or honor the “stupid” Paris deal and he wanted to kick the ambassador who asked. Here’s a memorable moment in international diplomacy: “You are trying to stifle us,” Duterte said on Monday in widely reported comments. “That’s stupid, I will not honour that. You signed … That was not my signature.” Duterte said: “I’m mad at this ambassador. I want to kick him,” adding that limits on carbon emissions for the Philippines were “nonsense”. “You who have reached your peak and along with it spewed a lot of contaminants, emissions … Good for you. We are here, we have not reached the age of industrialisation. We are on our way to it.” This is a bit of a bummer for the big-government collective. The Philippines has 100 million people and is the 12th biggest country on Earth population-wise. Brexit, India and the Philippines smell like “Clexit”The Trump factor looms too. Sensing a tidal wave, the UN promptly issued a call for everyone to hurry up. The United Nations has issued a plea for nations to fast-track ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement as some countries are backtracking on support for the deal’s sweeping restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. How about Thursday? U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged nations to attend a “special event” Thursday where they may deposit their “instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession to the Paris Agreement on climate change.” Progress so far? 177 nations turned up to the Paris party, but only 19 have ratified the agreement in the last six months. It’s not looking good. They need 55 nations which are responsible for 55% of the worlds emissions before the Paris deal gets legs. Marc Morano, who runs the skeptics’ website Climate Depot, said Tuesday that the cold feet on global warming shows that some countries are realizing the international climate agreement is “not in their best interests.” “More and more nations are realizing that the U.N. climate treaty is nothing more than an effort to empower the U.N. and attack national sovereignty while doing absolutely nothing for the climate,” said Mr. Morano, who debuted his film “Climate Hustle” during the negotiations in Paris. He said that the “time has come for a U.S.-led ‘Clexit’ from … the climate treaty.” The “Clexit” or Climate Exit, comes from Viv Forbes at Carbon Sense in Queensland. It’s catching on. The Washington Times also quotes Eric Worrall on Watts Up. Keep reading → July 22nd, 2016 | Tags: Clexit, Paris | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | |  Bacteria multiply In the West we could try to cure cancer faster with research like this, or we could pour billions into making expensive electricity to try to cool the world by 0.01°C for our grandchildren. Hmm. What to do? Which activity is more likely to make citizens richer, happier and more productive? In this approach (below) bacteria are engineered to find cancer cells, make lots of baby bacteria until they reach a large enough colony size then do a mass self-destructo at the cancer site — releasing a tumor killing drug. A few bacteria survive the micro-apocalypse and they start another round. So far, the researchers haven’t cured any cancers, but they can shrink cancers in mice and extend mousy lives by 50%. One day this might mean cancers can be “lived with”, if not actually destroyed completely.  A critical mass is reached and the colony “bombs”. So the bacteria can be engineered into neat little machines to manage cancer. But they are still living creatures, so are messy machines. One problem is that evolution tends to make all living machines chuck out bits of DNA that don’t improve survival, so the “survivors” will gradually take over, lose the special engineered addons, and not be so obedient. This approach is not guaranteed to be the right answer. Nonetheless, this sort of research may keep a loved one alive, make a company a lot richer, contribute more tax dollars, save on public health budgets, etc etc. For perspective, Australia has a $2.4b Emissions Reductions Fund (which is used to make expensive electrons with inefficient solar panels and such-like that the market would not buy otherwise). As a nation we spend about $900m on medical research each year total. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could double medical research, and halve electricity costs, and have a tax cut. _______________ Synthetic biology used to limit bacterial growth and coordinate drug release[Sciencedaily] UC San Diego researchers led by Jeff Hasty, a professor of bioengineering and biology, engineered a clinically relevant bacterium to produce cancer drugs and then self-destruct and release the drugs at the site of tumors. Keep reading → July 21st, 2016 | Tags: Microbiology | Category: Big-Government, Cancer, Medicine, Microbiology | Print This Post | | On a good day South Australia has more than 40% renewable energy. On a bad day, it’s -2 or something. Wind towers suck in so many ways. They can even draw more power out than they bring in and best of all — their peak electron sucking power comes just when the state needs electricity the most. Business blows up as turbines suck more power than they generateThe sapping of power by the turbines during calm weather on July 7 at the height of the crisis, which has caused a price surge, shows just how unreliable and intermittent wind power is for a state with a renewable energy mix of more than 40 per cent. South Australia has more “renewable” wind power than anywhere else in Australia. They also have the highest electricity bills, the highest unemployment, the largest number of “failures to pay” and disconnections. Coincidence? The emergency measures are needed to ease punishing costs for South Australian industry as National Electricity Market (NEM) prices in the state have frequently surged above $1000 a megawatt hour this month and at one point on Tuesday hit the $14,000MWh maximum price. Complaints from business about the extreme prices – in normal times they are below $100 – prompted the state government to ask energy company ENGIE to switch its mothballed Pelican Point gas power station back on. It’s not just about peak pricing it’s monthly pricing too: Electricity contracts for delivery in 2017 and 2018 are priced at $91-100MWh in South Australia, compared to $50-63 in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. South Australian NEM prices have averaged about $360MWh so far this month, Mr Morris said, compared to $80-90MWh in Victoria and NSW. SA has more disconnections than anywhere else: Statistics from the Australian Energy Regulator showed South Australia already had the highest proportion of disconnections in the nation. From January to March, more than 0.30 per every 100 customers or more than 2,500 South Australian residential customers were disconnected. This is the wind power contribution in SA for the last two weeks: (this is a typical pattern, see August 2015.)  Graph from ANEROID ENERGY
The current plan is to take this supply disaster and spread itHow much fun can you have? Here’s the total national grid wind power contribution. When the wind doesn’t blow in SA, it also doesn’t blow in NSW, Qld, Victoria and Tas too.
Graph from ANEROID ENERGY South Australia’s electrical pain is self-inflicted: Yet this month the state has run short of power and been hit by spot prices 30 times higher than the eastern states. The government has had to beg electricity suppliers to fire up mothballed gas generators to prevent major industries from shutting down. In recent months what was once the state’s main electricity generator, the coal-fired station at Port Augusta, was closed permanently because it couldn’t compete with subsidised renewables. Yet when storms rendered the turbines useless — too much wind — the state couldn’t import enough coal-fired power from Victoria. It was caught short and paid a high price. This was an extreme event but South Australians already pay the highest electricity prices in the country and some of the highest in the world. Doesn’t this look like a great place to build high tech submarines? RenewEconomy still claims wind and solar make electricity cheaperApparently spikes in electricity prices were more common in summer before SA installed a mass of solar panels. They don’t mention monthly power costs. It’s all a big conspiracy. Blame the Murdoch media pack and the importance of “smashing monopolies”. Somehow Australian corporates foolishly bray in support of the “energy oligopoly”, unlike the wise subsidy-sucking likes of Apple and Google in the US. Marvel that in green commentary there is an assumption that our companies are so stupid they don’t support the “cheapest” form of electricity. As if the big miners like BHP Billiton, Arrium and Nyrstar haven’t sliced and diced the numbers on their electricity bills to the nth degree. Here’s UNemployment around Australia:Tell me again how many jobs renewable energy creates? Keep reading → July 20th, 2016 | Tags: Renewable Energy, SA (South Australia), Wind Power | Category: Energy, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | The 6th richest guy in the US and the head of a major media corporation made it clear last December: “No CEO could survive if they tried to say climate change isn’t real,” Bloomberg said, offering a suggestion for why Fox News rarely features business leaders to tout climate sceptic positions. | BusinessGreen Dec 4th 2015 What about business leaders who just have a few doubts? He’s got that covered too: “You don’t sit there and say ‘I’m not sure it’s a real risk’. “ Bloomberg said. Apparently the Big Fear of Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney (head of the Bank of England) is that a few business leaders will start asking questions or speaking their minds, and we can’t have that. Successful entrepreneurs could be quite a scary force if many of them started speaking out. They have clout. They are not the gullible types and if they paid attention to this debate or even asked good questions, the whole House of Carbon would come undone so easily. That’s why it’s a big No No for leaders to ask questions, the believers know they don’t have the answers. These kinds of warnings need to be unpacked and discussed or they work. Business leaders who are willing to pander to the meme will still issue press releases and earn Bloomberg brownie points (or at least stay of the target), but those with doubts may feel intimidated and silenced. This stops those annoying independent thinkers from congregating and cooperating. But real leaders speak their minds. They don’t fall for this naked gambit. The message to CEO’s — Call their bluff… ask smart questions because investors can spot the fakes.
The one thing Malcolm Turnbull has got right in the last year? Out with Greg Hunt, and in with Josh Frydenberg. The new ministry has been announced, as predicted, without magnanimity, wisdom or grace. There is no role for Tony Abbott; Turnbull is still too afraid of him. But Greg Hunt has finally been moved out of the Environment portfolio which can only be a good thing. He has been a key proponent of passionate and pointless action on the weather, and was central to stopping a BOM audit and bringing in a carbon tax. Almost any other minister might actually try to get better science (see here and here), and solve real environmental problems instead of fake ones. Perhaps finally an environment minister may recognise that we need temperature data that can be independently replicated if we are ever going to understand the Australian climate? The Dept of Environment has been merged with Energy which makes sense for carbon traders and the renewables industry, but perhaps not for the environment. The new environment minister looks goodThe Sydney Morning Herald has put together the praise for Josh Frydenberg: Former Greens leader Bob Brown said Mr Frydenberg would bury Australia’s environmental hopes and aspirations. “The pro-nuclear, pro-coal Frydenberg has been whingeing about environmental campaigns against him in his seat of Kooyong,” Mr Brown said. He has previously supported an end to Victoria’s moratorium on onshore gas exploration and praised Margaret Thatcher’s record on environment and climate change. Greenpeace campaigner Nikola Casule said Mr Frydenberg’s views on climate change were “an embarrassing relic from a different era”. RenewEconomy likewise tells me that Frydenberg can’t be too bad: The Victoria MP has long been a supporter of nuclear energy, and has shown he is also a strong supporter of the coal industry, recently insisting it had a strong future, describing it as a “living, breathing, success story.” Keep reading → The tide of money, the vested interests flows
The current “green” industry is already around $1.5 Trillion a year. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England said he expects this to grow to $5-7 trillion. Financial Post: Climate change a $7 trillion funding opportunity He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound. If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leading investors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market… Again we get this “free market” myth:[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney  … Carbon pricing has failed to change the weather all over the world. Free markets don’t work when they aren’t free and when they apply to a ubiquitous molecule involved in almost every life form on the planet. And what does “clean pricing” mean anyway? The cost benefit assessment of using solar panels to reduce your exposure to flood damage in 2100 is as filthy-dirty-a-calculation as anything gets. Calculations don’t get messier, blacker or more pointless than this. Crunch those numbers and then bury them in 6 feet of volcanic ash. The idea of slapping a market onto a product that is mostly produced and consumed by nature is bizarre in the extreme. Almost none of players in a global carbon market will respond to the incentives on offer. The Pacific Ocean won’t buy a credit, and nor will phytoplankton, cows, sheep or yeast. Even in the 4% of the market controlled by humans, demand is “inelastic”, meaning the costs of energy already force most of the market to be efficient. The gains that are left are minor, pathetic creeping improvements. So sweeping, economy wide measures are inefficient, even if the IPCC models weren’t broken. Keep reading → July 17th, 2016 | Tags: Bankers, Climate Money | Category: Free markets, Global Warming | Print This Post | | … Something suddenly changed in December last year in the world’s second largest economy (some say it’s the first). For the last few years private investors in China have been running away at a faster and faster pace. Apparently, no one wants to invest in the Chinese economy except the government, and six months ago, the State launched a rocket. The massive growth of China is partly thanks to rampant money-printing. Say hello to Malinvestment. The Chinese economy is sick. It’s distraction time. Anyone want to stoke a war?  …
I saw the graph on the ABC news last night thanks to Phillip Lasker. The original graph came from Bloomberg under this unlikely headline: China Proves Doubters Wrong For Now as Credit Boom Stokes Growth “Stoking Growth” is not always desirable — to go biological — cancer “stokes growth” and so does Ebola. “The amount of cash Beijing is shoveling into the economy is stunning,” said Andrew Collier, an independent analyst in Hong Kong and former president of Bank of China International USA. “Given high fixed-asset investment among state-owned enterprises, it’s likely most of it is being consumed by the inefficient state sector. This is more bad news for structural reform. ” Keep reading → July 16th, 2016 | Tags: China, Economics, Fiat Currency | Category: Economics, Free markets | Print This Post | | On Candlelit vigils for the people in NiceWhat Tim Blair says: Ditto After so many repetitions, these events are now actually insults. They are not about the victims. They are about the mourners. They are indulgent displays of emotion that serve only to generate soothing feelings of moral comfort and to mask what should be a united and righteous fury. Tonight’s attendees should consider this. While you see every lit candle as a poignant reminder of life’s tragic fragility, Islamic State sees them as post-game bonus points. I know people want to talk about the atrocity in France. I wish. But thanks to Section 18C you will have to talk in other nations where offending someone is not an offence. Or perhaps if you are lucky you might be able to discuss this somewhere in Oz where they have paid staff to moderate and lawyerate. See also Andrew Bolt’s: We cannot keep living in this fear. Heartfelt thoughts to the victims and their families on a dark day. July 16th, 2016 | Tags: Free Speech | Category: Big-Government, Free Speech, Global Warming, Human Rights | Print This Post | | |
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Some big surprises from 
Climate change causes war
The good news is that a majority of people are aware of media bias, and are skeptical of what the media tells them. The bad news is that this is just another marker showing the average Western citizen is losing faith in the integrity of so many key institutions.
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