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UPDATE: Is this a record? Has there ever been a loss this bad in Australian history? Conservatives likely to win 74 seats of an 89 seat parliament.
Labor was reduced to only 11 seats in 1974, and on latest counting tonight appeared set to retain only nine seats. Some analysts put the figure even lower, at seven. This would mean Labor falling short of official party status and relying on the incoming LNP government to grant it party offices, staff and resources. The Queensland Greens failed to win a seat and suffered a fall in support. [The Australian]
This is thread for all those who want to comment on this election. According to Bolt, things are not just bad, they’re seriously awful for the Labor Party. Newspoll says LNP (conservatives) 55%, Labor 26%. Channel Nines polls says Labor could be left with less than 10 seats!
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9.7 out of 10 based on 131 ratings
The meme is spreading. Rapidly, day after day, I’m meeting more Skeptical-Austrians, and Austrian-Skeptics. I don’t mean the country, but the economics.
James Delingpole-the-brilliant enjoyed my post: The Ground Zero of Global Corruption: it starts with The Currency. He’s had his awakening a few months back. Just yesterday I was talking to Redmond, a skeptic in Canada who turned out to be founder and director on Mises.ca (you can’t get much more Austrian than that). Martin Durkin (the infamous director of Great Global Warming Swindle) is an Austrian too. Back in Bali 07, even then, that Monckton, Archibald, and Balle were discussing gold and currencies (nearly half of all the skeptics there). I’m guessing Chiefio might be. I hear Ray Evans of the Lavoisier Group is too.
…skeptics of government science are also skeptics of government money…
It’s no surprise, really, that skeptics of government science would also be skeptics of government money. My message to all the sleeping skeptics out there is: get with the game. When I said climate science is the second biggest scam in history, I wasn’t joking.
So James, yes, welcome to the club! Absolutely, I’m an Austrian and so, of course, is my other half, Dr David Evans, who introduced the idea to me years ago, so long ago I can’t remember when. (He prophetically wrote: Why Invest in Gold Now? in 2004). In 2006 I submitted a story to Quadrant magazine about “the crunch to come” due to excessive monetary growth. (McGuinness rejected it). In 2008 I wrote every month in The Mining Chronicle – about the M3, and gold trading. We are so Austrian, we were Austrians before we were skeptics. We’ve been watching monetary aggregates and investing in precious metals since before gold was $250/oz.
For beginner Austrians
Some readers will be wondering what all the fuss is. Many scientists have never even heard of the best-kept-secret of economics, and there’s a reason for that (I’ll get to that another day). But you might do what I did — read Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and revel in how economics really can make sense.
“…it is such an obvious truth that it’s been starved-into-submission for nigh on 70 years.”
Then ask a Keynsian why they’re right and the Austrians are wrong, and hear jargon unleashed. They’ll bedazzle you with reasons that ultimately “explain” why a few elected brains can make smarter decisions than the 22 million Australians, 60 million Brits, or 300 million US brains put together (and …. insert name of any other sovereign state). Remember, the wild successes of the “scientifically-planned” economies like, say, the Soviet Union? Exactly. It’s a banal sensibility that money is just another good to be swapped like anything else: if there’s more money and the same goods, of course the price of the goods goes up, and value of money goes down. Welcome to inflation.
Its all just supply and demand after all: Money Supply
The simplicity of it steamrolls other more convoluted theories. An increase in money is inflation*. The supply of money counts. If someone creates more of it — well they go to jail, it’s counterfeiting. (Unless of course, they are a government-protected-banker, then they get a three story yacht and a 10 bedroom mansion).
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9.3 out of 10 based on 54 ratings
Was it just me? Was I the only one who noticed a tiny announcement in February that Airport Scanners were coming to Australia, the land where terrorists haven’t landed (yet), and … wait for it… there would be no (NO!) — opt — out– clause. Did I hear that correctly?
And the crowd roared (about the cricket), nobody said a word about the scanners, and the ten libertarians left who can bear to watch the ABC were too busy trying to save the nation from nastier threats. Australia is getting millimeter wave scanners at International Airports, and if you don’t want to be scanned, you need to leave the country… by boat. (Either that or swim with the crocs across the Timor Sea.)
 Metal objects show up on a white body, but not on a black background. Image: Daily Mail and Herald Sun. With no opt out clause, what happens when the first person facing deportation refuses to be scanned? Well that’s all right then, we’ll just book them on a cruise to Kandahar? Civil Liberties Australia was one of the few to speak up. Maybe those scanners are safe? Maybe? But at least one man with a pacemaker says Australia is off his holiday list now. Can someone find the peer reviewed research showing there are no long term effects on the unborn?
There’s also the catch that if any terrorist has a computer with an internet connection, they probably know how to get guns past the scanners.
Then a nice man named Tony wrote to me asking if I liked his graphic (below), and I did. Do admire the powerful communication tool here (it’s worth a look). The only thing it lacked was to tell us non-US folk that the TSA stood for the Transportation Security Administration.
Once upon a time it took months to get to Australia, the ships had no GPS, sometimes not even an engine, and the in-non-flight food gave you scurvy. People died, no one had travel insurance, and before WWII even a blister could kill you.
Brace yourself, how things have changed. Travel in the satellite era is so dangerous now, it takes 62,000 employees to make it safe (just in the USA). Of those, nearly 4,000 are based in the Washington DC headquarters of the TSA. The average salary of those desk-based public servants in the regulating class is … $104,000. That’s average?
Here in Australia our airport scanning scheme is supposed to cost $28 million.
To be fair, the TSA do run an impressive blog pointing out that last week they stopped someone taking a 40mm high explosive grenade in a carry on bag, plus 2000 ecstasy tablets, a razor, a saw-blade and a garrote, and 16 loaded guns, plus knives and batons. (From personal experience I can tell you the Australian airport checks have stopped me threatening anyone with 3 pairs of nail scissors, 5 nail files, and a very deadly 80-year-old crochet hook.)
The bottom line:
I don’t like the sound of sitting in a flying box with so many weapons, oh no (wow, some people take that stuff in their hand-luggage?), but then, if it costs $6 million to find each gun, and most of them don’t belong to terrorists, it’s time to talk value-for-money. Should we reduce hospital waiting times, or spend money, and make travel slower, in order to reduce, but not eradicate, all the weapons on a plane?
I’d rather sit in a fully armed flight, than in one where there is just one gun…
(Do click to see this pictorial graphic – no – no nudes.)
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9.1 out of 10 based on 42 ratings
“In the old days they would have just bound her, thrown her into the lake, and waited to see if she floated.
Though a primitive method of witch-hunting, it would surely be far more effective than Jonathan’s, and would require much less in taxpayer funding.”
[MediaWatch comment by Preacher]
Jennifer Marohasy belongs to the “wrong” tribe, according to the ABC’s Media Watch program.
Media Watch is panting with excitement because — stop me if you’ve heard this before — she’s a scientist who earns money. My favorite part of the inadvertent expose-of-ABC-bias was the sneering voice-over, meant to be Marohasy or any supporter of her: petulant, petty and childish. The full ABC-festival-of-smug is right on display, thanks, as always, to the Taxpayers of Australia.
It’s so bad, it’s satirical:
MW: But many real journalists struggle when reporting science.
“Struggle?” Mr Holmes? You mean they are so confused about the real world, they think if a US group funds a group who write about a distantly connected topic, that therefore, ergo, and quid pro quo — that tiny funding demonstrates that Lake Alexandrina was always freshwater? Golly? Normally weak journalists settle for a direct ad hom, but Media Witch, like Wendy Carslisle, go out of their way to hunt for second degree nonsense. Could the tenuous connection be more distant?
MW: Let me be clear. We’re not suggesting [that Marohasy is corrupted by personal gain]. Nor are we disputing the AEF’s right to promote her views.
If Media Watch wasn’t trying to denigrate Jennifer Marohasy’s credibility, why did they spend over half their time detailing her funding sources, and even the funding sources of her funding sources, no wait, that was the funding source for the funding source for her former role. They also went after the sponsors of one of the groups she.. err… used to be a founding director of.
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8.7 out of 10 based on 100 ratings
“Conspiracy Theorist” – the taunt you use when you want to “win” the debate without having to argue your point.
When someone points out that the Regulating Class want to bring on a world government, they’re called a “conspiracy theorist”. When the king-pins of the Regulating Class, or their media apostles, actually admit they rather love the idea of a world government, where are the retractions? They can’t hold an honest conversation, let alone budget, plan and spend your money wisely.
Gary Stix – former Scientific American writer – blogs that he used to edit articles on nuclear fusion and clean coal, but now thinks he ought to have written more on psychology, sociology and economics. (See, when their attempts at logic, reason and evidence don’t win over the crowd, the anointed need to explain how stupid, flawed and selfish people are.)
Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe
Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.?
[Scientific American Blog]
Stix goes on to wonder: Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?
Dear Gary, could we? Let’s check the current UN record for success? They are the visionaries guarding-little-citizens who put Gaddafi in charge of “human rights”, and North Korea in charge of Nuclear Disarmament. Last week they endorsed a 2010 report where some of the worlds most repressive governments like Algeria, Iran, and Syria praised the Gaddafi regime’s human rights record. Not a single country objected. OK. So you think these are people that ought to have even more power over us? These guys are not even trying, not even pretending anymore that they need to look nice and rational. There is not even a pretense. Gaddafi thinks “human rights” means he has the right to bombs his own people and the big news is that UN is “thinking” twice about hailing him as a humanitarian hero?
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9.5 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
The scale of the rot is something to behold. Something is grossly, wantonly wrong with Western Civilization, and lots of people know it, but they don’t know why (and for the next blind rebellion, see, “Occupy”).
But a head of the hydra popped into view last week. First a high profile whistleblower from Goldman Sachs wrote Why I am leaving in the New York Times. Then today (possibly, it’s unconfirmed), an insider from JP Morgan came forward to reveal something far worse, and dark to the core. It’s posted on the CFTC site (that’s The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the market watchdog, or rather watch-puppy). [UPDATE: The CFTC have removed the page after 48 hours, a copy of the text is here, screenshot here.]
A Goldman Sachs Executive Director — Greg Smith — resigned from the 143 year old firm explaining he felt ill with the callous culture where people would boast about how much they had ripped off clients, which they called “hunting elephants”, and calling their clients “muppets” and worse. He said that in 12 years the company had completely lost the culture that made him proud to join it. There was nothing left of integrity or humility. He was not alleging outright fraud, but something that sounds more like the company has been taken over by white collar psychopaths. These were people who cheered when someone sold a lemon to a client.
The anonymous whistleblower, allegedly from JP Morgan, was apparently inspired to pop up and describe something that really was market manipulation and fraud on a huge scale, everything from hiding assets from MF Global clients, to attempts to manipulate LIBOR (which affects the price of all derivatives). He or she claims JP Morgan is manipulating the gold and silver price: ” We have a little over a 25% (give or take a percentage) position in the short market for silver futures “.
“… this most recent crash in gold and silver during Bernanke’s speech on February 29th is of notable importance, as we along with 4 other major institutions, orchestrated the violent $100 drop in Gold and subsequent drops in silver.”
Why should you care about esoteric precious metals markets? It’s your currency, even if you don’t own any.
It’s like this. The governments and their central banks make as much free money from thin-air through fractional reserve banking and other methods as they can get away with — it benefits those who “spend that new money first”. They spend it at current prices, and pay it back later, after inflation has decreased its value. The people who pay the difference are those who saved and held money while its purchasing power fell. Speculators grow rich, while retirees and savers get poorer.
In a free market this would quickly lead to inflation, and people would rush to the only currencies the government can’t inflate (or “print” for free) — they’d buy and hold gold or silver and keep their purchasing power. Remember, gold and silver are the currencies that evolved in the marketplace over the last 5,000 years and are not directly under the control of government. (And “so?” you say?). The point is, if the prices of gold and silver rise fast, people would abandon bonds and get into metals instead, thus correcting the situation by making the printing and speculating game vastly less attractive while saving and production became more attractive. Essentially, people dump the government money and go for the competitor, which means the government (and or Fed) has to increase the interest rate and pay more for its money, and nobody wants that: God forbid that Governments or Banks should pay people a fair rate for borrowing “their” money.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 121 ratings
The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?
We need a professional audit.
A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog) has been going through the Australia Bureau of Meteorology records (BOM). They’ve audited some 8.5 million daily observations across 237 High Quality and other close sites in Australia. Shockingly, while the BOM calls their database “High Quality” and instructed observers before 1972 to record in tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, the auditors started finding sites with long stretches of records where the weather suspiciously rose and fell only in Fahrenheit quanta, like 72.0, 73.0, 72.0, 71.0, 73.0, 72.0. After 1972, the BOM went metric, and oddly, so did parts of the Australian climate. Numerous sites started warming and cooling in pure Celsius integers.
The bottom line:
- The BOM records need a thorough independent audit.
- It’s possible that a significant part of the 20th Century Australian warming trend may have come from something as banal as sloppy observers truncating records in Fahrenheit prior to 1972.
- Many High Quality sites are not high quality and ought to be deleted from the trends.
- Even current electronic equipment is faulty, and the BOM is not checking its own records.
- Even climate scientists admit that truncation of Fahrenheit temperatures would cause an artificial warming effect.
The Audit Team identifies a suspicious problem
It was the sharp eye of Chris Gillham who noticed the first long string of continuous whole numbers in a site record. I wondered if it was faulty equipment and thus if other sites were affected, so people started looking, and suspicious stretches started turning up everywhere. The audit team were astonished at how common the problem was. Ian Hill and Ed Thurstan developed software to search the mountain of data and discovered that while temperatures of .0 degrees ought to have been 10% of all the measurements, some 20 – 30% of the entire BOM database was recorded as whole number, or “.0”.
Ken Stewart has the whole in-depth report at his site: “Near Enough For a Sheep Station”
 Fahrenheit era observations (prior to 1972) have even higher proportions of .0 than those of the Celsius era. Note the strange peaks at 0.1 and 0.9? Those are likely due to converting raw F to C and back.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 95 ratings
UPDATE: While MediaWatch (ABC) is hassling Jennifer Marohasy, Marc Hendrickx at ABCnewswatch responds in kind, posting an excellent open letter to MediaWatch, asking if they can outline their own scientific qualifications to judge Jennifer Marohasy’s scientific work. ABC staff want to know her motivations, but Marc wants to know theirs. And “given that they employ 11 staff full time” and produce “one 15 minute show per week”, do they consider that this represents good value for the Australian taxpayer? Touche!
Brilliant Marc. It’s a must read.
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Jennifer Marohasy has extraordinary influence. She’s so powerful that the ABC’s Media Watch program has singled her out, asking questions about her income and disclosures that they don’t even bother to ask Tim Flannery. Presumably they don’t think anyone still takes Tim seriously.
They sent her a barrage of questions last Friday, which she hammered in a detailed reply on the weekend. I hear they are still sniffing around anyone they can think of who may know something about Marohasy, asking leading questions and volunteering information that isn’t correct.
Media Watch (aka Witch Hunt) thought this was a question worth asking:
[To Jennifer Marohasy] In your recent opinion columns in The Land and you appear to make no declaration to your readers about your long-standing history of public campaigning on the Murray. Do you think you have any obligation to do so?
Would they ask Tim Flannery the same thing?
[To Tim Flannery] In your recent opinion columns in [The Australian, The Age, ABC, SMH, blah blah blah] you appear to make no declaration to your readers about your long-standing history of public campaigning on climate change, the fact you profit from selling books on this topic, that your income as a member of the climate commission is dependent on selling a government policy, or that you own shares in Geothermal Coy which received $90 Million in Government support. Do you think you have any obligation to do so?
The bias is obvious. Activists in the ABC tribe don’t need to explain anything. The pathological ad hominem focus (where did she get her money?!) reveals a stone-age tribal brain and their loyalty to the regulating class. The ABC is yet again, shown to be an intellectual sink.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 117 ratings
Black thinks the BBC reported on ClimateGate, instead they rushed to report a “hacking” that may not even have been a hack…
Richard Black thinks the BBC was the first to “report” Climategate in the mainstream press.
@BBCRBlackvia TwitterTired old meme that BBC was slow to report “ClimateGate” is circulating again – for record we were 1st main news org http://t.co/c4sU6puy
But the BBC didn’t report ClimateGate in that story at all. What they reported was a hypothetical hacking of a university in the UK, one which (two years later) still remains a claim that has no evidence in support of. Was it was illegally hacked or legally leaked? Don’t tune in to the BBC for the answer. They don’t even ask the question.
If the BBC had reported on Climategate, we could tell, because they would have reported what the emails actually said, not just the opinions that said “they don’t matter”.
Let’s compare Black’s reporting of Climategate and FakeGate
On ClimateGate, Black waited until after he had a spokesman from the CRU to comment, and having confirmed the emails were from the CRU, Black quoted exactly none of them. On FakeGate, Black posted so quickly that he had to rewrite it after Heartland replied, which happened in the first 24 hours.
With ClimateGate, Black ignored the emails that were effectively public property in the first place and turned out to be real. With Fakegate, Black either detailed or linked to quotes that turned out to be nonexistent (at least, I presume that’s what he needed to “re-work”, where is the original stored?).
Then there’s the point that ClimateGate is material to the scientific practices of lead authors in an issue of major planetary concern; FakeGate is about small amounts of legal, private funding that are irrelevant to the science. Oh yessity, those influential tiny funds from anonymous citizens must be public knowledge, (and forthwith!) but the original raw data of the worlds temperature stations? I don’t think so and stop harassing those scientists.
Point to note: Black is paid by public funds to report both sides of the story in an unbiased manner. The Heartland Institute is not.
With ClimateGate, Black was still referring to it o’ so carefully, as the “so-called ClimateGate“ issue more than two weeks after it happened, even though, by then, there were millions of pages using the term. (Those unnewsworthy heretics and all.) With FakeGate, he picked up the “DenierGate” term within 24 hours, and a month later, as far as I can tell, he still hasn’t used the term “FakeGate”, even though it’s beating “DenierGate” in the google stakes fully ten to one. (On last search “FakeGate scored 420,000 hits compared to DenierGate at 36,000. Now there’s a case study in a PR disaster.)
Black entirely missed the big story in ClimateGate, which was how trusted scientists were flagrantly breaching standards of honesty, good practice and transparency, and were admitting doing scandalous adjustments including “hiding declines”, dodging FOI’s, and colluding to manipulate the supposedly anonymous peer review process. And Black largely missed the big story in FakeGate too, of how an allegedly top researcher, Peter Gleick, stooped to impersonation, trickery and theft to “win” a debate about science. If stealing-to-save-the-atmosphere is permissible, then isn’t adjusting-the-data, or ignoring-inconvenient-data also “helpful”?
If it’s hidden it must be news?
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9.5 out of 10 based on 141 ratings
How the regulating class is using bogus claims
about climate change to entrench and extend their
economic privileges and political control.
Guest Post: Dr David M.W. Evans, 29 Feb 2012, last updated 13 Mar 2012, latest pdf here
The Science
The sister article Climate Coup—The Science (a more mainstream version of The Skeptic’s Case) contains the science foundation for this essay. It checks the track record of the climate models against our best and latest data, from impeccable sources. It details how you can download this data yourself. It finds that the climate models got all their major predictions wrong:
| Test |
Climate Models |
| Air temperatures from 1988 |
Actual rise was less than the rise predicted for drastic cuts in CO2 |
| Air temperatures from 1990 |
Over-estimated trend rise |
| Ocean temperatures from 2003 |
Over-estimated trend rise greatly |
| Atmospheric hotspot |
Completely missing –> water vapor feedback not amplifying |
| Outgoing radiation |
Opposite to reality –> water vapor feedback not amplifying |
The latter two items are especially pertinent, because they show that the crucial amplification by water vapor feedback [i] assumed by the models does not exist in reality. Modelers guessed that of the forces on temperature, only CO2 has changed significantly since 1750. The water vapor amplification causes two-thirds of the warming predicted by the models, while carbon dioxide only directly causes one third. The presence of the amplification in the models, but not in reality, explains why the models overestimated recent warming.
Who Are You Going To Believe—The Government Climate Scientists or Your Own Lying Eyes?
The climate models are incompatible with the data. You cannot believe both the theory of dangerous manmade global warming and the data, because they cannot both be right.
In science, data trumps theory. If data and theory disagree, as they do here, people of a more scientific bent go with the data and scrap the theory.
But in politics we usually go with authority figures, who in this case are the government climate scientists and the western governments—and they strongly support the theory. Many people simply cannot get past the fact that nearly all the authority figures believe the theory. To these people the data is simply irrelevant.
The world’s climate scientists are almost all employed by western governments. They usually don’t pay you to do climate research unless you say you believe manmade global warming is dangerous, and it has been that way for more than 20 years. [ii] The result is a near-unanimity that is unusual for a theory in such an immature science.
Sideshows Instead of the Whole Truth
The government climate scientists and mainstream media have kept at least two important truths from the public and the politicians:
- Two thirds of the warming predicted by the climate models is due to amplification by water vapor feedback, and only one third is directly due to CO2.
- The dispute among scientists is about the water vapor feedback. There is no dispute among serious scientists about the direct effect of CO2.
They seek to persuade with partial truths and omissions, not telling the truth in a disinterested manner. Instead, we are treated to endless sideshows. Issues such as Arctic ice, polar bears, bad weather , or the supposed psychological sickness of those opposing the authorities, tell us nothing about the causes of global warming. They divert public attention and the water vapor feedback escapes scrutiny—hidden in plain sight, but never under public discussion.
The Silence of the Mainstream Media
The data presented in Climate Coup—The Science is plainly relevant, publicly available, and impeccably sourced from our best instruments—satellites, Argo, and the weather balloons. Yet it never appears in the mainstream media.[iii] Have you ever seen it?
If the mainstream media were interested in the truth, they would seek out the best and latest data and check the predictions against the data. They don’t.
Global warning has been a big issue for years. Yet all of the world’s investigative journalists—those cynical, hard-bitten, clever, incorruptible, scandal-sniffing reporters of the vital truths who are celebrated in their own press—all of them just happen not to notice that the climate models get all their major predictions wrong? Really? Even though we point it out to them?
Good detectives do not overlook clues. The presented data contains half a dozen clues of brick-in-your-face subtlety. How could anyone miss them? Will the journalists who read this paragraph now follow the instructions on downloading the data, and report on what they find? No.
Perhaps they think it’s all too complicated, that it will make our brains hurt? A story with two numbers is too hard? No, we all understand a graph of temperature over time and can spot trends. Judging by the huge response on the Internet, the public want well-explained technical details about the climate.
The government climate scientists and their climate models said it would warm like this and heat up the atmosphere like that. But it didn’t, just download the data and check.
The media are withholding this data, so the “climate debate” is obviously not about science or truth. It must be about politics and power. Reluctantly, uncomfortably, the only possible conclusion is that the media don’t want to investigate the claims of the government climate scientists. Why? Who benefits?
The Regulating Class
Consider the array of forces in the climate argument:
| Believers |
Doubters |
| UN (including the IPCC) |
Independently-funded scientists |
| Western governments |
Private sector middle class |
| Major banks and finance houses [iv] |
Amateurs (from amore , the Latin for love) |
| NGO’s and Greenies |
|
| Totalitarian leftists |
|
| Government-funded scientists[v] |
|
| Academia |
|
| Renewables corporations |
|
| Mainstream news media |
|
The supporters of the theory of manmade global warming are mainly financial beneficiaries,[vi] believers in big government, or Greens. They are usually university educated. They generally prefer the methods of government, namely politics and coercion, rather than the voluntary transactions of the marketplace—especially when it comes to setting their own remuneration.
They are an intellectual upper class of wordsmiths, who regulate and pontificate rather than produce real stuff. There is little demand in the economy for their skills, so they would command only modest rewards for their labor in the marketplace. Arguably they are a class of parasites enriching themselves at the expense of producers, because they are rewarded out of proportion to the value they create—value as determined not by themselves, but by voluntary transactions in the marketplace.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 127 ratings
For pure, circular destruction of wealth, happiness and prosperity, it doesn’t get much better than this. Not long back Greenpeace and co were busted for planning a six million dollar campaign to disrupt and delay the coal industry — and today The Australian reports that three of the major organisations involved received close to $750,000 from the government, for “public climate change activities” raising doubts about whether public funds had been misused.
The Nature Conservation Council (NSW), Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of Western Australia have received grants of $211,000, $213,215 and $319,420 respectively for public climate change activities since last December.
Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of WA confirmed yesterday they had backed the development of the anti-coal campaign.
The coal miners are an industry that is legal, employs 40,000 people directly, provides the fuel for more than half our electricity and generates about $13b in tax dollars for the Australian government.
Now if the NGO’s wanted to explain to the rest of us why we ought to decide to reduce our coal mining, that would be fair enough, but they aren’t trying to convince us with reason or debate, they’re trying to disrupt a legitimate economic activity, and manipulate the legal system any which way they can. The headline title of the Greenpeace-CoalSwarm-Greame-Wood-Foundation project was not “Saving the Environment” it was “Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom”, as if that in itself was a worthy goal.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 115 ratings
Prius drivers may claim they want to help the poor but they are less likely to want to slow down and let them cross the road.
You’d think Prius drivers would hold pedestrians, who emit less carbon, in high regard. But alas, roadside tests show about one third of Prius drivers broke crosswalk laws, putting the Prius drivers in the most-unethical-driver class. (As with all generalizations we ought remember that two thirds of Prius drivers did the right thing.) The common factor among unethical drivers was that shiny expensive cars were three times as likely to plow through the crosswalk. It’s not so much the hybrid, or the greenness, it’s the status…
In a final experiment, the researchers took their hypothesis to the streets. At a busy intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, the team stationed “pedestrians” at crosswalks, with instructions to approach the crossing at a point when oncoming drivers would have a chance to stop. Observers coded the status of the cars’ drivers based on the vehicles’ age, make, and appearance. Drivers of shiny, expensive cars were three times more likely than those of old clunkers to plow through a crosswalk, failing to yield to pedestrians as required by California state law. High-status motorists were also four times more likely than those with cheaper, older cars to cut off other drivers at a four-way stop.
In an interesting twist, about one-third of Prius drivers broke crosswalk laws, putting the hybrid among the highest “unethical driving” car brands. “This is a good demonstration of the ‘moral licensing’ phenomenon, in which hybrid-car drivers who believe they’re saving the Earth may feel entitled to behave unethically in other ways,” Piff says. (The Prius results were observed but not analyzed for statistical significance in the study.)
Source: Science Mag
It could be a case of moral-licensing — the sense that drivers are helping the community by driving the hybrid car, so they are entitled to be a more selfish driver. This occurred with Green shoppers too. People who bought more “green” items were less generous when dividing up money and more likely to lie in tests where there was a financial reward.
But the real culprit could be status. The bigger implications of the study show that when people consider themselves higher up the social scale they are more likely to cheat, and when classes are split according to income, the upper class are more likely to lie, deceive, and take from others.
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
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9.3 out of 10 based on 50 ratings
Who isn’t finding shale gas these days?
To whom shall we sell all those super-costly solar units, that we will supposedly be “world leaders” in?
China reveals 25tn cu metres of shale gas
China announced the results of its most extensive official appraisal of shale gas reserves on Thursday, having found potentially recoverable resources of 25.1tn cubic metres – less than previous estimates.
Although the figure is lower than an earlier estimate of 31tn cubic metres, China is still believed to have some of the largest reserves of shale gas in the world and has been working to develop shale gas as a cornerstone of its energy policy. The new estimate is enough gas to meet the country’s current consumption for nearly 200 years if fully extracted.
As Richard North points out, this changes everything:
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8.6 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
Welcome to Australistan.
I haven’t read the whole 400 page Finklestein report, but Mark Steyn tells me that the Chinese government likes it. What more do you need to know?
As Steyn says, this is not a left-right thing, it’s a free-unfree thing.
Tim Andrews at Menzies House launches a New Free Speech Campaign: “This is a proposal that would seem right at home in North Korea or Zibmabwe. I never thought – as dark as things seemed- we could stoop this low here in Australia”.
People asked me if this would “affect your blog”. Ha ha, I laughed, Will it? Right now, I’m discussing whether I’d need to move to Fiji, or Florida, or become a citizen of the Dominican Republic in order to express my views. Could I split my blog into a different domain name each day to avoid being “monitored”? ( I could have 365 blogs: joannenova1.com.au, joannenova2.com.au… it would play havoc with the search engines.) Alternately, perhaps I write 100% satire, cartoons, irony, and the exact opposite of what I mean? Ho Ho. Who has the rule book on the Soviet black market for ideas? What can we learn and how does it translate in this Internet era?
If all this legislation achieves is to force me to invite Tim Flannery to do a post here, all I can say is Yes Please. Bring it on. But we all know that requirement would mean that instead of gaining “balance” we would gain silence. Because Flannery only has to say “Sorry I’m busy for a decade” and what, Joanne Nova has to hold all her posts until he finds the time? Paradoxically, though we could use the legislation to force the ABC to mention the unmentionable — except that in the end, selective enforcement by an unelected Big Brother team would decide what information was “safe” for Australians to read. And that pro-big-government team already thinks the ABC provides enough skeptic content (i.e. almost none).
They pretend it’s about serving the public. But the Finklestein report is aimed at skeptics and disabling the Murdoch newspapers, and the submissions were mostly from professional lobbyists. The “bias” category lists skeptic crimes according to well known warmists. Eighty-six percent of the 10,000 submissions the Inquiry received were boilerplate copies from Avaaz (foreign group), GetUp or “NewsStand”. GetUp support Avaaz, and NewsStand turns out to be a front for GetUP. All of them say they are for “Free speech” (as long it’s pro left-green speech). Avaaz and GetUp betray their lack of principles,when they run open “hate media” type campaigns against Murdoch papers.
Simon at Australian Climate Madness points out the futility of trying to stop an international information flow. “The Australian government cannot legislate regulations to take effect over media organisations outside Australian jurisdiction, without bipartisan agreements between those other states. I do not foresee this happening – for example in the US, the First Amendment prohibits any law infringing on the freedom of speech or the press.”
But then, if the government control the fibre-optic cables, perhaps they really can block overseas sites. Is that why the Labor Party thinks renationalizing Australian telecommunications into the NBN (National Broadcast Network) is “good value” so they can bring sanitized propaganda to every home? Will skeptics laugh at the toothless tiger from overseas sites, or end up broadcasting from moving vans via CB radio? Will anonymous twitter-hack networks spring up to defeat the ruling? Either way, the nation spends more of its intellectual wealth fighting a bureaucratic maze instead of fighting lies, half-truths, and Gongo-ideas.*
9.5 out of 10 based on 141 ratings
Showing the intellectual depth we’ve come to expect from progressives, Monbiot argues that the public debate on atmospheric dynamics would be improved by knowing who-funds-those-who dare speak against the government experts.
It’s as if the truth of future tropospheric warming comes not from weather balloons, but from bank accounts and budget papers.
What words do Heartland print that are so dangerous, forthwith, such a public hazard, that we must know who funds the paper they are printed on?
(Dear George, when private citizens choose to speak, it’s none of your business whether they got funding or not, and who paid them if they did. It’s about science, not motivations. Data trumps funding. Debate the message, not the man. If you think Heartland promote lies, just explain what they are. Your megaphone is bigger than theirs, and if you asked to speak at a Heartland Conference to correct their views, I’m sure they would welcome it. It’s called free speech and may the best argument win.)
According to Monbiot, stealing is not just alright, it’s heroic. Your goods are mine, comrade. Too bad if you object.
I see Peter Gleick, the man who obtained and leaked the devastating documents from the Heartland Institute, as a democratic hero. I do not think he should have apologised, nor do I believe that his job should be threatened. He has done something of benefit to society.
I believe we have a right to know who is paying for public advocacy. The groups which call themselves thinktanks but look to me more like lobbying organisations working on behalf of corporations and multi-millionaires, exist to try to change public policy. Yet, with a few exceptions, they operate in a vacuum of accountability.
There are three problems with this (for starters):
1. It works against free speech
In the world of Monbiot, before you are allowed to say what you think you not only need to give us your whole full name you need to declare all your income, and the names and addresses of any sources of income (including donors). Now, that’ll really encourage people to speak up, and donate to causes they believe in, won’t it? I guess if you’ve captured government funding and have all the experts on your side, suppressing free speech seems like a natural fit.
2. It buries the real debate
Life is short, time is precious, and there is only so much room on the public soap-box to solve major public issues. How does it help humanity to fill it with clutter? What public service is gained from loading pages and airwaves with discussions of exactly which person funded another person who is pointing at inconvenient data from NASA satellites? The data is what matters; the emails, addresses, and names do not. Sure, if that person is speaking as an elected representative, or is spending public funds, then yes we need transparency. But if they are private citizens, and take no money from the public purse, any attempt to demand private information is just another way to shut down or distract us from the debate on the points that matter.
3. Who decides what qualifies as a “public benefit”?
Is it just God-Monbiot who can arbitrate on what is or isn’t in a public benefit? There was a man called Breivik who thought his work on Utoya was “for the public benefit” too. That’s why we have laws, and why no one is supposed to be above them.
It’s not “democratic” at all, it’s pro-establishment and anti-citizen
Demanding that private citizens must declare donations for groups and associations they support, hands more power to the bureaucratic rulers and takes it from the people.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
We know the moon changes our tides, but can it also change our rainfall? Could the moon also cause tides in the atmosphere? Some researchers have found such periodic movements in air above 3000m. Some have suggested that the moon drives the cyclical shifts in the Length of Day (LOD) that occur on a fortnightly and seasonal basis.
Ian Wilson has been scouring the data quietly for years, following these ideas, and has found a link between lunar cycles and the sub tropical high pressure ridge that occurs in summer over the East Coast of Australia. He noticed there were 9.4 and 3.8 year cycles which match periods in spring tidal cycles. What matters is how close the full moon is to perhelion (the closest point Earth comes to the Sun). It’s yet another piece of the puzzle that the IPCC favoured models ignore.
The lunar forces are, not surprisingly, smaller than the solar one, and as the abstract points out: “it is not so much in what years do the lunar tides reach their maximum strength, but whether or not there are peaks in the strength of the lunar tides that re-occur at the same time within the annual seasonal cycle.”
It remains to be seen how his hypothesis stands up in the long run, but it’s yet another example of a genuine research avenues that are not being followed by government funded researchers who are heavily funded to find connections between CO2 and climate, but not so much to explore all the competing possibilities. Only open research and genuine curiosity will help us to truly predict the climate, inasmuch as it is possible to do so. Farmers, people living in flood zones, town planners, and dam managers desperately need models that predict the climate, instead of models that just give fashionable answers.
Long live the spirit of relentless curiosity.
–Jo
Lunar Tides and the Long-Term Variation of the Peak Latitude Anomaly
of the Summer Sub-Tropical High Pressure Ridge over Eastern Australia
 … [PDF available from Bentham Open]
Guest Post by Ian Wilson
The main take-home conclusions from this paper are that:
- The most important influence upon the climate of Northern NSW and Southern Queensland after the La Nina/El Nino phenomenon is the Peak Latitude Anomaly for the Summer Sub-Tropical High Pressure Ridge over Eastern Australia (L(SA)).
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8.7 out of 10 based on 36 ratings
In the big battle for the meme-of-the-moment, Fakegate has won.
DeSmog can’t be too happy about this. Google “DenierGate” and get 67,000 results, but google “Fakegate” and get 168,000.
UPDATE #2 March 14: FakeGate is now 6 times as popular. (“FakeGate” 420,000 results v “Deniergate” 69,000)
What do you know? Stealing things, breaching privacy, and exposing nothing but tiny funding isn’t catching on. As a PR faux pas this is a case study in implosions. DeSmog have inadvertently shone a beacon on the real David and Goliath story here, where the Big-Oil funding isn’t so big, and the real money is on the side who pretends they are “doing it for the planet”. Worse, between them, DeSmog and Peter Gleick have arranged a public ethics challenge for ethically challenged scientists, and a mass-media bias-test for biased journalists. The spectacle of scientists debating if it is OK to steal, and journalists making excuses for criminal activity, is doing as much damage as the original theft and overreaction. It’s so bad, even the Koch Brothers (target-number-one) can take the unassailable high ground (see below).
Note the auto-prompts: When it’s “FakeGate” it’s news, but when it’s Deniergate, Google queries the spelling … Did you mean: “denigrate”?
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9.5 out of 10 based on 111 ratings
The Guardian “Climate change will shake the Earth” (parroted by the SMH) is feeding the pagan masses who worship The God CO2. Which would be fine, except they pretend that it’s science when it’s the “hell” part of any religion. If you drive your SUV too far you, sinner, will bear the blame for earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. The mystery, we wonder, is why they forgot pestilence and plagues?!
Try this on. I’m quoting them: “So what – geologically speaking – can we look forward to if we continue to pump out greenhouse gases at the current hell-for-leather rate?”
- “we could almost certainly say an eventual goodbye to the Greenland ice sheet, and probably that covering West Antarctica too”
- “a 10-metre or more rise in sea levels.”
- “these could trigger submarine landslides spawning tsunamis capable of threatening North Atlantic coastlines.”
- [More]” landslide activity would be inevitable in the Andes, Himalayas, European Alps…”
- “acting to squeeze magma out of susceptible volcanoes that are primed and ready to blow.“
Oh, Lordy. And what major study are these dire pronouncements made on? Why, someone called Bill McGuire has noticed a lot more volcanoes lately. That’s it.
He seems to have trouble keeping things in perspective.
The bottom line is that through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of escalating geological havoc at a time when we can most do without it.
Sure, there has never been a worse time to deal with disasters: all those neolithic cave dwellers, and preindustrial people coped so much better with volcanoes and earthquakes than we do now.
Unless there is a dramatic and completely unexpected turnaround in the way in which the human race manages itself and the planet, then long-term prospects for our civilization look increasingly grim.
Grim? Here’s “Grim”
Among other things, Bill-the-vulcanologist seems to have overlooked the worst volcano in Human history, namely Toba, a supersized supervolcano of a magnitude 8 (and there is no “9” in that scale). It was so big it blew up in Indonesia and left 3-6 metre (10-20 foot) deep ash as far away as India. For all that Mount Pinatubo was a decent volcano, Toba blew off 200 times as much. In what was truly a global disaster of civilizational proportions, genetic studies on homo sapiens show a bottleneck in our gene pool at about the same time. It’s theorized that we were almost wiped off the planet — almost extincto-humanoidia.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 76 ratings
The Education Department and the CSIRO push their propaganda and scare our children with apocalyptic, unscientific scenarios.
They are even trying to target pre-schoolers. The ABC has accepted grants from the Climate Change Foundation to work the Climate Change message into ‘DirtGirl’, an ABC4Kids TV. Then there are demonstrations of bias like this from a school in Sydney.
They’re trying to train the next generation to “think” their way. We’d be mad to let them get away with it.
Thanks to the Gallileo Movement and donors, 300 FREE copies of Professor Ian Pilmer’s new book ‘How to get expelled from school’, are available to schools in Australia.
The Galileo Movement’s aim is to expose the unscientific claims made by climate change scientists and political attempts to unnecessarily control our freedom and future prosperity. If you are a teacher or you know one, you can help ensure that your local school library has a balance of books on climate change science.
Can you convince your Federal, State or Local member to talk the local school on your behalf?
The books are available to schools within Australia, all they need to do is fax a Purchase Order from their school to Connor Court, the publishers, on fax number (03) 5303 0960.
Free offer for Teachers: Details here
My review of the book
8 out of 10 based on 47 ratings
thank you to everyone who nominated and voted and for me. Cheers! Jo
———————–
Update: Sorry for the brevity, it was sent from a smart-phone-and-dumb-keyboard, on this beach. Yes, it’s a much needed holiday. Great place to get the news! 2012 Bloggies
Thanks to the guest authors who contributed including Michael Hammer, Brice Bosnich, David Evans, Frank Lansner, Anton Lang (TonyfromOz), Geoffrey Sherrington, Ken Steward, Chris Gillham, Indur Goklany, and David Lappi, Anthony Watts, and Chrisopher Monckton and the moderators who work anonymously as volunteers without whom I could not keep the comments open.
Thanks of course to all the commenters, from whom I learn so much.
Merci!
Jo
PS: Skeptics are sweeping the floor in the bloggies. Make no mistake, the mainstream media makes this so easy for us by ignoring independent scientists with a cutting message. The truth is winning 🙂
CONGRATULATIONS to Watts UP for picking up two awards — Best Science or Techonolgy Blog, and The LifeTime Achievement Award! And to Tallbloke’s Talkshop , Steven McIntyre (Climate Audit ),
9.6 out of 10 based on 158 ratings
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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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