There is much to say this weekend and I’m still at the beach… so here’s the Sunday thread. Jo 🙂
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I’m at the beach, it’s your turn to write 🙂 Jo
Heartland have released both emails that Peter Gleick wrote under his name (below) as well as under a false name. The deceit is there for all to see. Heartland have at all times behaved impeccably. — Jo From James Taylor at Forbes.com
CLIMATE CHANGE WEEKLY #39 Why would a prominent scientist/global warming activist commit acts of fraud and theft against global warming skeptics and then send to the media a forged document containing fictitious, over-the-top schemes that would embarrass skeptics? Answer: Because global warming activists cannot muster sufficient credible science to win the debate. Keep reading → This is so apt this weekend. The Ghost-of-Malcolm-Turnbull-leadership is channeling a message for the Labor Party. Listen carefully to him and do … the opposite. Turnbull’s uncanny ability to get it 100% wrongFrom reporting by Richard Black (BBC) Friday 27th November 2009 The issue (Climategate) is proving thorny enough to have split the opposition Liberal party, some of whose senators have rebelled against leader Malcolm Turnbull’s pledge to support the measure; and the government is planning to have another go at passing the bill on Monday. It could even lead to a general election, with Mr Turnbull warning that the party risks annihilation if the rebels hold sway:
The Coalition chucked the bill, and chucked the leader, and instead of oblivion, went on to poll 55-60%. The Labor Party struggled, fought, wheeled and dealed, flat out lied, and got that climate change legislation through, and face… whats the word? Annihilation. Keep reading → Who says it’s only Rudd versus Gillard? Abbott came from nowhere.Australia may have a new Prime Minister as soon as next week. Former PM, Kevin Rudd has just resigned from his Foreign Ministership so he’s going to challenge the current PM, and it could be any day. Here in Australia everyone seems to be saying it’ll be either Rudd or Gillard… but think back to the way another candidate can emerge when the heat is on. That’s what happened to the Liberals (our conservatives) when Abbott appeared. Keep reading → The Guardian: Gleick apology over Heartland leak stirs ethics debate among climate scientists Whoops. Suzanne Goldenberg unwittingly exposes how empty the Ethics Vault is in establishment climate science. Peter Gleick used a false identity to steal documents, and released them without permission and without an effort to redact private irrelevant details. So let’s ask climate scientists if stealing, deception and breaching privacy is OK. It’s a yes or no choice, is it a/ heroic, or b/ misguided? We’d hope a ten year old could get this one, but Goldenberg tells us that its thrown “the scientific community into tumult, with fierce debates…”. Oh. The correct answer was not even on offer in the Guardian: c/probably criminal. So when is stealing OK?
Here’s a face-meet-palm-moment: if Heartland is spreading misinformation on science then why not try explaining where their science is wrong, rather than just repeat this mindless, unsubstantiated claim? As it happens, if Heartland wanted to spread “disinformation” it sure seems an odd strategy to go out of their way to invite establishment climate scientists, and even Gleick himself, to speak at their conferences? In this upside down world, Heartland are the ones trying to start a science debate on a shoestring budget, while the establishment scientists, with 10,000 times the funding, debate whether they should steal things instead. The so-called “hero” scientists hurl names and unscientific ad-homs in lieu of evidence and reason. Goldenberg didn’t do enough research to understand that she is acting as an unwitting tool of activists, quoting preposterous falsehoods that are known to anyone who can enter “climate science, controversial, skeptic” into a search engine (see ClimateDepot, and btw Bing is better). Dear Suzanne, there are lots of polite scientists who can help you, you just need to ask. Keep reading → February 23rd, 2012 | Tags: FakeGate, Guardian (The) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | BREAKING: Peter Gleick admits admits he’s the one who assumed a false identity and emailed Heartland so he could steal their private documents. His apology marks, finally, a small turning point in the PR scandal and ethical vacuum. UPDATE: So when will DeSmog retract it’s false claim the documents came from “an insider”? When will they admit they were fooled, didn’t bother to check the veracity, and don’t care about putting out accurate information? His answer doesn’t quite put all the pieces together. The fake document has a timestamp just prior to DeSmog and others releasing it, so it is not the “anonymous document” he refers too.
Andy Revkin get’s it right: Keep reading → February 21st, 2012 | Tags: FakeGate, Gleick (Peter), Heartland Institute | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | It’s sad to watch the implosion of a Nobel Cause. Well it would be… But then DeSmog thinks providing fake documents “is in the public interest”. (Is there is a shortage of false and misleading articles around? Who knew?) This particular parody refers to Charles Johnson (who?). Hat tip: As Baa Humbug said in posting this in comments: This didn’t take long. Keep reading → February 21st, 2012 | Tags: FakeGate, Satire & Parody, YouTube | Category: Funny stuff, Global Warming, Satire & Parody | Print This Post | | Let the games begin. As promised, Heartland want justice, starting with the removal of all the fake and alleged documents. DeSmog have overplayed their hand. –Jo Support The Heartland Institute today (Go on, fake smears like the DeSmog one, are designed to intimidate donors, we can rise above!) ——————————————————————————————————– UPDATE: Joseph Bast explains why Heartland are doing this:“We realize this will be portrayed by some as a heavy-handed threat to free speech. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect Internet fraud, and there is no right to defamatory speech. “For 28 years, The Heartland Institute has engaged in fierce debates over a wide range of public policies – school reform, health care, telecommunications policy, corporate subsidies, and government waste and fraud, as well as environmental policy. We frequently and happily engage in vigorous, robust debate with those who disagree with our views. “We have resorted in the past to legal means only in a very few cases involving outright fraud and defamation. The current situation clearly fits that description, and our legal counsel has advised that the first step in defending ourselves should be to ask the blogs to take down the stolen and forged documents.” From: Jim Lakely By email and Federal Express to: Re: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-and-strategy
Dear Mr. DeMelle: On or about February 14, 2012, your web site posted a document entitled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” (the “Fake Memo”), which is fabricated and false. On or about the same date, your web site posted certain other documents purporting to be those of The Heartland Institute (“Heartland”). Heartland has not authenticated these documents (the “Alleged Heartland Documents”). Your site thereafter has reported repeatedly on all of these documents. Heartland almost immediately issued a statement disclosing the foregoing information, to which your web site has posted links. It has come to our attention that all of these documents nevertheless remain on your site and you continue to report on their contents. Please be advised as follows: Keep reading → February 20th, 2012 | Tags: DeSmog Blog, Gleick (Peter), Heartland Institute | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Thank you DeSmog! Without FakeGate we would not have had this cartoon. (Readership est 850,000)  Cartoon by John Spooner. The Age. Source:The Age John Spooner: The Age Gallery Spooner: Nat.Lbrary collection Spooner: The National Times Collection 🙂 TRANSCRIPT: Julia Gillard to Tim Flannery (top picture) Julia Gillard to Tim Flannery: (lower image)
On Wednesday I mentioned the Carter/Flannery disparity in wages:
On Saturday 😀 after he scores flack in other articles, satire restores the balance in favour of Bob Carter. (Now was that in The SMH too?) Message to DeSmog and that faker… whatever credibility you had… Keep reading → February 18th, 2012 | Tags: Carter (Bob), Cartoon, FakeGate, Flannery (Tim), The Age | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Major embarrassment for Joe Romm, and DeSmog and their unthinking fans. In the hours after the ClimateGate emails were released, skeptics asked about their authenticity (as we are wont to do). In the hours after the Heartland Documents (including at least one complete fake) were released, the commentators on the other side did not even ask (just as they uncritically accept any weak report in favour of their pet theory). They leapt to their defamatory conclusions in a smear-fest. At least one person out there has probably committed a criminal act. The rest are guilty of small brained unskeptical blind hatred, defamation, and ignorance. And will any of them apologize? I’ll be shocked if even one has the decency or manners. We should not allow them to forget it. DeSmog=DeSmear. They are a group happy to promote lies with no compunction. They are not interested in the truth, just in the PR. Oh the fool journalists who think the paid hacks at DeSmog ever had anything to say on science that was not biased or deceitful. Richard Littlemore, where is your apology? Instead, knowing the document is faked, he continues to promote it. So does Brad Johnson, and Joe Romm. Their attitude to the science is just the same to their attitude to falsified documents. They don’t care. They were all happy to trumpet an insider leak, yet none of them admit they were wrong, or showed poor judgment when it turned out the documents were obtained through trickery, deceit and malicious misbehaviour. Shame, they only had to email Joe Bast to ask. Even the most minor effort to get to the truth is too much to expect. As it is, if any of the rest is accurate, it only shows how effective Heartland is on a shoe-string budget. (See my post yesterday to see how petty the money is. Logic-gate: The Smog blog exposes irrational rage. Innumeracy. And Heartlands efficient success.) In the end, if they had evidence to convince us, they wouldn’t get so excited about the smears. — Jo
PS: Heartlands full response. ————————————————————————————————————– Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000. Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered. The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed. Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity. One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact. We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions. Keep reading → February 16th, 2012 | Tags: DeSmog Blog, FakeGate, Gleick (Peter), Heartland Institute | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  The Climate Change Scare Machine Chart The believers of man-made-weather-disasters are wetting themselves with excitement. It painful to watch grown men drool. Poor things, they were really wounded by Climategate, and they’ve been waiting, praying that some day someone would level the playing field and show that skeptics were just as petty, shameless, and money-grubbing as their team turned out to be (not to mention hypocritical, deceptive and incompetent). In their dreams. Instead the hyped non-denier-gate shows just how incredibly successful the Heartland Institute is. Look at the numbers. The skeptics have managed to turn the propaganda around against a tide of money, and it is really some achievement. …
These are annual turnovers or annual budgets So what the expose shows is that the Heartland Institute punches far above its weight with an incredibly efficient budget. That is, of course, assuming that the so-called expose is real and not a fake, or altered, which it could be, watch the Heartland site for any confirmation or information. [UPDATE: It was, see here] This is a wake up call to the freedom loving people of the world, it’s time to make donations a regular part of your monthly budget to support all the people out there who work on your behalf. The fact that Heartland has only one major, generous donor is remarkable. Where are the rest? The hypocrisy is flagrant. The Sierra Club listed a category for $1,000,000 donations by “anonymous donors” in their 2010 annual report. Strangely DeSmog didn’t froth with anticipation. Their Sierra Club annual report mentions “Matching Gifts”, and apparently supporters who matched gifts include the evil Exxon, not to mention GoldMan Sachs, Barclays, Google, Monsanto, Nestle, Yahoo, Bank of America, and many many more. But that’s alright then. And if Bob Carter receives an honorarium type amount of $1500 a month, the pull of those big dollars must be powerfully tempting for people like Tim Flannery who struggle along on about $1200 each day he works. As I always say when these matters are raised, YES Please. Let’s do talk about the funding. * * * The Climate Change Scare Machine shows how your tax dollars feed the cycle of alarm. What stops the cycle? … UPDATE: Key Heartland document is a forgery? Look for updates on Heartland or Climate Depot. UPDATE 18-2-2012. Delingpole has coined the term FakeGate and it’s apt, so I’ve renamed the title from “Logic-gate”. – Jo February 16th, 2012 | Tags: FakeGate, Gleick (Peter), Heartland Institute, Innumerate | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Believers in man-made-catastrophe can’t win over skeptics with evidence and reason. Instead the peak “believers” intellectual strategy is to hope the oldies might die off in time to save the planet: Death isn’t an option: climate change activists aren’t waiting for deniers to die. It’s sexist, ageist, intolerant and illogical: just what we’ve come to expect from “progressives”, eh? Oh the hubris and arrogance of the terminally immatureTake their conclusion that because skeptics are older, they are less educated, more selfish, and more easily fooled. Doesn’t the alternative sound more likely? Could it be that believers are younger and so more naive, less worldly wise, and throughout history, more likely to be the gullible rollovers — the mere tools of the powers at large? It’s not just that it’s happened before, its a standard repeat theme throughout history. But hey, it’s not their fault they are young and badly taught. When we don’t teach logic and reason at school anymore, we can’t expect them to recognize that con-men and crooks always pretend to be “helpful” at the start of a scam, and that people who attack the messenger are the one who are losing the debate. Besides, everyone knows that educational standards have slipped badly in the last 20 – 30 years, and that today’s students are given more self esteem and less, you know, facts and logic. Whatever – – none of it tells us anything about the planetary atmosphere. Not that you can explain that to the starry-eyed fan of Gaia who keeps believing the witchdoctors even though their predictions of droughts, warm winters, hot summers, dead reefs, and wild cyclones were all wrong. And they don’t seem to care that their witchdoctors are helping themselves to buckets of taxpayer’s cash… The immature believers struggle with numbers:Mathew Wright, executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions and the 2010 winner of the federal environment minister’s Young Environmentalist of the Year, says: things are moving faster than they ever have before, and the fact that solar didn’t work 20 years ago but works now is a problem that for some people is hard to face and admit to.” So what does “works” mean? Not something you can measure with money or kilowatts. Coal fired electricity costs 3c a kilowatt wholesale, and the government is paying up to 60c a KWH for solar electricity. The Victoria Auditor General showed large scale solar costs about 5.5 times as much as coal, and at best, rooftop solar costs at least 9 times as much. So Wright thinks something “works” when taxpayers have to fork out 5- 20 times as much for the same electricity? Keep reading → And who wants Global Warming when you can face avalanches, deep snow, and record cold? How much fun can you have with 2 meters of snow on your house, and none of that evil coal powered electricity? What’s happening in Europe and Russia over the last two weeks is not just your average cold-snap. Temperatures reached -28C in Moscow. One point in Russia hit -52.8C (-68F) on Monday. MOSCOW — Some 215 Russians have died this year in a prolonged period of abnormally cold winter weather, the health ministry said Monday as the overall death toll for Europe rose to well over 600. [National Post]
 NASA Earth Observatory. Dark blue areas are -15C below average. White areas are average. Deep Red are 15C above. (See the NASA link below for the proper scale):. The Danube has frozen over from Austria to the Black Sea, and 224 ships (some delivering fuel) have been stuck in their ports. Schools in Bosnia have been closed for days. Trains in Montenegroare at a standstill, and one train with 50 passengers was stranded in a tunnel for three days before rescuers began evacuating people yesterday. In Serbia 11,000 villagers are trapped by huge snowfalls as temperatures hit – 26C in one town (Al jazeera puts the figure at 70,000 people), and some Bosnian villages haven’t had electricity for days. Hundreds of barns are collapsing under the snow, killing the animals below, and prompting Tom Nelson to write “Children won’t know what barns look like”. For the first time in over 30 years, snow has fallen in the Sahara Desert. Alan Caruba found a Turkish writer lamenting the waste and misdirection of millions of dollars spent on the Green global warming bureaucracy instead of preparations to save lives. Keep reading → February 15th, 2012 | Tags: Cold Climate Risks, Cooling & cold snaps, Europe | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | This is disturbing news. What if eating undercooked meat, gardening, or having a cat could give you an infection which stayed with you for life, nested in cysts in your brain? Worse, those cysts somehow affected your personality, possibly putting you at increased risk of suicide, schizophrenia, or car accident? And here’s the stop-you-in-your-tracks point: up to one third of humanity may harbor this protozoan. That is one very successful parasite.
Sounds like a plot for a bad sci-fi but we know that Toxoplasma gondii makes small mammals take life threatening risks – an infected rat finds cat-urine “attractive” and runs about more, being fearless, but getting eaten: good for the parasite, not so good for the rat. Our brains may be larger but they are made with much the same building blocks and tools. Rabies is known to stir larger mammals into a rage, and there are “a truckload” of examples from the insect and fish world of parasitic mind control. Hmmm. Toxoplasmosis is thought to be a nasty parasite that affects pregnant women and immune-compromised people, but evidence of an insidious nature is accruing. Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist from Prague, has a theory that this protozoan might be rewiring our brains. ‘There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.’
Flegr has been ignored or years, but other researchers are now getting results that support his theory. Studies show that mental illness is 2-3 times as common in people who have the parasite compared to people in the same region who don’t. It could be that schizophrenia runs in families because of a genetic predisposition to a weaker immune response to parasites. According to psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, schizophrenia did not become common until around the same time as people started having cats for pets. Schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.”
Now that I ponder the unpleasant implications, it seems inevitable that evolution could toss up a parasite-host relationship which shifts human behavior. If Toxo isn’t doing it, sooner or later something else will. (Another reason we ought throw more money at medical research, rather than at bat-killing windmills.) Keep reading → The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there. People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus on the point of collapse? Mini update: The carbon market is being referred to as “dead”. Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Germany’s EON, urged policymakers to make fixes. “Let’s talk real: the ETS is bust, it’s dead,” Mr Teyssen said in Brussels this week, adding: “I don’t know a single person in the world that would invest a dime based on ETS signals.” [full story: Financial Times]. Point Carbon analysts have downgraded the forecast price of carbon credits for the second time in two months as the carbon market continues to slide. What was estimated to be 12 Euros, has fallen to 9 euros for 2012, and 8 euro’s for 2013. It’s a long way below $23, set by our Australian “free-market-lovin’-Labor-Party”. (If only they knew what a free market was.) The best known environmentalist in the German Social Democratic Party announced he had become a skeptic (see FOCUS and read about his new book). It doesn’t get much more damning than this. Fritz Vahrenholt was a chemistry professor and a leftie politician, and, could it be any more poignant… also headed up the renewable energy division of Germany’s second largest utility company. CEO of a wind farm for goodness sake. H/t to Keith and many many others. His book, The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen, is making waves in Germany where people don’t critize climate-change science much and where solar and wind power are major industries. I hear from a friend in Europe that this book is very much “hot stuff” in Germany. Thanks Stefan.
Thanks to the GWPF I also know that Australia will probably be the last-man-standing on the deck of the burning ship called “Climate Change”. Everywhere else around the world, the only people who aren’t abandoning ship are those who never climbed aboard. Subsidies to all new wind and solar plants were outright suspended in Spain last week, which was not just bad, but described as “one of the biggest blows ever to the sector. ” The changes are predicted to kill off much of the investment in renewables there. The people selling solar power in Greece were also told the government could not afford to pay their rates, and didn’t really want more of that kind of power right now either, thanks. The U.K. government joined the rush to abandon renewables and promised to cut subsidies for solar energy (see Bloomberg). Meanwhile 101 Tory ministers in the UK government declared they want to toss the wind-farm subsidies out the window. If Julia Gillard wants to lead the way in this market she could start by buying up the solar plants, and drilling their ground for shale gas. Why now: The perfect storm?
February 11th, 2012 | Tags: Carbon Credits, Carbon Market, EU Carbon Market, Solar Energy (PV), Tipping Point (of the Climate Scam), Wind Power | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | For forty years, people have tried to get Solar to work. Now, the worst possible thing for the industry has occurred: The Left are serious about trying to help it. The Large-Scale Solar Subsidies are bountifully generous on an unprecedented scale that involves taxing everything else that moves, but even that generosity is not enough to compete with…wait for it… the even more insanely lavish Small-Scale Solar Subsidies. Who would have thought? Remember these are the same people who tell us that the “free market solution is best”. They offered three times the going rate for rooftop solar electricity, and through utterly predictable market mechanics, created a glut in rooftop solar panels as every man and his dog rushed in to get free electrons from their roofs, and on good sunny days, even cheques in the mail. Now, the large-scale projects are struggling to get major electricity retailers to sign long-term contracts.
The Greens with their usual acute insight into economic affairs know exactly why the inefficient large-scale solar projects are failing: The issue has sparked attacks from the Greens, who have accused Mr Ferguson [Labor Minister] of mismanaging the process to maintain coal’s dominance. If only Mr Ferguson were a Green and knew the true evil of C.O.A.L. He would not allow those aromatic hydrocarbons to give up so much energy so cheaply.. They just don’t do numbers well do they? February 9th, 2012 | Tags: Greens, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Thank you GetUp! Australians are finally talking about how they can get more media competition and how we can lift media standards. Read on to see Moncktons reply, and the call for interestSpot those afraid of free speech.
 ... Gina Rinehart merely buys 13% of Fairfax, and the GetUp-union-funded-Labor-green fan club rush to start raising funds ($37,000 already), not to compete in the free market for shares, but to run the scariest adverts they can, to whip up fear and interfere with normal corporate board room activity. It’s just the way they do things. What are they so afraid of? They’re afraid the public might hear the other side of news. When you run a propaganda campaign, the worst thing that can happen is a crack in the armour — That people like Monckton, Bolt, Nova, or the libertarian economists at Mannkal might get a chance to be heard. Once the truth gets out it can’t be put back in the bag. It spreads.
Wait for it. This is the dark conspiratorial “secret” aim of free market thinkers that they uncovered. Remember some poor hapless soul had to view hours of free market discussion to find this: “And it seems to me that putting some time into encouraging those we know who are super rich to invest in perhaps even establishing a new satellite TV channel is not an expensive thing, and then get a few Jo Nova’s and Andrew Bolts to go on and do the commentating every day and keep the news free and fair and balanced, as they do on Fox. That would be a breakthrough, and give to Australia, as it has for America, a proper dose of free market thinking!” Christopher Monckton, Mannkal Office, 2011 What’s new? GetUp have milked a molehill into a donation-generating-scare. It’s hyperbolic spin, but their big mistake this time is that they are playing with fire. They’re exposing their most irrational fear, drawing attention to the thing they don’t want (media competition), and overplaying their hand. What exactly is so sinister about encouraging people to fund a new satellite channel that provides “free and fair news” in a balanced way? Where is the criminal sin, in “explaining how the free market business works every day” and competing with the other media? Be very afraid of that deadly free market thinking! And if Rinehart owning an eighth of Fairfax is “scary”, just think what would happen if Australia had FOX? Getupoplexy! When I told Monckton his idea of Fox Australia had gone viral, he shot back a reply that ups the ante (keep reading below). His message: Wake up Australia. Fox news out-rates all the other news services in the US because it provides something the people want and voluntarily choose in droves. It gives them the news from both sides, and then fills a vacuum in political commentary that was begging to be filled. Based on the romping success of Fox in America, Monckton estimates Fox Australia would make about a million dollars a week, and more importantly, the nation would get real debate, better investigative reporting, and eventually better policies. The only answer to propaganda is free speech. –Jo ————————————————————————————————————
Advance Australia Fox! By Christopher Monckton of BrenchleyThe frenetic reaction of the dwindling and desperate climate-extremist faction to the news that I am working on putting together a consortium to establish an equivalent of Fox News in Australia and another in the UK is interesting and tells us much. At the invitation of Mannkal, I gave a talk in Perth on the opportunities for restoring political balance to the near-universally hard-Left news media in both countries and for making healthy profits by doing so. Since I gave that talk, the 2010 report and accounts for News Corporation, the owners of Fox, have been published. They confirm my proposed business model in spades.
The climate extremist Left are visibly, audibly frightened that their poisonous near-monopoly of the news media may be broken in Australia, just as Fox News has so swiftly and profitably broken it in the US. Given the enormous amount of support I get for my talks in Australia, I’d guess that a Fox News equivalent in Australia would do just as well as in the US, where Fox now has half the nation’s news audience, because anyone who isn’t a totalitarian Socialist watches it and all the competition are totalitarian Socialist. Fox made $700 million last year, up from $500 million the previous year. Yet the advertising market shrunk. How did Fox do so well? The NewsCorp annual report says it is because viewership ratings have grown, and Fox’s advertisement revenue has grown with them. Scale this for Australia. Population 22.5 million compared with 307 million. Mean GDP $950 bn against $14.5 trillion. GDP per head in Oz is not far short of the US. So Australia’s equivalent of Fox News might make $1 million a week, simply by the old-fashioned method of giving both sides of the story – on climate and on all else – rather than just the Left-hand side. Keep reading → February 7th, 2012 | Tags: GetUp, Media Coverage, Monckton (Christopher), Rinehart (Gina) | Category: Big-Government, Free Speech, Media-matters | Print This Post | | When Christopher Monckton debated at the National Press Club in Canberra last July, he showed exactly why the fans of a man-made catastrophe are so frightened of free speech and open debates. With no slides or other images, in a single hour, he still changed the opinions of fully 9% of the audience , including influential journalists who had expected nothing of the kind. The Roy Morgan polling organization tracked the moment-by-moment opinions of a representative sample of 350 people throughout the debate, and Gary Morgan, the CEO, announcing the result, said that in his long experience of polling he had never seen a swing like it in opinion on any subject in so short a time. John Cook of un-SkepticalScience tried to rescue something from the event for the “cause”, but here Monckton shows how the claims that Monckton was “confused”, “lying” and “misrepresenting evidence” all come to naught, and if John Cook only had the manners (or curiosity) to ask Christopher first, he would have found that out before airing his poor research and logical errors in public. Monckton quotes peer reviewed references ad lib, and does calculations off the top of his head. Cook makes out that he is baffled by Monckton’s sources, which is odd because Monckton quotes the IPCC, Garnaut and other “consensus” documents, which we might have thought Cook would know well. As usual, the point of the alarmist rebuttals is not to understand the science, or to find common ground to build a better understanding, it’s to put the words, “myth”, “lies”, “bizarre”, ‘trick” and ‘distort” into the same paragraph as the words “sceptic” and “Monckton” even if there is nothing to substantiate those terms. In other words, it’s just policy-driven PR dressed up as science. What most disturbs me is that Cook underlies his entire reasoning with the logical fallacy that “consensus” is science, and that only the Chosen Ones are allowed to form an opinion. The attitude “Thou shalt not question our experts” belongs in a religion not in science, and shows that Cook is not even slightly skeptical – what skeptic starts with the position “the experts are always right?”. Hailing consensus ought be anathema to any scientist in the quest for understanding. The University of Queensland employs Cook now, so what does that “center of higher education” make of his low standards of reasoning or evidence and his anti-science values? It supports him, evidently. (The Quest for Knowledge being trumped by the Quest for Grants and Peer-Group Approval). The vice-chancellor has failed to answer a question from Christopher Monckton about why the university provides cover for Cook’s crude propaganda. Cook claims the lesson for him is that “verbal debates are a mistake”. Which is true when you can’t reason and don’t have the evidence. Like any sore loser he tries to blame the loss on something else — claiming Monckton lies, yet here we can see that if Cook had stood up in the National Press Club, and made these claims with Monckton present, Monckton would have had no trouble refuting them, and quite possibly even more of the audience would have been converted. Open debate is the only way the truth gets tested. Cook himself has been asked to post up Monckton’s rebuttal of his mistaken accusations on his website, but apparently lacks the intellectual honesty to do so. It is our pleasure to do for him what he should have done for himself in the interest of fairness and balance and the search for the truth. Jo Keep reading → Cheerio! Thanks to the dedicated souls who nominated it, this blog is a finalist in 2012 Web Bloggies Award. (Ta Pat, Val, Baa). 😀 ! That’s a success on its own (it’s already bringing in new readers). Cheers!  With your help, we can reach a wider crowd. The different traffic, new links and other bloggie-spin-offs can help your favourite sites rank higher in searches and means the messages you want to share travel past new eyes. (Shameless hinting…) And all you need to do is vote and spread the word (so email, facebook, letter boxing, billboards ;-)). Some excellent blogs have made the finals, it’s smorgasbord of skeptics, and Anthony Watts has helpfully listed my favourites, so below is his detailed guide to making your vote count. My one sentence version is: Click here to vote, put ticks in the grey circles next to your choices (one in each category you care about), do the “catcha” funny word to prove you are human, then wait for the email, AND verify the link to prove you are not a troll. You need to do all those steps to be counted. Thank you to all who take those few minutes.It’s time to be savvy. As Anthony essentially says, we know people who don’t like free-speech and independent thinkers are good at networking and make the effort to run campaigns to sabotage another site’s successes. We don’t need to stoop to that, but it sure helps if we vote for the sites we like. It’s your chance to guide the internet crowd in the direction you think is best. Merci, Jo [Here’s what the Australian and NZ category looks like. ]
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