Recent Posts
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Sunday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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Saturday
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Why is the renewables industry allowed to sponsor political advertising in schools and call it “education”?
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Wednesday
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In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
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Tuesday
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Monday
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The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
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Sunday
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Saturday — Election Day Australia
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Vote for freedom…
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Friday
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Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
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Thursday
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Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
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Wednesday
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Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
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Tuesday
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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
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Monday: Election Day Canada
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When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
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Saturday
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UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
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Friday
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The cocoa price crisis is a Big Government price fixing disaster, not a climate change one
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Thursday
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Blame the Vikings! Moss found in East Antarctica lived in warmer summers a thousand years ago.
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Wednesday
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Easter Sunday
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Saturday
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Good Friday
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In crash-test dummy land, we solve teenage girl climate anxiety with $500b in fantasy weather experiments…
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Thursday
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Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest business leader opposes the carbon tax and asks “Where are the other leaders?”
What’s unseen are the hundreds of business leaders particularly in the top 100, especially the BCA, who say nothing. The only businesses that want an Australian Carbon Tax are the renewable energy brands and, of course, the companies who won’t have to pay it (i.e. our foreign competitors). Plenty of Chinese, Indian and Brazilian companies would surely give a schadenfreude-smile at seeing their Australian competitors hobbled.
Few Australian business leaders are brave enough to say the bleeding obvious, and I’ve mentioned before that many fear retribution. Gina Rinehart has published an article in Australian Resources and Investment this month (see below) daring them to speak up: where are Australia’s business leaders?
 Bianca and Gina Rinehart with Lang Hancock in the 1980's. Rinehart’s position in Australia is a curious one: in 2011 she is clearly top of the rich-list, and is the first woman ever to hold that position. Her father, Lang Hancock, opened the Pilbara but died in 1992 with his estate owing large sums and close to bankruptcy. Rinehart turned those projects around and became the most successful entrepreneur in the country when her wealth tripled to 9 billion dollars in the last year. But far from being the darling of the feminist cohort, nearly twenty years after Hancock died, she is dismissively labeled by many in the mainstream media as a “mining heiress” as if she just got lucky. Do we hear James Packer described as just a “media heir”? Not so. Yet the Sydney Morning Herald improbably told Rinehart that she needs to denounce her late father if they are to believe she’s made it on her own. No one is asking James Packer to speak ill of his dad, and yet the green-feminists don’t seem too concerned about the incongruity. If Packer tops the “richest person in Australia” 20 years after his father died, will anyone be suggesting he didn’t deserve it?
The feminist hierarchy in Australia were thrilled when Julia Gillard was appointed as Australia’s first female PM, and when Quentin Bryce was appointed the first Governor General. Right now, we’ve got the female golden trifecta downunder — PM, GG, and richest person. But one arm of the trio is summarily dismissed. And while there are many women in politics, there are few at the top end of business — with just 15 women in the top 200. Being a female success, it turns out, is not what matters to a feminist. Their heroes have to hold the “right” opinions too, not think for themselves. — JN
Reprinted with permission from this month’s Australian Resources and Investment magazine.
Australian business leaders – where are you?
By Gina Rinehart
When is the last time you had discussions with a 27-year-old and thought ‘this person should be leading the Business Council of Australia?’
On a wonderful weekend overseas recently, I met one such 27-year-old who graduated from one of the US’s best schools, and then went on to graduate from a leading US business university. After working in Asia and Europe, he now heads important power generation projects in his own country, recognising that energy security will be one of the key needs of this century.
And what was I told by this young gentleman? That Australia, with its great resources, should also be a country of entrepreneurs, developing our resources for the benefit of our people and its adjacent neighbours. I was further told that what Australia needs is a reduction in taxation levels, so that better incentives are created for Australians to encourage them to take risks, work hard, plan, persist and strive to do better, and that we should also reduce approvals, permits and license processes.
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5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
CARBON DIOXIDE DOES NOT CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING
Dr Bob Carter
Adjunct research professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University
PUBLIC LECTURE
WEDNESDAY 11th MAY
7.30PM
PORT KEMBLA RSL CLUB AUDITORIUM
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Joanne Nova [Wasting money on Climate betrays the sick] bemoans the lack of cost-benefit analysis to support a price on carbon. She didn’t look very far. The energy economics literature is awash with estimates of the cost of both climate change and abatement measures. They disagree of course, but so would cost-benefit analyses of medical research expenditures, which Nova ignores.
A world where governments spent our money purely on the basis of cost-benefit assessments might look appealing but it’s not going to happen. Priorities reflect what voters want, annoying as that may be. It’s a small price to pay for our wonderful democracy that lets us keep arguing and trying to change each other’s minds.
Tom Biegler, St Kilda East, Vic
My reply sent to The Australian yesterday:
Tom Biegler thinks I’ve ignored cost benefit analysis of climate change abatement. No sir. There are no cost benefit analysis that start with checking the science. No institute or government committee has been paid to audit the IPCC, the BOM or CSIRO’s findings. All the reports assume that the UN favored climate models are right. And those climate models assume that humidity and clouds amplify CO2’s effect by a whopping factor of three, but their results don’t fit measurements of the real world by 28,000,000 weather balloons, 30 years of satellites, or 3,000 ocean buoys. Hence, if CO2 has a minor effect, the cost benefit of cutting carbon is easy to work out: it’s all cost, and no benefit.
Joanne Nova
The cost benefit studies assume the world will warm, and assume that CO2 plays a major role, so there has never been a cost-benefit study that analyzed the “benefits” of cutting CO2 by starting with the science.
But in hindsight, what was I thinking?!
We can show the cost-benefit studies are barking mad even if the “science” was right. Let’s assume the UN committee and their 75 favourite scientists are 100% correct, and that all their projections are spot-on. There are still exactly no benefits to the Australian community in lowering Australian emissions with solar panels, pink batts, or 2 billion fluorescent globes. Let’s all say it together… If we abandon Australia entirely, and reduce our CO2 emissions by 100%, we prevent 0.0154C of global warming*.
How can anyone justify taking one dollar from medical research to fund that?
*By 2050. See Carbon Tax Australia? Welcome to Futility Island for details.
PS: If you are new to this line of thinking, or this site — the page to start is here.
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Here’s a topic close to my heart. Before I became involved in climate change and currencies, my hot topic-of-choice for years was medical research and health. In my honours degree I worked to get a tiny step closer to treating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. When I saw that The Australian Government was threatening to cut medical research, I wanted to put a razor fine point on just what muddy thinking costs us. This article I wrote is published in The Weekend Australian today. We can’t afford to get the decision wrong on climate change. We must fight the battles that matter, not build fortresses against imaginary foes.
 
LOST opportunities are invisible but deadly. On climate change, the call to buy insurance by pricing carbon is a cop-out. Where is the cost-benefit analysis? We’re thinking of axing Australian medical research yet we’re supporting solar panel manufacturers in China. It doesn’t have to be this way.
All the money spent employing green police, subsidizing solar or researching how to pump carbon dioxide underground is money not spent on medical research. Opportunity cost is a killer. The path not taken could be lined with happier, longer lives. Only the best evidence and real debate have a chance of helping us see through the fog to pick the better road.
While most scientists agree CO2 causes some warming, there is great debate about just how much. If CO2 has only a minor effect on temperature then spending, say, $1 billion on inefficient roof-top solar panels is not just wasted money, it’s a choice that will kill people. We won’t be able to say exactly who it will kill but we can virtually guarantee that some people will die in the future who could have been saved.
Why? Solar energy costs us more than five times what coal-powered energy does. So instead of spending $1bn on solar panels, we could have spent $200 million on cheap electricity and used the other $800m to double our medical research budget.
Why? Solar energy costs us more than five times what coal-powered energy does. So instead of spending $1bn on solar panels, we could have spent $200 million on cheap electricity and used the other $800m to double our medical research budget.
Right now, the government is planning to cut $133 million from our $800m annual medical research budget. The Australian government has spent or will spend $3.8 billion dollars to combat climate change across four years. (The US government was spending about $7bn a year at last count.) When Julia Gillard spends money on climate-related work instead of medical research, she is making a choice about the net benefits and it’s supposedly based on science. It’s true sooner or later medical research will get the answers right, but for someone who is sick with a deadly disease, sooner makes a life-and-death difference.
If our government-funded climate establishment makes the wrong guess about what humidity does in a warmer world, CO2 emissions become trivial and inconsequential. But the money diverted or delayed from better causes leaves a trail of destruction that cannot be repaired. Money can always be replaced, but lives lost are gone for good.
“Which four-year-old in 2018 will die because Gillard introduced a carbon tax instead of increasing medical research funding? “
Julio Licinio, director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, put together a passionate, disturbing advertisement two weeks ago, a plea to stop cuts to medical research funding. His sister died aged four from a disease that is treatable today.
Which four-year-old in 2018 will die because Gillard introduced a carbon tax instead of increasing medical research funding? Which father will die in 2022 who would have lived if we had doubled our funding for medical research? It is for people such as four-year-old Fabiola that we should keep fighting for rational debate. Bad science makes for bad policy. Poor reasoning is deadly.
Medical research is blossoming at a phenomenal, historic pace
The exponential curve in gene therapy, telomerase research, genomics and glycobiology is barely beginning. Four significant breakthroughs were made in medical research in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000. These were the kinds of breakthroughs people had worked for decades to make, and some were not predicted even a few years beforehand. The human genome project was finished five years ahead of schedule and for a fraction of the expected price.
Right now, a year of medical research really does make a difference. These are the areas where we will be left behind and it will hurt. These are the industries where we need to stay at the head of the pack, not just to save lives but to save the economy as well. Access Economics estimated in 2003 that every dollar invested in the Australian health research and development sector returned at least $5 in national economic development.
What would we rather export ten years from now? Ten-year-old second-hand Chinese solar panels or an Australian made cure for prostate cancer?
When government-funded Australian researchers discover treatments, we own vital intellectual property. We not only export products the world wants, we avoid being beholden to foreign patent holders. Some effective cancer drugs cost $2000 a week. Isn’t that the kind of research we want to own?
If we lead the world in medicine, the world is our oyster. If it turns out clean carbon technology is useful, we can buy it with the spare change from the profits of medical research. We know we need a cure for cancer. We don’t know if the rest of the world will want to pump CO2 underground 10 years from now.
When we lead the world in putting inefficient solar panels on roofs, we only help Chinese manufacturers and we win a race no one wants to win. You can’t export second-hand solar panels or resell old pink batts.
Can we start looking at the cost benefits of all our policies instead of reasoning by fallacy? The precautionary principle is no principle of science: it’s a blind tool that works for both sides of any debate.
To quote Licinio:
“In 1964 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma of childhood was 100 per cent fatal. Now the cure rate is over 80 per cent, thanks to medical research. When Fabiola died I was so upset that it took me decades to recover. From protracted mourning to survivor guilt, the impact of that death shaped my life. For someone like myself who suffered tremendously due to a disease [that] was incurable and whose cure has been subsequently achieved through medical research, the proposed cuts to the NHRMC [National Health and Medical Research Council] budget are unconscionable.
“On a very positive note, my mother, Aurea, lost her own mother early on. My grandmother died at age 47 due to malignant hypertension, which was out of control, and sky-high blood pressures. My mother suffered enormously because of that death; and she knew that she had the exact same disease. Later in life, my mother also developed breast cancer. However, medical research always caught up with her and her blood pressure was always well controlled. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer she had state-of-the-art treatment, guided by medical research. My mother died in 2007 neither from hypertension nor from breast cancer. Medical research gave my mother 40 years of active, happy and highly productive life.”
Joanne Nova is a commentator and the author of The Skeptic’s Handbook. She is a former associate lecturer in science communication at the Australian National University.
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The Australian article.
The federal budget will be announced on 10 May. There is still time for you to write to your federal member to voice your support to protect medical research funding.
The photo above — so poignant — is from the advert.
Support Medical Discovery Australia (Professor Licinio’s blog)
Discoveries Need Dollars A campaign initiated by the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
Even if you don’t live in Australia you might benefit one day from research done here. Why not voice your opinion?
Other articles published by Jo Nova in mainstream media.
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My reply to the follow up to this article in the Australian
7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
The struggles for believers of the theory-with-no-observations are getting worse. Once upon a time they used to just ignore skeptics. Now they’re coming to terms with their fall from hallowed “untouchable” status.
The Climate Spectator posted an article Wish I wasn’t a warmenist last week discussing the new urban terminology:
Here’s how the online Urban Dictionary defines a warmenist: “Gullible, scientificially (sic) illiterate, unthinking acolyte and zombie-fired propagandist of the Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming.”
One in the eye, one supposes, for all those academies of science which have declared they accept the science of global warming and man’s role in it. But the definition goes on: “One who takes direct orders from High Priest King of Idiocy, Albert J. Gore. One who puts the “mental” in environmentalism. Historical inheritors of those who believed that King Canute could hold back the tides and that the wolf would eat the moon unless their first-born daughter’s virginity was sacrificed to the local shaman.”
They are even thinking of tossing out Tim Flannery (as gently as possible): “Given the level of national debate, maybe Tim Flannery wasn’t the ideal choice to champion the need to do something about climate change.” As usual when they dissect it, it’s not about verifiable predictions, or rigorous reasoning — it’s just a “communication” problem:
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Have you wondered just exactly how much money you could pay for the feel-good factor of knowing that your electrons came from fashionable sources?
Thanks to the Victorian government we can get the hard numbers in the Victorian Auditor General’s Report.
In a nutshell, most alternatives are 2-3 times as expensive, except for solar which is 5 times the price.
(Luckily at the moment, renewables only produce 3 – 4 % of all energy in Victoria. Be grateful. You Victorians could be a lot poorer.) As it is, it cost Victorians $415,000 to tell you this, but it may be the most effective money spent on renewable energy in the last ten years. (Though oddly they didn’t produce this helpful comparative graph below. I did that for free.)
The Full PDF
In 2002 the State government of Victoria decided to aim for 10% renewable energy by 2010. You can see how well that worked out for them:
 The light blue line (at 10%) was what they were aiming for. The report is 48 pages. Basically it found that nobody thought too hard about how these aims would be done. Nobody assessed how useful it was to toss lots more money at solar. The targets are not even close to being met, and it will all cost billions: specifically something like $6 – $8b. Next time, a cost benefit analysis would be handy.
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8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings
Thanks to the nocarbontax website.
Editor: Satirical Press
 ... In a shock result, a new climate model produced results that make sense. The new CCFAFM* model shows that future projected temperatures are closely tied to financial and political forcings. Unlike other climate models, the awkwardly titled CCFAFM was not coupled with oceanic or terrestrial carbon cycle simulations, but with money and politics. The model studied the flow of finance and found a quasi-linear relationship with Climate-Fear.
The NCT team concludes:
…the unbalanced outward radiation of taxpayer money, will very likely cause dangerous cooling of family finances.
We homogenized, adjusted and used liberally unprincipled component method**, too sophisticated for non-climate scientists to understand, and produced a new set of hockey sticks, giving a very robust prediction (>90% likelihood) that we are all being totally screwed (right).
A solution to the climate-financial cycle is apparent from the model
Currently information flow is unidirectional from the UN and governments to the population, so if the flow in information is reversed, potentially, tax funds will return to the people.
Similarly, funds paid to climate skeptics may reverse the financial outgoing longwave radiation.
A large uncontrolled, non-crossover, unhomogenized study is currently underway across the Western World. If you’d like to take part in the study, please email a politician, or bureaucrat^.
[Or donate to your favorite skeptic (;-)]
…
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
The PR machine has spent twenty years pretending to be scientific while they push poll the phrase “carbon is pollution” (Don’t you want to stop pollution?) But turn the polling inside out and the nonsense is exposed. Stephen Harper takes the PR team’s theme to its logical conclusion and uses it against them.
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Forget plate tectonics and continental drift. A trace gas in the atmosphere can reshape the Earth, at least, that’s apparently how many people see it. A new survey shows that over a third of the population think that climate change induces not just tsunamis, but even volcanic eruptions. Worse, 37% of people are so convinced carbon is pollution that they think it would be a worthwhile aim to reduce the carbon content of their body. (The ultimate diet, you might say).
About a quarter of the population are so plum-confused about what carbon is, they would rather not eat food with carbon in it. (Crikey!) The numbers taken in by the mass delusion are shocking. Nearly half the population think food would be safer without carbon.
This is the unscientific bias of our national bureaucracies, institutions, and science communicators laid bare.
Stephen Harper randomly questioned 100 people with one the most original, useful surveys I’ve seen yet. Even though the numbers are small, his questions give us real insight into just how successful our various science journalists, science communicators and government public relations departments are at getting across the basics. After all, Tim Flannery, CSIRO, and the Department of Education want to make sure people understand “the science” don’t they?
Indeed, believers of the Theory of Man-Made Catastrophe often blame their poor communication skills for the rising tide of skepticism. Au Contraire, I say. They’ve done a masterful job of conveying the public relations message “carbon is pollution” and have been extraordinarily successful at hiding the basic facts of life like: we are carbon life forms, and literally everything edible in your kitchen was made with CO2 (bar salt, water and industrial food additives).
The carbon in meat, milk and salad came from the sky. Did they forget to mention that? I can’t think why.
Don’t misread this, it’s not about how clever the public is or isn’t, it’s about how well “the science” has been conveyed. All the glossy brochures, school handouts, 3,000 page reports, press releases, endless repetition of “carbon pollution” by politicians and journalists, and coloring in competitions have been effective propaganda. The Ministry of Disinformation has been hard at work.
Thanks to Stephen Harper for this original, insightful contribution. It must have taken weeks to compile. The questions and results are documented in this PDF. The survey covered a broad cross section of ages and voting types, and Stephen plans to keep surveying to increase the size of the survey.
— Jo
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THE PUBLIC FAILS THE KNOWLEDGE TEST ON CARBON
IS MEDIA POLLUTION THE CAUSE?
Guest Post By Stephen L. Harper
April 29th 2011
A survey just conducted in the streets of Perth, Australia shows a disturbing lack of basic understanding of the roles carbon and carbon dioxide play in life processes on planet earth. It also highlights some monumental elementary misapprehensions regarding climate change issues.
A staggering 37% of carbon-based-life-form respondents are keen on reducing carbon in the human body. Perhaps the amputation of an appendage at the end of the leg will be the new way to reduce one’s carbon footprint.
Equally remarkable is the finding that 44% of respondents wish to eliminate carbon and carbon dioxide from food and drink altogether. Nonplussed are the 28% of respondents who don’t think there is any carbon or carbon dioxide in food and drink in the first place.
Another alarming finding is that 47% of respondents think carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Marginally less at 44% give poor old carbon, the sixth element of the periodic table (and my personal favourite, since without it we would not exist), the big thumbs down.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Gallup has done a world wide poll, about whether people believe the theory of man-made global warming. Though don’t stake too much money on the results, they only interviewed “approximately 1000 people” (what’s an approximate person?).
*So we’re talking about a survey of about 10 people per country.
The headlines are outrageously ambitious , “most of the human race”, yet having surveyed 111 countries it’s sort of half-way believable (with caveats). What’s striking is that the great man-made global warming theory has left no corner of the globe untouched… 10% of Somaliland believes it fergoodnesssake. (Well OK, so one person said “yes”.)
But it begs a few questions — like how do you phone poll accurately in countries where there are not many phones, and hardly anyone speaks English?
The China statistic is interesting. For all the talk that the world’s largest emitter of CO2 is “speeding to take up renewable energy” it ranks 105th out of 111 countries. “79%” of Chinese people are skeptics (well, more or less).
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Another leading commentator — this time Michael Stuchbury in The Australian — see the Carbon Tax as a dead dog.
ARE these the signs that Labor’s climate change policy is heading for a second disaster? Big unions and big business are in revolt as the mining boom’s strong dollar squeezes the rest of the trade-exposed economy. Households are up in arms over surging power bills.
And since the shambles of the late 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, Labor hasn’t doused worries that its carbon tax would put Australia in front of the world, a critical risk for a carbon-intensive economy.
This treble of jobs, cost of living and international competitiveness engulfs Julia Gillard and Greg Combet as they attempt to reverse Kevin Rudd’s humiliating 2010 retreat on his emissions trading scheme. It is replete with political and policy failures, some of which are only now becoming evident.
…
Facing a revolt among steel industry members, Australian Workers Union secretary Paul Howes last week vowed to oppose Labor’s carbon tax if it cost just “a single job”, even with unemployment below 5 per cent. Remember this is Wayne Swan’s union, which was mostly responsible for replacing Rudd with Gillard.
Tim Blair also points out that virtually every man and his dog are against the tax, and now adds Barley Australia, the QBE and ratepayers to the list.
[QBE chairwoman Belinda] Hutchinson:
“Two weeks ago I would have been in the minority of people in business speaking up publicly against the carbon tax,” she said.
“Today, we have a situation where everyone is talking about a carbon tax.”
Who does the Labor Party represent?
Combet vowed to “put households first” . Yet it’s households who will be forced to pay. But for what measurable benefit — how many degrees will that be Julia? The Labor Party used to be the party of the workers. Instead the carbon trading scheme (which is the “end” result of the tax) is destined to offer advantage to a select few industries. Which industry will make money no matter who buys and who sells and no matter what the price is?
Well lookee here:
Rothschild Australia and E3 International are set to become key players in the international carbon credit trading market, an emerging commodity market that analysts estimate could be worth up to US$150 billion by 2012.
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7 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
UPDATE: Art Robinson says: “It worked,”…’ The university “made some re-arrangements with the campus and replaced a couple of deans and did some special things to help my students.” Joshua received his doctorate and Matthew is on track to getting his, according to Robinson, but Bethany “couldn’t take the heat” and left after receiving her master’s degree.’ OSU claims they didn’t respond to his complaints. It must be a coincidence that all three were targeted, then all three were allowed to continue. Sure.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, as the power of big-government comes under threat the attacks on skeptics and free citizens grow worse than ever. We are all busy, but we cannot let this one get past. Art Robinson is one of us, one of the original skeptics, back when hardly anyone else was. He’s been a key player, dismayed, like the rest of us at the way science was being used for political purposes. Indeed, he was so dismayed, he ran for congress as a Republican last year. Against an allegedly full-on smear campaign from the incumbent Congressman Pete DeFazio, Art managed to get 44% of the votes in a long-held Democrat seat.
 Oregon State University Library The shocking thing is that, right now, Art has six children, and three of them simultaneously are getting their PhD projects canceled, snatched, and dismissed. They are or were all studying at Oregon State University, and despite all three having put in years of work and getting great grades, they are now locked out of labs or faced with the prospect of losing all their work.
OSU received $27 million from the same Democrat Congressman Pete DeFazio’s government that Art challenged.
“DeFazio and the other Oregon Democrat congressmen sent a reported $27 million in earmark funding to OSU during the last legislative cycle, and Robinson opposes all earmark funding.” [link]
Note that the issue right now is Art Robinson versus OSU. Robinson is making no comment about DeFazio in connection with this, and focuses on OSU members who are allegedly involved in the problems his offspring are suddenly having.
Political payback – Oregon style
Source: SPPI
by Paul Driessen
The idea that three outstanding students – PhD candidates at OSU – could face dismissal, and worse, shortly before receiving their degrees, is simply shocking. That this could be happening because their father had the temerity to challenge an entrenched 12-term Democratic congressman (and OSU earmark purveyor) could make people think the university is in Zimbabwe, not America.
What are the odds that three formerly outstanding students all suddenly slide to the point of having their projects canceled and simultaneously? And the last name of each student is “Robinson”! Does Jack Higginbotham, professor of one, who stood up for them all, deserve to lose his job too?
We didn’t ask to face this threat, but if we allow it to happen, it makes the next threat more likely, and potentially so much more unthinkably worse. There is something we can do.
The people pulling these strings are not even trying to disguise it. It is an open threat to all who oppose big-government, or who dare to run against a powerful incumbent. The message is that it’s not worth running for office, or voicing dissent on “establishment” topics, because those in power are too powerful already and have patrons who may bring pain to you and your family. How many potentially good candidates would not want to play that game and be dissuaded? Those potential candidates lose, and the voters lose too. No wonder good honest men are deterred from politics.
It doesn’t matter what side of politics you are on and whether you are a skeptic or not. Only the corrupt benefit from this injustice. If you believe in democracy this kind of attack is simply not-on.
Only a Russian could sum things up this pointedly.
From Paul Driessen:
As one reader – a Russian, in St. Petersburg! – wrote to me after seeing my article online over the weekend: “I’ve seen a lot of Edward Ray’s in schools and universities of my Soviet Russia. The only really shattering piece of news is that the painfully familiar situation is happening not in some Communist hell, like Cuba or North Korea, but in the USA – IN THE USA!!!” This is what we are up against. The only question is, What are we going to do about it?
The details of Joshua, Bethany and Matthews work are described on the Oregon State Outrage blog. They are all working towards PhD degrees in nuclear engineering.
The work of the three younger Robinson students is already being “assigned” to other students, without their credit. The machine that Joshua helped design is now off-limits to him. Without it, he can’t finish his work and he can’t complete that work at any other university.
What kind of man is Art Robinson?
Let the record speak. This man is a go getter, self-starter, hard-worker to the core. But more-so, he’s a man of integrity.
- Art Robinson is a true scientist to the core — last year he wrote a document about the current state of science that was so insightful I blogged part of it in: The truth shall make you free.
- Art was the man who set up the Petition Project — the mass volunteers effort to collect and verify signatures of scientists in the US who are skeptics. I quote it all the time: 31,500 scientists, including 9,000 PhDs.
- Art is a man who raised six children, mostly single-handedly, because he lost his wife and their mother, in 1988 when the youngest was just 18 months old. He home-schooled them. As he describes it, he realized he could not keep teaching them one by one, so he wrote a home-schooling curriculum where they teach themselves. Over 60,000 children have used the Robinson Curriculum. It is still in use today.
- Art Robinson is best known in science for his pioneering biochemical research work on the amide molecular clocks that are built into almost all protein molecules, work that has been brilliantly extended by his son Noah Robinson. In addition, Art is known for originating and carrying out much of the original work in the field of metabolic profiling, which is now a large part of the discipline known as “metabolomics.” This work involves the quantitative measurement of human health and disease by means of the quantitative analysis of biochemical patterns that are imprinted in the amounts of thousands of metabolic substances that can be measured in human breath, blood, urine, and tissues. [From Oregon State Outrage].
The PhD work of Bethany, Joshua and Matthew
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8.7 out of 10 based on 10 ratings
There are billions of dollars of money sneaking out the door of Western Nations and being used to feed the monster bureaucracy, the UNFCCC and its cohort.
In The Carbon Tax that Ate Australia Tony Cox and David Stockwell point out the Australian contributions fly so under the radar (despite being millions of dollars) that even the Australian government seems to have forgotten they agreed to pay them. Greg Combet, the minister for Climate Change promises “every dollar of the Carbon Tax will be given back to the people”:
Every dollar raised by the carbon price will be dedicated to supporting households with any price impacts, and supporting businesses through the transition to a clean energy economy. Because we are a Labor government, we will support the most vulnerable in our community — the people who need help the most.
But Combet in Cancun promised 10% of the Australian carbon tax as a tithe to the UN. (And there’s the $599 million as part of the Fast Start Finance program over three years that is in the pipeline.) So which commitment will the Australian government break? Or, let me guess, in the world of spin, the government can give all the tax money back to Australians because the other 10% “of that” comes from … err… other taxes? (That’s how 100+10 = 100.) Well that’s all right then… let’s call it “tax-creep”. Could the carbon tax quietly be 10% bigger than advertised?
The Copenhagen Accord seemed like such an innocuous piece of face-saving wall-paper, but a river of money flows to its organizers and patrons. The US — past the point where it can pay what it owes as its foreign debts mount — committed $1.7 billion last year. The UK, facing mass riots over public spending cuts, has given even more per capita. The Scandinavians are punching far above their weight too.
(Note the values are in local currencies but if you “Click” on the calculator it will convert…)
|
total pledged |
total committed |
programmes |
| Australia |
AUD 599 million  |
|
5 |
| Belgium |
EUR 150 million |
EUR 42,0 million |
– |
| Canada |
CAD 400 million |
|
– |
| Denmark |
DKK 1 200 million |
DKK 308,0 million |
12 |
| European Union |
EUR 150 million |
EUR 50,0 million |
8 |
| Finland |
EUR 110 million |
|
7 |
| France |
EUR 1 260 million |
EUR 1 260,0 million |
24 |
| Germany |
EUR 1 260 million |
EUR 291,9 million |
51 |
| Iceland |
USD 1 million |
|
– |
| Japan |
USD 15 000 million |
|
– |
| Luxembourg |
EUR 9 million |
EUR 9,0 million |
– |
| Malta |
EUR 1 million |
EUR 0,1 million |
2 |
| Netherlands |
EUR 310 million |
EUR 310,0 million |
7 |
| Norway |
USD 1 000 million |
USD 382,0 million |
20 |
| Portugal |
EUR 36 million |
EUR 12,0 million |
– |
| Slovenia |
EUR 8 million |
|
2 |
| Spain |
EUR 375 million |
|
9 |
| Sweden |
EUR 800 million |
|
17 |
| Switzerland |
CHF 140 million |
|
– |
| United Kingdom |
GBP 1 500 million |
GBP 568,0 million |
8 |
| United States |
|
USD 1 700,0 million (for 2010) |
|
Ponder that this program manages some $5 billion USD (of committed funds) and 4 months after Cancun, (and 14 months after the Copenhagen Accord) the website documenting it appears to be the part time work of one man in the Netherlands. Perhaps I’m missing something, and the real official site is somewhere else. At least they are not wasting funds on glossy graphics, but it’s disconcerting to say the least that there are so few details. Are they kidding? Is this really the official site for a program this size?
Remember, as you admire the empty cells and out-of-date information on the Fast Start site, that this is what “transparency” looks like from the closest thing we have to a world government.
The most generous interpretation is that these funds are merely rebadged foreign aid amounts that would have been used in foreign aid anyway. But why shuffle them through the UN or the UNFCCC — the kind of people who aim to try to hold back a tide that is barely rising at 2 or 3 mm a year. I mean, levees to stop the ocean rising must be low on the wish list for countries where children die of malaria every day. Are children lost because some bureaucrat hijacked foreign aid to build a sea wall that will probably never be needed?
Thanks to Tony Cox and David Stockwell.
Just to put a razor fine point on it commenter Lawrie writes on the last thread that the Canadian wheat crop cycle is being cut short just as David Archibald predicted (thanks to UN aid, those kids who will need wheat to eat are getting levees instead):
David Archibald is sure this SC24 [solar cycle] and possibly SC25 will both be short and weak leading to a Dalton Minimum type cooling. He also states that should such cooling occur the Canadian wheat crop would be seriously reduced. This is one of several stories coming out of the northern prairies: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-18/canadian-wheat-sowing-may-be-delayed-on-wet-weather-board-says.html
It seems late snows and melt are delaying sowing 10 to 20 days. The same region experienced a number of early frosts last year. Combine the two and the short growing season will see yield reductions. Maybe it’s La Nina and maybe it’s the solar cycle or maybe a bit of both. Either way cold weather equals less food.
7.5 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
Heartland is offering people the chance to see and possibly meet some of the heroes of the skeptic world in Washington in June 30 – July 1, 2011, Washington D.C. (I hear this may possibly be the last of the Heartland Climate conferences. I hope not!)
Unfortunately I won’t be able to get there, but Bob Carter, Fred Singer, Harrison Schmitt and Steve McIntyre will, the great Craig Idso will be.
Click on the images to enlarge them and read
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5.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Tim Blair broke the story of Tim Flannery claiming to be working for Panasonic. (But wait, I hear you say, how could that be, we thought he was working for the Australian people?!)
If you are a foreign multinational and you want to influence national Australian policies, you don’t need to spend much. Prime time advertising in Australia is as cheap as chips, but it only works on politically correct topics where our national broadcaster (the ABC) will give you a free pass. When it comes to climate change, ABC adverts don’t interrupt the program, they are the program.
Flannery has been on ABC’s Q&A five times, ABC’s Lateline three times [1,2,3,], the ABC’s 7.30 report, ABC breakfast, ABC Latenight live, something on the ABC called Conversations, and too many radio spots to mention. When people question whether Tim Flannery ought be proud of promoting an electronics giant at the same time as he is paid for government funded work … the ABC comes out defending him, and their no-hard-questions approach to promoting what he promotes.
It’s not that someone of his notoriety shouldn’t be getting ABC airtime, it’s that he gets away with failed predictions, half truths, and is allowed to push his agenda without analysis or scrutiny.
Naturally if Tim Flannery helps swing Australia into the low carbon pit, then Panasonic will be there to reap the profits.
It’s disguised third party endorsements on the “government funded TV channel-that-doesn’t-do-adverts”. The ABC rightly point out that they haven’t been promoting Panasonic, which is true. But when Tim says he’s “been waving the Panasonic flag”, it’s not that he’s selling the brand Panasonic, instead he’s selling their brand of policy. Panasonic can blitz their non green competition if Australia goes “low-carbon”. And won’t they sell a magnitude more solar cells and rechargeable car batteries if the government mandates “greenness”?
The cost of influence?
Panasonic Australia pledged $690,000 to fund environmental research and public education as part of a new Macquarie University eco initiative.
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8.3 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
The last chief scientist of Australia, Penny Sackett, was disappointed not to be invited to the cabaret at Copenhagen. She quit after she she felt “ignored” . Possibly she belated realized that the government may have appointed her to just so she would not disagree inconveniently with any of their pet projects, thus neutralizing the role of Chief Scientist and reducing it to a rubber stamp.
The new chief scientist is Ian Chubb, Vice-Chancellor of ANU, and a neuroscientist. Unlike Sackett, he’s already said he will “leave the climate debate to politics”. Surprisingly, his actual views on climate science are not easy to pigeonhole. He didn’t mind getting money to buy huge supercomputers for ANU climate modelers (what vice chancellor wouldn’t?). But when he spoke at an event at the ANU climate change conference in Oct 2007, many of his statements can be read both ways.
Is it possible… could it be, that he is a scientist enough to know what the scientific method is and be willing to be a guardian of it? Refreshingly, he does not like the name-calling and the hyperbole of the climate debate. He repeated calls for rational debate, from both sides. He wants a contest of ideas and (good news!) he realizes this is a multivariate problem which is highly complex, so at least we have a chief scientist who is not repeating pat anti-science lines like “the science of climate change is settled.”
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
The zeitgeist of the anti-tax revolt in Australia is beginning to gather momentum.
In the last month I’ve met a dozen mining and business leaders, 6 elected members of parliament, and I’ve spoken to 450 pastoralists in remote Australia. Each time the theme is the same: businesses are afraid of the tax, but they are also afraid to speak against it. The phrases I’ve heard specifically are “it’s a vindictive government”, and “they have long memories”. At least one of these business leaders was CEO of a household-name multi-billion dollar company.
It’s the same with business associations and committees. They’re wondering if they should focus on hammering out a better deal in the cat fight for compensation or take the “riskier” position and oppose the carbon tax outright.
For Labor the dark winds of discontent are gathering pace.
Things have gone distinctly pear shaped in the last week for the Labor carbon pricing plan. Polls are punishing the Labor party (it’s the lowest results for them in 15 years); the most powerful union leader in Australia (normally a Labor supporter to the end) has threatened to oppose the tax “if one job is lost”; Andrew Bolt is speculating on just who could replace her, and even Labor MPs are urging Julia Gillard to do something quickly.
Food giants join war on carbon tax Goodman Fielder, George Weston Foods, Nestle Australia, CSR, Laucke Flour Mills, Yakult Australia and Bundaberg Sugar.
Two Fairfax journalists contacted the top 50 ASX companies to ask “Do You support the Governments plan for a carbon price?
Do you support the Governments plan for a Carbon Tax?
|
Yes |
On the fence |
No |
Didn’t reply |
| Survey ofthe Top
50
ASX |
Qantas
Woolworths
Suncorp
BHP Billiton
AGL Energy
IAG
MAP Group
NAB
GPT
Incitec Pivot
Westpac
Newcrest |
Santos
Wesfarmers
Stockland
ANZ Bank
Fortescue Metals
Fosters
CSL
Alumina |
Coca-cola Amatil
Woodside
Bluescope Steel |
27 companies
did not answer
the survey
(54%)
|
In other words, the most common answer to a question from one of our two major media outlets on the largest piece of legislation proffered for years, is “No Comment”.
But many companies were unwilling to reveal their hand on carbon pricing. The strategy for many is to keep their powder dry until the government provides details about pricing and transitional help.
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Ten more faulty assertions from Climate Minister Combet
Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks & Bill Kininmonth
(Also on Quadrant, here and here.)
In a speech given at the National Press Club on April 13th, Climate Minister Combet has yet again revealed that he is receiving unbalanced scientific advice, and that his understanding of the problem of hypothetical dangerous global warming is inadequate. His predecessor, Senator Penny Wong, exemplified the same weaknesses and so does the government.
It is a structural governance deficiency of high order that our current government continues to take exclusive advice on global warming from an unelected, unaccountable international political body (the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; IPCC), as translated for Australian consumption by the CSIRO and by the Department of Climate’s advisor, Professor Will Steffen.
There are multiple clouds of impropriety hanging over the IPCC’s advice: ClimateGate, thermometers next to hot concrete and artificial heating sources passed off as measuring “global” warming, vital graphs of past temperatures that depend on a single tree in far north Russia, global data sets that are missing, official forecasts of temperature and atmospheric warming that are nothing like the reality that later eventuated, and much more.
Surely the Government should conduct an inquiry before acting on such impaired advice, yet it remains unaudited. There are no checks and balances, and no formal oversight. To commit our nation to deliberate economic hardship, and that of a regressive nature, without even seeking a second opinion would in any other circumstances be considered both foolish and unacceptable (remember Tirath Khemlani, and the bypassing of the Loans Council?).
We deconstruct the scientific part of Minister Combet’s speech below, putting his statements in bold italics, and our commentary in ordinary type.
1. The evidence of atmospheric warming is very strong, and the potential for dangerous climate impacts is high. The scientific advice is that carbon (sic) pollution (sic) is the cause.
Atmospheric warming and cooling happen the whole time naturally, and global temperature has been level or cooling gently for the last ten years; and that despite the fact that a quarter of all human emissions of carbon dioxide, over all of history, have occurred since 1998.
No empirical evidence has been provided, and especially not by the IPCC or Professor Steffen, that a significant part of the late 20th century warming was caused by human carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, warming alarmist arguments rely upon computer modelling and assumptions about positive feedback from moist air and clouds.
Neither has any evidence been provided that the number or intensity of dangerous climatic events has in the near past fallen outside of normal natural variation.
The term “carbon pollution” is a pejorative term that displays ignorance by those who use it. In reality, the public debate is about the magnitude of the warming effect exercised by human carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide from whatever source is an environmental benefice that sustains most of the ecosystems on planet Earth.
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8 out of 10 based on 5 ratings
 David Evans and I are honoured to have been asked to tour with Christopher Monckton and Ross McKitrick. July (and the Green controlled Australian Senate) is not far off, and there is much to do to make the tour happen, but details are coming together quickly. Where there is a will…
Thanks to The Climate Sceptics and Leon Ashby for their tireless work behind the scenes — Jo
——
From Leon Ashby
Dear Reader,
Please find attached a poster inviting you to help bring a very important tour to Australia in July.
 A small group of volunteers wish to bring Christopher Monckton and several other speakers around Australia for an important tour to explain the science and politics of a carbon tax. We believe it will complement the “No Carbon Tax Protests” happening.
The reason for the extra speakers is to cover all angles of the debate. We want to do it as well as we can with this tour. Despite some large venue costs and a modest admission fee, we believe the tour will pay for itself, but being responsible, we need to have approx $100,000 in either donations, loans or guaranteed funds before we begin booking things up.
Currently we have about $30,000 promised in the bank. This is a great start and we certainly thank everyone who has helped with a donation or loan or a guarantee so far.
If you can assist us in some way that will be fantastic. You can either direct deposit into this account or Post a cheque to Climate Sceptics: PO box 721, Mt Gambier SA 5290
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Garth Paltridge is an Australian atmospheric physicist with 45 years experience. He worked with CSIRO, the WMO, NOAA, and as Professor and Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies. He has explained why he’s skeptical of the theory of man-made global warming in his book — The Climate Caper: Facts and Fallacies of Global Warming. Here he explains how a scientific “consensus” can be bought. There’s more than one good reason why argument-from-authority is a fallacy. — Jo
A less-than-nobel consensus
Guest Post by Garth Paltridge
We hear that Julia Gillard is happy to have the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Academy of Science on her side while making her arguments for a carbon tax. Well of course she is. She and her predecessor bought them. And bought them but good. Over the last couple of years her Department of Climate Change (the DCC) gave them 27 million dollars in the form of research grants. That pays a fair swag of the salaries of the CSIRO and Bureau climate scientists who make up the majority of all employed climate scientists in Australia.
University climate researchers, while relatively few in number, are vocal enough to be heard in many public forums. Julia has bought them too with another 5.5 million dollars from the same source. That sort of money is handy in the university environment, since it is mostly on top of already assured salaries. Moreover, it is fairly easy to get. Certainly it is much easier than normal university research funds which come mainly from the Australian Research Council – this after a soul-destroying application and peer-review procedure that wipes out 80% of the applications and reduces the individual grant moneys to sub-optimal levels. Julia’s climate money is very different. Among other things it can be put towards such niceties as business-class travel to the many international workshops and conferences that are part of the climate-change industry.
Monopolistic Funding
The bottom line is that virtually all climate research in Australia is funded from one source – namely, the government department which has the specific task of selling to the public the idea that something drastic and expensive has to be done to the structure of society in the name of mitigating climate change. And if you think that government agencies shouldn’t be in the game of social engineering, then you are way behind the times. Over the last two years more than 100 million dollars was distributed by the DCC for exactly that purpose.
So there can be no doubt that climate-research grant recipients know perfectly well that scepticism concerning the climate-change story does very little for their careers. One therefore wonders a bit about the much-vaunted consensus of the global warming establishment regarding climatic doom.
Surely there is no way a whole scientific discipline can be subverted, either consciously or subconsciously, by crass materialism? Well, maybe not in the long term. But if past experience is any guide, the sorting out of a problem of vested scientific interest can take many decades. At the moment, climate scientists are trapped in the coils of a disaster theory sold prematurely to the world at large. They are supporting the theory with long-term forecasts about an atmosphere-ocean system whose behaviour in many respects is inherently unpredictable. On the one hand, public discussion of the uncertainties associated with the ‘main conclusions of the science’ must be discouraged, and on the other there is a need for sufficient uncertainty to justify a continued flow of research funding. In short, they are in a right-royal mess of political correctness.
Scientists are human too!
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
It’s fairy-land economics out there. In a big economic advance, the Labor Party realized that they can solve world poverty: the secret is to take money from the big producers, and hand it to anyone and everyone — it will not only keep our national economy productive and efficient, but millions of people will be richer! Why we didn’t do it 50 years ago!*
Millions to be ‘better off’ under carbon tax
Think of the possibilities! If it works on a national scale, why not go international — how much richer would we all be if we buried our five cheapest sources of energy in a pit under Maralinga, forced everyone to use the sixth, seventh, and eight best sources of energy, AND we took the profits from the most efficient successful operations around the globe (known henceforth as “polluters” (sic)) and gave them to all the world’s poor and needy?
Where do Gillard and Combet think the “Big-Polluters” get their money from? Would it be from:
(a) giant Swiss-bank-accounts held by Nazi war criminals,
(b) ancient Saxon wishing wells, or
(c) pots at the end of the rainbow?
Do they think the big-polluters pull money out of thin air? (Excuse me sir, you need a banking license to do that.)
Money has to come from people
The mature age audience (people over fifteen) know that corporations get money from either people who choose to buy the goods or services they make, or from shareholders who give money (voluntarily) in order to help the company profit and to keep themselves off the street.
“Big polluters” are really law-abiding hard-working citizens
If you hung out in Labor-land too long, you’d think industry was full of Ogres, but the people that the carbon tax is attacking are already THE big contributors. “Big-Polluters” provide things to the community: like keeping houses warm (or cool), and helping move food to the table, and that’s just for starters; they provide money, yes buckets of cash, and lots of it, to the families of the people who help them make it all happen (known as employees); and as if that’s not enough, they pay more than a third of all they get after that to the people of the nation (its called tax).
So let’s figure out what happens when the government gets even more involved in this chain of transactions.
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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
|
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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