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Australian Anti-Carbon Tax Protests

We all have better things to do, but when the people who represent us call the greatest plant nutrient “pollution”, and label the volunteers “stooges” while calling their paid hacks “independent”; when they look at a color chart and say yellow is really red (and they call us “deniers”); we know things are running off the rails.

When they ask us to pay billions to change the weather, then we know the quicksand has come. And when even they admit if we succeed beyond our wildest dreams that the results will be too small to measure (how many thousandth of a degree will that be, Julia?) sometimes we just have to do something don’t we?

We can act now or pay the cost for years to come. Each time we let them get away with an untruth they grow stronger. Each time we ignore the Orwellian perversion of our language (Is it carbon (sic) pollution (sic)?), we feed the parasites who want our freedom and our money, and that hurts us, our children and the environment.

The big protests around the country start on Wednesday next week.

We want an election first. The tax affects every transaction in the economy. We want a choice before this major legislation goes through. Julia Gillard did not get a mandate at the last election. She promised a “committee” and no tax, then gave us a tax anyway. Where was the debate, the discussion, the analysis? The voters voted overwhelmingly for parties promising “No Tax”.
It will hit the economy. Gillard won’t give details, she’s hoping we’ll all think someone else will pay and that vague “compensation” will save the pain for the big “polluters”. But these so called polluters are also companies owned by Australian shareholders, with Australian employees, and Australian consumers. We will all pay one way or another.
It won’t help the environment. If we abandon Australia we save 0.015°C and 2mm of sea level rise. So this is not about the environment, it’s about power and money.

CANBERRA

Weds 23 March, 12:00pm
Parliament House
Facebook
Website: http://www.nocarbontaxrally.com/ (CATA Consumers and Taxpayers Association)

Speakers include Joe Hockey, David Archibald, Bob Carter, Angry Anderson, John Madigan, and possibly quite a few others.

There are at least 30 buses organized for this already. Please sign up by TODAY if you want a lift from Melbourne or Sydney.

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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

A warning from Europe: The green-tape jobs we don’t want

When Björn Lomborg wrote that Green jobs were overhyped, a visiting European friend agreed and sent me examples of the spreading inanity of the green-tape-jobs-market that has taken over Europe.

Stefan points out that most Green jobs created by building windmills or solar power are short lived. The permanent “green” jobs are, insidiously, the expanding green bureaucracy and police. In Europe, the green-police fine people for putting plastic in a glass recycling bin. They force people to write lists of what’s in their rubbish bags; to use electricity when it suits the wind-generators, and not the people.

The Green-police are self propagating. They unwittingly create problems that then need even more auditing, advising and checking. Green-police closed off the natural drafts in houses, then when people got sick from the fungus, they sent around officials to create artificial airflow to stop “sick building” syndrome. When green bureaucrats demanded everyone use less water (whether they needed to or not) stagnant ponds were created in places that had water to spare, and that then led to the creation of a new army of green-water-specialists to sort out the putrid ponds. In an exponential pattern, the populace was slowing co-opted from productive tasks into the big-government-green-merry-go-round.

Thus the patron class of big-government dependent voters expands, and that of independent free citizens shrinks. And we are all poorer, because of the missed opportunities for all that wasted human talent and labor. — JN

A warning from Europe

If you comply with the European follies this time, your brave soldiers will have fought and died in vain. You will be no longer be free citizens, able to hold the politicians responsible. You will be regarded just as stupid ATMs, just like the Europeans are now.

Dr Lomborg is right, many predictions about green manual jobs in the manufacturing of windmills and solar panels were overhyped. Most jobs are shortlived. Many companies manufacturing renewable energy in Europe pay just the legal minimum wages. They frequently go bankrupt and offer little job security.

The big increase in “green jobs” in the last 20 years in Europe has been in the public sector. A whole new caste of people are working to expand green tape. Green tape is now the reality, and has created millions of new public sector jobs in Europe. Typical green jobs are mainly public sector jobs – enforcing regulation, taxing, and surveillance of people. An ever-increasing tax on carbon will speed up this transformation of society.

Let´s give some examples.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Carbon Tax Australia? Welcome to Futility Island

Assume the IPCC is right. Assume that Australia would have kept emitting the same proportion of global emissions of CO2 for the next four decades — despite the rapid catch up in emissions-per-capita as the developing world gets cars, frozen foods, and holidays-in-Bali. Then assume somehow, theoretically, we might be able to completely stop emissions of CO2 suddenly (by Tuesday). What’s the most generous possibility of success we could get from massive Australian sacrifice and green action now? Answer: Tops, absolutely as high as it gets, exceeding beyond our wildest expectations — if Australia stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, we could save … 15 thousandths of one degree of warming (0.0154 °C) by 2050. Spiffy eh?

David has done the number crunching that we’re “sure” the ALP has done many many times as they redirect billions of Australian dollars in search of a world that’s immeasurably (and un-measurably) cooler. — JN

CARBON TAX AND TEMPERATURE

Dr. David Evans, 14 March 2011

BY HOW MUCH WILL A CARBON DIOXIDE TAX REDUCE AUSTRALIA’S TEMPERATURE?

Suppose Australia reduced its emissions over what they would otherwise be. The effect, according to the IPCC’s theory of man-made global warming, is:


Average reduction in Australia’s emissions from now to 2050	Decrease in the temperature in 2050 due to Australia’s reductions
0 %	0.0000 °C
5 %	0.0007 °C
10 %	0.0015 °C
20 %	0.0031 °C
50 %	0.0077 °C
100 %	0.0154 °C

Notice that if Australia shut down entirely, and emitted no CO2 starting today, it would lower the temperature in 2050 by just 0.0154 °C (on IPCC figures).

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8.9 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

(Un)Skeptical Science uses unmeasureable fudge factors

A comment from Tel late last year was so surgically cutting, it’s worthy of it’s own post. Un-Skeptical Science was trying to explain why climate sensitivity is high. The post includes formula’s and fancy graphs, and looks authoritative — yet underlying everything are errors of reasoning that nullify all the points that rest upon them. Things like assumptions about linearity (which means more or less, they make the mistake of assuming that all forcings and feedbacks operate at similar ratios and strengths when the planet is an iceball as they do when Earth hits a rare warm phase). An unmeasureable variable is the telltale signature of a fudge-factor. It is what you make of it. Fits better in a course analyzing postmodernistic intertexuality of Swahili neo-linguists.

Guest Post by Tel

This “Skeptical Science” post is an excellent choice to show how little credibility there is in the whole feedback house of cards:

It’s important to note that the surface temperature change is proportional to the sensitivity and radiative forcing (in W m-2), regardless of the source of the energy imbalance. The climate sensitivity to different radiative forcings differs depending on the efficacy of the forcing, but the climate is not significantly more sensitive to other radiative forcings besides greenhouse gases.

So sensitivity is all the same regardless of the forcing, but at the same time, it might be different thanks to an “efficacy” which means whatever you want it to mean, in order for everything to have the same sensitivity. Hmmmm, right I think I’ve got it. So what are the units of “efficacy”? Oh, it doesn’t have any units, it is unitless because all factors are scaled relative to CO2 forcing… except we have some of those forcings being solar radiation, others being a gas, and others as particulate matter. What sort of unitless scaling factor can relate particulate counts to solar radiation? Why, CO2 of course! Is that the LOG of CO2 vs the LOG of solar radiation (presumably giving an answer in decibels)? Maybe it is the small signal gain based on the first derivative about some arbitrary operating point? Who knows, who cares, just blurt some numbers on the table, no one is about to check any of this.

In other words, if you argue that the Earth has a low climate sensitivity to CO2, you are also arguing for a low climate sensitivity to other influences such as solar irradiance, orbital changes, and volcanic emissions.

Unless you happen to argue for different “efficacy” factors, in which case you get any result you feel like getting.

In fact, as shown in Figure 1, the climate is less sensitive to changes in solar activity than greenhouse gases.

So some forcings are more equal than others, makes sense. Solidarnosk comrade, we will outlast them.

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7 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

New Here? The “ten second” guide to the world of skeptics

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Almost everything you thought you knew about man made global warming might be a worthless half-truth.


……………..	The evidence shows temperature controls carbon dioxide (you read that correctly). Temperatures rise first, and CO2 follows. Global warming is real, but it started a century (or two) before our emissions. The world is warmer than in 1850, but cooler than 1,000 years ago, 8,000 years ago, 130,000 years ago, and cooler than most of the history of life on Earth. CO2 is called “pollution” but it feeds all plant-life on Earth. Big-Oil paid some skeptics, but Big-Government outspent it 3,500 to 1, and even Big-Oil spent far more on renewables than on “deniers”. Big Greens used to fight big corporates, but now they are big-corporates. The real grassroots movement are the skeptics who take on the lot.	………………

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Lastly, Big Bankers want us to trade carbon. Think about that.

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The Skeptics Handbook sums up the science (with cartoons)

I used to believe in man-made global warming. Then I found out that there was another side to the story, and I was shocked. The good name of science is being exploited. Over $79 billion dollars has been fed into one side of a scientific question, while almost none has been put into auditing the reports, checking the results, or investigating other theories. (Which National Institute do climate skeptics apply for a job at? Answer: None.) We paid to find a crisis, and we got what we paid for. Thousands of skeptics are working pro bono because they are outraged. Retired scientists and engineers and teams of helpers are independently auditing official reports. They are busting major peer reviewed papers.

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We are being deceived.

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The killer question: How much will reducing emissions cost and how much warming will it save? They won’t name a number because it’s makes a parody of their policy. (See: Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees.)

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Why has this become so big?

In 2009, world carbon markets turned over $130 billion dollars. If a new global carbon market was created it will become a $2 trillion market, the largest commodity market in the world (bigger than oil). Banks want to broker those trades (thank you, ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching). Auditors want to audit the unmeasurable, invisible gas; scientists want their rock star status, grants, and worldwide junkets; WWF would like the $60 billion in carbon credits it expects from buying Amazon forests; Solar and wind want the subsidies; Greens want votes, power and the chance to get control over everything down to the light globes you use, and most pathetically, journalists want to impress their friends at dinner parties. Few are brave enough to risk being called a “denier”. So the gravy train rolls on, and no one asks the obvious questions. Name-calling works, eh?

The PDF reports that sum it up

For the overview of the only points that matters in the science, see The Skeptics Handbook (translated into 15 languages by volunteers). To find out about the massive money poured in and profits pulled out, see Climate Money.

Global Bullies want your money – expands on the money, politics, and science of the first handbook.

To see the pattern of how results are almost always adjusted in one direction, how the “science” of man-made global warming relies on data that’s hidden, adjusted, and on poor equipment, poor placement, and poor methodology, see Climate Corruption. How many excuses does it take?

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The common ground?

Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Yes it absorbs infra red and will probably make the air around it warmer. Did you know, even most alarmists will admit that doubling CO2 will only lead to 1.2 ^oC of warming. That’s the theoretical direct effect (see Hansen et al 1984). Did they forget to mention it? Often when people rave about how much evidence there is, they are only talking about this direct effect and this minor amount of warming*.

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What’s THE bone of contention?

So why are we told the Armageddon of 3.5 degrees, or 6 degrees is coming!? Because their computer simulations assume that humidity will rise, stick around, and that water vapor (which is a more powerful greenhouse gas) will amplify that warming (along with cloud changes and other effects). This is called positive feedback. But, there is no empirical (by observation) evidence that net feedbacks (mostly clouds and humidity) will amplify the warming in the long run.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 70 ratings

The ABC notices the anti-carbon tax rage

Lateline reports on the rising anger among Australians on the carbon tax issue. Though as usual, it does’t actually spend a lot of time talking to the people who understand what drives this movement. Instead the reporter, John Stewart, tries to link it to the Tea Party (but only because presumably he thinks that’s a bad thing, and bear in mind, many people downunder don’t know anything about the Tea Party either). The editor makes sure to throw in Tea party file footage of heated anti-communist remarks — rather than any of the tea party’s carefully considered party platforms. We wouldn’t want to accidentally offer some insight there now would we?

Lateline then tries to suggest the new anti carbon tax movement could be a Liberal Party* front – but that ends up looking rather half hearted when they run out of any substantial connection.

Then they manage to allow someone to throw in the biggest ad hom they can find — wait for it — these protesters are linked (how vague is that) to … skeptical bloggers. And yours truly got a nanosecond of fame with a blog header on the screen (the ABC noticed us:-)). These devious nasty bloggers of course deny the basic science… –that’s the “science” according to one political online activist anyway.

JOHN STEWART: Most of the websites promoting the anti-carbon tax rally in Canberra also contain links to climate change sceptics. There are sceptics T-shirts and caps for sale.

The online activist group GetUp is planning to stage counter-demonstrations.

SIMON SHEIKH, GETUP NATIONAL DIRECTOR: What they’re calling for is driven by climate denialism. They do not believe in the basic science of global warming. They’re anti-progress. But if you look on their websites, they’re also anti-Islam, they’re anti-refugees. These are people who fundamentally don’t support Australia moving forward.

To get a skeptics T-shirt (as mentioned above) visit The Climate Skeptics Shop. I’ll tell you more about this shop soon, but let’s just say I know the business owner — a fellow pro bono skeptic in arms — he’s not doing this for profit, but because he wanted a classy way for skeptics to identify themselves. Any profits will be used to help skeptics like myself keep running. (Thanks).

Lateline ABC program: Conservative uprising targets carbon tax

At the end of the day, the ABC coverage is helpful, but what specifically did viewers learn about what is driving the anti carbon tax rallies? Err… We found out it’s being linked to the Liberals, but they are not driving it, and that left leaning commentators who don’t understand the tea party think the two movements have something in common. (They do, but only that they’re both driven by grass roots anger at the political class of rulers who have pushed voters too far.) We also found out that the opposing political group (Get Up) can always front someone to say ad hominem attacks that the ABC will dutifully repeat, on air, with no substantiation, or right of reply.

That’s because the ABC “thinks” (I’m being generous) that ad homs are the way to understand the climate.

*Liberal Party in Australia, perversely, is a conservative party. It’s wierd I know.

8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

The Big Scare Campaign looks set to claim another political victim

It made my day. The front page of The Australian: Record Labor low on Carbon Fury. Julia Gillards message is finally getting though and the voters are sitting up and paying attention. Where previously, they said “I like the idea of being good global citizens”, the question has changed: now no one is asking your opinion, they’re telling you they want your money and they will take it from you starting on July 1 2012, on every car, tank-full, and trucked banana, on cold days, hot days, rainy days and at night time.

How bad is the news for Labor:

According to the latest Newspoll survey, taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, Labor’s primary vote crashed six percentage points to just 30 per cent, the lowest primary vote in Newspoll survey history.

How intricately tied to the Carbon Tax plan, announced a little over a week ago, is the bad news?

In just two weeks, Ms Gillard’s personal support has gone from its best since she became Prime Minister in June last year to her worst. It is now the same as Mr Rudd’s failing personal support when he began campaigning for the mining tax in May last year.

As I said, Thank You Julia Gillard.

By announcing the Carbon Tax plan she has provided the catalyst to get the crowd to notice what it means. Am I pleased to see Labor reduced to such a weak point? No. But if they want to reduce the power of the Green vote they need to copy the good green policies and expose the bad ones instead of adopting them. It never made sense to pick the worst most-gullible plan as their “engine of change”.

This changes the playing field.

5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

The Silent Giant Coal Monster

Greg Combet (our Minister for keeping-the-weather-the-same) can keep a straight face when he tells coal miners that their jobs are protected with him. You might think that’s insane, (especially if you are Green) but he has a point. Even if carbon mattered, our coal exports do not. (Not that Combet seems to explain this point very well, he seems to think people won’t notice the contradiction about supposedly “making the big polluters pay”, even though he’s taxing mom-and-dad and partly-exempting Big-Coal).

Australia is the worlds largest exporter of coal, you’d think our production mattered. But Combet knows that it makes no difference at all to the environment if we dig masses of coal up and send it to the Chinese to burn. Australia might have lots of coal, but it earned the ‘biggest exporter” title only because lots of the other contenders forfeited. Basically, we only win because there are not many people living here. Other places dig up a lot more coal, but coal is so handy, vital, and irreplaceable that they keep every last sodding bit, burn it all themselves and have none left over to sell.

Australia sold about $55 billion dollars worth of coal in 08/09, more than iron, gold, beef and wheat. It’s our largest commodity export. Despite Australia making stacks of money selling coal, and using it to power 85% of all our electricity needs, we don’t talk about coal much. Coal has no friends, but it very much keeps Australia going, energy, jobs and money . Keep that thought in mind, as Cohenite shows the entire Australian annual coal production can pack into one Chinese average mining month. Then explain what would happen to the Australian economy if we made our coal more expensive.

Australia might be the world largest Exporter of coal, but that’s only because all the bigger producers keep their coal to themselves.

Guest Post by Cohenite

The major aim of the carbon tax is to cut CO2 emissions by making coal and oil energy too dear. Very few other nations in the world have or propose having carbon taxes despite all the lip service about fighting man-made global warming. So, the argument is that Australia should set the moral precedent by being the first major country [apologies to Kiwi readers] to have a carbon tax. This moral argument is bolstered by claims that vast economic opportunities for business and jobs will follow the imposition of the new tax and movement towards green energy.

However, there is a simpler argument against Australia bringing in, essentially unilaterally, a carbon tax.

Coal Exports are Australia’s largest single export industry. In 2009 Australia produced for sale ~335 million tonnes [MT] of coal, of which ~261MT were exported leaving 74MT for internal power generation. But large as that is, what China produces blows that number away.

In 2009, entirely for domestic consumption, Chinese production was just over 3 billion tonnes [BT] of hard and brown coal.

China is consuming about 40 times what Australia is and nearly 12 times the entire amount that Australia exports.

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8.3 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Unthreaded

I’ll be away for a week with the family resting on warm beaches, near wandering rivers and spectacular gorges. I’ll be thinking of you. (Actually, I won’t be completely gone, though I may be beyond mobile range, and in uncharted non-NBN territory, there will still be some guest posts thanks to the o-so-talented pool of skeptics around here.)

If you have especially brilliant ideas, hot tips, or your comment goes lost, please email the dedicated select set of moderators at support AT joannenova.com.au. (Please don’t wear out the email address though. There are real people with real lives who have other commitments).

In the meantime, this thread is for commenters… there is so much to discuss. Like for example: the satellite that could have settled this: blown up I hear, and for the second time, how careless? Then there’s the Greenie-navel-gazing as they try to figure out what went wrong. “The long death of environmentalism“.[See here for some commentary.]

Australian Skeptics – put Weds 23rd March in your Diary. We’ll be protesting the Carbon Tax in capital cities. I will be speaking in Perth.

5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Australian politics churning

Things are hotting up in politics downunder. The immovable force meets the polls. Twenty years of PR catches up on the PM who didn’t do her homework. As Tim Blair says: It’s a meltdown, Labor is seething. Bring Your PopCorn.

“There is evidence the public’s general confidence is being shaken by sudden policy shifts and uncertainty about a minority government; there is growing disquiet, even dismay, among business leaders that dealing with the government on the basis of compromise with a commercially viable outcome is being overtaken by ideological demands.” The Australian

Everything had the semblance of order until Julia Gillard announced the Carbon Tax. Sure the order was only superficial, and we knew dark forces of chaos ran underneath. The policies were based on corrupted science, self-interest ran amok, and the hung coalition was cobbled together with seats that would never have voted green. The government was running the knife edge.

It took 17 days deliberation to arrange the “deal” to form government, and it was said at the time that a hung parliament might be a poisoned chalice. If Julia Gillard promised the independents or greens that she would break her promise to the voters of “No Carbon Tax” then she reaps right now, what she sowed with deceit.

The blogs are alive downunder as the political landscape shifts. I’m not sure there is any coming back from a mistake as big as this. Not only did Julia Gillard break her word, it was on major legislation, a change that affects every transaction, every industry, and every citizen. There’s no pretending this was just another piece of spin. Worse, it was done clumsily, without party room approval.

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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees

The key question — with all the billions spent on cutting Australia’s carbon production: the trade and income lost; the jobs cut; the pain of living near wind farms; the foreign holidays avoided and then paying more for petrol and electricity than we have to — how many degrees will our actions cool the world by?

Assuming the IPCC are right about the effects of CO2, and that Australia stopped producing CO2 entirely (if we all left the country) by 2100 the world would be 0.0123 degrees cooler, and sea levels would be 2mm lower. These are so small they are unmeasureable.

Abandon Australia and save

0.0123°C

The statistics every Australian should know:

Australia produced 1.38% of global human emissions of CO2 in 2011. (EIA, 2011a)
Each year global emissions increase by twice Australia’s total annual output. (2.8%/year (EIA, 2011a). If we all emigrated and left a bare deserted continent, it puts off the warmer Armageddon by just six months.
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6.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

How well have the media and PR groups informed us about climate ?

Given the multimillion dollar budgets and advertising campaigns about climate change, it would be safe to assume there was a high public awareness of the most basic facts about CO2 right? But reader Gregg has taken the initiative and gone out and done a survey of 100 people and asked them a few basics and he’s made a valuable point in a prototype survey. The results tell us something about the aim of public education campaigns.

Governments and UN Agencies have enough resources to tell us that climate change will cause droughts, floods, storms, starvation, shrinking glaciers, extinctions, sea level rise, more aids victims, more wars, water shortages, rapes, terrorism, malaria, rabid bats, and biblical plagues of jellyfish (thanks to the Hooterville Gazette for the links to all those). But despite the acres of news space devoted to all these, Gregg’s quick survey suggests not many of our public servants or journalists have done much work to give the public the basic facts or to put things into perspective.

It seems that the average Australian is under the impression that there is 1000 times more CO2 in the atmosphere than there is, and that when it comes to sources of global emissions, people assume we put out about half of all the CO2, when really it’s only 3%.

In a perfect world, a good government would make sure it’s people had all the useful facts, so they could decide where they wanted to put their resources.

In the real world, the government has already decided for them, and it’s aim apparently is to filter the PR so that the public can reach the “right” preconceived conclusion. (An approach also known as “propaganda”.) Hence I can’t see the Climate Committee rushing to tell all Australians they only emit 1.5% of 3% of global CO2.

Question 1. What percentage of the atmosphere do you think is CO2?

Responses: Nearly all people thought it was “20% – 40%”, the highest said 75%, and the lowest estimated 2% – 10%.

Answer: 0.039% or about one thousand times less than what the average punter thought.

Question 2. Have you ever seen the percentage given in any media?

Responses: All said ’No’ or they ‘couldn’t remember’.

Question 3. What percentage of the CO2 is man-made?

Responses: Most estimated it to be 25% to 75%, and answers ranged up to 100%. Only four people thought it was 2 to 10%.

Answer: Human emissions are about 3% of the total.

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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Galvanising against Gillard

Welcome to another day in the lost democracy. The place where an elected government thinks that cheating is the answer. What was Julia Gillard thinking? This turnaround is happening so fast. She announced the Carbon Tax only last Thursday, and already former members of her own party are discussing what genre of “lie” it qualifies as, or speculating over who will take over as PM, the polls are falling, and thousands of people are getting organized behind the scenes. Even one of the star team at the launch of the Tax has had to admit he’s not completely behind it. Worse the opposition now has a clear cause to fight for (Repeal the tax!). Rallies are being planned in most capital cities, phones are running hot, new groups have sprung into action, posters and T-Shirts are being printed. O Joy and what not, “Galvanised” is the word. People I’ve never spoken to are emailing me about their plans.

Meanwhile the Greens are falling all over themselves to help the skeptics. Please, someone – organize more mass media interviews with Bob Brown and Christine Milne where they tell people alternately that the Greens are behind the Big New Awful Tax, and how making everyone pay more for petrol is a good thing.

Poor Gillard had tried to take power from the Greens by shifting “left”, but instead has fed the monster. She’s pumped them oxygen, and with a industrial compressor. They’re twice life size and floating. The last thing Gillard needed was to look like she was being controlled by the greens, and the last thing any of the do-gooder patchwork government needed was to remind all the voters that the rulers were quite enjoying the thought of the economic penance the public would have to pay.

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5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Does the lie matter? Only if you think Democracy does.

Thank you Julia Gillard. Nothing could have put the fire back into the carbon debate like promising not to tax us during an election, then barely scraping in by the thinnest of “wins”* (with hang-nail support of two men in some of the most conservative seats in the country) and then doing what you said you wouldn’t.

This is much more than just a lie.

Imagine if Gillard had announced the Carbon Tax as part of her election platform. How many voters would have changed their vote? It wouldn’t take many. The two party preferred vote in Australia was split by only 0.12%.

Would the Labor Party have won?

Back in August 2010 Julia Gillard obviously thought the Australian people would not have wanted a carbon tax, or she would have run her campaign on it. Instead she thought we’d want an ineffectual climate committee and the certainty of knowing a carbon tax would not be imposed before another election.

Seven ALP seats were won with less than a 2% margin.

In Corangamite, a mere 769 voters who didn’t want a carbon tax could have changed the leadership of the nation.

This is not just a “lie”, it’s deception writ large. The Australian public were never given the chance to vote on this issue. There was never a discussion about the benefits. It was not a debate topic. The commentators and opinion writers did not thrash out the costs and risks. This is not how democracies are supposed to work.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

New Poll. More skeptics than ever and yet the carbon tax is coming

The good news is that skeptics are the majority, the bad news is that we’ll all have to pay the tax anyway. The IPA commissioned a Galaxy Poll in Australia and only one third of Australians believe that man-made global warming is real. Despite the advertising, the propaganda, the Nobel Prizes, the support of major institutions, the ABC censorship of skeptical science news, and the educational indoctrination at schools, most people are unconvinced.

Despite the falling polls, today the Gillard Government committed itself to getting a “carbon price” — the nice way of saying “tax”. (Note the poll attached to that story: Do you support a carbon tax? 84% say NO.)

It’s a question of youth

From the full results it’s clear that belief is mostly a “young” naive thing, and that by the age of 30 people are waking up to the truth. Half of the 18-24 year olds think that man is to blame, but only a quarter of the over 50’s do. The old cats who’ve been there and done that are wiser to exaggerated scare campaigns. Half of the 25 -34 year old group answered that they are not sure.

It’s also a socio-economic thing. Blue collar workers were more likely to say the cycle was natural than white collar workers (33% versus 22%) and white collar workers were more likely to blame man (37% versus 28%). The fans of The Big Scare would say that because the more highly educated know more about the science, but we skeptics know that this is not about science any more. If it were about the science the believers wouldn’t run scared from public debates, the media wouldn’t be too intimidated to interview people with other opinions, and people who asked polite questions wouldn’t be called rude names. When skeptics asked for empirical evidence for positive feedbacks the alarmists would be able to provide some (and from several sources and over long time spans).

Skeptics won the science years ago (back when the hot spot went missing, and the ice cores showed a long lag). Belief in man-made global warming is about the fashion, the meme, the religion. Since this is a fashion meme which is used as a substitute for an IQ test and a measure of someones “compassion”, this is a test that university educated people most want to pass.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

ABC – Agitprop for the Bureaucratic Class

The ABC is so afraid that the public might read comments from global warming skeptics that they frequently censor or delay reasonable comments, while allowing defamatory, unprofessional, and unsubstantiated ones through. (Guess which way the editors of The Drum vote?)

Marc Hendrickx describes how hard it is to get rid of a single baseless defamatory comment on the ABC taxpayer-funded-site:

The following anonymous comment was posted to [Sara] Phillips’s blog shortly afterwards:

Annie : 03 Dec 2010 7:07:53pm

The denialist clowns return again . . . climateaudit.org . . . run by Stephen McIntyre a known climate denialist and extremist right-wing provocateur . . . you are a joke as are your answers . . . laughing hysterically.

Marc Hendrix suggested it be removed as defamatory. The ABC editors protested, and here’s the weird thing, it would have taken them less time to just say “yes” — after all, it’s only a comment. But in the sum total editorial-calculation-of-the-day there was apparently some net benefit in fighting to keep an unsubstantiated insult visible among hundreds of other comments? (Go figure.) According to the ABC editors: “He [MacIntyre] could reasonably be described as ‘right wing’ as a speaking member of the George C Marshall Institute, which is known for its right-leaning politically conservative views. ‘Provocateur’ is a name given to describe those whose thinking goes against that of the status quo, another label that could reasonably be given to Mr McIntyre. As such, the comments from Annie are not unfounded and therefore not defamatory.””

Hendrickx then passed on the ABC editorial point of view to Steven McIntyre, and he replied:

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Johnny Ball on how he has been vilified

Maintained by bullying and bluster, the facade grows more brittle by the day, as heretics start to come out of the woodwork — being pragmatic, concerned, but unapologetic.

From the Daily Mail in the UK — Johnny Ball says Beware of the Global Warming Fascists. More evidence that this is a propaganda campaign, not a question of science (as if we needed that). Kudos to the Daily Mail for printing thousands of copies of this story. A hat-tip to Johnny Ball for being brave enough to face down the bullies.

In the past decade or so I’ve been mocked, vilified, besmirched — I’ve even been booed off a theatre stage — simply for expressing the view that the case for global warming and climate change, and in particular the emphasis on the damage caused by carbon dioxide, the so-called greenhouse gas that is going to do for us all, has been massively over-stated.

And something very similar has happened to Dr David Bellamy, who has never been shy about expressing his belief that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon. His media career, particularly in television, has suffered as a result.

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8.3 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

Black Propaganda: US Government solicits software to generate fake personas

Part of the US Government has been caught trying to buy software that would allow it to generate 500 fake personas generally known as sockpuppets. They plan to use Facebook, Twitter, and blog comments. This particular leaked email refers to a submission from the Air Force, and apparently for use in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the details reveal that “persona management software” is a spookily mature market sector. Who knows how widespread this is already?

Astroturfing by community organizations is one thing. But Establishment anti-news, non-points, and funded fake opinions are quite something else. When the Establishment sponsors the activists and the activists post fake messages, taxpayer funds are used against the taxpayer. Is it happening? How would we know?

The story is starting to spreading through blogs.

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

The source of the quote above, and for publicizing the revelation is Happy Rockefeller on The Daily Kos.

UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All

Washington’s Blog “The Empire Fights the Net” has a useful description of the power involved.

Unfortunately, the Air Force’s contract description doesn’t help dispel their suspicions either. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be “replete with background history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.” It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator’s Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it’s a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

They apparently want top-dog programmers:

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Floods are manmade, you say now?

Flood Marker in Rome 1598, when CO2 levels were extreme-(extremely low). Photo by Anthony M.

After twenty years of drought predictions that turned out to be not worth a rhinestone rune-stone, the acolytes of the scare campaign were keen to find some evidence that they were still “right”. Two new papers came along showing that, golly, warming really “formally” “officially” caused floods after all, and they were just what the PR-doctor ordered. So the BBC, ABC, and the usual suspects rushed out to talk about how it was now “proven” that any flood was now officially man-made with a “robust” study and the “first scientific evidence” of a link. Richard Black even got excited that the study was based on “real world data”, which makes you wonder which studies used the fake sort?

If it’s all so definitively proven and obvious now that it’s a shame they didn’t think to join these dots, say, two years ago, so they could warn the world beforehand. It must be frustrating for them that they always seem to get the forecasts right two years too late. It’s another post hoc “prediction”.

And what are these two (TWO! shouted the believers) papers based on (AND don’t forget they’re from Nature)? The new-found certainty comes from about 50 years of records, interpreted by climate models, with those results then fed into precipitation models (just to magnify the error-margins even further). The handy thing about models is that if you try hard enough you can get nearly any result you want.

The Pall et al, 2011, abstract sums it up:

Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing^{11, 12}, we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred. Results are fed into a precipitation-runoff model that is used to simulate severe daily river runoff events in England and Wales (proxy indicators of flood events). The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.

Nature

Note that what we are not seeing here is an empirical study that found a correlation between past high CO2 era’s and more floods. That is difficult to get (and it’s absence doesn’t prove anything) but skeptics can point to those kinds of studies, for example, to show how cold periods kill more people.

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8.3 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

House votes 244-179 to kill U.S. funding of UN IPCC

Breaking News, straight from Climate Depot.

Another victory for science! The House votes 244-179 to kill U.S. funding of UN IPCC!

‘[The US government] no longer wishes to have the IPCC prepare its comprehensive international climate science assessments’

Defund IPCC ‘amendment was sponsored by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Missouri), who read aloud on the floor from the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists!

(Written by Climate Depot’s Morano) — Luetkemeyer: Americans ‘should not have to continue to foot the bill for an (IPPC) organization to keep producing corrupt findings’

Note: U.S. Senate’s 700 Scientist report has been updated to more than a 1000 by Climate Depot. See: * SPECIAL REPORT: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.

This still has to get past the Senate.

The US contribution directly to the IPCC is only $2.3 million, and the loss of that would just shorten the two week annual junket by a few hours. But the turnaround in attitude is telling. This wouldn’t have happened two years ago. The Republicans are letting the nation know they are serious.

A majority of the research of the IPCC comes from US institutes and organizations. When this new attitude spreads to the direction of research grants, “PR” units, and to other nations, it could really start to bite. Imagine if the US congress started to fund independent audits, or solar-driven-climate research, or more satellite data collection?

5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

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