The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.
People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus on the point of collapse?
The last year of carbon trading in EUR's continues to fall. (Click to enlarge).
Mini update: The carbon market is being referred to as “dead”. Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Germany’s EON, urged policymakers to make fixes. “Let’s talk real: the ETS is bust, it’s dead,” Mr Teyssen said in Brussels this week, adding: “I don’t know a single person in the world that would invest a dime based on ETS signals.” [full story: Financial Times]. Point Carbon analysts have downgraded the forecast price of carbon credits for the second time in two months as the carbon market continues to slide. What was estimated to be 12 Euros, has fallen to 9 euros for 2012, and 8 euro’s for 2013. It’s a long way below $23, set by our Australian “free-market-lovin’-Labor-Party”. (If only they knew what a free market was.)
The best known environmentalist in the German Social Democratic Party announced he had become a skeptic (see FOCUS and read about his new book). It doesn’t get much more damning than this. Fritz Vahrenholt was a chemistry professor and a leftie politician, and, could it be any more poignant… also headed up the renewable energy division of Germany’s second largest utility company. CEO of a wind farm for goodness sake. H/t to Keith and many many others.
His book, The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen, is making waves in Germany where people don’t critize climate-change science much and where solar and wind power are major industries. I hear from a friend in Europe that this book is very much “hot stuff” in Germany. Thanks Stefan.
Thanks to the GWPF I also know that Australia will probably be the last-man-standing on the deck of the burning ship called “Climate Change”. Everywhere else around the world, the only people who aren’t abandoning ship are those who never climbed aboard. Subsidies to all new wind and solar plants were outright suspended in Spain last week, which was not just bad, but described as “one of the biggest blows ever to the sector. ” The changes are predicted to kill off much of the investment in renewables there. The people selling solar power in Greece were also told the government could not afford to pay their rates, and didn’t really want more of that kind of power right now either, thanks. The U.K. government joined the rush to abandon renewables and promised to cut subsidies for solar energy (see Bloomberg). Meanwhile 101 Tory ministers in the UK government declared they want to toss the wind-farm subsidies out the window. If Julia Gillard wants to lead the way in this market she could start by buying up the solar plants, and drilling their ground for shale gas.
Why now: The perfect storm?
Skeptics have been hammering away at this for years. The mainstream media won’t publish any skeptical science, not even a comparison of land or ocean temperatures against the model predictions (how “technical” is that?). But thanks to the Internet, people found out anyway — it just took a bit longer.
The weather is cold or wet. The witchdoctors claim that this is what they predicted, and it’s due to global warming, but the crowd are not that dumb (and again, the Internet — their bad predictions are there for all to see).
The money ran out. Ten years later, people have noticed.
For forty years, people have tried to get Solar to work. Now, the worst possible thing for the industry has occurred: The Left are serious about trying to help it.
The Large-Scale Solar Subsidies are bountifully generous on an unprecedented scale that involves taxing everything else that moves, but even that generosity is not enough to compete with…wait for it… the even more insanely lavish Small-Scale Solar Subsidies. Who would have thought? Remember these are the same people who tell us that the “free market solution is best”. They offered three times the going rate for rooftop solar electricity, and through utterly predictable market mechanics, created a glut in rooftop solar panels as every man and his dog rushed in to get free electrons from their roofs, and on good sunny days, even cheques in the mail. Now, the large-scale projects are struggling to get major electricity retailers to sign long-term contracts.
THE federal government has delayed issuing key grants under its $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program after a preferred applicant, the Moree Solar Farm, failed to meet a December 15 deadline to reach financial closure on its project.
Solar projects have struggled to secure contracts with retailers, who have taken advantage of a supply glut created by the high take-up of solar rooftop panels.
Mr Ferguson said the government remained committed to large-scale energy technologies.
“However, we must also ensure that taxpayer money is spent prudently.”
The Greens with their usual acute insight into economic affairs know exactly why the inefficient large-scale solar projects are failing:
The issue has sparked attacks from the Greens, who have accused Mr Ferguson [Labor Minister] of mismanaging the process to maintain coal’s dominance.
If only Mr Ferguson were a Green and knew the true evil of C.O.A.L. He would not allow those aromatic hydrocarbons to give up so much energy so cheaply..
Thank you GetUp! Australians are finally talking about how they can get more media competition and how we can lift media standards. Read on to see Moncktons reply, and the call for interest
Spot those afraid of free speech.
...
Gina Rinehart merely buys 13% of Fairfax, and the GetUp-union-funded-Labor-green fan club rush to start raising funds ($37,000 already), not to compete in the free market for shares, but to run the scariest adverts they can, to whip up fear and interfere with normal corporate board room activity. It’s just the way they do things. What are they so afraid of? They’re afraid the public might hear the other side of news. When you run a propaganda campaign, the worst thing that can happen is a crack in the armour — That people like Monckton, Bolt, Nova, or the libertarian economists at Mannkal might get a chance to be heard. Once the truth gets out it can’t be put back in the bag. It spreads.
Wait for it. This is the dark conspiratorial “secret” aim of free market thinkers that they uncovered. Remember some poor hapless soul had to view hours of free market discussion to find this:
“And it seems to me that putting some time into encouraging those we know who are super rich to invest in perhaps even establishing a new satellite TV channel is not an expensive thing, and then get a few Jo Nova’s and Andrew Bolts to go on and do the commentating every day and keep the news free and fair and balanced, as they do on Fox. That would be a breakthrough, and give to Australia, as it has for America, a proper dose of free market thinking!”
Christopher Monckton, Mannkal Office, 2011
What’s new? GetUp have milked a molehill into a donation-generating-scare. It’s hyperbolic spin, but their big mistake this time is that they are playing with fire. They’re exposing their most irrational fear, drawing attention to the thing they don’t want (media competition), and overplaying their hand. What exactly is so sinister about encouraging people to fund a new satellite channel that provides “free and fair news” in a balanced way? Where is the criminal sin, in “explaining how the free market business works every day” and competing with the other media?
Be very afraid of that deadly free market thinking!
And if Rinehart owning an eighth of Fairfax is “scary”, just think what would happen if Australia had FOX? Getupoplexy!
When I told Monckton his idea of Fox Australia had gone viral, he shot back a reply that ups the ante (keep reading below). His message: Wake up Australia. Fox news out-rates all the other news services in the US because it provides something the people want and voluntarily choose in droves. It gives them the news from both sides, and then fills a vacuum in political commentary that was begging to be filled. Based on the romping success of Fox in America, Monckton estimates Fox Australia would make about a million dollars a week, and more importantly, the nation would get real debate, better investigative reporting, and eventually better policies.
The only answer to propaganda is free speech.
–Jo
————————————————————————————————————
Advance Australia Fox!
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The frenetic reaction of the dwindling and desperate climate-extremist faction to the news that I am working on putting together a consortium to establish an equivalent of Fox News in Australia and another in the UK is interesting and tells us much. At the invitation of Mannkal, I gave a talk in Perth on the opportunities for restoring political balance to the near-universally hard-Left news media in both countries and for making healthy profits by doing so. Since I gave that talk, the 2010 report and accounts for News Corporation, the owners of Fox, have been published. They confirm my proposed business model in spades.
I’d guess that a Fox News equivalent in Australia would do just as well as in the US, where Fox now has half the nation’s news audience …
The climate extremist Left are visibly, audibly frightened that their poisonous near-monopoly of the news media may be broken in Australia, just as Fox News has so swiftly and profitably broken it in the US. Given the enormous amount of support I get for my talks in Australia, I’d guess that a Fox News equivalent in Australia would do just as well as in the US, where Fox now has half the nation’s news audience, because anyone who isn’t a totalitarian Socialist watches it and all the competition are totalitarian Socialist.
Fox made $700 million last year, up from $500 million the previous year. Yet the advertising market shrunk. How did Fox do so well? The NewsCorp annual report says it is because viewership ratings have grown, and Fox’s advertisement revenue has grown with them.
Scale this for Australia. Population 22.5 million compared with 307 million. Mean GDP $950 bn against $14.5 trillion. GDP per head in Oz is not far short of the US. So Australia’s equivalent of Fox News might make $1 million a week, simply by the old-fashioned method of giving both sides of the story – on climate and on all else – rather than just the Left-hand side.
When Christopher Monckton debated at the National Press Club in Canberra last July, he showed exactly why the fans of a man-made catastrophe are so frightened of free speech and open debates. With no slides or other images, in a single hour, he still changed the opinions of fully 9% of the audience , including influential journalists who had expected nothing of the kind. The Roy Morgan polling organization tracked the moment-by-moment opinions of a representative sample of 350 people throughout the debate, and Gary Morgan, the CEO, announcing the result, said that in his long experience of polling he had never seen a swing like it in opinion on any subject in so short a time.
John Cook of un-SkepticalScience tried to rescue something from the event for the “cause”, but here Monckton shows how the claims that Monckton was “confused”, “lying” and “misrepresenting evidence” all come to naught, and if John Cook only had the manners (or curiosity) to ask Christopher first, he would have found that out before airing his poor research and logical errors in public. Monckton quotes peer reviewed references ad lib, and does calculations off the top of his head. Cook makes out that he is baffled by Monckton’s sources, which is odd because Monckton quotes the IPCC, Garnaut and other “consensus” documents, which we might have thought Cook would know well.
As usual, the point of the alarmist rebuttals is not to understand the science, or to find common ground to build a better understanding, it’s to put the words, “myth”, “lies”, “bizarre”, ‘trick” and ‘distort” into the same paragraph as the words “sceptic” and “Monckton” even if there is nothing to substantiate those terms. In other words, it’s just policy-driven PR dressed up as science.
What most disturbs me is that Cook underlies his entire reasoning with the logical fallacy that “consensus” is science, and that only the Chosen Ones are allowed to form an opinion. The attitude “Thou shalt not question our experts” belongs in a religion not in science, and shows that Cook is not even slightly skeptical – what skeptic starts with the position “the experts are always right?”. Hailing consensus ought be anathema to any scientist in the quest for understanding.
The University of Queensland employs Cook now, so what does that “center of higher education” make of his low standards of reasoning or evidence and his anti-science values? It supports him, evidently. (The Quest for Knowledge being trumped by the Quest for Grants and Peer-Group Approval). The vice-chancellor has failed to answer a question from Christopher Monckton about why the university provides cover for Cook’s crude propaganda.
Cook claims the lesson for him is that “verbal debates are a mistake”. Which is true when you can’t reason and don’t have the evidence. Like any sore loser he tries to blame the loss on something else — claiming Monckton lies, yet here we can see that if Cook had stood up in the National Press Club, and made these claims with Monckton present, Monckton would have had no trouble refuting them, and quite possibly even more of the audience would have been converted. Open debate is the only way the truth gets tested.
Cook himself has been asked to post up Monckton’s rebuttal of his mistaken accusations on his website, but apparently lacks the intellectual honesty to do so. It is our pleasure to do for him what he should have done for himself in the interest of fairness and balance and the search for the truth.
Cheerio! Thanks to the dedicated souls who nominated it, this blog is a finalist in 2012 Web Bloggies Award. (Ta Pat, Val, Baa). 😀 ! That’s a success on its own (it’s already bringing in new readers). Cheers!
With your help, we can reach a wider crowd. The different traffic, new links and other bloggie-spin-offs can help your favourite sites rank higher in searches and means the messages you want to share travel past new eyes. (Shameless hinting…) And all you need to do is vote and spread the word (so email, facebook, letter boxing, billboards ;-)). Some excellent blogs have made the finals, it’s smorgasbord of skeptics, and Anthony Watts has helpfully listed my favourites, so below is his detailed guide to making your vote count. My one sentence version is: Click here to vote, put ticks in the grey circles next to your choices (one in each category you care about), do the “catcha” funny word to prove you are human, then wait for the email, AND verify the link to prove you are not a troll. You need to do all those steps to be counted. Thank you to all who take those few minutes.
It’s time to be savvy. As Anthony essentially says, we know people who don’t like free-speech and independent thinkers are good at networking and make the effort to run campaigns to sabotage another site’s successes. We don’t need to stoop to that, but it sure helps if we vote for the sites we like.
It’s your chance to guide the internet crowd in the direction you think is best.
Merci, Jo
[Here’s what the Australian and NZ category looks like. ]
Thirty eight of the worlds top, most consequential climate scientists sought to slap down the Nobel prize winner, astronaut and glitterati of science, and all they could come up with was a logical fallacy and a single paragraph of incohate, innumerate, and improbable evidence. It’s hand-waving on stilts.
Is that the best they can do?
Trenberth and co try to rebut No Need to Panic About Global Warming, but those 16 eminent scientists quoted evidence and pointed out major flaws in the assumptions of the theory. They described forms of scientific malpractice, and called for open debate. In comparison, the 38 climate “scientists” offered hardly more than argument from authority, “Trust Us: We’re Experts” they said as if the lesser beings, who were mere Professors of Astrophysics, Meteorology, and Physics, were too stupid to know the difference between a doctor and a dentist. I mean, sure the 16 skeptics could be wrong, but if the evidence is so overwhelming, why can’t the 38 experts find it?
Q: What kind of doctor is a scientist who can’t reason?
A witchdoctor.
First — the Fallacy
1. “Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?”
If my dentist tells me that my heart surgeon was caught emailing other surgeons about how to use tricks to hide declines, that he broke laws of reason, that his predictions are basically all wrong, or that his model of understanding is demonstrably wrong, then I’m listening to the dentist.
Try this out: My dentist has no vested interest, but has provided years of trusted service and medical training — and he warns me there are doubts about my heart surgeon and I need to get a second opinion (say from a Dr Lindzen, Dr Christie, or Dr Spencer*). So I tell him to “go jump”, “what would he know”, and keep returning to the same heart surgeon even though my blood pressure doesn’t change and the pills cost $3 billion a month. Sure.
2. He uses fallacies to reason — like “argument from authority” instead of empirical evidence.
3. He’s been caught cheating “hiding declines”, trying to get dissenting doctors banned from publishing their work, and worrying what will happen if his patients realize how little he knows: “They’ll kill me probably.”
4. He refuses to debate his radical treatments publicly. “It’s beyond debate”.
7. When you ask him for evidence that the treatment works he keeps saying “Trust me, I’m an expert”.
8. The numbers don’t add up. Where’s the cost-benefit sums? (Like this or this?) His treatment plan means the nation needs to lower it’s quality of life now, … so … our children’s children will live ten minutes longer in 2100?
“America is now the land that rewards failure– at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is in that abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge statist sucking swamp. From Motown to No Town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists.What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?”
misanthropology (from Urban Dictionary): the scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of hatred in humans misanthropology-the opposite of optimistology.
For what it’s worth, I think misanthropology is often just a veneer, it’s not a real hatred at all, but just the semblance of it. It’s much more small minded. It’s not about “hating humans” so much as it is about impressing the chick (or boy) next door. A kind of competition to get to snob-land first: ‘I look down on humans more than you do.” (Which translates loosely as: I, the exalted one, speaks from a greater height, fellow misanthropist….)
During the last couple of weeks, truck-drivers in an advanced western region with 5 million people have blockaded roads and ports protesting at the sudden 40% rise in the fuel price (due to taxes) which is wiping out their business. The fishermen joined in, so did farmers. The area is heavily dependent on road transport, and was apparently paralyzed for days with fuel shortages, and empty supermarket shelves. On the internet, people are describing this as a middle class uprising, and on the verge of revolt. Can you name the location?
…shades of a magna-carta type moment
Possibly not. The mainstream media are not describing this uprising at all … it’s o’ so unnewsworthy. And you can imagine that readers might not care if this were taking place in the back-reaches of Venezuela, the slums of Chad, or the dark corner of Uzbekistan. But it wasn’t. It’s was in the West, in Sicily. Who knew?
Word on the internet is that the middle class producers are rising up en masse. It’s known as the ‘Movimento dei Forconi’ or ‘Pitchfork Movement’. Just like the The Convoy of No Confidence in Australia last August, it started with truck-drivers and farmers, and just like the Convoy, the media ignored it. Ultimately, the journalists are not on the same side as the working middle class.
There are shades of a magna-carta type moment.
These are some of their demands:
The arrest of all corrupt politicians.
To reduce the number of parliamentarians
To remove the provincial bureaucracy, as most of these politicians
have been there for over forty years.
To drastically cut the salaries and privileges of parliamentarians
and senators
To restrict politicians two only two terms in office
David Archibald, polymath, makes a bold prediction that temperatures are about to dive sharply (in the decadal sense). He took the forgotten correlation that as solar cycles lengthen and weaken, the world gets cooler. He refined it into a predictive tool, tested it and published in 2007. His paper has been expanded on recently by Prof Solheim in Norway, who predicts a 1.5°C drop in Central Norway over the next ten years.
Our knowledge of they solar dynamo is improving, and David adds the predicted solar activity ’til 2040 to the analysis. Normal solar cycles are 11 years long, but the current one (cycle 24) is shaping up to be 17 years (unusually long), and using historical data from the US, David predicts a 2.1°C decline over Solar Cycle 24 followed by a further 2.8°C over Solar Cycle 25. That adds up to a whopping 4.9°C fall in temperate latitudes over the next 20 years. We can only hope he’s wrong. As David says ” The center of the Corn Belt, now in Iowa, will move south to Kansas.”
He also predicts continuing drought in Africa for another 14 years, with droughts likely in South America too.
If he’s right, it’s awful and excellent at the same time. Cold hurts, but wouldn’t it be something if we understood our climate well enough to plan ahead?
See his post below for all the details…
– Jo
———————————————
Just how much cooler will it get?
Friis-Christensen and Lassen found the relationship between solar cycle length and temperature in 1991. In 1996, Butler and Johnson applied that theory to the 200 years of temperature data at Armagh, Northern Ireland and found a relationship of 0.4°C per extra year of solar cycle length. I showed that Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory could be used as a predictive tool in 2007. My methodology was copied by Professor Solheim in an article for a Norwegian astronomical magazine. His work predicts a 1.5°C decline, on average, in Norwegian temperatures over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23.
The CSIRO announced the discovery of a perverse, perplexing atom
The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 3-6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.
When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other byproducts are produced.
Despite all the headlines we see, 2011 in Australia was remarkable for its extraordinary averageness. It is a rare year that is more average than 2011 was.
(This email was spotted on it’s way to various government officials. — Jo)
———————————————
Guest post from Steve Woodman
2011 was the 52nd coldest year on record in Australia, colder than 1912, 1914, 1915 & 1919
Alarmist propaganda outlets such as the ABC were clearly disappointed by 2011 and were forced to resort to decadal temperatures rather than individual years to provide it with its headlines 1:
“Last decade equals warmest on record: UN”
The article then goes on to say:
“2011 ranks as the 10th warmest year since 1850, when accurate measurements began”
That may be so in a global sense, but if the ABC took a more local perspective, in Australia, 2011 was below the 1961-1990 average (see the graph below) 2.
A new brief summary of the reasoning and evidence behind the skeptics case. –Jo
———————————————
The Skeptic’s Case
Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists Or The Data?
Guest Post Dr David M.W. Evans
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message — here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
What the Government Climate Scientists Say
Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C. [1]
The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.[2]
Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.[3] The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.
The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks. They admit there are discrepancies, and go to great lengths to resolve them (see for example, Thorne, Dessler, Sherwood).
Oil on Canvas George Crie (cropped). "Panic Attack or Anxiety PTSD" Neosurrealismart.com.
I just love some of these terms. Verity Jones (Diggingintheclay) and E. Michael Smith (Chiefio, see the postscript) are rolling on a neologistic wave, and they’re generating something special. The comments thread on Diggingintheclay is quite abuzz (and this comes from both that and Chiefio’s thread).
Adjixtered: Adjusted without adequate or meaningful explanation
Cliflation: The tendency for anything climate related to be inflated in importance, size, warming tendency, etc. (I think the pronounciation doesn’t capture the “climate” origin, hence I suggest “Climaflation” — as in “The clown fish research has been Climaflated.”)
Empixelated: To uncritically believe anything presented to you by the pixels on your screen. “Jones was sure Mann would be empixelated by the latest runs of HADcrut”. (I think this needs a different example: The Department of Climate Change produced brochureware websites designed to empixililate unsuspecting taxpayers.) (H/t Another Ian for the word “empixilated”)
Envirallax (noun) – the apparent shift in importance of a report, quotation or publication related to climate science due to the difference in belief or opinion on the causes of climate change between two readers (cf. parallax). Related terms – biased interpretation, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance.). Alternate definition: That peculiar tendency to see things shifted through an environmental filter just out of kilter. Political parallax. (I like it. Methinks this word will stick, credit to Verity Jones.)
Farigle (verb): To inexplicably adjust data that is far enough away that nobody will notice, or, alternately, to alter data originating in a place distant from a research facility and difficult to verify, especially after the passage of time.“After farigling the Arctic Data, trends were warmer.” (ht Verity for the word, Judy F for the second definition).
Googlehuffing: To manipulate search engines so as to rank an article (especially one about climate) extra high for political / monetary purposes. “AlGore asked the programmer to googlehuff his latest book”. A non-standard usage is to down rate articles by skeptics or with a skeptical point of view. “Algore demanded WUWT be googlehuffed into the 20th page”. (credit Chiefio).
Panixilation: (Br. Sp. Panicselation) That peculiar tendency to turn anything into a Panic Attack, especially with some exhilaration about it. Often seen in the Warmers World. “Hansen was clearly panixilated about the coal trains”. (h/t Chiefio for this excellent word).
Wikimentia: A kind of dementia commonly seen in wiki articles reflecting bias in the various sorts of delving into too much detail, not enough detail, making up detail, deleting inconvenient facts, and generally being politically driven to excess.
Doomian (Doomsian): The world view that says anything we do can only lead to doom. Related to panixilation, but more operative in that an actual outcome of doom is predicted. Doomers is a related noun form. “The doomian result was clearly sea level rise of 1000 meters and the loss of all islands in the Pacific.” Or even “Jones, a clear doomer, looked at the printout, panixilated, and said ‘The end is near!’; yet Smith just thought him doomian.” j ferguson suggests “the Apocolypsters” and “Catastophers“. (The French came up with that already: catastropher vt. to devastate). Catastrophobes could study Catastrophology?
Gillard once lauded the genius of the carbon market. That part of the “free” market which is free to move, is moving — and right out. The smart money is saying that carbon trading is a dead dog. It’s a has-been-tulip, a sick puppy, a sinking ship.
The future of global carbon trading is so “certain” that Barclays Bank is not even bothering to leave one part time guy in the US office with a post box, so they can pretend they still have an interest in it. The mood has so changed, they see an advantage in letting the world know they’re not wasting a single cent more on carbon trading in the United States of America. Well that made my day. :-).
“That is not good news for carbon-dioxide trading, especially not in the US,”
Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a carbon trading desk, and fast to move into carbon trading: “Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market, having traded some 300 million tonnes as at February 2007″.
They control our money, our armed forces, our tax inspectors, jails, and police. Against that, we the people wield our biggest weapon — information.
The biggest threat to people in positions of power is the flow of news and ideas. The internet is the largest menace, the most powerful tool of the people, so we always knew the pushback was coming. Those who control the net, control the ability of the people to organize en masse, and to judge who is being honest, and who can be trusted. The Internet was vital in publicizing the climate data that contradicts the government climate scientists, because the mainstream media sure didn’t do it.
If SOPA PIPA is stopped (as it appears it might have been, as 6 supporters pull out) the only thing we can be sure of is that there will be other attempts to stop us speaking freely. This is an unending battle.
How bad is SOPA PIPA?
On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech….and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of “wrong-doing”. It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding allowing “them” to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.
How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet Service Providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait – I thought it was innocent until proven guilty….oh….that was “before” the NDAA.
SOPA and PIPA are proposed government regulations that go far beyond protection of IP.
The regulations in the act are clearly designed to be abused by the government to censor parts of the internet and require organizations such as Facebook and Google to become content policemen.
There are better ways to solve the piracy problem:
It’s easy to stop movie piracy, put all the movies online for a reasonable fee (say $3 to watch). Apple’s iTunes has mostly supplanted illegal music downloading by offering most of the worlds songs for $1+. — Matthew Lock
(Useful discussion on itunes and piracy here and here.)
Where will the demands end?
The establishment will keep asking for more until something stops it… and what stops it growing? Nothing except us. It grows until the protests become too strong. We must not only protest just to keep what is ours (our freedom) but we must teach our children that protesting unwanted laws is a fact of life.
It’s just as with the laws of physics: a body in space will move until a force opposes it, children will ask for more until they test the limits, and governments will grow until something stops them.
Protests work. More people are checking Wikipedia during the blackout, and the only pages they can see are SOPA PIPA ones. Better to protest loud and strong now than wait til our freedom to speak is reduced.
History repeats — Rulers opposed information flows
The LA Times laments the loss of the totalitarian educational view — pity the poor students subjected to hearing both sides of the story:
Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.
In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.
The news itself is interesting, but sadly viewed through the usual green-colored glasses.
Is it “reporting” or a propaganda piece? Let’s check the three boxes:
Box 1: One half of the story is reduced to Orwellian nonsense. Tick yes! — who, exactly, teaches children to deny we have a climate? Johnny, there are no clouds… Which state passes resolutions declaring that the climate does not change? Henceforth California will be 78…
Box 2: Look for the Mandatory Ritual Pean:“scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly”. Tick two! Ritual complete. Notice that daring sweeping conclusion, of course, is backed by pffft-puffery-nothin’. (Yes we believe that driving causes droughts, and heaters cause hurricanes. Storms are coming, switch off your air-con to save the world!)
Box Three: Find spurious tenuous associations of one view of climate change to a/ Tobacco-propaganda, b/ creationism or c/ Big-oil-profits. Tick b and c. Yessity yes. (How did they manage to leave out the tobacco slur?)
Despite the propaganda, the news is good news. The people are not fooled.
“Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they’re running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. “We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family.”
You’ve gotta love it.
But look out for the “New national science standards for grades K-12 (which) are due in December.” Since they are based on standards from the National Academy of Sorcery, we know logic, reason and evidence will need all the help they can get.
Ron Paul is painted as fringe by the Establishment. (If you’re not part of the establishment then you must be “fringe”, right?).
Ten years ago Ron Paul made long series of detailed economic and foreign policy predictions that he hoped he would be proven wrong on. It was a year before the US started action in Iraq. Five years before the housing bubble busted. Six years before the Global Financial Crisis. Nine years before the Arab Spring. (At least he was wrong on the US “draft”. So far).
How many mainstream politicians can point to a speech like this? How many presidential candidates saw it coming?
“Let it not he said that no one cared,
that no one objected once its realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy”
Ron Paul
Ron Paul 2002 April 24th.
There’s a copy of the video of the speech without newspaper overlays, and background music, for those who prefer the uncluttered view.
“He saw these things coming because he reveres liberty above all else and when you cherish liberty you can see the things that threaten it. “John Carey
I have transcribed parts, but not all of his rapid fire delivery of specific point after point. The video above shows recent headlines to match the predictions as he made them. (The full transcript is here.)
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
, p 219.
The establishment will keep asking for more until something stops it… and what stops it growing? Nothing except us. It grows until the protests become too strong. We must not only protest just to keep what is ours (our freedom) but we must teach our children that protesting unwanted laws is a fact of life.
Recent Comments