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
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.
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.”
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.
Food giants join war on carbon tax Goodman Fielder, George Weston Foods, Nestle Australia, CSR, Laucke Flour Mills, Yakult Australia and Bundaberg Sugar.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!*
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.
It’s the ultimate in pre-cambrian law. Gaia in the courtroom. Shh. The Statutory Spirits are at work. It’s not just the right to life for amoeba, it’s the right not to have your cellular structure modified.
Looks like salad is off the menu.
So is meat, fruit, tea and coffee, and no you can’t eat moths either. Who will prosecute the next cougar which violates the constitution by chomping on a Flamingo?
Looks like 10 million people might get to subsist on organic free range eggs, and milk from consenting cows. Perhaps they can reach a trade agreement for honey with The Andean Bee Collective. But then it’s not clear the honey doesn’t have a right to exist too.
I’ve been with our five year old in hospital overnight (with asthma), and there is no time to post… thanks to all the people who have donated to Tim Ball’s case (and you can donate through Dr Ball’s website via paypal http://drtimball.com/), and to commenters and moderators here too.
Lubos has a nice line: “To err once is human, to err twice is accident, to err thrice is coincidence, to err four times is dumb, and to err 12 million times isto be David Suzuki.”
The Big Scare Campaign is desperate, when they can’t win with reason, they can always find a reason to sue and hope to silence their critics. Their deep pockets make them an ominous foe, and the legal battles are running hot. Actions are running against Andrew Bolt, and Tim Ball (see below), and we only just found out, that one was launched against James Delingpole by the East Anglia CRU.
If it sounds like I’m overdoing it, consider this: the PCC’s ruling must be among the first by any quasi-official body anywhere in the world to take the side of a Climate Change sceptic rather than that of the Warmist establishment. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
The Commissions ruling:
In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”. They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews.
…
Through its correspondence the newspaper had provided some evidence in support of the statements under dispute, and the columnist had included some of this evidence in the second blog post under discussion. In relation to the columnist’s description of Professor Jones as “FOI-breaching, email-deleting”, the newspaper had provided extracts from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”, and another email in which he had written “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?”
With respect to the columnist’s assertion that Professor Jones was “scientific method-abusing”, the newspaper had provided an extract from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”. In view of this, the Commission considered that there were some grounds for the columnist’s opinion – which readers would recognise was subjective – on these points.
But as Andrew Bolt says: I’m glad for James, but the problem is that even when you win, you lose. I can only guess at the stress and cost James has suffered. Who’d dare to go through that themselves?
Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace way back in 1971. He abandoned them in 1986 so he could pursue his environmental passions. As you would. Last November he published a tempting book: Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. And not surprisingly stretched a few of his old friendships. The Vancouver Sun has a rare debate between Moore and Rex Weyler, another co-Founder (see below for a snippet). Predictably, Greenpeace is firing their best ad hom, and referring to him as a “paid spokesman for the Nuclear Industry” and are busy rewriting history. They used to list Moore as a co-Founder on their website in the past (copy here), but now they say that they were formed in 1970, and he joined it in 1971, “see the letter”. I did see the letter, and it seems “Greenpeace” didn’t quite mean the same thing in 1970. What Moore joined in 1971 was a committee called, engagingly, “Don’t Make A Wave Committee” (I can see why that didn’t catch on) and it seems they had a boat called Greenpeace. He was also president of Greenpeace from 1977, and was even on the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in 1985. You’d think that would count for something. Patrick Moore is very much a skeptic
:
“We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last 200 years…The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people. It’s not good for people and its not good for the environment…In a warmer world we can produce more food.”
He quit Greenpeace when they banned chlorine:
“The last straw was when Greenpeace decided to run with a global ban on chlorine. “This is when Greenpeace really lost me. As a student of advanced biochemistry, I realized chlorine was one of the 92 natural elements in the periodic table and that it is essential for life. You don’t just go around banning entire elements…”
Today he is chair and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. From the Vancouver Sun
Transcript: A heavy-weight bout between two founders of Greenpeace
Greenpeace have produced a hit job on the ANZ Bank: a (fairly) slick production designed to seriously hurt the bank’s brand name, and to make it harder for coal miners to raise funds (which ultimately makes it harder for the poorest in society to pay their electricity bills).
This is why I insist: Yes, this IS about the science. Even if we defeat the tax and trading scheme, as long as the public think “carbon is pollution” any honest business or business working with them will be subject to this bullying. Coal provides about three quarters of all Australian electricity. Yes, we need to get rid of the pollutants in coal production, but carbon dioxide is not one of them.
We are carbon life forms. There is no evidence that the climate models are right, and that CO2 emissions hurt the planet. Greenpeace could attack the coal industry because of poor safety standards, or because of other pollutants released, but instead they pursue their religious convictions. That’s why this is a witchhunt.
Greenpeace took in €200 million in 2009 (page 31 of their annual report) which is $280m USD. They have become the big corporation they so despised. (And so much for transparency, there did not appear to be a list of contributors in the annual report).
In the end this kind of knifing could turn out to help us. After an attack like this, ANZ will be more open to hearing the other side of the science. Sooner or later the green elements will have made so many enemies that businesses and people everywhere will rise up to put an end to the intimidation based on assumptions, guesses, and predetermined conclusions.
The Carbon Tax is melting down Australian politics. The spin is running wild and the falsity of “carbon pollution” (sic) preys on yet another political leader.
Two polls met head to head today, one showing 59% of Australians don’t want the tax, and other saying that 72% of Australians want government to negotiate with Greens on the carbon levy. It’s a PR war out there, and, humans being gregarious creatures, every side wants to be in the majority — it’s a critical mass type of thing.
It’s easy to figure out which poll is closer to the truth.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) poll asked 550 adults the simple question: “Thinking about the carbon tax. Are you in favour or against the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia?”. 59% were against, 13% didn’t know. Making it 72% who are not for it.
Meanwhile, proving that you can get almost any result you want on a poll if you ask the right questions, Galaxy Research asked 1036 people, the complex, loaded double whammy:
Thinking now about some federal issues. All sides of Australian politics agree that there is a need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help address climate change. Do you believe that the best way to achieve this is to tax the big polluters or pay money to polluters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions?
Support tax: 58%
Support paying polluters: 17%
Undecided: 25%
The poll tells us nothing about climate change but definitively shows 42% of the public are not fooled by loaded questions. What’s surprising is that only 58% support the idea of taking money from monstrous self serving polluters. I mean really, if there were polluters out there, surely everyone would tick that box? Why aren’t they in jail?
That CO2 you emitted last Tuesday: Is it coming back next month, next year, or in March 3011?
Tim Flannery makes it clear that CO2 circulates o-so-slowly, circa “a thousand years”. Remember that CO2’s “greenhouse” effect occurs at speed-of-light timescales, so if the temperature is affected, so must be the CO2 (according, at least, to the World of Flannery).
If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years… Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly. [Thanks to Andrew Bolt]
There are a few clues that maybe CO2 doesn’t idle the centuries away aloft, and that (I know you’ll be shocked) the Climate Commission (and IPCC) have overstated things: If emissions are absorbed by the global system in a matter of months, it rather blows the idea that we have to act decades ahead to stop the catastrophe. If CO2 levels adjust quickly, our “sins” will be much more quickly forgiven, and we can wait and see.
The thousand-year time frame doesn’t fit very well with NASA’s official carbon cycle and the empirical evidence.
You can see below in the NASA diagram that plants absorb 16% of all the carbon dioxide in the entire atmosphere each and every year (121 Gt of the 750 Gt in the air), and oceans absorb 12%, meaning that 28% of all the CO2 in the global atmosphere is sucked down each year. Let’s call it one quarter.
In any given year, tens of billions of tons of carbon move between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. Human activities add about 5.5 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The illustration above shows total amounts of stored carbon in black, and annual carbon fluxes in purple. (Illustration courtesy NASA Earth Science Enterprise^)
If a quarter of all atmospheric CO2 is being turned over each year, this implies that if humans found the Fountain of Endless Energy and stopped emitting any CO2 tomorrow, within just four years, only about 30% of that CO2 would remain. Indeed 90% of all the emissions that we’d ever put up there since Cheops built a pointy rock house* would be gone by 2020.
Who knew? CSIRO funded a 5,000 person poll last July and August and then sat on the results for months. Perhaps they were disappointed that only 50% of people thought humans have any role in changing the global climate? Worse, 90% of people acknowledge that the world is warming, and 40% have figured out that that the key issue is not whether it warms but whether it’s natural that matters, and it’s hard to call them deniers. How inconvenient.
Let me guess, Tim Flannery realizes that the more he explains the climate, in a one-sided staged discussion, the more people become skeptical, right? But then again, it could just be that the explanations are not credible. He’s closer than he realizes.
A lack of “credible information” is one of the main reasons that 40 per cent of Australians do not believe that humans have a role in global warming, according to the head of the federal government’s Climate Commission, Tim Flannery.
The real problem for Tim is that the people are getting too much of his kind of information. The more they get, the less they like it. Even without skeptics working online, the man-in-the-street knows that predicting the weather is damn difficult, the answers presented are too chumpy-chumpy clean cut, that there is no real debate, and any dissenters are marginalized and vilified (which is odd for a debate that is supposedly about science). The public can smell the propaganda. They are irritated by the one-sided fakery of the “conversation”.
UPDATE: The French protests were 2010 news (and have been rediscovered around the web). H/t Jeremy C and David for pointing out the date, for a couple of hours I thought it was 2011 news. It’s an apt time to remind everyone in Australia of yet another country that isn’t rushing to become “carbon free”. It’s a rather prophetic warning to the Gillard Government, especially since the NSW landslide election against the Labor Party last weekend is still being analyzed and viewed increasingly as a “seismic event” in Australian politics.
——–
The economic reality of big-debts, and poor decisions made by people spending “other people’s money” always hurts in the long run. Sooner or later it all ends in tears. It’s a common theme: there were deadly protests in Greece, then these French protests in March 2010, and this March, the mass London protests with 250,000 people. Civil unrest is coming.
From The Telegraph and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, March 2010:
President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday scrapped the country’s proposed carbon tax and reshuffled his cabinet in populist tilt after suffering a crushing electoral defeat over the weekend, when his Gaulliste UMP arty lost every region other than in its bastion of Alsace and the Indian Ocean island of Reunion.
The greens were dismayed but business was relieved:
[I just love this graph. It’s so over-the-top, it’s like a “Pepsi-climate” ad -JN]
They reckon we have to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions immediately or we’ll fry. But these forecasts are based solely on what are essentially the same faulty climate models as in 1988, and are similarly exaggerated.
Their Earlier Scary Forecast Was Bunk
U.S. government climate scientists started the climate scare with a forecast to the U.S. Congress in 1988 which was based on climate models. Here it is, with the actual temperature that eventuated later added in red:
Hansen, 1988, forecast, projection, compared to UAH 2010
I’m traveling at the moment, in Darwin tonight. I can’t really comment on the hot-bed of climate action that Australia is right now, but instead this is something from afar that caught my eye a few days ago.
Video’s bore me usually, but I enjoyed watching Courtillot — he’s possibly the clearest, fastest, crispest speaker I’ve ever heard, and it’s all the more amazing because he speaks with an accent. Don’t misunderstand — there are no jokes, no satire, and no punch lines here, just an honest summary of the state of the current scientific play, especially with his synopsis of the cosmic ray theory. (He is a colleague of Nir Shaviv).
Usually I find speakers are too slow, but Courtillot packs the words in, without overstatement or monotony. He’s is a smart man who knows his topic well and it’s unusually obvious.
Background: Can a Western Government wipe out an honest business with red tape? (What a naive question…)
Janet and Matt Thompson
Matt and Janet spoke out as skeptics in May 2007 and their life savings and business are now at grave risk as they fight off bankruptcy. What has undone them is not the financial crisis, or any failure of their business, but impossible clauses and conditions. Indeed they were so profitable in 2007 they were turning away business. They’ve broken no laws, are popular with their nearest neighbors, 6000 odour tests showed there was little problem in the town, and the Thompsons complied with every departmental request to manage the farm. Yet licensing changes and new conditions were so onerous, that banks won’t loan money against the license (it’s not much of a licence). Clause A1 means their licence can be whipped away again at any time if they “offend” anyone anywhere or interfere with their “health and comfort”. How do we measure that — Let the loudest complainer win. (If complaints about “comfort” can shut down a business, there go the wind farms…. Why is there one rule for one business, but not for all?) Even the department (DEC) admits it broke it’s own normal procedures and treated them unfairly. The operations manager of Narrogin Beef committed suicide, and the Thompsons have been reduced to the last thread as they pin their hopes on the difficult task of suing the Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation in the Federal Court.
D-Day on the decision in the Federal Court is Friday April 1. Though if they win, it means they have the right to sue the Department, not that past injustices will be righted on the spot. This is a long road ahead.
Matt and Janet write:
“Thanks to all who have supported us in so many ways. We have managed to stay on our property and fight for our rights legally since this all came to a head last September.
The legal process is very difficult, expensive, and cumbersome. However, we have managed to fight off a series of minor skirmishes and will finally be presenting the main body of our case for the first time before a federal court Judge in Perth on Friday April 1. This hearing will not be the end, but it will set important directions.
Joshua Forrester of Ranger Legal in Perth, and Peter King QSC Sydney are acting on our behalf.
The bottom line is that when all this went public on the sites last year we had been asked by the receivers to prepare to leave by October 15. The public outcry and the actions of our solicitors have so far prevented the other side from gaining possession and kicking us out. However, we have been unable to earn income by operating our facility in the meantime while the case is pending for legal reasons.
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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
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