Bonds set record on record, stocks down, gold leaps

The world is so poised on the edge. The jitters are sweeping through tonight.

Just suppose you have $100m in assets that you are nervous about. You cannot stick that amount in a bank, because government guarantees only cover the first $1m or whatever, and banks are all risky now. So you buy into the biggest, most liquid market in the world — US Treasury bonds, that is, the debt of the US Government. Sure, you risk losing a few percent as bond prices jostle up in the panic, but at least you preserve your wealth. So you sell your assets, convert the proceeds to US dollars, and buy US Treasuries.

So much money had run to US Treasury bonds that the yield — which was at a record low yesterday — just got a lot lower. People are happy to give their money to the US government for an historically low yield.

Yesterday things were more scary than any time since WWII:

On Thursday, benchmark 10-year Treasuries yields fell to a historic low of 1.5326 percent, according to Tradeweb. The previous low was in November 1945 when yields ended that month at 1.55 percent.

Tonight, things are more scary than any time since Napoleon:

Benchmark 10-year Treasury notes were up as much as 1-4/32 in price with a yield of 1.442 percent, the lowest level since records going back to the early 1800s according to Reuters data.

Gold just zoomed up nearly $70 in two hours as the NY exchange opened. German and Australian bonds are also attracting refugee money.

Keep reading →

8.7 out of 10 based on 38 ratings

Spot the conflict: GE owns NBC, the Weather channel and lots and lots of wind turbine factories

+ … .. = “…news”?

Harold Ambler (Don’t Sell Your Coat) points to a conflict of interest that hadn’t hit my radar til now (golly):

“In the newspaper business, and other journalistic domains as well, fires are of note. Non-fires aren’t. Fair enough. But something very insidious has taken place. The selling of weather disasters as entertainment has led to a state in which big business stands to gain handsomely from the perception that the planet has gone meteorologically mad. Specifically, General Electric stands to profit. When in 2008 NBC (owned by General Electric) purchased The Weather Channel, an interesting thing took place: the largest domestic producer of wind turbines became the owner of the best-positioned purveyor of images of destructive weather. The same year, NBC’s Today Show continued its longstanding practice of “showing” the great destruction to the ocean-atmosphere system caused by manmade global warming, with story after story: fires, floods, melting Kilimanjaro, you name it. The rest of NBC News, and the Weather Channel, meanwhile, keep the same pieces of videotape on nearly infinite repeat.”

How “Green” is GE I wonder?

GE Australia explains that the company focus is so green they have a special word for it: “Ecomagination is GE’s business strategy to help meet customers’ demand for products that improve their bottom line and reduce their impact on the environment. This will also drive growth for GE that delivers for our investors.”

How much money does GE make from green philosophies? I don’t know, but GE wind explains that their most widely used wind turbine has produced no less than 16,500 bird killing, bat chopping versions planted around the globe, though they don’t say it quite like that. They have big plans for it. Their “ecomagination commitments for 2010 – 2015” are planned to “double R&D to $10 Billion…” So that’s just $2 billion a year that GE will spend on green R & D for the next 5 years?

Remember, Exxon have been controlling this debate by funding deniers with a measly $2 million a year (which stopped years ago). It just puts things in perspective…

What else is part of the business plan? The media

“NBC Universal is GE’s media arm, which operates locally through CNBC, broadcasting relevant business news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week…” [From the GE Australian factsheet]

It puts a new tint on the phrase “business news” — is that news relevant to your business or mine? For the record, GE owns Universal Studios, Telemundo, NBC Universal Global Networks (MSNBC, CNBC, NBC WeatherPlus, WeatherPlus, and WeatherChannel plus lots more.)

And who knows? GE is a huge multinational company, and I’ve seen no evidence that GE management makes any editorial demands about green articles, but then, there is no evidence that MSNBC, CNBC or the Weather Channel are reporting both sides of the climate change news either, is there? It’s a point to bring up next time someone tells you Big-Oil funded deniers control the debate.

Lately GE has sold some of NBC. Now, it’s only a 49% stake. Perhaps that’s alright then?

But when Gina owns 13% of Fairfax, it’s a national crisis, “Democracy is doomed”?

—————————————————————————-

Don’t Sell Your Coat by Harold Ambler

Thanks to Harold for sending me a copy, and for being so patient… 🙂

A few weeks ago, “Don’t Sell Your Coat” was doing so well, it was topping the list of Climatology best sellers on Amazon (beating out Mann and co). Ambler is a professional journalist, and very much the story teller, and it shows. The book is a smooth read that flows easily. It has beautiful sentence construction (and you’re wondering why I’d even mention that, but predictable sentences are a pet hate of mine). Ambler works his craft with skill. I like it. Relaxing.

Keep reading →

8.5 out of 10 based on 42 ratings

Does Climate Money matter? Is a monopoly good for a market?

Climate Money turned the tables on the Big-Oil criers

A reply to an article on Wired and Ars Technica

Alarmists rarely attack, or even mention the Climate Money paper I did in 2009. It’s an own goal to draw attention to the fact that skeptics are paid a pittance, while the alarm industry soaks in extended baths of cash, grants, and junkets, and the vested interests are a magnitude larger. Exxon might lose some money if a carbon tax comes in, but the world will still need oil. The same can’t be said for ACME-Solar. If a carbon scheme falls over, so does a Solyndra.

So yes, let’s do talk about The Money. As Climate Money pointed out: all Greenpeace could find from Exxon was a mere $23 million for skeptics over a decade, while the cash cow that is catastrophic climate change roped in $2,000 million a year every year during the same period for the scientists who called other scientists “deniers”.

John Timmer tried to debunk it with words like “bogus”, and “false” but lacked things like evidence and numbers to back up his case. As far as I can tell the arguments amount to saying that a massive wall of money doesn’t influence the scientific process because scientists are incorruptible, the peer review process is faultless, and the human process of science works in ways that no other human process does. There are no political aims, personal ambitions, or human failings in *The Science!*™

Here’s why each excuse doesn’t pan out:

Excuse 1/”this is not how science works”

If money doesn’t have any influence on researchers, by implication, climate scientists are not like the rest of the human race. (Why do we pay them at all, one wonders?) It would take a truly angelic mature being to welcome awkward results with a smile. Who would enjoy finding data that showed that they’d been barking up the wrong tree for two decades and was now an expert in a dead-end irrelevant topic? If the results did not support their theory, which superhuman scientists would willingly work to ensure that their own specialty would plummet off the public agenda from “The Greatest Moral Threat” down to 193rd on the list of hot topics needing public attention? After we figured out that CO2 was of minor importance, the funding would slow, the red carpet events would dry up, and the two week long annual UN coordinated junkets in exotic countries would invite other experts from other fields.

Periodically an alarmist will claim that “mainstream science” would welcome the discovery that man-made emissions were irrelevant. But we don’t need to do that thought experiment, we’ve tested it already. Scientists who publish papers supporting non-catastrophic conclusions get called Deniers, they quickly get a DeSmog/SourceWatch/Exxon Secrets smear page that investigates contracts they may or may not have made 20 years ago, makes fun of their religious beliefs, dissects their biography, and if they persist, Greenpeace sends letters to their employer suggesting they ought not have a job. What’s not to like about that?

The price for speaking out against global warming is exile from your peers, even if you are at the top of your field.

We need a real free market in climate science before we create free markets in the real economy based on those conclusions.

Excuse 2/ The funding was mostly for “Climate Technology”

Funding for “technology” will not affect the science, says Timmer. Apparently Jo Nova misread her own graph (and “spectacularly too!”) Except JoNova labelled the graph accurately, read it correctly and just drew different conclusions. Technology isn’t science research, but as far as the media, politicians and press are concerned, the difference is moot. The IPCC was happy to count those solar, wind power, biomass and geothermal scientists as “science experts” that made a consensus. (Remember 4000 scientists support the IPCC conclusions.) No one complained that the solar engineers were “not climate scientists” when they made statements on press releases saying “climate change is real”. Money for solar, wind and carbon sequestration fueled many press conferences and expo’s where the “threat” that CO2 poses was taken for granted. In universities those research groups added to the pressure on science faculties to “keep the alarm running”, if only because they adopted the same disdainful culture to scorn dissenters. None of any of these researchers spent ten minutes checking the modelers assumptions on water vapor feedback. Neither did any of the zoology majors who report on iguana habitats shifting either. They all became mindless cheerleaders for the message. Can someone explain how any of those technology (or biology) researchers had an interest in announcing flaws in the theory of man-made climate funding?

Excuse 3/ It’s incomprehensible that money could affect science. Ergo science is uncorruptible?

I pointed out that “Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite.” Timmer responds that this is “an almost incomprehensible misunderstanding” (and there goes Adam Smith in the bin) but the effect of only funding one side of a theory is not just “comprehensible” but documented in peer reviewed journals. Anyone with eyes can see how adjustments to the data progressively shift the graphs in one direction. (See these sea level graphs for example.) The adjustments are non-random, just like the adjustments to global temperature sets, and ocean heat content. The trend is always shifted to be more like the models. That’s exactly what you’d expect if you funded hundreds of people to look for one answer. You get what you paid for.

**Excuse 4/ Timmer points out that some people are looking for solar effects on the climate.**

True, a scattering of scientists funded through other areas are looking for natural causes of climate change, but they are not necessarily free to find it. Funding for climate change is so large, and the anti-skeptic culture is so strong that even in astronomy researchers know better than to speak their skeptical minds freely. The grants panels of national research committees almost always include someone who is a fan of the man-made theory, and when competition for a grant is so fierce that making one enemy on an assessment panel can make the difference between success and failure, researchers know that keeping their skeptical opinions to themselves is important. Hence, even distant fields are affected by the rivers of money flowing in the Climate Change Stream. I’m relaying this story direct from a researcher, though for obvious reasons I cannot name them.

Excuse 5/ The government had been throwing lots of money at climate science for decades.

(So?) Timmer claims climate funding had not expanded out of nothing in 1989 though he has no numbers (that is always the way isn’t it?). Certainly, the US government had been studying climate science under many different agencies before then. But what the graph unmistakably shows is that money directed towards man-made global warming issue was expanding fast. The new “climate change” label plastered over hundreds of research grants, and underlying billions of dollars of spending, tells us that the emphasis, the motives, and the aim of international research had shifted. There was no “climate change” research project before then. In those days, people were mostly just trying to understand the climate.

Major Research Programs were created to solve preordained problems

Whole programs were created around 1990 to deal with a “risk” and “danger” from climate change. What previously was called “climate science” (or geography, geology, meteorology, and oceanography) now became part of a large campaign called the “climate change science program”. Note, sec 204 of the legislation that created the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Paraphrased:

The President shall establish an Office of Global Change Research Information. The purpose of the office is to supply information about the research and development related to:

reducing energy use,
promoting renewables,
solving the ozone hole,
reducing the amount of CO2,
helping poor countries use agricultural and industrial chemicals,
promoting recycling and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

In other words, before the research was even done, the government was funding it so that results could help them achieve policy goals that were already decided. The questions were not: 1. Figure out if reducing CO2 is worth the cost, or is even beneficial. 2. Make climate models that will predict the weather and help agriculture and town planning. The science was decidedly unsettled in 1990, yet the government knew that it wanted to reduce CO2, burn less fossil fuel, and promote renewables.

Excuse 6/ Science is done by peer review, not auditing

Christopher Essex wrote to me to point out that when billions of dollars rests on research results, peer review is not enough, the work ought to be audited:

“Timmer is right that there is a difference between auditing and peer review. These things are very different and they have different purposes. Peer review is cursory in some sense. It is a compromise at best, but it is not intended to check or reproduce everything in a study, but provides an author and editor some feedback on the merit of a piece. The problem is that the peers are not school teachers marking a student’s assignment, because they are peers. They do not necessarily know better than the author. In fact even a peer with great reputation can be wrong, which is why publication is not adding to holy scripture, but an opportunity to allow peers to respond with their own papers. Peer reviewed papers can thus be terrible, while non-peer-reviewed papers of high quality can experience a very rough ride.

Independent auditing is an entirely different matter. It has limited place in normal scientific give and take. But it is crucial from a corporate or policy point of view. If you aim to adopt something out of the scientific literature as a basis of a business or government strategy or policy, the executive has a fiduciary responsibility to be sure that the work adopted is correct in terms of its internal consistency and credibility of the assumptions and interpretations. Peer reviewed literature must be subjected to that from a liability point of view. That means everything needs to be checked, with caveats fully discovered and reported. This is not science except in as much as reproducibility is legitimately important to science.

The problem here is that most adoptions of peer reviewed literature by the UN were not audited. That makes those responsible for the various UN IPCC howlers liable for the costs that have arisen as a result. Of course there is always a question of whether the UN can be sued, but that is the principle of it. All of the government policy stuff needs to be audited as some level, peer review is not sufficient. On that other hand non-peer-reviewed material might also be audited, and be fine.

One does not want suits over peer reviewed material in the science literature, because it is important that scientists do not get a chill over making mistakes. That would compromise the ability of the scientific community to work things out and to advance. But this caveat does not apply to corporate or government uses of science where people may be hurt financially or physically because of mistakes or bias. “

Cheap Shots that prove my point

The bottom line is that Timmer is so short of real arguments that he scratches for slurs, even resorting to associating a climate change skeptic to a HIV skeptic: “Like many other self-proclaimed skeptics, Nova …” (follow the link). There is no connection between the two topics. John Timmer’s attempt at denigration by association (of the non-existent kind) is more proof of just how unscientific, unenquiring and desperate the world of climate groupthink is. Why does the team that claims to do *The Science!* have to resort to baseless character attacks instead of reasoned arguments? Could it be they have no evidence?

Then there’s the standard of research”: Timmer claims I’m an “Australian journalist” but if he’d done ten seconds of research and read the “About” page on my site, he’d have seen that I’m not and have never been a journalist. It’s irrelevant in the big scheme of things, but emblematic of a sloppy mind. If he didn’t know or care what Jo Nova does, why say anything?

After ten years of hearing how Big-Oil was controlling the debate by funding experts, it took him two and half years to come up with the idea that money has no influence. Is he sending a memo to DeSmog? Is he telling them to call off the Exxon attack dogs?

More information:

If you value articles like this, you can help make more of them possible.

Every donation is gratefully received 🙂

9.3 out of 10 based on 63 ratings

EU Carbon trading crashes: German bourse closes and Irish end carbon rort

More signs Australia is leaping onto a burning ship as it starts carbon taxing, just as the largest carbon markets are winding up:

(Reuters) – Bavaria’s stock exchange will abandon its carbon emissions certificate trading operations in the EU-traded CO2 market on June 30 after volumes in Europe “plunged to practically zero” in recent months, it said on Tuesday.

The EU’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) limits the carbon dioxide emissions of the 27-nation bloc’s factories and power plants and covers nearly half of EU emissions.

EU prices are down 60% over the last 12 months

“Emissions trading will never find its feet again without radical political action,” said Christine Bortenlaenger, the head of the exchange…

[Source: Reuters]

The Borse management claim they were closing because of the fraud and hacking as well as the market downturn:

Bayerische Borse listed a number of other contributory factors in its decision to quit the carbon market, including current macroeconomic and policy uncertainty and the instances of VAT fraud and hacking attacks on national emissions registries between 2009 and 2011 that tarnished the image of emissions markets.

A Bayerische Borse spokesman Tuesday told Platts that it held less than a 1% share of the European carbon market. [Source: Platts]

The Industry Group IETA hit back at the German Bourse, and tried to salvage something:

The International Emissions Trading Association Wednesday denied that Europe’s carbon trading system is broken, dismissing suggestions by a German exchange operator Tuesday that industry does not support the scheme.

But the fact that they are even talking about whether it is “broken” or not says all you need to know.

Meanwhile — one of the suspended trading schemes (ICE Futures) will remain suspended. 16 months and counting…

Could the Irish bureaucrats have made this more complex? Was that a levy on a tax?

The Irish are closing off a lucrative carbon rort. Irish Energy companies were told they needed to pay for carbon emissions, but were given free carbon credits during the start up phase (they are supposed to start buying them for real soon). The companies were passing on the theoretical cost of the carbon credits to customers, and thus netting a nice profit with customers paying for a credit that the companies got for free. To stop these naughty companies from making a windfall, the Irish government had the bright idea to …remove the EU trading scheme? No. They decided to add a levy onto these companies to make the trading scheme even more complex. The levy raised €75 million for the exchequer last year. But now, the carbon revenue levy has been dumped though the carbon tax on fuels remains.

Keep reading →

8.6 out of 10 based on 65 ratings

$700,000 for believers to convert skeptics – but nothing for skeptical science

From the 2011 Australian Research Council report: as much as $45,700,000 was spent on An Environmentally Sustainable Australia in 2011.

The cash cow that is “Climate Change” is so loaded that over a six year period, $718,000 dollars of ARC funds has flowed to “believers” (their terminology) to study and convert dissenters.

The death threat that wasn’t (by the kangaroo culler — John Coochey) was made at an event that deserves more attention. The “Deliberative Democracy” turns out to be part of a project funded by the Australian Research Council to the tune of $378,500. It’s title: Social Adaptation to Climate Change in the Australian Public Sphere: A comparison of individual and group deliberative responses to scenarios of future climate change. This year, a new version of the same project has been awarded another $340,000.

Quite properly, the deliberative forum claims it was not going to take sides:

“The project sought to engage with the full range of positions from people who are sceptical about climate change through to those who are very concerned. We do not endorse any particular point of view – it is the aim of the project to find out what these views might be.”

But the team included known alarmist Will Steffen. Andrew Bolt discussed the Forum and eye witnesses of the project report tell how skeptics were treated:

Mondo:
Messrs Steffen and his team delivered presentations on various aspects of climate change. We were not allowed to ask questions, or to challenge the multifarious false statements made. Instead, we broke out into groups, with the idea that a group could ask a question. Of course, each group was dominated by “warmists”, and the lone sceptic in each group was a) abused, b) derided, c) not listened to.

The result was that Steffen and co were presented with soft questions that were based largely on ill-informed views, convenient to the organisers.

John Coochey:
… they hired a comedian [Rod Quantock] previously trading as Mr Snooze (to be fair he was not bad modern style of humor) to ridicule anyone who was not a believer. That is not even an attempt at deliberation.”

In the name of research they had to listen to Rod Quantock tell jokes about skeptics at dinner? Was his speaking fee paid by the ARC grant?

The proposals always look so noble. The leading researcher, Dr Simon Niemeyer, describes his philosophy:

The solution is not to dazzle unbelievers with science, but to engage everybody in a mature debate

How mature is it to hire comedians to mock the unbelievers? How unbiased are the researchers who refer to one half of the public as “unbelievers” — implying not that they hold a different opinion, but that that some scientists know “the truth”, the one and only permitted view, and anyone who disagrees gets “dazzled” by the light.

But he doesn’t want to browbeat skeptics:

So the task now is to see if a more considered approach to debate is possible in the wider public sphere and to engage with people with different views rather than try to harangue them

Source: SMH

Browbeating, and haranguing are right out, but it is alright to dismiss, denigrate and categorize those who disagree?

Keep reading →

8.9 out of 10 based on 44 ratings

Man-made sea-level rises are due to global adjustments

Frank Lansner’s first graph surprised me. It’s well known and often quoted that sea levels have been rising by 2-3mm a year every year for the last 20 years. But it’s not well known that the original raw satellite data doesn’t show that at all.

What astonished me was the sea levels first recorded by the Topex Poseidon satellite array showed virtually no rise at all from 1993-2001. Surely not, I thought. I asked sea-level expert Nils Axel-Morner, and he confirmed: “Yes, it is as bad as that.” Now, given that Envisat (the European satellite) showed no rise from 2003-2011 (until it was adjusted) that means we have almost 20 years of raw satellite data showing very little rise.

We thought satellites would finally give us a definitive answer on sea levels. Instead, like the tide gauges, and every other tool available to mankind, apparently satellites systematically underestimate the rising trends. And despite the speed of light being quite quick and all, it can take years for the data to finally arrive. Sometimes 4 or 5 (or 10 years) after the measurement was made scientists “discover” that it was wrong.

Now of course, any one of these adjustments could be for very legitimate reasons and give us results closer to the truth. But the adjustments always bring data closer to the modeled trend. It’s decidedly non-random. Either there is a God who thinks teasing climate scientists is spiffy, or else there is something fishy going on, and some investigative journalists need to ask some investigative questions. Is that sea-level rise due to global warming or is it due to global adjustments?

— Jo

————————————————————————————————————-

Guest Post by Frank Lansner

Edited by Jo Nova

Sea levels – the raw data is always adjusted upwards

The raw data on sea levels is repeatedly adjusted “up”

Fig 1 The data for recent years has gone through significant changes. In Morner 2004 the raw satellite data for sea level rise was shown with the original slope (the grey line with dots named “Topex/Poseidon as of 2001” above).

The data was shown in the Morner 2004 peer reviewed article. It does seem that Morner was simply presenting data on sea levels as they were known at the time. In addition, Holgate’s data from 2006-7 also seems to show a similar flat trend after 1994.

Holgate’s flat sea level graph ends in 2004 – when Envisat starts out with yet another dataset showing flat trend. The Envisat data is stitched so that 2004-6 overlaps with the satellite data. (But it could have been aligned with the original raw data of Topex/Poseidon, so that Envisat continues where Holgate 2007 ended.)

Sea Levels

Fig 2.The original red graph is from the IPCC AR4 dataset (Church and White 2006). Other datasets for sea level rise have been added to show the trends as they were reported at the time with the year each one was released.

Something happened to the sea level data from satellites around 2004-2005 it seems, because in 2005 Morner points out that the satellite data has been changed significantly. The trends don’t look like they did before 2004.

Keep reading →

9.2 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

Models get the core assumptions wrong– – the hot spot is missing

This is part of a series that Tony Cox and I are doing that references the most important points and papers, as a definitive resource about the evidence. The missing hotspot is not just another flaw in the theory, it proves the models are wrong: not just “unverified”, not just “uncertain”, but failed. Apologies to those who feel I harp on about this! This is a condensed review, squishing years of a scientific battleground down to it’s bare bones… — Jo

It is not well known that even the IPCC agrees that the direct effects of CO₂ will only increase world temperatures by 1.2°C. All of the projections above that (3.3°C , 6°C etc) come from model projections based on assumptions of what water vapor and clouds will do (these are the feedback effects of the original 1.2°C).^[i] Are the feedbacks correct?

If the IPCC models are right about the feedbacks, we would see a hot spot 10km above the tropics. The theory is that with more heat, more water will evaporate and rise, keeping relative humidity constant at all heights in the troposphere. The point has been conclusively tested with 28 million weather balloons since 1959.^[ii]

The CCSP (Climate Change Science Project) published the predictions and observations as graphs in separate parts of its large 2006 report

The CCSP (Climate Change Science Project) published the predictions and observations as graphs in separate parts of its large 2006 report.^{[iii] ,[iv]}

Keep reading →

9.4 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

Blame the whites for climate change?

Back when the climate was perfect, and there was no internet, no cars, no electricity lines, and not a single evil coal fired station — ominously, the Australian climate was changing.

Back in 1846, the population of Australia was essentially just the size of the city of Canberra (a mere 340,000 people). They all rode bikes, or horses, or walked to work; it was “Earth Hour” every hour; every plasma screen was not just on standby, it was permanently unplugged.

Yet the flooding rains were giving way to droughts, and the creeks were drying up. Aboriginals said that the climate has undergone this change “since white-man came in country.”

Stephen Goddard found the quote.

The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, Wednesday 11 March 1846

Quote:

Keep reading →

8.7 out of 10 based on 48 ratings

Unthreaded – I’m back (just)

I’ve returned from two weeks away around some old haunts in Canberra. It’s been fascinating.

Thanks to David T for dedicatedly migrating my whole blog to a new more secure and less expensive location (PS David, I have that visual editor again. Ta!). I have 1846 emails (and that’s after several days worth were lost). Apologies for the delays in replying and apologies to those whose messages bounced.

Keep sending in the news as the meme collapses…

9.3 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

A nation still drawing 18,000MW in it’s sleep can’t go solar…

I’m away, so this is a good time for Guest posts. Here Tony explains that we need lots of electricity even while we sleep. I didn’t realize our electricity needs were so high at night. The lowest power use each day is still as much as 60% of the peak. That’s the base load at 3am, and solar panels and wind farms just can’t provide it. We can burn the odd $500 billion building hundreds of solar plants, but even then, we would have to go “medieval” for about 8 hours each night. Candles anyone? — Jo

Guest post by Anton Lang

AUSTRALIAN POWER CONSUMPTION LOAD CURVES

There’s a message in these two diagrams that underlies every decision about national energy.

Summer power curve - Time of Day versus power consumption (MW)

These two diagrams are the most misunderstood images in the whole debate — the Load Curves for actual power consumption. These two shown here are for the whole of eastern Australia (including Tasmania and South Australia).

The top diagram shows typical consumption for a day in mid summer (Monday 30^th January 2012) and the second is for a typical mid winter day (Friday 22^nd July 2011). (Usually peak winter consumption is a bit higher).

Consumption dips at 3AM to 4 AM on both diagrams to 18,000MW. So even when asleep, eastern Australia is consumes 18,000MW of power, basically 60% to 65% of every Watt of power that could be generated (generation capacity is about equal to the peak load).

Keep reading →

9.1 out of 10 based on 95 ratings

US Government only spent $70 billion on climate since 2008

Remember the fear of global warming is falling because skeptics are well organized and well funded by vested interests and, after all, the US government is only spending ten thousand times more than Heartland. How could they compete?

The Congressional Research Service estimates that since 2008 the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on “climate change activities.”

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe presented the new CRS report on the Senate Floor Thursday to make the point that the Obama administration has been focused on “green” defense projects to the detriment of the military.

The Daily Caller

Hello to all the fans of global warming who know they are right because no matter how reasonable JoNova appears to be, no matter how convincing those graphs are, she “must be paid by Big-Energy”*. I know this post won’t make the slightest, infinitesimally small difference to you, because it was never about evidence anyway, was it? There’s no evidence skeptics were well funded, just like there is no evidence of that positive feedback in the models.

But sometime, somewhere (it’s coming) the world will wake up and realize that climate cash was not just a moneystream but an ocean. Climate funding is so large, there is not just a flow but currents, waves and tidal ebbs. Not to mention the sharks.

Seventy billion dollars and in just four, that’s “4”, years. What could possibly go wrong?

UPDATE: Table 5. Budget Authority for All Reported Climate Change Programs

FY2008 through FY2012

(in millions of nominal dollars)

	2008 Actual	ARRA Enacted	2009 Enacted	2010 Enacted^a	2011 Enacted	2012 Enacted	Total FY08-12
Department of Agriculture	268	271	147	574	75	83	1,418
Department of Commerce	280	222	392	381	338	319	1,932
Department of Defense	150	139	261	226	0	0	776
Department of Energy	5,873	25,288	4,711	4,570	5,689	5,693	51,824
Department of Health and Human Services	4	0	5	4	4	4	21
Department of the Interior	34	0	45	199	64b	59	572
Department of State	41	0	55	202	125	0	422
US Agency for International Development	115	0	222	306	398	0	1,041
Department of Transportation	20	100	45	128	1	1	295
Department of the Treasury	46	0	46	432	296	292	1,112
Environmental Protection Agency	124	0	129	154	133	119	659
NASA	1,223	268	1,205	1,247	1,431	1,390	6,764
National Science Foundation	228	123	293	346	351	363	1,704
Smithsonian Institution	6	0	6	7	7	8	34
Totals	8,412	26,411	7,562	8,775	8,913	8,330	68,402

The Congressional Research Service (CRF) Report in PDF form.

Very related stories:

The Ground Zero of Global Corruption – it starts with The Currency

Map: The Climate Change Scare Machine — the perpetual self-feeding cycle of alarm

Hat Tip: Climate Depot

*No. I’m not funded. Net, the blog has cost our family a considerable amount. Thank you to those who donate. It does help. – Jo

9.8 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

Glikson tells us to publish a paper – we say “the heretics have — when will you?”

Golly, but The Heretic is a play that appears to be genuinely useful art, something that actually challenges the paradigm. Brice Bosnich reviews it (see below), Andrew Glikson rails against it (so, it must be useful).

Glikson says, rightly: “Opinion and “belief” are no substitute for evidence. Those who doubt the basic laws of nature and empirical data are always welcome to submit research to peer review journals…”

To which Jo Nova says to Dr Andrew Glikson, “Skeptics can name 900 papers that support our views. And you still haven’t found that one mystery paper with observations that suggests CO2’s effect will be catastrophic eh? Is there any evidence?“

Glikson can name (as he did in our debate) hundreds of papers that are irrelevant, not based on observations, or are based on a logical fallacy. Climate models are not observations of the real world. Glikson’s faith in his theory is unscientific.

Before Glikson demands we disprove him (and we can) he needs to show he has some observations that support him. Until then, man-made global warming is just another religion.

Jo

———————————————————————————————–

Guest Post: Brice Bosnich

Just back from seeing The Heretic in Melbourne on Tuesday. The theater was full. This is my reaction.

a) Leaving aside the scientific message, I would score the play as a 7.5 out of 10, where 10 is metaphysical perfection.

b) It is set in an earth science department, recently retooled as climate science, of a British university.

c) A cast of 6 is involved; a female faculty member (lecturer?) and her daughter, an anorexic greenie going though youthful rebellion, a male student who is green but delights in scientific rationality, a former military type janitor whose reason for existence in the play remains obscure to me, a human resources female and the male professor of the department.

d) The play is dominated by the female faculty member.

e) The female faculty member and the professor did a fine job of their parts, the anorexic and the male student did an awful lot of shouting as a substitute for acting subtlety and the human resources women, although appropriately over-painted and over-dressed, was not sufficiently desiccated to be truly representative.

f) The play opens showing a white board (Panasonic!) on which is written the (accepted) logarithmic relationship between CO2 concentration and forcing. The science described in the play is remarkably accurate.

g) The female faculty member finds the theory of AGW and its purported consequences to be unsupported by facts. Her professor, although probably sharing a similar view, adheres to the official line because of the considerable advantages he sees for himself and his department and the nasty consequences of not toeing the line.

h) Whereas the professor could reluctantly live with the faculty member’s conclusions, he is outraged when she expresses them to her students in class and, worse, on TV.

i) As a consequence the professor attempts to get rid of the heretic, with the help of human resources.

j) Although the lecturer gets death threats, human resources does nothing. The military type janitor seems to be involved with the death threats.

k) The rest of the play is about the interactions between the various actors.

My wife who is not a scientist found some of science talk in the play obscure, eg linear versus logarithmic relationships etc. As I said, I did not find the play especially engaging, but as an accurate representation of the state and politics of climate science it was right on the money. As Dr Johnson said about Scotland, “Sir, it was worth seeing, but it was not worth going to see.” (We drove from Canberra!)

Cheers,

Brice

(Professor Brice Bosnich, FRS, is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Professor in Chemistry at The University of Chicago, Emeritus, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University. Prof Bosnich was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000.)

—————————————————

Dr Andrew Glikson objects to The Heretic in a letter to its author

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/5/15/dealing-with-the-heretic.html

Mr Richard Bean
Director
Melbourne Theatre Company

Dear Mr Richard Bean

As an Earth and paleo-climate scientist of some 45 years-long experience and more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, I suggest the show “The Heretic”, which I have not seen but about which I have read, can only lead to trivialization and further denial of what the scientific world regards as the greatest threat humanity and nature are facing.

I suggest the show plays into the hands of those who support the use of the thin terrestrial atmosphere (breathable thickness of less than 10 km) for further carbon emission on top of the 350 billion tons of carbon already emitted since the 18th century and >150 billion tons carbon released by land clearing, fires etc.. As shown in my enclosed paper, the pace of CO2 rise over the last 40 years, recently reaching >2 ppm CO2/year, has now exceeded any recorded for the last 65 million years, while the atmospheric level of 394 ppm CO2 is now near that of the warm Pliocene era some 3 million years-ago. Our empirical evidence is based on direct observations of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system by the world’s climate monitoring bodies – including NOAA, NASA, NSIDC, Hadley-MET, Tyndale, Potsdam, CSIRO, BOM and other.

Opinion and “belief” are no substitute for evidence. Those who doubt the basic laws of nature and empirical data are always welcome to submit research to peer review journals where their papers will be treated the same as any other. In so far as their propositions are upheld, anyone who is able to demonstrate as if:

The Earth’s climate is not warming, or
The anthropogenic release of >500 billion tons of carbon since the 18th century is not the primary factor responsible for global warming

is bound to receive the highest accolades.

I wonder whether such a show, if concerned with denial of the holocaust of world war II, would have been conceived?

I suggest that, given the threat of anthropogenic global warming to the terrestrial climate and to marine ecosystems, a theatric show making mockery of the gravity of the climate issue for future generations can only be seriously mistaken.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Glikson
Earth and paleo-climate scientist
Australian National University

7.1 out of 10 based on 46 ratings

We can’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale

This is part of a series that Tony Cox and I are doing that drills down to the most important points and papers, with proper references, as a definitive resource.The models are wrong: not just “unverified”, not just “uncertain”, but proven to have failed. — Jo

Joint Post: Tony Cox and Jo Nova

Across different regions, and different time-spans over the last century, the models fail.

Koutsoyiannis and Anagnostopolous et al show those models can’t model the recent century, and because the models fail to predict regional and smaller scale effects it’s impossible that they could predict longer and global values.^[i]

On 30 year time frames, the original observations are nothing like the models projections on a local scale. (Click to enlarge).

The models should retrospectively match the actual temperature over the past 100 years. This test of retrospectivity is called hindcasting. If a model has valid assumptions about the climatic effect of variables such as greenhouse gases, particularly CO₂, then the model should be able to match past known data.

“…all the models were “irrelevant with reality” at the 30 year climate scale…”

When tested, the global climate models failed to hindcast the climate at 55 locations around the world. The models were even worse at reproducing what happened across 70 sites spread throughout continental USA. Their outputs show the models are unable to model the known climate.

70 sites were used around the US. Models couldn’t model this size region accurately. (Click to enlarge)

…

Keep reading →

8.5 out of 10 based on 50 ratings

Flashback: The Great Debate, a rare chance to shakedown the science

Dr Andrew Glikson

The litany chants“The Debate is over”, but hey where was that debate?

Could the Nova Glikson “Great Debate” be it? Surely not, you think, but debates in “climate science” are high stakes affairs, where branded climate scientists will not publicly debate well known skeptics. They know they can’t win. Instead, the closest thing we get to a real debate is a kind of debate by proxy. The heavyweights on the establishment side pretend to be above it all, but of course, they are only an email away from the man on the front line.

What started as a single pair of “Yes”, then “No” articles that started on Quadrant become a five part saga lasting more than a month. I’ve compiled it all into a PDF which can be printed or read from start to finish, and might be just the thing for fence sitters who like to read. Some people really hanker after the “back-and-forwards” answer and question format. For those that missed it, two years on, the Great Debate still remains a rare example where two opponents actually drilled down to the points that matter.

To Andrew Glickson’s credit, he did not knock back the challenge with the usual “I only debate real climate scientists” — which automatically rules out most of the competition and leaves them debating other government funded establishment “thinkers” who also haven’t disagreed with the meme and been sacked, sabotaged or retired out of frustration.

Dr Glikson is a paleoclimatologist who works at Australian National University along with Will Steffen and the Climate Institute. I’m a blogger with questions he can’t answer. He’s connected via email with most of the team of so called expert climate scientists in Australia. I’m widely read and networked with people who don’t take anyone’s word for it.

When a science theory is monopolistically funded, the normal competition in science is hobbled. So the internet becomes the front line: where the ruling establishment meets free wits.

As it happens the online format is arguably the most powerful method for getting to the truth. There are no limits on space or time, both sides can use as many graphs and references as they want, and can “phone a friend” ad lib. It doesn’t depend on “showmanship”, nor on an ambush, and everyone has infinite right of reply.

It came about because Dr Andrew Glikson requested space for a one off article on Quadrant and the editor, Michael Connor, agreed, and then approached me to write a reply. The debate went through five rounds (one round, possibly the key point, came out in comments). Dr Glikson asked to reply the sixth time. I welcomed it, but two years later, it still hasn’t arrived.

Glikson Vs Nova: The Great Climate Debate PDF.

If I can only post one exchange to sum it up — this was in my final reply, summing up the paleoclimatic evidence Dr Glikson had put forwards.

Dr Andrew Glikson: Studies from 3 million to 500 million years ago show that when volcanoes blow up or asteroids hit, CO₂ levels rise and animals die

Jo Nova: Yes. That’d be because both those events are God-awful, destructive things that dump mountains of ash in the atmosphere. The ash cools the planet. Cold times are horrid for life on earth. Animals die en masse. Tsunamis, dust and lava are none too friendly either. The CO₂ effect is a mere rider of correlation, and correlation is not causation.

We know (as I’ve said before) that colder oceans suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere. We would be shocked (shocked!) if the geological record didn’t show a correlation between temperature and CO₂. Temperature drives CO₂.

Read the caption on Figure 1. “Dating errors are typically less than ±1 Myr.” We’re hunting for an effect that ought to happen in days, weeks and months, with some result within decades, and the graph we’re looking at resolves things to plus or minus one million years. We’re searching for nanotubes in a hay stack, and we’ve only got our bifocals.

Keep reading →

9.7 out of 10 based on 54 ratings

Unthreaded

I’m travelling interstate at the moment, and with site maintenance being rather larger than usual, apologies for things being thin on the ground here. I have finally got email working again, and have been following the ever entertaining antics of the death threats that werent, the gun licence that wasn’t, and the accurate, restrained and well mannered scientists who aren’t accurate, restrained orwell mannered. I will be posting more soon.

8.2 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

Blogger’s speech to the NY Fed tells it like it is

Joint Post: David Evans and Jo Nova

Robert Wenzel says to Federal Reserve: “Leave the Building to the Four-Legged Rats”

Finally a speech with attitude tells it like it is, at the US Federal Reserve. The speech was given by blogger Robert Wenzel in late April to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, because they invited him to speak. It deserves a read — a man who knows the details tallies up the score, and politely lays out the contradictions of the Federal Reserve at point blank range.

But it is much more than that. For the US Federal Reserve to invite Wenzel to explain Austrian economics to them is like “the team” in Australia inviting me along for lunch at the Department of Climate Change to explain why the CO2 theory ain’t too hot. If that happened (as if), what would I say? This is the nature of the choice that Wenzel faced. A slam-dunk, in the nicest possible way.

The convergence of common sense: Austrians are the skeptics of economics

Wenzel is an Austrian economist, which is like being a climate skeptic in climate change. In the 1930s, Keynesian economics took over from classical economics among the central banks and governments, then academia, and by 1970s, in the words of Richard Nixon, “We are all Keynesians now”. Well not quite. Austrian economics came into existence around 1930, in response to the monetary upheaval. It is similar to classical economics but with a better understanding of the business cycle and monetary theory. It makes sense, fits the facts, and the man in the street can point out mistakes made by the elite. Since the Internet started, it has enjoyed a revival. A huge revival.

Keynesian economics was essentially an elaborate excuse to lower interest rates in the 1930s, basically because the banks were about to go bust. The main assets of banks at the time were bonds, which are worth more if interest rates are lower. And governments love lower interest rates, because that creates more money (who wants to be disciplined eh?). Loose Money means Loose Legislators. It appears to boost short term demand, and that makes influential businessmen and other recipients of the new money very happy. Governments can avoid hard calls on welfare. (Everyone seems to get a free lunch — everyone except the hardest workers and diligent savers.) Another part of the problem of the 1930s was that there wasn’t enough money around — some towns literally had no money to circulate — so schemes to hand out money by burying it in bottles and having people dig it up had a certain logic — indeed, they weren’t any different from giving tax refunds to people who didn’t pay tax, except that people who dug for bottles of cash got fitter. But schemes to simulate demand were perversely backwards: corn prices would rise if we stop farmers from farming, wages would rise if we legislated it (but jobs would be lost). A proliferation of government boards made the economy bureaucratic, but ultimately prevented the US from recovering as quickly from the 1929 shock like the rest of the western world.

But what is good for banks and government isn’t necessarily good for the economy. Keynesian economics were considered crackpot by the standards of the day and by classical economists. Ever noticed how Keynesian economics never quite seems to make sense, explanations are often complicated and unfinished, and Keynesian commentators like Paul Krugman of the NYT or Ross Gittins of the SMH are always contradicting themselves two years later? Keynesian economics was a radical and “counter intuitive” economic response, that made little sense to experts at the time, but governments and banks loved it.

So how did it become the orthodoxy? Same as the CO2 theory of climate. Government adopted it, force fed its practitioners money via plum jobs and consultancies, while quietly ignoring and starving its opponents. The central banks adopted it, and they fund much of the research work at universities. By the 1950’s you could only get a PhD in economics if you were a Keynesian, because outside money to the economics department came from organizations that preferred Keynesian for political reasons, and it pretty much still that way. Anyone with a PhD in economics is a Keynesian, with rare exceptions. Nearly all the interesting consulting jobs in economics come from central and commercial banks, and they strongly support Keynesian economics. Like being a climate skeptic in climate science, being an Austrian economist is very career limiting.

Keynesian economics and the CO2 theory of global warming are Big Game hunting arenas for people seeking power, control and buckets of cash. In both areas, Big Government is one of the hunters. Same mechanisms, same practitioners, same beneficiaries. And both came unstuck starting around 1999 because the nonsense was progressively unmasked on the Internet. Which is why Austrian economics and climate skepticism are on a hot-ticket convergence at the moment as two audiences of reality-lovin’ net-heads cross paths.

I think Keynsianism is the tempting path to tyranny, but Keynes himself was no fool. There is a very strong account that when he we was near death he essentially told a visitor that his theory was just a response to the particular political conditions of the 1930s, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously in other contexts. Modern Keynesians vehemently deny this, of course.

The period 1982 to 2007 saw a huge build up in debt as money creation took off, with low interest rates and relaxed banking rules, just like the last time — 1920 to 1929, after the creation of the Fed and after WWI was out of the way. That bubble ended in a serious deflationary contraction 1929 – 1931. Bernanke, a student of the period, has vowed not to let the same happen again. Which is why the Federal Reserve, and other central banks, can be relied upon to print as required this time around, not to let our money/debt bubble deflate. Instead they will inflate away the debt, like a prolonged version of the 1970s. The investing world is only starting to work this out. Like Wenzel (and Murdoch) have been saying, there is a great deal of inflation dead ahead. Are your investments ready for that? See, these arcane arguments can really matter!

A few selected highlights from the original at Economic Policy Journal. (And see some of the feedback.)

—————————————————————————

Robert Wenzel

Please allow me to begin with methodology, I hold the view developed by such great economic thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard that there are no constants in the science of economics similar to those in the physical sciences.

In the science of physics, we know that water freezes at 32 degrees. We can predict with immense accuracy exactly how far a rocket ship will travel filled with 500 gallons of fuel. There is preciseness because there are constants, which do not change and upon which equations can be constructed..

There are no such constants in the field of economics since the science of economics deals with human action, which can change at any time. If potato prices remain the same for 10 weeks, it does not mean they will be the same the following day. I defy anyone in this room to provide me with a constant in the field of economics that has the same unchanging constancy that exists in the fields of physics or chemistry.

And yet, in paper after paper here at the Federal Reserve, I see equations built as though constants do exist. …

…

Keep reading →

8.9 out of 10 based on 79 ratings

Unthreaded – Site maintenance coming

Apologies for the inconvenience. Unfortunately sometime this week the site will be offline for some hours (up to one day). This move is in an effort to reduce costs. Thanks to a generous offer from a reader (thank you David) for the suggestion. I hadn’t been paying attention, and bandwidth charges had rather surprized me. (Don’t miss the post on the ARC funding that I just put up too). Jo

PS: People emailing me during this day will have trouble. Please save those emails and send them again in a day or two.

8.5 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Want climate resistant oysters, or climate “Justice”? The ARC has millions to help. But no money for skeptics.

File this under “Monopolistic Science”

Australian Taxpayer funds in 2012 are supporting around 50 projects about “climate change” or “greenhouse gases”.

One David McKnight has got $95k to study how Australian governments “spin” the news. So which cancer research project was knocked back so he could study a “hyper-adversarial” news system? And what is so bad about a competitive news system in any case? What are we aiming for — real news or better propaganda? (See my response to David McKnight in The Australian to see how confused this journalism lecturer is.)

The dollar values here are usually for three year projects. Some of these projects potentially produce press releases which are nothing more than disguised forms of government advertising for big-spending climate policies.

———————————————————————

Guest Post: Dr Roberto Soria, Perth

The ARC Major Grant results for 2012 were announced in Nov 2011. Here is what Australian scientists are up to this year.

The ARC (Australian Research Council) is the main source of funding for all researchers in all fields of natural, political and social sciences. Getting a grant will make a difference between carrying on doing research and finding another job, for many researchers. Take a look, for example, at the abstracts of the winning Discovery Projects.

I counted at least 50 winning projects with the magic words “climate change” or greenhouse gas emission in them (compared with about 10 astronomy projects, and 19 cancer research projects, for example). “Climate change” projects raked up $16 million in the Discovery category alone.

There’s a handful of them. But there are projects listed as geography, biology, film & digital media, oceanography, journalism, civil engineering, statistics, applied maths, soil science, political science, physiology, geology, archaeology, literary studies, psychology, econometrics, and more… all claiming in their 3-line abstracts that their various pet projects are going to help us understand, fight, adapt for, convince people of climate change. There’s one grant proposal that starts with the words “climate change represents a moral challenge to humanity“: it won a cute $200,000, no need to read more. There’s one that promises to study how oysters can be made resilient to climate change: here’s $285,000 coming their way. A $320,000 civil engineering research proposal informs us that “evidence” shows how floods and rains are getting worse because of global warming. Another one got $250,000 for drafting recommendations to achieve “climate justice” (whatever that is); expensive, yes, but do you want to put a price on justice? Then there’s a physiology professor at Sydney Uni who got $370,000 for a 3-year project that “will show to what extent individuals can compensate for temperature changes, and thereby render populations resilient to climate change” (I put on my sweater; I take it off. There, I have just saved you 3 years of work and $370,000).

For the old school Marxists, there’s a $239,000 Monash (where else?) project that will “develop a new cultural materialist paradigm” applied to science-fiction representations of extreme climate change. And we cannot miss a $314,000 Monash grant to study how climate change is shrinking birds (in California, climate change is making birds bigger, but never mind). A group of civil engineers got $320,000 for developing light-gauge steel roofing systems: they were clever enough to say that we need steel roofing to increase building resistance against “extreme wind events caused by climate change”. $100,000 went to two Queensland sociologists who will study how to guarantee “food security in Australia in an era of climate change” through “a multiplicity of agencies” (well, at least these two chaps have got food security for a couple of years).

Keep reading →

8.9 out of 10 based on 48 ratings

Has CO2 warmed the planet at all in the last 50 years? It’s harder to tell than you think.

Joint Post: Jo Nova and Tony Cox

Even most skeptics agree that the world has been warming during the last 50 years, but there is apparently no significant underlying warming trend in 46 out of 47 years of data. Something decidedly unusual happened to the world in 1977 and we don’t know for sure what it was. The world got warmer, and the change “stuck”. But there were no extra emissions of CO2 in that year, so there is no reason to pin this to CO2.

It’s difficult to believe we are not sure – but the last 50 years of warming trend depends on that single stepwise leap in 1977. Look at the graph below. Does it show one strong underlying warming trend, or is it really a trend so insignificant that it wouldn’t exist if there was not a step change that artificially bolstered it?

A series of two flat lines can appear to be a continuous warming trend if a linear trend line is fitted because it ignores the step change. McKitrick and Voselgang

This step effect was first noted by David Stockwell in 2009

The continuous warming appears to be obvious in the records of the lower atmosphere when we draw a linear trend line.

McKitrick and Voselgang (click to enlarge)

But look again at the data, allowing for the step-change in 1977.

McKitrick and Voselgang (click to enlarge)

Keep reading →

8.4 out of 10 based on 87 ratings

Tim Flannery in Parramatta will be happy to answer your questions. Book now!

Tim Flannery is paid to help you understand why Australia is getting a Carbon Tax in eight weeks time. If you can’t fathom why the nation which emits just 1.3% of all man-made CO2 is going to pay three times the current market rate to reduce world temperatures by 0.00 degrees C, I’m sure Prof Tim will be delighted to help. Do book quickly. Sometimes these events sell out (even before they are publicized).

Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, Professor Tim Flannery, is visiting Sydney. The sixth biggest CBD in the country, Parramatta will host the next public forum for the Climate Commission. This is your opportunity to get involved in the conversation about climate change.

The Climate Commission provides independent, authoritative information on climate change to the Australian public.

Event details

Where: Parramatta RSL club , Cnr Macquarie & O’Connell St , Parramatta

When: 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM, Tuesday 15 May 2012. Doors open 6.00pm

Everyone is welcome. Book your place now to avoid disappointment.

Click here to Register for attendance
H/t Pat

What would you like to ask Tim in our National Climate Conversation?

Perhaps you wonder why he keeps calling us names?
Maybe you can’t figure out how the Climate Commission can call themselves “independent” when it’s funded by The Government?
Perhaps you’d like to see a real debate instead of just being told “there isn’t one”.
Could it be that the compelling case to sacrifice billions to “lead the way” to escapes you? You wonder why we don’t spend that money planting trees, curing cancer, or feeding kids in Chad? Better to let them starve eh?
The Clean-Energy-Future-Fund tells households they don’t have to pay the carbon tax (because it only applies to evil corporations). If we don’t have to pay, which part of our electricity bill do we ignore?

9.7 out of 10 based on 69 ratings

Recent Posts

Don’t Sell Your Coat by Harold Ambler

Excuse 1/”this is not how science works”

Excuse 2/ The funding was mostly for “Climate Technology”

Excuse 3/ It’s incomprehensible that money could affect science. Ergo science is uncorruptible?

Excuse 4/ Timmer points out that some people are looking for solar effects on the climate.

Excuse 5/ The government had been throwing lots of money at climate science for decades.

Excuse 6/ Science is done by peer review, not auditing

Cheap Shots that prove my point

Could the Irish bureaucrats have made this more complex? Was that a levy on a tax?

Guest Post by Frank Lansner

Sea levels – the raw data is always adjusted upwards

Guest post by Anton Lang

UPDATE: Table 5. Budget Authority for All Reported Climate Change Programs

Totals

8,412

26,411

7,562

8,775

8,913

8,330

68,402

Very related stories:

Guest Post: Brice Bosnich

Dr Andrew Glikson objects to The Heretic in a letter to its author

Joint Post: Tony Cox and Jo Nova

The litany chants“The Debate is over”, but hey where was that debate?

Joint Post: David Evans and Jo Nova

Robert Wenzel says to Federal Reserve: “Leave the Building to the Four-Legged Rats”

The convergence of common sense: Austrians are the skeptics of economics

Robert Wenzel

File this under “Monopolistic Science”

Guest Post: Dr Roberto Soria, Perth

Joint Post: Jo Nova and Tony Cox

Event details

What would you like to ask Tim in our National Climate Conversation?

JoNova

Find Things

Register for emails

Recent Comments

Statistics

Handbooks

Most commented

Archives

Tags

Links

Categories

Books

**Excuse 4/ Timmer points out that some people are looking for solar effects on the climate.**