The Planet Under Pressure conference has brought out the clawing powermongers. The Commentator.com team who were brave enough to attend, tell us that no one got very excited about the science, but the word “regulation” was received, well… ecstatically.
The conference was largely focused on how scientists and activists can coalesce to deconstruct the Western way of living and moving to something entirely different, where economic growth and wealth creation is abandoned and replaced, instead, with sustainability targets, trade barriers, regulation and taxation. Indeed there were numerous occasions during the main sessions whereby even the mention of the word ‘regulation’ was met with rapturous applause.
See? The “regulating class” name fits them to a tee.
They have given up on reasoned debate and instead are fomenting a revolution.
According to Lord Anthony Giddens – a preeminent sociologist and speaker at the conference – it means that now is the time for an “activist civil society” to move away from the Western way of life which has proved “too destructive” and toward a radical utopia (read, communes) – all part of what he terms a renewed assault on global warming sceptics.
We can laugh at them, but as Marc Morano points out, they speak from the seat of power (and on taxpayer funds). More of the taxpayers are strongly skeptical than strongly pro-“climate”-action, yet they shamelessly use those funds to promote their own agenda.
And we always knew that “Sustainability” was not a field of science. This prof demonstrates why:
We heard from Sander Van Der Leeuw – Dean and Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University – that now is the time for scientists to forget objectivity and become citizens once again; for scientists to “better understand decision-making” at the highest level.
How blatant! A call to put politics ahead of science…we’ve been complaining for years that some of the government climate scientists have been doing that, now this professor doesn’t even bother to pretend any more.
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ADMIN NOTE: For site maintenance (in an effort to rearrange things to reduce costs) the site may be down over Easter for 24 hours. Don’t panic! Apologies for the inconvenience. — Jo
The brilliant James Delingpole is coming to Australia thanks to the IPA to promote freedom for the world, to rescue modern science and to sell a hundred thousand copies of his new book: Killing the Earth to Save It (How Environmentalists are ruining the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your jobs). He is visiting Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. If you don’t know who James Delingpole is, all I can say is Where Have You Been?
Delingpole is devastating. His disarming honesty, outrageous anecdotes and wide ranging research makes for an ripping read that combines politics, science, money in ways only Delingpole can. His quips paralyze the most excessively pious and drown pomposity with cold common sense.
He has a knack for getting to the heart of the matter, and usually with a poleaxe. I’d heard a lot about Agenda 21, but I didn’t know why it mattered or where it came from until I read Killing the Earth…”
James Delingpole – one of the worlds most popular, most irreverent libertarian commentators. His twitter bio says: I’m right about everything. He pulls no punches, and tells it like it is.
Guaranteed to be eye-opening, though provoking, and entertaining.
In Perth, numbers are limited, so please RSVP with names to make sure you don’t miss out. Thanks to Council for the National Interest (CNI WA) for helping with the Perth event. We’ll be asking for donations to cover the costs on the night.
Soon, the moment will come when the crowd will say “I always knew it was fake”.
Here are three signs we are at the beginning of The End.
1. Op-Ed writers will be pointing out how governments are unwinding policies: Dominic Lawson: Britain Has Finally Rejected The Bogus Economics Of Climate Change. Germany (home of half the worlds solar energy production) is winding up its pursuit of renewables, and eight Eastern European nations said “No Thanks” (legally) to the EU’s authoritarian dictat on carbon emissions, and hardly anyone complained…
And which energy source is ecologically correct Germany now developing faster than any other? Lignite, otherwise known as brown coal, the most carbon- intensive fuel known to modern man.
This makes the countries on the European Union’s eastern borders (notably Poland, for which indigenous coal is a dominant energy source) even more reluctant to accept the national emissions targets promoted by Brussels. Eight of these nations launched a legal challenge and last week they won a ruling by the European Court of Justice that Brussels had exceeded its powers in imposing such limits. The court brushed aside the European commission’s complaint that it would not otherwise be able to “protect the integrity of the EU-wide market of [carbon] allowances”.
The most telling point is that this verdict gained almost no coverage. As Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, observes: “In the past, Poland’s intractable hostility to green unilateralism was greeted by protestation in capitals around Europe. Today it is hardly noticed by the media, while green campaigners have become limp . . . Other and more pressing concerns are taking precedence and are completely overriding the green agenda.”
3. And writers will tell us how skeptics are winning:
For years S. Fred Singer was one of a few voices to challenge the claims of impending doom from alleged manmade global warming.
TEXT BY MARK LANDSBAUM
We visited with him during his recent visit to Chapman University. It was a happy occasion. After years of criticizing the allegedly “settled science,” Singer’s side of the debate is enjoying new and widespread credibility. This is thanks to many convergent developments.
First, there’s that inconvenient problem for warmists that the scant atmospheric heating they pointed to as evidence of looming doom pretty much stopped about 15 years ago. It’s awkward to keep screaming that the sky is falling when everyone can see it isn’t.
Then there are the discoveries of how alleged climate experts for years bullied dissenters, plotted to keep opposing views out of peer-reviewed publications and doctored data to conveniently arrive at the necessary conclusions to keep “the cause” alive. “The cause” is how insiders referred to what they wanted you to believe is impartial science. But it always has been a cause, almost religiously so. We know these things now thanks to two massive leaks of emails revealing accounts of the insiders’ candid hand-wringing and scheming.
Also in recent years has been an awakening among respectable scientists, heretofore content to go along with the supposed “consensus” about manmade global warming’s threat. One of them, David M.W. Evans, formerly of the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change), became skeptical when he discovered the main global warming argument collapsing from 1998-2006.
Scoff scoff scoff. There is no global conspiracy to get One World Government. If there was, the leaders would have sent a memo to Bob Brown to be quiet, to Scientific American to rephrase the agenda, and to Richard Black to stay out of group photos at socialist events. So there is no central command, no invisible patriarch who pulls all the strings. But clearly there is a whole class of people who “know” what you need better than you do, and they know you need more governing. The regulating class. Shhhh.
First, the red shade of Black
Blacks Whitewash* has caught Richard Black (paid by the British taxpayer to be an impartial science reporter) taking an active part in a meeting of people who want to influence government policies. Quoting BlacksWhitewash:
“So the Outreach Group advises UNEP and it looks at how unelected NGO’s can better use the information within the GEO reports to pressure Governments. In the Network 2015 document there is a photo of the Outreach Group at the San Sebastian meeting:
There, behind a Felix Dodds and an Esther Larranaga, is Richard Black, BBC journalist, a publicly funded broadcaster with a duty to remain impartial, in the middle of an advisory process that seeks to influence Government decisions. There with the full knowledge and agreement of the BBC.”
Imagine we had BBC reporters sitting in on, say, Heartland Institute meetings (with hypothetically — coal-industry-activists in the room too). How the MSM journalists would howl, if they caught him “being one of the team”, explaining how to get messages out, and how to push an agenda. (And bear in mind it is not a true equivalence, comparing NGO-green-activists with Heartland. The latter use private money (not government grants) and promote policies that reduce taxes and the burden on individuals, where as the UNEP and co always want the opposite, and do it with taxpayer help as well. Which group poses a greater threat to the public? Which group needs great scrutiny?)
Black is supposed to serve the taxpayer, yet he is using the position and support the taxpayer has given him to assist groups who are pushing a controversial proposal for highly expensive, onerous policies that will give these groups and their “friends” more power, and more money, all at the expense of the people Black is supposed to represent.
The BBC Charter states that it is supposed to “…do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality…”. How could Black point out flaws in their arguments when he spends so much time helping them craft their message and so little time with the people who point out the flaws?
Blacks Whitewash points out this is a long ongoing pattern, and that Black has been involved since 2007 in repeat meetings, and that he does not just attend but delivers presentations like this: “Media – Lessons from the WSSD and the Obama Campaign – Richard Black, BBC Environment Correspondent”. Read it all, it’s an excellent post. [Waybackmachine archive of BlacksWhitewash page here].
Here’s a forgotten paper that deserves more attention: Idso 1998.
Rather than using an enormously complex global circulation model (or 22) to come up with a figure for climate sensitivity, Sherwood Idso does calculations from eight completely different natural experiments which all arrive at similar figures. In short, he reviewed 20 years of work to arrive at a prediction that if CO2 is doubled we will get 0.4°C of warming at most, and even he admitted, it might be an overestimate. Basically by the time CO2 levels double, he says we ought expect 0 – 0.4°C of warming, after feedbacks are taken into account. Idso started off assuming that the feedbacks were largely positive, but repeatedly found that they were negative.
Idso’s approach was novel. Instead of climate sensitivity to CO2, he estimates the sensitivity of the Earth to any factor. He calls it the “surface air temperature sensitivity factor“. Once something known heats or cools the Earth, how much do the net feedbacks amplify or dampen that initial change? Rather than trying to measure and capture every single feedback and process, and then calculate the end results, Idso finds situations where he can isolate a factor and calculate the effect after all the known and unknown feedbacks have occurred.
There are eight natural experiments Idso looked at. Even he was skeptical initially, knowing his initial experiments were based on one city and shorter time frames, but the independent experiments turned up such similar numbers that he grew confident that the results were meaningful.
Natural Experiment 1: Humidity over Phoenix affects minimum temperatures
He looked at humidity and temperatures on cloudless days over Phoenix Arizona. He followed 30 years of records looking for how water vapor may have influenced the maximum and minimum temperatures at the same time of year. He found that the amount of water vapor didn’t affect maxima, but did affect the minima which occur just before dawn — when the effect of the humidity trapping the outgoing heat radiating off the planet was not confounded by incoming solar radiation.
Natural Experiment 2: Dust over Phoenix keeps the city warmer in winter
Idso estimated the sensitivity by calculating the extra warming effect of the dust in the winter months and the changes in radiative flux from the changes in vertical distribution of dust between the seasons.
Natural Experiment 3: Changes in incoming solar radiation and temperature at 81 US sites
There were two common trends, a lower one for the West Coast which he speculated was driven by the Pacific, and a higher one for the interior which matched the trends at Phoenix. This was the beginning of a pattern that consistently shows that different regions have slightly different sensitivities — all negative.
Natural Experiment 4: The natural greenhouse effect
The natural greenhouse effect is accepted as being 33°C due to 348Wm-2 of greenhouse warming. That’s 0.1°C /(W m-2). (The IPCC expects that doubling CO2 will increase radiation by 3.7 W m-2 before feedbacks,, suggesting a temperature increase around 0.4°C.)
Natural Experiment 5: The Pole to Equator Gradient
Idso divided up the globe into small bands across the latitudes, used the distribution of cloud cover , mean air temperatures, water vapor pressures and the solar radiation absorbed at the surface to calculate estimates of sensitivity for each band. The results fell into two major trend groups. Basically most of the globe recorded similar estimates to the one in Experiment 4 [0.1°C /(W m-2)], but the poles were twice as sensitive [0.2°C /(W m-2)]. This is what we’d expect. (The tropics are less sensitive to temperature change because evaporation rises dramatically at around 30°C which slows further heat gain. The poles are the most sensitive because there is little evaporation, and albedo changes from highly reflective ice to highly absorbent ocean can exacerbate temperature changes.)
It comes as not even a tiny surprize that when someone asks “Where does all the CO2 go in an ice age?” that the answer is “The Ocean“.
We already know temperatures rise 800 years before CO2 levels (Caillon 2003), and we know the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the sky. Moreover, basic chemistry tells us that CO2 (like all gases) will dissolve better in cold water, and be released as the water warms. To cap it all off, the deep abyss of the oceans turns over once every millenia or so (which fits loosely with the “lag” between temperature and CO2 levels).
But you would think this new research was solving a deep mystery, rather than confirming what most sane knowledgeable people would expect. Nonetheless, this may be the first detailed study of C13 levels going back 24,000 years.
Why did the atmosphere contain so little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago? Why did it rise when the Earth’s climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study based on newly developed isotope measurements. This study has now been published in the scientific journal “Science” by scientists from the Universities of Bern and Grenoble and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association.
What does it take to be a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science? Apparently, making wildly exaggerated predictions that are already known to be wrong, calling people names, and having a thin grip on the scientific method is just the stuff the Academy is looking for. Who knew? Science used to be about seeking the truth.
Tim Flannery
The Australian Academy of Science thinks that it can give the besieged Tim Flannery more credibility. Instead, they pour their own credibility down the sink. If making predictions that are wrong and exaggerated, and following fashions of scientific groupthink is “good science”, who next will make the hallowed list of “Fellows” — Cate Blanchett? Clive Hamilton? Charles Manson?
Hailing people who achieve in Science Communication might be fine, but it is not communicating science when their predictions don’t fit the real world and they won’t change the theory. The prophesies of Tim are a religion. (See “Help! How you can tell a scientist from a non-scientist”.)
Now every time Flannery makes a statement like these below, it can carry the AAS logo:
For the first time, this global super-organism, this global intelligence will be able to send a signal, a strong and clear signal to the earth. And what that means in a sense is that we can, we will be a regulating intelligence for the planet, I’m sure, in the future … And lead to a stronger Gaia, if you will, a stronger earth system”. ABC The Drum (No record available?)
‘This planet, this Gaia, will have acquired a brain and a nervous system. That will make it act as a living animal, as a living organism, at some sort of level.’
‘Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof,‘ The Age, 2006
‘It’s hardly surprising that beaches are going to disappear with climate change, National Climate Change Forum, (see here)
‘Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis.‘ 2004
“The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.” March 2008
Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane would ‘need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.’ June 2007
In science, ”a theory is only valid for as long as it has not been disproved“… (The Weather Makers, 2005, p2)
Vincent Gray dryly replied: If I state that Flannery will go to a special monkey heaven when he dies, who could ever disprove that?
How many favors has Flannery done science communication? The reputation of science?
Flannery says we need “a clear and level-headed discussion“, but he calls those who disagree with him “deniers“, and likens Nobel Physics Prize winners to “flat earthers“ who say “the climate isn’t changing“, even though no serious skeptical scientist has ever said such a thing. It’s sloppy thinking based on sloppy research and wrapped in hypocrisy and ideology. Flannery is not a man who is even trying to have a scientific conversation. Is this the AAS “spokesman” for science?
How did it come to this? The downfall of another once-great institution
The Academy needs to move with the times. It’s been caught here, another unwitting victim of the government monopsony that distorts the scientific market free of ideas. While our government (and many others) have poured billions into research to find a crisis due to CO2, none of them have paid anything to find the opposite. The scientists of the Academy have been caught napping. There are around 450 Fellows, and 20 of the 21 new appointments are rigorously done, but it only took 6 in the Special Election Committee to recommend “Tim-Flannery”. The only vote is an email one, and there is no proviso for discussion or dissent before the vote. (There used to be when votes were taken at the AGM.)
Hello Earthians! It’s time to say thank you to Edison, to Faraday and Maxwell, it’s time to celebrate the Gift of Light.
Saturday night at 8.30 – 9.30pm this week is the Hour of Power
(Don’t confuse this with the splinter group celebrations called Earth Hour, where people sit in the dark — so they can appreciate the glory of luminosity come 9.31).
The Glory! We are the lucky generation with light at the flick of a switch
The CEI gets the thumbs up too. They are running Human Achievement Hour. (Click the image for more info).
In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived the odd ninety thousand year stretches of hypothermic, abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years, cowering in corners, listening to drips, waiting for the sun.
There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny.
It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness. Be brave, stand up to the people who want to tell you what kind of globe you are allowed to buy. Feed the world by helping to boost global CO2 to lift crop yields and fertilize farms all over the planet. Children are hungry in Haiti and, since CO2 is a well mixed gas, sooner or later, you will be helping them.
Things you can do at 8.30 on Saturday:
Write down the tally on the electricity meter.
Turn on all the lights you can find (bonus points for incandescents from the stash.)
Put on the party lights, the patio light, the pool light, the mozzie zappers, unpack those Christmas decorations. Get out your torches. Switch the movement detector spotlights to continuous operation. (Involve the kids — they love to help).
Light your backyard with the landcruiser headlights! (Don’t flatten the battery, make sure you keep that engine running.)
Don’t forget those bar radiators — revel in that infra red! (Light the kitchen with the ones in the oven and grill.)
Drink German Beer and or French Champagne. Drink toasts to coal miners, oil rig workers, and power station staff.
Take a photo, take lots of photos, and send them to myself, and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt.
At 9.30pm read that meter and tell us how many KWhr you’ve liberated. Who will win The Hour of Power?
Some of those fossil fuels have been waiting for 100 million years to return to the sky.
The cheapest most cost-effective way to liberate those fuels is to buy Hard Coking Coal which is as cheap as $1/ton on Alibaba (enough for every power hour for the rest of your life, and there’ll be some left for the kids too: the minimum order is 30,000 t. Send your bulk carrier.)
We shouldn’t underestimate shift that has just taken place. The psychology of Australian politics moved as the large swinging center was revealed. Not only was the Queensland election worse for Labor than anyone predicted, the message was clear, voters rejected the lies, and rejected the carbon tax. The smear campaign by the Labor leader (Bligh) did more harm to her than it did to her target. Finally, the Hype-&-Spin Machine ran off the rails.
This is real progress. Today both Queensland and Victoria are peeling back the warmist bureaucracy. I’m happy.
The new premier of Queensland Campbell Newman, is scrapping many state carbon reduction schemes. Who knew that the head of Queensland’s Office of Climate Change was none other than Mr Withers, husband of former Premier Anna Bligh? Who said the Labor Party nowadays is just about government money for supporters and mates?
Campbell Newman has said he won’t sack Withers. Instead he wants him to unwind all the programs he put in place. Newman is keeping the solar subsidies for household rooftops, but everything else is being dumped.
The showpiece of the Gillard government’s $1.5 billion Solar Flagships Program is now in jeopardy, after Mr Newman yesterday pulled the plug on $75 million in state funding pledged for the $1.2bn Solar Dawn solar thermal project near Chinchilla, west of Brisbane. Mr Newman yesterday declared his LNP government would axe seven other green schemes, on the grounds the carbon tax would make them redundant.
This was posted in Sept 2011. I don’t know why I didn’t see it til this week (h/t Jennifer Marohasy’s).
“They want to regulate every aspect of your life, and they are prepared to lie to do it…”
Great job here from 1984Report. (Do please contact me “1984” 🙂 )
On this Monckton tour Carlisle spent hours listening to David Evans and myself talk about errors in climate models, with peer reviewed evidence that the models are wrong, yet she didn’t think it was worth mentioning that to the people of Australia whose government was proposing new taxes based on those models. She interviewed me for an hour and asked for references, and presumably she couldn’t find holes in them, because she didn’t mention them either. She wanted to know where I got my money from. When I explained how pure and untainted my funding was, that I essentially hardly have any, she forgot to mention that too. Character assassination, anyone or is it just a form of ABC Alzheimers?
A gold bar that should have weighed 1,000 grams, weighed 2 grams too little. The owner had it cut in half to reveal that the certified, stamped bar with serial numbers had tungsten rods inserted all the way through it. Tungsten, has a density of 19.35 g/cm3, so is a near-perfect match for gold (19.32 g/cm3) and it sells for just one ten thousandth of the price.
The gold bar was cut in half to reveal the tungsten rods.
The problem of fake gold bars
By Felix Salmon
March 25, 2012
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten. This bar was discovered only because it was 2 grams lighter than it ought to have been: the forgers failed to add quite enough gold to the outside of the bar to make up for the weight lost when they replaced gold with tungsten. But if they’d gotten the weight right, it would probably still be circulating today.
Is this a big issue? Who knows? Gold bars are rarely audited. Indeed even the most respectable bars in the world, the ones the People of the USA own at Fort Knox, haven’t been so much as independently counted, let alone properly audited or even checked for purity. That’s $300 billion dollars of assets no one appears to have audited since 1953. Remember gold is a relic from a bygone era. It is so irrelevant, that at Fort Knox, no one is even allowed to photograph it.
A gold bar of one kilo is worth about $50,000. Tungsten sells for roughly $400 per ton, or $50/kg for ferrotungsten. (No, those numbers don’t match, tungsten is either cheap or very cheap.) In any case, if a crook can replace half a 1kg gold bar with tungsten, they stand to make $20,000. If they do that with a 400 oz bar, “profit” comes in at around a third of a million dollars. For that kind of money I imagine quite a few people might think it was worth learning how to use a gold drill.
Hey, but this is alright when you are spending someone else’s money isn’t it?
Staff at the Australian Department of Climate Change are so depressed, I can’t think why, that the government is spending $175,000 to cheer them up.
Could it be that the poor staff would enjoy their jobs more if they weren’t doing something which was a complete waste of time, and their programs weren’t a vacuous drain? Remember if we all abandon Australia, AND if the IPCC aren’t wildly overestimating the effects of extra CO2, then, and only then, will Australia cool the world by as much as — rounded to the nearest whole number — zero degrees. (Pace Matt Ridley)
Things are so bad, people were ashamed to admit to people that they worked at the Dept of Climate Change. Worse, this study was done back in 2010 – before a round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2011 and then another round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2012. This was before the worst of the plummeting Labor polling, before FakeGate… just how low do these people feel now?
175k to cheer up Department of Energy and Climate Change staff
Labor was reduced to only 11 seats in 1974, and on latest counting tonight appeared set to retain only nine seats. Some analysts put the figure even lower, at seven. This would mean Labor falling short of official party status and relying on the incoming LNP government to grant it party offices, staff and resources. The Queensland Greens failed to win a seat and suffered a fall in support. [The Australian]
This is thread for all those who want to comment on this election. According to Bolt, things are not just bad, they’re seriously awful for the Labor Party. Newspoll says LNP (conservatives) 55%, Labor 26%. Channel Nines polls says Labor could be left with less than 10 seats!
The meme is spreading. Rapidly, day after day, I’m meeting more Skeptical-Austrians, and Austrian-Skeptics. I don’t mean the country, but the economics.
James Delingpole-the-brilliant enjoyed my post: The Ground Zero of Global Corruption: it starts with The Currency. He’s had his awakening a few months back. Just yesterday I was talking to Redmond, a skeptic in Canada who turned out to be founder and director on Mises.ca (you can’t get much more Austrian than that). Martin Durkin (the infamous director of Great Global Warming Swindle) is an Austrian too. Back in Bali 07, even then, that Monckton, Archibald, and Balle were discussing gold and currencies (nearly half of all the skeptics there). I’m guessing Chiefio might be. I hear Ray Evans of the Lavoisier Group is too.
…skeptics of government science are also skeptics of government money…
It’s no surprise, really, that skeptics of government science would also be skeptics of government money. My message to all the sleeping skeptics out there is: get with the game. When I said climate science is the second biggest scam in history, I wasn’t joking.
So James, yes, welcome to the club! Absolutely, I’m an Austrian and so, of course, is my other half, Dr David Evans, who introduced the idea to me years ago, so long ago I can’t remember when. (He prophetically wrote: Why Invest in Gold Now? in 2004). In 2006 I submitted a story to Quadrant magazine about “the crunch to come” due to excessive monetary growth. (McGuinness rejected it). In 2008 I wrote every month in The Mining Chronicle – about the M3, and gold trading. We are so Austrian, we were Austrians before we were skeptics. We’ve been watching monetary aggregates and investing in precious metals since before gold was $250/oz.
For beginner Austrians
Some readers will be wondering what all the fuss is. Many scientists have never even heard of the best-kept-secret of economics, and there’s a reason for that (I’ll get to that another day). But you might do what I did — read Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and revel in how economics really can make sense.
“…it is such an obvious truth that it’s been starved-into-submission for nigh on 70 years.”
Then ask a Keynsian why they’re right and the Austrians are wrong, and hear jargon unleashed. They’ll bedazzle you with reasons that ultimately “explain” why a few elected brains can make smarter decisions than the 22 million Australians, 60 million Brits, or 300 million US brains put together (and …. insert name of any other sovereign state). Remember, the wild successes of the “scientifically-planned” economies like, say, the Soviet Union? Exactly. It’s a banal sensibility that money is just another good to be swapped like anything else: if there’s more money and the same goods, of course the price of the goods goes up, and value of money goes down. Welcome to inflation.
Its all just supply and demand after all: Money Supply
The simplicity of it steamrolls other more convoluted theories. An increase in money is inflation*. The supply of money counts. If someone creates more of it — well they go to jail, it’s counterfeiting. (Unless of course, they are a government-protected-banker, then they get a three story yacht and a 10 bedroom mansion).
Was it just me? Was I the only one who noticed a tiny announcement in February that Airport Scanners were coming to Australia, the land where terrorists haven’t landed (yet), and … wait for it… there would be no (NO!) — opt — out– clause. Did I hear that correctly?
And the crowd roared (about the cricket), nobody said a word about the scanners, and the ten libertarians left who can bear to watch the ABC were too busy trying to save the nation from nastier threats. Australia is getting millimeter wave scanners at International Airports, and if you don’t want to be scanned, you need to leave the country… by boat. (Either that or swim with the crocs across the Timor Sea.)
Metal objects show up on a white body, but not on a black background. Image: Daily Mail and Herald Sun.
With no opt out clause, what happens when the first person facing deportation refuses to be scanned? Well that’s all right then, we’ll just book them on a cruise to Kandahar? Civil Liberties Australia was one of the few to speak up. Maybe those scanners are safe? Maybe? But at least one man with a pacemaker says Australia is off his holiday list now. Can someone find the peer reviewed research showing there are no long term effects on the unborn?
There’s also the catch that if any terrorist has a computer with an internet connection, they probably know how to get guns past the scanners.
Then a nice man named Tony wrote to me asking if I liked his graphic (below), and I did. Do admire the powerful communication tool here (it’s worth a look). The only thing it lacked was to tell us non-US folk that the TSA stood for the Transportation Security Administration.
Once upon a time it took months to get to Australia, the ships had no GPS, sometimes not even an engine, and the in-non-flight food gave you scurvy. People died, no one had travel insurance, and before WWII even a blister could kill you.
Brace yourself, how things have changed. Travel in the satellite era is so dangerous now, it takes 62,000 employees to make it safe (just in the USA). Of those, nearly 4,000 are based in the Washington DC headquarters of the TSA. The average salary of those desk-based public servants in the regulating class is … $104,000. That’s average?
Here in Australia our airport scanning scheme is supposed to cost $28 million.
To be fair, the TSA do run an impressive blog pointing out that last week they stopped someone taking a 40mm high explosive grenade in a carry on bag, plus 2000 ecstasy tablets, a razor, a saw-blade and a garrote, and 16 loaded guns, plus knives and batons. (From personal experience I can tell you the Australian airport checks have stopped me threatening anyone with 3 pairs of nail scissors, 5 nail files, and a very deadly 80-year-old crochet hook.)
The bottom line:
I don’t like the sound of sitting in a flying box with so many weapons, oh no (wow, some people take that stuff in their hand-luggage?), but then, if it costs $6 million to find each gun, and most of them don’t belong to terrorists, it’s time to talk value-for-money. Should we reduce hospital waiting times, or spend money, and make travel slower, in order to reduce, but not eradicate, all the weapons on a plane?
I’d rather sit in a fully armed flight, than in one where there is just one gun…
(Do click to see this pictorial graphic – no – no nudes.)
Jennifer Marohasy belongs to the “wrong” tribe, according to the ABC’s Media Watch program.
Media Watch is panting with excitement because — stop me if you’ve heard this before — she’s a scientist who earns money. My favorite part of the inadvertent expose-of-ABC-bias was the sneering voice-over, meant to be Marohasy or any supporter of her: petulant, petty and childish. The full ABC-festival-of-smug is right on display, thanks, as always, to the Taxpayers of Australia.
It’s so bad, it’s satirical:
MW: But many real journalists struggle when reporting science.
“Struggle?” Mr Holmes? You mean they are so confused about the real world, they think if a US group funds a group who write about a distantly connected topic, that therefore, ergo, and quid pro quo — that tiny funding demonstrates that Lake Alexandrina was always freshwater? Golly? Normally weak journalists settle for a direct ad hom, but Media Witch, like Wendy Carslisle, go out of their way to hunt for second degree nonsense. Could the tenuous connection be more distant?
MW: Let me be clear. We’re not suggesting [that Marohasy is corrupted by personal gain]. Nor are we disputing the AEF’s right to promote her views.
If Media Watch wasn’t trying to denigrate Jennifer Marohasy’s credibility, why did they spend over half their time detailing her funding sources, and even the funding sources of her funding sources, no wait, that was the funding source for the funding source for her former role. They also went after the sponsors of one of the groups she.. err… used to be a founding director of.
“Conspiracy Theorist” – the taunt you use when you want to “win” the debate without having to argue your point.
When someone points out that the Regulating Class want to bring on a world government, they’re called a “conspiracy theorist”. When the king-pins of the Regulating Class, or their media apostles, actually admit they rather love the idea of a world government, where are the retractions? They can’t hold an honest conversation, let alone budget, plan and spend your money wisely.
Gary Stix – former Scientific American writer – blogs that he used to edit articles on nuclear fusion and clean coal, but now thinks he ought to have written more on psychology, sociology and economics. (See, when their attempts at logic, reason and evidence don’t win over the crowd, the anointed need to explain how stupid, flawed and selfish people are.)
Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.?
Stix goes on to wonder: Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?
Dear Gary, could we? Let’s check the current UN record for success? They are the visionaries guarding-little-citizens who put Gaddafi in charge of “human rights”, and North Korea in charge of Nuclear Disarmament. Last week they endorsed a 2010 report where some of the worlds most repressive governments like Algeria, Iran, and Syria praised the Gaddafi regime’s human rights record. Not a single country objected. OK. So you think these are people that ought to have even more power over us? These guys are not even trying, not even pretending anymore that they need to look nice and rational. There is not even a pretense. Gaddafi thinks “human rights” means he has the right to bombs his own people and the big news is that UN is “thinking” twice about hailing him as a humanitarian hero?
The scale of the rot is something to behold. Something is grossly, wantonly wrong with Western Civilization, and lots of people know it, but they don’t know why (and for the next blind rebellion, see, “Occupy”).
But a head of the hydra popped into view last week. First a high profile whistleblower from Goldman Sachs wrote Why I am leavingin the New York Times. Then today (possibly, it’s unconfirmed), an insider from JP Morgan came forward to reveal something far worse, and dark to the core. It’s posted on the CFTC site (that’s The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the market watchdog, or rather watch-puppy). [UPDATE: The CFTC have removed the page after 48 hours, a copy of the text is here, screenshot here.]
A Goldman Sachs Executive Director — Greg Smith — resigned from the 143 year old firm explaining he felt ill with the callous culture where people would boast about how much they had ripped off clients, which they called “hunting elephants”, and calling their clients “muppets” and worse. He said that in 12 years the company had completely lost the culture that made him proud to join it. There was nothing left of integrity or humility. He was not alleging outright fraud, but something that sounds more like the company has been taken over by white collar psychopaths. These were people who cheered when someone sold a lemon to a client.
The anonymous whistleblower, allegedly from JP Morgan, was apparently inspired to pop up and describe something that really was market manipulation and fraud on a huge scale, everything from hiding assets from MF Global clients, to attempts to manipulate LIBOR (which affects the price of all derivatives). He or she claims JP Morgan is manipulating the gold and silver price: ” We have a little over a 25% (give or take a percentage) position in the short market for silver futures “.
“… this most recent crash in gold and silver during Bernanke’s speech on February 29th is of notable importance, as we along with 4 other major institutions, orchestrated the violent $100 drop in Gold and subsequent drops in silver.”
Why should you care about esoteric precious metals markets? It’s your currency, even if you don’t own any.
It’s like this. The governments and their central banks make as much free money from thin-air through fractional reserve banking and other methods as they can get away with — it benefits those who “spend that new money first”. They spend it at current prices, and pay it back later, after inflation has decreased its value. The people who pay the difference are those who saved and held money while its purchasing power fell. Speculators grow rich, while retirees and savers get poorer.
In a free market this would quickly lead to inflation, and people would rush to the only currencies the government can’t inflate (or “print” for free) — they’d buy and hold gold or silver and keep their purchasing power. Remember, gold and silver are the currencies that evolved in the marketplace over the last 5,000 years and are not directly under the control of government. (And “so?” you say?). The point is, if the prices of gold and silver rise fast, people would abandon bonds and get into metals instead, thus correcting the situation by making the printing and speculating game vastly less attractive while saving and production became more attractive. Essentially, people dump the government money and go for the competitor, which means the government (and or Fed) has to increase the interest rate and pay more for its money, and nobody wants that: God forbid that Governments or Banks should pay people a fair rate for borrowing “their” money.
The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?
We need a professional audit.
A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog) has been going through the Australia Bureau of Meteorology records (BOM). They’ve audited some 8.5 million daily observations across 237 High Quality and other close sites in Australia. Shockingly, while the BOM calls their database “High Quality” and instructed observers before 1972 to record in tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, the auditors started finding sites with long stretches of records where the weather suspiciously rose and fell only in Fahrenheit quanta, like 72.0, 73.0, 72.0, 71.0, 73.0, 72.0. After 1972, the BOM went metric, and oddly, so did parts of the Australian climate. Numerous sites started warming and cooling in pure Celsius integers.
The bottom line:
The BOM records need a thorough independent audit.
It’s possible that a significant part of the 20th Century Australian warming trend may have come from something as banal as sloppy observers truncating records in Fahrenheit prior to 1972.
Many High Quality sites are not high quality and ought to be deleted from the trends.
Even current electronic equipment is faulty, and the BOM is not checking its own records.
Even climate scientists admit that truncation of Fahrenheit temperatures would cause an artificial warming effect.
The Audit Team identifies a suspicious problem
It was the sharp eye of Chris Gillham who noticed the first long string of continuous whole numbers in a site record. I wondered if it was faulty equipment and thus if other sites were affected, so people started looking, and suspicious stretches started turning up everywhere. The audit team were astonished at how common the problem was. Ian Hill and Ed Thurstan developed software to search the mountain of data and discovered that while temperatures of .0 degrees ought to have been 10% of all the measurements, some 20 – 30% of the entire BOM database was recorded as whole number, or “.0”.
Fahrenheit era observations (prior to 1972) have even higher proportions of .0 than those of the Celsius era. Note the strange peaks at 0.1 and 0.9? Those are likely due to converting raw F to C and back.
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