UPDATED: Former CSIRO researcher talks about the lack of freedom to speak against the government.
See Angry Anderson’s speech and Art Raiches speech about the decline of CSIRO: Art Raiche on CSIRO Canberra Protest. Dr Raiche talked of the days when the CSIRO was a world class organisation and worked for Australia, Agriculture and Industry.
“Management learned how to bring the most senior climate scientist under their control. It was OK to think independently…as long as Management approved of it.
We were given very strict, VERY strict guidelines on not publishing anything or publicly discussing any research that could be seen as critical to Government policy.If we did not do it, we would be subject to dismissal.
We had now become a Government Enterprise. We were told by the Chairperson that we Scientists no longer worked for Australia, we had to learn that we worked for the CSIRO.”
Destination Canberra – nearly 4000 km away
This is a protest to set records. For these vehicles in Perth, it’s 4 days of driving nearly every waking hour (and another 4 days minimum to return). The cost of petrol, accommodation, wear and tear and camper-hire, not to mention time-off-work, mean you need to be very very motivated to take part in the Convoy of No Confidence from so far away. We were pleased with the turnout in the darkness this morning!
All filmed by Phil Cole and edited by Sean Morris.
August 16th, 2011. It’s just another huge rally at Parliament House.
There was a crowd of 3000 according to the ABC report, but Nick Bryant from the BBC estimated 4,000-5,000, and significantly he also admitted that the crowd was not a red-neck, ute crowd, and that for many it was their first protest. For others, like one doctor, it had cost them dearly to get to the rally (see the quotes from his piece below). Such is the passion of the protesters.
And they filled the lawns. Photo: Dr Jim Sternhell
This is mainstream Australia talking
A few things struck me about crowd. Many of the protesters were old and retired, as one would expect from a protest in the middle of the week. Many were attending their first ever protest rally, which is more significant. Rising energy bills was something that had got these first-timers out in force. Nobody that I spoke to at the rally thought the Gillard minority government had any legitimacy, let alone any mandate. Most thought it incompetent, and said the carbon tax had crystallised broader fears.
A surprisingly high number, curiously, were Brits who have settled in Australia. Many were farmers and blue-collar workers. But I also ran into a GP, who had given up $2000 in consultation fees for the day to drive down to Canberra from Sydney. In other words, this crowd could not be written off as a “red-neck mob”, tempting though that caricature might be to supporters of the carbon tax. This was an Audi estate crowd as well as a “ute” crowd.
The local state Liberals (the conservative party, who are in government in this state of Western Australia) voted overwhelmingly in favor of a Royal Commission on climate change science. Now that is a news story all by itself. It could have had headlines like: “Liberals demand climate scientists be put to the test”, “WA Liberals demand answers from Climate Science”.
Instead the ABC makes its headlines from almost the only person in the room who disagreed:
Actually, he wasn’t even in the room. As it happens, Mal Washer didn’t attend the conference last weekend, and sums up his total insight into why this motion was passed overwhelmingly:
” I don’t know who brought it up and I don’t know who would be silly enough to support it.”
“I don’t know how many were there when this, I was not there when this happened, right, so I don’t know how many people were there”
“... I don’t know how that slipped through. Whether they’re a bit battle fatigued at the end of the day….”
Since I hear practically the whole party supported it (apart from Leader Colin Barnett, and possibly a couple of young libs), and Mal Washer wasn’t even there, it seems the ABC sought out the one person who knew the least to ask him the question he was baffled by. With this technique of interviewing the people who don’t know the answers, it’s obvious why the ABC are ten years behind on climate reporting. They could have interviewed anyone, anyone else from the Liberal Party ranks, and learned more. Indeed one member wrote to me to describe the meeting, and said there was virtually no dissent in the room, and support for the idea was loudly vocal. It wouldn’t be too hard surely to find someone else to interview?
Tomorrow, a road convoy will set off from Port Hedland in Western Australia for a journey across the country. Two more convoys will leave Perth and Cairns on Thursday. By the end of this week, 11 convoys will be in motion, all heading to a single convergence point next Monday. This is the ”convoy of no confidence”. [SMH]
FOR some it’s climate change alarmism; for others too much wasted taxpayers’ money on boatpeople, school halls, or pink batts; and for others still it’s the importation of Chinese apples, the temporary ban on the live cattle trade, or same-sex couples rearing children.
But the common thread in what is emerging as a national Tea Party-style revolt in the form of a “Convoy of No Confidence” to Canberra is a burning conviction that politicians of all persuasions have lost touch with the real-life needs of the common man and woman they are supposed to represent.
What began as a truckies protest against the carbon tax has grown into a mass alliance of those outside the urban elites who feel they have lost their voice.
It’s an amalgam of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who are mad as hell and not going to take it any more. [Australian]
These are good stories, well written and capturing some of the spirit of the moment, albeit, weeks after the news broke on the new media.
When is enough enough?
Today the editors of The Australian (Convoy of Discontent Rolls On) claim “There is no justification for the early election its organisers want”, but what would be justification for an early election?Do people have to wait for the businesses to go broke before asking? Do they need to wait for the government to legislate a major transformation of the economy that it promised it wouldn’t do? When is government failure big enough to warrant a new election?
More evidence of the backlash against the dominant Green-memes. (There’s a rich field of possibilities there for the taking.) Funny or Die do a pretty good job. UPDATE: hilariously I hear, these are “warmer” personalities, thanks Bananabender and Curt, but if they thought they were poking fun at skeptics, it only shows how badly this has backfired. (The warmer-team are the ones who not only suggest we can control the climate, and they’re already asking us to pay up now for the service.)
"Stop the Environment", Funny or Die video snapshot.
Warning: Coarse language. (They’re saying, “F U,” to Mother Nature) This is a Funny Or Die creation by Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant, Ed Asner and Mindy Sterling.
It’s hard to believe, but not long ago, people used to write to me to tell me not to use the word “skeptic” telling me it had a bad name. “Use the word realist” they said. But I wasn’t going to let the forces of darkness get away with destroying the English language. I’m proud to be a skeptic. I wasn’t giving that word up. And besides, I had a feeling that if we stuck with the truth, the distortion the-newspeak-team had set up would come back to bite them, and I rather wanted to whip them with that.
After all, what’s not to like about the word skeptic (or sceptic):
1565–75; From the Latin scepticus, meaning thoughtful, inquiring
From the Greek : skeptikós, means to consider or examine (akin to skopeîn, meaning: to look, “scope”)
“Skeptic” is a prize worth having.
In Nov 2009 I pointed out the bleeding obvious truth: What’s the opposite of skeptical — gullible. It caught on(if I do say so myself).
And if we are the skeptics, then it followed that they are the Unskeptics and who wants to be an Unskeptical Scientist?
Bitten by their own propaganda campaign, the apologists-of-authority rushed to make out that they are skeptics (who just coincidentally always happen to agree with authority), and say pat-truisms like “all scientists need to be a bit skeptical” and “true skeptics are useful”. Which meant of course they had to call us odd things, like quote-unquote “skeptics”, contrarians, naysayers, or else resort to their favorite ritual insult: “deniers”. (Which is the richest of all, really when you think about which side of this debate is saying that red equals yellow. See the missing hot spot, and Spot the real denier).
The “debate” meme is falling
For twenty years they’ve said “there-is-no-debate”. Al Gore was doing it back in 1990. But things have changed since then and while this is a work in progress, some are backpedalling. Prof Stefan Lewandowsky said “there is no real scientific debate about climate change” in 2010, so we laughed at him for throwing tenets of science out the window. Now, without admitting he ever got it wrong, in 2011 he’s seen the light and says: “Science is Debate“. (And, you cynic, you think they never listen?)
Climate is a non-problem. What is happening is Cooling
Archibald Speech Rally Canberra 16th August 2011
My first duty to you today is tell you what is happening to the climate. What is happening is cooling. The oceans started cooling in 2003, and the atmosphere is following. There has been no warming since 1998.
In fact, the temperature of planet today is almost the same as it was when satellites first started measuring it in 1979. No one under the age of 32 has experienced global warming. Some of us predate that and remember the heavy frosts of the nineteen seventies. Those frosts are returning, and worse. Solar activity is weakening, and will remain weak for another 22 years.
We in this blessed country will be spared the worst of it, but a large portion of the grain belt in the northern hemisphere will have crop failures due to longer winters and early frosts. Canada will go from being a large exporter of grain to becoming a frequent importer. As long as Australia remains a net food exporter, we will benefit from the shorter Northern Hemisphere growing season.
For us, climate is a non-problem. Carbon dioxide’s heating effect is real, but minuscule. The one hundred parts per million that we have added to the atmosphere in the last one hundred years has heated the planet by one tenth of a degree. We will add another hundred parts per million over the next fifty years. The total of two tenths of a degree will be very welcome by mid-century.
In fact, the more carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere, the better. During the ice ages of the last three million years, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere got as low as one hundred and seventy-two parts per million. Plant growth shuts down at one hundred and fifty parts per million. Life above sea level was almost snuffed out due to a lack of carbon dioxide. We were only twenty-two parts per million from extinction. We came so close to dying out due to a lack of carbon dioxide. And, for those amongst us who like plants and animals, they would have died out too.
The more we can increase the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, the safer life on this planet will be.
The more we can increase the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, the safer life on this planet will be. For those amongst us who feel for the Third World, increasing the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere is like giving them free fertiliser. Their crops will grow faster. Who amongst us would be so heartless as to deny the Third World that benefit at no cost to themselves? The Government hunkered down here in front of you is that heartless. But then, they don’t care about Australians either.
This fake problem of climate is distracting us from real problems. The first of which is the fact that our oil self-sufficiency is declining rapidly. It is 40% now. It will be down to 25% by 2015. We now import oil from as far afield as Azerbaijan, Algeria and the Congo. We are forced to rely upon their kindness to keep our farms and factories running.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s obvious (to anyone who knows there’s no free lunch) that one way or another this Festival of Funny Money was going to end in tears. And so it flows… but let’s not forget what lead us to this, the problem that lies under all others.
The government can print (base) money from nothing, and they can set interest rates artificially low so as to encourage private banks to create (bank) money from nothing. And governments keep doing it, because it’s so much easier to be elected handing out loaves and fishes, and grants and solar-rooftop-subsidies, in a froth of easy money and rising asset prices. Any fool can spend someone else’s money, especially when the sucker doesn’t even know it was their money.
Thus does inflation steal from all and sundry. Silently.
Watch them print money… say hello to inflation.
In the real world, we have to repay our debts. But the world of the ruling class never has to make ends meet. Alan Greenspan admitted that this weekend — effectively announcing that the US is the United States of Wonderland, where no matter how high the debt is they can never default — because they can print money. Helicopter Ben to the rescue!
There is a pot at the end of this rainbow. And it works as well as any superhero or perpetual motion machine.
As soon as money is blinked into existence, it starts to redirect economic activity away from the things that people-who-earned-money thought were useful. Instead the behemoth of mass activity swings towards producing things that those-who-blink-money want… and they come up with unlimited ways to waste money: like giant windmills that stop floods, bicycle paths that prevent cyclones, and ten top techniques to stuff a fertilizing gas down a mineshaft where nothing will ever grow.
Nice. The CanDo team have printed thousands of sticky notes with a message for consumers everywhere. Australian’s can order them and pop them on items that will cost more under The Carbon Tax (ie. that’s everything except subsidized Chinese solar panels, and bird-blending windmills.*)
Take a photo of your most inspiring spots and send it in to CanDo. People are using these sticky notes in restaurants, airports, petrol pumps, at home and in the office.
This is a chance to remind Australians that the Carbon Tax will cost them, and we will never know exactly how much.
Are you losing sleep because of the Carbon Tax? (Click to see a large version. Thanks to MaxL)
It used to be that being Green was assumed to be the done thing in any advert promoting something, especially something that aimed at the professional set (like a herbal sleeping tablet). So I was surprised to see an advert, on the front page of The Australian a few days ago (August 3rd) which unashamedly played to those-who-don’t-welcome-The-Carbon-Tax.
At least one herbal supplement supplier thinks the tax is the hot topic stressor of the moment, keeping business people awake at night.
I wanted to keep this turning point for posterity, for the poor PhD student in 2035 analyzing how the Great Global Warming meme went from Nobel prize winning grandeur in 2007 to well-known-scam status five years later. This is a point along the way. As far as I know, it’s a first in the Australian print media.
In some towns closer to Canberra there will be so many vehicles that the AFP, and local councils have been called in to help. Some convoys are so large that up to five separate ovals and fields are being arranged per town to accommodate all the traffic overnight.
The final petition has been put together. Many thanks to commentors here. I was not involved in writing it, but I did connect together the people who did, and they found the feedback here useful. Thanks 🙂
“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again,” he continued. “There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea! … It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.”
He’s uses all his science degrees to come back with an erudite answer to his critics:
It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!” Gore exclaimed.
Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s spent time at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.
Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.
CO2 variations do not correlate with man-made emissions. Peaks and falls correlate with hot years (e.g. 1998) and cold years (1991-92). No graphs are available from Salby's speech or paper yet. This graph comes from Tom Quirk's related work (see below).
The higher levels of CO2 in recent decades appear to be mostly due to natural sources. He presented this research at the IUGG conference in Melbourne recently, causing great discussion and shocking a few people. Word reached the Sydney Institute, which rushed to arrange for him to speak, given the importance of this work in the current Australian political climate.
The final petition will be released NEXT WEEK. Thanks to commenters for feedback here, it’s been very useful and passed on to all the people that matter. It’s been decided that the petition will be redone. The preferential voting point has been dropped and I think the rest of the petition will be carefully reconsidered too. Time is short, so that’s a shame, but Mick Pattel wants to do this properly. And oh my goodness, but the plans for this Convoy are becoming bigger than Ben Hur. You should hear behind the scenes! They are looking for 4 or 5 ovals in some towns in order to accommodate the trucks and cars and caravans… HUGE! — Jo
The Convoy to Canberra protest is generating a massive response. Organizers have been astounded at the number of cars and trucks joining in. Gobsmacked! It is shaping up to be a historic event! Remember, even if you can’t drive the whole way, you can show you support and join the convoy just for an hour, especially at the start to send them on their way! 🙂
“The petition is to be given to the convoy leaders of the Coalition of Industries Convoy of No Confidence in the Federal Government. It must have real signatures – the future is in your hands now.”
based on an idea and research by Anton Lang (who writes as TonyfromOz at PAPundits)
It’s the paradox that will torture the Greens. What if the best way to achieve their environmental aims as well as providing jobs and power was to build more coal fired power stations? Imagine if we could reduce CO2 emissions by more than 5%, supply 24 hour baseload electricity, create jobs, and save thousands of square kilometres of Australian bush from industrial domination. Imagine if “New Coal” turned out to be the lowest cost alternative as well? Anton Lang has researched it, and Tony Cox has confirmed that the big numbers make sense with an Australian electricity company (who shall not be named). Selling the Carbon Tax in Neverland is already a public debate that’s pretzel tied in impossible contradictions, so what’s one more unlikely twist? Possibly, just enough to get us out of a knot, or at least enough to expose the real aims of the carbon reduction plan. Old existing large scale coal fired power plants in Australia are all twenty to forty years old. Major advances have been made in coal-powered technology, and new coal plants are, incredibly, much more efficient, so much more efficient that they produce up to 30% less CO2. Who would have thought there was such a bonanza-cherry there, ripe for the picking?
“New large scale coal fired plants have generators that can produce considerably larger amounts of power, they use better turbines to drive the generator, have better boilers to make the steam to drive the turbine, and have better furnaces to make the heat to make that steam, and most importantly in this case, they burn less coal, do that more efficiently, and in the process emit less CO2.
They are already using these new coal fired plants, especially in China, where large scale plants of this nature are being brought on line delivering power for consumers at the rate of one new plant a week.
So, if those older plants here in Australia were to be replaced with these new plants, there will be an overall reduction in the current emissions of CO2, and the most surprising thing in all of this is that those reductions could be in the vicinity of 25 to 30%.”
Those who want to reduce CO2, could have their low-carbon cake mix, and the electricity to cook it with too. You can see here that a new coal fired plant produces about 30% lower emissions than a conventional one, it costs $4-$5 billion to set up (instead of $20 billion… or $200 billion!) and uses less coal to run. Comparatively, wind costs something like 2- 5 times as much and solar, a budget breaking, hock-the-nation 5 to 20 times as much (or worse). Not only that but solar and wind occupy vast areas, and don’t produce base-load reliable power. (See here for the lower best case estimates of renewables costs from the Victorian Auditor General.)
Comparing the cost of different power generation plants. Cost “A” is the initial capital outlay, Cost “B” is the lifetime cost. TWH: TeraWatt Hours.
For the notes (see the end of the post), and for more info on the table: See Climate Sceptics.
Why aim for 5% when you could get 13%?
The Greens would accept a 5% reduction in Australian emissions by 2020 (and due to our high immigration rates that’s harder than it looks). Because coal produces about 40% of our emissions, so a reduction of 30% of those emissions from all our major coal fired stations would give us a total national reduction in emissions of 13%. It’s possibly achievable by 2020 with proven technology). According to Tony Cox, the word from the local industry is that an upgrade costs about $2 b, and a new modern station about $4 billion.
This single idea solves all the ineluctable paradoxes of Neverland Economics at once
Queen Meave and the Druid, Eleanor Hull, The Boys’ Cuchulainn, Image: S. Reid.
Some commenters wonder why I allow the word cultist, but sometimes there is no better term. Remember, apocalyptic storms are coming, and we’re all going to die, unless we heed the prophesies of the new Gods of Science.
What’s the difference between a real disaster foretold by scientists, or a cult? Evidence, for starters, and we’re still waiting for observations that support the idea that a catastrophe is coming, but there are more clues.
In normal conversations people can be, you know, wrong, but in a cult, wrongness is not a comment on a scientific point, it’s a statement of identity and a judgment of moral fitness. Those who speak against the (insert doctrine) are not just wrong, they are evil, immoral, and not “worthy” of polite conversation. Believers who become skeptics, are exiled (think “apostate”) and let’s not forget the sacrifices for penance (anyone want to buy a carbon credit for their sins?).
Then there’s the machinations to avoid dealing with reality. No matter what evidence skeptics point to, the answer is effectively always the same: the weather-balloons, satellites, ocean buoys and temperature proxies are all flawed but the models are not. When you really get right down to it, it’s right because “the government climate scientists say so” (aka “The Gods must be right”). An eight year old can tell that the whole corrupt thermometer thing is obviously not science, but believers willingly accept that distant all knowing computers can adjust for each individual siting problem en masse and without any information on the siting problem. Likewise, computers on the ground can estimate the temperature of the air 10 km above the tropics better than a radiosonde that passes right through that air. Who would have thought?
Jim Guirard pointed out the similarities between a cult and the belief in catastrophic man-made global warming back in 2009 (excerpt below). Bear in mind that the cult similarities don’t apply to all people(or even most people) who think we need a carbon tax or have Green sympathies, but sometimes it’s exactly the right term (witness the awful murder-suicide in Argentina; what else could you call that?) — Jo
CLARIFICATION: If “cultist” is ok, what’s wrong with “denier”?
Bulldust raises a fair point, “what’s the difference”?” When is an insult OK, and when is it mindless namecalling? Answer: When it can be substantiated. I ask those who use “denier” to point to any scientific evidence we deny (which is exactly what “denier” implies). Since we deny nothing — the descriptor is 100% wrong. It’s a misuse of the English language, it’s Orwellian, and designed to denigrate, to dismiss, and to dehumanize. There is no point talking to a “denier” and no point listening to them.
That said, I did point out that the term only applies to some people. It treads a fine line, and skeptics should be wary of misusing it. But when a dogma is unhealthy, obsessive, condones bullying, and encourages violence (think 10:10 and the gruesome joke of blowing up children) the term “cultist” is accurate, and we should not silence accurate writing, especially while our opponents destroy English. Denier is applied to all and sundry — including people who merely question the evidence. It’s a mindless group-label. You’ll note that I have no single one descriptor for unskeptical commentators, I change it to suit the context. ( eg. Warmer, warmenist, alarmist, pro-carbon-crisis, believer in man-made global warming, supporter of a carbon-tax, government funded climate scientist, Establishment scientist, fans of the Big-Scare-Campaign, unskeptical scientist, activist, and Team Carbonista). Group stereotypes can be dangerous memes. Please use the term “cultist” with care.
It’s good to see this post and the issue of namecalling being debated in the thread. That is exactly as it should be for a skeptical community . — JN
The Anthropogenic Global Warming Movement (AGW) has taken on worrisome attributes of a pseudo-religious cult, which operates far more on the basis of an apocalyptic “belief” system than on objective climate science.
Kingdom of the Cults
Here are ten of this AGW ideology’s very specific characteristics, many of whose roots and lock-step influences can be found in Walter Martin’s and Ravi Zacharias’ definitive, award-winning 2003 book, “Kingdom of the Cults:”
Leadership by a self-glorifying, manipulative New Age Prophet — in this case, former Vice-President Al Gore, though he is possibly being supplanted by President Barack Obama.
Assertion of an apocalyptic threat to all mankind.
An absolutist definition of both the threat and the proposed solution(s).
Promise of a salvation from this pending apocalypse.
Devotion to an inspired text which (arguendo) embodies all the answers — in this case, Prophet Gore’s pseudo-scientific book “Earth in the Balance” and his more recent “An Inconvenient Truth” documentary.
A specific list of “truths” (see the Ten Commandments listed below) which must be embraced and proselytized by all Cult members..
An absolute intolerance of any deviation from any of these truths by any Cult member.
A strident intolerance of any outside criticism of the Cult’s definition of the problem or of its proposed solutions.
A “Heaven-on-Earth” vision of the results of the mission’s success and/or a “Hell-on-Earth” result if the cultic mission should fail.
An inordinate fear (and an outright rejection of the possibility) of being proven wrong in either the apocalyptic vision or the proposed salvation.
Prophet Gore’s (and now Prophet Obama’s) Ten Commandments
This weekend, I’ve got another article in The Weekend Australian. It’s a credit to the Murdoch News team that they are willing to print both points of view. This point is one that resonates with many people — a consensus can be bought with monopolistic science funding. It explains why research could run off the rails. We paid to find a crisis.
…
—————————————————————————-
Climate change suspect must be given a fair trial
GOVERNMENTS across the world have paid billions to find links between carbon dioxide and the climate, but very little to find the opposite, and that’s a problem.
Teams of professionals have searched high and low for any possible hint that CO2 poses a threat, and that is all very well, but no one has been paid to find otherwise. CO2 has been convicted without a defence lawyer.
It is self-evident that any expert in a field will reap more rewards, fame and fortune if their field is critically important. Why would anyone expect such experts to go out of their way to hunt down evidence that might suggest their field ought not be the centre of a global economic transformation?
Would people with the right training choose to forgo Sunday golf in order to download Hadley radiosonde data and shoot holes in the national temperature record? Actually, they would and they have, but it’s taken years to build, and it’s a silly way to run the country.
When results come in that conflict with catastrophic model predictions, hordes of researchers scour every nook and cranny to find early warm biases, or recent cold biases, and they may legitimately find some. But no one is paid to hunt down the errors or biases leading the other way. The vacuum sucks.
Did anyone really expect that teams of volunteers without offices, budgets, access to data or PR writers would spontaneously arise and point out any flaws? Would people with the right training choose to forgo Sunday golf in order to download Hadley radiosonde data and shoot holes in the national temperature record? Actually, they would and they have, but it’s taken years to build, and it’s a silly way to run the country. This was always a loophole begging to be exploited.
We wouldn’t let a company issue a prospectus without being audited. But we’ll transform the national economy based on a report issued by a foreign committee that no one has been paid to criticise. There are no audits on the science from institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA or the CSIRO. No due diligence study has been done. Hallowed peer review amounts to unpaid anonymous reviewers, often picked from a pool of people who agree.
Where is the Institute of Natural Climate Forces, or the International Bureau of Solar Science? Where are the researchers whose reputations and grants rise in value if they find holes in the theory of man-made global warming?
It’s supposed to be a simple tax on every ton of pollution. But nothing is simple when you try to tax a basic element of life. In a true free market you only need a buyer, a seller and a product. The Australian government is running this market from beginning to end: There are 340 pages of unfree rules.
The complexity is a chance to hand out favours to “our friends our fans and our marginal seats”.
How many ways can they crony up the country?
Legal-eagles, and number crunchers, please comment here so we can highlight the points that matter.
H/t Kevin
UPDATE #1
In 340 pages there’s zero instances of the terms “global warming”, and “temperature”.
What’s this tax supposed to do??? h/t Pat
Speedy posted this skit in the comments thread here at #85. From that sequestered position, it’s taken two weeks but it’s going viral and Oops!, the satire of Clarke and Dawe is being credited to Clarke and Dawe. I’ve had 6 emails in the last couple of days. Let’s give Speedy some credit!
Australian politics is like buying a second hand car — Jo
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Nice. The CanDo team have printed thousands of sticky notes with a message for consumers everywhere. Australian’s can order them and pop them on items that will cost more under The Carbon Tax (ie. that’s everything except subsidized Chinese solar panels, and bird-blending windmills.*)
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