Here in the sunburnt country, floods are running rife, temperatures are so low some people might have a White Christmas, indeed many people are wearing clothes that are from the wrong season, and all of this of course is just weather.
Luckily we aren’t getting as much weather as the UK and Europe.
This is not a real post, that comes tomorrow, but I thought it gives you some idea of the transformation going on downunder thanks to the PDO switch. If only our policy makers had seen it coming. They might not have thrown so much money at desalination plants to boost water supplies in Dams that on the Eastern Seaboard are all now suddenly full.
Bear in mind all this rain recorded above was before the current December floods
Great news: This commentary appears in The Weekend Australian today (in a slightly different edited version). Below was what I submitted, before the edits, with the links intact. Comments are open at The Australian. I’ll be posting less often over the Southern Summer, possibly quite irregularly, so if you want to get an email from me and find out when the more important posts go up, please add your email to my list (top right, see “register”).
Here’s a UNSW “Senior Research Fellow” in journalism who contradicts himself, fails by his own reasoning, does little research, breaks at least three laws of logic, and rests his entire argument on an assumption that he provides no evidence for. Most disturbingly — like a crack through the façade of Western intellectual vigour — he actually asserts that the role of a national newspaper is to “give leadership”. Bask for a moment in the inanity of this declaration that newspapers “are our leaders”. Last time I looked at our ballot papers, none of the people running to lead our nation had a name like “Sir Sydney Morning Herald”. Didn’t he notice that we live in a country that chooses its leaders through elections?
The role of a national newspaper is to report all the substantiated arguments and filter out the poorly reasoned ones (like his), so the readers can make up their own minds.
“The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen…”
The point of the “free press” is surely for the press to be free to ask the most searching questions on any topic. Yet here is a supposed authority on journalism attacking The Australian for printing views of scientists? And these scientists that McKnight wants to silence are not just the odd rare heretic. The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen. It includes some of the brightest: 2 with Nobel Prizes in Physics, 4 NASA astronauts, 9000 PhD’s in science, and another 20,000 science graduates to cap it off. A recent Senate Minority Report contained 1000 names of eminent scientists who are skeptical, and the term “professor” pops up over 500 times in that list. These are the people that McKnight, an Arts PhD, calls “deniers”.
Just because thousands of scientists support the skeptical view doesn’t prove they’re right, but it proves it is nothing like the “tobacco” sceptics campaign that McKnight compares them to, in a transparent attempt to smear commentators he disagrees with.
Ponder the irony that McKnight-the-journalism-lecturer is demanding The Australian adopt the policy espoused by the dominant paradigm, the Establishment, and censor the views of the independent whistleblowers? He thinks repeating government PR is journalism, the rest of us know it as propaganda.
McKnight has so little evidence to base his assumptions on, that he resorts to name-calling —“denier”. He doesn’t name any scientific paper that any skeptic denies, instead it’s just a pre-emptive bully boy technique designed to stop people even discussing the evidence about the climate.
McKnight’s research starts with the assumption that a UN committee, which was funded to find a crisis, has really found one, and that they are above question. He probably has no idea that there are thousands of ivy league physics, geology and engineering specialists who are sceptical. His investigation appears to amount to comparing articles in Fairfax versus Murdoch papers, as if the key to radiative transfer and cumulative atmospheric feedbacks lies in counting op-ed pieces.
If he had made the most basic enquiry, McKnight might also have found out that the entire case for the man-made threat to the climate rests on just the word of 60 scientists who reviewed Chapter Nine of the Fourth Assessment Report. He’d also know that the people he calls deniers, far from being recipients of thousands of regular Exxon cheques, are mostly self-funded, many are retirees, and that Exxon’s paltry $23 million for 1990 – 2007 was outdone by more than 3000 to 1 by the US government alone which paid $79 billion to the Climate Industry during 1989 – 2009.
Just suppose, hypothetically, that the government employed many scientists on one side of a theory, and none of the other. McKnight’s method of “knowing” who is right involves counting up the institutions and authorities who support the grants… I mean, the theory. If science were exploited this way, McKnight would fall victim every time…
So “sharp” is McKnight’s analysis that he calls the independent unfunded scientists “a global PR campaign originating from coal and oil companies”, all while he is oblivious to the real billion dollar PR campaign that is waged from government departments, a UN agency, financial houses like Deutsche Bank, the renewable energy industry, the nuclear industry, and the multi hundred-million dollar corporations like WWF. Here’s a man who thinks David is Goliath.
The people in power, and many major banks, are telling us to be worried about a particular gas. Isn’t the point of an investigative journalist to err… investigate that? Not so, says McKnight. The job of a newspaper is to decide which scientist is right about atmospheric physics. Is Phil Jones from the East Anglia CRU right, or is Richard Lindzen — prize winning MIT meteorologist right? Add that to the new list of duties for aspiring national editors. Tough job, eh?
Many landholders along the Tumut River have not returned to their homes because of increased outflow from the Blowering Dam. (AAP: Wolter Peeters). From the ABC site.
It’s not like we need another case study in just how creatively dumb bureaucracy can be, but Jennifer Marohasy has been relentless in pursuing the extraordinary case of a government contracting a corporation to pour nearly 7000 Mega litres into a area facing life threatening floods. That’s more than 2000 Olympic pools worth of water dumped into a flood zone just last Wednesday.
Remember, this legislation was made with good intentions, and it was supposed to help the environment…
The Whole Truth: Water Deliberately Dumped into Flooded Area
SNOWY Hydro chief executive, Terry Charlton, recently confirmed that water was dumped into the already flooded Murray-Darling Basin, but said the authority had little choice (The Australian, December 15, 2010, page 7). A real time operational diagram, however, tells a very different story.
Last Wednesday, Snowy Hydro could have sent water into Eucumbene dam. At only 20 percent it had a storage capacity of a whopping 4 cubic kilometres of water.
Instead, the water managers set the trans-mountain tunnels so water was flowing away from Lake Eucumbene at over 80 cubic metres per second (6,912 megalitres for Wednesday).
Tumut River residents were issued with urgent evacuation orders last Thursday after the increase in outflows.
Desperate farmers phoned Snowy Hydro last week asking why flood waters were being sent west, rather than east to Lake Eucumbene, given this dam was less than half full, but their calls were ignored.
UPDATE BELOW:See also the Shut Up Choir’s new song — self satire at work
Armstrong and Miller mock the Global Warming thought police as they tell us to ignore our lying eyes, and give us glossy printed pamphlets telling us what we are allowed to think.
The formerly fashionable theory of man-made catastrophe is becoming the regular butt of jokes. Bear in mind that half of the comedic team of Miller and Armstrong is known as an eco-activist (that would be Ben), and the skit isn’t necessarily poking fun at the science but at the militant marketing, and over-the-top dogma.
Possibly even funnier (in a tragic kind of way) are the comments from pro-man-made global warming fans. They think it’s funny too.
UPDATE May 27, 2011: While the inflation information here is correct, be aware news has just come out that the NIA (who made the video) is a pump and dump group, doing potentially fraudulent work. So enjoy their videos but beware of their stock recommendations. We wondered who was behind this video — at least it finally makes sense.
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Background Joanne occasionally writes about the science and corruption of monetary systems. She summed up the connection between the two dismal sciences (climate and economics). If you are new to this theme see the explanation and links at the bottom of the article.
You might think inflation and climate science are only linked metaphorically. But the corruption in science is fed by the corruption in our currencies.
The monetary system that allows a privileged few to print money from nothing is the same system that allows massively misdirected spending. When there are so few controls on the growth of money, there is less negative feedback, fewer brakes, and virtually no limits. If the system is swimming with easy money, people can “afford” to build wildly extravagant and unproductive things — like wind-farms, carpets of solar panels, or symbolic rivers of blue plastic.
This is a video related to the endgame of that topic, and I gather it’s going viral. It’s provocative.
‘The sound track is very professional, even if the plot time-line is overly compressed. In the end this is also interesting because it marks another incremental step up in the war between new media and old. If you have a message to tell, you can pay for advertising on MSN or you can create an online video and watch it run…
Could this happen in a day? No. But over a few weeks or months, maybe. The US debt level (compared to its GDP) is now higher than it’s ever been. The easiest way to pay off these debts (and possibly the only way left now) is to print money. The new money is digital, so no one will need a wheelbarrow. (Did you hear the one about the German in 1923 who got mugged on his way to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow load of cash? The mugger dumped the cash and took the wheelbarrow.)
After the awful post-Climategate-and-Copenhagen year, more than anything else, the Big Scare Campaign needed a PR win. And in that sense Cancun was a major victory. Nobody agreed to anything legally binding, Kyoto was not extended, and all they achieved amounted to nothing more than an extension of the yearly junkets, and the promise that the gravy train is not dead yet. But the headlines will warm the hearts of all on Team-Scare-Us. The most important thing for the side that’s losing friends, faith and face, was to regain momentum. They’re trying to stop the death spiral.
The Australian ABC is only too happy to help be a part of the cheer-squad:
Expect the raves to grow in western recollections. But in the rest of the world things are different. India is congratulating itself for avoiding any commitment:
See below for the 4 ingredients for a PR victory, and then see how Australian tax dollars are used to “help the environment” by adding 5000 Mega Litres of water a day into a flooded river.
What happened through the last long night of the Cancun talks?
The most recent news I can find suggests the Greens are partly happy, which means more money must be going to flow from the people to the bureaucratic machinery, though nothing appears to be confirmed. Ponder the power of 100 billion dollar pledges. It buys a lot of PR advertising and school propaganda, and creates millions of active patrons as jobs and industries are established that are wholly dependent on keeping the big-scare-campaign going. The ambit claim of “1.5% of GDP” appears to have been dropped.
The saving grace of this fixed monetary commitment ($100b vs 1.5%) , if it is confirmed (and if you can call it a “grace” of any sorts), is that by 2020, $100 billion may not buy much, thanks to rampant inflation on the way. Feel the relief?
See UPDATE 2 (at the bottom): It appears nothing has been signed, and the future promises are just more “talks”. But, $100 billion has been pledged each year …? If so, that’s a win for the climate industrial complex and the bureaucrats, but will be painted as a quiet partial step forward. It’s not as big as it could have been, but $100 billion per annum is a major win in anyone’s books. Even if they didn’t get world government this time, their mission can only be advanced by this. Does it start now, or in 2020?
UPDATE #3 (from Comments):
The trustee is the World Bank (not… the UN?), and “We’re talking about a [combined] reduction in emissions of 13-16%, and what this means is an increase of more than 4C”. BBC News h/t Richard C (NZ)
The draft moves forward a pledge that wealthy nations made last year in the Copenhagen Accord of $100 billion per year in financing, starting in 2020, for developing countries. The money would help developing countries mitigate emissions and adapt to the worst effects of global warming, like heatwaves, droughts and stronger storms.
The text also sets up a “green climate fund” to help channel some of the money to developing countries.
The text drops a demand from developing countries that rich countries offer 1.5 percent of their gross domestic product in financing.
The power hungry tyrants learnt from Copenhagen. They realized that they have a far better chance of success by underselling the expectations and sliding in long impenetrable documents in front of underling bureaucrats. Due to the importance of this I have reproduced Christopher Monckton’s words in full as reported at SPPI (see below).
The UN wants nothing less than 1.5% of our GDP.
That’s $212 billion from the USAevery year ($2700 per family of 4).
That’s $32 billion from the UK every year ($2000 per family of 4).
That’s $13 billion from Australia every year ($2400 per family of 4).
The Secretariat will have the power not merely to invite nation states to perform their obligations under the climate-change Convention, but to compel them to do so. Nation states are to be ordered to collect, compile and submit vast quantities of information, in a manner and form to be specified by the secretariat and its growing army of subsidiary bodies.
Please send this message on and email politicians. Australian elected representatives are listed here. Once this is quietly established, how will any single nation back out even if it’s citizen vote to do so (other than the US with the military might to match the UN?)
If you would prefer to spend that money on other things. Now is the time to protest. The more money they get, the harder they are to stop.
I usually add some gentle humor to these reports. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bl**dy care.
The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements of the outcome, are drafted with what is called “transparent impenetrability”. The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so what are we complaining about?
Since the Chairman’s note is very long, I shall summarize the main points:
Finance: Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred of the provisions in the Chairman’s note will impose huge financial costs on the nations of the West.
It appears the warming of the 20th Century has been done before. It’s just business as usual for the planet.
Frank Lansner has been hard at work again, and we’ve been discussing the Vostok ice cores. This time Lansner was looking to see if the current warming trend was unusual, and if there was evidence to support the high climate sensitivities the models suggest. As it happens, most of those high climate sensitivities that the models “estimate” come not from carbon dioxide directly, but from the feedbacks (the way the planet responds to any small change in temperature).
The models assume the net feedbacks are positive. These same feedbacks ought to have been working 100,000 years ago, and if so, there should be some hint of it in the ice cores. Lansner has been hunting for large swings in temperature during the periods when Earth was at a similar temperature to present day conditions — but what he finds is that the current claimed rise of 0.7 degrees C over the last century, even if it were true (and not exaggerated by thermometer siting, the UHI, inexplicable adjustments, or selective use of records) would still be a dog-standard rise.
The Vostok ice cores sampled temperature at 20 – 60 year intervals. At least three times in the last 350,000 years temperatures have been warmer than they are today. If positive feedback was a real factor we ought to see sudden rises that then rapidly increased another 3 degrees within 100 years. That is exactly what Hansen, Gore and the IPCC are telling us is likely to happen. If water vapor rises, sticks around and makes the upper troposphere more humid, then surely we would see it happening in records from the Pleistocene world which had much the same oceans in the tropics as we do today. We can’t measure water vapor back then, but we can see if any natural bursts of warming were amplified. Instead Frank finds that there are often rises of a degree in 100 years, but that it almost never goes on to be amplified into a larger rise.
This fits with the other empirical evidence we have for negative feedbacks. It’s exactly what we would expect given that the radiosondes don’t find warming or more humidity in the upper troposphere (that hot spot is missing). The pieces of the jigsaw fit together.
Frank ignores the times when temperatures were much colder than today. That’s because the feedbacks could be quite different in a cooler world, and what we are really interested in is the current conditions on Earth. Will the CO2 we put out there mean a small warming is magnified into a big one? Feedbacks like the melting icecaps, vegetation changes, and release of CO2 from warming oceans — would work in similar ways no matter what caused the initial rise in temperature. The icecaps don’t care what caused the warming…
— Jo
Guest Post by Frank Lansner, Civil engineer, Biochemistry
Is the warming in the 20th century extraordinary?
I have examined high quality Vostok temperature ice core data from the interglacial periods of the last half million years. These warm periods are the best evidence we have from Earth to examine the dynamics of present day climate on Earth.
We are looking for other huge temperature rises of 3K – 6 K that should result from just minor temperature rises.
Below I have identified all temperature rises of the Vostok data fulfilling the following criterion: “Temperature at the beginning of temperature rise must be at most 1 K below today’s temperatures indicated by -1K anomaly in the Vostok data. Next, the examined periods must be at most 300 years in length (we want to focus on the warming effect of one century time intervals) and finally, the initial temperature increase from glacial to interglacial is not included”:
The latest Newspoll test on climate gives out almost no useful information on what Australians think about carbon emissions, but definitively shows that Newspoll survey designers didn’t think too hard about the questions. Indeed the survey is so meaningless that sometimes sceptics and unskeptics would have to both tick the same boxes. Could this be a survey-bot at work?
THINKING NOW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE. DO YOU PERSONALLY BELIEVE OR NOT BELIEVE THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS CURRENTLY OCCURRING?
Isn’t the aim of polling to get answers that are not ambiguous?
Does “Climate Change” mean: a/ that the climate changes, or b/ that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are affecting the atmosphere?
I would have to tick YES for this question. Yes, I do think that ice-ages occur and warm periods do too, and that there is no static perfect temperature for the Earth, and that currently there is no reason to believe that the forces that have changed our climate for 4.5 billion years have suddenly, for the first time, reached a fixed unchanging stasis.
Presumably the 22% of people who ticked : “Not believe” were using definition ‘b’ above, and not the literal definition ‘a’. Instead of information about public attitudes to man made global warming, Newspoll may have shown that 73% of people read literally, and 22% interpret questions in light of current “fashions” in Orwellian gobblespeak. But then again, maybe not. What if the 22% can read literally, but chose to send a message to politicians by ignoring the literal meaning. Who can tell? Not Newspoll.
Normally Newspoll is one of the most rigorous of surveying organizations in Australia — but this time they have fallen for the shifty reframing tricks of the Scare Campaign Team.
There’s a media war going on here in Australia. At stake is free speech — but the discussion about it is completely disguised and parades instead as a debate about “balance” in science reporting.
It’s reached the point where our national masthead felt the need to issue a whole feature article rebutting their critics (Climate debate is no place for hotheads) which includes quote after quote of The Australian’s pro man-made-global-warming editorials. But why under the Goddess of Free Press should any serious newspaper feel required to declare their belief in a particular scientific theory?
“The Australian ‘s editors are being attacked for questioning authority. They’re supposed to be journalists who investigate everything, not a PR agency who promotes an ideology. In reply the Australian could have been roasting the other media agencies…”
The Australian has been taking heat from the rest of the Australian media (notably Fairfax and ABC employees, and a couple of book writing academics). It’s not that The Australian has held back on publishing the illogical, unreasonable PR, and baseless posturing of vested-carbon-scare-interests, no sir. They are just as ready as anyone to publish the unscientific Lomborgs, Orsekes, and Hamilton’s. The real issue at stake is censorship. The rest of the media thinks The Australian should do more of it. They disparage The Australian in scathing terms, not for what it won’t publish, but because it does not shield the dumb punters enough. The Australian commits the sin of giving some column space to people who don’t hold UN-approved-views.
Censorship is the single most important tool of those who want to scare the masses. (Money, of course, would trump that, but there is no shortage of whole government departments devoted to pumping the climate gravy, so while money is theoretically vital, in this case it’s guaranteed. Censorship, though, is an entirely different story: it could “disappear” in an instant, and once gone, it’s hard to get back.)
So the climate-establishment and their willing minions crave censorship — and why wouldn’t they, they’re practical people. They know that if skeptical writers were allowed to publicize their opinions along side the professors who keep spouting logical errors and baseless insults, then the grand facade of the carbon scare would be cremated by Christmas, captured in comedy by New Year, and forgotten by Australia Day.
This is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream story on an unrelated topic where the writer assumes everyone understands how dodgy climate science is. Climatology is relegated to a joke.
For the sake of posterity, I wanted to capture this moment in the downfall of a once respected profession. Source, the Wall St Journal: Wikileaks R US
Private companies already offer solutions to protecting data systems. “Data-at-rest” and “data-in-motion” programs look for anomalies in emails and other data moving through networks or resting on hard drives. SIM (security information management) software tracks network intrusions. It’s pretty good, the way climatology is pretty good.
Ladies and gentlemen, its only a small sign, a crumb, but it’s revealing. When Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall St Journal, was looking for an example of something that doesn’t work well, he thought of climatology.
What do you know? The Medieval Warm Period, which either “didn’t exist” or “only happened in Europe”, also hit Western Antarctica.
Booth Island and Mount Scott are also on the Antarctic Peninsula. Photo: Stan Shebs.
The climate models don’t know why the world was warmer 1000 years ago. They don’t know why it cooled into the Little Ice Age either. The models don’t do regional projections well, and they don’t do seasonal projections with any skill, and they (in the last ten years) don’t work on short decadal timeframes either, but surely when it comes to big global temperature changes the models have got all the major forces figured out? Surely they’d be able to predict large movements across the entire globe eh? — but the first test we come to, a mere thousand years ago, shows the models have a predictive ability not significantly different from a coin toss.
Just because it was warmer 1000 years ago (due to some other reason), doesn’t mean that CO2 isn’t responsible for this warming cycle, but when all the evidence for CO2’s guilt comes only from models that can’t get the last warming cycle right, and from argument from ignorance (“Our models don’t project this warm period without putting CO2 in!”) then we know that the “evidence” (such as it isn’t) is very weak. The mysterious forces that warmed us a thousand years ago could easily be at work right now. Worse, some entirely different factor could be too. The unknown unknowns eh?
During the “perfect stable idyllic climate” before SUV’s and power stations were invented and while the global population was one 20th of what it is today, ice on the Western Peninsula was at least as degraded as it is now, or possibly was even more so.
It’s all a grand charade — the matinee show put on by the Theater of Science was merely being used for the Grand Extravaganza called the Theater of Politics.
Wikileaks, not surprisingly, turned up some not-so-diplomatic and not-so-scientific goings-on in the political race to steer power and dollars.
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord“, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
The wrangling behind the scenes involve the usual offerings of pork-barreling type funding for piddling little projects — like $50 million dollar projects in the Maldives, or $30 million in aid for Bolivia — to win support for the weak non-binding Copenhagen Accord, which suited the US. Thus the $2 trillion market was being made and unmade by votes bought with the spare change from carbon trades during morning tea.
Even the Saudis were asking for a handout:
Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on 12 February records a meeting between US embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. “The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a US commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would ‘take the pressure off climate change negotiations‘.”
The Saudi’s were worried they might have missed the gravy train:
The assistant petroleum minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told US officials that he had told his minister Ali al-Naimi that Saudi Arabia had “missed a real opportunity to submit ‘something clever’, like India or China, that was not legally binding but indicated some goodwill towards the process without compromising key economic interests”.
In the end, it’s mostly what we all suspected anyway. Call me a cynic, but did anyone believe that atmospheric research really affected the political decisions?
The political wheeling and dealing behind the scenes is where the big moves occur:
The cables obtained by WikiLeaks finish at the end of February 2010. Today, 116 countries have associated themselves with the accord. Another 26 say they intend to associate. That total, of 140, is at the upper end of a 100-150 country target revealed by Pershing in his meeting with Hedegaard on 11 February.
The wikileaks material shows again that voting at these COP meetings is nothing to do with the science put forward in the IPCC reports (which in turn are not based on the scientific method, or what wide body of the worlds scientists actually said anyway).
It all merely proves that the best protection for the people of Planet Earth is to have many competing democratic governments, none of which can gain too much power over many of the others. The UN process of mock democracy plays a dangerous game, where buying off single officials in tin-pot countries is a cheaper form of pork barrelling than the domestic politics of large Western election campaigns.
“Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances.”
Japan is the third largest economy in the world. In absolute, unequivocal terms it has just announced it will not be extending the Kyoto agreement.
It’s hard to see how a carbon trading scheme can continue to grow when major emitters are pulling out.
“The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancún suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international treaty that commits most of the world’s richest countries to making emission cuts.
Presumably this is the perfect time then for the Gillard Government to launch Australia (with it’s minor player, 800 billion dollar, GDP) into a sacrificial symbolic scheme that the rest of the world is abandoning.
‘The forthrightness of the statement took people by surprise,’ said one British official.
If it proves to be a new, formal position rather than a negotiating tactic, it could provoke a walk-out by some developing countries and threaten a breakdown in the talks. Last night diplomats were urgently trying to clarify the position.
Ansley Kellow’s book “Science and Public Policy” normally sells for $110 (£59.95), but he’s arranged for a special discount for readers of climate science blogs: $40 (£25)! Use the email information below to order.
It deals with the politics and philosophy of science, including the hockey stick controversy, the SRES scenarios, the species-area rule, etc. Published in 2007, it deals with the preference for computer modelling over observational data and the corrupting influence of modern communications such as e-mail on peer review and other quality assurance processes. (Aynsley writes that “I can claim to have anticipated Climategate – though I underestimated its extent”).
Normally £59.95/$110.00 Special price $40/£25 + postage and packing
To order this book please email (with full credit card details and address): [email protected], or on our website enter ‘Kellowoffer’ in the special discount code box after entering your credit card details and the discount will be taken off when the order is processed.
The Thompsons have no income, but fight on with borrowed help.
Matt and Janet Thompson moved to Australia, got all the approvals to set up a cattle feedlot, invested their life savings, then the rules began to change. They didn’t need a license at all when they started. Then a paddock was called a watercourse, and apparently they needed one. They were turning away customers in 2007, but then Matt spoke as a skeptic and things began to degenerate. In March 2008 their cattle license was cut in half. The West Australian Dept of Environment solicited complaints, and green groups, funded with lottery commission assistance, advised locals on how to target businesses and cut their cash flows to destroy them.
The license conditions suddenly increased, Matt and Janet responded to every request, but no matter how many letters of support, petitions, surveys, studies or odour assessments they got, it was never enough. All the way along DEC kept promising verbally that uncertainties would be resolved soon, but each time the written information arrived, the uncertainties grew and the news got worse and worse. DEC has issued an unbankable license, whereupon DEC can declare they have given the Thompsons what they asked for, but it’s meaningless, because no bank would recognize it as economically viable.
DEC effectively runs the state of Western Australia. It has veto rights on all the businesses. That’s bearable if you are a large multinational corporation with big advertising budgets in The West Australian, and a team of QC’s, but for small businesses who will stand up for you? Not the ABC, not The West Australian, not the Ombudsman.
Matt and I feel like we need to keep everyone updated on what is going on. You have all been so generous and caring…we can never thank you enough. But sharing information with you is the least we can do. I apologise that I’ve not done that well.
I decided that this was the best place to post our updates, but if you have another suggestion, please just let me know.
We are still onsite, still living behind locked gates, “playing” the legal game. We’re living minute by minute, with no certainty of our future. I’m working part-time to keep the lights on and food on the table while Matt keeps the place up and deals with creditors and legal issues. We share house/kid/food duties.
Having said that, we need to give the appearance of normalcy for the kids’ sake, and we put up our Christmas tree on Sunday. The kids were so excited! It was uplifting for me to just swim in their enthusiasm.
A billion dollars that could have been used for housing, schools, hospitals and health programs was drawn into solar subsidies to provide electricity that could have been produced in far cheaper ways.
There is no sunnier first world country than Australia. If solar was going to be a raging success anywhere, surely it would be in the land of the Sunburnt Country. Instead the Australian government has poured in more than a billion dollars to install solar panels on the roof tops of private homes. It’s a text book case of misdirected spending.
In the end the government drew money from the population-at-large to help Chinese solar panel manufacturers, and to provide “cheap” electricity to 107,000 households in mostly medium-high wealth areas. It reduced Australia’s emissions by a piddling 0.015 per cent, at an exorbitant carbon price of $300/ton.
Solar power is clearly not viable yet. So that billion dollars could have been spent on research to make solar power economic (in which case no subsidies would be needed). It could have made us world leaders with a product to patent and sell (or it might not). Instead governments of both major parties chose to pour a billion dollars into a program that never had any chance of helping the environment, or our export industry. Mere feel-good window dressing.
The program gifted up to $8,000 dollars as a rebate to encourage people to install solar panels on their roofs, but it had to be canceled suddenly last year because the bill for the overly generous scheme was blowing out. Another different rebate for solar generated electricity promised to pay 60c a kwhr (compared to the usual 20 c/kwhr) and met the same fate. It too was suddenly canceled. In both cases the local solar industry had to deal with rapidly changing rules and rewards, leading to bubbles and overnight busts. It makes a mockery out of the “free market” driving small businesses to the wall, and discouraging long term planning and employment.
Renewable energy makes up only 6% of Australia’s energy needs, and fossil fuels, 94%. Solar PV panels provide 0.1% of all our electricity. There is no nuclear energy industry here, despite Australia having one third of the worlds uranium. Roger Pielke, Jr. has looked closely at Australia’s emission targets and calculated that it would need 35 nuclear plants, or 8,000 “Cloncurry plants”, finished and operating in nine years time in order to meet the targets. Ponder that the single Cloncurry “plant” those numbers are based on, has been beset with set-backs. After three years in development, when I last looked, the project had only 4 mirrors of the 8,000 it was supposed to have. It was due to be finished in early 2010. Possibly not the raging success it was hoped to be.
Having a solar panel on the roof used to be a badge of pride for the green-minded. But as people realize the panels took money from the poor to give cheap electricity to the wealthy and achieved almost nothing for the Australian environment or economy, surely they will become seen as the mark of the parasitic, the selfish or at best, the silly…
Even progressive activists know that this doesn’t make sense. D. Brady Nelson explains that a left-leaning group at the ANU, which accepts all the assumptions of the man-made global warming (government funded) “science”, just can’t justify the exorbitant waste for so little gain.
Monday, 20 March 2000. Look out! Back when every witchdoctor had a PR agent and newspapers dutifully repeated their latest crystal ball incantation, it was reported (without so much as a caveat) that there would soon be no more white Christmases in London, and worse, soon “kids will not know snow”. Gone too would be the scenes that inspired glorious impressionist images, and lyrical poetry. Are you in tears yet? The travesty!
Pity the poor shop owners who were trying to order stock based on met office “forecasts”. Back in 2000, shop owners were not bothering to stock sledges.
No more snowmen in England!
h/t to Bernadette and Trevor who spotted this gem.
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
By Charles Onians, 20th March 2000
Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.
“[There are] no implications for the EU and UK,” Emilie Mazzacurati, head of carbon research for North America at Point Carbon, told BusinessGreen in an email.
No implications? None? And would they have said that if new markets had blossomed in, say, Japan or Brazil?
The market opened in Nov 2000, and as Milloy notes, with a red carpet future:
The CCX was the brainchild of Northwestern University business professor Richard Sandor, who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX. For his efforts, Time named Sandor as one of its Heroes of the Planet in 2002 and one of its Heroes of the Environment in 2007.
The CCX seemed to have a lock on success. Not only was a young Barack Obama a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX, but over the years it attracted such big name climate investors as Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.
Who would have thought? The man who would be president (and with support on both sides of Congress) knew about the CCX from the beginning, and a former VP made a giant smashing PR documentary in 2005. He and the IPCC conglomerate won Nobels. Yet in 2010 CCX carbon credits are worthless (and so, after years of abuse, are the peacely-Nobels).
Richard Santor, who founded it, still made nearly $100 million for his trouble. Who said the man-made-global-warming-team fight against big corporations? They are big corporations.
The ECX may soon follow the CCX into oblivion, however — the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. No new international treaty is anywhere in sight.
Business Week seems to be waking up to the potential shift here…
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After the awful post-Climategate-and-Copenhagen year, more than anything else, the Big Scare Campaign needed a PR win. And in that sense Cancun was a major victory. Nobody agreed to anything legally binding, Kyoto was not extended, and all they achieved amounted to nothing more than an extension of the yearly junkets, and the promise that the gravy train is not dead yet. But the headlines will warm the hearts of all on Team-Scare-Us. The most important thing for the side that’s losing friends, faith and face, was to regain momentum. They’re trying to stop the death spiral.
The
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