JoNova

Minister of the Environment and Queen of WA?

! UPDATE ! : The administrators have just written to give notice of eviction for October 15th. They also want the legal rights to the proposed litigation by Narrogin Beef Producers. In other words, they want to firesale the farm and clean up any proceeds of the wrongs done against Matt and Janet. The Thompsons would lose everything. Right now more than anything they need legal brains to help them out.

Here’s the sweet two line clause that pretty much gives total control over all businesses in WA to the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC).

Condition A1 is an all encompassing point recently added to the Thompson’s license. It’s a sweeping clause, and measured entirely with opinions. Anyone with the right to say Yay or Nay on what’s reasonable here is the proxy for ruling Monarch. It’s so powerful that if we referred to noise instead of odour, and applied it to, say, Perth Airport, I’m pretty sure we could stop all flights to Western Australia until they shift those runways to the Gibson Desert.

ODOUR CONTROL
A1 The licensee shall ensure that odour emitted from the premises does not unreasonably
interfere with the health welfare, convenience, comfort or amenity of any person who is not on the premises.

(Apparently, if they’re on the premises, they can be uncomfortable or inconvenienced, and that’s quite ok.)

What’s “unreasonable” exactly, and how do you measure that? Do we count an “inflammatory-quotient” of the complainants letters? Is that extra points for CAPITALS and overdone exclamations “!!!”? If we tally up the pain, perhaps we divide that number by the profits they hope to make if the feedlot is shut down and their dreams of wealth from subdivision come to pass? If only someone could sell us a reasonable-o-mometer.

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Join us in Sydney, Friday October 1

A free one day seminar in Sydney on Climate Change.
Friday, October 1

Hosted by The Heartland Institute, it’s the fifth in a series of international conferences on climate change that Heartland has hosted since March 2008, and the first to be held outside the United States.

Chris de Freitas | Bob Carter | Cory Bernardi | David Evans

| Alan Moran | Barun S. Mitra | Jo Nova

Emissions policy

Sea level changes

Corruption, Costs, Benefits,

Defeating the Witchdoctors

The seminar is part of the Pacific Rim Policy Exchange, sponsored by Heartland, Americans for Tax Reform, the Property Rights Alliance, and the Institute of Public Affairs.

For more information or to register for the Policy Exchange, click here.

ATR and the HEARTLAND INSTITUTE are offering FREE registration for both conferences

Please contact Rachel Rountree at 512.476.4403 or email her at [email protected]

Read on here for more information on the Agenda and the Speakers…

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Thompsons part 4: Every slope is a watercourse

!UPDATE! Things are desperate.

Matt Thompson has just advised me that NAB showed up today and have appointed administrators. Behind the scenes a few key people are trying to convince the NAB to rescind the administrator and give the Thompsons 90 days. Now is the time to email politicians and media. Can someone email Tim Blair?

Background: This is the ongoing saga of how Big-Government uses complexity to play Kingmaker. Their story was summed up a few days ago in a post that with Watts Up has swept up support from around the world.

UPDATE on Donations: $27,000 plus from 670 people. Thank you!

When Matt and Janet first came to Western Australia they were told they could run a feedlot without regular licenses, as long as they were not within 100m of a watercourse. It makes a big difference: if a farm is a category 68, it can run thousands of cattle without being licensed (and many dairy farms do).

I didn’t think I’d ever find agricultural codes interesting, but by paying attention to the detail we can see just how powerful the Department of Environment (DEC) is, and how selective it can be. You would think it would be easy to measure 100 m toward a waterway, but how do you define a waterway? You might expect that it would have banks, or that in a 100 year flood the water flowing in the gully might have a chance of reaching a body of water big enough to have a fish. If so, don’t apply for a job at DEC in WA!

DEC has declared that Narrogin Beef Producers are a Category 1 property needing licenses because there are watercourses to the north of the feedlot, and to the southwest. This picture is a photo (slightly amended) of the paddock to the north, in winter (the rainy season). Would you call this a watercourse?

A photo of the northern "watercourse" on the Thompson's property. (Sign added.)

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

News from the Non Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

I have great respect for the team that put together the exhaustive, comprehensive NIPCC report. This team is constantly updating their information on the NIPCC site. If you want information on the peer reviewed references related to the climate, it’s a resource par excellence.

Here’s just a sample of new material posted on the NIPCC Web site:

The Glaciers of Greenland were smaller 5000 years ago;
African savanna trees thrive with increases in CO2;
It was hotter in China a thousand years ago, and by a whole degree;
Marine-life-with-shells can’t agree on their favourite CO2 level and
Temperatures make no difference to the 5000 year record of hurricanes.

Details follow:

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Most unpopular state government wants to run the country

What a mess.

The New South Wales State (NSW) Government is one of the most unpopular state governments in the history of Australia. Maybe this gives us a clue why. The latest plan is to please the population by taking an unnecessary statewide carbon abatement scheme and launching it on the whole nation:

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Unintended Consequences – part 1

We come across these stories all the time: Those moments when the most well-intended ideas turned out to have a kicker of an outcome. It’s time to start organizing and filing them.

Money is a powerful fuel. But, some people think you can inject it into a human ecosystem, and that everyone will keep acting the same. Like people are forgetting the feedbacks….

Here, one legislator describes the outcome of his own work as a “gigantic rort”, and another researcher uses the word blackmail. Meanwhile, two out of three children diagnosed with autism in Queensland are apparently not autistic.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

4 days notice! The Thompsons are served notice of eviction.

Matt and Janet ponder their future

From Agmates (and many emails), news comes that The National Bank served notice today that the Thompsons have to be off may lose control of their property in four days. (See Update #3).

This is a family with four young children, who ran a profitable business; they filled in every form and ticked every box. They have broken no laws, and there are no outstanding environmental notices, but yet, they came to Western Australia with their life savings and they are losing everything.

Don’t bring your investment dollars to Western Australia — not while the Department of the Environment effectively controls the state.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Holdren uses free market to get back to Stone Age

Nearly 40 years ago, John Holdren (now “science” advisor to Obama) wrote a book with the infamous Ehrlichs. In the “recommendations” at the end of 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, they said: “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States”.

It’s a weird use of the word. But, there is no mistaking “de-develop”: to undo development, to go backwards, to get rid of advances….

And it was hardly a juvenile slip of the tongue. 37 years later, all this time passes, and when asked about that passage, he acknowledges it’s still on his agenda:

“What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality. Thanks a lot.”

CNSNews.com then asked: “And how do you plan on implementing that?”

“Through the free market economy,” Holdren said.

Just imagine what twisted, sicko “free market” would freely choose to do some de-developing?

Holdren’s version of freedom is just another grand control scheme: “Let me tell you how to live”. “Free market” has become the false advertising banner of the totalitarians. A market is not free if you have to coerce people or jail them into joining the market.

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6.6 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

Australian Survey of Scientists: Quick speak up while you can!

A comment from Speedy is worth taking up.

I fear they will close the survey soon. Don’t miss the chance to let them know how disappointed you are in falling standards of scientific integrity in our major scientific institutions and associations. These groups should be speaking out against unscientific behaviour, illogical announcements, and a lack of empirical evidence in policy proscriptions. These institutions should be serving the public.

The survey is for members of Australian Science Associations and members of FASTS.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

7 Signs of the Times

If we are winning this war, we would expect to see signs of retreat, and many signs have crossed my desk recently.

1. The EU abandons the Unilateral Kyoto Agreement

Reuters 14th Sept. Read between the lines, and hidden amongst the rest:

Connie Hedegaard’s comments were delivered alongside a warning that Europe would not automatically sign up again to the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, the main global deal to tackle climate change.

Hedegaard said progress looked “very difficult” in the run up to global climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November, and that nobody should expect the EU to sign up to an extension of the Kyoto Protocol unless loopholes are closed and other big players commit.

(Thanks to Benny Pieser)

2. Russia and China have never been fooled by the Big Scare Campaign

The Russian bets that coal mining will be a good deal for 25 years to come. China agrees. I don’t think either of these countries is thinking seriously about paying a carbon price on top.

Chinamining.org

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Australian Temperatures in cities adjusted up by 70%!?

Ken Stewart has been hard at work again, this time analyzing the Australian urban records. While he expected that the cities and towns would show a larger rise than records in the country due to the Urban Heat Island Effect, what he found was that the raw records showed only a 0.4 degree rise, less than the rural records which went from a raw 0.6 to an adjusted 0.85 (a rise of 40%). What shocked him about the urban records were the adjustments… making the trend a full 70% warmer.

The largest adjustments to the raw records are cooling ones in the middle of last century. So 50 years after the measurements were recorded, officials realized they were artificially too high? Hopefully someone who knows can explain why so many thermometers were overestimating temperatures in the first half of the 1900’s.

50 years later?

The raw Australian urban temperature records are in blue. The adjusted records in red. Note that temperatures in the middle of last century appear to be adjusted downwards. These are the annual average recordings for all 34 sites.

Remember Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology said:

“On the issue of adjustments you find that these have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).”

Yet it’s obvious that there are far more warming adjustments than cooling ones, and remember, many (almost all?) of these urban sites will be markedly different places than what they were in say 1920. The encroachment of concrete, cars and exhaust vents can surely only go in one direction, though I guess, it’s possible all these sites have new sources of shade (why aren’t the themometers moved, if that’s the case?) Like the rural records, the temperatures overall are roughly a quarter of a degree higher after the “corrections”.

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7.6 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Clive Hamilton’s War on Science

Clive Hamilton writes again on The ABC Drum

It’s a strange, inside-out world. Poor Hamilton seems to suffer from a kind of public form of projection, where he inadvertently lumps skeptics with all his own failures. Everything he claims to be standing for, he unwittingly attacks. Everything he protests about is something he does himself, and in spades. Virtually every point is easily refuted, yet promoted with public money.

It’s quite an achievement. Hamilton is anti-science, intolerant, and hypocritical all at once, and his arguments collapse when measured against his own benchmarks. He resorts to name-calling, and rank speculation without basis or substantiation. The ABC betrays its wafer thin intellectual standards and bias by not noticing that Clive barely makes a point that does not dispute itself.

Clive protests about the War on Science, but doesn’t realize he is waging it.

The thing that makes the scientific method vastly different to all the other philosophies and methods of acquiring knowledge out there is that evidence always stands above opinion. Yet the very core of Hamilton’s arguments depends on the “Consensus”, and Clive apparently hasn’t noticed that the famous begotten “Consensus” is just a collection of … wait for it… opinions.

Clive apparently hasn’t noticed that the famous begotten “Consensus” is just a collection of … wait for it… opinions.

Why do I need to explain this to a Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics? It’s a joint center of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, all three of which ought to hang their heads in abject shame. What does it mean to have a Centre of Applied Philosophy that hires professors ignorant of the most baby-basic detail about the core philosophy that lifted Western Civilization out of the Dark Age?

The thing that makes science not another religion is that there are no Gods, there are no opinions of science that stand above the measurements of nature. In science, empirical evidence trumps opinions, even the opinions of scientific and (gosh) political authorities. Yet here is Hamilton acting all religious about the two-thousand-apostles-of-the-IPCC. Send him back to school and let the rest of us get on with a decent community discussion where we don’t have to explain the basis of science to a so-called professor. (While we are at it, can we have our tax money back so we can donate it to universities that know what science is?)

Hamilton looks in a mirror and unwittingly attacks himself

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UN totalitarians want your money and your life

After a Year of Setbacks, U.N. Looks to Take Charge of World’s Agenda

United Nations Totalitarian power hungry want the world

The World: It’s part of the United Nations

It’s a story that just begs to be translated into English. It’s just another naked grab for power disguised as a helping hand. We come in peace, we’d like to run your country.

The UN bureaucrats, that no one elected, want to decide what happens to everyone everywhere in the world. They want p o w e r and control (I’m shocked I tell you!)

After a year of humiliating setbacks, United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and about 60 of his top lieutenants — the top brass of the entire U.N. system — spent their Labor Day weekend at a remote Austrian Alpine retreat, discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of the world’s agenda.

The topics included:

— how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit;

In charge of the world’s agenda? They want to control our weather, our money, our sources of power (is there anything much left?). Maybe we still get to choose the movies…

They really want to award the money you earned, to the people who didn’t, which includes their friends, their fans, and that enormous group of people who are about to become their friends. This is known as patronage. If you are the man handing out the money, you get the “thanks”. If you are the man forced to pay, your reward is to not-get-jailed.

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8.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Deutsche Bank — A Wunch of Bankers

Deutsche Bank Logo Carbon credits

Carbon credits: Just another excuse to "print money"

…
If this was Exxon pushing a PDF promoting skeptical views, it would be on the front page tomorrow. Where are the front page headlines?

“Bankers feed scare-mongering report”

Instead it’s just Deutsche Bank try to save the world their profit line.

Just in case you are missing your daily dose of being spoon fed propaganda by Bankers who want your money, see Climate Spectator Balancing reason and risk, where Deutsche Bank is helping the skeptics by giving us yet another example of just how desperate they are to get carbon trading running.

Q: When will the bankers worry about whales?

(Ans: When they can trade Humpback Credits.)

The good news is we are getting to them, and we are marking the lines they need to jump over. They now admit it looks bad when they denigrate scientists (they finally “get” that they shouldn’t call scientists deniers):

Although the scientific community has already addressed the sceptic arguments in some detail, there is still a public perception that scientists have been dismissive of the sceptic viewpoint,

Watch how they pretend to care about the science (science-schmaltz), even as they trash the scientific method by arguing from authority:

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8.7 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Australia can meet it’s 2020 targets with just 35 nuclear power plants or 8000 solar ones!

Roger Pielke, Jr. has looked closely at Australia’s ETS targets and helpfully put some numbers into the hypotheticals.

With all their subsidies, goodwill and fervent wishes, solar, wind, and geothermal produce just 3% of our energy needs. Fossil fuels produce a whopper 94%. And “energy” on these grand continental scales is measured in quadrillion BTUs which is known as “one quad”. Australians use about 5 quads / year, and to make that we pump out about 400 Mt of carbon dioxide per year. (These kind of big-picture numbers are often hard to find, so I wanted to capture that to keep things in perspective.)

Australias Energy Production Fuel

…

Population growth is a big factor in Australia

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8 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

Election news: Independents split – Labor Wins.

UPDATE: Oakeshott and Windsor go with The Labor Party.

Why? Because more than anything they want a long stable government. They like both packages from both parties, but the deciding factor appears to be that they think the Coalition would be more likely to call an early election because they’d be more likely to win it. Figure that. They’re admitting the Labor minority government is weaker, and that’s why they’re backing it.

Putting long-stable-government over better-government, or more popular-government is pure self-interest. The independents feel they would hold more power in a three-way-split Labor party minority, and that their power would last for longer.

And Oakeshott might get a Ministry. (Not that that has anything to do with it…)

See Bolt.

So the plan now as the world faces the Global Financial Crisis part II is that anyone who disagrees with any government proposal needs to run active campaigns to make sure these two independents know exactly why those proposals are counter to Australia’s interests.

Steve Fielding will save us from the-Argentinian-path until July next year. After that…

…

EARLIER: One of the three independents has announced he will back the conservative coalition. That makes the tally effectively 74:74. The last two independents will decide it, but they must move together or we’ll need another election, which is the last thing the Independents would want, as they risk losing their key roles.

North Queensland independent MP Bob Katter will back the coalition to form minority government.

Mr Katter said his decision would have no bearing on fellow independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, signalling that they would be supporting Labor.

Mr Katter said he would respect Mr Windsor’s and Mr Oakeshott’s decision on which of the two major parties to back.

‘They have very moral convictions and they will follow through on those convictions,’ he told reporters inside his office at Parliament House.

‘I will most certainly respect whatever decision they make.’ SKY NEWS

Since Katter doesn’t want a carbon tax or a mining tax, it would seem bizarre for him to back the Labor Party and the Greens which want both. Wierdly though, he says he would have, if Rudd had been leader.
Katter implies the other two will go with Labor, but these Independents are in some of the most conservative seats in the country. They appear to want to go Labor, but what price paid at the next election?

9.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Hamilton rages on, Monckton replies

Clive Hamilton, the Australian “public intellectual”, and failed Greens candidate is a busy man: leave no ad hominem unsaid, no law of logic unbroken. The man has a predictable formula. Rule one: Make an unsubstantiated claim; cast aspersions on all who so much as question it — dig deep for an attempted character assassination if possible; then top it off with feigned moral indignation mixed with grandiose generalizations. It helps to toss in some strawman conspiracies, and confound it with unrelated topics. Rule two: never discuss the evidence.

The Australian newspaper: MP’s obligation is to the planet

Hamilton was trying to guilt trip and intimidate the independent parliamentarians in Australia (who will probably announce their decision tomorrow about who will form government). Almost everything he says is based on a bluff.

The danger of climate change towers over all other influences on the security and health of future generations, yet the Liberal Party and the Nationals are run by people who reject the vast body of scientific evidence that proves it.

Can’t one journalist just ask Hamilton to name the scientific paper that we “deniers” deny? Something that shows carbon dioxide has a major effect on our climate (ie. more than 1.2 degrees?) [See this post for more info on the kind of paper that Clive can’t name.]

The Coalition stands in the way of what must be done if we are to have a chance of avoiding, or even being ready for, a world less sympathetic to the flourishing of life.

Hamilton’s target is Tony Abbott (leader of the opposition), but Hamilton can’t really do the character assassination attempt on Abbott, so he goes for the assassination-by-association, and derides Abbott for even meeting a skeptic. Imagine the sin. Tony Abbott actually was in the same room as Christopher Monckton.

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Unthreaded – September

And a small operational note: I’ve set up an email address support AT joannenova.com.au which goes direct to the fabulous helpful volunteers who moderate. If you see a comment that needs reporting, that’s the email to use. Likewise, if your comment disappears into the spam autofile, you can email the moderators who can set it free. If you email me I may not be able to help for hours.

Please bear in mind that your email will go to several busy people who have other real jobs and commitments. Please respect that.

Otherwise, this thread is for all those topics that I haven’t written about lately, or for news.

Latest comments

The latest comments (at this moment) come from 6 different threads, one of which is from a post last December. I think it’s a great thing if people can post on-topic and revive old threads. Thanks to the latest comments page, it means that people have more chance of getting an answer or an audience on old posts.

Notes on finding “that post”

If you are not familiar with them, my INDEX, ARCHIVES and LATEST 30 COMMENTS pages are all working well. I’m quite proud of them. 🙂

If you are looking for a particular post, sometimes the monthly archives are the winner (as opposed to my complete ARCHIVES page which lists every single post just by dates and headlines). The monthly archive lists posts month by month, but unlike my complete archives page, it also gives a few lines of information about the post. (Look for those monthly archives on the far bottom left column.)

6.7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Pachauri admits the IPCC just guesses the numbers

Such is the pressure finally beginning to bear on the IPCC that Pachauri has been forced into the ridiculous position of trying to rescue credibility by contradicting most of their past PR campaign. He’s taken the extraordinary step of admitting they don’t have hard numbers, hey, but it’s all OK because the IPCC is really a government agency to make policy, not to write scientific reports “that don’t see the light of day”.

So he’s admitting that the IPCC was all about policy prescriptions all along? And the science was just fudged-up window dressing to provide an excuse? Well, who would have guessed.

Hidden beside Pachauri’s declaration that he’s happy about the IAC report, he let slip a corker of a line:

Times of India asks: Anything in the UN probe report you completely or partly disagree with?

They have talked about quantifying uncertainties. To some extent, we are doing that, though not perfectly. But the issue is that in some cases, you really don’t have a quantitative base by which you can attach a probability or a level of uncertainty that defines things in quantitative terms. And there, let’s not take away the importance of expert judgment. And that is something the report has missed or at least not pointed out.

So if you can’t quantify uncertainties (like is climate sensitivity say 0.5 degrees or 6.5 degrees, and with what probabilities) just go with your best guess, call it expert opinion (especially if you only pick and pay the “right” experts) and say that there is a 90% certainty, even if there are no numbers you can add up to get that.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

A spot of Australian news this week

Australia – The Sunburnt Country going Green around the Gillards?

Will we or won’t we? Each day for nearly two weeks we swing politically… looks like Labor… looks like the Coalition… One side has more seats, then the other; one side has a higher primary count, then the other; the three crucial independents say things that sound like they find the big-spending side of government appealing, then polls show that their electorates all voted conservatively; then the 2-party-preferred vote swings one way, swings back, and swings again, in the end it’s a piddling few thousand votes out of 14 million or so.

I’m kind of getting used to not-having-a-government. The Business Council wails repeatedly that business “hates uncertainty”, but I keep thinking that if UFO’s took our elected reps on a 3 year wine-tour of Alpha Centauri, Business would revel in the certainty that no new-fang-dangled-clauses would appear.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings