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And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to steal the blood, sweat and toil of the many.
They lied, broke solemn promises, failed to provide evidence, and displayed a singular lack of good-manners. They viciously insulted anyone who disagreed, they hid the models the public were forced to pay for, they gave patrons highly paid jobs to advertize their scheme.
They speak arrant nonsense as if it is the bleeding obvious: telling us that we will grow rich if we use energy that costs more; that coal miners are to blame for heavy rain; that more taxes will bring investors; that we’ll lose jobs if we don’t pay more than we need to for energy; or that 6.98 billion people will follow the 0.02 billion who lead us on the path to the Land of Stupid. They made prophesies that failed time after time, yet speak on, as if only they have the vision to guide us.
The polls show the public would not have elected people who wanted to bring in a Carbon Tax. Yet it is law.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
[…]
This is about what it adds up too: If the carbon tax costs us, say, $10 billion a year (anyone have a better number?) we not only have to pay that, but we might lose another $20 billion a year as well.
As I’ve said before, you can’t compensate the nation. There is no productivity gain, no win, no efficiency improvement. There is no bigger pie if you have to cook with leather.
Treasury likes to pretend that the rest of the world is “joining” in the carbon schemes, and that by 2016, the US, Canada, Japan, Russia, China and India will have changed their minds and legislated a carbon price.
The Minerals Council of Australia wasn’t convinced that was a good plan, and asked the Centre of International Economics to analyze the Treasury modelling on the carbon price. The Treasury wouldn’t let them. (Who do they think owns the models?) Instead the CEI had to do their own modelling.
They are apparently the first to try to figure out what might happen in Australia if the rest of the world doesn’t leap head-first and suicidally into carbon pricing schemes.
The CIE finds losses that are 6 times greater:
That […]
Australia will — bar asteroid impact — get its Carbon Tax on Tuesday.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual in skeptic-world: Wild unheard-of snow started falling early in the US; there’s another story about masses of fossil fuel energy somewhere under Australia, another western nation makes it stark raving clear that it won’t be getting an ETS (Yay for Canada eh), while a different one pulls the pin on solar panel subsidies (Go Britain). The G20 leaders give Julia Gillard the deadly “you are so incredibly brave” speech, and said they aren’t going to follow.
“PM Julia Gillard told by G20: you’re on your own on carbon”
9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
Kudos to John O’Sullivan for finding this story; see the note at the end about the extraordinary response his post on this received.
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Who are the world’s worst “polluters”? According to a new high-spectral-resolution Japanese satellite — it’s developing countries.
Who knew detailed spectroscopic data on Earth’s atmosphere was available to figure out where the CO2 and other greenhouse gases are being produced and absorbed?
In January 2009, a Japanese group launched a satellite “IBUKI” to monitor CO2 and methane spectral bands around the world to establish exactly where the world’s biggest sources and sinks of greenhouse gases were. With climate change being the perilous threat to millions, this data would seem so essential you might wonder why didn’t someone do it before. As it happens, NASA tried — it launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in Feb 2009, which was designed to do exactly the same thing, but it crashed on launch. Oddly, NASA don’t seem to be prioritizing the deadly climate threat, as it will take NASA four years to figure out why the Taurus XL rocket failed and relaunch it.
The results from from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) show that Industrialized nations appear to […]
Another notch on the winners tally board. It’s a mark of the times that one of the most popular, well known and respected science commentators is willing to to put his reputation and effort into laying out such controversial science publicly, pulling no punches and in a potentially hostile environment. Compare this to the obituaries of “global warming” from believers.
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, spoke at an event by the RSA* in Edinburgh. Emails are coming in — it has hit a nerve — and it’s insightful to watch Matt stand in enemy territory, carefully finding common ground with the real scientists in the audience, the seekers of truth, before he launches his attack on the consensus position. According to Bishop Hill (aka Andrew Montford) the speech was well received.
I’ve selected key paragraphs, though ended up with a 2,400 word version. The full 4,000 word version is on Bishop Hill.
David* and I were fortunate enough to have a private lunch with Matt Ridley on his Australian tour, and it was a delight. Days like that are one of rewards for the hours of work unpaid. I usually don’t mention these kind of events — […]
BREAKING: Steven McIntyre reports that “649 Berkeley stations lack information on latitude and longitude, including 145 BOGUS stations. 453 stations lack not only latitude and longitude, but even a name. Many such stations are located in the country “[Missing]“, but a large fraction are located in “United States”. Steve says: “I’m pondering how one goes about calculating spatial autocorrelation between two BOGUS stations with unknown locations.”
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The BEST media hit continues to pump-PR around the world. The Australian repeats the old-fake-news “Climate sceptic Muller won over by warming”. This o-so-manufactured media blitz shows how desperate and shameless the pro-scare team is in their sliding descent. There are no scientists switching from skeptical to alarmist, though thousands are switching the other way.
The sad fact that so many news publications fell for the fakery, without doing a ten minute google, says something about the quality of our news. How is it headline material when someone who was never a skeptic pretends to be “converted” by a result that told us something we all knew anyway (o-look the world is warming)?
The five points every skeptic needs to know about the BEST saga:
1. Muller was […]
A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in May 2009 about how depressingly similar the US problems are to emerging economies he has worked with. It’s a provocative article: The Quiet Coup (a few excerpts posted here).
“Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.”
The Quiet Coup
The problem is oligarchs who overborrow, become too powerful, and gain too much influence:
Click the chart above for a larger view
“Wall Street ran with these opportunities [lightweight regulation, cheap money, securitization, interest rate swaps, and I would add, high frequency trading]. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.
“The great […]
Lucky the BEST* project is here to save us from the lying thermometers of the past. Apparently people in the 1960’s and 1970’s were clever enough to get man on the moon, but too stupid to measure the temperature. Millions of people were fooled into thinking the world was cooling for three decades by erroneous thermometer readings. Who would have guessed?
Back then, everyone was sure that the 1970’s was a lot colder than the 1940’s, as Steven Goddard reminds us:
Newsweek April 1975
See the original Newsweek report at Denis Dutton‘s site.
The Global Bermuda-Triangle Effect: Thermometer Weirding
The performance of global thermometers is baffling. The technology is nearly 300 years old. The first thermometers were produced in 1724 by Daniel Fahrenheit, and by 1742 Anders Celsius had invented its main competitor. This simple, reliable instrument spread throughout the world and worked well. So far so good. But from 1920 we see the first signs of worldwide systematic errors (first too high, and then too low?!).
The strange “Wierding” effect struck both mercury and alcohol thermometers and was most savage between 1945 and 1975. Frank Lansner compared the BEST projects result with his Rural Unadjusted Temperature […]
In the UK, gargantuan (as in wow!#$) amounts of cheap energy were discovered a month ago, yet it seemingly hasn’t changed the political landscape. (Or, then again, maybe it did? I gather no one in the UK government seems to be admitting it, but from afar, it looks like a lot of clunker UK policies have not-coincidentally got the boot in the last month.) Overtly, it’s been the gift no one wanted to open… but possibly a few in power are well aware of what’s under wraps and it is influencing policies?
Back in August 2011, the experts at the The British Geological Survey team thought the country only had 150bn cubic meters of shale gas. Then on Sept 22 a group called Cuadrilla announced that they’d found the odd 5,660 bn cubic metres under Lancashire.
Right about then, a sea-change ought to have come over ministers and corporate leaders in the UK. Here was a get out of jail free card, with lots of cash-cow potential, not to mention 50+ years of gas for the whole nation. It ought to have been time for large parties, champers, and the dumping of the competing energy sources. Instead a month later, […]
I need to do some testing, so odd things may come or go… but hopefully it will all be working properly soon. 🙂
Thanks for your patience, but do keep commenting!
Jo
PS: New star ratings added for blog articles. Thanks for your enthusiastic clicking, but seriously, surely I need to do more than write two lines to earn eight stars!
8.9 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
We want evidence, reason, and well informed opinions from all sides on important topics. Instead we’re coerced into paying for propaganda, character assassination, and the personal views of journalists.
The ABC has been outdoing itself lately. It doesn’t just ignore skeptics, it’s been actively working to denigrate them. No ad hom is too low, no fabrication too far fetched. Could it be complete fiction? Why not? Could it be the most expensive high profile ABC programs, costing tax-payers hundreds of thousands an episode? Yes sir.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a culture. When comedians and scriptwriters live off a diet of dogma at the ABC (it starts with the science unit), why would we be surprised that they’d churn out the same half-truths, deceit, and sloppy reasoning in their fictional work?
The ABC Chairman — Maurice Newman — recently worried about the poor intellectual quality of ABC “investigations” in The Australian, “Ad hominem attacks substitute for logical and evidence-based discourse that would otherwise allow viewers and listeners the opportunity to decide for themselves where they stand on the issues.”
Our billion-dollar ABC is supposed to represent the diverse views of the country:
The ABC editorial policy tells us the ABC […]
Good news: signs are coming in from all over the non-Australian-and-New-Zealand world. Hints of sanity are spreading. Everywhere Green schemes are being slashed, junked and rethought.
I’m heartened. There are reasons to be optimistic, (even if, in the end, the good news was not because politicians got rational, but because the money ran out).
For those that missed it, Delingpole reported the beginning of the October good-news shift with ‘Let’s commit suicide more slowly,’ suggests Osborne.
George Osborne has vowed that the UK will not lead the rest of Europe in its efforts to cut carbon emissions, raising the prospect that the country’s carbon targets could be watered down if the EU does not agree to more ambitious emission reduction goals.
EU referendum reports on the collapse of the UK’s largest Carbon Capture Scheme and what it means for the Green Agenda
It has come to pass that Longannet, the flagship scheme for carbon capture in the UK, has been junked, despite the availability of £1 billion funding from this moronic administration. And since it is the only remaining project in the running for CCS funding, that makes it about thirty months from inception […]
I thought the Canadians had gotten over this type of insanity. Environment Canada apparently wants to cut the coal industry in half. (At least that’s as much as they’ll admit too. Presumably they’d feel like they’d completed their life’s work if they could only wipe it out completely.)
Christopher Monckton has analyzed the Canadian regulatory action on “Coal Emissions” and finds that, as usual, legislators are choosing the most expensive option possible with other people’s money. Environment Canada wants to spend $6 billion to reduce the atmospheric concentration of a trace molecule by 0.01 ppmv, and assuming there is any advantage in doing so, it would still cost one-eighteenth as much to just do nothing, suck it and see, and pay for all the theoretical damage that could ensue.
Like so many other Western Nations, there is not even the pretense that the legislation makes sense judged by any numerical outcome, yet Canadian citizens may have to pay thousands in tithe to witchdoctors and carpetbaggers in a futile attempt to change the weather. It’s as if the highest echelons of Western leadership are stone-age innumerate.
As per usual with these type of posts, I expect no real challenge to Monckton’s […]
If you are in Sydney, I recommend dropping in to meet David Archibald and hear him speak!
6.30pm, Club Five Dock, 66 Great North Road, Five Dock
Details below… Jim Simpson runs a model group of skeptics 🙂
9.2 out of 10 based on 11 ratings […]
La Nina is here. But how big will it get?
The NCEP NOAA forecasts suggest it might be so big, it’s historic — stronger and colder than anything since possibly 1917. (Then again, the Australian BOM are saying it’ll be a bit weaker than the last one.) But as Frank Lansner points out, the NCEP model got it right last year when many others were not even close.
Lansner has spotted the uber cold forecasts of NCEP. By March next year their models are telling them the Pacific Ocean (section Nino 3.4) will be 2.5 degrees below average. The forecasts are so unusually cold, some of the model runs don’t even fit on the graph. (Warmistas must be quaking at the thought of a blockbuster cold northern winter. Bring out your “warming causes cooling” memos.)
If conditions do reach 2.6 degrees below average, that would make the ocean surface temperatures in that zone, colder than anytime in the last 60 years. It would be the La Nina to almost match the strength of the 1998 El Nino anomaly (2.8K) that set records all over the world.
7.9 out of 10 based on 18 ratings […]
Pickering has it in a picture 🙂
Let’s applaud the brilliant Larry Pickering.
It says a lot about the state of our nation, that after retiring 30 years ago, the esteemed cartoonist felt the inescapable urge to come back now.
The Australian government and the Big Climate Scare are both achieving once-in-a-generation status. They are both ideas so preposterously absurd, they are Fertilizer for Funnies.
When a government is so bad, that it brings long retired cartoonists out of retirement, you know this era is the end-game stage of a historic low.
Cartoons like this are exactly why the Big Scare Campaign is scared to death of free speech.
Pickering uses comedic exaggeration to the full, but people don’t need to take this literally. It cuts through. This captures a dangerous idea. What if the government was milking the scientific system? Imagine if they treated some scientists different (what, you mean like calling them names?).
Gillard may control the Army but we skeptics have the best cartoonists. It’s no match. The Tax is temporary.
9.4 out of 10 based on 36 ratings […]
Have you wondered what the global raw rural data tells us?
What did those thermometers say before the adjustments, smoothing, selection, and averaging?
This just might be the first time anyone has publicly compared the global raw data to published adjusted data sets in this way.
Frank Lansner has been dedicated in the extreme, and has developed a comprehensive Rural Unadjusted Temperature Index, or RUTI. One of the most interesting points to come out of this extensive work is the striking difference between coastal stations and inland stations. Frank kept noticing that the trend of the inland stations was markedly different from coastal stations and island stations.
Fig1. Red-Blue lines mark regions where there was a different coastal to inland trend. In green areas the two trends were similar.
What he finds is perhaps not so unusual: The coastal areas are heavily influenced by the sea surface temperature. Inland stations record larger rises and falls in temperature, which is hardly surprising. But, the implications are potentially large. When records from some stations are smoothed over vast distances (as in 1200 km smoothing), results can be heavily skewed by allowing coastal trends to be smoothed across inland areas. What Lansner […]
Bountiful Joy! The Australian Labor Party have discovered the endless free lunch, and they’re going to feed the Nation!
All this time we’ve been wondering how to make the pie bigger, save the world, and live to be 105, and the answer was staring us in the face!
The Diabolical Choice
Box One: Cheap Electricity
Box Two: Same electricity — Costs a lot more!
Labor chooses Box 2!
Why? Look at the benefits:
1) For $11 billion dollars a year you get almost as much electricity (except at night time, early morning, late afternoon, and on cloudy, windless or extra windy days.)
2) You are providing a guaranteed market for a product no one in their right mind would buy! (This is the Labor “free market solution”.)
3) You give people “Hope”! Hope that someday, the people profiting from selling you a product that isn’t very good, will pay for the research to figure out how to make it worth buying!
4) Then whoever that smarty pants country is, will sell this back to us, making even more profit because they own the patents. Good […]
The End Game of the Great Global Warming Myth draws closer
With impeccable timing the Australian Government is snatching defeat from the jaws of what could have been a glorious victory. Just as Gore, activists and then Hansen admit they lost, the infighting among the big scare campaign begins, the EU pulls the pin on Kyoto, and UK news outlets are asking if a Little Ice Age is on the way…
No one in officialdom is admitting the science has changed, or that they got it wrong, but the world is behaving as though it no longer believes.
What are the odds? Today the Australian Government is voting on the “Clean Energy Bill” (which will henceforth be known as the “Costly Energy Bill”) and at the same time the EU is saying: Enough! The big boys have to play or we are out. Which means the impossible trio of USA, China and India need to sign up to Kyoto II.
They might as well have said: “It’s all over for us. Kyoto II is dead”.
EU sets conditions for signing up to Kyoto II
LUXEMBOURG – European Union environment ministers — responsible for only 11 percent of global carbon emissions […]
What’s the worst thing you could call a scientist? Apparently, a “climate change denier” and “a fraud”.
Even scientists who are hunting Yetis are not suspected of being as evil, unscrupulous and deranged as skeptics-of-the-extent-of the-UN-committee’s-projections-of-man-made-global-warming, aka, “climate-change-deniers”. I mean, who would dare question the UN, eh? It is a collective God, it can’t be wrong — like, say, the Pope in 1633. If they say it’s 3 degrees / 2 degrees /3.3 degrees, whatever, they must be right (even if they do keep changing their mind).
Scientists who are hunting Yetis have no credentials, poor sods and are ripe for a whack.
Who are these “international scientists” who are going to find his Yeti for him? We have been given no names, nor credentials, nor institutions they belong to. I suspect, like so many of the so-called climate-change deniers, they are frauds.
But here’s the thing, I know the author, Darren Curnoe (though it’s been a while), and he’s a really nice guy. We shared a group house once, when I was on the way from science to TV, and he was on the way from TV to science. We had avid conversations about the evolution […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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