It is foolish beyond measure to enter into an Emissions Trading System (ETS) based on the hysterical predictions of CSIRO’s computer modelling. To quote Prof Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the world’s most eminent physicists: “The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”
If there is global consensus that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing global warming, why is it that over 30,000 US scientists disagree and have petitioned the US government against actions to mitigate CO2 emissions? See http://www.petitionproject.org/
Why have the oceans been cooling for 5 years? Why is Antarctic sea ice increasing?
Why is it that despite the past decade of increased CO2 emission levels, the temperature has been stable and is predicted by the Hadley Centre to actually go down over the next decade?
We need to think very carefully before following the recommendations of the Garnaut Report, possibly the longest economic suicide note in Australia’s history.
Art Raiche
Killara, NSW
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
And when did it all start?
The magazine might be controversial but have a read of this document.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
In 1996 the Australian economy dodged the Asian financial crisis due to the reforms introduced by Keating and then steered forward by Howard so that by 2001, we ducked the US tech collapse.
Now in 2008, after 12 years of increasing prosperity we have become so economical complacent we’re allowing a new government to dismantle decades of reform and install massive new bureaucracies and regulations while imposing punitive taxes based on a phantom fear of our collective imagination.
And all this irrational, anti-competitive damage is being inflicted just as the world economy tips over into a recession likely to be the worst since the 1970’s.
Garnaut has shown clearly at least one point—climate change delusion is likely to lead to economic catastrophes of historic scale.
Our government is not acting in the best interests of the nation.
Spot on Wes.
I do love the line about Garnaut being the longest economic suicide note ever written.
Nick Raffan, a mate, has the latest Raff Report posted on Henry Thornton – he thinks we are headed for a global recession and we compared notes on the metal prices, most of which are heading south.
Rudd is also thinking of taxing the NW Gas producers, according to The West Australian, and there is a Treasury Paper out on a $5 Billion carbon sink plan, all theoretical of course.
We are truly in for interesting times.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/emissions_trading_even_sacks_says_it_sucks/
There are two prevailing fashions dominating the political scene, whose aims and effects are in direct contradiction with one another. But that does not prevent virtually all of the political parties in the Western democracies from attempting to embrace both at the same time.
They are global warming and the mission to eradicate poverty. What scarcely any leader seems prepared to admit (although they are all coming bang up against the reality of it) is that the objectives and tactics involved in forwarding the cause of preventing global warming are inimical to the cause of fighting poverty on a national and an international level.
OPINION: POOR PEOPLE CAN’T WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING by Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/14/do1401.xml
I have always been dumfounded by the connection that proponents always make between the cause and remedy of AGW. Watching Q&A last week make me sick in the stomach knowing that young greenies who have never known financial hardship are willing to send the country into a depression in the name of Gaia. What’s worse ETS is being heralded (or hoped) that it’ll solve all pollution, fill the dams, save the whales and wean us from oil!
Tapir, I saw that ABC Q&A too and knew then that, like Al Gore says, We are Dooooooomed!
People in the audience were actually chiming cheerfully that to halt our economic development was a small price to pay to save the Earth, so disconnected from reality and so pampered their existence has become.
You could see that behind their glazed eyes lurked a moral superiority devoid of causality or reason, but full of the self satisfaction one feels after a hard morning of shopping (on credit) …let the poor eat carbon caps.
One consolation is that the more the modellers adjust their models to reflect new and unexpected developments, the sooner the models will be proven wrong. In the world of foreign exchange this is well-known as the danger of curve fitting or over-optimisation of computer models. It usually ends in disaster.
What makes Guano look diabolically ridiculous are these temp charts … i.e. The Southern Hemisphere .. where we live ….. has been trendless for thirty years.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3231
Even a dumbo banker would see this fact as relevant. All this talk about carbon pollution coming from Rudd and Guano is bat poop designed to fertilise some special people’s pockets … an outrageous, superstitious climateering fraud.
One wonders how the Bright Young Things in the Q&A audience, (not to mention Tone the Bone himself), would cope with regular and sustained electricity blackouts?
Especially outages that occured during midwinter or midsummer extremes….When demand would deem them most likely to occur!!
Maybe that is the cure they deserve;andmaybe it is not that far away.
Having spend my youth growing up in a communist country, I despair at how little freedom is apparently valued these days by my fellow Australians. Government is viewed as some sort of benevolent entity, which is responsible for sorting out any and all of society’s ills. Ever more taxation/regulation is viewed as the universal way forward. The ETS proposal and the general craziness associated with AGW is a classic case in point.
My wife is no scientist, but she says that the coming severe global recession will knock all this silliness on its head, once the current generation, who have never had to live through economic adversity, is forced to take off their green-coloured glasses in order to put food on the table. She’s probably right, but it is sad to have to accept that widespread hardship and misery is the necessary price for re-discovering rationality.
As Gerald Ford said: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government strong enough to take from you everything you have.”
If only more people realised the truth in that saying…
“She’s probably right, but it is sad to have to accept that widespread hardship and misery is the necessary price for re-discovering rationality.”
Bring it on. The sooner it starts, the sooner we get through it.
Regrettably – within the 24/7 news spincycle, the policymakers are going to see that opinion is arguably on their side in regard to doing ‘something’:
“Action on climate can’t wait, voters say
THREE-QUARTERS of voters believe Australia should act on climate change even if the rest of the world does not…..”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24021126-11949,00.html
I have no idea as to spin within the relevant survey or otherwise.
But if you keep telling a nice middleclass nation like Australia that we’re all doomed, the ever-cautious middleclasses will look for succour.
The raging debates on blogs like this one just don’t register in The ‘Burbs unfortunately, and nor do ideas as to what decarbonising a modern economy will mean either.
Most folk think no further than that electricity comes from that sockety thing on the wall, so how difficult or costly can it be to change the entire grid ?? So this is an opinion poll – not profound commentary on the global energy situation.
And it was almost inevitable that one island nation in the Anglo-sphere would fillet it’s economy as an example to the rest of the world. I had hoped it might be the UK or NZ that would immolate themselves first. But Australians are renowned trend-followers and fashionistas – so it rather looks like the Working Families are voting for “Go First and Go It Alone – Oi Oi Oi”.
With an eye on geography and history though – it is no wonder that fast tracking of schemes are being made while the opinion poll going is good.
Despite the successful steering through economic downturns in recent years, Australia remains a long way from most other major population and economic centres; is relatively sparsely populated; and scattered around the edges of a large continent.
We lack economies of scale and suffer the tyranny of distance, as Blainey coined. And as energy costs rise, the disadvantages of distance and scale will start to be felt more by the service and financial sector workers in the suburbs with their first world lifestyle aspirations.
And even more experienced hands see storm clouds on the horizon for those who do recall a little subject called history ( which seems to have perished from collective knowledge since the fall of the Berlin Wall ) that might just refocus the attention of the Working Families on much more pressing and immediate concerns before long:
My 80th birthday wish: not to see another Black Monday
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24019718-30538,00.html
Interesting link Louis. Note the common MO between the climate fraudsters and Meade. If you need a rationalisation for your own political agenda, then just head off as far into the distant Pacific (insert South Pole/Greenland/Africa or other distant location of choice) where no-one can check the veracity of your claims. Keep sloppy records, conduct no double blind tests to exclude your own bias and, before you know it, Aunt Margaret has given all your siblings and cousins the clap.
So instead of Meade’s rationalisation of expat paedophilia in vulnerable island communities we now get rising sea levels on sinking atolls. And as usual, the message is driven home to the locals that they are powerless to do anything about it. Indeed, they will keep talking down the future of pacific communities until they sell the sea bed rights for half a dozen Virgin Blue shares.
That link was a timely reminder of how interlinked the whole sixties bowel movement was with climate armageddon, overpopulation (and free love, no less) and substance abuse. It only made sense after a third of your brain had disolved in the bong water. Plus ca change..
“But if you keep telling a nice middleclass nation like Australia that we’re all doomed, the ever-cautious middleclasses will look for succour.”
The ever-cautious, but ever-selfish middle class. Of course, once the going gets tough, it will be a completely different story. Look at the recent uproar over petrol price increases – and the furious backpedalling by both Rudderless and the good Doctor.
This little blip will, of course, pale into insignificance once the full effects of the cap-and-redistribute scheme starts to bite. Petrol prices up, electricity prices up, gas prices up, food prices up – jobs slashed, the whole nine yards.
If there is one good thing to come out of it all it will be this: the comfortable middle class will be baying for blood (“we thought you meant everyone else was going to suffer – not me!”). And the most obvious targets will be the oxygen thieves in the CSIRO/Ministry of Truth and the other sheltered workshops who have been responsible for urging all this along. It will be gratifying to see them get their just deserts.
Kevin: “Most folk think no further than that electricity comes from that sockety thing on the wall, so how difficult or costly can it be to change the entire grid ??”
Frightening but entirely accurate. I have recently personally witnessed a green-leaning co-worker seriously assert that farmers should get rid of cows, because they add to greenhouse gasses. When asked where would she get milk from if this happened, she said “Coles, same as now.”
I’m not joking. These people vote.
Ha Ha – Thanks John – genuinely – no sarcasm,
Unfortunately you have just re-stoked my paranoia that the universal franchise will be the ultimate undoing of us all:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
Attribution – source contested on the internet, but I like the insight no matter who originated it. And I place making the cows disappear while still expecting milk to flow in the same broad category of incinerating the common wealth.
Unfortunately, right at the moment I would suspect that more vocal interests and list assemblers would actually seek to dis-enfranchise me for participation in blogs such as Jennifer’s, just before loading us on to a train to the re-education camps.
So out of sheer self-preservation I will continue with staunch support for liberal democracy and the faint hope that common sense may yet prevail if we are allowed to continue to voice opinions.
“I’m not joking. These people vote.”
I hear ya. I sat at my desk one day just dumbfounded while a co-worker expounded on how workers would simply be moved out of the cities to regional centres like Bendigo and Ballarat and housed in cheap accommodation – and that the work would be moved to them so they didn’t have to travel. (This was a professional person with a degree, no less.)
I knew the battle was well and truly lost after listening to this. You can’t reason with these people – they have to experience it and perish.
In fact, Ivan, an increase in (or return to) regionalisation is likely to be one of the more significant responses to high energy prices and economic decline. It will not be a remedy for the core economic/social ills but it will be a logical partial correction to a degree of economic centralisation that was always subsidised by cheap energy, and therefore, transitory.
The lesson of history is that if cheap energy favoured bigger players and market concentration then expensive energy will favour market fragmentation, the break up of the conglomerates and the re-emergence of regional and local suppliers. And to that prospect I can only say, bring it on, Huey.
But having said that it will take a lot more than a mere relocation to turn your average urban lumpen scheiser into a horny handed son of toil, capable of justifying a full stomach by his own efforts.
Ian,
The problem was – she wasn’t suggesting that these people return to be “horny handed sons of toil”. The proposition was that industry would relocate to these regional centres and, in effect, work camps would be set up around them. So you would have a GMH ‘work camp’ and a Ford ‘work camp’ and so on. And Ford and GMH would pick up all the tab for this, of course.
When I made the obvious comment that if Ford and GMH (and whoever) had to make an investment of this magnitude just to keep a bunch of brainless greenies (sorry – tautological, I know) happy, why wouldn’t they just spend a hell of a lot less and move the whole operation to China or Thailand? Doubly so, given that no-one here will be allowed to drive cars, anyway – at least not if Ender and his Brownshirts get their way.
And who would want it anyway? If it comes to that, put the needle in first.
Ah ha, sorta like big rock-candy mountains, then?
They seriously believe that core industries will remain under a major (world leading) carbon tax while there are 2.5 billion chinese and indians who will not be taxing?
Those types of suggestions do not surprise me, Ivan. After all, the benevolent uncle Joe Stalin did just that in the Soviet Union, relocating entire peoples to the frozen wastes of Siberia, where he decreed new cities and industries would hence come forth. And they did.
What’s a few tens of million of deaths if your aim is saving the planet, no less! Besides, every greenie knows that there are too many people alive now as it is.
The totalitarian tendencies of the modern Left have really never strayed too far from the tried and tested ones practised by their last century spiritual brethren. Alas, those who forget history are bound to repeat it & those of us who do remember are in the minority.
A quote from the remembering (the time frame is pre WW 2):-
“— it is hard to believe that purely engineering reasons can explain it. Politics and idealogy lead to strange things in pre-war France and it must be in these areas that the explanation is to be found”
Trading junk bonds, derivatives, and other things that nobody’s thought to name have driven the world’s cash and credit markets into crisis.
Do we need “carbon credits” to add to this mess? There are a number of people headed to jail over selling worthless, imaginary investments. Selling and buying CO2 ranks right in there.
Al Gore in cuffs? This is, actually, not beyond imagination. They’ve already arrested guys with lots more money than he has.