It’s truly amazing how much can happen when I take a hiatus, and I’m pleased to see something positive happening.
In large part thanks to Climategate (which I’ll discuss separately as it really needs its own article), a large number of truly conservative politicians in the Liberal Party have found the courage to stand by the convictions and announce their (accurate) belief that man-made global warming is a crock, and that the Emission Trading Scheme (or Carbon Pollution [sic] Reduction Scheme, or whatever you want to call it) is a giant tax which will only lead to a massive redistribution of wealth, something which the Rudd government have effectively admitted.
From one day to the next we hear a different figure about how much the Everything Taxed Substantially (OK, sorry, couldn’t help myself) will cost per household per year, but we keep being assured that it’s all OK, because there will be subsidies for low-income households. In other words, we’ll tax everyone, but we’ll cancel out the tax for people who we declare to not be “rich”. We will redistribute wealth…we won’t fix the climate.
In fact, the ETS has nothing to do with the climate any more. Even the Greens, the great purveyors of climate doom, are not supporting the ETS in its current form. If the Greens won’t support it, how can it possibly have anything to do with the climate?
We are being fed lies by Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong et al about the climate and about the ETS. They want to have their ETS in place before the cHOPEnCHANGEn climate conference (Barack Obama is visiting the conference on his way to receiving his Nobel Hope And Change Peace Prize) because they know that, with all of the publicity that the proposed climate treaty’s bizarre “one world government” junk has been getting, along with the Climategate emails, there is no chance of a treaty being signed, and that will kill off their attempts to pass an ETS once and for all.
The conservatives inside the Liberal Party know this. They know that man-made global warming is a fraud. They know that the ETS is a giant tax, and above all they know that agreeing to pass the ETS will result in them simply being a watered-down version of the Labor Party which will never attract enough Labor voters to form government. As strange as it may be, Malcolm Turnbull’s leftist reign over the Liberal party has done more for the conservative movement than it could ever have done for the left-wing movement if he had joined the Labor party.
So, the Liberal Party are faced with a choice on Tuesday morning. Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott or some other as yet unknown challenger. If Malcolm’s rhetoric this weekend is anything to by, he is not going to leave of his own accord, which effectively rules out Joe “I want to be anointed, not voted for” Hockey as leader. I have mixed feelings about this.
Joe Hockey is photogenic, for lack of a better word. To the majority of the electorate who are more interested in Tiger Woods’ marital problems than the state of the nation, Joe is a large, jolly, Santa Clause-esque figure who could easily attract the personality vote in the way Kevin Rudd (Kevin ’07) and Barack Obama (hope and change) did in their respective elections. To the same extent though, Joe believes that humans are causing global warming and is yet to rule out supporting the ETS. There is a huge risk that, with Joe as leader, the Liberal Party may remain fractured and the ETS may go through.
I thought that Julia Gillard made one good point during her excruciating ramble on ABC TV’s Insiders this morning, and that was that Joe Hockey visited John Howard for advice this weekend…John Howard, a man who, as much as I think he was a great Prime Minister, did jump on the global warming bandwagon towards the end of his tenure in an effort to regain the support of the electorate.
Joe is being referred to as a “consensus candidate” which is a description that I’m pretty sure the media have invented. Nobody can work out where this consensus comes from, and that’s because it doesn’t exist. The word that the media were actually looking for is “moderate”, the same word that we would use to describe 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Not a conservative, but a moderate. A sort of “none of us quite agree with everything he says, but we can tolerate him more than a bloke from the other side of the political spectrum” internal Party mediator. The trouble with moderates is that they can never attract enough voters away from the other party, and ultimately fail because they don’t stand for anything.
I responded to Joe’s cry for help on Facebook the other day, informing him that if he opposes the ETS, he can regain my support. That support though, on reflection, can only go so far as a front bench position. Joe Hockey as leader is untenable, and would be slaughtered by Labor attack ads at the next election. I can see the ads already:
“This man said he believed the IPCC’s report in to climate change, now he says he doesn’t believe it. A vote for Joe Hockey is a vote for uncertainty. Vote 1 Kevin Rudd”.
In fact, with Joe Hockey as leader, I fear that we will see a mass exodus from the Liberal Party over to the National Party. The coalition will dissolve. The Liberal party will become a truly “liberal” party, vying with Labor and the Greens for the left-wing vote, whilst the Nationals will expand their existing role as the true conservative party of the country and run candidate everywhere. It would be short-term turmoil and it would make for a very unpredictable election next year. In the long-run though, it could be precisely what the country needs, and even if the Nationals didn’t win the next election, they would probably hold enough seats, along with the Climate Sceptics party who must surely be in a stronger position thanks to Climategate, to kill off the ETS.
But that is long-term, and I am yet to find a politician who thinks far enough in to the future to risk running as a candidate for a different party in the next election…and besides, as I mentioned earlier, Joe doesn’t want to challenge, he wants the leadership handed to him in the same way that Peter Costello wanted the leadership handed to him.
That leaves Tony Abbott. What can I say? Tony’s a conservative through-and-through and (thankfully) opposes the ETS. I like Tony, but I’d much rather have Barnaby Joyce (I know, wrong party) simply because Barnaby, apart from being a conservative, actually has a noticeable personality. There are times when I wonder if Tony Abbott has left a cardboard cut-out of himself and a voice actor in Canberra and gone on a holiday. Tony would make a great Prime Minister, but I’m not convinced that he will be able to attract voters to the Liberal party…at least, not on his personality…but that might not be such a problem this time around.
Kevin Rudd can’t go to the next election of his personality again, because people know that he doesn’t have one. He has to go to the next election on policies, and with the ETS very likely to be delayed, the main point of the next election will be climate change. Unlike the global financial crisis, Kevin Rudd can’t bribe everyone with $900 and hope that they don’t notice that he has no idea what’s going on. This time he is proposing a massive new tax on everyone and everything. All that Tony Abbot and the Liberal party need to do in order to defeat that, is seize on the Climategate emails and the real data which shows that Australia and the planet have not warmed in the last decade, and show the ETS for what it is: a giant tax, and an instrument of socialism.
The polls already show that 60% of Australians oppose the ETS, so a “no ETS” stance backed up by the facts (or lack thereof) of global warming, plus information about how damaging the ETS is, should be enough to get a conservative party across the line, regardless of their leader’s lack of personality.
A quick side-note. Please don’t get me wrong here. I think Tony Abbott has a great sense of humour, I just don’t think he knows how to show it outside of the parliamentary chamber…and the majority of the country ignore the chamber.
There are two things which must be done in the coming two days. Firstly, people must continue (and start if you haven’t already) contact your Senators and urge them to oppose the ETS. I have contacted Gary Humphries’ office about this which, given Gary’s stance may have been a waste of my time, but also may help to make him oppose an ETS in any form, and I will contact Kate Lundy’s office, although I’m sure that contacting her Senatorialism will be a waste of time given her stance on the ETS, and the fact that I have previously written her a letter offering her an ancient Chinese curse. None-the-less, it must be done.
Secondly, the Liberal Party must appoint Tony Abbott or another true conservative as leader on Tuesday morning. If they fail to do this, then the conservatives must maintain their opposition to the ETS, block it, and break away to the National Party immediately. Failure to do so will result in the imposition of “the great green tax” (as Andrew Bolt put it on Insiders this morning) on the nation, and our utter collapse.
This is not a time for compromises, consensuses, moderation, or whatever you want to call it. This is a time for action based on what one knows to be true and just. This is a time for all politicians, not just conservatives, to stand up for the future of the country and oppose the ETS, and it is beholden on all of us out here in the public to ensure that our elected representatives know that we do not want, nor do we need, a huge climate tax that will not achieve a darn thing, except the collapse of our great nation.
And with that, I’m back. The whole catching up on sleep and getting my energy back thing has been a limited success, but I am now back to being able to put my thoughts in to writing without having to spend a week working out how to word it, so we’ll call it a success.
I’ve got a lot to get through, and seeing as blog posts with multiple short stories in them seem to be the flavour of the trimester on about half the blogs I read, and it’s convenient in this case, I’ll bite and run such a post here.
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Sleep? Hmmm, well it’s 3:32am as I type this and I last finished sleeping at 8am yesterday. You do the math. That said, in the last few nights I have had dreams where I:
1. Was in a repeat episode of Third Watch. Nobody could be bothered attending to the emergencies as they all knew that the people survived the episode, so why bother risking injury doing the stunts again?
2. I plunged to my death in a taxi, on a wet night where the left half of the road had been washed away. A very vivid and disturbing dream.
3. KXNT’s Alan Stock was elected as Chairman of the Nevada Action Committee, although what this actually achieved is beyond me, because the only thing he was required to do as part of this job was take five minutes out of his show each morning to read the KXNT phone number over and over and over and over and over (we’ll come back to this in five minutes when he’s done with the phone number)
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Speaking of KXNT, their traffic bed (the music they play under their traffic reports) is one of the bits of music which I managed to get stuck in my head this week. I also managed to get the First Option Mortgage jingle stuck in my head for three excruciating hours, and get it stuck in somebody else’s head simply by mentioning it on Facebook. Apparently it’s called “ear worm”. I also had another song stuck in my head, but I dare not try to remember what it was lest it happen again.
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Frasier and Seinfeld repeats at 7:30pm and 8pm weeknights respectively on Go! Channel Nine receive my perpetual thanks for this.
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There was some Bollywood movie on SBS Two the other night. I watched ten minutes of it near the beginning during which time the married couple managed to patch up their differences, and the wife declared that she didn’t really care about her husband’s flaws anyway. How they could drag that about the next three hours is beyond me, and I’m glad that I didn’t stick around to find out. The ten minutes was good for a laugh though.
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Cisco have calculated (which is probably code for “guessed”) that the average broadband Internet user downloads 11.4 gigabytes per month. I average 20-25GB per month and will probably start doubling that in the not-to-distant future if one of my household projects gets off the ground.
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Facebook have decided to preserve the accounts of deceased members, minus status updates and other “sensitive data”. This intrigues me as I have often thought about what would happen to this site and my other online data if I were to cease existing for whatever reason. I would like to keep it all online permanently, but am yet to find a viable solution. The National Library’s PANDORA project archives the essence of this site, but seems to have a lot of broken links and missing data, which is hardly surprising given the sheer size of this site (6.97GB and growing). Preserving this site is a work in progress…I suppose I’ll just have to stick around for long enough to ensure that it happens.
Anyway, if and when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’m happy for my Facebook account to be preserved as some sort of shrine, but I don’t want anything to be removed from it. How does one go about sharing this wish with Facebook. One’s will?
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Speaking of the dead, Yahoo have finally killed off Geocities. I’m glad that I was reminded of this imminent death the other day, as I had one page on there which I needed to save. I’ll republish it on here at some stage.
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Monash Drive has been removed the ACT “National Capital Plan”. The proposed road had been slated to run along the foot of Mount Ainslie behind Hackett, Ainslie and Campbell, roughly in-line with the already cleared sections which the high voltage power lines use. Politically, the road was never going to happen, which is a pity because it could have reduced a lot of congestion, especially in the years ahead.
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We’ve been following Barack Obama’s approval ratings here for some months now using the figures from Rasmussen, who had the polling figures closest to the outcome of last year’s election. That said, the other polls are interesting as well, especially when you consider that in the Gallup poll, Obama has recorded the worst third quarter of an elected president in recorded history. A nine point drop in his approval rating in the space of three months.
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The White House have declared war on FOX News, claiming that they’re not a news organisation. The White House clearly can’t tell the difference between news programming and opinion programming, even when it’s pointed out to them. Funnily enough though, the other networks have defended FOX. Late last week, White House officials tried to ban FOX from a White House Press Pool interview session, but the other networks wouldn’t have a bar of it, quite clearly telling the White House that “if Fox can’t be a part of this, then none of us will interview your chap”. It worked, and the White House backed down, for now.
Here’s the point. FOX out-rate every other cable news network consistently, partially because of their news programming, and partially because of their opinion programming. People want to watch it. The White House don’t like the opinion programming as it is often critical of the Obama administration, unlike others such as MSNBC whose opinion programming often favours the Obama administration. The other networks know that if they let the White House exclude FOX, then they are all trapped in an unwritten “do as we say, or we cut your access” agreement. It is an attack not only on FOX, but on every other network, on freedom of the press, and on freedom of speech.
Glenn Beck, on one of FOX’s opinion shows, put together a rather amusing piece on the War On FOX which had me in hysterics when I first watched it.
One wonders if people would have voted for Obama’s “new era of bi-partisanship” if they had known that “bi-partisan” is defined as “the other side will do as we say, therefore we all agree”.
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The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?
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Channel Seven have announced their new digital channel, to be called “7TWO”, on (you guessed it) channel 72. I’m not in the least bit surprised that regional affiliate Prime aren’t putting it to air straight away, I mean Prime own the “6” channels in digital TV land, and it would look rather silly have 7TWO on channel 62. I suspect that Prime are working on their own branding of the new station…PRIMExtra perhaps?
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RIP Don Lane, one of the great entertainers, who passed away at the age of 75.
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Remember when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be turned on for the first time and people were afraid the world was going to end? It amazed me how many people who believed that, were subsequently placated when it was turned on, broke down, and the world didn’t end. The whole cause for concern was for when it would finally reach the actual colliding stage, which it never did.
733-KXNT, 733-5968, 733-KXNT, 733-5968 (Alan’s still going…)
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Clive Robertson filled in for Tim Webster on 2UE and 2CC’s afternoon show yesterday. What a relief! Tim Webster, as much as like him personally, has bored me to death of late…I can not listen to his show any more, I just can’t. Tim is much better suited to a news-based show than the lifestyle-amalgam show that he is now presenting. Clive, however, suits the format perfectly, and is brilliant afternoon entertainment.
Memo to 2UE for next year’s lineup: Breakfast with Mike Jeffreys, Mornings with Stuart Bocking, Afternoons with Clive Robertson, Drive with John Stanley, Nights with The Two Murrays, Overnights with Jim Ball.
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And now at 6:18 it’s time for KXNT’s traffic and weather together on the eights, here’s Tate South (finally, Alan’s morning Chairman task is finished, which means that I can wrap up this blog post).
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There was an ad on TV last night for that boat from Victoria to Tasmania and back, in which they advertised the rate for taking your car with you as being an “each way” rate (eg. “x dollars each way”). Sorry, but does that mean it’s the return rate (you can travel each way for this amount) or the one way rate (each way costs x dollars)?
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Congratulations to Chris Matlock, KXNT’s Radiostar competition winner for this year. I listened to the entries of the 20 finalists when I was last in Deniliquin, and Chris was my favourite from the start, so I was very pleased to see him win. Chris will have his own show soon, apparently, and will start off co-hosting with Ciara Turns on “Sundays with Ciara” on Sunday, November 8 between 10am and 1pm. That will either be 4am-7am or 5am-8am Monday, November 9 in Canberra, depending on whether daylight saving has ended in the US by then.
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And finally, Lord Christopher Monckton spent much of the latter part of last week and the start of this week outlining the issues with the proposed Copenhagen climate change treaty which, don’t forget, is designed to stop a warming which hasn’t happened in about the last decade. The main points:
1. The setting up of a world government, with binding power over all countries.
2. Some peculiar scheme to send all the money from the western countries to the developing countries, to pay for some supposed “climate debt”.
Glenn Beck interviewed his lordship last week, which makes for very interesting and enlightening listening.
Part one:
If you ever needed proof that the whole global warming thing has everything to do with social change, and nothing to do with climate change, you now have it.
CSIRO chief executive Megan Clark has warned higher prices on water and agricultural carbon emissions will make it difficult to sustain the world’s growing urban population.
[..]
She says the challenge will be made even more difficult because climate change will put a higher price on water and on agricultural carbon emissions.
Close but no cigar ABC editor. It’s not “climate change” that makes things more expensive, it’s carbon taxes implemented by government’s to stop global warming, which has already stopped, which makes things more expensive.
Farms are losing valuable topsoil in a rare dust storm across NSW and southern Queensland that has also raised concerns about an increase in carbon emissions.
[..]
“That’s a problem because that (the topsoil) is where most of our organic carbon is stored and carbon is a big issue in terms of emissions and sequestering carbon,” Dr Cattle said.
Dr. Cattle, whose sentences are as elegant as those written by cattle, is apparently a “soil scientist and dust expert at the University of Sydney”…yes, a dust expert. Did you ever know that such a thing existed?
Thankfully though, Dr. Cattle did admit to the ABC that the storms will occur whether we like it or not, and so didn’t blame global warming for dust storms which are now to blame for global warming…wouldn’t that be an interestingly vicious cycle?
“So to an extent we can control the severity of these storms, but at the end of the day nature will always win.”
4BC Drive presenter Michael Smith examines what’s in our atmosphere, and how much we’re polluting it.
Here’s a way to understand Mr Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere that we want to rid of human carbon pollution. We’ll have a walk along it.
The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.
The next 210 metres are Oxygen.
That’s 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.
The next 10 metres are water vapour. 10 metres left.
9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.
A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.
The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre – that’s carbon dioxide.
A bit over one foot.
97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural.
Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. About half an inch. Just over a centimetre.
That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.
And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.
Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre.
And that, Mr. Rudd, is why an Emissions Trading Scheme is pointless, and why, Mr. Demetriou, your night games under lights with teams being flown all over the country, are not heating the planet.
That’s a title I never expected to have to write…but then again, I never really expected them to launch a “green round” either.
The issue of climate change affects us all, the game we all know and love is being severely impacted by climate change
[..]
the footy community from grass roots through to the AFL, the clubs, our corporate partners and the stadiums are banding together and calling in the experts to come up with solutions to save our game and ensure its healthy future
What utter drivel. Need I remind Andrew Demetriou, CEO of the AFL, that global temperatures haven’t risen for the better part of the last decade?
That’s right Andrew. I will not be watching, listening, commenting or otherwise on the matches this weekend. I won’t even be paying attention to the results. And I will repeat this every time you pull this stunt.
AFL Green Round, Round 20 of 2009, is hereby officially boycotted.
It could just be a really good joke. This letter from this week’s editions of The Chronicle.
GOVERNMENT targets to slow and stabilise carbon emissions are universally and belatedly inefficient and will likely result in no northern hemisphere ice sheets, permanent El Nino conditions, a sea level rise of 10 metres, loss of the Amazon rainforest through drought and fire along with the Barrier Reef and salination of Kakadu this century.
The government’s approach to something for the environment lobby and something for the business lobby will fail. An action plan as great as that made in the Second World War, when Australia was prepared to spend a third of its economy on that national emergency is required.
John Keen
Page
(line breaks added for readability)
Sea levels rising by ten metres? I know that the ABC’s science guy did one claim it would be one hundred metres, but even ten metres is much higher than any official forecast.
But anyway, if the government’s move are “belated”, then why bother? Why not just adapt?
I seriously can’t tell if this letter was serious or a work of comic genius.
Tony urges the Liberal party to vote for the Emission Trading Scheme so that they’re not faced with what he believes would be an unwinnable double-dissolution election. Tony, comments like that are what we call “out of touch”, and create unwinnable elections.
TONY Abbott has urged Liberal MPs to back the embattled leadership of Malcolm Turnbull and asked them to pass Kevin Rudd’s flawed emissions trading scheme in the Senate to avoid a double-dissolution election that they cannot win.
The one-time leadership opponent to Mr Turnbull has turned into his staunchest public defender and has appealed to Liberal MPs to “allow” the Opposition Leader to exercise his assessment on emissions trading and to save the Coalition “from a fight it can’t win”.
[..]
Mr Abbott’s strong advocacy of Mr Turnbull’s right to change the party’s position threatens to fuel divisions over climate change. Last night, the Liberal leader in the Senate, Nick Minchin, another conservative on the issue, told ABC TV’s Q&A program the Coalition would block the emissions trading scheme in the Senate next month.
“We don’t think parliament should be presented with legislation on this subject until after we know the outcome of Copenhagen,” Mr Minchin said.
“We will vote against this legislation in August, as will every other non-government senator.”
Although Mr Abbott believes an emissions trading scheme won’t cut global carbon emissions and that it will cost jobs, the conservative Liberal frontbencher and Howard government minister has called for Liberals to pass the ETS in the Senate and avoid a double-dissolution election.
That’s a corker of a paragraph…Tony wants to pass legislation that he thinks will hurt the country, just so that he can save his seat in parliament for a few extra months.
It’s about time the Coalition, and the Liberals in particular, grew some backbone, not to mention some common sense. They should not vote for the ETS. Thousands of conservative supporters and members of which I am one, want to see some courage from the opposition, not a betrayal of principles.
Don’t worry Padders, I think it’s just one self-important windbag. Any coalition MP worth a cent of their income, let alone their seat in parliament, will not side with his utter lunacy.
We will not support a scheme that costs Australian jobs, we won’t support a scheme that delivers nothing for the Australian environment and we won’t support a scheme that is way out of kilter with what’s happening in the rest of the world. We have principles. We have issues that we stand up for and if we want the public to support us in an election—whether it be a normal, routine election in two years or some kind of contrived double dissolution—then the public will want to be sure we’re standing up for things and that we will deliver better outcomes for the country.
Precisely. Liberal Party take note and preselect somebody else to run in Tony’s electorate at the next election.
Kevin Rudd has signed on the dotted line on behalf of Australia, despite the fact that Australia is not a part of the G8.
AUSTRALIA has signed off on a global deal to restrain global warming to two degrees which could mean Australia must do more to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Errr, no. Greenhouse gas emission continue to skyrocket, but temperatures haven’t risen for about a decade, in fact they seem to be going down.
Anyway, the science of it (which Kevin Rudd and his “G8 and then a few” buddies clearly don’t understand) to one side, if they’re serious about this, it’s a serious worry.
Australian climate expert Will Steffen says limiting warming to two degrees means a global atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases of not more than 450 parts per million.
And for the world to reach that, Australia must cut emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, and by 80 per cent by 2050, he says.
[..]
Australia has promised to cut emissions by 5 to 25 per cent by 2020, and by 60 per cent by 2050.
The existing (albeit thankfully unpassed by parliament) targets are damaging enough. If they go ahead with the greater cuts, we might as well all pack up and go to a country with a sane government, and take our money with us. In fact, it looks like that’s what Kevin Rudd wants us to do:
Mr Rudd said international progress on climate change at talks in Italy represented “modest” but significant steps.
Meanwhile Mr. Rudd is using the hot air of non-binding agreements to try and ram through his Emission Trading Scheme.
The G8 had provided strong support to emissions trading schemes as a good way to reduce emissions, Mr Rudd said, adding the federal opposition should take note of this and pass the government’s scheme.
The forum aimed at making progress ahead of key UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, which is due to ink a new climate pact.
“Right now I don’t think we are on track to get an agreement at Copenhagen,” Mr Rudd told [Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen]. “There are too many problems.”
It looks like I won’t need to lose any sleep over the economic consequences of the “G8 and then some” communiqué after all.
The Democratic-controlled House, dealing a legislative victory to President Obama, narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation’s first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in a new era of cleaner, yet more costly energy.
The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening consumers with a new tax in the form of higher energy costs.
The House’s action fulfilled Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s vow to clear major energy legislation before July 4, and sent the measure to a highly uncertain fate in the Senate.
[..]
The legislation would require the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and by about 80 percent by mid-century. That was slightly more aggressive than Obama originally wanted, 14 percent by 2020 and the same 80 percent by mid-century.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are rising at about 1 percent a year and are predicted to continue increasing without mandatory limits.
Under the bill, the government would limit heat-trapping pollution from factories, refineries and power plants and issue allowances for polluters. Most of the allowances would be given away, but about 15 percent would be auctioned by bid and the proceeds used to defray higher energy costs for lower-income individuals and families.
[..]
On the House floor, Democrats hailed the legislation as historic, while Republicans said it would damage the economy without solving the nation’s energy woes.
With any luck this thing will die in the Senate, much likes it seems to be doing here in Australia.
Average temperatures in the Arctic have not gone above zero degrees Celsius yet this year, which makes this year a particularly cold year up there as normally the average temperatures would be above zero by now.
The average arctic temperature is still not above (take your pick) 32°F 0°C 273.15°K–this the latest date in fifty years of record keeping that this has happened. Usually it is beginning to level off now and if it does so, it will stay near freezing on average in the arctic leading to still less melting than last summer which saw a 9% increase in arctic ice than in 2007.
Yes, that’s right, it’s the coldest year on record for the Arctic, and they not only had a 9% increase in ice last year, but they’re on track for another bumper ice season.
Temperatures usually begin flatlining in late June which would suggest less ice loss, although the water temperature beneath plays a key role and all of the warm water that entered the Arctic when the Atlantic was very warm in the middle 2000s (now is nearer normal) may not have circulated out yet.
And there we have further support for the fact that the planet is cooling. The seas were warmer a few years ago than they are now.
Meanwhile CNN’s Ross Hays has even more good news:
Kiruna had had the coldest June in 150 years!
Kiruna, incidentally, is in Sweeden, where Ross is based.
As I noted yesterday on Facebook (and thanks to Padders for pointing it out to me), I am very pleased to see that Senator Steve Fielding has sided with the truth, and declared that global warming/climate change is not caused by human activity.
After talks with the government and top scientists, Senator Fielding, whose vote could be crucial in passing the Federal Government’s plan to put a price on carbon emissions, has released a document setting out his position.
“Global temperature isn’t rising,” it says.
[..]
Senator Fielding’s document was prepared with the help of some of the country’s most prominent climate-sceptic scientists.
It says it is a “fact” that the evidence does not support the notion that greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming.
The even better news is that this could be the end of Kevin Rudd ridiculous Emission Trading Scheme.
The Government is struggling to muster enough votes to pass the legislation ahead of a vote scheduled for tomorrow [Thursday/yesterday].
Senator Fielding’s stance appears to torpedo the chance of the scheme passing as the Government would need his support, as well as that of the Greens and independent Nick Xenophon.
The support of the Greens is not assured. The party is concerned that the Government’s model for emissions trading lets big polluters off too lightly and has an emissions reduction target which is too weak to do any good.
[..]
If all cross-bench senators reject the ETS, the Government would need the support of the Opposition to pass the scheme.
Since that article appeared on Wednesday, the vote on the ETS has been delayed until August.
Dr Willem de Lange, IPCC author and senior lecturer in Waikato University’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, describes some of the dodgy science at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and explains why he believes that global warming and cooling is not caused by humans.
In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second Assessment Report was released, and I was listed as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernable human influence on climate.
I was an invited reviewer for a chapter dealing with the economic impact of sea level rise on small island nations… I was not asked if I supported the view expressed in my name, and my understanding at the time was that no evidence of a discernable human influence on global climate existed.
The chapter I reviewed dealt primarily with the economic consequences of an assumed sea level rise of 1 m causing extensive inundation… I disagreed with the initial assumptions, particularly the assumed sea level rise in the stated time period.
Further, there was good evidence at the time that sea level rise would not necessarily result in flooding of small island nations… Subsequent research has demonstrated that coral atolls and associated islands are likely to increase in elevation as sea level rises. Hence, the assumptions were invalid, and I was convinced that IPCC projections were unrealistic and exaggerated the problem…
What has sea level actually done so far this century? There have been large regional variations, but the global rate has slowed and is currently negative, consistent with measured ocean cooling. Claims to the contrary are exaggerations and not realistic…
Trying to stop or control climate change is akin to stopping ocean tides…. As the latest IPCC report notes, there is no convincing evidence of the impact of CO2 (or any other human influence on climate) at a continental scale…
So, I am a climate realist because the available evidence indicates that climate change is predominantly, if not entirely, natural. It occurs mostly in response to variations in solar heating of the oceans, and the consequences this has for the rest of the Earth’s climate system. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis runaway catastrophic climate change due to human activities.
Looks like those ocean flow models which contribute to those (already wrong) climate change models are wrong:
A 50 year old model of global thermohaline circulation that predicts a deep Atlantic counter current below the Gulf Stream is now formally called into question by an armada of subsurface RAFOS floats drifting 700 – 1500m deep. Nearly 80% of the RAFOS floats escaped the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC), drifting into the open ocean.
This confirms suspicions that have been around since the 1990’s, and likely plays havoc with global models of climate change.
[..]
the research represents a major paradigm shift in ocean circulation theory.
No real surprises here…just more proof that flawed theories form large parts of flawed theories.
The way it started, oh so long ago, was that a particular person under the name “Morgan” was interested in convincing Jumba to “go green”, and wanted to use the discussion to take numbers of interested people to Jumba, so that they could then decide on what, if any, plans may be viable:
I am interested in exploring the idea of making our hosting with Jumba a darker shade of green! Have been advised to guage interest from other users here on the forum… anyone interested? Am guessing we will need to take over one of the jumba servers and then offset the power usage of that machine. I have contacted Carbon Planet Australia to get an idea of the cost. Shoot me a message with an indication of the amount of domains you have with jumba… will come back with a price soon,
cheers,
Morgan
This whole thing placed me in a difficult position, because silence would indicate either a lack of interest or agreement, especially if the entire thread was filled with people supporting the idea, and no dissenting voices. On the other hand, butting in to the thread to say “no” would almost certainly drag the thread off-topic, with it devolving in to a discussion of global warming.
When there were three people in a row supporting the idea, I couldn’t remain silent on the issue as one of the reasons I am happy to deal with Jumba on an ongoing basis is that they (to the best of my knowledge) do not have any of these anti-global warming programs, and I needed to make sure that they knew there is not unanimous support for any “green” plans.
If I merely said “no, not interested” then it would have been inevitable that somebody would come back with a “you don’t want to save the planet?” response…so in the interests of keeping my contribution to a minimum and to give Morgan as much time and room as possible to gather their numbers, I decided to mention my unwillingness to be involved in any sort of “green” project that they may be considering, and a brief outline of my reasons:
Sorry, but no. I aim to avoid giving money to “green” companies, especially seeing as the planet’s temperature is trending downwards.
Not trying to start a debate, just pointing out that there are people such as me who will avoid this type of scheme for various reasons.
Succinct and, in theory at least, should have kept the “where’s your proof? Haven’t you seen the evidence?” brigade at bay. Alas, no…it seems that going against “green” anywhere requires a flame suit. One of the three aforementioned supporters of the idea was less than impressed:
Samuel,
1. How exactly is it that you are not starting a debate when you add a message to a discussion saying that you don’t believe what it is about?
2. Looking at the page you referenced, of what is visible, the upper, later half of the cycle of the smooth is much higher than the lower part – indicating increasing average temperature over the top of the smooth. Looks to me like the smooth won’t cycle to as low as that of ’87-’89. Conclusion: upwards trend. Also, the person who wrote the site you reference agrees that there has been an increase in temperature over the last 100 years, but disagrees as to the cause. You should get you references straight.
3. Human society has existed for about 10,000 years – basically since the Earth’s temperatures settled in a temperature range which allowed us to grow crops. If we can’t grow crops, it’s back to the trees and the savannahs – no cars, no internet. Even if it is only a remote possibility, from whatever cause, but overwhelmingly acknowledged to be caused by us, would you wish that on future generations?
Karl
Whether Karl was legitimately asking the questions, or just trying to make me drag the thread off-topic, I don’t know, but I replied briefly.
Because I’ve been in this position before. If I don’t briefly explain why I won’t send money the way of green companies, then people speculate about my reasons.
If you want answers to the rest of your questions, PM me, I’m not dragging this thread off-topic.
The thread then went back on-topic, and I never heard from Karl…until a couple days ago. The replies to the thread had long since died off, but months later Karl decided that now would be a good time to revive it by provoking me…he must have known which buttons to press because loony arguments are good way to interest me in a debate:
Samuel and lonely,
Nobody is requiring you to do anything. I happen to want the energy that I use to be from non-polluting sources. Many, many others do as well (I think the majority of people, but that is not for discussion here). This has no effect on you – you can choose where your energy comes from.
Nobody in this discussion has said that you should be using any particular form of energy. You have freedom of choice and my desire to obtain non-polluting energy does not impinge in any way on your ability to choose polluting energy.
In fact, what you are doing by disrupting this thread with you nay-saying is removing mine and others’ freedom of choice. This is hypocritical.
Your comments may be well-placed in discussions where people dispute the effects of pollution or where people are requiring the use of non-polluting energy. Neither is happening here. Your comments are neither relevant nor welcome.
I ask that you remove yourselves from this thread.
Karl
Uh huh. “This is a place for believers of the warming faith only…we don’t want your numbers included in any tally because, let’s face facts, you’re ignorant unbelievers who should be banished from the planet for your evil polluting and warming ways.”
A reply from me, once I read it and got myself a coffee this morning, was inevitable:
Originally Posted by kgg
Samuel and lonely,
Nobody is requiring you to do anything.
Except to say whether I’m interested in “greening” my association with my hosting provider, so that the OP can take numbers to said hosting provider.
Originally Posted by kgg
I happen to want the energy that I use to be from non-polluting sources.
As is your choice.
Originally Posted by kgg
In fact, what you are doing by disrupting this thread with you nay-saying is removing mine and others’ freedom of choice. This is hypocritical.
Wrong. Suppose that I, and people with similar views to me, stay silent, and a large number of people with your views respond…Jumba might just decide that carbon offsets or some other green plan should become part of their mandatory plan pricing, which would cause me to move hosting provider in order to maintain my “freedom of choice”.
By replying in this thread, I am not removing your freedom of choice, I am simply making it known that not every Jumba customer supports this idea. My aim is not to prevent Jumba from going down this path, merely to make carbon offsets etc “optional extras” for those who do want to use them.
I am completely in favour of freedom of choice.
Some days it’s therapeutic to demolish a loony argument. Now I’ll wait and see if he responds again. If he does, I will politely inform him that the argument is off-topic (but a clever way to draw attention to the thread) and I will reply by private message.
The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?