Skewering the clueless
Sorry it’s a day late – mea culpa. As always a great read!
Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup
31 July, 2010 by
iPhone app for climate sceptics
30 July, 2010 by
Rushing to post today as I am flat out, but you must check out the new iPhone app for sceptics.
Jo Nova has the story here and the app can be downloaded from iTunes here.
[You may notice a related link below “Only junk science needs an iPhone app to counter sceptics”, but since there exists an iPhone app for junk science, there is a need for one for proper science as well]
Poll: Most Australians want tough action on climate – really?
29 July, 2010 by
Centre for the Study of Choice, UTS
So says a report in the Sydney Morning Herald today:
MOST Australians want a more ambitious emissions trading scheme than the one abandoned by the Rudd government, whether or not the US and China take similar steps, according to the most detailed study of public attitudes yet undertaken.
…
The two-year emissions trading scheme study found the majority of the 7000 randomly selected people wanted to see carbon trading operating before 2012, even though it would be likely to lift some of the costs of living.
“The results clearly showed we do not want to wait for the Americans and the Chinese to act, which was a surprise,” Professor Jordan Louviere, director of the Centre for the Study of Choice at the University of Technology, Sydney, said. (source)
Sounds pretty compelling, doesn’t it? A little research and an email to Prof Louviere elicits more information about the study (see here for PDF). It was different from most surveys in that it required participants to choose between alternative emissions reductions scenarios, rather than answering Yes/No questions. All fine so far. In 2008/9 they developed 16 pairs of emissions scenarios, based on five key factors:
- Start date (lower cost with earlier date): Labour/Greens – 2010; Coalition – 2012
- What to do with revenues: redistribute (Labour); reduce taxes (Coalition)
- Allocate 20% of revenue to R&D: Yes – Garnaut, universities, some interest groups; No – Mixed Labour, some interest groups
- Exempt transport for 3 years: Labour/opposed by Greens
- Concessions to energy intensive sectors: Which sectors (electricity, exporters, farmers); free permits – how many/how long
The following additional features were factored into the later parts of the study:
- How fast to cut back to reduce 60% by 2050?
- Should the 2050 goal be tightened?
- Use “hybrid” permits with price caps in early years?
- Role of efficiency/renewable standards
- How much should Australian actions depend on other countries such as U.S./China?
All looks fairly reasonable up to a point. But what is the obvious flaw with all this? Clearly, it is the assumption that the requirement for an ETS is not up for question, and that implementing one will somehow be beneficial for the environment. The choice is only between different types of ETS, and, naturally, respondents are going to choose the one which they are informed will hurt them least. But there is another option which hurts the economy and their hip pocket even less than choosing between different types of emissions trading schemes, and that is to have no ETS or carbon tax at all. For as we all know, Australian emissions represent less than 1.5% of global emissions, and cutting them to zero overnight will make not the slightest bit of difference to the climate, whether globally or locally (even if we assume for the time being that the climate is sensitive enough to notice). But that option isn’t presented to them – there isn’t a “no ETS” route to take.
So the “choice” is a false choice, and not a realistic choice. The necessity for an ETS is assumed, and the public will clearly take the least worst option. But they will all damage the economy, and are utterly pointless from an environmental perspective. Give them the option of “no ETS with no discernible negative effect on the climate” and see what the results are.
For the Sydney Morning Herald to claim this as supporting an ETS is highly dubious. I will leave the last word to CenSoC, which reveals, at the end of the report, a motive behind the study:
We urge public policymakers to seriously consider the evidence from 7000+ Australians who took the time and put in the effort to evaluate many possible plans.
Sounds rather too much like environmental advocacy to me.
UK climate madness: Huhne wants more wind farms
29 July, 2010 by
Expensive, inefficient, ugly. Like Huhne.
Here in Aus, we haven’t yet got to this level of lunacy, but we’re well on the way. So as we watch the lights slowly fizzle out in the country formerly known as Great Britain, but which should now be known as piss-weak Britain [and I should add it is the country of my birth, so I don’t say that lightly], it is a salutary lesson to the rest of us.
The Conservative/Liberal coalition has only been in power for five minutes, but has already demonstrated that it is as nauseatingly deep green as the outgoing Labourites, if not worse. Christopher Booker is incredulous:
The penny is fast dropping that by far the most disastrous appointment made by David Cameron to his Coalition Cabinet was that of the ultra-green, Lib Dem millionaire Chris Huhne as our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain’s energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.
As was only too predictable, the overall theme of Mr Huhne’s message was that ‘climate change is the greatest global challenge we face’.
We must do everything we can and more to cut down very drastically on our ‘carbon emissions’, as we are now legally committed to do by the Climate Change Act – at a cost of £18 billion a year.
But in the real world, the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close.
The headline answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.
As a 24-carat green ideologue, he is viscerally opposed to replacing the ageing nuclear and coal-fired plants which currently provide us with more than half our electricity.
Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before him, he dreams we can somehow fill that gap by erecting 6,000 wind turbines in the seas around Britain’s shores, and thousands more across many of the most beautiful parts of our countryside.
What is truly terrifying about Mr Huhne as our energy minister is that he seems so astonishingly ignorant about even the most basic principles of how electricity is produced.
He boasts about how the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the ‘capacity’ to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity.
Capacity is the crucial word here. As he could see from figures on his own department’s website, thanks to the fact that the wind blows only intermittently, the amount of power these windmills actually produce is barely a quarter of that.
In other words, the amount of electricity generated by all those turbines put together, at a cost of billions of pounds, is no more than that provided by a single medium-size conventional power station – equivalent to a mere two per cent of the electricity we need.
The lights will be going out in the UK pretty soon.
UK Met Office: greenhouse gases "the glaringly obvious explanation"
29 July, 2010 by
"Pollution kills polar bears" - the climate debate according to the Telegraph
The moonbat papers are gleefully trumpeting alarmist stories this morning about the latest State of the Climate report from the UK Met Office and the US NOAA, like this one in the UK Telegraph:
The State of the Climate report shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.
And despite the cold winter in Europe and north east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record [in other words since about 1880, ignoring all the previous warmings which were likely to have been warmer].
The annual report was compiled by the Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Both the NOAA and Nasa have stated that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record [i.e. since 1880], while the Met Office believes it is the second hottest start to the year after 1998.
None of this tells us anything about the cause of that warming, but hang on, here’s the killer argument from the Met Office:
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said “variability” in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain, does not mean the rest of the world is not warming.
And he said ‘greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation’ for 0.56C (1F) warming over the last 50 years.
Ah, the “glaringly obvious explanation”! That’s the answer clearly! Just like the “glaringly obvious explanation” that irate gods cause thunderstorms, or the “glaringly obvious explanation” that stress and spicy foods cause gastric ulcers. It’s all just correlation, without causation.
Read it here.
UPDATE: And the ever-calm, ever-balanced ABC reports it thus:
Climate check-up ‘screams world is warming’
Peter Thorne, of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, says the scientists were not swayed by the debate over climate data and whether it had previously been manipulated.
“What this data is doing is screaming that the world is warming, and that cannot be driven by any single individual or even a small set of groups, because the evidence is there to see – there are lots of groups doing this stuff,” Mr Thorne said. (source)
Laughable, if it weren’t so tragic.
Tom Switzer: Labor "gutless, weak, hypocritical"
28 July, 2010 by
Great stuff from Tom on Labor’s “all spin and zero substance” approach to climate. Thanks to Australian Conservative for the video:
[hana-flv-player video=”http://media.stylespress.com/media/100726-qanda-2.flv”
width=”400″
height=”330″
description=”Tom Switzer on Q & A”
player=”4″
autoload=”true” autoplay=”false”
loop=”false” autorewind=”true”
/]
Alan Jones interviews Julia Gillard
27 July, 2010 by
What a terrier!
Climategate vs The Afghan "War Diary"
27 July, 2010 by
Hycposiry from The Grauniad
Richard North contrasts the media treatment of the Climategate “leak” with that of the War Diary files posted on Wikileaks relating to the conflict in Afghanistan. We all know, because the media told us, that the Climategate emails were “hacked” or “stolen”, despite the fact that the material was, by and large, well ordered and relevant, and has all the hallmarks of a leak. But what about the War Diary?
Big news of the day is how “a huge cache of secret US military files” provides a “devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan”. They have been obtained by the “whistleblowers’ website” Wikileaks in what is described as “one of the biggest leaks in US military history.”
The files have been made available to The Guardian, The New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, with The Guardian in particular, pushing the boat out, running multiple stories and linking to the files.
But do we see here, or in The Independent, or even in The Daily Telegraph – which also features the files – any suggestion that they are stolen?
Largely, is seems they have been “revealed” or “leaked” and the contents “disclosed”. But nowhere do I see the word “stolen” – so far. How so very different this is, then, from the treatment of the “Climategate” files, which had the media, and especially the left wing press, spluttering in its muesli.
We even had The Times report that: “UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, ” and that was after them claiming that “computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.”
Thus, whatever the merits or otherwise of “release” of the “war logs”, as The Guardian is calling them, the difference in treatment is quite remarkable. Some might even call it hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy? From The Guardian? Surely not…
Read it here.
Election 2010: Leaders' debate
26 July, 2010 by
"When are the other two again, Julia?"
The leaders’ debate last night was a bit disappointing. Neither side landed any serious blows, but what came across more than anything was the stark contrast between the hyper-rehearsed sound-bite friendly spin of Julia Gillard and the more authentic, but less assured, honesty of Tony Abbott. Gillard is so like Rudd in the way she can speak for five minutes and not say anything – it’s quite uncanny. Her responses to questions on boat people showed she hasn’t a clue what she’s doing, and the climate issue didn’t get as much traction for Abbott as it should. But he made the very important point that the Coalition at least has a policy whereas Labor are just putting off announcing anything in the hope that the electorate will just vote her in anyway.
Are the Australian people that stupid? Maybe, if the Channel 9 worm is anything to go by. The debate was very close, with most of the commentators giving it to Abbott, yet the worm showed a huge advantage to Gillard – WTF? Just goes to show how easily swung the average voter is by gloss and spin, a new hairdo and nail job.
But there are encouraging signs that things are turning Abbott’s way. The latest NewsPoll shows a move to the Coalition:
THE election campaign has become a tight contest, with the Coalition back in front on primary votes.
Furthermore, Tony Abbott has narrowed the leadership gap on Julia Gillard.
The latest Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, reveals voters have turned against Labor’s proposal for a citizens assembly on climate change and that the women’s vote advantage for Australia’s first female Prime Minister has disappeared.
Labor’s 10-point lead on a two-party-preferred basis at the start of the election campaign has been reduced to a knife-edge 52 per cent to 48 per cent over the weekend, while the Coalition’s primary vote jumped four points to 42 per cent, compared with Labor’s 40 per cent, down from 42 per cent.
And even more dramatic is Gillard’s personal rating, plummeting like a stone:
Satisfaction with the new Prime Minister has also dropped dramatically, from 48 per cent to 41 per cent; dissatisfaction with the job she is doing leapt from 29 per cent to 37 per cent last weekend. (source)
Maybe the Australian people aren’t so stupid after all. We can only hope.
Election 2010: Greens want 100% renewables by 2030
25 July, 2010 by
Vote Labor and this is what you will get
100% out of touch with reality. 100% deluded. 100% on another planet. 100% dangerous for the future of Australia. That just about sums up the Greens, who, as we must keep reminding everyone, will have the balance of power in the Senate after their shady back-room deal with Labor (which Jooolia Gillard doesn’t want to talk about for obvious reasons). To propose 100% renewables by 2030 is pure madness – let’s just think for a moment what that actually means: no coal-fired power stations at all (and no nuclear, of course, no, no, no, we can’t have that), no petrol or diesel driven vehicles at all, no natural gas at all, and all within the next 20 years! Not only that, but they plan to rely on fart power and sunbeams instead! Words cannot begin to describe the utter lunacy of this. But this is precisely what they want, and what they will demand when they hold the balance of power in the Senate. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports:
The Greens want to completely replace Australia’s reliance on coal with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
Greens Senator Christine Milne said yesterday: “Australia can harness our tremendous resources of the sun, wind, ocean, Earth and human ingenuity to replace our reliance on coal with 100 per cent renewable energy within decades.”
Senator Milne said this could be achieved by 2030 with the right preparation and infrastructure. (source)
And Miranda Devine, also in the Herald yesterday, spelt out exactly what life under the Greens would be like:
There’s a lot more Brown and the Greens want if Labor wins: mandated zero net greenhouse gas emissions, the effective end of coal-fired power generation, phasing out of coal exports, a ban on new coalmines or power stations, removal of GM crops, and active discouragement of cars. They want a ban on the exploration, mining and export of uranium, and closure of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, which produces medical isotopes used for cancer treatment. They want to restrict funding of private schools. They want to abolish mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and to expand the definition of refugee to include ”environmental” or ”sexuality” refugees. They want to legislate for same-sex marriage, tinker with age of consent laws, establish ”intersex” as a legal gender, fund gender reassignment, require government to consult lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people on policy, and provide easier access to abortion. On drugs, they are harm minimisation all the way, with more needle exchange programs and injecting rooms. And be prepared for a barrage of nanny-statism, starting with a ban on junk food advertising [which ACM commented on here].
The Greens’ published policies are carefully couched in escape clauses, to avoid the scare campaigns of past elections, when their extreme social agenda cost them votes. But the effect will be the same. And of course, their big-ticket policy, the one with the most nation-changing consequences, is an ETS or carbon tax, with householders paying the price in soaring energy costs. (source)
I have written to Tony Abbott this morning encouraging him to expose the Greens for the extremist, far-Left, hysterical environmental advocacy group that they are, who are not fit to participate in politics full stop, let alone determining the future of Australia under a Labor government. I encourage all Australians to do the same.
UPDATE: To contact Tony Abbott, go to: http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/ContactTony.aspx, or email: tony.abbott@liberal.org.au (Liberals) or Tony.Abbott.MP@aph.gov.au (Parliamentary). Thanks to Sean for the suggestion.
Australian Climate Madness 
Recent Comments