Climate policies invariably totalitarian

24 February, 2014 by

It's for your own good

It’s for your own good

This truth is revealed in an excellent and very entertaining article at American Thinker, in which author Daren Jonescu asks why there isn’t a single climate policy advanced by the headbangers that does not require despotic, undemocratic and tyrannical impositions on the lives of the population.

It’s all about climate change being too big a problem for democracy to handle (where have we heard that before? Clive Hamilton), so they demand the right to do whatever they like:

Global warming “admitters” — to distinguish you from those of us you call “deniers” — I have a question for you: Do any of you have an answer to the cataclysm your settled science has proven beyond any possible doubt is coming which does not require totalitarian measures?

Let me rephrase that, in case the connotations of the phrase “totalitarian measures” have not yet passed peer review, in which case their meaning may not be able to reach minds occupying the rarefied atmosphere of pure science. My question, then, is: Do you, or any of your gods of peer review, propose solutions to anthropogenic global climate change which do not involve the violation of property rights, the restraint of individual liberty regarding matters of self-preservation (i.e., jobs and wealth-creation), the weakening of every nation’s sovereignty in favor of increased “global governance,” and the expanded empowerment of thousands of bureaucrats, think-tankers, and advisors accountable to no one?

I ask this only because it has become apparent that you admitters, who are undoubtedly on the right side of history — at least compared with the anti-science Neanderthals over on this side of the fence — are absolutely at wit’s end (or even a little beyond that) in seeking to understand how anyone could possibly continue in ignorance, when both Leonardo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson are on the side of Truth. Concerned about your shattered (but scientifically settled!) nerves, I propose to help you out with a little inside baseball concerning the intellectual (yeah, I know, silly word choice) reticence of the unbelievers to join in your celebration of the revealed religion.

Read it all.

(h/t Junk Science)

Filed Under: Climate

Adaptation is the only response to climate change

23 February, 2014 by

Mitigation…

Mitigation…

It has been said many times on this blog, whether or not climate change is a problem, there is only one response: adaptation.

Climate change mitigation action, such as carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes etc, have done nothing whatsoever to alter the climate, but have cost the global economy billions, and probably trillions, of dollars – dollars which could have been spent far more wisely.

It is scandalous that so much hard-won cash has been squandered on pointless environmental gestures, when millions are dying from lack of clean water or cheap electricity. As the author of the following article points out, these decisions are not ones that should be made by scientists:

It is interesting to enquire initially just whose job is it to tell us how to respond if we believe climate change is happening and materially human-induced. When various clever non-scientists raise concerns about climate change models they are waved away by specialists in the area, told that these are proper scientific questions for proper scientists. Yet all too often scientists fail to apply the same rules to themselves. The issue over whether there is global warming and what the human contribution to it might be is – at least to a material extent – a scientific question. But whether we should do anything about it and, if so, which of the available technical options is best to adopt, is emphatically not a question for scientists. Instead, it is a question for economists, which then puts you very much in my world. (source)

And for those morons who continue to label anyone who questions the climate dogma ‘deniers’, the thing we should be denying is any more of the money you want to flush down the pan on mitigation…

There’s plenty more – read it all.

Filed Under: Climate

Highlights of the week

22 February, 2014 by

Krauthammer

Krauthammer

A few articles caught my eye this week, all of which are worth a read.

Charles Krauthammer at Investors.com:

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.

I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist-in-chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.”

Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.

Arnold Ahlert on Progressive Insanity and the Global Warming Cult:

Progressives will do virtually anything to advance their agenda. In the arena of global warming, they have resorted to hysteria and angry denunciation of those who dare to question their infallible “wisdom.” And as it is with every aspect of their agenda, such wisdom must be imposed at the expense of liberty.

Leading the charge is Secretary of State John Kerry, who epitomized the above approach in a speech to Indonesian students, civic leaders and government officials in Jakarta, Indonesia. First he laced into one the left’s favorite punching bags, namely the coal and oil industries he accused of “hijacking” the conversation. ”We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” he declared. ”Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits. The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.”

Possibly suspecting that his presentation might be insufficient to galvanize the unwashed masses, Kerry added a dash of fear to the mix. ”This city, this country, this region, is really on the front lines of climate change,” Kerry warned. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that your entire way of life here is at risk. In a sense, climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” he added.

Ben Pile eviscerates our least favourite psychologist in Lewandowsky nails his faeces to the door:

Lewandowsky does not ‘examine why individuals choose to reject well-established scientific findings’. Few that Lewandowsky has claimed ‘reject’ the claim that ‘the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions’ in fact reject the claim at all. Lewandowsky’s research invariably depends on the idea that any criticism of any aspect of climate change, from science, through to policy, is a rejection of the claim. But his is misleading. Moreover, and has been observed here many times, the claims that ‘the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions’, is not a scientific claim — it lacks any precision. It can mean anything from an inconsequential amount of warming, through to changes that will bring about the end of civilisation. Lewandowsky’s propagandising has to omit any sense of proportion, because admitting that climate change is not just a matter of degree, but matters of degree on matters of degree precludes the possibility of making polarising statements and moralistic claims, as is his intention.

Any my personal choice for article of the week, Dr Roy Spencer loses his rag:

Yeah, somebody pushed my button.

When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it.

They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.

Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back.

I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.

The pseudo-scientific ramblings by their leaders have falsely warned of mass starvation, ecological collapse, agricultural collapse, overpopulation…all so that the masses would support their radical policies. Policies that would not voluntarily be supported by a majority of freedom-loving people.

They are just as guilty as the person who cries “fire!” in a crowded theater when no fire exists. Except they threaten the lives of millions of people in the process.

Good for you!

Filed Under: Climate

Yet another excuse for The Pause

10 February, 2014 by

Age-old excuses

Age-old excuses

UPDATE: One of the other ABC reports (and there are plenty) leaves no room for any doubt:

Stronger than normal trade winds in the central Pacific are the main cause of a 13-year halt in global surface temperatures increases, an Australian study reveals.

Note: “are” the main cause. Not might be, or perhaps, but “are.” And if that weren’t enough, we have a D-word alert:

The authors reject the study gives impetus to climate change deniers and instead suggest that when the winds ease, global warming will accelerate rapidly.

The ABC really is a piece of shite.

The ABC breathlessly reports that a well-known warmist has worked out yet another reason for The Pause, and another factor that the climate models apparently didn’t know about.

Matthew England of the University of New South Wales (see here and here, for example of his impartiality on the matter) proposes a variation on the ‘Dog Ate my Warming’ excuse, accepted uncritically as usual by the ABC:

Scientists have come up with an explanation for the pause in global warming, which has long been a point of contention raised by climate change sceptics.

Over the past 15 years the rate of global warming has slowed – and more recently almost stalled.

Sceptics say the slowdown suggests warming is not as bad as first thought, while most climate scientists say it is just a natural climate variability.

Now an Australian-led team of researchers has found strong winds in the Pacific Ocean are most likely to be behind the hiatus.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) researcher Matthew England said oceans were much more dominant in terms of their heat uptake.

“Obviously we have implications of that such as sea level rise,” Professor England said.

Professor England led a team of researchers from around the world that has come up with an explanation for why the oceans soak up the heat.

Their research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, has found the answer lies in stronger than usual trade winds whipping across the Pacific Ocean.

It was found the winds were churning the Pacific like a washing machine, bringing the deeper colder water to the surface and pushing the warmer water below.

“The phase we’re in of accelerated trade winds particularly lasts a couple of decades,” Professor England said.

“We’re about 12 to 13 years in to the most accelerated part of the wind field.

“It’s important to point out there’s a cycle we expect to reverse and when they do reverse back to their normal levels we’d expect global warming to kick in and start to rise.” (source)

Note how the day of reckoning, when warming is set to resume, has been pushed out to some unspecified point in the future. Personally, I think it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster that’s tinkering with the climate, reaching out with his noodly appendage to fool the warmists… no more ridiculous than the above, I would say.

Add it to the list.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Cook ‘n’ Lew’s propaganda war

9 February, 2014 by

Propaganda war

Propaganda war

John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, the Laurel and Hardy of pop climate psychology, are back with more self-serving consensus nonsense in The Conversation.

The question posed by the first article, “The truth is out there – so how do you debunk a myth?” seems to be answered by the response “replace it with a different myth”:

First and foremost, you need to emphasise the key facts you wish to communicate rather than the myth. Otherwise, you risk making people more familiar with the myth than with the correct facts.

That doesn’t mean avoid mentioning the myth altogether. You have to activate it in people’s minds before they can label it as wrong.

Secondly, you need to replace the myth with an alternate narrative. This is usually an explanation of why the myth is wrong or how it came about. Essentially, debunking is creating a gap in people’s minds (removing the myth) then filling that gap (with the correct explanation).

If you had to boil down all the psychological research into six words then it can be summed up as follows:

fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas.

Myths are persistent, stubborn and memorable. To dislodge a myth, you need to counter it with an even more compelling, memorable fact.

But Cook’s first ‘memorable fact’ is itself another myth. The 97% consensus figure is as meaningless as any other factoid. Nothing in that figure conveys the subtlety of the arguments in play – it’s a typical black/white result chosen to mislead. Putting aside all the statistical sleight of hand (which others have dealt with), even if we accept the conclusion, what does it tell us? That almost all papers conclude that the climate is changing and humans have an influence? Count me in.

What it doesn’t show is the range of views within that group – from those like me, who acknowledge the effect on climate but question its magnitude and the proposed response, to those like Cook ‘n’ Lew, who think there is no natural component to the recent warming, it’s all man-made, and we should wreck the global economy in a pointless gesture that won’t change a thing.

The second ‘memorable fact’ is simply misleading and emotive: the Hiroshima bombs analogy.

Global warming is a build up in heat. Greenhouse gases are trapping heat which is building up in our oceans, warming the land and air and melting ice. When scientists add up all the energy accumulating in our climate system, they find the heat build-up hasn’t slowed since 1998.

The greenhouse effect continues to blaze away. It turns out the laws of physics didn’t go on hiatus 16 years ago.

Creating a metaphor

To communicate this, we used a metaphor. We toyed with many metaphor ideas but found none able to conceptualise the heat build-up in a stickier manner more than this:

Since 1998, our planet has been building up heat at a rate of 4 Hiroshima A-bombs per second.

We released a website with an animated ticker widget to show how much heat our planet is building up each second. The widget, which can be freely embeded on other websites, also includes a number of other metrics such as the amount of energy in hurricane Sandy, an earthquake and a million lightning bolts.

This is intentionally and cynically misleading, since it plays on the ignorance of the general public as to the amounts of energy flowing into and out of the atmosphere. As pointed out in this post, 4 Hiroshima bombs per second is very small compared to the 1000 launched at us by the Sun every second. But your average man in the street wouldn’t know that. They would look at the destruction of Hiroshima and link that with the ‘destruction’ wrought upon the atmosphere.

Cook is then joined by Lew for another defence of the fake Consensus, this time against an attack from their own side. Mike Hulme argues that simply quoting figures (like the 97% fake consensus) has little influence on the political actions that are needed (or not) to deal with the problem (or lack of a problem). Cook and Lew disagree, naturally, since the fake Consensus is their baby:

The data we have just reviewed show otherwise: there is strong evidence that the public’s perception of an overwhelming scientific consensus is key to stimulating the constructive policy debate we should be having.

All of this is wrapped up in cliched comparisons with the tobacco lobby (whereas many do and will continue to die from lung cancer as a result of smoking, the planet is refusing to warm as expected despite increasing CO2 emissions; whereas stopping smoking will reduce your chance of dying from lung cancer, taxing CO2 will make no difference to climate change; etc etc) and the citing of fake data about the funding poured into the denial machine.

In case you haven’t noticed, this is all propaganda. It is about creating a consensus where none exists, in order to fool the public.

But, guys, it ISN’T WORKING. Despite all your desperate attempts to manufacture agreement, the Australian public (and around the world) are even more sceptical of the exaggerated and alarmist claims of extremist environmental groups, Western governments, the UN and the IPCC. The more you try, the worse it gets.

In other words, keep it up!

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , ,

Aussies not fooled by relentless alarmism

7 February, 2014 by

Why mention Melbourne's temperatures??

Why mention Melbourne’s temperatures??

The Aussies can, thankfully, see straight through environmental scares.

They’ve heard all the doom and gloom before, they’ve seen all the hysteria, the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those suckling at the government’s teat. Then, if that weren’t enough, they look at the fudging of data, the enviro-activists posing as impartial scientists, the cover-ups, the abuse hurled at critics, the politically-motivated massaging of the message, and realise that the pronouncements of these troughers aren’t worth jack shit.

Australians rank climate change well down on their list of concerns, even though most believe temperatures where they live will rise, according to an annual survey of attitudes by the CSIRO.

On a list of 16 issues ranging from health and cost of living to terrorism and drug problems, climate change came in at just 14th.

Even among environmental issues, the climate ranked only seventh out of eight concerns, behind household waste and above only salinity.

Zoe Leviston, a social psychologist at CSIRO and lead author of the survey, said the ranking was “surprisingly low”, not least because more than 70 per cent of respondents also judged climate change to be either somewhat, very or extremely important. (source)

“Surprising” because, living in a bubble, like most CSIRO scientists do, Ms Leviston has no idea that the rest of the population have more pressing things to worry about, like paying bills, keeping their jobs – you know, trivial stuff… And get this:

Another finding from the CSIRO survey is that people tended to underestimate how widely accepted climate change is in the community. “Climate change denial, or contrarism, or whatever you want to call it, is overrated,” Dr Leviston said.

Yep, the Aussies don’t buy the 97% bullshit either. Onya! And note that anyone challenging the hysteria is either a ‘denier’ or a ‘contrarian’. Who’da thunk it?

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Abbott knifes the ABC – labels it ‘unpatriotic’

29 January, 2014 by

So far left it's coming back the other way…

So far left it’s coming back the other way…

Tony Abbott finally makes noises against the ABC’s incessant bias. From global warming to asylum seekers, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, from Obama-worship to apologists for Islamist atrocities, from smearing our Navy to damaging the relations with our international neighbours, the ABC is always of the hard left. It even criticises Labor and the Greens from the left! I repeat my post from September 2013:

Reform of the ABC long overdue

This blog has frequently exposed the barely-concealed left-wing bias of our publicly funded broadcaster, the ABC. As Gerard Henderson points out regularly on his must-read Media Watch Dog, there isn’t a single conservative presenter or editor on any mainstream current affairs programme, earning the corporation’s acronym the alternative interpretation of “Anything but Conservatives”.

In their stead we have had to suffer “Red” Kerry O’Brien (whose “old leather bag” visage will be gracing the ABC’s election coverage tomorrow, naturally), Tony Jones (adding another lefty voice to the already skewed Q&A panel every week), Fran Kelly (activist presenter of Radio National’s Breakfast show), News Radio’s political editor and resident Lefty, Marius Benson, Jonathan Green (editor of the Drum, which is banged repeatedly for Labor/Green causes) and Mark Scott himself – wilfully blind to the “groupthink” that is endemic in his organisation – to name but a few.

Then we have all the climate change alarmists, like Dr Karl, Robyn Williams, Adam Spencer, Bernie Hobbs, Tony Jones again, all the Catalyst team etc., 95% of the contributors on the online site, extremists like Clive Hamilton, Stephan Lewandowsky etc, and the list goes on.

It is galling that taxes paid by all Australians go towards funding that Lefty/Green echo-chamber, which caters for a small urban elite, staffed with inner-city Ultimo types who couldn’t run a chook raffle. Privately owned media organisations stand or fall on their output, witness the enduring success of News Corp, and the rapid decline of Fairfax, as it too panders to the latte-sipping, sandal-wearing intelligentsia, and in the process ignores the vast majority of Australians. The Age astonishingly endorses Labor for the election tomorrow – as one commentator pointed out, after asylum disasters, NBN, massive debt, waste, dysfunctional leadership, knifings, in-fighting, Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper, what would it take for them not to endorse Labor?

But the ABC is paid for by all of us, and it should be representative of the views of all Australians, not just a mouthpiece for the Left. It is probable that a Coalition government will be elected tomorrow, sweeping away six years of Labor incompetence. Yet you wouldn’t believe it listening to the ABC this morning, with the majority of stories either puff pieces for Rudd and Labor, or criticism of the Coalition and Abbott. Maybe they realise that the clock is ticking, time is running out, so they have to make the most of it, like the last gasp of the Roman Empire.

It’s time for the ABC to be subjected to significant reform. Balance must be restored in current affairs broadcasting, and the ABC must fully reflect the diversity of Australian opinion. Whether this is by some form of privatisation or otherwise, the population have switched off in droves, with Sky taking over as the de facto national broadcaster.

When the ABC isn’t trusted to run the election debates, something is seriously wrong. Let’s hope Tony Abbott and the Coalition will start to fix it.

It looks like they might. The ABC itself reports (ouch, that must hurt…):

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has stepped up his criticism of the ABC, accusing the national broadcaster of being unpatriotic in its coverage of the Edward Snowden leaks and asylum seeker abuse claims.

Mr Abbott also questioned the ABC’s newly established Fact Check unit, saying he wanted the corporation to focus on straight news gathering and reporting.

“A lot of people feel at the moment that the ABC instinctively takes everyone’s side but Australia’s,” he said in an interview with Ray Hadley on Sydney radio station 2GB.

“I think it dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but its own and I think it is a problem.”

Asked if he shared those sentiments, Mr Abbott said he was “worried and concerned” by the ABC taking a lead in reporting leaks from Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor.

The NSA leaks revealed Australia’s spy agencies tapped the phones of Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudohoyono and his wife in 2009.

The revelations caused a rift in the Australia-Indonesia relationship early in Mr Abbott’s prime ministership.

“The ABC seemed to delight in broadcasting allegations by a traitor,” Mr Abbott said.

“The ABC didn’t just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said, and that was a deep concern.”

Mr Abbott’s attention was also drawn to a Facebook post published by an ABC researcher seeking off-the-record discussions with Navy personnel.

In the post, the researcher said her “boss” doubted asylum seekers’ claims they were mistreated during a boat turn-back operation.

The asylum seekers say they suffered burns when Navy personnel forced them to hold onto hot pipes coming out of the boat’s engine.

The Navy has denied the allegations and the Government has strongly defended the military, without confirming or denying the operation took place.

“You can’t leap to be critical of your own country and you certainly ought to be prepared to give the Australian Navy and its hard-working personnel the benefit of the doubt,” Mr Abbott said.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the ABC should apologise for casting doubt on the reputation of Royal Australian Navy sailors if the organisation felt it was wrong.

“If the ABC now finds that these allegations were utterly unsubstantiated then it should come out and say so,” Ms Bishop told reporters in Brisbane.

The first step on a long road, Tony. Don’t waver. You can listen to the interview here.

Filed Under: ABC Bias, Aussie Politics Tagged With: , ,

UK sanity: Govt slashes climate budget by 41%

29 January, 2014 by

Cheers!

Cheers!

And shills for The Cause can see the wheels falling off the gravy train, attack ‘scepticism’ – yawn. The ultra-green Independent reports:

Owen Paterson has been accused of “incredible complacency” over climate change after new figures showed his department has slashed spending on helping Britain cope with global warming.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) will spend just £17.2m on domestic “climate change initiatives” this financial year, a 41 per cent decline on the previous 12 months, according to its response to a freedom of information request.

The figures will fuel fears that the Environment Secretary’s personal climate-change scepticism could be exposing the UK to a higher risk of flooding and other global warming consequences.

Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute, said: “These shocking figures should worry everyone in the UK. Defra is the lead government department for climate change adaptation and is primarily responsible for making the UK resilient to the impacts of global warming, such as increased flood risk,”

Maria Eagle, shadow Environment Secretary, said such a steep drop in domestic climate change initiatives “reveals an incredible level of complacency about the threat to the UK from climate change”.

She added: “This is further evidence that Owen Paterson’s unwillingness to accept the science on climate change is leading him to make the wrong choices on spending cuts within his department.” (source)

It’s still £17.2m too much, of course. And if that weren’t enough, the editorial weighs in, linking recent floods to climate change in highly emotional terms:

These are desperate times for parts of the South-west of England, where monsoon-like rains have left villages stranded by floodwater for the best part of a month. Nor has Somerset been the only part of the country to experience the full force of what to many seems an increasingly volatile and spiteful climate. After the largest tidal surge in 60 years hit the east coast last week, parts of East Anglia may have to be abandoned to the sea for good.

As the weather does its worst, David Cameron’s government – the same one that once boasted of its green credentials – seems bent on ignoring the implications of climate change. New figures show that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under Owen Paterson will spend only £17m on “domestic climate change initiatives” this financial year, a fall of more than 40 per cent on the previous year. Spending on this vital issue will now account for only 0.7 per cent of total departmental spending. (source)

Either the opinion writers are incredibly stupid, or have incredibly short memories – it has to be one or the other. This nonsensical belief that extreme weather didn’t happen before 1980 is ludicrous. Even the IPCC refuses to link extreme weather to climate change, but that doesn’t stop the headbangers at the Independent.

But at least the UK is following Australia’s lead, and cutting pointless waste of taxpayer money on “climate” initiatives.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Bye-bye Bryce

28 January, 2014 by

Political, to the bitter end

Political, to the bitter end

A thoroughly decent and honourable man, former defence force chief Peter Cosgrove, will be the Governor-General from March – and not a moment too soon.

Vowing to keep out of politics, he will be a welcome change from his predecessor, Quentin Bryce, a thorough embarrassment to the office, who frequently blundered in to highly sensitive matters (always from the Left, naturally) where she had no place to be.

Here are a few cringeworthy examples from the ACM archives:

October 2008 – Governor-General gets political

“Andrew Bolt is rightly fuming that the new GG, Ms Quentin Bryce, will launch the book version of the Garnaut report. She doesn’t appear to have been told that as the representative in Australia of the Queen, she is supposed to put herself above politics, and represent all of us, not just those who vote Labor.”

October 2008 – GG speaks out on climate change

“Why would she do that, unless she had no idea whatsoever of the role she has accepted? She’s the Queen’s representative in Australia, and therefore above politics, but here she is, helping none other than Ross Garnaut, launch the book version of his report – a highly political document prepared for the Labor Government.”

[The photo shows Bryce with Ross Garnaut at the launch – story here]

January 2009 – GG gets political – yet again

“… she’s at it again, off on a jolly to Abu Dhabi to speak at the World Future Energy Summit (a fancy title for a gathering of eco-fundamentalists discussing solar and wind power), sharing the stage with Lord Stern, Tony Blair and none other than IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. So clearly no politics there, then…?

She displays an extraordinary lack of judgement on these matters, and is showing herself to be wholly unsuitable for the role of GG of Australia.”

January 2009 – Deluded GG urges “climate action”

“OK, now I am sure that Quentin Bryce has lost the plot completely. Someone needs to sit her down, with a cup of milky tea, and explain just exactly what the role of Governor General is, because she clearly hasn’t a clue. It is certainly not to act as a shill for the climate change lobby and the Rudd government. Here are the words of former Governor General Michael Jeffery, which Bryce could do well to remember:

“One always tries to throw in ideas or suggestions without treading on any political toes because as a Governor-General you simply can’t do that,” he says. “It’s not your role to become controversial, to be agin the government or agin the opposition for that matter.” His job, he says, is “to help the machinery of government”, in the broadest sense.”

Later the same day:

Wong defends GG’s comments on climate change

“Here’s a little poser for you… what do you think Penny Wong would have said if the GG had come out as an AGW sceptic? Can you imagine Penny saying that the GG has every right to participate in the debate? It would be outrage on all sides, “shouldn’t meddle in politics”, not her place, inappropriate for representative of the Queen to get involved, harumph harumph…

As usual, double standards rule in the climate change debate.”

Bryce seems to have managed to keep her trap shut on climate from then on, but at the very end, managed to eat the two highly political topics of a Republic and gay marriage together with a lump of E. Coli, and then sprayed them out of her arse at 300 miles an hour (© Malcolm Tucker):

Ms Bryce spoke out in favour of gay marriage during her Boyer Lecture address last night, stating she hoped Australia might become a nation where “people are free to love and marry whom they choose”.

She then added: “And where perhaps, my friends, one day, one young girl or boy may even grow up to be our nation’s first head of state.”

Which prompted my open letter to the GG:

November 2013 – Letter to the Governor-General

“That a representative of the Queen should advocate for a republic is beyond my comprehension, whilst expressing a position on same-sex marriage, a matter which is highly political and contentious, is entirely inappropriate for a person occupying the role of Governor General.”

No reply, or even an acknowledgment, has, to date, been forthcoming. Oh well, swept into the dustbin of history at last.

Filed Under: Aussie Politics, Climate

Massive rescue bill for Spirit of Mawson

25 January, 2014 by

Where will the liability fall?

Where will the liability fall?

Prof Chris Turney and the University of New South Wales could end up liable for up to AU$2.4 million to cover the cost of the rescue of the Ship of Fools:

THE Federal Government will seek the full costs incurred during the recovery effort to save the MV Akademik Shokalskiy.

Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt yesterday said costs, estimated at about $2.4 million, would be sought from the insurer of the operators of the vessel.

The MV Akademik Shokalskiy, chartered by the University of NSW-associated Australasian Antarctic Expedition to retrace the steps of explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, became stuck in thick sea ice on Christmas Eve.

The 52 passengers were rescued by the Aurora Australis on January 2.

Mr Hunt said the Commonwealth would seek compensation for the recovery effort. “We will be seeking full cost recovery through insurers for the up to $2.4 million costs incurred by the Australian government,” he said. “We have a duty to protect life at sea and we do that willingly.

“However, what we see here is that there are some questions as to whether or not the ship was detained by the action of those on board within an area the captain had identified as potentially being subject to being frozen in.

“I think we have a duty on behalf of taxpayers to seek full cost recovery.” (source)

Turney continues to claim the events were unavoidable:

“We were unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an extreme event and it caught us,” he said.

“On Boxing Day, we got hit with a south easterly blizzard with wind gusts up to 70km/h, the result of which was that the sea ice edge to open water blew out from two to four nautical miles to 20 nautical miles and there we stayed.”

The Sydney Morning Herald, however, claims that Turney ignored the instructions of the captain:

From midday on December 23 passengers were transported from the ship on snow vehicles over five nautical miles of ice to the Hodgeman Islands.

“Everyone on board was keen to make the journey across the fast ice to the Hodgeman Islands,” said one passenger.

A weather forecast predicted 25-35 knot winds reaching 40 knots late in the day.

“Despite the wind and extreme cold, the scenery on the journey was spectacular – it seemed unreal, as though we were on a movie set,” said the same passenger.

About 2.30pm the weather deteriorated. At the same time Captain Kiselev saw slabs of sea ice moving into the open water channel from which the ship had entered the area. He called for everyone to return.

A passenger standing near Professor Turney overheard the voyage leader, Greg Mortimer, telling him over the radio to bring passengers back to the ship so it can leave.

But minutes later, Professor Turney drove six more passengers into the field.

The overloaded vehicle had no space to collect returning passengers.

Failing to follow an instruction of the Captain would likely breach the terms of the charter agreement, since a term should be included which required the charterers to follow such instructions, and may be regarded as negligence on the part of the charterer.

In such circumstances, the insurer would seek to recover the losses from the party in breach – UNSW – who would no doubt seek to recover it from Chris Turney. Ouch.

If anyone has a copy of the charter party, please let me know.

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