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UPDATE: Oakeshott and Windsor go with The Labor Party.
Why? Because more than anything they want a long stable government. They like both packages from both parties, but the deciding factor appears to be that they think the Coalition would be more likely to call an early election because they’d be more likely to win it. Figure that. They’re admitting the Labor minority government is weaker, and that’s why they’re backing it.
Putting long-stable-government over better-government, or more popular-government is pure self-interest. The independents feel they would hold more power in a three-way-split Labor party minority, and that their power would last for longer.
And Oakeshott might get a Ministry. (Not that that has anything to do with it…)
See Bolt.
So the plan now as the world faces the Global Financial Crisis part II is that anyone who disagrees with any government proposal needs to run active campaigns to make sure these two independents know exactly why those proposals are counter to Australia’s interests.
Steve Fielding will save us from the-Argentinian-path until July next year. After that…
…
EARLIER: One of the three independents has announced he will back the conservative coalition. That makes the tally effectively 74:74. […]
Clive Hamilton, the Australian “public intellectual”, and failed Greens candidate is a busy man: leave no ad hominem unsaid, no law of logic unbroken. The man has a predictable formula. Rule one: Make an unsubstantiated claim; cast aspersions on all who so much as question it — dig deep for an attempted character assassination if possible; then top it off with feigned moral indignation mixed with grandiose generalizations. It helps to toss in some strawman conspiracies, and confound it with unrelated topics. Rule two: never discuss the evidence.
The Australian newspaper: MP’s obligation is to the planet
Hamilton was trying to guilt trip and intimidate the independent parliamentarians in Australia (who will probably announce their decision tomorrow about who will form government). Almost everything he says is based on a bluff.
The danger of climate change towers over all other influences on the security and health of future generations, yet the Liberal Party and the Nationals are run by people who reject the vast body of scientific evidence that proves it.
Can’t one journalist just ask Hamilton to name the scientific paper that we “deniers” deny? Something that shows carbon dioxide has a major effect on our climate (ie. more […]
And a small operational note: I’ve set up an email address support AT joannenova.com.au which goes direct to the fabulous helpful volunteers who moderate. If you see a comment that needs reporting, that’s the email to use. Likewise, if your comment disappears into the spam autofile, you can email the moderators who can set it free. If you email me I may not be able to help for hours.
Please bear in mind that your email will go to several busy people who have other real jobs and commitments. Please respect that.
Otherwise, this thread is for all those topics that I haven’t written about lately, or for news.
Latest comments
The latest comments (at this moment) come from 6 different threads, one of which is from a post last December. I think it’s a great thing if people can post on-topic and revive old threads. Thanks to the latest comments page, it means that people have more chance of getting an answer or an audience on old posts.
Notes on finding “that post”
If you are not familiar with them, my INDEX, ARCHIVES and LATEST 30 COMMENTS pages are all working well. I’m quite proud of them. 🙂
If […]
Such is the pressure finally beginning to bear on the IPCC that Pachauri has been forced into the ridiculous position of trying to rescue credibility by contradicting most of their past PR campaign. He’s taken the extraordinary step of admitting they don’t have hard numbers, hey, but it’s all OK because the IPCC is really a government agency to make policy, not to write scientific reports “that don’t see the light of day”.
So he’s admitting that the IPCC was all about policy prescriptions all along? And the science was just fudged-up window dressing to provide an excuse? Well, who would have guessed.
Hidden beside Pachauri’s declaration that he’s happy about the IAC report, he let slip a corker of a line:
Times of India asks: Anything in the UN probe report you completely or partly disagree with?
They have talked about quantifying uncertainties. To some extent, we are doing that, though not perfectly. But the issue is that in some cases, you really don’t have a quantitative base by which you can attach a probability or a level of uncertainty that defines things in quantitative terms. And there, let’s not take away the importance of expert judgment. And […]
Australia – The Sunburnt Country going Green around the Gillards?
Will we or won’t we? Each day for nearly two weeks we swing politically… looks like Labor… looks like the Coalition… One side has more seats, then the other; one side has a higher primary count, then the other; the three crucial independents say things that sound like they find the big-spending side of government appealing, then polls show that their electorates all voted conservatively; then the 2-party-preferred vote swings one way, swings back, and swings again, in the end it’s a piddling few thousand votes out of 14 million or so.
I’m kind of getting used to not-having-a-government. The Business Council wails repeatedly that business “hates uncertainty”, but I keep thinking that if UFO’s took our elected reps on a 3 year wine-tour of Alpha Centauri, Business would revel in the certainty that no new-fang-dangled-clauses would appear.
7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
I feel like I keep stating the obvious. A carbon tax is bad because it’s unnecessary and nobody wastes money better than big government, but a carbon trading scheme is worse. The latter is a fake market that feeds corruption and creates it’s own vested industry of financial brokers who profit no matter what the price and no matter who buys or sells (they just need a government mandated scheme that forces businesses to buy and sell), and no matter whether anything useful happens to the environment. Once the financial houses are set (and they are already well advanced) how could this policy ever be unwound?
Carbon Tax = bad
Carbon Trade = sew raw steaks to your shirt and swim with sharks
…
…
So everyone has a handy pocket list as a reference:
Carbon trading is NOT a free market. (In a free market, no one would pay for an atmospheric nullity they can’t use. A carbon trading market is one where the government compels some parties to buy, so it is not free.) It feeds the financial sharks. (Think “ENRON” x 100). Its a magnet […]
Here’s a devout follower telling off his own kind for showing their “faith”. “Beyond Belief” (Climate Spectator)
The “believers” have suddenly realized how uncool it is to talk about “beliefs” when it’s supposed to be about science. So the rush is on to post articles warning believers to hide their “faith” and to throw in token comments about evidence instead. Indeed the Real Deniers are scrambling to claim the “name” skeptic that they used to despise.
It’s a measure of how far this debate has come. Such was the success of the PR campaign, some skeptics gave up on the term and opted to use “realist”. But the skeptics have been proved right time after time, and the unskeptical scientists have been embarrassed by their own conniving words, mistakes, tricks and lies. The resurgence of the word “skeptic” is rising like a rocket.
As I’ve said many times, the opposite of skeptical is gullible. And an unskeptical scientist is an oxymoron.
So here’s Paul Gilding in the publication that panders to the climate industry: Climate Spectator, offering the fake guise of a skeptical soul:
It’s time for true confessions. I don’t believe in climate science.
That’s because I’m a […]
File this one under: Experiments in Green Government. Watch this box.
There’s a spot in Australia called The Australian Capital Territory, where our National Capital, Canberra, sits and which has it’s own anachronistic government: a kind of glorified local council and junior “state” government at the same time*.
In 2008 they were lucky enough to elect a Labor minority government with a Green coalition. Now it seems they’re going to showcase the ACT in a grand symbolic experiment by enacting the strictest carbon reduction scheme in Australia.
ACT environment minister Simon Corbell tabled the new target in a Bill in the Legislative Assembly today. (Aug 26, 2010)
“Governments have a responsibility to act on this issue, and the ACT Labor Government is leading Australia on reducing our carbon footprint,” Mr Corbell said in a statement.
The ACT has also pledged to have its emissions peak by 2013, decline by 80 per cent by 2050, and for the ACT to be carbon neutral by 2060.
Forty percent cuts (from 1990 levels) in just ten years?
Samuel J at Catallaxy Files calculates that as the mother of all emissions cuts translating to a 62% per capita reduction in a decade.
5.5 out […]
cartoonsbyjosh.com
You can’t buy the truth, but you can buy a committee interpretation of it.
One year ago a group of eminent scientists wrote a letter to congress provocatively titled “You are being deceived.”
Now, in a similar vein, but with all the gory details, John McLean has put together a 66 page compilation of the modus operandi and history of said deception. It’s a story of how small committees of activists cite their own work, ignore contradictory information and dissenting reviewers, use the peer review system to lock out opponents, and blithely acknowledge crippling uncertainties (but only in tracts of text that few will read, and never in summation when it matters).
Click to read the full article
When your favourite prancing-horse-committee — the IPCC — is failing to impress the crowds, it’s time to distract them with dressage from another source. In this case, the IPCC is being reviewed by the brand new InterAcademy Council (IAC). Expect their somber pronouncement to discover some minor flaws of process, posit a few proceedural improvements, and then declare that above all, the science is sound, rigorous, and that carbon dioxide will surely kill millions if we don’t allow the […]
The ice cores are often lauded as evidence of the effects of carbon dioxide. Frank Lansner asks a pointed question and goes hunting to find any effects that can be attributed to carbon.
Where is the data that actually shows a strong and important warming effect of CO2? If CO2 has this strong warming effect, would not nature reflect this in data?
He has collected together the data from the last four warm spells (the nice interglacials between all the long ice ages) into one average “peak”. The common pattern of the rise and fall has already been recorded in many scientific papers. Orbital changes trigger the temperatures to rise first and about 800 years later (thanks to the oceans releasing CO2), carbon dioxide levels begin to climb. At the end of a patch of several thousand warm years, temperatures begin to fall, and thousands of years later the carbon dioxide levels slowly decline. No one is really contesting this order of things any more. What is contested is that those who feel carbon is a major driver estimate that the carbon dioxide unleashed by the warming then causes major amplification or […]
Thanks to Down To Earth Magazine. Author: DIVYA
All round the world thousands of greenonomists recommend a “free market solution” to our so called pollution problem. But as I keep saying: this “free market” isn’t free. It’s a pale pathetic imitation: a “managed market”.
In Europe, if a factory produces CO2 (what factory doesn’t?) it can pay people in China and India to not produce an-equivalent-amount-of-CO2. Sounds sort of fine in intent except that paying people to not do something they were-going-to-do depends on knowing the future (and reminds us of a process known as extortion). That’s loophole number one. Officially it’s called “additionality”, which is a fancy way of saying people wouldn’t do something-in-particular to reduce emissions unless they got paid in carbon credits.
The Chinese and Indians, not being stupid, immediately gamed the system. Why wouldn’t they?
The irony of unintended consequences. Here’s how it goes: HFC-23 is the godfather of greenhouse gases: it’s 11,700 times as powerful at warming as CO2 is. The chemical makers are paid as much as $100,000 in carbon credits for every ton they destroy… Suddenly making-and-then-destroying HFC-23 is very valuable business, so people rush to fill this “demand”. HFC-23 is a […]
An interesting story quietly slipped into the news last week during the election campaign. It crosses several new lines, none of which it acknowledges.
Not only are the Western Climate Establishment sitting up and paying attention to skeptics, they’re slowly getting the hang of having the climate debate, and they have finally realized they can’t pretend the “science is settled” on climate feedbacks.
Australian Academy of non-Science
Humans affect climate change
* From: The Australian (my emphasis added) * August 18, 2010
THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate.
Good news. They finally admit (by inference) that there is a debate. Since we amateurs are beating them in the debates and asking questions they can’t answer, they have finally acknowledged that they need to try to answer the questions, and they need to call us skeptics. (They can hardly pit expertise against “deniers” eh?)
The statement expresses for the first time the consensus among Australia’s top climate scientists on the evidence for human-caused global warming.
Oh ha-de-ha… after all the other versions of the anti-science fake consensus […]
With one day to go before the Election, Julia Gillard announces that she is prepared to make one of the most significant changes to our economy by putting a price on carbon, and that if she wins she will assume she has a mandate for it.
She’s had weeks to announce it, put it up for discussion, and convince the voters it’s a good idea. Instead she quietly slides it in at the last minute, allowing no time for dissenting views. This makes a mockery of a “mandate”.
When it’s something as serious as a committee of lucky-dip-citz’ with no official powers: that deserves a proper launch and three weeks consideration. But an economic move that affects every transaction, our international competitiveness, the energy sources we built our civilization on; That’s trickled into an interview with 24 hours to go. Righty-o.
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
Since time immemorial people have been inventing or exaggerating scares to gain power. I used to think carbon dioxide posed a real threat, and I even used to be an active member of the Australian Greens. Then I discovered all the things we weren’t being told (like this and this), and how much money was involved and I was shocked.
There are many good people among the Greens who will be outraged when they realize how they have been used.
The most selfish aims are always cloaked in “good intentions”
Some Greens really believe a market based trading system is the best way to deal with pollution. But this pollution is not a pollutant, and this “free market” is not free. Last year the carbon market reached $130 billion dollars. It’s projected to reach $2 Trillion, and you can be sure that “sub-prime” carbon is coming too. The market depends wholly on government mandate; it’s “fixed” from beginning to end. Who would buy a carbon credit if they weren’t forced to? In a free market, no one.
Worse, funneling money through fake markets is like inviting corruption to a three course meal.
7.5 out […]
Are the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug, under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of CO2?
By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993.
Sea levels: The El Nino / tropical storm anomaly in 1997-1998 is clear. A long sustained rise is not.
Take the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as 5.7 mm/year back in 2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look at the Seaframe Graph – its flat. It is universally forecast […]
Good news… In news just in, there’s another important sign that the momentum is shifting as Money goes in search of better prospects.
ICE cuts 50% of staff at Chicago Climate Exchange
The 1st round of layoffs began July 23, with more to come. U.S. climate inaction is being blamed as main reason for cuts. Things are so bad, that ICE is collecting feedback on what to do with climate bourse
ICE just came in one day and started hacking away … We were told the company was restructuring,” said one source, who declined to be named.
Another said ICE cut around 20 roles at the CCX late last month, and at least another six high-level layoffs would come before next spring.
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
Just when you think it’s too dead to kill: along comes a new paper in a top ranking statistics journal by McShane and Wyner. It’s worth taking stock. It’s a damning paper:
…we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.
…
But in the big scheme of things the Hockey Stick Graph was already dead.
Each one of these points is enough to cast grave doubts on the Hockey Stick. The Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of proxy – tree rings. Trees grow faster when it’s warmer, and when it’s wetter, or when the tree next-door falls down and a herd of manure-making cows move in. Almost all other types of proxies disagree (like ice cores, ocean sediments, corals, and stalagmites). Over 6000 boreholes, hundreds of studies, as well as recorded history show the world was warmer 1,000 years ago. (See here for the refs.) Even among tree rings, the Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of tree – Bristlecone pines – which appear to grow faster as CO2 […]
Once more the ABC is posting logical failures, confused non-evidence, and baseless thinking. This time Professorial Fellow Stephan Lewandowsky also tries to talk about economic cost benefits, without analyzing either costs or benefits, and doesn’t seem to know the difference between a free market and a fixed one. Why do they bother?
Lewandowsky says we should act — despite the supposed “lack of certainty”. Given that there are multiple studies and empirical evidence that suggests carbon has no catastrophic effect, what he is effectively saying is we should ignore the observations and be obedient to the Gods of “science” instead. It harks straight from our stone age tribal era.
Right from the outset, let’s be clear, that for all Lewandowsky’s bluster about the scientific evidence, he has never once posted any reference showing observational evidence that the touted positive feedback written into the models-of-doom has any basis in fact. As usual, he points to the Biblical “Consensus”, even though we’ve pointed out the basics of science (that consensus is an unscientific, illogical argument from authority, and is baseless in science). When the government has poured in billions to “find” a consensus, it would be flat out shocking if they couldn’t […]
The peer review system, so important to the bolstering the voice of the climate establishment and suppressing dissent, is broken. Not that it was perfect and somehow got wrecked, but that it was never stringent or transparent in the first place. As the force of money, power, and reputations was ramped up, it was an eminently corruptible system, and thus it has become. Seriously, what other profession would call unpublished comments by two unpaid anonymous colleagues “rigorous”?
Dear IRS officer, my tax return was audited by two accounting friends I won’t name, and they say it’s right. OK?
Nigel Calder (a former editor of New Scientist) recently discussed the merits and failings of peer review and pointed at a couple of interesting articles in The Scientist. Not surprisingly, it’s not just climate science where peer review is up-the-creek. Other branches of science are subject to the same petty personality squabbles in a system where no one really gets much benefit from doing a proper honest analysis of their competitor (or compatriots) work.
I Hate Your Paper
Source: The Scientist. The story of how some journals are trying to fix peer review.
Suggestions include ways of allowing authors […]
This is one humdinger of a paper and it’s been a long time coming. It’s a big step forward in the search for the hot-spot. (If the hot spot were a missing person, McKitrick et al have sighted a corpse.) In 2006 the CCSP quietly admitted with graphs (in distant parts of various reports) that the models were predicting a hot spot that the radiosondes didn’t find (Karl et al 2006). Obviously this was a bit of a problem for the Scare Campaign. Much of the amplifying feedback created in the models also creates the hot-spot, so without any evidence that the hot-spot is occurring, there goes the disaster (and the urgent need for funding and junkets). Douglass et al officially pointed out the glaring deficiency in 2007. Santer et al replied in 2008 by discovering a lot of uncertainties, and stretching the error bars. Since the broad errors bars overlapped he could announce that the hot spot wasn’t really missing (even though he didn’t really find it either). He wrote this up in words effectively saying that the inconsistency in temperatures was not so inconsistent. McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out these key Santer results which used data up to 1999 were overturned with the use of data up to 2009. Somehow, despite all the excitement over Santer et al 2008, the IJOC decided updating it and contradicting it was “not interesting” and it took months to reach that banal conclusion. […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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