And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to steal the blood, sweat and toil of the many.
They lied, broke solemn promises, failed to provide evidence, and displayed a singular lack of good-manners. They viciously insulted anyone who disagreed, they hid the models the public were forced to pay for, they gave patrons highly paid jobs to advertize their scheme.
They speak arrant nonsense as if it is the bleeding obvious: telling us that we will grow rich if we use energy that costs more; that coal miners are to blame for heavy rain; that more taxes will bring investors; that we’ll lose jobs if we don’t pay more than we need to for energy; or that 6.98 billion people will follow the 0.02 billion who lead us on the path to the Land of Stupid. They made prophesies that failed time after time, yet speak on, as if only they have the vision to guide us.
The polls show the public would not have elected people who wanted to bring in a Carbon Tax. Yet it is law.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
“We’re copying the EU” except the EU took $1.50 per capita over 5 years, and we’re taking 250 times as much.
The selfish include the parasitic members of the species homo-sapiens — they who produce little of value, but demand the rest provide them with food, housing and rewards. These demands are enacted through the government, under the guise of “helping” to prevent a non-existent threat.
The deluded include many people of good will, who are too busy (working to support the parasitic class) to check that their news sources, schools, and government officials are giving them both sides of the story, or that their search engines are behaving fairly (who would know?).
People can simultaneously belong to both groups. Some of the parasitic class, deceive themselves that they are helping. They take no responsibility for the children who drowned in floods they said would never come. They will never know, nor apologize to those who die prematurely of diseases that could have been cured. They think not of all the invisible jobs that were gone before they were offered, or the factories that moved overseas.
Australians, Bob Brown just knocked on your door and demanded your house pay somewhere from $390 up to $1,000 per person each year (depending on your model) from July 1, 2012, for ever. For this money, you will receive in return a change in the climate too small to measure. If you don’t pay, you will be incarcerated.
You no longer have the opportunity to spend that $1,600 – $4,000 per household each year on things that are more important to you. Money that could have been used to teach our children, or cure diseases, or give clean water to the poor will now be used to employ people to audit, market, and manage schemes that enrich bankers and traders and feed the mafiosi.
If that makes you angry, there is plenty you can do. We don’t have to accept this, but it will take work. All around the world the vacuity and self serving nature of this false alarm is spreading by word of mouth. Photos of thermometers in car-parks, and cartoons or charts of rivers of money, are spreading from intray to intray. The flow of believers becoming skeptics is one way and cumulative, and the tipping point is near when it will be open knowledge that the great CO2 scare amounts to nothing.
You too, can send a letter to the editor of every major newspaper.
Bob Brown wants you too: “Feel like your Government is not listening to your concerns?” he asks… “Then use our letter writing facility “. The Greens helpfully provide us with a page to write to the editors of all the national newspapers. I recommend you use it. Politely.
The financial day of reckoning (think Greece, think the Eurozone) will hasten the process of putting the climate scare in its place.
Labor will live to rue the day it fell for the most blatant of scams.
It will be marked for a generation as the gullible patsies of global financial houses.
Thank the Greens and Julia Gillard for waking up the citizens, for they could have kept growing their power through stealth and calculation, but instead they’ve bet double or nothing on one card which turned out to be The Joker. They are one cutting documentary, or one scathing feature film away from going down in history as the sock-puppets of banksters who thought they could change the weather.
Who is cheering today as the legislation goes through? Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays,…. The Greens are unwittingly acting as agents for large financial institutions who want monster profits from a trading scheme of paper credits in an atmospheric nullity.
(Yes, I too, was once a Green who believed in man-made global warming .)
Last year, $142 billion turned over in global carbon trading markets, and …the climate kept changing.
The Nation can never be compensated.
Send a letter to National Editors and vote in the SMH poll.
But yes, there is hope. Abbott has vowed to repeal it, and most of the rest of the world is abandoning it.
The IPA and Ian Plimer are calling for donations. http://donate.ipa.org.au/
Yep. No wonder ‘asylum’ seekers choose to come to Australia.
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That was one of your weakest articles Jo. To try to draw a link between spending money on climate change and not spending money on poor little Fabiola is ridiculous.
The deluded include many people of good will, who are too busy (working to support the parasitic class) to check that their news sources, schools, and government officials are giving them both sides of the story, or that their search engines are behaving fairly (who would know?).
They can just as easily claim that you’re deluded.
Labor will live to rue the day it fell for the most blatant of scams. It will be marked for a generation as the gullible patsies of global financial houses.
Bet ya they don’t.
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#1: Still denying the reality of budgets eh? I guess you just click your fingers and money for medical research appears?
#2: They can claim we are deluded but we have the evidence, they just have name-calling.
#3: Bet you they never admit they were wrong.They don’t have the moral principle. Pick the scape-goat now.
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Trolls pollute blogs, zero tolerance is not a bad policy. Since I and other skeptics are not allowed to comment on alarmist blogs, I quite enjoy returning the favour.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/moderating-trolls-soup-ladles-and-ethics/
Pointman
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Are you calling me a troll?
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Okay, let’s play the budget game.
In Column A put all the things that are in the budget.
In Column B put all the things that could conceivably be in the budget.
The game works like this. Construct a sentence as follows:
Because we spent money on <thing from column A>, that means <something that thing from column B could possibly have affected>.
Jo’s turn:
Because we spent money on climate change, that means little Fabiola will die of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma.
My turn:
Because we spent money on submarines, that means my nephew’s school won’t have enough cricket bats.
Anyone else want to play?
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Yes, Tristan, and thus you can justify spending anything on anything, because according to you, it’s not fair to look at any cost benefit relationship or comparison.
Thus, with the handy Tristan-tool-to-avoid-the-topic any conversation can be converted to the inane in an instant.
Apparently it’s just a pointless rhetorical game deciding (as they were when I wrote that post) whether to
a/ cut medical research funding that might save lives
b/ buy more chinese made solar panels that make expensive electricity we could get cheaper elsewhere.
A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. Real decisions can be life or death.
PS: As for your “evidence” (below), go ahead, make my day, name that paper the IPCC can’t find that shows observations of long term positive feedback leading to more than 1.2 degrees. (model simulations don’t count). We can name 900 papers that support us, you can name zero that support the catastrophe. We deny nothing, but the alarmists create alarm.
No you can’t just say you have the evidence, you need to provide it.
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Not to mention that Swan is now looking for budget cuts… clearly any new policy, regardless of how wasteful it is, will be sacrosanct. Which means traditional areas of spending will have to wear the brunt of the cuts.
With the pending crash, which it appears will be triggered by Greece*, Gillard is even talking of another spendathon to stimulate the Australian economy. You really have to ask what we will be stimulating, because Australia will tank hard this time around IMHO. I say this because we are used to having the Aussie dollar collapse when mineral prices go down in a recession, which buffers us from mineral price drops. This time seems to be different.
Iron ore prices have dropped by a third since mid September, and the Aussie dollar hasn’t budged. My suspicion is that the traditional safe havens of the US dollar and the Euro are so sick that people see Australia as the place to be on the flipside of the recession when China takes the economic lead again.
Who knows… Prediction is difficult, particularly about the future ~Niels Bohr.
* Under normal economic circumstances no one outside of Greece would care too much if the Greek economy collapsed, it simply isn’t that big. Today we take it as a barometer of the health of the EU. Let’s face it … if they can’t fix Greece, they have no hope with Italy and Spain which are far bigger economies, and hopelessly broken.
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Jo, as you know, this has nothing to do with justifying spending on anything. It’s about creating a false impression of the ‘costs’ in the C:BA. the cost of solar panels and submarines is money, not medical research and cricket bats.
Should Australia have reduced medical research funding? Absolutely not. We don’t invest enough in areas where we have a competitive advantage. You and I would cut spending on different things. You’d first cut out CC responses, whereas the first thing I’d kick is probably deployment in Afghanistan (whether it’s right to be there or not, it’s not an effective use of money).
As for evidence, you’ll note that I said ‘they can say it right back’. Which is true, they can say it, you can say it. It doesn’t make either of you right.
Regarding the 900+ papers:
A significant chunk of the list is authored by a small group of writers with extensive links to each other and to the oil industry.
The most cited source for the ‘peer reviewed papers’ featured is a minor journal which appears to have a political agenda to promote climate skepticism.
Not only do many of the other papers on the list either support the scientific consensus on climate change, or not discuss human influence on the climate, we found several cases where scientists featured on the list described the inclusion of their work as misleading.
But you are unaware of all this right? Because as a science communicator you’d never promote a study like that without significant caveats, would you?
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Hmmm. John Quiggin did a cost benefit analysis of US defense spending, and came up with this
Anyway, you’ll be unsurprised that I’m with Tristan on this one. It is a standard political ploy that, whenever a change is proposed, you wheel out a little granny from Oodnadatta and show how it will ruin her life.
Completely OT, but how many floods have there been since the end of the last El Nino? Why is so much water coming out of the sky?
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John, your question “Why is so much water coming out of the sky?” reminds me of a similar question:
You can read the conversation here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/global-warming-a-classic-case-of-alarmism/#comment-14408
The strangest thing is how I found it basically impossible to get someone to believe that not only was the drought going to break, it already HAD broken, and they just weren’t paying attention at the time. That was back in 2009, a year and a bit before the Brisbane floods (but I’ll point out that other, less significant areas of Qld had already been flooded at that stage, it just wasn’t politically convenient for the government of the day to care).
The answer to both questions is that we are a land of drought and flooding rains, the natural variability of our rainfall is huge compared with any long-term systematic drift. This means that if there is any genuine climate change (and quite likely there is some), then this is on the border of what we can measure using perhaps 150 years at best of statistics that we have collected. At any rate, doing our best to adapt and prepare for the natural variability is a whole lot smarter than preparing for microscopic changes in some long term trend.
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Total lie,
Are Skeptical Scientists funded by ExxonMobil?
The Scholarly Peer-Reviewed journal Energy & Environment only represent 14% of the list. There are over 750 papers from 256 other journals on the list.
What political agenda is that? The editor is a Social Democrat! All this nonsense is debunked here,
Correcting misinformation about the journal Energy & Environment
Since you quoted the Carbon Brief, this is the complete rebuttal to their nonsense,
Rebuttal to “Energy and Environment – “journal of choice for climate skeptics” Analysing the 900+ skeptic papers part III”
Rebuttal to “Using our paper to support skepticism of anthropogenic global warming is misleading.” Part II of our analysis of the 900+ climate skeptic papers
Sorry to destroy all your arguments at once.
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Again, Jo, they can say it right back: ‘All you have is name-callling, we have the evidence’.
Also: Should temperatures/sea level rise and ice volume decline at a rate you can’t explain, will you admit you were wrong? If so, what rate is your ‘turning point’? Are you game to supply one?
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Tristan,
you’ve piqued my interest here.
Could you point me to some information on how much the sea level will rise if all the Arctic ice were to melt?
Tony.
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I suppose I shouldn’t be so inflammatory, but sometimes you just can’t help not asking the odd trick question.
Tony.
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It would be the same if all the antarctic sea ice were to melt – zero!
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I think Tristan stated “ice” and did not specify sea ice.
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Hi Tony
You’ve raised the sea level again. Just joking.
The perspective of history can tell us a lot about what might happen in the future.
We are awash with claims that we will be inundated because of rising seas but for that to happen we need available ice to melt – don’t we?
At the end of the last great melt which ended about 6,000 years ago, the oceans had risen 119 metres (some say 130 metres).
In the last 5,000 years the seas have dropped 1.5 metres (rapidly over about 1500 years) and at the moment are going nowhere.
20,000 years ago just as this big melt started, New York’s Grand Central Park was 1500 metres under an ice sheet; this gives an idea of how much ice there was on the planet then.
Unfortunately for the alarmists THERE IS NO ICE LEFT TO MELT.
IT’S ALL GONE and the small amount left at the poles is not going to melt in a hurry.
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Should temps and sea level rise? Well according to the IPCC they should be rising now BUT they are not. So why spend billions on a non problem.
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Big mistake Tristan, very big mistake!
You’ve broken one of the basic laws of AWG alarmist prediction.
Never make an assertion that can be tested in your lifetime – ask Paul Ehrlich and James Hansen?
You’re going to have to eat this one, in fairly short order.
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I heard Christine Milne interviewed on NZ radio this morning. She was crowing on about how the Carbon Tax and related legislation was in the agreement the Greens have with the ALP , so the Greens should get all the plaudits for what has occurred.
So here is my prediction. When the economic truth and the lack of effect of all this starts to bite hard the ALP will drag out all this crowing by the Greens and try to paint a picture to the voting public that the ALP had their arm twisted on this and it really wasn’t the ALP’s fault. Of course they will spin in much better words than I have used but the meaning will be the same.
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Heck, here’s a few predictions for you.
By the end of 2015 we will have had another record maximum surface temp year, and record maximum sea level (both since 1800). Ice volume will be dramatically lower than at any prior post-industrial point. The line from 1998 to 2015 will show an unambiguously positive trend. And Plimer and Singer will still be saying it’s not happening. 😉
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Unlike the line from 1998 to 2011 that shows temps declining and in the last 2 years sea levels declining. Why is the polar ice level above the average for the last 32 years. Answers on a post card …………….
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No Tristan….We have no argument against the obvious NATURAL warming trend which started prior to large scale CO2 emissions in the modern industrial era… So a warming world is of no surprise… However these pauses in warming despite increasing CO2 levels, are problematic for the AGW hypothesis.
You, as proponents of the AGW hypothesis must show that the warming is anthropogenic and that the small effect that a doubling of CO2 will have is actually measurable against the background noise of natural climate variability….. You ABSOLUTELY must agree to uncertainty in the very least…. Because that is the true standing of the science as of this moment.
…. and then there are the serious problems with the modeling and the fact that many of the earlier predictions are now shown to be overestimated… and massively so.
No Tristan, if you were honest, you would admit that this “Carbon Tax” is seriously in error when all things are considered.
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Two things Steve:
A) Picking 1998 is what people call a ‘cherry pick’.
Allow me to demonstrate with this graph.
As you can see, both the years either side of 1998 generate a rather more positive trend!
B) The statistical power of this analysis is weak anyway. In order to have enough data to be able to distinguish a rise of ~0.017 from zero given the amount of ‘noise’, it’s estimated that 17 years is about the minimum required length of observation.
C) I prefer techniques that attempt to remove some of the noise, to better access the underlying trend. You can read about one such attempt here.
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The problem with us warmists, is that we can’t count to 3.
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Tristan,
there you go, piquing my interest yet again by mentioning the words ‘cherry pick’ as applied to certain dates.
So tell me mate, in reference to the original Kyoto Protocol, why might they have selected that specific date 1990 that ALL GHG emissions have to be 5% lower than what they were in 1990.
Oh, also, might you also mention how many of those 191 signatories have actually achieved that.
(Hint – It;s another trick question)
Tony.
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Tony,
Melting sea ice doesn’t raise sea levels, though obviously sea levels rise if land ice becomes sea ice (or melts altogether).
You won’t find me defending the Kyoto Protocol.
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J.H
I just addressed Hansen’s first serious attempt here.
As for the so-called ‘pause’, it isn’t problematic at all. It’s what happens when you have noisy data. On top of that we’ve a pretty good idea of what that noise is (above comment c)).
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Tristan get a glass ,fill it up with ice until it is above the rim,
now fill the glass to the rim with water, Pay attention to the ice above the rim, Now leave the glass to sit and watch the Ice slowly melt. According to your flim flam advice the water should overflow onto the surrounding area, IE: Rising sea levels .
Try it , you will find you have discovered Archimedes
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“Tristan”,
With each post you demonstrate your gross lack of even primary school science.
It is truely amazing how you even remember to breathe.
Stop embarrassing yourself !
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Here’s some high school science for ya. You don’t have to ‘remember’ to breathe, unconscious respiratory control is handled by the brainstem.
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Here’s some high school science for ya:
Handled by brainstems? Now your makin’ stuff up.
Wanna try for the difference between carbon & carbon dioxide?
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What a bunch of bananas we have here from both sides. The centre of control of breathing is in the brainstem AND CO2 levels are what is detected to gauge the rate and depth of breathing required.
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For the record & fairness:
Oxford Food & Fitness Dictionary:homeostasis
Pollution, the building block of life on our planet.
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an honest retraction but really it is better to look BEFORE you leap.
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Thats good advice GA when you consider recent political events………its just a shame we did not……..look first i mean.
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Tristan,
breathing is triggered by excess of carbon dioxide, it’s even been on the ABC so it must be true, see
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/06/15/1392360.htm
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Unusual to agree with Tristan but the brainstem does contol breathing through CO2 levels in the bloodstream – this has been a post topic before.
Man is familiar with two opposing patterns of breathing: Singing (increases B/S CO2 and Cheyne – Stokes Breathing at death (reduces B/S CO2 or oxygenates B/S).
CO2 is essential in regulation of human organism (us).
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Almost as ridiculous as spending it on the Earth’s thermostat.. How arrogant to think we can change our climate you guys are truly deluded !!
Say YES to an election now !!
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Inside two years, Tristan, you will be sent back to the ghetto of irrelevance, where you should never have escaped from. That you have become a temporary member of the ruling class will become part of the public learning about things they should never allow to happen again. You can gloat like a delinquent who has got away with murder; just bear in mind you have not yet been called to account. And don’t betray your ignorance by imagining that your Greens will succeed in hijacking Australian public policy. This tax will be repealed eventually because it is destructive and useless. How about you concentrate on proving your evidence-free scientific hypothesis?
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Flash fiction?
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Tristan said:
The Labor/Green government sees our future in sponges.
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From those of us in the States who are actively fighting this scam, our hearts go out to you. It is my hope and prayer that you are correct…..that the greens will be discredited for a generation or more. Fight this on the editorial pages…fight it at the ballot box….talk to your neighbors, employees and friends. Fight it until you win. Your children will thank you.
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For once logic, reason good science has trumped over the newfound selfishness and vested interests swamping this nation. A small victory to good sense.
Time to move on to more important things like providing a just society for all who wish to contribute.
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“Mat Lipson” you would have enjoyed working in the politburo in the USSR !
With people like you in our society who needs enemies.
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Not so fast Pancho
In time we will move on to an election. And the labor rats who have destroyed the jobs and futures of their constituents will find out about justice.
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“Logic, reason, good science”????
Definitely living in the Land of Stupid!
And I do agree (partly) that we have far greater priorities to deal with than a paltry few tenths of a degree increase that may already be heading back down. A just society might include third world people able to access energy, food, clean water, cheap transport…. no, fighting climate change is much more romantic.
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Mat – you clearly don’t look at the detailed science. You would find it not exactly “good science”. I used to be a proponent of global warming mitigation ideas, but that caused me to closely examine the data (yes, I’m a scientist by trade). What the data shows is the basis for the carbon tax is not justified, and indeed the global temperature has been flat for about 13 years. Simply speaking the low sensitivity hypothesis fits all the climate data, but the IPCC’s high sensitivity hypothesis doesn’t. I’d be happy to explain in detail if you wish.
The trouble I see is that the ALP and the Greens have not given themselves any insurance against the consensus science being wrong, which happens quite often – think ulcers, quasicrystals, continental drift, heliocentricity.
When the global temperature stays down, as seems likely, the ALP and Greens will be discredited in the worst way. I’m sad that is the case, because quite a few of the ALP MP’s are decent people. But I would cheerfully see the whole pack of ALP bosses, ministers and every Green in Parliament out the door. It would be nice to think they might then get real jobs, but sadly I fear otherwise.
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Mat… I used to contribute to this society by producing seafood until ecofascist regulations based not on science but ideology, forced me from my profession and destroyed my industry and all the support industries that relied on it….. So don’t go friggin’ telling me to move on to more important things….. Informing people like you is now my immense pleasure….. and you will be informed. Of that you can be certain. Australia now has a Tax on carbon dioxide that will not do a single thing to lower the global temperature in any meaningful or measurable way, nor will it increase the prosperity of this nation…. It will be a burden for every single family in this country…. and we will point this out at every opportunity.
No my foolish friend…. We are not going away….:-)
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This Hard Labour Government has Borrowed an extra 300 Billion dollars to prop up its wealth redistribution program.
Windmills, pink batts, solar power subsidies and the resultant clean-up that follows a nightmare are costly .
But wait!
Not everyone has lost from this debacle – only the taxpayers who didn’t get anything from the redistribution.
Someone has pocketed the $300 billion – any guesses – friends in the know.
Whatever, the end result is that there is a debt that is accruing interest and the Labour party has no intention of paying it off – ever.
The annual interest bill per person, man woman and child ; forever, is $1,050.
This has never been about helping the environment – it has been about raiding the till – and to get away with it you need ha to have a story that sounds believable.
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It is depressing to realize that you are right.
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The #2 commenter has no appreciation for the art of wordsmithing and is equally deficient in the intricacies of the dismal science.
From east of the Cascades in Washington State
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Sticks and stones.
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Jo I used to feel sorry for the idealistic in our midst who “believe” they are doing something for the planet.
But they cannot begin to imagine the level of abuse and deception they have suffered at the hands of their “comrades in arms”.
To get money from the public tax coffers takes a lot of effort and has to be made to look realistic.
Look at the Republicans in America who use the excuse of wars to transfer huge amounts of cash to “friends” operating munitions and armaments factories!
In Australia we have had pink batts, solar power generation, Global Warming mitigation and so on but the best by far was the Desalination scam in every state that sent hundreds of millions into waiting accounts.
The green left have done their part well in providing the “moral cover” necessary to successfully pull it off.
Well done guys and girls.
There has been an enormous breach of trust here; young innocents have been taken for a ride on the Environmental bandwagon .
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I doubt that the greens are even vaguely aware that they have been duped and their “cause” has been usurped/hijacked by marketers. Greens don’t think for themselves but instead gravitate to authority – they are no more than drones.
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Hung Democracy? meh.
The previous title was better. We are in “The Land of the Stupid” as long as one does not sweep this broad brush too widely and keeps the tar-coated bristles pressed firmly against the numpties in Canberra. Everyone will have their own post-mortem on this law; here’s mine.
Democracy
This is (shock horror) where I have some partial agreement with one of Catamon’s previous observations. The idea that one party must have an absolute majority to rule unilaterally is put under the spotlight by this situation. The very idea of a “hung democracy” pre-supposes this Big Party doctrine. Surely a parliament in which disparate ideals have to compromise is just plain democracy, perhaps more so than the unfettered power that was normal. We didn’t speak about an ALP dictatorship in Rudd’s time or a Liberal dictatorship in the Howard years (except for the greens). We do now seem to have a Green dictatorship which has already had ill results, but by symmetry with ALP and NLP you can’t purely blame a lack of democracy for that, it’s one of several ingredients.
Nobody complains about the benevolent dictator.
Having one party rule absolutely is less important than ensuring legislation is based on accurate facts, representative values, and logic. Questioning the democracy casts doubt on whose values are being represented and I think rightly points to the mechanism of how a minority view can get some or all of its way (as has happened in the last 6 months). In the age of biotech, having environmentally conservative values represented in legislative processes is necessary. But compromises or compensations for minorities are not always possible so the action plan may not go their way. That’s just the usual tyranny of democracy.
Science
There is still the other missing ingredient to consider. Why does this minority view even exist on a topic which has an objective basis such as climate change? This is why I say the democracy aspect is not even the most crucial aspect in this case. If the facts were known to all, there would be no logical way to arrive at the conclusion that CO2 must be exorbitantly artificially priced to prevent an impending ecological catastrophe. This leaves us with the crazies (green left minority) and the uninformed (vast general public), and the size of the latter is sufficient to let bad things happen.
Consensus doesn’t make facts false, so democracy should not be permitted to rank issues based only on headcount.
Democracy decides how to respond to a real issue, it should not decide the reality of the issue. We have science for that. We used to have science for that. Mentally insert here the well-trodden arguments and copious evidence of the absence of the scientific method in consensus climate science. I reckon the political system in Australia needs more technocrats, not to decide what’s important or what to do about it, but to put numbers against the size of the issues in the most objective manner.
As much as it infuriates me, let’s be generous and set aside the unceremonious dumping of 4500 public submissions to the CEF JSC and chalk that up as democracy not having the time to listen to everybody. Let’s even set aside the unwillingness to take the issue to an election or a plebicite, because consensus tells us about people, not the climate.
What happened in Canberra is that a falsehood was fed by a trusted source into a political system with no consistent data standards for vetting policy, and from that point onwards democracy functioned about as well as it always has and lead predictably to a crazy and suboptimal conclusion. As long as the great unwashed rely upon the same false source, the crazy result will be accepted as the necessary price of a fair and logical process.
The majority are not even asking the question and yet we already know the answer is Real Science.
Hey, it worked in the Dark Ages, it can work again.
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Andrew
One of the best pieces I’ve read on the link between democratic processes, decision making, science, what it means to make informed decisions etc.
Particularly liked the concept that democratic decision making is a choice between “real” options as determined by accurate assessment of facts.
It has been amply illustrated that a “mob” cannot make a scientific decision and their job is to judge the scientists making the assessments for accuracy and truthfulness and hold them accountable.
This, I believe, is the reason we need to hold a Royal Commission on the veracity of the contentious science that says that man made CO2 controls world Climate.
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The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and
Self-Deception in Human Life
Event Date: Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 2 pm
Location: Baxter Lecture Hall
Speaker: Dr. Robert Trivers
WHETHER IT’S IN A COCKPIT AT TAKEOFF OR THE PLANNING OF AN OFFENSIVE WAR, a romantic relationship or a dispute at the office, (or climate alarmism) there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceive—but deceit and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality and can lead to disaster. So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives? In his bold new work, Rutgers University evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers unflinchingly argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit—the better to fool others. We do it for biological reasons—in order to help us survive and procreate. From viruses mimicking host behavior to humans misremembering (sometimes intentionally) the details of a quarrel, science has proven that the deceptive one can always outwit the masses. But we undertake this deception at our own peril.
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And I recommend you don’t!
In my experience, it is naive to expect that any political web site that purports to pass on comments to a third party would not filter and edit that material on the way through.
This conduit was brought to us by the mindset who also gave us 10:10, and “the poor starving polar bear cubs”.
Certainly write to the editors of the newspapers, but not through this “helpfully provided page” .
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Hi Rereke Whakaaro
Good point.
My comment to a local newspaper saying that sea level should rise by no more than 27 cms by 2100 was changed to 270 cms.
They are ugly.
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This is what I’ve sent to the Courier Mail and the Australian, not via the greens site.
Never have so many lost so much by the actions of so few. This Carbon (Dioxide) Tax is based on a lie, instigated by a Liar and forced on the public by a government who had no mandate to do so.
Can you please tell me how much the temperature in Queensland will be reduced because of a tax levied in Canberra.
I’m looking forward to the next election, more than a lot of sitting Labor and Green politicians can say.
Richard
Brisbane
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“Labor will live to rue the day it fell for the most blatant of scams.”
Labor may well ‘rue’ this day. I do not believe however that the Luddite Party of Double Think “fell” for anything. Always an eager supporter of the Ministry-of-we-know-best, their brand of socialist dogma has metamorphosed into a fusion of Gaia-ism and socialism. Leaving aside the obvious we-know-best-how-to-redistribute-your-hard-earned-money, they have acquired a more dangerous motivation, what they believe is a moral imperative, in this case, to save the planet. The details are unimportant, CO2 is irrelevant, except of course that it is a vehicle for this new policy.
This is a desperately tragic day because it is the day an unwitting populace, duped by politicians with an eye on a different end game, supported by muppet-like scientists clamouring at the funding trough, finally got what they deserved. Enough believed the lies masked by the rhetoric and promises. They failed to exercise due diligence or caveat emptor.
The result, a solid first step for Gaia-esque Australian Totalitarianism. Make no mistake, without melodramatic exaggeration this IS the most important fight for freedom anyone will experience for generations. It is NOW! The architects of this morally bankrupt enslavement – taxation on exhalation – will be held to account and for the future, perhaps it is time politicians were legally held to account for their statements, promises and official utterances.
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[…] to a “Hung” Democracy 08/11/2011Featured , Globalists , InternationalNo comments JoanneNova.com.au November 9th, 2011 And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to […]
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Yep- “There will be no Democracy in the Carbon Tax I lead”
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An interesting article in The Australian, August 20, 2010:
The election was held the next day.
So you all saw this article in the Australian on the day before the election didn’t you? Right guys? No? Well I’m guessing neither did anybody else.
There’s a reason political campaigns are meant to end a week before the election.
It’s partly because there should be time for ALL candidate’s promises to be widely understood, instead of, you know, slipping it into the fine print at the last minute and verbally saying phrases designed to be interpreted as meaning the exact opposite.
— —
BARRRmmmmmmmm
Cobb: What if… there was a way to make the subjects believe they voted for this?
Bob: Is that possible?
Cobb: Yes.
BARRRmmmmmmmm
Julia: We have to get the tax in before the subjects wake up!
BARRRmmmmmmmm
D E C E P T I O N
— —
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I actually prefer “There will be no Government under the Carbon Tax I lead”
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Like it!!
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Austalias future?
“Panorama investigates the inconvenient truth behind the UK’s rocketing energy bills – that government policy is stoking much of the rise. Your money is being staked in the country’s biggest energy gamble ever. As power stations are closed down, due to old age or high carbon emissions, 200 billion pounds are needed to keep the lights on. Fuel poverty now threatens one in four households yet the government remains committed to expensive alternatives like offshore wind and nuclear power: greener but, so far, dearer.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0177101/Panorama_Whats_Fuelling_Your_Energy_Bill/#programme-info
Panorama is a prime time current affairs programme on the BBC. Don’t know if you will be able to view this programme on the other side of the world,but really worth half an hour of your time.
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The ballot box is mighter than the sword …
(until the sword is used to destroy the ballot box)
Alexander Tyler summed it up pretty well. Bright people, those Scots.
Regards to all,
Mark H.
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Mark – The ballot box, I am sorry to tell you, is riddled with termites. For the first time in my life I am not voting this year in the NZ general election. I am sick of the back-room deals and broken election promises which put my paltry vote effectively in the waste bin. The utter disdain for public opinion amongst our fearless leaders is infuriating. We had the anti-smacking bill a few years ago, despite a 89% referendum against it. We had the government cede ownership of crown-owned beaches and seabed to the Maoris despite John Key saying he would do no such thing prior to his election. And of course we have had the ETS scam rammed through despite Climategate and the thick cloud of uncertainty around CO2 sensitivity.
As for the sword – the pen is mightier and it is grassroots blogs like this one that encourages use of the pen. Write to Abbott and make sure he will repeal it – all I have heard is he has promised to repeal it if there is a mandate, which is hugely different from Jo’s assertion at the end of her article.
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Mike, as a fellow Kiwi, I would encourage you to vote anyway. Cast an informal vote or vote for someone with no chance of getting in, just to show your disdain. And vote in the referendum to eject MMP – tail wagging the dog politics.
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I agree with Grant.
If you do not vote, then you are endorsing the behaviour of politicians by default. You are saying, “Go ahead, do whatever you want, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter to me.”
I have worked inside the political bubble, and believe me, an abstaining vote is treated as a positive vote.
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PROTEST RALLY TO REPEAL THE CARBON DIOXIDE (PLANT FOOD) TAX !!!
Here are the details …..
http://www.stopcarbonlies.com/canberra_rally.html
These communists must be stopped or there will be no future for any Australians except POVETY !
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I will cite a suitable comment from the Swedish “The climate scam” made by “Klarsynt”
Sometimes you read about old civilizations that acted very irrational seen from our perspective. They wasted huge resources to please various “Gods”
whilst the people was poor and probably starved.
I just wonder if not our civilisation will be viewed in the same fashion in the future. We use huge resources to stop emission of carbon dioxide which is completely meaningless
instead of using it on projects that has an impact on health, avoidance of starvation and prosperity.
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Judging from the results of the SMH Poll so far it looks as though a lot of people have turned as Juliar has said and she may still be right that come the next election the current population of this country will forget about an already established Carbon Tax and move on.
For me this is a bigger issue than just a tax. I have, personally, been lied to by a government. They broke their promise to me and I will not be forgiving! I believe the majority of Australians do not care and this will pass into history, done and dusted.
Very very sad indeed !
Say YES to an election now !!
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It was a big lie, a real election turner. No party could have survived the election on such a platform, therefore it is democratically illegitimate. Of course, that’s what subsequent elections are for.
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How sad it is for future generations to know that Australia’s first female Prime Minister will, in the future, be remembered as our stupidest.
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China declines to follow.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/683031/Airlines-to-sue-EU-over-carbon-scheme.aspx
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Is this the same China that our Labour party and stupid greens keep telling us are leading the fight against CO2 emissions.
The same china that poisons its own people to produce rear earth minerals.
The same China that builds a new coal fired power station per week
The same China that creates HFC 23 so they can destroy them and claim the carbon offsets.
That China
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This is the same China which the IEA predicts will consume 70% more energy than the USA by 2035:
By contrast the Greens would wish away all fossil fuels in the next ten years… of course the Greens have a very tenuous grasp on reality at the best of times…
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It was not a Hanging Jo, it was a lynching.
Well right now I am in Far North Queensland. Our first real holiday in over a decade.
For those who don’t know, this area is really reliant on the tourist dollar (Its the biggest market after sugar cane I believe). This has dried up significantly over the past 2 years. Some of its due to the GFC, some is due to Yasi (even though most areas were not hit and were opened the next day), but on top of that the lack of consumer confidence since the Eurotrash treasurer of the year got the drivers seat has really hurt the economy.
Hundreds of businesses have closed just in the first 6 months of this year. These are the real sorts of businesses – many of them family owned with families reliant on it’s income.
And now, they get another massive kick in the guts.
They can kiss goodbye the aussie tourist dollar not just due to a lack of consumer confidence, but the very target market this area relies on is exactly the same economic target of this Carbon tax.
Good one. Obviously this government and it’s supporters want far north queensland to become a hopeless backwater. Onya Anna Bligh!
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I’m looking forward to kicking anna BLIGHT’S ass to the kerb in the next Qld State election!
Can’t come soon enough !
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But China also wants to make a dollar or two. Welcome to the GHG credits market.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-threatens-massive-venting-of-super-greenhouse-gases-in-attempt-to-extort-billions-as-unfccc-meeting-approaches-2011-11-08
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Oh the lovely Chines just trying to save the planet. 😉 🙂
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Can I get carbon credits for lighting my own farts? Sounds like it could be highly profitable!
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Jo
It looks like the banks are looking the “other side” as well in terms of investments. Here is an article from Bishop Hill about a bank advisory on the possible “costs” to renewable energy projects if Scotland gets independence. If they can’t keep up the subsidies it is history for investors –oh what a shame!!
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/8/will-renewables-kill-off-scottish-independence.html
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Isn’t Julia a lawyer?
On ABC radio yesterday it was reported that not all businesses are unhappy about the carbon tax legislation being passed since it will create opportunities for banks & law firms.
Banks & law firms already profit handsomely from the current paradigm of the monetisation of the government’s irredeemable debt. Shame that nobody cares that their future is being hocked by the government.
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Echoing previous posters, it is a sad outcome and if Gillard gets away with this most grievous breach of faith as some suggest, it also sets a dangerous precedent.
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ONLINE POLL REGARDING THE CARBON DIOXIDE (PLANT FOOD) TAX
http://www.smh.com.au/polls/australias-carbon-tax-20111108-1n4qv.html
This carbon DIOXIDE (PLANT FOOD) tax must be stopped !
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Big Al had the audacity to celebrate the passage of the Australian Tax with a post on the Huff Post. I thought you might like the opportunity to respond.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/australia-climate-_b_1081536.html
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Good Grief,
Can’t the man get anything right? New Zealand has had an ETS for over two years now – we know from first hand experience how stupid the whole idea is. What a wonker.
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online Poll: Do you think the carbon DIOXIDE (PLANT FOOD) tax is here to stay?
http://www.theage.com.au/national/its-done-now-for-the-carbon-poll-20111108-1n5pt.html#poll
Obviously NOT !
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I just voted twice in that poll, it aint worth the pixels its written on.
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Great… now we will likely see millions more wasted on political advertising thinly veiled as explaining the CO2 tax:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/national/11500268/opposition-demands-pm-rule-out-carbon-ads/
Hopefully Windsor will stick to his guns and stop this political advertising campaign.
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Since the mantra of this communist gillard “government” is “the science is settled”, why is millions of hard working Australian taxpayers dollars being wasted on utterly superfluous proaganda???
Another example of how bereft of integrity and morality gillard and co are !
10
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
Thanks for the comedy respite BD i really needed it as i was (up until now) having a bad day
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If it isn’t a tax, and only the big polluters will pay, how can they justify a widespread advertising campaign?
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The widespread advertising campaign is not designed to inform you of how the tax works, it is merely an extension of the sales pitch we have had so far to secure your vote leading up to the next election.
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Windsor stick to his guns……hilarious. More chance of Tanya Plibersek becoming Prime Minister
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I know… but I honestly did try to keep a straight face as I typed it… honest, I tried.
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Governments, at their fundamental core are just protection rackets. Therefore, don’t expect you are going to get much “democracy” from them.
Like some well-known protection rackets they use the same tactics of dressing up in nice suits and they give themselves titles (honourable) to fool people.
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Welcome to the world of tomorrow, the world of the socialist union of fortress Europa. :p
Here’s a fact about socialism: they only suffer democracy (the power of the people) to further their own goal (their way or the high way).
It’s actually in their little red book.
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Welcome to the USSA (United Socalist States of Australia) !
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Dear Australians,
As someone who has spent considerable time in the Great Oz and has great respect for the deeply seated common sense of ordinary Australians, I am sure that you will be able to serve up some nice cold electoral vengeance next time you go the polls.
In the mean time, make Gillard’s political life pure hell . . . she so richly deserves it.
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A timely reminder by Tim Wilson of the sheer futility of the Australian CO2 Tax. I gnash my teeth whenever I hear some poor deluded misinformed person say we need to do this our children. Do what, reduce their scope for future employment?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/what-happens-to-carbon-trading-after-durban/story-e6frgd0x-1226189349283
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Right from the start when I started out three and half years ago now, I said this had nothing to do with the environment and was only ever all about the money. People just assumed it was a mantra from an opposing point of view, and I’ve always had to explain it.
Politicians know ‘Politics’ and to them (all of them) they barely even understand ‘Science’, witnessed so graphically when I get scoffed at for even daring to suggest that one ton of coal being burned produces on average 2.86 tons of CO2, actual physical tons.
Knowing ‘Politics’, they then understand that politics is mostly about money, great heaps of it, and the constant need for more of it.
At the start, they acknowledged that ‘perhaps’ there may be correlation between one and the other, (CO2 emissions and Global Warming, which sometime around two and half years ago then morphed into Climate Change) and they also knew that something like this was of an esoteric nature, and that there was nothing really they could do about it.
They needed convincing.
So, the money aspect was hit upon.
Again, that needed very careful explanation, because, as with everything about it, the numbers were huge, astronomical even, hence when people looked at those huge numbers, they doubted they were true. So, careful explanation was required.
Once someone (someone who understood the monetary side of things) realised that this now became a source of huge dollars, it became easier to convince the ‘Political’ people.
They may have used just one example, say something like the following.
A typical large scale coal fired power plant produces around 2000MW of power. To actually do that they need to burn coal, by crushing it to a powder, forcing it into a high temperature critical furnace with lots of air. The generated immense heat is then used to boil water to high pressure high temperature steam. The steam drives a (typical) three stage turbine, which then drives a large generator, rolling it around at around 3000RPM, or up to 1000 tons at that 3000RPM.
Huge amounts of coal are needed for this.
That plant will burn around 6 Million tons of coal each year, year in year out for anything up to and even beyond, 50 years.
As that crushed coal is burned, each Carbon atom in it combines with two atoms of Oxygen to form CO2, almost tripling the weight of that original Carbon atom, and that’s basic high school Science right there. The Carbon component of coal is quite large, so that (average) mutiplier is in fact 2.86.
So, 6 million tons of coal being burned now produces a tick over 17 million tons of CO2.
Now, Mister politician, imagine if you will we could place a cost on that CO2, and now, having settled upon that $23, the total, (just for this one plant remember) becomes a tick under $400 Million.
Now multiply that by say, just the 15 large scale plants that supply Australia’s Eastern States, and you can now see the numbers rising, and rising considerably, and in fact just from the production of all forms of major power supply, you’re looking at close to 7 to 8 Billion dollars. No multiply that for the years of operation left in the plant, all contracted (binding) to keep supplying that power.
Now keep in mind here that all this electrical power is required, absolutely, so the ‘target’ is a captive one. They just have to keep doing what it is they do, otherwise the Country just shuts down completely.
So, it now has become a source of huge income for a Government who understands this money aspect of this plan.
From that point on, when the penny finally dropped, all that was needed was an excuse, and that excuse is the so called ‘Science’.
Get as much of that Science ‘stuff’ as you can and bombard them with that, said the Politicians.
Placing a monetary value on those emissions will not in any way ever, lower those emissions. People (as a whole Country, not individually) will always consume the electricity needed to run the Country. Saying that this cost will lower them is just a ploy, because any lowering of consumption will be of such a minor effect, that it will be totally and utterly negligible, and will not have any major effect on the ‘bottom line’ of the money that is coming in.
Now if, (and let’s concentrate on that really big IF) the original problem was so dire, then the only obvious answer would be to immediately close down every plant that was emitting this foul dirty pollution.
Shutting down those plants in that manner would be absolute and immediate ‘hara kiri’ for those politicians.
So now, they have to justify their mantra that placing a cost on that CO2 will in fact lower that CO2.
Now, the plants are a necessity, and just HAVE to stay open, so now the ‘target’ is entrenched and must keep supplying, and now it also must keep paying.
A very neat little package indeed. All ends wrapped up tight.
The ‘Science’ is just the excuse.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the environment.
It’s just about the money.
Tony.
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Tony,
The only thing i would add to your excellent post is that the tax WILL drive inovation, this clause needs to be added to defend against your claim that the tax will not drop emissions, the tax will drop emissions because it will drive innovation in the green energy sector.
We as consumers will peel away from coal once the green power comes on line, the details in how this will happen have never actually been explained in amongst all the government transparency
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Hi Crakar24
In theory it may be true; what you say about innovation, the problem lies in the degree of activity.
I would expect that any innovation arising from this tax would be in the area of “moving to a more favorable business environment” which would be somewhere overseas?
Can’t really see too many positive aspects of a carbon tax.
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That ‘renewable power’ mantra has also become part of the ‘ensure the money keeps coming in’ mantra.
‘Some’ of those politicians have actually been briefed that renewable power just cannot EVER replace large scale coal fired power generation.
Knowing this, they take great pains not to bring up the truth of the matter, because that, of itself, will actually jeopardise that money mantra.
So, a sanguine picture is painted that renewables actually are the way of the future.
At no stage will you ever hear the real truth about renewables.
Horrendously expensive, marginal amounts of power, inability to provide at better than 8 hours a day, considerably shorter life span, , and so many groups with hands in the honey pot, all wanting their cut.
No, truths like this will jeapordise that huge inflow of money.
The move to renewables has now become part of the excuse to ensure the money from the CO2 keeps flowing.
There are so many things that they can use as an excuse, and if they cover as many bases as they can, then the mindless ‘Gaia’ followers will just accept it.
Somewhere, some politicians know that renewables are actually useless.
If they were so good, and the CO2 problem so dire, then ALL of the money would be being sunk into them as quickly as possible so those coal fired plants could be closed.
Instead, what they do is hype to the max a small boutique plant here and there, making sure that there’s a decent photo opportunity in the announcement.
Some of them also have an idea just how long it will take to get just that one plant up and running, and for the amount needed, it will take many decades, and still only deliver tiny amounts of power on a limited time basis, craftily smiling to themselves that even while this is happening, all that lovely CO2 money just keeps rolling in.
These people make Scrooge McDuck look like a beginner, rolling about in his big money tower.
Of the very few people who do know some of these truths, Bob and Christine are most definitely not among that number.
You could tell them the truth, show them the facts, prove it beyond doubt, and they wouldn’t believe it.
Again, even when it comes to renewable power, it also has nothing whatsoever to do with the environment.
They’re blinded by the huge amounts of money to be made from this.
Just wait till that first large scale coal fired plant runs back to zero, never to fire up again.
See what happens then, as the Country grinds to a halt.
Bob and Christine will have taken their pensions and perks and run off into the Sunset by then.
We, the people will be the ones who suffer then. It’ll be too late to hold them to account.
Tony.
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I think based on this http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/australia-will-send-57bn-a-year-overseas-by-2050-treasury-modelling-shows/story-e6frg9k6-1226118430293 we have no intentions of shutting down any coal mines.
Imagine what we could do with 57 billion dollars a year
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Unfortunately Tony you are now wasting your breath now we just have to live with it.We have now moved into the part of the experiment where we live the nightmare.
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This is a opportunity for those who have faith in their leaders to wake up to the grand deception they are perpetrating onto you. If they can so blatantly screw us on climate change, then what else are they screwing us on?
I’m specifically looking the in direction of the right-wing monarchists who haven’t woken up to the fact that the royal family are pushing this scam as hard as anyone, yet, they somehow still believe in the divinity of the queen.
I’m also looking in the direction of the left-wing socialists who are about to see their utopian ideas turned against them to become a fascist nightmare.
The seizure and control of personal liberty has accelerated. As a former slave colony, we have never been a free country. Perhaps that time is soon upon us when we choose to be free and create laws that enshrine those inalienable rights. Republic much Australia?
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insanity:
8 Nov: Reuters: Bruce Hextall: Australia carbon laws boost to electricity futures: traders
The government has set carbon tax of A$23 a tonne on the top 500 polluters until July 2015, almost double the European costs of between $8.70 and $12.60 a tonne.
“In the short-term we are likely to see more liquidity beyond July 1 next year as we know there are a lot players out there who weren’t able to take positions so the legislation may see them come into the market,” said Vincent Cornes, chief executive of Next Generation Energy Solutions.
NextGen, an electricity and environmental commodities derivative broker, allows wholesale clients to buy derivative products over-the-counter and in the futures market…
Westpac has been one of more active non-electricity sector participants in the Australian electricity market, stretching back to 2002 when it recruited a trading team from failed U.S. energy group Enron Corp, one of the largest corporate collapses in U.S. corporate history.
Trading in base-load futures contracts for supplies from New South Wales and Victoria state based generators extended out to the December quarter of 2012 but there was no trading beyond 2012…
The Sydney-based trader said the price placed on carbon emissions had moved up to around A$19 per tonne in the electricity futures market for second half calendar 2012 contracts.
“It has crept up over the year – people have been essentially looking at taking a A$19 (per tonne) option or buying a futures contract and covering the risk of the legislation not getting through by not paying full price for carbon,” the trader said.
NextGen’s Cornes said it remained a wait-and-see game for carbon emissions derivatives trading because of continuing political uncertainty due to threats by the Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott to unwind the legislation should he become prime minister.
“I think it will be some time before we see much action in the carbon space itself…it is more a process of how we get ready for carbon trading at this point,” said Cornes.
Westpac’s Rousel said there would some activity before 2015 when carbon pricing would be determined by market forces…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/08/us-australia-carbon-electricity-idUSTRE7A71AT20111108
hope we can devise ways to subvert the carbon tax/ETS. we cannot depend on the pollies and their MSM ennablers.
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[…] Welcome to a “Hung” Democracy […]
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OT,
The global warming indicator has come in at +0.11C for October, as my wife would say “is it cold in here or is it just me?”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/11/uah-global-temperature-update-for-october-2011-0-11-deg-c/#comments
Seriously…… or as serious as i can get on this subject, if Oct is +0.11C does this simply mean that since 1979 (no date) till now the planet has warmed by a tad under 0.2C?
If so i would like the usual suspects on this site to respond by explaining why this has happened in defiance of all predictions and also and more importantly what would they expect to happen to this temp set post carbon tax/ETS implementation.
Failure to respond to this post by those of differing opinions will simply confirm in my and many others minds that they are as dcietful and disingenious as our government.
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Here we have a jorno telling us how things are and talks about Coogee moving to China
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/terry-mccranns-column/our-carbon-tax-future-has-started/story-e6frfig6-1226188102426
Here is teh company telling us teh same thing
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/ipad/chemical-company-in-pm-julia-gillards-electorate-to-shelve-a-1-billion-expansion-because-of-the-carbon-tax/story-fn6t2xlc-1226187047963
Here is combet defending the indefensible with jibberish about how they can make money from being taxed
http://www.perthnow.com.au/business/wa-company-news/federal-government-says-coogee-chemicals-wrong-on-carbon-tax/story-e6frg2s3-1226187461862
And morons like Cat a mon swollow this shit hook line and bloody sinker.
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And the serial liar we have for a Prime Minister said this today:
“I do want Australian businesses in our emissions trading scheme to be paying a price which is the world price. That is a very important part of the scheme.”
But Ms Gillard said the price volatility in Europe was to be expected because of the tumultuous economic conditions there in the wake of revelations about government debt in a number of countries, particularly Greece.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbontax-law-abbott-proof-pm-declares-20111109-1n6k9.html#ixzz1dBZXBj9b
Lying rats.
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One has to wonder about the Chinese too. Either they are super smart and see through the carbon permits scam, and who can blame them. Or they are blackmailing the UN by threatening to release tonnes of HFC’s, before the Durban conference. I hope these people who push the carbon trading scam take note of this, report on WUWT site.
England or UK is cutting subsidies on solar and is now working up to stop subsidies on wind turbines. At last the BBC is waking up to this scam. Yet Australia is now advertising on TV for investors in wind and solar farms, but through in the Ord River hydroelectric scheme as a detractor. Yes Australia or her politicians are stupid
and the quicker this government goes the better.
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Yep looks like the germans are smarter than us BB.
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110713-36277.html
Oh hang on…..
(At this point i was supposed to give you a link to where you are told Germany cannot switch to coal because the European ETS would send the country broke) So lets just pretend OK.
So in the end the GErmans have decided to spend their surplus green extortion money on band aides for their aging nuke factories. When one gets China’d we can blame the stupid greens.
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ze Germans might be onto something here maybe a Carbon credit or 2 in this scheme. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Say YES to an election now !!
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Yes bunny the Chinese will do what ever is in the best interest of the Chinese and I can tell you saving the planet comes stone motherless last.
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Oh, typo, I meant throw in not through in.
10
why do some not admit the Coalition NEVER came out with any strong statements against the CAGW scam; they ignored Climategate completely; they still plan to have an ETS (which was designed by them and which seems to be up and running already); however, the Coalition plan does not have the sweetener of compensation helping lower income folks who will be hardest hit by the carbon tax/ETS, which compensation was added on in order to get the stupid bills through the Parliament by making it seem more palatable to some sections of the public.
of course the compensation won’t make up for the ever-increasing costs associated with this re-engineering of the entire western economy from one based on fossil fuels to one based on carbon dioxide, but the public wouldn’t know that, because the MSM has never explained it:
9 Nov: Andrew Bolt Blog: MTR today, November 9
The Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce joins us to damn this tax, warn against the money being shipped overseas and dodge criticism of the Liberals’ failure to speak as frankly as he does against this betrayal of our reason and our national interest…
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/mtr_today_november_91/#commentsmore
shame on all of them.
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So Labor has finally found a way to tax the air we breathe. Look out Australia, they’ll want to tax sex next ! Just think of all that CO2 heavy breathing must produce.
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Terry, that is closer to the mark than you might think.
Appropriate random avatar, by the way.
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Oh good Terry at my age I should have some sex offsets to sell. 🙂
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The point is you have to record everytime you knock back sex to get the credit you cant just say you dont get it and expect a credit.
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Why not Crakar24 thats the way carbon credits work.E.G the Chinese create HFC 23 that they don’t have to then claim a credit when they destroy them.
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Has anyone calculated the CO2 output of a human riding a bicyle?
And include the CO2 from the steel/alloy manufacture.
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http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/08/climate-change-believers-skeptics-battle-to-explain-early-wintry-weather/
There is so much material in this story that i do not know where to begin firstly,
a 2 in 3 chance what is thus a crap shoot?
Oh hang on a little further down we get
“But the IPCC says climate change did not cause last month’s wintry surprise”……..how do they know?
The lines have become so blurred nowadays to exactly what is and what is not caused by AGW.
In the end it is a very, very sad day when the warmbots at the IPCC are reduced to blaming weather events on AGW and if it not for those very same warmbots we would not have this tax
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More garbage.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/5934690/Rising-seas-on-the-way
You just can’t get away from it. I think I’m going to get a nose bleed….
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Did a NIWA scientist really say that! Exactly what are we to make of it?
IMO “pretty certain” ~ 80% and “fairly certain” ~ 70% but I’m assuming those figures and I could be wrong. So is he saying we have a 0.7 * 0.8 or around a 56% chance of it happening. Why is he being so vague why can’t he come out say what he means. Really a scientist, would they really say something like that?
No wonder my faith in science is being destroyed.
Say YES to en election now !!
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Yes. Twice a day -with the tides
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That cant’t be right FD as far as I am aware NZ and Australia have switched off their global warming due to the introduction of a carbon tax and an ETS.
Spending all that extra dosh overseas will prevent the sea level rise from happening only now we will have to borrow it back in case we need sea walls to push back the water.
Say YES to an election now !!
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More garbage…YES and backed up by the Presstitutes that are called “media”.
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I’m buggered if I know how the hell Treasury are going to keep up with all these monstrous figures now that Comrade Brown and Madame Gillard have deemed that in the interest of reducing emissions from Government departments, calculators are henceforth banned and abacus are being reintroduced. In the new “zero emissions” nirvana that the Watermelons want us all to inhabit, we will all be reduced to annual baths (an already established staple of a Greens voter), bi-annual haircuts (more small businessmen and women on the scrapheap), zero Meat consumption (abattoirs gorn!), compulsory listening to John Butler and watching endless re-runs of Cate Blanchette movies.
Australia as we know it has changed forever.
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The CSIRO are at it again…Durban calling.
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C’mon Aussies, get of your effing butts and DO something about these thieves that pose for a Gov.
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Time for a revolution!
Seriously!
What would happen in other countries if the government tried to pull this stunt?
RIOTS, BURNING BUILDINGS, SHOOTINGS etc….
Since words will not save us from these communists what other option is left.
Surely all the diggers that have given their lives over the years to keep Australia free haven’t died in vain!
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how utterly arrogant, and blatant to boot:
9 Nov: SMH: Elizabeth Knight: Carbon tax just another cost – so get used to it
*****The director of emissions and environment at Westpac, Emma Herd, describes carbon as a bit like a currency. Each country has a different carbon currency and Australia will soon join the ranks.
Most can also trade in the international carbon currency, the CER.
And, like currencies, floating carbon prices fluctuate depending on demand. Thanks to the economic malaise in Europe right now, emissions are lower and demand for carbon credits has fallen, and in turn so has the price, which is now about $10 per tonne.
In this sense, a traded carbon price has a built-in hedging mechanism.
Industry groups such as the Business Council of Australia have a real problem with the fixed-price regime the carbon scheme will have for the first few years. In theory this is understandable but the big emitters are being compensated for the fact that this is an impost their offshore competitors don’t have to wear.
”It is extremely disappointing that the Parliament has not heeded the council’s calls to include essential safeguards in the legislation and act in Australia’s national economic interest,” the council says…
Business has fought a valiant fight and rightly claims this deal was done by a government to appease the Greens on whom it relies to govern.
But now that it is done, business will need to get used to factoring in a carbon price in the same way they have to deal with other cost issues such as labour, raw materials, the currency and the demand for their goods and services.
There has been plenty of time – the prospect of the carbon tax has been on the agenda for nearly 10 years…
Herd says for the most part Westpac’s business customers have made preparations well in hand for the carbon tax…
http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-tax-just-another-cost–so-get-used-to-it-20111108-1n5k6.html
meanwhile in SE Qld Logan region, the local rag that never exposed a single aspect of the CAGW scam has a front page saying 100,000 locals require food handouts and calls on the public and businesses (what little is left of them since electricity and water prices shut many down, with more to go) to help with offers of food.
same paper writes about a large retailer who won the regional award for creating jobs, simply by employing OR TRAINING 14 people in the entire year, and how this business is now in the running for the National Award!
for the rest of my life i will be voting informally and will never forgive any of the polical parties for perpetrating the worst scam ever on us, the public, without our approval. even worse are the elites – pollies, banks, MSM – and their sanctimonious claims of helping the poor countries while handing over new financial instruments based on the air we breathe to the very same banksters and crooks who have created every bubble in modern history and who have caused the GFC. nice going:
6 Nov: News24: Claudine Renaud: African farmers can’t go green
Johannesburg – As South Africa prepares to host UN climate talks at the end of the month, African farmers say they are struggling to access a key programme meant to help them take part in the fight against climate change.
The continent’s farmers were meant to be among the main beneficiaries of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which lets industrialised countries and their companies fund green projects in the developing world in exchange for credits toward their emission-cutting targets under the Kyoto Protocol…
…farmers in Africa complain the CDM’s complicated paperwork puts the emissions trading programme out of their reach.
“Small-scale farmers do not have the knowledge to present projects,” Effatah Jele of the Zambia National Farmers union told AFP.
“My major concern is that it affects the small farmer, who is usually a woman. I’m a dairy farmer and I want to know how to feed my cattle so they produce less gas.”
Zanele Phiri, director of Swaziland’s farmers union, said applying for CDM projects is too expensive for ordinary farmers.
“Why was it made in that way? It costs a lot of money,” she said.
The women were speaking on the sidelines of a recent conference of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU), which drafted a resolution calling for climate negotiators to simplify the CDM at the Durban talks, to be held November 28 to December 9.
The resolution said the programme’s funding mechanisms should be revised “to make them accessible to farmers in developing countries”…
Questions are now being asked about how farmers can access the carbon market or some dozen other initiatives like the Climate Change Adaptation Fund, which has given money to only two African projects in two years – an irrigation programme in Eritrea and coastal erosion prevention in Senegal…
“It is complicated and a long process,” admitted the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Christina Seeberg-Elverfeldt.
“But it can be initiated by farmers if there is an idea. It should at least involve 50 000 farmers.”…
http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/African-farmers-cant-go-green-20111106
there is nothing more to say that is fit for print!
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Break it up a bit if you want us to read it.
And for the rest of your life, in the interests of democracy, don’t vote informal. As a step in the process of developing our democracy, vote against.
If you live in a safe electorate vote for the less favoured major party candidate, regardless of what you think, but in the next election vote for the conservatives, even if it means voting for someone very like Uriah Heep (such as the ‘umble Greg ‘unt). Labor should be punished this time so that this sort of contempt for the electorate never happens again.
(I have never voted conservative in my life and never thought I would. I am a Howard hater (still), but I would vote for George Pell before I would vote Labor at the next election.)
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for once i believe the PM:
9 Nov: International Business Times: Vittorio Hernandez: Gillard Claims Abbott has No Intention of Repealing Carbon Tax
Despite Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s vow to repeal the carbon tax if he comes to power, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed in a question-and-answer portion at the CarbonExpo conference in Melbourne on Wednesday that Mr Abbott will not repeal the tax.
“My prediction would be we are seeing the maximum drama right now but it will abate over time,” The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Ms Gillard.
She based her claim on record of opposition parties, including Labor, which eventually reneged on their word to reverse major legislative changes made by Australian governments such as the Medicare and the general sales tax (GST).
“The reality is Tony Abbott knows you can’t go back (on carbon pricing)…. This is a great Labor reform and for all the theatre now, Tony Abbott has absolutely no intention of repealing the legislation,” Ms Gillard said…
Although coal-fired power plants would continue to run in Australia for four more decades despite the carbon tax, Ms Gillard said the country’s energy-production mix would change. She said the carbon price would help create $100 billion renewable energy projects…
However, Greens leader Bob Brown admitted the 80 per cent reduction target of greenhouse gases by 2050 is a good one even as he urged striving to generate 100 per cent of Australia’s energy requirements from renewable sources.
“Putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is an attack on the wellbeing, the health, the happiness, the economy, the job creativity or the next generation,” The Australian quoted Mr Brown.
Ms Gillard added that she discussed clean energy with U.S. President Barack Obama at the G20 meeting in Cannes and would take up the topic again when Mr Obama visits Australia in the middle of November.
Despite the prime minister’s claim, Opposition Climate spokesman Greg Hunt insisted they will repeal the carbon law if they win in the next election…
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/245825/20111109/gillard-claims-abbott-intention-repealing-carbon-tax.htm
google malcolm turnbull and see the maximum MSM positive coverage he has right now; google the missing Abbott (who should have been available to the MSM when the Bills were passed into law) and check the negativity and limited coverage by comparison. the push has been on for weeks and is speeding up to bring back the Minister for Goldman Sachs, whom Labor, the Greens and the MSM love, but the public hates, just like they hate the carbon tax/ETS.
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I saw and heard Turnbull on Q&A this week. Reith was also on and together they gave pretty good reasons why the targets of both the ALP and Coalition for CO2 emissions reduction were pretty useless, given that the US which did not join Kyoto is unlikely to follow Australia down the carbon tax or ETS path.
Turnbull, who is looking anything but charismatic these days, mentioned that the only hope of anything significant being done about GHG emissions lay with China (forlorn hope I’m sure). Turnbull who is not a fan of a carbon tax but rather of an ETS would probably buy the argument that Australia should not do anything until the major emitters like China the US and possibly the next great industrial power, India go first. On his Q&A performance I think he would be willing to back scrapping the Coalition’s present GHG emissions reduction policies on the same grounds. So Abbott’s maim opposition to repealing the carbon tax is likely to come from the MSM, including the Australian.
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The End!
I had it with this Govt & Gillard & Brown! All warm and fuzzy!
Now the grilling about free speech – how long will it be before we can’t even use Jo’s site to voice our own opinion?
I’m afraid Memory Vault may be correct – once the income of this CO2 Tax starts flowing – no MP will vote to get rid of it! (The LNP only has to change leader to blot out the blood promise of Tony)
New party start idea!
THE D9 PARTY.
Every member has to contribute $1.00 each as a member – then once enough money – purchase CATPILLAR D9 bulldozers to get rid of the stupidity of the parliments decisions – once demolished – then lease out for infrastructure development and members get paid a dividend.
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I blame this all on John Howard.
If he’d not bought back the guns, they’d have more to fear! 🙂
I’m reminded by some in/from the USA that their right to bear arms exists mainly to protect the people from (unacceptable) government.
Here’s a somewhat-relevant article at EU Referendum
There is no wiggle-room. No possibility of “changing the language” to avoid the fact that the Brown-Gillard régime does not have the consent of the majority of the public.
The outcome of their persistence in office will invoke a repeat of history. To preclude such a calamity, the P.M. can choose to go to the polls; or the GG can dismiss the Reps.
It is essential that government maintains consent to the rule of law.
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Here’s a bit of pure gold economics from Australia’s greatest treasurer:
“Of course our government takes a different view. Australia has a decisive advantage in mining. It is carrying the Australian economy, but the old taxes such as company tax and royalties are not enough. The government thinks we need new taxes as well. I could almost understand this if the plan were to lock away money in our sovereign wealth fund for a time when trading conditions return to normal. But the plan is to spend all of the money raised by the new taxes and to spend a good part of it on industries in which we have no comparative advantage – such as ”green energy”. When a government diverts resources from efficient industries to inefficient ones it has one effect – it lowers productivity. And over the longer term that makes a country poorer.”
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/an-industry-in-profit-is-an-industry-worth-supporting-20111108-1n5az.html#ixzz1dCON3R2h
This is in the left wing Age so it is interesting to read the comments of some of the brain dead constituency of that broadsheet and the ALP. It goes a long way to understanding how the bunch of knuckleheaded ex union officials in Canberra stuffs up at every turn.
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This story is an indication of the appalling lack of scientific understanding in the community.
According to New Ltd:
An Australian designer has won this year’s James Dyson Award with an invention that sounds more like magic than science and the inventor owes his success to an unassuming beetle.
Airdrop is a low-cost, self-powered solution to growing crops in arid regions.
ttp://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/australian-designer-edward-linacres-irrigation-system-turns-air-into-water/story-fn5fsgyc-1226190299339
What is this miraculous device? An overly complex collection of plastic and copper parts that collects a few spoonfuls of water each night via condensation.
The rate of evaporation on a hot windy day can exceed 10mm. This equates to 100,000 litres per hectare.
Anyone with a gram of common sense could see this device is utterly useless.
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I heard a caller on talkback radio complaining that the grass in his yard has gone all brown and he blamed, you guessed it, global warming!
Honestly, some people are to stupid to live!
You wonder how they even remember to breathe!
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It fades the curtains too.
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I thought that was daylight saving??
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Llew Jones –
the thing is the Coalition NEVER says we will not have an ETS or we will not allow carbon dioxide trading in any form, or anything similar.
the Coalition, including Greg Hunt’s comment above, always says they will repeal the carbon tax. there is never a mention of the ETS.
once again, i repeat, the ETS without the CO2 tax and compensation was so bad the govt had to go with the tax/compensation to prevent the most vulnerable, including elderly pensioners, etc from going under with the higher electricity/water/food prices etc. the turnbulls of this world wouldn’t let that concern them one iota.
a pox on all their houses.
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Pat,
Well we can have a bit of fun mocking the alarmist climate scientists on the basis of their dodgy science if we have nothing better to do. For some, including trolls, posting here may be nothing more than cheap therapy. On slack days when we have nothing better to do we all perhaps indulge ourselves a bit in that sort of game.
There is no doubt that this is a premium blog for evaluating the science and I’m thankful for Jo’s work in making so much valuable information on climate science available and for the expert commentary from many who post here.
However some have begun to see that we have a very serious problem with the policy directions this ALP federal government is taking. We can blame the Greens for this but when Rudd, without the Green alliance, was in charge the same economy damaging policies were put in place including a carbon tax/ETS regime. Thus it is ALP policy. It is after all a democratic socialist party only following the policies of the organisation to which it openly belongs. No conspiracy theory here.
What is shocking many is not only its economy destroying carbon tax and its profligacy, of the Italian etc variety, with revenue but its attempt to muzzle the critical press with the Finklestien enquiry. That should be a wake up call to even the historically naive.
The only conclusion, bar some conspiracy theory about the reincarnation of an authoritarian regime is that our country is now run by ex-union officials who are using the same style of thuggery that the unions have used in the past and are presently returning to, to run our country.
As far as the Coalition goes it certainly has its share of scientific illiterates exemplified in Turnbull and there are others. However it is not, formally at least, a democratic socialist party nor is it composed of shadow ministers from the anti business union movement. Further no one in the ALP has as far as I know has referred to CAGW as crap. That is a good start for any skeptic.
All that indicates to me that any hope of getting rid of the carbon tax and its longer term massively damaging effect on our economy and getting rid of union thuggery tactics in government rests on Abbott’s Liberal/National Coalition getting into office(certainly not Turnbull’s).
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Could someone explain how this carbon trading works because I think I must have missed some thing.
If we have to send 2/3’s of the money we have to pay to buy emission permits overseas how does that generate the money we are supposed to be pouring into innovation and the building of the renewable energy
system that is going to power our clean energy future?.
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The innovation & building must be mostly overseas then. Ie. Where the clean energy future can be bought from . It clearly wasn’t meant to work on a merely national scale.
The bigger you can think, the longer it takes to realise when things aren’t adding up.
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Didn’t we just see that the people we send the money too are actually the biggest CO2 emitters…the developing world.
Oh, I see, it’s about control.
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Vicky Pope, head of climate science advice at the UK Met Office, says it is important to keep the politics and science separate. Problems arise, she says, when campaigning groups seek to use the science to make their own arguments. ‘The science needs to be seen to be objective, peer-reviewed and open, so people can ask questions.’
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1114521/beyond_climategate_can_we_keep_the_politics_and_science_of_climate_forecasting_separate.html
What amazes me is this is from the UK Met Office … the great believer in the IPCC mantra! Vicky Pope is clearly acknowledging the vital role of ‘skeptics’ questioning and challenging the ‘consensus science’ pushed by governments like the Gillard Green/Labor government.
The above article is also interesting because it acknowledges the limitations of General Circulation Models … it acknowledges that future climate will never be able to be predicted because of the nature and complexity of weather systems.
But listening to the likes of Gillard, Combet, Garnaut … heck, even Malcolm Turnbull, they’re quite satisfied the science is settled when it comes to climate change. They’re quite satisfied that the IPCC’s model predictions are accurate. And none of them have found any reason, for prudence sake, to just double check and listen to the scientists who claim the IPCC has got it all wrong or to look at the evidence why such scientists claim the IPCC has got it so wrong.
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Was she laughing or did she give a wink when she said this.
If there was no climate change then the IPCC could have closed after its first meeting but they are there to invent big scary stories.
After all their moto is IT IS WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT. 🙂
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The Chiefio has an outstanding article and commentary, (6/11/11) “Marginal Propensity to Invest” that is a damning critique of the socialist economic model, government investment and the growth of economic bubbles. It should be mandatory reading for’progressives’ like Bob Brown. 🙁
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Nova outdoes herself ” They take no responsibility for the children who drowned in floods they said would never come.” she bleats. Oh really. Play the violin tape. Firstly quoting an article about the wrong tributary. Secondly ignoring a decades work on extreme rainfall events on the Scenic Rim.
More poorly researched trash and simply reciting sceptic memes in the normal Pavlovian reflex.
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WAJ – If you are serious about persuading people, please add some links. Then I could discuss with you your thesis and what the scientific merits are.
As CAGW people often say that sceptics refuse to debate the science, here I’m offering you the chance to test this.
Although I’ve not studied the extreme rainfall events you refer to I’ll kick off with this finding – that the Pakistan floods of last year were found by NASA to be due to jet stream blocking, as was the Moscow heatwave. You will be aware that jet stream blocking is more common and more pronounced when solar activity is low. Likewise floods are often linked to la Nina’s, which tend to be more common and more intense in the downswing of the PDO. Last I looked the PDO, ENSO and the other ocean cycles have not been attributed to Chinese or even Australian CO2, nor have the IPCC favoured models succeed in matching their effects.
So flooding events are historically known to be more common due to the cyclic swings in the Sun and in ENSO, and we are in such a phase at the moment. What makes you think this is not the case and that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause?
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Bruce of N – well your vast list of issues is simply irrelevant and diversionary. A quick google of abbs gold coast extreme rainfall would show that as usual Jo hasn’t done her homework.
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WAJ – thanks for the brief citation – I’ve now looked at the Abbs et al 2007 report briefly.
My first comment is you did not address the relationship between floods and ENSO which I gave. As I said, when you have big la Nina’s you tend to get floods. The recent floods around Brisbane were clearly related to the deep la Nina WHICH in Australia manifests as warmer ocean temperatures (it being cooler on the other side of the Pacific). And as I pointed out, la Nina’s are statistically more common and longer in duration in the down-phase of the PDO (a natural ocean cycle). That is simple data.
I would also mention the previous major flood of Brisbane in 1974 – a year I remember because I didn’t have to go to school for a whole week because of flooding and of course the year of Cyclone Tracy. 1974 was aslo a big la Nina year, which again caused those floods.
Now regarding Abbs et al, CSIRO has used their global circulation model to look at flooding on the Gold Coast. I agree that warmer temperatures will cause more evaporation and therefore more flooding – that is what I said about la Nina and warm SST’s around Australia. But, the CSIRO GCM is like other IPCC-style models, it assumes high CO2 climate sensitivity because the training period (in this case only from 1961) was a time of large indirect solar effects which were not included in the variables behind the model. These effects are only just coming clear now, although they were visible in previous data which IPCC had ignored.
As it happens I’ve done a lot of modelling both using statistical fitting and iterative modelling in my own field so I know how this basically works. When you are training the model to the known data (in CSIRO’s case to the climate data 1961-1999 roughly) you have to have all the significant variables incorporated in your model. Then you are able to determine the unknown variable (climate sensitivity of CO2) by difference. If you leave out a significant variable (eg the solar magnetic and UV effects) the statistical algorithms force the climate sensitivity upwards to make up for the missing variance. So the value for 2XCO2 is too high. In the IPCC models this is the well known 2.5-4.5 C/doubling value, which is well above the empirically measured values. CSIRO’s model has the same problem – it has model derived positive feedback for clouds whereas recent direct measurements show large negative feedback.
So the CSIRO dramatically overestimates CO2 related warming in their GCM, which Abbs et al use for their regional model. Thus the modelled temperature is higher, you get more evaporation and apparently more floods. But this is a complete artefact of the bad statistics behind the original GCM.
So, this paper is crap I’m sorry to say, since it is built on a bad computer model. If the CSIRO does incorporate the new findings on indirect solar effect then they will see the modelled climate sensitivity fall down to sub-Arrhenius values and they’ll find they can hindcast outside of the the training range a whole lot better.
That is my analysis of Apps et al. She has built an amazing edifice on a poor foundation.
If you disagree I am happy to address any science you raise in their defense.
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What pretentious nonsense.
Firstly it’s not relevant to the point about the rigour of the science at all – it’s your diversion. Nova’s point is about “no warning for little kiddies” and “it would never rain again”. And here we have a serious body of work about extreme rainfall event risk in the region.
So take your pick – she either lied or is incompetent.
As to your comments about the rigour of the model. You don’t think CSIRO know about La Nina and PDO – well isn’t that silly when it’s part of their research.
But Abbs et al (not Apps) is about small scale phenomena like extreme rainfall systems in the region under higher greenhouse conditions not macroscale. Your comment “As it happens I’ve done a lot of modelling both using statistical fitting and iterative modelling in my own field so I know how this basically works.” is clueless. Oh weally? Matey this is NOT how it works at all. What silly nonsense and if so uninformed as to be laughable. And more “the statistical algorithms force the climate sensitivity upwards to make up for the missing variance.” hilarious !!
And you have the temerity to want to talk about climate science detail as if you actually know something.
No wonder CSIRO just laugh at you lot.
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WAJ – Apologies for misspelling Dr Abbs name. As to whether “she either lied or is incompetent” I will leave to you to determine whether this is true of Dr Abbs. I myself only believe she is mistaken.
As to your comment about microscale vs macroscale I will quote from Abbs et al 2007 section 3.1:
My emphasis. In other words Abbs et al are using their RAMS model to interpolate the CSIRO GCM results to a finer geographical descrimination. My point is valid: because the GCM has high climate sensitivity it causes higher model output temperatures than current climate science predicts. The RAMS model then takes those too-high temperatures and finds more rainfall and more floods. That is fine…except the recent data, much of it published only this year, is showing that climate sensitivity has been overestimated by the IPCC by a factor of about 7. Therefore the rising temperatures are rising barely at all (since the PDO downswing is underway and the Sun is in a low patch). If this was used for input to RAMS it is almost certain you’d see no increase in floods and extreme rainfall events…because the temperature would be (and is) flat or falling.
If you ignore science you are running on faith. I prefer to make a judgement on the science as it arrives, and that has caused me to change my position from accepting CAGW as a possibility to accepting that the science is now excluding it as a possibility. We are not going to drown or fry. And I for one am angry that our PM lied to get a carbon tax up which itself is based on the CAGW lie.
As to the CSIRO, I have worked with people from the CSIRO for decades. Including very senior ones. Also I have formal statistical training, a peer reviewed paper in statistical modelling, and a PhD in chemistry. I’ve never had a CSIRO person laugh at me, nor do I laugh at them. I have long been sad to watch their endless fighting against mad bureaucratic initiatives and scratching for money to survive. What do you expect when a giant flood of climate money appears from Mr Combet? Scientists are good at justifying their findings “if” this and “if” that. In the case of Abbs et al it is a valid finding “if” CSIRO’s GCM is correct.
But it isn’t.
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What utter drivel.
Either Nova lied about no research on increased extreme events in last seasons flood regions or is incompetent.
Your filler on carbon tax and bureaucrats is just that – irrelevant filler and off-topic. Did I comment on the utility of an Aussie carbon tax – no.
As for comment about interpolation – uh no mate – not at all – your knowledge of this research is appalling. If you have great training in stats think about using it. You can’t resolve microscale scale features with a macroscale model so nested modelling is used. You can’t interpolate supercells out of thin air.
Abbs work is from way back so any crap from you about gravy trains and this work is pure sledging.
Now as to veracity of Abbs work in the longer term – well all this area is evolving work in progress – however THE ORIGINAL surmise about no work on extreme events in the region is crap. And no surprises that the Golad Coast City Council with many assets in harms way funded much of the early work.
And isn’t it interesting the July-Dec 2010 east coast vapour pressure 3pm and tropical SSTs for same period were record breaking. Just like you’d expect from a La Nina in an AGW world. Not proof but oh so interesting. You guys are just flakes in your pretentious pseudo-analyses and conspiracy theories about the motivations of individual scientists.
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WAJ – Bit confused aren’t you. You’ve said “interpolation – uh no mate – not at all” and “You can’t resolve microscale scale features with a macroscale model so nested modelling is used”. I think this just might be called interpolation.
I said the RAMS model is built on and starts from the CSIRO GCM output. Dr Abbs says this. In the paper. Which I quoted. The RAMS model also uses the two regional models, but these are aligned to the GCM. Which is fitted to the temperature record.
And that is the problem. The GCM does not use recent findings that solar effects in toto are about 6-7 times the simple calculated effect of TSI. Which was known before even if they didn’t know why then. Climate scientists are starting to find out now what the mechanism is.
As I said, if you don’t include the variance for that additional solar effect the model will incorporate it wrongly into the derived climate sensitivity. Which is then too big. This is the case in the CSIRO GCM. It is so because they are doing the same as everyone in statistical analysis does, they are minimising the residuals between the model output and the dataset (eg temperature). You leave an independently covarying variable out that is what happens.
And yes if you bothered to read what I wrote I acknowledge that a RAMS approach is fine (as far as the code goes). But build it on crap and you will get crap to 16 significant figures. I have seen this in modelling so many times I get tired.
Er, did I not say that waters around Australia are warm during la Nina events? And when, exactly, was the last large la Nina event? The deepest since 1954 and the fastest drop since records began?
Oh mate I think you really need to look at the science a bit more before you say things like that.
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WAJ – and before you get hot under the collar about large la Ninas and AGW, I just might remind you that the IPCC consensus suggests la Nina is rarer in a CAGW scenario and el Nino is more common. Some more excitable types think CAGW would lead to a permanent el Nino, which seems more than slightly contradicting of the biggest la Nina since 1954.
And yes I agree that AGW exists. It is harmless.
And as I said, the data shows la Nina is more common and is deeper in the downswing of the PDO, which is the phase we are now in (and which is not included or properly modelled by current generation GCM’s). It is also logical, but not as far as I know yet quantified, to predict that la Nina is deepened by the effect of blocking – SOI is a pressure differential, so if you have blocking it stands to reason that the pressure differential can build to a larger difference than otherwise would be the case if weather patterns could more normally move eastwards. So a big la Nina is more logically due to the quiet Sun and PDO downswing than to CO2. In other words you get la Nina more when the world temperature is cooling and el Nino more when it is warming.
So why was it you mentioned the monster la Nina again?
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Still ducking the original POINT about Nova and extreme rainfall.
It’s not interpolation. It’s nesting. And different physical features are resolved thus. Bruce you really don’t listen do you?
“So a big la Nina is more logically due to the quiet Sun and PDO downswing than to CO2. In other words you get la Nina more when the world temperature is cooling and el Nino more when it is warming.” mmmmmmm – do tell …. like in 2011/12 eh? … rush to publication – LOL
In fact the PDO itself has probably been moved by AGW http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008JCLI2552.1
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Hi What_a_joke
And the name truly is appropriate for the discussion at hand, namely the influence of human origin CO2 on the worlds climate: What_a_joke.
As a scientist with training in modeling the real world the one thing that comes to me when I read about people discussing modeling is how inept they are.
Truly : What_a_joke.
You can’t claim to be modelling something when you can’t even name all the factors at work let alone quantify them.
Modeling is something best left to women in high heels and short dresses: What_a_joke!!!
ps How much CO2 is produced in the top 1 metre of soil world wide?
Are there summer winter oscillations??
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WAJ – Regarding extreme rainfall I asked you originally for a link to back up your thesis. You gave me a brief citation of Abbs et al 2007. I then read that paper. As I said, it has nothing valid to say about extreme rainfall EXCEPT if the temperature goes up you can expect more heavy rainfall events. I agree with this.
But as I said, her RAMS model is built on and runs from the output of an invalid GCM. Therefore I have shown your comment about extreme rainfall is wrong. The temperature is not going up as predicted by the GCM, so forget about heavy rainfall due to significant temperature rise. Thus your argument is wrong and by inference (since you have provided no other data – despite my linking multiple papers) Jo’s argument is correct. I believe this is known as logic. Which was invented by the Greeks on one of their rare good days. Logic is the basis for the scientific method.
If you wish to disprove Jo’s statements about rainfall you have to give the data to do so. The only data you have provided is not valid or applicable data, it is invalidated model output (for your case – it is OK for the limited hypothesis I mentioned in the 1st para).
I have only read the abstract of Ben Santer’s paper on the PDO shift. However the data I see do not support his conclusions. The sinusoidal shape of the PDO, AMO and ENSO (and the subtended sinusoidal signal in the long term temperature record) have been on schedule all this decade. I note a new paper by Scafetta is out which puts the long term cycle at ~60 years, whereas I usually take it to be 64-65 years.
You and he may be right, but the data is noisy and sparse – the temperature and AMO records only cover a bit more than 2 full wavelengths and ENSO and the PDO only one or so. Difficult to tell much. But as I’ve said with low climate sensitivity of CO2 if there is a shift in the wavelength or amplitude of the PDO it is more likely to be due to the strong solar effects (ie this new minimum) than to CO2. However I can’t give you a citation as I’ve not much looked at that question.
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Unreal – you selected Abbs 2007 not me and there are plenty of other papers. Sinusoidal PDO – what rot ! If it were sinusoidal we’d have a perfect forecast old son. It ain’t ! And perhaps the PDO doesn’t even really exist. Maybe it’s just statistical ENSO debris.
Nova’s stupid statement “They take no responsibility for the children who drowned in floods they said would never come.”
The point is REGARDLESS of the veracity of the modelling, CSIRO are publishing on extreme rainfall risk. Therefore Nova’s statement is either incompetent or a lie.
There is no logic – it’s simply bald faced facts. But hey you guys aren’t ever big on being scholarly.
Furthermore Bruce you’ve well demonstrated here that you’re clueless on what the research actually is with your inane comments about interpolation.
Have you ever looked at an individual GCM instantiation Bruce – of course not. If you did you wouldn’t find a monotonic signal.
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WAJ – I was going to give you a more precise answer, but I just lost it all, so I’ll keep it short.
1. I did not select Abbs et al 2007, you did. You said “A quick google of abbs gold coast extreme rainfall”, so I googled “abbs gold coast extreme rainfall”. Abbs et al 2007 was the first hit. If you want me on the same page you should either give a link or a better citation.
2. Wivenhoe is today releasing water. They are doing so because BOM has told them to expect a wet summer. Not because of global warming. Because of the extended la Nina. Which is impossible if you accept CSIRO’s modelling as reported by Prof Flannery. I think he said something about a semipermanent el Nino? Maybe you think el Nino and la Nina can coexist? And that CAGW theory now says la Nina is the product of global warming, like all these snowmageddons are?
3. I do not have a supercomputer in my basement. I have not run GCM’s, though some of the models I do use are a couple gigs in size (they run handily on a good laptop, and I get paid well doing them : ) ). But I’ve done plenty validation of models. It is required in the business. All the validation I’ve seen for GCM’s show that (a) they don’t fit short term responses to climate forcings (b) they fail to forecast or hindcast with skill (c) they do not fit to the long term temperature record whereas (d) statistical models do IF they use the significant variables.
4. Saying “CSIRO are publishing on extreme rainfall risk” is true. But they should be publishing in Analog not JOC.
Sorry mate, if the models I do had the performance of the GCM’s in the validation phase I’d’ve been out of a job a long time ago.
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“What_a_joke”,
YOU and your ilk are Treacherous, Deceitful communist traitors.
Love to know where you live…….
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Why what are you going to do? Hold your breath?
Anyway we don’t let riff raff onto the grounds I’m afraid.
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And would you be one of those who question why some people chose to use pseudonyms when they comment on the internet??
Hint: Its because of the occasional over the top nut-bagger who likes to abuse and threaten.
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I agree, it is unacceptable. A Greenpeace guy was castigated last year for saying that. I do not think sceptics should be saying such things either.
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looks like get up are back again
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Where! Who! Should we flee??
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Yup, an astroturfing exercise.
Dunno why she bothers, Bolt and Akerman spout the same unresearched rubbish. Guess she wants you guys to rock up to stunts and demos?
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Excerpt from Cory Bernardi’s latest newsletter:
This week Australian Greens deputy leader, Christine Milne, thought she was insulting me when she proclaimed in the Senate that I “promote limited government, lower taxes, free enterprise and traditional values, as well as campaigns against the government and its policies, most potently against the carbon tax.”
I duly thanked her in person for her kind remarks!
Was there ever a doubt concerning the real manifesto of the toxic Green sludge?
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9 Nov: Reuters: Nina Chestney: UPDATE 2-Warming limit risk if no climate action by 2017-IEA
World on ‘dangerous track’ to 6 degree rise if no climate deal
Renewables from non-hydro seen rising to 15 pct by 2035 (Adds estimate of low-CO2 tech cost, subsidies, reaction)
Additional low-carbon technology and energy efficiency investment to 2035 would need to total $15.2 trillion to limit warming to two degrees — out of a total energy supply investment of $36.5 trillion, the report said…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/09/climate-iea-idUSL6E7M93CI20111109
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look how easy it is, and u get a Certificate:
9 Nov: Ninemsn: City of Sydney now carbon-neutral: mayor
The council has reduced its emissions by improving energy efficiency and installing solar power.
Remaining emissions are offset by buying carbon pollution credits from projects such as wind farms…
Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet is to present the council with formal carbon neutral certification on Wednesday evening.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8371786
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This is hideous!
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pat,
What gets me about all this is the absolute hypocrisy of it all.
You can keep emitting whatever you have been emitting, but buy credits enough to offset those emissions, and suddenly you have that warm green glow, and can call yourself a ‘responsible’ citizen.
If the Government was serious, and the problem is as bad as they say, they wouldn’t be asking for money for pieces of paper to offset emissions. They would be closing down the facility that is causing the emissions and doing it tout de suite.
Try actually doing that and see what the result would be.
Chaos is a word way too mild.
Naah! They know!
It’s just about the money.
Tony.
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Actually, the polluters won’t be able to buy permits for all their emissions, they will have to reduce them.
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I hope she doesn’t fall off her bicycle again.
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The impact of the carbon dioxide tax on Australia?
I think I am quoting Asimov when I say “the only logical deduction is revolution”.
I suspect it will not the be the sort of revolution that the government had planned.
Sadly, when AGW scam and its derivatives are exposed, “science” “environment” will be dirty words for a generation.
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Guardian sister paper, Observer, has a story to tell that once again highlights just how hypocritical the CAGW crowd and their concerns for the poor really are:
30 Oct: UK Observer: UK firm’s failed biofuel dream wrecks lives of Tanzania villagers
The collapse of Sun Biofuels has left hundreds of Tanzanians landless, jobless, and in despair for the future
by Damiam Carrington in Tanzania
“People feel this is like the return of colonialism,” says Athumani Mkambala, chairman of Mhaga village in rural Tanzania. “Colonialism in the form of investment.”
A quarter of the village’s land in Kisarawe district was acquired by a British biofuels company in 2008, with the promise of financial compensation, 700 jobs, water wells, improved schools, health clinics and roads. But the company has gone bust, leaving villagers not just jobless but landless as well. The same story is playing out across Africa, as foreign investors buy up land but leave some of the poorest people on Earth worse off when their plans fail…
The aim is to reduce carbon emissions, but many say biofuels actually increase pollution…
Abasi’s job was spraying pesticides, but he claims he was initially given no protective equipment. “During spraying, we became like drunk people,” he says. When his contract was terminated after Sun Biofuels went into administration, he says he was not paid the full severance pay due for his 18 months of service.
Mhaga’s crowded school teaches 257 children and was promised new classrooms, books and materials, says teacher Rhamadani Lwinde, but all that appeared were a few portable blackboards. In addition to the village land, the company also took 670 hectares of Lwinde’s family land, he says. He was offered 13m Tanzanian shillings (£4,835), which he says was not a good price, “but we were advised to accept it by the district authorities. If we had problems we would sort it out later, they said.” In the end he says he was paid for just 85 hectares.
In the nearby village of Mtamba, villagers tell the same stories of broken promises and unpaid compensation…
Sun Biofuels and two related companies went into administration in August, but their shares in a Tanzanian subsidiary – Sun Biofuels Tanzania, which did not go bust – were sold. The insolvency company directed the Observer to Christopher Egerton-Warburton and a company called Thirty Degrees East, based in the tax haven of Mauritius.
*****Egerton-Warburton is a former Goldman Sachs banker and now a partner at the London-based merchant bank Lion’s Head Global Partners…
Whatever the reason, the company is far from alone. A large jatropha plantation created by a Dutch firm called Bioshape in the southern Tanzanian district of Kilwa has also gone bankrupt, leaving locals complaining of missing land payments. Also in Tanzania, a large ethanol biofuel project set up by Swedish company Sekab went bust. In both cases, the land has not been returned to its owners.
Further afield, in Ghana, a Norwegian-backed jatropha project has collapsed, while in Mozambique a UK-linked company called Procana, behind a huge ethanol project, has folded in acrimony. The Observer’s investigations and those of journalist Stefano Valentino have identified at least 30 abandoned biofuels projects in 15 African countries.
The thirst for biofuels to meet the UK and EU’s rising targets has led British companies to lead the charge into Africa. Half the 3.2m hectares of biofuel land identified is linked to 11 British companies, the biggest proportion of any country…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/30/africa-poor-west-biofuel-betrayal
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So, Tristan, Cat, JB
How does it feel to be spruiking so heavily for the “benefits” of neocolonialism and post modern re-exploitation of the poor in Africa? Must make you Bwanas feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing the crimes being committed in your name.
One must have a strong stomach to sit casually by while your dogma causes such “unforeseen” collateral damage. Of course, our “loony” conspiracy theories are obviously wildly inaccurate that the CAGW ethos is ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous bankers, industrialists, thieves and profiteers who care only about getting their filthy mitts on the huge buckets of money being thrown around so liberally and without proper controls.
How did we become so deluded, and you so enlightened? Perhaps a few years of deprogramming at hard labour in the nearest gulag will re-orient my moral compass and allow me to join in the overwhelming consensus that this really is the way to a clean energy nirvana. Praise, Gaia!
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I told my fiance* that I was accused of spruiking the “benefits” of neocolonialism and post modern re-exploitation of the poor in Africa.
She wants to know where.
*Zambian, brilliant, well versed in the history and politics of colonial and post-colonial Africa, I learn from her every day.
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What is the above examples in Pat’s post @65, but a present day tragedy unfolding right before our eyes, echoing the worst exploitation of 19th and 20th century colonialism? Since it directly occurs as a consequence of the whole clean energy paradigm, which you have stood firmly in favor of, surely those of you advocating these approaches ( of which biofuels are one aspect, and in defense of which you have mocked on several occasions posters’ concerns about the 3rd world impacts of same as conservative paranoid fantasy) share some measure of responsibility for the unintended consequences of your ideology. Whether or not your partner is African, is a bit irrelevant. I’m not suggesting you desire these adverse effects, just share your measure of responsibility for them. The carbon tax/ETS trading schemes with offsets in the 3rd world have also inadvertently created an environment for these robber barons to exploit those Africans most vulnerable to the scam (Ugandan farmers run off their farm land to plant trees but one example ) So, when you cheered for the passage of the tax, you own the whole of it’s effects, for better or worse, good or evil, that flow from it. So, in effect you are spruiking a policy that has the effect of creating a neocolonial exploitative environment.
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Hi Winston
Well put.
A similar scheme of abuse by absence of action occurs in PNG which was once an Australian Protectorate under UN Auspices.
The Australian presence or rather the presence of democratic process, was of enormous benefit to the poor and uneducated of PNG but left wing politics demanded that the poor of that country be given their “freedom”.
Once given “freedom” the lot of the poor rapidly deteriorated and the rape of the country and people began. No more education, no more input through patrol officers just abuse from people in power similar to most of Africa.
Just look up “Vanimo” (near the border with Indonesia) and “logging” to get an idea of the progress brought by “do gooders” with no real comprehension of a situation.
And running in parallel we have the same green left naive “rent-a-crowd” upping the ante by “saving the planet” and helping the scammers and bankers enslave and damage the hopes and dreams of less well off people everywhere.
You are right to say that being silent is to condone the abuse of power.
Being silent about Global Warming Bankers or “logging in PNG or Tibet” or chemical pollution in China is a form of ugly complicity.
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So let’s get this straight:
A) I advocate controlling GHG emissions.
B) Some people who advocate controlling GHG emissions support the use of biofuels.
C) Some biofuel producers have engaged in exploitative behaviour.
D) Therefore I am partially responsible for that exploitative behaviour.
Link please.
I live with someone who comes from a country suffering from the impacts of land grabbing, who actively campaigns against land grabbing and yet I am regularly portrayed as being in some sort of environmentalist ivory tower.
I’ll do you a deal Winston, I’ll cop the biofuel abuses, if you cop the deaths and adverse health effects due to coal pollution, the destruction of livelihoods and the environment around the world due to oil spills and all the evictions, killings, detention and beatings because people opposed various fossil-fuel related decisions throughout Asia and Africa.
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Firstly, the good news
You have my utmost admiration, the two of you, if you are (as you state) advocating on behalf of the most disenfranchised….they need a voice and an advocate, because IMO they are under greater threat now than at any point in the last century And that is saying something. I suspect, if I met you, Tristan, that I would find you quite charming, intelligent and well intentioned.
Now to the bad news….
You are being rather generous to yourself there, my friend. Biofuels is but one pretext to disenfranchise these people of whom I speak. If this was the only abuse, it would be forgivable.
a)The whole carbon credits scheme is rife for piracy and profiteering, including such examples as those in Pat’s post above, the Ugandan families killed or maimed to run them off their farmland to plant forests for the government to claim carbon offsets, paying Sth American natives to not tend their land by signing over tracts of land to shady Aussie and Euro-trash sharks without any understanding of what they are doing and how it will impact on their future, while these “entrepreneurs” take their “cut”. I’m sure the list will increase exponentially if some of the advocates of these carbon offset approaches don’t start to view their ideologically motivated actions more critically and prevent it being open to such egregious abuses.
b)The UN siphoning off large chunks of loose change without any details as to how it will be spent. Without a regulatory framework, designed and audited independently, this money (in the trillions) will be calved off at every juncture- from the sweat off the backs of the hard working proletariat to the pockets of narcissistic UN power-brokers (the Dominic Strauss-Kahn’s of this world). The aim merely to feather their own nest and lay the foundations for a UN run bureaucratic behemoth world government, to advent at the collapse of the current democratic based sovereign nation system. You may view that as a “great thing” to right the imbalances you perceive currently at play in the system as it has evolved. I think you underestimate just how much market driven economies have delivered to the world in terms of innovation and progress from the labour intensive crushing grind of poverty to the affluence that allows many to have some measure of happiness not dreamed of a century ago, except by a minute proportion of the population. The iniquities in the system come down to needing better sovereign governance and weeding out corruption (an area the left leaning excel at, I might add), not replacing it with an equally or more corrupt global entity. IMO, this ‘world government’ model spells disaster for every man, woman and child on the planet. At least with sovereign countries (for all the flaws in the system), each is compartmentalised to some extent from the other to prevent one country dragging all the others down with it- witness the EU experiment which blind Freddy can see is doomed to fail and will disenfranchise all those at the bottom, while those at the apex will merrily profit by everyone else’s misfortune- now imagine the EU disaster as a global catastrophe, and you will get some idea of the ramifications of which I and others here speak. I actually also believe that humanity thrives on diversity and difference, in spite of it’s instinctive desire for like-minded individuals within similar cultures. Nothing would be more upsetting (and damaging for the future progress of humanity IMO) than to find a global “community” homogenised, all speaking Esperanto, eating the same cuisine, travelling to far flung places to view exactly the same architecture, art, theatre, dress, etc, etc. This diversity of approach is the secret to man’s successes. To some extent European advances in particular occurred due to the close proximity with, but also isolation of, different communities developing separately but then coming into contact and cross-pollinating. Without the initial diversity, and importantly without that isolation, such advancement would have been less able to fire progress- a potential energy, if you will, is required to power the collision of ideas to produce the most spectacular outcomes. But I digress……
c) By allowing “carbon” to become a de facto currency, a few things have occurred and will then follow IMO. Energy has somewhat and certainly will increasingly become a premium item, it has been (even more so now than ever before in human history) made into a luxury item, one which should be rationed and controlled, meted out only to those “worthy” of it, I suspect. At present the cost of fuels is escalating, which is in lock step with all those energy dependent items which we ALL rely upon, especially (I would argue) those who are most impoverished. As was pointed out by another poster, every item we eat has a significant energy component in it’s cost. As you increase this component cost, you necessarily increase the cost of all those items which contain that component. This will disproportionately affect those people you claim to advocate for. Do you have any confidence at all in governments, in say Botswana or Sierra Leone or Mozambique, to pass on ANY financial benefits which might trickle down from the UN (who have already pocketed their “management fee”), and if so how will it offset even tiny increases in food and fuel necessities for the most vulnerable in these societies? Have you or any of your fellow travellers thought these aspects through? Nowhere do I see any detail reported of exactly how this wealth redistribution will all occur, by magic perhaps. The devil truly is in the detail and there has been an underwhelming amount of detail given, making one entitled to be suspicious that the mooted benefits of said schemes are nothing but a mirage to justify a massive money and power grab by the very sort of people you would I’m sure claim to despise- the crooked politicians, the rapacious bankers, the amoral financiers and the criminals and scam artists of the world, looking for an edge to scam easy money for no labour.
So, now to the myth that somehow I need to take responsibility of all the ills of the “fossil fuel” industry, even though I was not even alive to advocate it as and energy source at the time it was established or indeed propagated to the level we see today.
Firstly, I don’t recall any advocacy I have for Big Oil, quite to the contrary, I believe that BP, Shell, etc are the main beneficiaries of the whole “CO2 is a villain” scam. They’ve managed to make a bountiful, cheap product appear firstly scarce (with the myth of Peak Oil, cartels, capping wells to cause fuel “shortages” etc) to jack up the price and hence profit. Then, the advent and successful application of abiotic fuel theory in the USSR, means they now must profit another way. By vilifying their own product, they have the optimum excuse to eradicate their major competitor- Big Coal- by hitting it with a BIG ‘GREEN’ STICK. Coal is possibly more emission intensive in terms of CO2 but is less polluting in other ways IMO (can’t remember the last Coal spill in the Atlantic). While they are at it, Oil companies become the principle fall back fuel source with Coal out of the way and other source useless as base load energy providers and thereby promoting an artificial “scarcity” as a result of increased demand- allowing the price to inflate further and profits to go up more so. Then, additionally investing heavily in the expensive alternatives like solar cells and wind turbines- investing in your “opposition” is not unheard of, and they obviously do have the cash (BP and Shell for example- So civic minded of them!).
I am not suggesting we increase our dependence on fossil fuels at all, just not create an environment where they become more expensive and this leads to fuel based poverty- diversifying fuel sources is a good idea, but within a market dynamic, creating stilted economic playing fields is an inefficient way to go about it. Cleaner coal based power, for example, makes more sense to me than eradicating it altogether, or shipping it to someone else (China) to use it with much lesser environmental controls and greater environmental damage. So, I believe you are advocating that particular ill-advised scheme in our unilateral Carbon tax, just that Chinese peasants will die from “coal based pollution” in their thousands rather than a handful here!- Good trade off of risks, Tristan- out of frying pan into molten lava!
Suffice it to say, before this post gets too unwieldy, that I think you need to take greater ownership of what you are advocating, because it is based on a massive over-exaggeration of the minor (if any) GHG effect of CO2 which remains unquantified with any believable scientific certainty, when other forms of pollution are far more important and require our attention, regulation and control (which the West has been doing well progressively over the last century in stark contrast to China and the like). Creating fuel poverty, global government by a corrupt UN, and diverting funds without regulatory frameworks to provide an environment for the sharks and bankers and scam artists to pillage those most vulnerable is really a poorly thought out approach, no matter how legitimate the concerns that may have motivated them. The road to hell is really paved with good intentions, Tristan, and we are but a quarter of the way down that road- it’s not to late to stop and have a think about the options we might have. Don’t allow your idealism to make you an easy mark for the Al Gore’s or Malcolm Turnbull’s of this world.
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Good post Winston.
I’ll change my offer.
I’ll cop all the negatives from pursuing the GHG reduction agenda if you cop all the negatives of not pursuing that agenda.
Or written in a less interesting way: You and I have a different opinion.
As you point out, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t like one another or agree on a lot of things, just that for whatever reasons (which would be interesting to establish) we don’t agree that aggressive reduction of GHG emissions is best (in some utilitarian sense).
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Hi Winston @65 . something.
A long post – started to read it – and will get back, but now:
It seems to incorporate my earlier comments on the rape of PNG while do gooders in the Australian Compassion Industry stand idly by.
Tristan’s reply sounds like a model of the UN where the wealthy and well scrubbed stand around sipping champagne while they devise the next advertising campaign to avert hunger in Africa or some other nonsense.
Manipulation of words, as occurs here, will not end man made global warming – that’s the bad news; the good news is that MMGW does not exist so we can do nothing and will still be OK.
The paradox is that while the UN IPCC is frothing at the mouth over MMGW it does nothing for the problems in Africa which neede urgent attention FORTY YEARS AGO!!!
The problems are described as famine or starvation or even a “human tragedy” by the wordsmiths writing the adds for MSF.
Really? It looks more like despotism, slavery, subjugation, rape and torture to me.
The problem in Africa is Bad People in power. Why is the UN TOTALLY INACTIVE on this; just like it was in the Balkans?
People who in imitating the UN think they are helping Africa need a severe reality check.
Take a trip through the now “independent” PNG which Australia did such a great job of helping, a long time ago.
Tristan? Tristan ? ….. Anybody????
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Hi Winston
Your question : “So, now to the myth that somehow I need to take responsibility of all the ills of the “fossil fuel” industry” does bring up the “other” question which Tristan seems to allow us to ignore.
It is a paradox that we are told to feel guilty about the FF use but we are “excused” from any guilt over the appalling excesses in human misery in Africa – the worlds last meat churnel.
It is a mystery to me how “warmer” protagonists can ignore the meat grinder.
Presumably the “left” P.C. concept that because it is all happening within the borders of a sovereign state it is OK ??
There is an air of unreality about this whole conversation.
We don’t need to “save the atmosphere from human CO2” but we do.
We need to stop events in Africa such as have happened over the last 40 years where a hundred thousand people have been slaughtered.
But the CO2 – non event – is less messy at cocktail parties.
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Thanks Tristan,
In answer to your assertion, I would cop to all the consequences of not aggressively cutting GHG, because I don’t believe any of the negative consequences hysterically ascribed to it- Hurricane Katrina, Cyclone Yasi, Qld flood, etc etc- relate at all to man’s CO2 releases into the atmosphere. As you say, we can agree to disagree, and if scientists can present some significant, unexpurgated and unadulterated evidence to counter my beliefs, I am open to changing them. But, quite frankly, it is not my fault that I find the case as presented for MMGW and especially CMMGW circumstantial at best (being generous), and weakly made with an excess of certainty not warranted by the lack of rigorous scientific methodology. Lets hope this will clarify itself in the near future and we can concentrate our efforts in areas that really matter.
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Why is the UN TOTALLY INACTIVE on this; just like it was in the Balkans?
The UN is inactive because the UN was never designed to deal with internal issues of sovereign entities. The Libyan situation was a bit of an anomaly and required a specific interpretation of the UN charter.
One of the defining properties of a state is a monopoly on the use of violence (via police and army). If the UN is given mandate to intervene in internal issues then it becomes a lot closer to a world government.
It is a mystery to me how “warmer” protagonists can ignore the meat grinder.
I don’t believe that to be the case at all. In my experience environmental activists tend to be more aware of the situation in Africa than the general public.
The idea that this is some sort of left/PC issue is pretty hard to swallow. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are equally willing to shake the hand of whichever human rights abusing state leader is giving them a good deal – an implicit acknowledgment of that leader’s legitimacy. The voters don’t give them cause to do otherwise.
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Hi Tristan
Apologise if I’ve misunderstood.
My main thrust was not so much at the UN, they are professionals who float on top of the hard earned tax dollars of the world’s “ordinary” citizen, but towards Labor and leftist groups like the WWF and Conservation Groups and associated infrastructure.
There is a serious lack of understanding on my part.
I can’t “get” how such publicly “compassionate” groups can be so cynical as to put there own hunger to “bring down the establishment who caused CO2 runaway Global Incineration” ahead of stopping the mass slaughter of African and poor everywhere.
Over the last forty years, in Africa, there have been several events involving over 100,000 humans murdered. There have been several with over 10,000 murdered.
The Green Left seems to not see these as important World Events requiring intervention by the Worlds Moral Majority.
Instead the World’s Moral Majority invents a scheme called man made CO2 did it and shame on those who use fossil fuels.
Take off the green glasses and see the roses.
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Clover Moore hosted a consenus meeting on the carbon tax in Sydney Townhall last night. Guests included Tanya Plibersek, Greg Combet, Ross Gittens, some grizzely old guy who claims to have been a ‘big’ business and a couple of other randoms – all were basking in the afterglo of the Carbon tax becoming law. There were very few vocal disenters (four of us and perhaps one or two others) in a fairly well populated room of warmests – but that is not what is scary. What is scary is seeing government ministers talk about how fantastic this great big tax on everything is – they truely do live in some wierd parallel universe. Poor old Ross should think about retirement – some of his answers made no sense at all and the Sydney Morning Herald were up there pimping the tax as well.
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How many at the coven Darrin? Combet is the real menace; this guy has degrees in commerce and engineering; unless he got them from a cornflakes packet he will know that AGW is BS; in fact I’m sure he does since he bought his new house by the sea!
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Of course, all engineers from real unis know AGW is BS. Lol. Well I’ve got an engineering degree from a real uni so I guess you’re wrong Cohers.
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As a matter of fact Australia Engineers have an official pro-AGW position; crazy isn’t it?
As for you Matty I’m sure you’re genuine in your delusion and don’t have a house by the sea or lake or river.
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Should my posts be like this heap of crap and abuse, Jo?
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Only because I can’t afford one!
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I met Combet once as he was/is part of the ministry for defence. He was part of that wonderful logic defying decision to take 20 billion off the defence so they could afford to spend 20 billion on defence….bit like taxing the economy so it shall grow stupidity i suppose.
Anyway shaking his hand is like holding a dead clamy fish, you get shudders up your spine.
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You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake
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Or a woman, for that matter. It doesn’t lie as easily as weasel words tend to do.
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I thought by reading that Comet studied mining engineering at Sydney that he at least had an undergraduate degree. Perhaps he found it too hard and switched to economics? The following CV is hardly the sort of caper an engineer would get up to. Probably indicates he wasn’t much good at economics either in other words perfectly equipped to help stuff up our country.
“Greg Combet was born in Sydney and attended Baulkham Hills High School. He was later educated at the University of New South Wales where he studied mining engineering,[3] and then graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Economics, and a Graduate Diploma in Labour Relations and the Law. He was a project officer for the New South Wales Tenants’ Union before working for the Lidcombe Workers’ Health Centre. In 1987, he was employed by the Waterside Workers’ Federation, now part of the Maritime Union of Australia.” wiki
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Oh okay; Combet doesn’t have an engineering degree, just studied it. He isn’t as well qualified as Matty; that explains a lot.
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What have been a couple of hundred across a fairly demographic. It seems the brains of warmests stopped developing at about 13, judging by the less then dignifed behaviour of at least one elderly warmest.
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Sounds like a LEFTIST LOVIN!
Their days are numbered………..
Hopefully people suitably protested against these communist traitors!
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Just spray painted red under the beds
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Anti AGW protests are tiny, and the govt is picking up support since the ETS Bills passed the House of Reps.
You guys are a very tiny, irrelevant minority.
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Maxine said:
So why do you spend so much time here?
Anyway, it dosen’t matter if we are a very tiny, irrelevant minority, just as long as we are winning.
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Leftist Lovin is the Bestist Lovin though John. Consideration of others don’t you know.
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[snip – read the post, see the links, ask better questions. –JN]
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Far out Jo, you read the crap your RW dupes spout? At least I deal in facts!
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[snip – make a point, be polite, back up your claims. ]
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Combet fudges on how many billions he’ll force us to send overseas
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/coimbet_fudges_on_how_many_billions_hell_force_us_to_send_overseas/
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Andrew Bolt is a dill of the worst kind. no money from the ETS is being sent anywhere. There may be a fund set up and we will contribute to it but it depends on how many nations sign up etc and how the next climate conference in Durban goes. Certainly no figures can be given now. But it will not be ETS money!
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Gee Maxine,
it seems you are so blinded by thinking you’re a winner that you really have no idea at all.
You’re obviously not aware of the Kyoto Protocol, signed by Rudd, and the only legally binding document that there is at the moment, with no possibility of anything to replace it. You need to do some checking into that to see what our commitment is in terms of dollars.
Then there’s the CDM.
You really are quite hopelessly misinformed. Either that, or you haven’t even bothered to find out.
Tony.
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That is Bolt fudging and calling on the IPA (of all places) for support.
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Bear with me for a minute.
The Prime Minister was asked a tricky question yesterday. Someone curiously asked why we have a price of $23 per ton on CO2, and in Europe they are barely managing $10.
Besides not answering the question (quite the normal MO for Labor Ministers) there was the usual waffle, but it makes you wonder.
Again, notice how they have been very careful not to tell the people the whole total take from this CO2 tax, and just how much of that gets selectively given back. (keep that last part about the giving back in mind)
If that price in Europe, and elsewhere stays that low then isn’t it just so fortuitous that our price is set in stone, (oh and rising each year) and set so high, while everywhere else it’s tanked out and dropping. Lucky because our Government can keep the rest, and be very aware the amount the Government actually keeps is no insignificant amount.
Now when the price moves to the ETS phase, where the price is set by
Doctor Smith’sthe market mechanism, then the price will be similar all across the World, eh!If the price then aligns with everywhere else, and that price stays at the current Euro low, then what now happens to the Budget bottom line where the compensation package to whoever gets that compensation was originally set, modelled to the original price of $23.
Will the Government be asking those compensated for some of the money back, or will the Budget now have another excuse not to be brought back into surplus, the blame now being the low price of CO2 credits in the rest of the World.
Also, don’t you just wonder sometimes.
When the Coalition had control of both Houses, did you notice the hue and cry from Labor, and their media backers that the Senate just became a rubber stamp.
Now, however that all Labor’s legislation just gets rammed through, there’s no talk (anywhere) about the Senate being a rubber stamp.
No, all of a sudden, it’s good Government, and getting the job done.
Tony.
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Plain Packaging got delayed quite a bit by the Libs in the Senate, but thankfully passed today.
The govt publishes all the money it takes in and pays out in the annual Budget. Plenty accountants and economist go over that with a fine tooth comb, there will be no money used by the govt to fudge the books, what an idiotic suggestion! And it is Treasury, not the Treasurer prepares all the detailed statements, charts etc that make up the Budget, the Treasurer just sets the objectives and policy etc.
The price for permits in Australia will be set here not Europe. Why do’t you do some reading before rushing to type all your misunderstandings and conspiracy theories?
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No Maxine I think you need to do the reading.Do you remember the bit about Australian companies having to buy 2/3’s of their permits from overseas.You know buy them from the market except there is something about a floor price of ,is it,$16. don’t know what happens if the market price is $10 dollars.Don’t know what happens to the $6 difference.Of course what happens if there is no market in 3 years time.What with Europe going down the toilet there maybe no overseas market to buy from.
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I wonder when someone will pick up the obvious business opportunity: plastic cigarette packet covers. Get ’em made in China for 10c each and sell them for a buck. Easy money.
People won’t want olive-drab medically challenged boxes in their handbags when they can have pretty ones with flowers on them.
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No. Observing politics make it too obvious.
Well actually, yes it is.
When Howard had control of both Houses, whatever the policy decided by the Executive went through both Houses as legislation. ref: WorkChoices.
It’s misrepresenting the situation to say that:
It would be more accurate to say that the Coalition has failed to come up with amendments to proposed legislation that have enough support in the House or Senate to get up, and that’s really an expression of their silliness and desire to grandstand more than anything else. They don’t seem to want to contribute anything, unless they can have it all their own way.
Parliament is actually working EXACTLY the way it should at the moment. The Lib/Nats could be making a policy contribution as an opposition, but they aren’t. They seem to prefer heckling impotence to the kind of policy development that we should be able to expect from them as the “alternative govt”. If they had wanted to demonstrate a different attitude they would have been part of the Multi Party Committee that thrashed out the Carbon Price policy but instead they stuck their heads under the blanket and tried to wish it all away.
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Do you notice how they change the subject.
Tony.
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John Brookes @ 2.1.2.1.3
John: The CO2 Tax doesn’t start until July 2012 – then all your problems will be solved. And all for only $9.90 per week for each and every Australian! But there’s more:
* Sea levels stop rising
* Temperature stablilises
* The Reef will come back
* The ice won’t melt
* The grapes won’t flower early anymore (your wine can still come from Margaret River)
But Wait: There’s more – you also get paid back this $9.90 per week through income tax breaks, and also you won’t be out of pocket at all from July 2012 – ever?
But Wait: There’s more – only the big nasty polluters will pay – and all the excess money will be used to develop renewable windmills in your area, plus solar power, plus geothermal, and big wave generators right out the front of Waterman’s Bay.
SO John – you’re just going to have to wait these next 7 short months for all these nasty things to stop – AND stop they will!
IT’S all in the science and has been proved that this $9.90 (which you do get back) will solve your never ending worries.
Can hardly wait to celebrate on July 1st 2012 with you John! (Oh sorry – I’m busy that day!)
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Here’s a little bit from the BOM relating to the Brisbane area in 1825 when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was estimated to be at about 280ppm or pre-IR levels. If a little time is spent reading the BOM records since that time it should disabuse the minds of those who imagine higher CO2 levels were the cause of last years Bribane and surrounding area floods. Those floods were eclipsed in size by regular floods well before there was significant change in atmospheric CO2 levels. The 1893 flood (CO2 about 290ppm) was supposed to be the daddy of them all. A little checking will show that the same is true for other regions around the world, including 3,000 year old geological records from parts of Africa:
1825 – “Major Edmund Lockyer mentioned the evidence of a large flood while in the area of today’s Mount Crosby pumping station – “marks of drift grass and pieces of wood washed up on the sides of the banks and up into the branches of the trees, marked the flood to rise here of one hundred feet”. Lockyer’s descendant, Nicholas Lockyer, in 1919 made the following remarks: “the official record of the flood level of the river on the 4th February 1893 at the Pumping Station, the site of which is within a mile of Lockyer’s camp, was 94 feet 10.5 inches. His remarks would seem to suggest that between Oxley’s visit in September 1824 and his [Major Edmund Lockyer] own in September 1825, the river had experienced a flood as great as that subsequently experienced in February 1893.” (Ref 2)”
More here:http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/brisbane_history.shtml
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Yet the BoM has seen that AGW is starting to affect Australia.
But even without AGW La Nina events cause floods, no one has ever denied that. So what is your point?
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Maxine (are you really female? – not many climate blog addicts are), I’m lazy, thats all. I just want someone to tell me how the current global flood situation compares with everything going all the way back to Noah. But I can see its a futile hope.
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The history does not have to go back to Noah (given he lived before the Industrial Revolution) for those with reasonable powers of deduction. About 200 years takes us back to pre-Industrial Revolution atmospheric concentrations of CO2.
I’m assuming you are not as dumb as Mr. Maxine appears to be but just in case here’s the “logic”. If severe flooding events have been occurring with about the same intensity and frequency in that period of time (200 years) up until the present then it is highly unlikely that changing CO2 concentrations are a relevant factor simply because their has been no significant change as CO2 concentrations have increased.
The same of course is true for the intensity and duration of droughts. You will also find that the geological records, where they exist, often paint a similar picture over much a longer time frame. Bit hard to follow every rabbit down its burrow but when a “scientist” tells you the nature of floods and drought in a particular region is being altered by human induced climate change, check the available written and geological records for that region and you will be surprised to find, as I have on quite a few occasions, that they are ignorant of the climate history of that region and their claim is therefore nonsensical.
That doesn’t require any scientific ability beyond using a search engine and reasonable reading and comprehension skills.
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Why not do some reading, reading of the real science I mean? Start with the BoM website, CSIRO, NASA etc.
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You can reply inline now Dave. Its not that hard….
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[…] http://joannenova.com.au/2011/11/carbon-tax-arrives-australia-senate/ […]
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Many of us are feeling pretty angry about what is happening to Australia under this Gillard Green/Labor government.
Something tells me that come the next Federal election we are going to see a wipe-out of Labor, the Greens and the independents.
I have never known a time when the general population of Australia has felt like it is currently feeling… so pissed off!
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Polls are actually improving for the govt, picked up more once ETS Bills passed the Hor.
Plain Packaging of cigarettes went thru Senate today. community welfare workers get equal pay which will be a good wage rise = more spending = healthier economy besides being plain justice. This is a fantastic govt!
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Just how fantastic will be seen at the next election.
Tony.
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You do realise the polls have actually swung a fair way towards the govt? And that the press is starting to ask questions of Abbott?
But we will see late 2013. I am about to bet $100 at Sportingbet on Labor winning the election in 2013, and another $100 on Gillard to be the Leader then. Gillard now appears Prime Ministerial, wrapped in incumbency and will be hard to beat at any time as Tony found out last year!
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You keep saying that Maxine, in the style of a litany (The writing style exposes your origins). Repeat it often enough and someone might believe it.
The last Newspoll is not improvement.
Given your affiliation, I cannot resist pointing out that after the next election the ALP will have no seats in WA, maybe 1 in QLD, not enough for a bridge game in SA, a cricket team in NSW, Victoria (their stalwart at the last election) sadly will not be able to field a parliamentary cricket side.
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Well, I repeat it when I see people act as if the polls were still 59:41. Those days have passed and won’t be back.
The second last Newspoll had a weird artifact where the Green vote jumped by 3%. This was not real. The latest Newspoll corrected that. To quote the poll Bludger:
So your dire predictions will not come to pass. Both the Newspolls I mentioned were since the ETS Bills went through the House of Representatives.
Barry O’Farrel is instructing his electricity retailers to print on the electricity bills the amount of the so-called “carbon tax.” I hope he does! People will see the small increase due to the ETS and compare it to all their previous big increases and also the tax cut/pension increase they got and go “so what!” I wonder what excuse Colin Barnet has for all the big utility hikes he has inflicted on West Ausstralian residents?
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Woops, sorry for forgetting to close the link!
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The ALP (Australian LIARS party) and the REDS (greens) will not exist after the next federal election they will be wiped from the face of the political landscape forever.
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To be fair though, the real problem is government spending.
One way or another you are going to pay tax, be that through income tax (almost reached 100th anniversary) or Carbon tax or some other tax, it’s inevitable. Think of it as protection money (because that’s what it is).
However, government spending is the real culprit. Keep that under control and you solve so many other problems.
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Ummmm
Only big polluters will pay the ETS misnamed as “carbon tax.”
Modern Monetary Theory implies govts don’t need to tax or borrow money. Google it.
Govt spending keeps people in jobs! In Ireland where they have been cut cut cutting govt spending to reduce the deficit unemployment is officially 25%, in reality a lot more if you count the numbers of Irish who have emigrated to the UK, US and here. Oh and the Irish deficit? Still there I am afraid.
Seems cutting govt spending by itself does more harm then good, as Greece is finding out.
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OK, I’m converted.
Australia @ 9/21 in their second innings in South Africa!!!!
Must be Gillard’s fault. Would never happen if we had a manly, athletic PM. He would have wisely spent the money on the development of a strong cricket team not a Carbon Price!
REGIME CHANGE NOW
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So close to lowest score ever. *sighs* At least it’s the lowest score in the last 100 years.
Stupid ACB, now there’s a regime change I could get behind. 8th time in history that #11 top-scored in an innings.
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this is so off topic but I’d be interested in those other 7 times. I wonder how many were upper order batsmen who returned to save the team after retiring hurt?
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Sweet as
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it is not very big is it. Let’s wait for the full scale model.
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Once they move beyond the Tonka Truck testing to real testing and get passed any issues they have there and finally go into full scale production the gubbermint will slap a “Hydro” tax on it (just like gas) the technology will flounder.
When will you people learn this has nothing to do with anything except making cash!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Ah gee Tristan how much energy is there in 200 litres of diesel and how big a tank of hydrogen do you need for that amount of energy.
Hell they can’t even get cars to run any distance on it.
You might like to check how the exercise of running Perth buses on it if they are still ding it.And that hydrogen was derived from petroleum refining. 😉 🙂
Just wishing and hoping and praying.
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Very Cool! I have heard a bit about solid state hydrogen storage. Will be a pretty big tech if they crack it.
And Crakar24, it kind of makes sense that if we reduce our fossil fuel use, and the Govt gets less in the way of excise revenue, they are going to have to raise taxes somewhere else or they drop their revenue base. They have to make the cash somewhere sweetie.
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Catamon,
Try to follow me here, we tax oil and petrol to force an alternate, LPG produces very little CO2 (as compared to the previously mentioned) people jump on board and the gov applies excise tax.
Someone designs a way to run a car on hydrogen (nothing really new in it) so people jump on board coz its low in CO2 how long before an excise tax is applied?
When are you ideologists going to get it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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[how long before an excise tax is applied?]
In that case it would make sense to apply an excise after the technology has well and truly established itself and supporting infrastructure is on place.
Its hardly a position informed by ideology. More by a recognition that if we want a govt that can spend on our behalf in relation to the common good, they have to able to raise the funds to do so.
You have a problem with that?
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Catamon,
I enjoy our little chats as i know i will win because i use logic whilst you use belief systems (not an unsult) its just that you want to ignore all the little things that i dont.
Ok so we have an excise tax on petrol, as part of our push to tackle the climate change monster we offered everyone a generous discount on coverting our cars to LPG, in fact manufactures designed engines that ran purely on gas. Once enough people were using gas the gov says they will bring in an excise tax!!!!
And who can forget that guy in QLD who went around and gathered up all that old oil that would have been dumped somewhere and converted it to diesel and sold it (a very environmental friendly thing to do) but was shit down by the gov as he needed to pay excise tax!!!!!!!!!
So above are two examples which clearly show the gov are only interested in tax revenue and NOT tackling the monster.
So now we come to hydrogen fuels at which time do not have an excise tax but will once enough suckers have been lured into the market.
We have excise and now we have a carbon tax (double dipping….now make that triple dipping with the GST) to force people to use fuels that take on the monster head to head but in order to give the monster a fighting chance we will slap a tax on it.
Only ideologists could see a silver linning in this storm cloud.
Cheers
Crakar24
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Just remembered seeing a little model car that ran on a hydrogen fuel sell were I think the hydrogen was produced by a solar cell on the car.
Funny I have never seen a full scale model of the same.
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I’ve followed JN’s blog for a long time and, at one end of the spectrum, have enormous respect for many who post here while at the other end I am 180 degrees out of phase both in sentiment and common-sense.
One of the former is TonyFromOz who clearly has forgotten more than I will ever learn. In my mind he speaks, relates and reinforces ideas that appear logical and, subjectively neutral, self evident.
His ‘follow the Money’ message seems axiomatic but I suspect that he may be missing a more powerful incentive for the madness that underlies his premise.
‘Follow the Power’ supercedes ‘Follow the Money’, IMO.
Create the power trail, set the agenda and the legislation that supports that agenda and the money will follow just as night follows day.
Build your war-chest, bribe your supporters, denigrate your detractors and what do you get? Rome, circa pre-demise aka ‘.. the fall of Rome’
OK, you may drop ratings and fail to be in power the next time but, given the low rate of political assasinations currently evident, you’ll sweep to power once again!
Power is the key. Key to a gold-guaranteed pension.Key to temporary, and highly lucrative, employment in a ‘Global’ position while ‘suffering’ national embargo.
Power both in the abstract (political) and physical (GWh) is a neat way to keep the coffers full for the few while rapidly emptying for the many.
RIP – Oz. Once a nation of Lions led by Donkeys but now a nation of has-beens puppeteered by parasites!
Forgive me for my crudeness but HTH did all you Bruces and Sheilas let these ****(add how many as you feel fit),****(DITTO) stitch you up?
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RoyFOMR
Say, thanks. I’ve come over all blushing now.
You mention above:
I’m never one to complain, but that one mention of a gold guaranteed pension is in fact quite a good one, and I’ll quote just one example.
Let’s pretend that there was an Australian politican who was alleged to have improperly used a credit card for the procurement of, er, some added, er, ‘entertainment’ purposes.
Let’s pretend he gets booted out at the next election.
He will have served his Country for 6 years as an MP.
He is eligible for the Government Superannuation comcomitant with that service.
I also served my Country as a member of the Royal Australian Air Force, and I served for 25 years, more than 4 times his service.
His Superannuation benefit, both as a payout, and the accrued fortnightly benefit he will be eligible for is a tick over 4 times greater than mine, before any of the perks that he is also entitled to are added on.
Admitted, his service is way, way more important than mine ever was, and as an example I remember distinctly just how difficult it was at school to put my hand up and say ‘present’ when the roll was called, and the same when asked ‘all those in favour, put up their hands’. His job has a degree of difficulty I cannot even imagine, so I understand fully why his service is rewarded at a rate more than 4 times greater than mine was, for less than a quarter of the time served.
I know this comment may seem personal in nature, but perhaps you can see why these politicians are willing to do anything they possibly can to hold onto their seats for as long as they can, including something that some of them might not agree with, eg, this iniquitous Tax on what is a staple of life, access to a constant and reliable supply of electricity. Understanding Politics as they do, they would probably not even be aware in the slightest what it is they have done, and if truth be told, they probably don’t really care.
With this vote, they have jeapordised that, and while some at this blog may think that is overly dramatic, then it is they who need to really look into what will happen to that supply of electricity as a result of what they have subjected us to.
For them, this a political point, if you will, a point based upon the sense of power.
For those of us affected by this, it is real life.
Tony.
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Poor you!
If it wasn’t for Mark Latham when LOTO forcing Howard to end the completely outrageous politicians super then Craig Thomson, who you are alleging did something wrong, would get a much more lucrative super in 2013.
Next to politicians the pensions of servicemen are the next most generous, over generous in all likelyhood (lots who leave the military have picked up vital skills and soon find well paid jobs.)
So stop whining and do some research before just regurgitating your prejudices.
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Gee Maxine,
It was a comparison, not a whinge.
After I got out of the Air Force, I did work in the private sector for ten years. I was retrenched because
I was too oldthe Company restructured, and I was the one person out of 65 people who was retrenched, incidentally, the, er, oldest person at that particular workplace.I then set about looking for work privately for 6 months, only to be told that
I was too oldI was too over qualified. What they really wanted was someone with all my qualifications, and experience, only 25 years younger, because, after all being so old, they wouldn’t get a real lifetime of service out of me, barely another 10 years at most.I bit the bullet and went into Centrelink who told me
I was too oldI might try getting a lawn mowing franchise, or perhaps work for a Real Estate Agency, or I could go and do a number of courses to gain even moreuselessqualifications.I applied to TAFE to teach, using my Air Force acquired teaching qualification. They told me
I was too oldI could teach there for two years as an unpaid volunteer and perhaps after that I might be taken on as a casual.I suppose that in your eyes, I didn’t try hard enough, and that I’m now bludging on those real workers who, after all, are supporting me.
Now I’m a full time stay at home carer for my good lady wife.
Maxine, I have no reason EVER to whinge.
I’ve had a wonderful life, and why whinge.
Life is good, in fact, life is great.
Sorry about being so personal.
Tony.
P.S. Oh, Maxine one last thing, something that really makes me smile. I feel sure that if there was a way, you guys would find a way to blame John Howard for World War 1.
00
Leave that one with me Tony. I’ll check the Collective’s position on that and get back to you mate.
00
That’s easy – he passed some (more) retrospective legislation.
Everybody knows about Howard’s retrospective “bottom of the harbour” tax laws.
Less well known is his retrospective declaration of war against the evil Hun.
00
I’ll help you and your collective out Cat.
You see, the imminent assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was signalled by way of a message just hours before the assasination. Preventing the assasination could have prevented WW1.
This hand written message, ment for the ambassador of Austria, was erringly delivered to one Reginald D Howard, ambassador of AUSTRALIA.
Old Reg, (the grand uncle of John Winston) having downed one too many cognacs during the pre Ferdinand tour party, read the note and thought it was a larrikin joke because the ‘heir to the throne’ (the only throne that counted to the Howards) was one Edward V111.
Reg threw the note in the dustbin, and the rest, as they say, is history.
00
Ah Maxine,
what a wonderful day for someone of your leaning to
denigrateshow your respect for the people who served in the Armed Forces.Tony.
00
You got to love the balance these people have in their lives hey Tony.
Servicemen get shot at, wounded, maimed and or killed and they’re “over compensated”.
But shoot Maxines lot with some words they find “offensive” and it’s off to the libel courts for some real compensation.
Maxine; YOU, specifically, particularly, especially and unequivocally YOU, are what’s wrong with modern western society.
At some stage in your life Maxine, however belated, however too late to do any good, I hope you are struck down with crippling sense of shame and worthlessness.
00
From the spelling of “likelyhood” you could place Maxine as being under forty.
That is a very young age to been so embittered.
At that age I would suspect that most of us had our heads down, working our butts off, in average paid jobs just trying to get by, with no thought that we were being “used”.
The main difference between us and the Maxines, who feel hard done by, is that we only ever criticized ourselves as the likely cause of any failure to advance financially or whatever.
The constant Politico – Tripple Jay JJJ – indoctrination that baby boomers had it easy and left the world in a mess for the next generations is unrelated to any reality – it is just advertising that helps Politicians coral unsuspecting potential voters to their vote tally.
The fact that three recent deaths of Australian armed services personnel does not temper comments about service entitlements is alarming but understandable.
Advertising is designed to progressively remove the capacity for critical thinking from individuals so that they can become susceptible to suggestion.
And so the deaths of soldiers is “just something on TV” and doesn’t register, or Carbon Pollution messages are so all pervading, see “SkepScience” that they become Real.
All the Maxines can assert their own individuality – try it.
00
” From the spelling of “likelyhood” you could place Maxine as being under forty.
That is a very young age to been so embittered. ”
Maxine is actually old enough to know better.
00
Gee thanks guys for being so interested in little old me!
I actually employed people, put bread on peoples tables, and made a comfortable living doing so.
But, you know, I have a degree and I read. You people are losers, really you are.
Did any of you take part in the Convoy of Incontinence or just sit on your bums and cheer them with posts here?
Climate change is real and poses manifold dangers and we cause it.
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Hey, wherte were you guys today? Big protest in Canberra?
Only demo I saw was legalise marijuana!
You people are failures!
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“”I have a degree and I read””
“”I have a degree and I read””
“”I have a degree and I read””
Well good for you.
Too bad you either don,t read views that conflict with your own or you have no understanding of science.
BSc(Max) Climate Science Communication?
Very post moderne.
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Yes Maxi
THIS IS ALL ABOUT MONEY.
MONEY
MONEY.
GLOBAL WARMING = MONEY FOR THE SELECT FEW and pain for the rest of us.
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