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Hey, but this is alright when you are spending someone else’s money isn’t it?
Staff at the Australian Department of Climate Change are so depressed, I can’t think why, that the government is spending $175,000 to cheer them up.
Could it be that the poor staff would enjoy their jobs more if they weren’t doing something which was a complete waste of time, and their programs weren’t a vacuous drain? Remember if we all abandon Australia, AND if the IPCC aren’t wildly overestimating the effects of extra CO2, then, and only then, will Australia cool the world by as much as — rounded to the nearest whole number — zero degrees. (Pace Matt Ridley)
Things are so bad, people were ashamed to admit to people that they worked at the Dept of Climate Change. Worse, this study was done back in 2010 – before a round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2011 and then another round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2012. This was before the worst of the plummeting Labor polling, before FakeGate… just how low do these people feel now?
175k to cheer up Department of Energy and Climate Change staff
9.9 out of 10 based on 67 […]
Thanks to Truthseeker & Anthony Watts
…
UPDATE: Is this a record? Has there ever been a loss this bad in Australian history? Conservatives likely to win 74 seats of an 89 seat parliament.
Labor was reduced to only 11 seats in 1974, and on latest counting tonight appeared set to retain only nine seats. Some analysts put the figure even lower, at seven. This would mean Labor falling short of official party status and relying on the incoming LNP government to grant it party offices, staff and resources. The Queensland Greens failed to win a seat and suffered a fall in support. [The Australian]
This is thread for all those who want to comment on this election. According to Bolt, things are not just bad, they’re seriously awful for the Labor Party. Newspoll says LNP (conservatives) 55%, Labor 26%. Channel Nines polls says Labor could be left with less than 10 seats!
9.7 out of 10 based on 131 ratings […]
The meme is spreading. Rapidly, day after day, I’m meeting more Skeptical-Austrians, and Austrian-Skeptics. I don’t mean the country, but the economics.
James Delingpole-the-brilliant enjoyed my post: The Ground Zero of Global Corruption: it starts with The Currency. He’s had his awakening a few months back. Just yesterday I was talking to Redmond, a skeptic in Canada who turned out to be founder and director on Mises.ca (you can’t get much more Austrian than that). Martin Durkin (the infamous director of Great Global Warming Swindle) is an Austrian too. Back in Bali 07, even then, that Monckton, Archibald, and Balle were discussing gold and currencies (nearly half of all the skeptics there). I’m guessing Chiefio might be. I hear Ray Evans of the Lavoisier Group is too.
…skeptics of government science are also skeptics of government money…
It’s no surprise, really, that skeptics of government science would also be skeptics of government money. My message to all the sleeping skeptics out there is: get with the game. When I said climate science is the second biggest scam in history, I wasn’t joking.
So James, yes, welcome to the club! Absolutely, I’m an Austrian and so, of course, is […]
Was it just me? Was I the only one who noticed a tiny announcement in February that Airport Scanners were coming to Australia, the land where terrorists haven’t landed (yet), and … wait for it… there would be no (NO!) — opt — out– clause. Did I hear that correctly?
And the crowd roared (about the cricket), nobody said a word about the scanners, and the ten libertarians left who can bear to watch the ABC were too busy trying to save the nation from nastier threats. Australia is getting millimeter wave scanners at International Airports, and if you don’t want to be scanned, you need to leave the country… by boat. (Either that or swim with the crocs across the Timor Sea.)
Metal objects show up on a white body, but not on a black background. Image: Daily Mail and Herald Sun.
With no opt out clause, what happens when the first person facing deportation refuses to be scanned? Well that’s all right then, we’ll just book them on a cruise to Kandahar? Civil Liberties Australia was one of the few to speak up. Maybe those scanners are safe? Maybe? But at least one man with a pacemaker […]
“In the old days they would have just bound her, thrown her into the lake, and waited to see if she floated.
Though a primitive method of witch-hunting, it would surely be far more effective than Jonathan’s, and would require much less in taxpayer funding.”
[MediaWatch comment by Preacher]
Jennifer Marohasy belongs to the “wrong” tribe, according to the ABC’s Media Watch program.
Media Watch is panting with excitement because — stop me if you’ve heard this before — she’s a scientist who earns money. My favorite part of the inadvertent expose-of-ABC-bias was the sneering voice-over, meant to be Marohasy or any supporter of her: petulant, petty and childish. The full ABC-festival-of-smug is right on display, thanks, as always, to the Taxpayers of Australia.
It’s so bad, it’s satirical:
MW: But many real journalists struggle when reporting science.
“Struggle?” Mr Holmes? You mean they are so confused about the real world, they think if a US group funds a group who write about a distantly connected topic, that therefore, ergo, and quid pro quo — that tiny funding demonstrates that Lake Alexandrina was always […]
“Conspiracy Theorist” – the taunt you use when you want to “win” the debate without having to argue your point.
When someone points out that the Regulating Class want to bring on a world government, they’re called a “conspiracy theorist”. When the king-pins of the Regulating Class, or their media apostles, actually admit they rather love the idea of a world government, where are the retractions? They can’t hold an honest conversation, let alone budget, plan and spend your money wisely.
Gary Stix – former Scientific American writer – blogs that he used to edit articles on nuclear fusion and clean coal, but now thinks he ought to have written more on psychology, sociology and economics. (See, when their attempts at logic, reason and evidence don’t win over the crowd, the anointed need to explain how stupid, flawed and selfish people are.)
Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe
Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as […]
The scale of the rot is something to behold. Something is grossly, wantonly wrong with Western Civilization, and lots of people know it, but they don’t know why (and for the next blind rebellion, see, “Occupy”).
But a head of the hydra popped into view last week. First a high profile whistleblower from Goldman Sachs wrote Why I am leaving in the New York Times. Then today (possibly, it’s unconfirmed), an insider from JP Morgan came forward to reveal something far worse, and dark to the core. It’s posted on the CFTC site (that’s The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the market watchdog, or rather watch-puppy). [UPDATE: The CFTC have removed the page after 48 hours, a copy of the text is here, screenshot here.]
A Goldman Sachs Executive Director — Greg Smith — resigned from the 143 year old firm explaining he felt ill with the callous culture where people would boast about how much they had ripped off clients, which they called “hunting elephants”, and calling their clients “muppets” and worse. He said that in 12 years the company had completely lost the culture that made him proud to join it. There was nothing left of integrity […]
Plenty to discuss…
7.5 out of 10 based on 27 ratings
The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?
We need a professional audit.
A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog) has been going through the Australia Bureau of Meteorology records (BOM). They’ve audited some 8.5 million daily observations across 237 High Quality and other close sites in Australia. Shockingly, while […]
UPDATE: While MediaWatch (ABC) is hassling Jennifer Marohasy, Marc Hendrickx at ABCnewswatch responds in kind, posting an excellent open letter to MediaWatch, asking if they can outline their own scientific qualifications to judge Jennifer Marohasy’s scientific work. ABC staff want to know her motivations, but Marc wants to know theirs. And “given that they employ 11 staff full time” and produce “one 15 minute show per week”, do they consider that this represents good value for the Australian taxpayer? Touche!
Brilliant Marc. It’s a must read.
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Jennifer Marohasy has extraordinary influence. She’s so powerful that the ABC’s Media Watch program has singled her out, asking questions about her income and disclosures that they don’t even bother to ask Tim Flannery. Presumably they don’t think anyone still takes Tim seriously.
They sent her a barrage of questions last Friday, which she hammered in a detailed reply on the weekend. I hear they are still sniffing around anyone they can think of who may know something about Marohasy, asking leading questions and volunteering information that isn’t correct.
Media Watch (aka Witch Hunt) thought this was a question worth asking:
[To Jennifer Marohasy] In your recent opinion […]
Black thinks the BBC reported on ClimateGate, instead they rushed to report a “hacking” that may not even have been a hack…
Richard Black thinks the BBC was the first to “report” Climategate in the mainstream press.
@BBCRBlackvia TwitterTired old meme that BBC was slow to report “ClimateGate” is circulating again – for record we were 1st main news org http://t.co/c4sU6puy
But the BBC didn’t report ClimateGate in that story at all. What they reported was a hypothetical hacking of a university in the UK, one which (two years later) still remains a claim that has no evidence in support of. Was it was illegally hacked or legally leaked? Don’t tune in to the BBC for the answer. They don’t even ask the question.
If the BBC had reported on Climategate, we could tell, because they would have reported what the emails actually said, not just the opinions that said “they don’t matter”.
Let’s compare Black’s reporting of Climategate and FakeGate
On ClimateGate, Black waited until after he had a spokesman from the CRU to comment, and having confirmed the emails were from the CRU, Black quoted exactly none of them. On FakeGate, Black posted so quickly that he […]
How the regulating class is using bogus claims
about climate change to entrench and extend their
economic privileges and political control.
Guest Post: Dr David M.W. Evans, 29 Feb 2012, last updated 13 Mar 2012, latest pdf here
The Science
The sister article Climate Coup—The Science (a more mainstream version of The Skeptic’s Case) contains the science foundation for this essay. It checks the track record of the climate models against our best and latest data, from impeccable sources. It details how you can download this data yourself. It finds that the climate models got all their major predictions wrong:
Test Climate Models Air temperatures from 1988 Actual rise was less than the rise predicted for drastic cuts in CO2 Air temperatures from 1990 Over-estimated trend rise Ocean temperatures from 2003 Over-estimated trend rise greatly Atmospheric hotspot Completely missing –> water vapor feedback not amplifying Outgoing radiation Opposite to reality –> water vapor feedback not amplifying
The latter two items are especially pertinent, because they show that the crucial amplification by water vapor feedback [i] assumed by the models does not exist in reality. Modelers guessed that of the forces on […]
For pure, circular destruction of wealth, happiness and prosperity, it doesn’t get much better than this. Not long back Greenpeace and co were busted for planning a six million dollar campaign to disrupt and delay the coal industry — and today The Australian reports that three of the major organisations involved received close to $750,000 from the government, for “public climate change activities” raising doubts about whether public funds had been misused.
The Nature Conservation Council (NSW), Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of Western Australia have received grants of $211,000, $213,215 and $319,420 respectively for public climate change activities since last December.
Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of WA confirmed yesterday they had backed the development of the anti-coal campaign.
The coal miners are an industry that is legal, employs 40,000 people directly, provides the fuel for more than half our electricity and generates about $13b in tax dollars for the Australian government.
Now if the NGO’s wanted to explain to the rest of us why we ought to decide to reduce our coal mining, that would be fair enough, but they aren’t trying to convince us with reason or debate, they’re trying to disrupt a legitimate economic […]
Prius drivers may claim they want to help the poor but they are less likely to want to slow down and let them cross the road.
You’d think Prius drivers would hold pedestrians, who emit less carbon, in high regard. But alas, roadside tests show about one third of Prius drivers broke crosswalk laws, putting the Prius drivers in the most-unethical-driver class. (As with all generalizations we ought remember that two thirds of Prius drivers did the right thing.) The common factor among unethical drivers was that shiny expensive cars were three times as likely to plow through the crosswalk. It’s not so much the hybrid, or the greenness, it’s the status…
In a final experiment, the researchers took their hypothesis to the streets. At a busy intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, the team stationed “pedestrians” at crosswalks, with instructions to approach the crossing at a point when oncoming drivers would have a chance to stop. Observers coded the status of the cars’ drivers based on the vehicles’ age, make, and appearance. Drivers of shiny, expensive cars were three times more likely than those of old clunkers to plow through a crosswalk, failing to yield to pedestrians […]
Who isn’t finding shale gas these days? To whom shall we sell all those super-costly solar units, that we will supposedly be “world leaders” in? China reveals 25tn cu metres of shale gas Financial Times
China announced the results of its most extensive official appraisal of shale gas reserves on Thursday, having found potentially recoverable resources of 25.1tn cubic metres – less than previous estimates.
Although the figure is lower than an earlier estimate of 31tn cubic metres, China is still believed to have some of the largest reserves of shale gas in the world and has been working to develop shale gas as a cornerstone of its energy policy. The new estimate is enough gas to meet the country’s current consumption for nearly 200 years if fully extracted.
As Richard North points out, this changes everything:
8.6 out of 10 based on 58 ratings […]
Welcome to Australistan.
I haven’t read the whole 400 page Finklestein report, but Mark Steyn tells me that the Chinese government likes it. What more do you need to know?
As Steyn says, this is not a left-right thing, it’s a free-unfree thing.
Tim Andrews at Menzies House launches a New Free Speech Campaign: “This is a proposal that would seem right at home in North Korea or Zibmabwe. I never thought – as dark as things seemed- we could stoop this low here in Australia”.
People asked me if this would “affect your blog”. Ha ha, I laughed, Will it? Right now, I’m discussing whether I’d need to move to Fiji, or Florida, or become a citizen of the Dominican Republic in order to express my views. Could I split my blog into a different domain name each day to avoid being “monitored”? ( I could have 365 blogs: joannenova1.com.au, joannenova2.com.au… it would play havoc with the search engines.) Alternately, perhaps I write 100% satire, cartoons, irony, and the exact opposite of what I mean? Ho Ho. Who has the rule book on the Soviet black market for ideas? What can we learn and how does it translate […]
Showing the intellectual depth we’ve come to expect from progressives, Monbiot argues that the public debate on atmospheric dynamics would be improved by knowing who-funds-those-who dare speak against the government experts.
It’s as if the truth of future tropospheric warming comes not from weather balloons, but from bank accounts and budget papers.
What words do Heartland print that are so dangerous, forthwith, such a public hazard, that we must know who funds the paper they are printed on?
(Dear George, when private citizens choose to speak, it’s none of your business whether they got funding or not, and who paid them if they did. It’s about science, not motivations. Data trumps funding. Debate the message, not the man. If you think Heartland promote lies, just explain what they are. Your megaphone is bigger than theirs, and if you asked to speak at a Heartland Conference to correct their views, I’m sure they would welcome it. It’s called free speech and may the best argument win.)
According to Monbiot, stealing is not just alright, it’s heroic. Your goods are mine, comrade. Too bad if you object.
I see Peter Gleick, the man who obtained and leaked the devastating documents from the […]
We know the moon changes our tides, but can it also change our rainfall? Could the moon also cause tides in the atmosphere? Some researchers have found such periodic movements in air above 3000m. Some have suggested that the moon drives the cyclical shifts in the Length of Day (LOD) that occur on a fortnightly and seasonal basis.
Ian Wilson has been scouring the data quietly for years, following these ideas, and has found a link between lunar cycles and the sub tropical high pressure ridge that occurs in summer over the East Coast of Australia. He noticed there were 9.4 and 3.8 year cycles which match periods in spring tidal cycles. What matters is how close the full moon is to perhelion (the closest point Earth comes to the Sun). It’s yet another piece of the puzzle that the IPCC favoured models ignore.
The lunar forces are, not surprisingly, smaller than the solar one, and as the abstract points out: “it is not so much in what years do the lunar tides reach their maximum strength, but whether or not there are peaks in the strength of the lunar tides that re-occur at the same time within the annual […]
In the big battle for the meme-of-the-moment, Fakegate has won.
DeSmog can’t be too happy about this. Google “DenierGate” and get 67,000 results, but google “Fakegate” and get 168,000.
UPDATE #2 March 14: FakeGate is now 6 times as popular. (“FakeGate” 420,000 results v “Deniergate” 69,000)
What do you know? Stealing things, breaching privacy, and exposing nothing but tiny funding isn’t catching on. As a PR faux pas this is a case study in implosions. DeSmog have inadvertently shone a beacon on the real David and Goliath story here, where the Big-Oil funding isn’t so big, and the real money is on the side who pretends they are “doing it for the planet”. Worse, between them, DeSmog and Peter Gleick have arranged a public ethics challenge for ethically challenged scientists, and a mass-media bias-test for biased journalists. The spectacle of scientists debating if it is OK to steal, and journalists making excuses for criminal activity, is doing as much damage as the original theft and overreaction. It’s so bad, even the Koch Brothers (target-number-one) can take the unassailable high ground (see below).
Note the auto-prompts: When it’s “FakeGate” it’s news, but when it’s Deniergate, Google queries […]
The Guardian “Climate change will shake the Earth” (parroted by the SMH) is feeding the pagan masses who worship The God CO2. Which would be fine, except they pretend that it’s science when it’s the “hell” part of any religion. If you drive your SUV too far you, sinner, will bear the blame for earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. The mystery, we wonder, is why they forgot pestilence and plagues?!
Try this on. I’m quoting them: “So what – geologically speaking – can we look forward to if we continue to pump out greenhouse gases at the current hell-for-leather rate?”
“we could almost certainly say an eventual goodbye to the Greenland ice sheet, and probably that covering West Antarctica too” “a 10-metre or more rise in sea levels.” “these could trigger submarine landslides spawning tsunamis capable of threatening North Atlantic coastlines.” [More]” landslide activity would be inevitable in the Andes, Himalayas, European Alps…” “acting to squeeze magma out of susceptible volcanoes that are primed and ready to blow.“
Oh, Lordy. And what major study are these dire pronouncements made on? Why, someone called Bill McGuire has noticed a lot more volcanoes lately. That’s it.
He seems to have trouble keeping things […]
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