... a three hour cruise. Part 1 and 2

A quick break from talking about the natural cycle of climate change and how certain folk seem dead keen on making a religion about it and other folk just wanna rob us blind over it.

Time to go boating. Yeah, apologies to readers from the Northern Hemisphere who have got loved ones stranded under the English Channel, or stuck in a London or Paris train station or in a New York airport at the moment ... hey, howz that "Anthropogenic Global Warming" thing working out for ya ?

Anyway, here is a newtube from a week ago. BTW, if you're ever curious as to what youtubes I've got going, then just click on the following link for the complete list: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=derspatz48&search_type=&aq=f

Here is my tube of my maiden voyage in the new old (built in the 1960s) water toy on her way to be dry-docked for some repairs and antifouling (ie, painted with special stuff to stop other stuff growing on it):





Howz all those Mussels on the stern drive legs, eh ? Mmmmm, where is a pot of boiling water and some chilli or garlic when you need it ?

That was Part 1. Short and sweet eh ? Well stay tuned for Part 2 ... it ain't so short, so hang on to your life-jackets, this is going to get rough !

Here she is a week later on the planned quicky excursion back to the mooring that actually turned out to be a mini-odyssey. Once again, apologies to snow-bound folk unable to travel or get home over in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment.

Somebody elsewhere asked me earlier: "Oh and about your boat, what happens if she's leaking again, I guess that means she won't get looked at again til after x-mas new year? Be a bummer to your holidays if that happens."

The following is my response to that:

See for yourself and note the lack of concern in my voice.





"Today I ..." shared a surprise adventure with LSCP that we could have prolly done without but all things considered, better that it happened when it did rather than later.

Today was the day the new old water toy went back into the water after a week in dry-dock getting her bum sanded and anti-fouled (cheers Adrian & Daniel at Aquarama) and a new steering helmet put on her starboard leg and having the leg bolted down (a common "fix" for older volvo penta legs and their reverse retaining clamp of suspect design), the old Ward 32'er is back on the water again and ready to get up and go.

What a difference a week and a whole bunch of work and money makes, because "get up and go" she now does !

After paying the bill and visiting the fuel jetty to pay for go-juice at expected standard extortion rates, LSCP headed off in the car and I back to the mooring. All was good and well and the salt air soon made the smile on my face set harder than pelican poo on the aft deck.

I easily solo navigated her up to Claremont jetty where LSCP (who had driven around there from the slipyards downstream on the other side of the river) jumped onboard and soon took over Skipper duties.

Yup, LSCP not only stands for "Life Style Choices Partner", but also "Lady Skipper, Cute n Pretty".

As the newtube shows, she made skippering look easy. Tis much easier to steer now that one leg isn't flapping around in the chop. As for the water in the bilge, that's no worries and quite a normal thing to happen in a wooden boat that has been out of the water for more than a couple of days. The timbers dry out and shrink a bit and in leaks wet stuff, but I found even just a couple of hours later on the mooring, things seemed to have already swollen up again and the bilge contents back to more or less what they were before she was taken out of the water a week ago.

Besides, just like with Witches, Ducks, and Very Small Rocks, wood floats.

Ah, but on WHAT mooring "a couple of hours later" ?

Well, that's where the Adventure began.

After LSCP took her for a burn, she then assumed "grab the pole and hook up the mooring rope" position up forward. We idled up to the mooring and she deftly hooked up the mooring rope and slipped it over the thingumy on the front of the boat wot such things attach to, and I did my bit and turned off the engines and batteries.

Picture perfect, with no swearing or shouting at each other. Quite amazing really, especially considering the stiff breeze we were working against that was busy trying to push us ashore.

Then a strange thing happened.

Another mooring passed us.

WTF ?

How can that happen ... we're attached properly to our mooring !

Uh, yup ... but what was our mooring attached to ?

A long line of heavy duty chain that wasn't attached to anything other than algae and the wet stuff we were floating in.

fcukity fcukity fcuk ! (which is French for "oh bother, the train has stopped in the middle of the Chunnel")

Before I could get to the anchor, we had drifted aground ... well, the nicely newly antifouled/painted stern drive legs had. Meh.

So, then began the telephone ring around.

First up a call to Freo Sea Rescue (I'm a member and both boats registered with them for rescue attention ... well worth the $35 a year considering that they would tow me all the way back from Rotto at no cost).

Then a call to the owner of the mooring to tell him that it was no more and that the contractors employed to check it may have stuffed up because at the end of the chain there was a massive shackle missing its pin. A pin that holds it to the trio of chain linked concrete blocks at the bottom or whatever it is that is down there. A pin that is supposed to be wired to the shackle to prevent it coming loose like it just had.

Then a call to the DPI (Department of Planning and Infrastructure - all moorings are registered/licensed with them).

Then the owner rang back to say he had contacted the contractor but they wouldn't be able to attend until Wednesday (so what were we to do until then ?) and he suggested I get back onto the DPI again as they have access to some emergency moorings. Good to know !

Then the Freo rescue called to confirm our predicament (that we needed pulling into deeper water so we could start the engines and motor elsewhere).

By this stage another boaty on a nearby mooring had noticed our situation and rowed his tender over. LSCP and I were in the middle of sorting out a long rope to go from the bow to a nearby mooring with the idea of hooking it up and pulling ourselves into deeper water. I was in my Jesus boots and shorts and up to my waist in (thankfully warm) water (so much for Jesus boots allowing walking ON water) holding the bow into the wind. Anyhoo, the boaty rowed the rope out to the mooring and tied it on then came back and he and LSCP sat up forward and hauled on the rope while I put my back to the stern and heaved up while pushing and before you could say "ewwww, a jelly fish, and WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT SQUISHY THING I STEPPED ON" we were in deep enough water again.

So, time to call Freo Rescue again and say "thanks, but we're ok now" (I intend to send them an online donation later tonight for their troubles), and also call the mooring contractors who had called while we were hauling.

They confirmed they couldn't get there until Wednesday but wanted to know where they could pick up the recovered mooring equipment from. I told them they would know once I knew where I was going to end up.

Okay, where were we ? On somebody else's mooring, wondering.

We decided to go back to Claremont Jetty, tie up there, then walk up to the club to see if they had temporary/short term pens or moorings available.

No such luck ... especially seeing as we weren't members. Still, they were very helpful with what they could do, which was to lend me their phone to sit through "on hold music" until an obviously Very Busy DPI were able to offer a rescue by registering my port-less vessel to one of the emergency moorings they have.

Excellent, even though it was around 9km away in [deleted for now]. So, after "merry festivus"es were exchanged with the DPI and the Claremont Club staff, LSCP headed off in the car and I in the boat. Talk about having an unplanned workout ... and so much for the plans of getting her back in the water and back to her mooring in about an hour !

Still, what better way to get used to skippering her alone ... especially seeing as this was only the second time I'd actually skippered her since purchase. On the way around to [deleted for now] with the salt spray slipping by the middle window and helping with setting my smile again, I got to thinking how blessed it was that the mooring should go when we were there to attend to it rather than in the middle of the night and have the boat smashed up on shore.

Yeah, I'm a glass half-full kinda guy.

Are we there yet ?

Almost there ...

So after having a laugh with Poseidon and telling the Sirens (I did say "Odyssey" earlier) they were wasting their time coz I already have all the lurv'n'comfort I need with my LSCP, etc, etc, I made it into the still waters of [deleted for now].

Now WTF is that DPI mooring ... and how am I going to tie up on it without LSCP to help ?

Couldn't find it ... but I did find a complementary temporary mooring and was able to pull up my fine craft along side and hook onto it by myself. Then it was a simple matter of paddling ashore using one of the waveskis and towing the other one, then LSCP returned with me.

Another call to the DPI and the lovely and patient lady explained exactly where it was and yeah verily what other numbers were nearby ... and instructed me to call back when we were safely tied up there.

The instructions proved instructive and after a bit of mucking around making our own multiple mooring ropes, we had a new temporary home.

Yes, we are now "there yet".

All that remained was to secure the wayward mooring for the contractor team, paddle ashore with me singing LSCP's praises all the way for her patience as well as apologising for the one (maybe two) occasions I, uh, "failed to effectively communicate" and did an exasperated naggy whinge thing.

The poor girl is now horrible sun-burnt as she wasn't expecting to be in the sun much at all for what we originally planned ... but seriously (and as I said multiple times throughout the long afternoon) "you wouldn't read about it" (let alone plan for it !)

And yet here you are doing that very thing ... and well done if you made it this far.

Anyhoo, I get home to hear about cyclones up North and folk stranded under the English Channel and New York snowed in, etc, etc, and so how can I think of our afternoon's troubles and inconveniences being anything other than an adventure ?

Merry (good natured) Bah Humbug to one and all and may all your travels be adventures ... rather ordeals. Grin.

regarDS

Climategate - "I am a climate scientist ..."

Above image from:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/jo-nova-finds-the-medieval-warm-period/#more-13698 It shows the Real Story of the climate cycle as opposed to the one Michael Mann fraudulently wanted the IPCC (et al) to believe in ... one with no prior warmer-than-now time called "The Medieval Warm Period" that helps prove that humankind is NOT the cause of global climate change.

I recently found the following on http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/a-devastating-response-to-theres-nothing-to-see-here-move-along/#more-13710 and AFAIC, it is worthy of as much mirrored blogspace as it can get ... so here it is:

I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.

Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England).

Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.

As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why “hide the decline”?) are ignored or hidden.

As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.

We have long known that Jones’s paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn’s plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).

Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by “peer review” is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.

We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science “settled”, refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional “overwhelming evidence” continues this anti-science activity.

All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word “trick”. Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only “value added” data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).

But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it.

If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, “peer review” was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?

The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the “global warming believers” to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.

Contrary to Prof. McCarthy’s assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.

But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no “consensus” exists. The “2500 scientists agree” number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).

The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.

Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains “overwhelming support” for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.

Posted by Sean December 2, 09 11:26 PM

And for an example of the kind of code cooking going on that shows what fraudulent mischief the CRU crew were up to, go here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/climategate-the-smoking-code/

And how is this from an Oz newspaper found here: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-email-mess-hits-australia-20091204-kb39.html ?

What the hell was Phil Jones and the rest of his colluding CRU crew using for raw data anyway ?

... The Australian data comes in for particular criticism as the programmer discovers World Meteorological Organisation codes are missing, station names overlap and many co-ordinates are incorrect.

At one point the programmer writes about his attempts to make sense of the data. "What a bloody mess," he concludes.

In another case, 30 years of data is attributed to a site at Cobar Airport but the frustrated programmer writes: "Now looking at the dates. something bad has happened ... COBAR AIRPORT AWS [automatic weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!"

In another he says: "Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data ... so many false references ... so many changes ... bewildering." ...

Wow, weather station data from a weather station not established until 32 years later ... now THERE is a "trick" !

Seems to me that the only thing holding up AGW now is religious blind faith and wishful thinking ... and why would anyone want it to be true anyway, hmmm ?

regarDS

Big News! AGW's "Hockey Stick" well and truly broken ...

This is Big News. At long last, after near a decade of being stymied and stonewalled, the Base Data used to help give the world the infamous "Hockey Stick Graph" has been made available for suitable scientific peer-review scrutiny ... and it is now plain why such desperate efforts were made to keep it from being scrutinised in the first place.

Rather than repeat what has already been said, get thee instead to the following links from the award winning science blog "wattsupwiththat.com":

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/quote-of-the-week-20-ding-dong-the-stick-is-dead/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/28/mirror-posting-of-climate-audit-article-on-yamal-a-divergence-problem/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/28/update-a-zoomed-look-at-the-broken-hockey-stick/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/29/leading-uk-climate-scientists-must-explain-or-resign/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/29/more-broken-hockey-stick-fallout-audit-of-an-audit-of-an-auditor/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/30/a-must-read-the-yamal-hockey-stick-implosion-in-laymans-terms/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/30/agu-presentation-backs-up-mcintyres-findings-that-there-is-no-hockey-stick-in-yamal/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/30/more-yamal-tree-ring-temperature-data-this-data-is-flat-as-roadkill/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/01/mirror-posting-yad06-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/01/response-from-briffa-on-the-yamal-tree-ring-affair-plus-rebuttal/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/02/ross-mckitrick-sums-up-the-yamal-tree-ring-affair-in-the-financial-post/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/02/a-hands-on-view-of-tree-growth-and-tree-rings-one-explanation-for-briffas-yad061-lone-tree-core/

Or if you don't have the time to be reading all that at the moment, then enjoy the following rant from Hitler ... but please pardon any mis-translating of German into English I may have inadvertently made in providing subtitles. Heh.

So, "man-made climate change" is in fact shown to be "mann-made climate change". Not that I expect the AGW environmentalist religionists to suddenly abandon their cult just because a central sacred icon to it has been hurled down. They'll soon find something to replace it with ... such is the nature of such True Believers.

regarDS

Can you hear me Penny Wong ?

I thought I better resist the urge to launch into yet another massive/longwinded post on the topic of AGW Alarmism.

So I'll launch into a song instead. Heh.



Lyrics (as found in the comments section at http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/it_should_have_been_defeated_because_its_insane/
by "Perturbed") as follows:

EARTH ODDITY. (Apologies to David Bowie)

Kevin Rudd to Penny Wong
Kevin Rudd to Penny Wong
Put your special hat that's made of tinfoil on.

Kevin Rudd to Penny Wong
Legislation spin switch on
Check your factoids and may Al Gore be with you

(Countdown from 10 - 1, then Liftoff!")

This is Kevin Rudd to Penny Wong,
Weve really made the grade!
And weve sidelined that weird singer with no hair
Now lets push the ETS through if we dare

This is Penny Wong to Kevin Rudd
My hearts gone through the floor
For theyre voting in a most peculiar way
And the outcomes looking miserable today!

For here we are with our hats of tinfoil
Trying to save the world
The ETS we blew and there's nothing we can do.

Though we've made three hundred billion debt
We could do better still
But the stupid Senate told us where to go
(To a double dissolution, dont you know?)

Kevin Rudd to Penny Wong
Our Climate Change crusades gone wrong
Can you hear me, Penny Wong
Can you hear me, Penny Wong
Can you

Here we are with our hats of tinfoil
Baying at the moon
The ETS we blew and theres nothing we can do

Anyway, to participate in the debate, join up at: http://www.behindthebox.com.au/showthread.php?t=38673

regarDS

A minor win in the war on stupidity and fraud that is AGW Alarmism and ETS.

On the 13th of August, 2009, a minor skirmish in the war on gross stupidity and outright fraud was won when the PRO-Anthropogenic Global Warming Alarmist Government had its CO2 indulgence scheme ala "CPRS" voted down.

Featured below is a speech from one of the voices of reason who voted against the Government's ruinous plans for Australia. Please note that all paragraph breaks and bold (etc) emphasis, have been added by yours truly. The speech in its original form was not provided with paragraph breaks so I've had to guess where they may have been.

To see it in its original format, visit: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/it_should_have_been_defeated_because_its_insane/

Tuesday, 11 August 2009
BY AUTHORITY OF THE SENATE
Tuesday, 11
August 2009 THE SENATE 1
CHAMBER SPEECH
Date Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Source Senate
Page 70 Proof Yes
Questioner Responder
Speaker
Minchin, Sen Nick Question No.

Senator MINCHIN (South Australia) (7.32 pm)—

The government this week are asking the Senate to support passage of a package of no less than 11 separate bills, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 and related bills, to give effect to their Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, as they call it.

This scheme represents one of the most dramatic and far-reaching interventions into the Australian economy ever proposed by an Australian government. Its passage and entry into force would have enormous impacts on the Australian economy and the economic circumstances of millions of Australians.

The government knows there is no Senate majority for this legislation, yet it is determined on what is nothing more than a cynical political exercise. This legislation should be withdrawn for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it proposes a scheme which will not commence operation for another two years. There is absolutely no justification for the government’s insistence that the parliament deal with it now.
Secondly, the government is seeking to legislate an emissions trading scheme for Australia well in advance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen in December, which will determine the extent to which, if any, the world is prepared to act in concert on CO2 emissions. It is utter folly for Australia to legislate a scheme prior to the Copenhagen conference.

And, thirdly, the United States, currently the biggest emitter, is currently considering the issue of an ETS. It is, in our view, cynically irresponsible to propose that the Australian parliament lock in an Australian ETS prior to the US —as I said, the biggest emitter of CO2—before it determines whether or not it will commit to an ETS and, if so, the nature and design of such a scheme. For these reasons, the opposition condemns the government for its naked political opportunism in forcing the parliament to consider its so-called CPRS at this time.

Not only is the timing of this legislative initiative to be condemned, so too should the very name given to this package of legislation be condemned by this parliament. It is regrettably typical of this spindriven government to use such a grotesquely Orwellian approach to the description of this legislation.

For no more than base political purposes, the government has called its emissions trading scheme a ‘carbon pollution reduction scheme’. This is of course the perpetuation of a cruel hoax on the Australian people, childishly simplistic and misleading. The scheme proposed does not deal with carbon. It purports to deal with something quite separate—carbon dioxide emissions—and the scheme does not deal with pollution.

Whatever the climatic role of human induced emissions of CO2, CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant. CO2 is, as we know, a clear, odourless, colourless gas vital to life on earth. Indeed, CO2 is essential to a healthy environment.

One of the most cynical and deceptive manoeuvres of the climate change fanatics is to seek to convince people that CO2 emissions are pollution, to demonise CO2 per se. Anyone with any understanding of science knows this to be a complete falsehood. Indeed the Rudd government knows it too. Its own environment department’s website has a link to the official Australian National Pollutant Inventory, which lists 93 pollutants. Surprise, surprise, carbon dioxide is not listed among them. Mind you, after this speech, I bet some poor public servant will be bullied into adding CO2 to the list. So even the government’s own official list of pollutants, all 93 of them, does not include carbon dioxide.

It is also typical of this deceitful and spin-driven government to so cynically misrepresent the nature of carbon dioxide. Of course this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.

I want to commend Senator Fielding for his questioning of the government over the causes of global warming. The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century.

No-one, of course, disputes the reality of climate change. Of course the climate is constantly changing —it always has; it always will—but the main drivers of the small degree of warming that occurred in the 20th-century and the extent to which we should be concerned about it are hotly disputed in scientific circles.

One of the world’s most eminent atmospheric scientists, Professor Richard Lindzen of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently observed:

"The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing."

That is Professor Richard Lindzen, one of the world’s most eminent atmospheric scientists, who I suspect knows a little bit more about this subject than Senator Penny Wong. On Tuesday, June 23, writing in the Australian, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at Flinders University, in Adelaide, reinforced this:

Repeatedly in science we are reminded that happenings in nature can rarely be ascribed to a single phenomenon. For example, sea levels on our coasts are dependent on winds and astronomical forces as well as atmospheric pressure and, on a different time scale, the temperature profile of the ocean. Now, with complete abandon, a vociferous body of claimants is insisting that CO2 alone is the root of climatic evil.

I fear that many supporters of this view have become carried away by the euphoria of mass or dominant group psyche. Scientists are no more immune from being swayed by the pressure of collective enthusiasm than any other member of the human race.
To acknowledge the reality of continuing scientific debate is not to say that Australia should not act in concert with other nations to give the planet the benefit of the doubt and to seek a global agreement to contain CO2 emissions. To the extent that anthropogenic CO2 emissions may be a cause of the limited global warming that has occurred, and to the extent that that warming is considered to be damaging, internationally coordinated measures to contain emissions at the least possible cost may be warranted.

Indeed, as someone trained in economics, I proclaim the virtue of an approach based on ensuring the most cost-efficient use of finite resources. The world has not measured up to that standard in relation to its use of energy. But, given the continuing scientific debate, it is especially important that a country like Australia only take steps in relation to CO2 emissions that are in concert with the rest of the world and clearly involve the least cost and most economically efficient means of CO2 containment.

The government’s CPRS clearly fails that test. The case against this scheme was convincingly made by my colleague the member for Goldstein, Mr Robb, in his speech on this bill in the House of Representatives. I also commend the work of my coalition colleagues on the Economics Legislation Committee in their reports on these bills and of Senator Xenophon on his minority report, which is a well-argued condemnation of this CPRS. I should also make mention of the critical analysis of this CPRS undertaken by the Select Committee on Climate Policy, chaired by my colleage Senator Colbeck, which exposed the CPRS’s many, many flaws.

Not enough is made of the reality of Australia’s circumstances in the consideration of measures to contain anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Australia contributes a little over one per cent of the planet’s CO2 emissions. If we were to completely shut down the Australian economy tomorrow, Australia’s CO2 emissions would be fully replaced by China within nine months. It is indisputably the case that nothing Australia does on its own can have any impact whatsoever on the earth’s climate. The deceit perpetrated by climate change fanatics that an Australian ETS will save the Barrier Reef is utterly contemptible.

The manic determination of the government to impose this scheme on Australia also ignores the reality of the Australian economy. Australia’s economy and our higher standard of living have been built upon our access to relatively cheap and abundant supplies of energy generated by coal-fired power stations. This is regrettably not well understood in this parliament let alone in the wider community.

It was my privilege to serve as Minister for Industry, Science and Resources for three years in the Howard government, an experience which reinforced this fundamental reality about Australia: all the great manufacturing and value-added industries of Australia, which this Labor government professes a commitment to, have been built on and are sustained by access to cheap, reliable energy derived from coal. That is why an ETS, essentially an energy tax, is such a threat to this country.

As Terry McCrann so accurately said in the Australian of 20-21 June: ... an ETS threatens to kill the Australian economy. It is a direct attack on our core comparative advantage: bluntly, the production of CO2. Power generated from cheap and abundant coal is a, perhaps the, core building block of both our standard of living and our entire economy.

That is a reality which this government wilfully ignores. What we see here is a Labor government sacrificing workers in energy-intensive industries on the altar of green votes. The cruel joke is that all those thousands of jobs to be destroyed by Labor’s CPRS will be in vain, because this scheme will make absolutely no difference to the global climate.

Most Australians clearly do not understand what an emissions trading scheme is, how it would work and what its consequences would be. That is perfectly understandable. I suspect most of the Labor caucus has no idea, either. Essentially it will be a very substantial tax on energy, and that is why Labor’s flawed CPRS is such a threat to our economy, dependent as it is on relatively cheap supplies of energy. Hence the utter folly of Australia designing and implementing this scheme ahead of the rest of the world.

Labor’s CPRS is a serious threat to many regional economies and the jobs they support, and I commend Senator Fiona Nash for her eloquent espousal of their cause. In my own state of South Australia it is estimated that it will cost 2,000 jobs by 2020 in the minerals industry alone. As a senator for South Australia, I do not see how I can possibly vote for this legislation, nor do I see how any government senators representing South Australia can vote for it.

While the financial capitals of Melbourne and Sydney may relish the creation of a new financial instrument to be traded by 20- something bankers, the people of a state like mine will pay the price in a higher cost of living, in industries and jobs destroyed and in a reduction in competitiveness — all for zero environmental gain.

It is also reprehensible that Labor would seek to legislate this serious attack on the Australian economy at a time when, as Mr Rudd constantly reminds us, we face a very serious set of economic circumstances. Mr Rudd loves to remind us of the seriousness of the so-called GFC and its threat to Australia. Indeed, it is his justification for the most massive explosion in government spending, government deficits and government debt seen since the 1930s. Yet, while talking endlessly about our serious economic situation, he seeks to fit Australia up with a set of concrete boots called his CPRS.

As Geoff Carmody, one of Australia’s most eminent economists, wrote in the Financial Review on 23 June this year: The CPRS is ‘the GST from hell’, delivering negative protection. Why should any country unilaterally tax its exports and effectively subsidise its imports, for no global emissions reduction?

At a time when policy should be wholly directed at maximising the efficiency, productivity and international competitiveness of the Australian economy, Mr Rudd seeks to impose a unilateral massive new tax on Australian industry and consumers which will damage our economy and do nothing to combat global warming.

The government’s pursuit of this legislation at this time is nothing more than an act of vanity on the part of Mr Kevin Rudd. This most vain of prime ministers wants to strut the stage at Copenhagen in December with a legislated ETS in his back pocket. He and his government propose to sacrifice Australia’s national interest on the altar of his vain desire for international acclaim from the vast UN bureaucracy being built around climate change policy.
The Australian parliament should not even be considering legislation for an ETS until we know the outcome of the UN’s Copenhagen conference and the US Senate’s consideration of the Waxman - Markey bill. The Australian people agree with this view. An Australian Newspoll conducted on the weekend of 24 to 26 July showed that 53 per cent of Australians wanted their government to either delay the introduction of an emissions trading scheme until after the Copenhagen conference or not introduce an emissions trading scheme at all.

On that basis, and for the reasons I have outlined to the Senate tonight, I urge the Senate to reject this package of bills.

Hear, hear.

regarDS

The creator of the Weather Channel wants Gore sued for fraud

While on the subject of The Goracle (who is in Oz busy recruiting latte-lefty Melboredites even as I type), here is a picture of his Crystal displays. At last we have his chief advisor and source of faulty information revealed !

Yup, as always suspected, the Goracle depends not only on Liquid Crystal Displays, but also the old fashioned Solid Crystal Balls (as circled in purple in the pic).

In fact, The False Prophet only requires but ONE "SCB" to four LCDs to arrive at the fraud, scam, carpet bagging and flim flammery he touts.

Incredible, eh ? Yup ... and in every sense of the word.

How many big screen monitors and trees does it take be the profit, uh, prophet of AGW (Anthropogenic (ala "man made") Global Warming) Alarmism anyway ?

I see from http://www.climatedepot.com/a/1893/Gore-US-Climate-Bill-Will-Help-Bring-About-Global-Governance that the false prophet of climate change is (still) busy calling for "global governance", too.

The very thing I've been talking about for yonks now re: the pragmatic use of AGW Alarmism to cement together a mish-mash of governments into a New World Order of a Global Government. As also represeneted by "the 10 toes" of the "feat of iron and clay" final last days kingdom as per King Nebuchadnezzar's dream as interpreted by Daniel in the book by the same name and from chapter 2.

Not only has the march towards global government been steadily progressing as promised, but also is still happening and fast taking on its final form as detailed in the symbol of that King's infamous statue.

If indeed AGW Alarmism turns out to be the "clay" that cements the "iron" together in that final government before a certain big finish, then does that mean that The Goracle isn't just a false prophet, but in fact is THE False Prophet spoken about of the final days before Heavenly Intervention ?

If so, then not even the book writings of a hundred Professor Plimers are going to turn back the "man-made climate change" Alarmist madness, but rather it is more a matter of firmly choosing sides and accepting the consequences that go along with those choices.

I choose the side of science, rationality, and anti-fanaticism ... which obviously puts me directly opposed to Gore and all of the (mostly) loonie left who support him and who are pragmatically using natural climate change as a way to establish global systems of government that are not only anti-conservative and anti-christian, but also are likely (if left unchecked) to lead to a greater blood-letting than the extreme lefty regimes under Stalin, Hitler, and Mao (etc) put together.

Yes, you read that correctly, I reckon that the Nazis, ala "National Socialist German Workers' Party" were lefties who were found just to the right of the very much lefty Stalinists. To quote another blog on the subect, "The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)" See: http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2006/05/american-roots-of-fascism-american.html for the entire article.

Still don't think so ? Well no matter, for "left/right" politics isn't a spectrum ... it's a circle with the extreme left and the extreme right ending up at the same place; fascism and totalitarianism.

Which is precisely what the world will get if the fanatical extremist environmentalists slash AGW Alarmists slash disenfranchised socialists slash Gorites get their way.

Their kind of mindsets just love the bloody revolutions and the mass murder of dissenters that such forms of overbearing government always bring ...

regarDS

PS: For more Climate Change Alarmism news articles and commentary (mostly from yours truly. Big surprise ?), visit: http://www.behindthebox.com.au/showthread.php?t=38673

The vindication of carbon means the vindication of human freedom.

If you've not realised yet, I'm a "Climate Realist". ie, I am of the reasonable and sensible view that the world's climate is changing, has always changed, and shall continue to change in the future. I certainly have not in any way, shape, or form, bought into the current nonsense that (a) CO2 is a pollutant and (b) human production of CO2 is driving global climate change.

Nor am I of the view that Real Science is decided by consensus - and just as well it isn't or we might never have found a cure for stomach ulcers.

I'm also of the view that on a global scale, our flora is somewhat starved for CO2 at the moment and could greatly benefit by an increase of at least 3fold to current levels. Which would be wonderful for providing so much more of the planet's population their daily bread !

Could it be that the desire to remove CO2 from our atmosphere is a desire to bring about population control via starvation ?

Anyway, I found the following at

http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/

which is the website of a new Oz political party dedicated to the truth getting out and the evil greenie loonie lefty religion of environmentalism being exposed for the fraud and enemy of humankind and the planet that it is.

The full link is:

http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/downloads/Vindication%20of%20Carbon.pdf

all bolds and extra emphasis are mine and paragraph format is probably different from the original (all formating was lost in the cut and paste)

Start Of Quote

THE VINDICATION OF CARBON MEANS THE VINDICATION OF HUMAN FREEDOM
Robert D. Brinsmead

The evidence is piling up every day that the world is now getting cooler instead of warmer, the oceans are now cooling instead of warming, the ice is returning to the Arctic rather than receding, the sea ice in the Antarctic is at record levels, and that rising sea levels have moderated. The sun has recently gone into a less active phase of fewer sun-spots, and the ocean decadal currents have changed from a warming to a cooling phase.

Before too long the global warming scare will be as dead as the scares about the Y2 bug or acid rain. Already some of the global warming alarmists, anticipating this may soon happen, are reinventing their alarmism into the scare about the oceans becoming acidified by our CO2 emissions – even though the oceans already contains 90 times more CO2 than the atmosphere (Chilingar, et.al.)

Beyond all these things, however, we need to get to what this debate and this climate change alarmism is really all about.

Beyond all this alarmism about global warming or ocean acidification, we need to see that on a deeper level it is a debate about carbon, and when we dig into that level of the debate we will finally see that behind the demonization of carbon and CO2, it is all about an attack on humanity itself.

Global warming alarmism is not a science, but a religio/political movement. This paper will show why it a dangerous totalitarian ideology and a more serious threat to human freedom than Communism or Nazism. It is also like a bad joke, because carbon just happens to be the most wonderful of all the elements in the periodic table because of its ability to make so many organic compounds that are fundamental to the formation of life. Yet here is a movement that is all about demonizing carbon.

The Wonders of Carbon

Nearly every new product that human ingenuity has devised on the road of human progress is a carbon-based product. Steel, for instance, is made by blending carbon with iron. There would be no construction industry without carbon. Nearly every product in a modern house, including most of the surfaces, with the exception of the glass and the bricks, is a carbon-based product.

If our clothes are not made of natural fibers such as wool, cotton or silk (all of which are carbon-based), then they will be made from synthetic fibers, all of which are carbon based too. All plastics and polyethylene products are carbon-based materials. All the foods we produce and eat are carbon products - and that not only includes our carbo(n)hydrates, but all the fats and proteins in our food are made of carbon compounds too.

Not just the petrol and oil that run our autos, but the cars themselves, right down to their brake linings, are made of substances that would not exist without carbon. There could be no aviation or space industries apart from a whole plethora of carbon-based products.

There are ten million naturally occurring carbon compounds (more than all the other elements of the periodic table combined), and beyond these, man is finding that there are almost limitless
opportunities to come up with new products using carbon -from fantastic nanotubes composed of the toughest stuff known to making better tennis racquets. This never-ending variety of new products is all due to the amazing and unique features of the carbon molecule that is so adaptable and so flexible that there is no end to what new products might be made with it - from the hardest to the softest substances known.

Carbon is not just the fourth most common element in the universe, but through its millions of compounds it is as ubiquitous and as necessary to life as oxygen and water.

Carbon is the Basis of Life

This brings me to my main point. Human ingenuity, as I have pointed out, can make an astounding array of new products that are carbonbased, including products that play a vital role in taking man into space. But, for all that, we cannot make living things with carbon because we can't solve the mystery of replicating life. But when the time came for the good Lord (or Gaia or Lady Luck if you insist) to make a world of living things, whether amazing plants that live and reproduce, or animals that can live and reproduce, or the human brain that can actually think creatively, what do you suppose this life-generating power used?

Carbon, of course!

Any good biology text book will tell you that life is carbon-based. All living things, starting at the cellular level which is common to all life, is based on carbon compounds, including the DNA that carry the gene sequences of the genetic codes. Of the trillions of cells in the human body, there is not a one of them that is not made of carbon.

Think of giant Cedars, Californian Redwoods and Tasmanian Mountain Ash - they are all made of carbon. Every blade of grass, every delicate orchid, every kind of fruit (there are ten thousand known varieties) is made of carbon. Think of all those tantalizing flavors in fantastic variety - juicy mangoes, buttery avocados and versatile limes, all filled with fruit sugars so varied and in such abundance - they are all made of a carbon/hydrogen combinations. Ordinary pure sugar is made up of ten atoms of carbon compounded with sixteen atoms of hydrogen. There are eight kinds of sugars essential to the human body and vital in cell to cell communication. Glucose, fructose, lactose and mannose are the more common ones. Sugar is fundamental to brain function. Every diabetic knows that.

When we turn to the animal kingdom, including mankind itself, we find too that leaping deer, frolicking seals, lumbering rhinos or thinking humans are all forms of animated carbon. In the human species we have thinking carbon through which the universe actually becomes conscious of itself. The human brain is the most complex and intricate piece of equipment in the universe. This is the organ of the human mind through which carbon not only becomes thinking carbon, but reaches the sublime heights of becoming caring, sharing, loving carbon.

So who is going to tell me that carbon is just some black old ugly stuff that deserves to be demonized as the world’s great pollutant?

Stand back, and let your mind take into this whole wondrous biosphere - the living earth - and what you are surveying is the awesome wonder that carbon has come alive in the great dance of life.

What is made of carbon must be fuelled by carbon. Now consider too that this great dance of living things is not just made of carbon, but it has to be fuelled by carbon. It needs to feed on carbon to grow and reproduce. Yet we have people who call themselves scientists or leaders of society who are so deluded with a disease called carbophobia (an irrational fear of carbon), that they label carbon a dangerous pollutant which has to be regulated and sequestered to the nether regions of the earth. For pity's sake, how can their carbon-thinking brains reach such anti-carbon conclusions?

This is not just madness; it is madness gone mad.

Mad science. Mad politicians. Mad anti-carbon activists on a mankind-hating, lifehating crusade of self destruction. In the entire history of civilization, no mass hysteria has ever come close to being such a monstrous threat to civilization at this!

Where do animals, including mankind, get their carbon-based fuel?

All animal food has to originate from plants, of course. Plants start this food chain by making carbo(n)hydrates for the animal kingdom. No plants = no food chain = no animals = no mankind. So where do the plants source their carbon so that they can make all this carbonbased food to sustain all creatures great and small?

The only gateway through which carbon can enter the food chain to enable the biosphere to exist is through the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no other way. It all starts with CO2 in the atmosphere. The entire chain of life starts with plants absorbing this entirely natural, colorless, odorless, absolutely non-toxic aerial gas called CO2.

They used to teach these simple facts to primary school kids, but nowadays teachers who are way off with the environmental fairies are scaring the daylights out of our children with hobgoblin stories about the evils of CO2.

This insanity must stop. It's time to teach the kids again and to remind the adults of this world that CO2 is the primary plant food that ends up feeding them too. They need to be told again the simple fact that the leaves on a plants have stomata through which they absorb or breathe in C02, and by a process of photosynthesis, the plants turn this CO2 into carbo(n)hydrate food for animals and man.

They need reminding that more than 90% of the dry matter of plants is simply processed C02. Whether it is a cow eating the grass or humans eating the cow, all are eating -and being fuelled - by processed CO2.

CO2 is as natural and as necessary to life as water and oxygen. It is not a poison. It is not a pollutant. It feeds the whole world, Stupid!

Unless the soil gave off carbon emissions into the atmosphere, unless the sea (which contains 90 times the amount of CO2 than the atmosphere) gave off carbon emissions, unless the micro-organisms which comprise more than two-thirds of the world's biomass gave off their carbon emissions, unless the termites gave off their carbon emissions, unless cattle gave off their carbon emissions (their belching and flatulence actually give off more carbon emissions than the entire human transport system), and unless we as part of this tapestry of life gave off carbon emissions, then life could not go on for the simple reason that the plants would have no food by which to grow, and then no creature on earth would have anything to eat.

For life to go on, the carbon used to make all living things and to feed all living things, must be circulated back from whence it came to start the life-cycle all over again. Every form of life simply borrows the carbon by which it lives only to give it back again. We give some of it back when we breathe, we give some of it back in our bodily wastes and we give the last bit of it back when the shovel thumps the ground on top of us.

Demonizing Carbon is a Dangerous Nonsense.

In the light of all this, it is a sheer nonsense of the highest and most dangerous order to put forward the notion that carbon or carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It is double nonsense to say that the carbon emissions of either humans or cattle is a threat to the earth anymore than the much more abundant carbon emissions of the soil microorganisms or the carbon emissions of the oceans that outdo our human carbon emissions in an order of magnitude many times to
one are a threat to the earth.

Be warned: this dangerous eco-Taliban wants to subject us to a carbon taxing, carbon regulating police state. It surely has to stand to reason that you can't regulate human carbon emissions without regulating every aspect of human existence - and that would be more totalitarian than anything the world has ever known. This is a religio/political ideology masquerading as science.

Their plans to decarbonize our footprint and to decarbonize our economy will reduce our civilization to a weakened and impoverished state of carbo-anorexia. Does that sound like a lot of fun?

People need to be told the plain truth that much higher carbon emissions and much higher levels of atmospheric CO2 than we see at present would mean more plant food, more plant growth and more food for man and animals to eat. Carbon is the greenest stuff on the planet.

I speak now as a horticulturist. Plant nursery operators know that CO2 enrichment of the air in the nursery house means that the plants grow quicker, have bigger roots and get by on less water.

Certainly every indoor tomato grower in New Zealand, Australia, Holland or anywhere for that matter knows that he can increase the yield of tomatoes 40% simply by increasing the CO2 content of the air by about 300%. What's good for plants is good for animals because animals and plants evolved together and share a common basis in life based on cells.

A great leap forward in world agricultural productivity took place in the 1920's when they learned to take nitrogen out of the air and put it into the soil where it could stimulate plant growth. Our highly populated world could not feed itself today without recourse to synthetic nitrogen. The second leap forward is staring us in the face. It is to take the carbon out of the earth and put it into the air where it can benefit plant life and so enhance food productivity. The technology has already been proven and demonstrated thousands of times. It is estimated that the agricultural industry today enjoys a 15% increase of food productivity due to the modest rise of atmospheric CO2 levels of the last 100 years from 280 ppm to 385 ppm.

More and more evidence accumulates that in an ideal world we would have 1000 to 1500 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere instead of a mere 385 ppm as we have now, or a 280 ppm that the carbophobics would take us back to if they have their way.

That level of CO2 happens to be only a tad higher than the point at which plants suffocate for lack of CO2. (See the Wikipedia article on CO2) 300% to 400% higher levels of CO2 will have no adverse impact on humans or animals.

In evolutionary history, the explosion of life-forms took place during the Cambrian Age when there were many times more CO2 in the atmosphere than we have today. Besides, humans work in indoor tomato-growing facilities and indoor offices where the CO2 levels are around 1,000 ppm.

As for world temperatures, more and more evidence piles up every day, especially over the last five years, that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 have no catastrophic effect on climate.

In the theory of the global warming alarmists, CO2 has heat-trapping properties, meaning that the more CO2 builds up in the atmosphere, the warmer the world will become. There are some inconvenient facts, however, that destroy this theory:

(1) CO2 is only a small player when it comes to greenhouse gas, more than 90% of which is water vapour – and who gets paranoid about water vapour?

(2) The earth and her systems – including the very complex climate system – are robust, resilient and self-regulating. Apparently, they easily adjust to a bit more CO2 just as easily
as all the plants and animals do.

(3) The proof of any scientific theory is in observing and measuring what takes place in the real world irrespective of what computer modeling might indicate. Whilst CO2 levels have continued to rise over the last decade, world temperatures have begun a downward trend. If the current behavior of the sun with its diminished sun-spots and magnetic strength is any guide, and if the recent changes of the Atlantic and Pacific Decadal Currents are any guide, then this cooling trend will continue for a least another 20-30 years – all proving that C02 never was and never can be a primary driver of climate.

Carbophobia - the irrational fear of carbon - has become the disease of our age, the religious myth of our time and the apocalyptic delusion of this moment of history. It can be cured, however, with a good dose of common sense.

Why then worry about the size our carbon footprint? - the bigger the better if the aim is to green the earth and to feed the world. As for pollutants, let's direct our attention to the real pollutants in our environment like the sulphurs, the nitric oxides and real chemical pollutants. CO2 is not one of them. Before we get too morbidly obsessed about the size of our carbon footprint, it might help to remind ourselves that the termites and the micro-organisms have a very much larger carbon footprint than we do.

As for the oceans, their carbon emissions are so massive that they make human carbon emissions appear about as significant as some flatulence in a hurricane.

Carbon is good for you, good for every living thing, and good for the earth. So relax and enjoy your good portion of carbon under the sun, especially if it happens to be a carbonated cold one.

The fear of carbon is the fear of life. The love of carbon is the love of life. Humans are animated carbon. Everything we consume and emit is carbon-based. Everything we make or purchase causes carbon emissions.

It is not possible to control and regulate carbon without controlling and regulating every aspect of human existence. To be anti-carbon is to be anti-human freedom.

The war on carbon is an ill-disguised war on humanity, a war on human freedom. Carbon and carbon emissions are simply a proxy for human activity. This whole movement to demonize carbon is driven by a world-denying, man-hating worldview. It is time to rip away the mask and expose the movement whose real aim is to put the human race in chains to a system that controls every aspect of human existence.

It is time to stand up and say, “You take your jackboots off my carbon and off my life.”

It is heartening to see that more and more scientists are waking up to the junk science of man-made global warming alarmism and that they are are now coming out of the woodwork to say so. The movement to shut down our energy sources by a beat-up against CO2, if successful, would turn off the lights of civilization. It is fitting that the symbolism of the recent Earth Hour was darkness rather than light.

There has never been more than a small coterie of pseudo-science activists and social engineers driving this global warming alarmism cart. They have been remarkably successful in closing down the debate and silencing opposition by their big lie about their enjoying an overwhelming scientific consensus. They have intimidated a lot of scientists with the fear of losing academic funding if they should open their mouths with a contrary opinion.

As for the Media that refused to obey their own credo of rigorous investigative journalism, that ducked from asking the hard questions, that forgot they were supposed to be independent journalists instead of advocates for the popular hysteria, its integrity and credibility has been trashed by its own hand.

Long live the free spirits of the Internet, the indefatigable bloggers who would not be silenced.

*Robert D. Brinsmead is a Horticulturist and a free-lance Writer.

End of Quote

regarDS

Easter on the Swan River, Western Australia

Howdy whoever you are and however you got here. This entry is just going to be a couple of happy snaps taken by numba1son, LSCP ("LifeStyleChoicesPartner" for those who've come in late, or in this case "Lovely Skipper Cute'n'Pretty"), and yours truly.

The context is that we decided NOT to join the crazy and mad annual Easter migration out of Perth to Down South to do some camping, and hung out on the river for days on end instead.

Our first overnighter was in front of/below Christchurch diagonally opposite from Point Walter (near the very view LSCP has from her office and dance studio), then around to Matilda Bay for a day of frolicing in the shallows with family and the consumption of numerous cold beers, then our regular spot at Herrison Island lagoon near the WACA, then all the way up to Guildford, and then as far as it was safe to actually take the boat which turned out to be past Caversham House and Sandleford wineries and up near Bandiup prison.

Which all will mean absolutely nothing to most folk not from Perth. So, enough waffle, here are some pics:

LSCP enjoying the Day Bed below Christchurch

numba1son learning The Cube
derspatz being derspatz (ie, smug and good looking. heh)

the view from below Christchurch over to Point Walter. LSCP impressed me the next morning by paddling the wave-ski all the way from there to Matilda Bay, a self-powered distance of 8.7 kilometres of the total 82.3 kilometres travelled over the 3 days and nights on the water.
(big gap in picture taking due to socialising and drinking)

2 nights later.

cruising past a nice old cruiser way up the river at Caversham House

numba1son gameboying. Heh at the title of the book under the scrabble. It reads: "Don't Sweat The Small Stuff ... and it is ALL small stuff !"
Lovely Skipper Cute'n'Pretty (LSCP) getting us home (just gone past Garrett Road Bridge in Bayswater ... a bit tricky with the extra vessels in tow.)
Anyway, here is to hoping your Easter Break was as wet and liquid as ours ... and you remembered to offer suitable thanks and appreciation to The One who continues to make it all possible, year, after year, after year.

regarDS

Oz day on the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia

Just got back to land from two great days and evenings relaxing on the Swan River in front of the beautiful city of Perth. I've been wanting to take my own boat out for Oz/Invasion day for years but I usually had to be on shift ... but not this year. Yay !

So, numba1son, LSCP, and I, put in at the boat ramp down the street from us at around 7pm on Sunday night (the night before Oz day) and he and I putted around to pick LSCP up from an even closer spot to home after she took the boat and trailer back for safe-keeping. Then it was time to cruise downstream for but a couple of kms and hook/raft up with a mate who was already busy "relaxing" with his own LSCP on this nice little toy:

A few snags and ales later it was time for us to give the love birds some peace and quiet and to motor back upstream for about half a click (if that) and pull in for the night at "The Lagoon" at Herrison Island. We had it all to ourselves and all was calm with much high pitch whining in the air. Bloody mosquitoes ! Ah well, the price of taking shelter from the wind ... and nothing a bit of roll-on repellent didn't fix.

About 10am we managed to raise enough energy to motor back out into the river and so we headed off and found a great position next to the skyshow perimeter looking back at the city from South-Eastish Perth. A bit of a battle getting to it mind you. It was low tide so I had to pull up the 135hp outboard and drop down the 8hp kicker instead - and even THAT had to be kept with prop about level with the bottom of the keel in order to avoid kicking up mud and crap !

Not a place to be diving off boats. Anyway, here we are in the afternoon chop which fortunately did settle down in the early evening and by midnight had become dead calm for the rest of the night. Oh, and not only did we have the Biggest Flag in those parts of the river, but I only saw one other Red Ensign anyway. The Channel 10 news chopper made a point of hovering low nearby and filming towards LSCP and I cuddling on the bow with that Big Flag flying over behind us. Her cover is well and truly blown now ! Heh.

These were some of our closest boating neighbours. Really nice folk in "Fuzzy Duck" (far right) and a bunch of Really Big ski-boats rafted next to them ... apparently all friends of their son. They all spent most of the day floating around in arm-chair thingies. I'd hate to think of how their skin looked when they finally got out ... not just because of the "pruning" affect, but also because of the 2stroke oil, etc, that ends up spread through the top 10cm or so of water from all the dirty outboards (guilty, your honour).

Anyway, ya can't spend a day or two on the river and NOT get in ... so here is yours truly running the gauntlet on the "Swan River Whalers" (that's "Bull Sharks" anywhere else in the world ... nasty buggers and they are making a comeback in our waters apparently). Numba1son and I also got into some water fights with lotsa kids and dads on other boats. I put the 8hp on my inflatable/tender which gave me a speed advantage, but I tell you what, they were pretty cunning with the outflanking and balloon artillery. All I had was speed and a bucket ... which was also pretty good for catching what was squirted or flung at ya. Heh. It made things pretty hairy for any to-ing and fro-ing from our pozzie on the river to where the "Big Toy" mentioned earlier was moored, so we had to give up on that particular trip as the day progressed - kinda hard to transport cameras and guitars and keep an LSCP's hair-dry when there are gangs of kids armed with super-soakers, balloon water-bombs, and buckets just waiting for you to take a step off your craft.

Yeah, the unwritten rule of the river that day was if you left your main boat, you were fair game for a soaking. Great Stuff. Good clean harmless fun ... well, as clean as it can be in a muddy 2stroke soaked river. I should mention that the only water delivery device numba1son had at his disposal was a silly little trigger squirt atomiser used to keep one cool. Sure, it could manage a straight squirt if you twisted the stupid little top on it, but we are talking about a pinhole stream against massive water-guns that could suck up litres of river in one move and eject it 5 metres with another. His comment ? "How emasculating". His battle cry was "I'm a man" as he squeezed the trigger to let fly with his feeble dribble that only managed to wet his own feet. LOL. Never a truer word spoken.

Here is a view of our front row vantage, taken from the tender. Pretty choppy still. Note the plane doing acrobatics to the right. There was A Lot of that stuff going on all afternoon. Everything from squadrons of Bi-planes (pics coming up) to cowboys flying choppers backwards or pin-wheeling across the sky, to water bomber planes and choppers, to sea-planes landing and taking off on the river, to military jets doing the "shock and awe" thing at noisy low altitude. Top Stuff, all of it !

Here are but a couple of pics of the Air Stuff on display. No, don't expect any photos of the fireworks ... we were all too busy enjoying the 30min display of some 20,000 shells being ejected into the sky in pleasing arrangements of colour and noise to worry about photographing it.

Okay, there WAS one flag bigger than ours. :) ... but I had something prettier, closer to mine - and I'm not just talking about that beautiful wooden craft to the left/behind ours. Heh.

Anyway, to any Oz readers, I hope your Oz day was a True Blue and "Ridgy-Didge" as ours was.

... and as the Oz flag flew off into the sunset, numba1son sat quietly contemplating the fact that in but a few days it is "Back to School again". Heh++

regarDS