regarDS
PS: CLE, I don't know whether to thank you or curse you for making me aware of this game, so to play it safe and cover all options, deem a virtual chocolate bar infected with "DSBB" to have been mailed your way. :)
gimel zayin yud
regarDS
PS: CLE, I don't know whether to thank you or curse you for making me aware of this game, so to play it safe and cover all options, deem a virtual chocolate bar infected with "DSBB" to have been mailed your way. :)
"Dear Dr Jensen. Sorry to read what has just happened to you re: pre-selection, particularly considering your views regarding AGW Alarmism. I do hope you continue with the good fight in that regard, either with the Liberal Party or as an Independent. I submitted the following note to the Liberal Party webpage and Malcolm Turnbull's webpage this morning because I am very much concerned by the direction that the Coalition seems to be going in relation to the typical AGW alarmist position and the Rudd & Wong "ETS". Also, because of Mr Turnbull's stance and recent decisions I find that I can no longer speak of the Liberal Party in good terms while he remains its leader and in support of any kind of ETS. Letter is as follows, and thank you for your time:"To the Federal Leader of the Opposition. In every election over the last 27 years I have voted for either the Liberal party or the Coalition, either directly or via preferences but mostly the former. I will be unable to continue this trend in the next election should the Liberal party continue in anyway to support the alarmist nonsense and fraud that is "man made climate change", CO2 being "a pollution", and any kind of "Emissions Trading Scheme" related to CO2. Instead, I will be supporting candidates who demonstrate climate change realism, which at the moment seems to only be the Family First party. Yes, the climate is changing, it has always changed, and it continues to change, and atmospheric CO2 levels always lag behind global temperature changes and not lead them ... and regardless of mankind's pitiful contributions to the same. Besides, when it comes to atmospheric CO2 levels, the planet is virtually starving for the stuff anyway, and would benefit by actually being doubled or more. Make no mistake. If the blogs and forums are anything to go by, there are a lot of longstanding typical coalition supporters out there who will be casting their votes elsewhere unless the Liberal party soon chooses to admit to the folly of AGW ("manmade global warming) and associated fraud of an ETS, and instead adopt a unified Climate Change Realist position that is contrary to the kind of disaster the ALP (let alone The Greens) are trying to inflict upon Australia. Also, don't under estimate the power of "the internut" in terms of reaching people and shaping public opinion. At the moment, it would appear that KRudd and Co are continuing to use it far more effectively that the Coalition. Personally, I think you will find that if you decisively establish policy that not only opposes the ALP's "ETS" but also rigourously demands answers to the kinds of questions Senator Fielding recently asked on the topic, and made it all very public, then the Australian Public would overwhealmingly support your party. The average voting age Ozzie can sniff out BS from 50 paces and most of us probably know by now that there is something distinctly fishy about the whole AGW Alarmist thing and that to implement an ETS would be to put the country and economy through a hiding for nothing, so with that in mind it would be quite foolish to do a "me too" to what Rudd and Wong want to inflict upon us. As a blogger and prolific forum participant I will be continuing to warn against AGW Alarmism and an ETS, and similarly will be denouncing any and all political parties who support those scams. In fact, this very letter is also about to be posted to my own blog and a highly google referenced forum, and I will also be supplying it by way of comment to the PM's new blog on the topic of climate change. I firmly believe that how your party chooses to approach the (Natural) Climate Change topic will directly affect your chances at the next election. To merely support or echo the ALP postion will render you irrelevant, but should you choose to take a stand against the Alarmist hysteria and nonsense, you could not only be returned to Government but also save Australia from ruin. Thank you for your time. regarDS (name included)
Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet – stop gambling with our future. You’ve got to know when to fold ‘em – and for the skeptics, that time has come. The Government I lead will act. - Kevin Rudd, 6/11/09Ooooh, I wonder what new laws our desperate little weasel of a PM is busy cooking up to see the likes of Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen silenced ? Re-education camps where "arbeit macht frei" ? I don't reckon MSM is going to be in much support of Kevvy for much longer. Interesting recent news is that Rupert Murdoch reckons KRudd "is delusional". You can read about that here: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26316630-2,00.html
"If Rudd thinks we can set an example for the rest of the world with a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions - the ETS - all it would do is push up the cost of living in Australia and the rest of the world will laugh," - Rupert Murdoch 07/11/09How's that for a fair shake of the sauce bottle in the fullness of time, Kev ? You'll be needing that job in the UN by the time all this is over, coz no one is going to want you in Oz. Anyway, you should fit in well over at the UN. They aren't all that big on "due diligence" either. regarDS
"Dr Kearney said the study, which relates specifically to Melbourne, would prove a practical tool to forecast the impact of climate change on the city's biodiversity."
Butterflies emerging earlier due to climate change
Published: 7:20AM GMT 17 Mar 2010
Butterflies are emerging from their cocoons ten days earlier than 65 years ago because of climate change, experts warn.
The finding represents the first concrete evidence of a link between greenhouse gases and the timing of a natural event, according to researchers.
The team found that on average, the Common Brown butterfly (Heteronympha merope) has emerged earlier and earlier over the last half century, with an average of 1.6 days per decade over a 65 year span.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne said that the findings tally with a corresponding increase in temperature of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade over the same period.
This warming is shown to be human-induced, researchers say.
Lead author of the study Dr Michael Kearney, from the Department of Zoology, said the findings could help our ability to forecast future impacts of climate change on biodiversity.
He said: "Shifts in these seasonal life cycle events represent a challenge to species, altering the food and competition present at the time of hatching. Studies such as ours will allow better forecasting of these shifts and help us understand more about their consequences."
The study, funded by an Australian Research Council grant to Monash, Melbourne and Wisconsin Universities, is due to be published in Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
The team looked at catterpillars raised in the lab and compared their development to increases in temperature and climate change models.
Professor David Karoly said: "Scientists have previously observed that biological events are happening progressively earlier in spring over the past few decades.
"This new work has tied the earlier emergence of butterflies directly to a regional temperature increase, and has tied the temperature increase very strongly to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by humans."
Above image from: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/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
Wow, weather station data from a weather station not established until 32 years later ... now THERE is a "trick" !... 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." ...
Hear, hear.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.