Emission Trading and climate change

Originally Posted by chrisp

I'm sure the Doc will be back soon. I wonder if he is riding in a truck back to WA?

He at least is easy to spot, his postings are as repetitive, obvious and predictable as the droppings in the bottom of a guinea pigs cage

Originally Posted by Rod Dyson

Hey Johnc, you might think these posts are repetetive. But we seem to either have a lot of Jonhc or Geno62 at any one time all pushing a similar line??

Disappointingly, there are only 2 lines of discussion here. 'For' or 'against'. I admit, my pendulum sways left, but still, it sways, unlike some narrow-read, stubborn right-winged posters on this forum.

Originally Posted by Jamesmelbourne

Disappointingly, there are only 2 lines of discussion here. 'For' or 'against'. I admit, my pendulum sways left, but still, it sways, unlike some narrow-read, stubborn right-winged posters on this forum.

Not to mention again, the right-wingers just don't realise that the numbers are done! They continue to wade through their arrogance. [psssttt - budgie-smuggling loyalists, shift the focus]

Maybe a separate politics thread ?

Originally Posted by ringtail

Maybe a separate politics thread ?

NO!
We are a Renovation forum.

The Admin and Mods have enough to do without having to sort through unwinnable crap each day.

Originally Posted by Jamesmelbourne

Not to mention again, the right-wingers just don't realise that the numbers are done! They continue to wade through their arrogance. [psssttt - budgie-smuggling loyalists, shift the focus]

There does seem to be a real problem with the vocal head in the sand mob, typified by the likes of Alan Jones that aren't the least bit interested in anything that doesn't support their view that climate change does not exist, or alternatively any change has to be normal variation. I'm not a rusted on supporter of any political party or view, as long as we keep our minds open, accept the experts views and any informed alternative view (and not by unqualified bloggists) then we should be in the right frame of mind to react to the challenges be they enviromental or economic.

The saddest part of this whole debate is the number of people that are so willing to believe figures and opinions from individuals who do nothing but distort and lie or who have vested interests that clearly prejudice their view.

Originally Posted by The Administration Team

NO!
We are a Renovation forum.

The Admin and Mods have enough to do without having to sort through unwinnable crap each day.

Whoa, ok ok. Try a glass of warm milk.

The saddest part of this whole debate is the number of people that are so willing to believe figures and opinions from individuals who do nothing but distort and lie or who have vested interests that clearly prejudice their view.[/QUOTE]

Yep, exactly. You got it in one. Spoken like a true skeptic. Do you know which side your on ?

Originally Posted by Marc

Thank you James; not that I needed confirmation for the fact that Global warming alarmist are lefties and that climate realist are right wing. (What is your problem with a traditional male Speedo-style swimwear used by lifesavers? )

So anyone cares to venture why this is so?
I don't think that there has ever been a true scientific proposition that neatly separates the contending parties into such defined political views.
Even the debate about existence of God that is traditionally attributed to left wing atheist and right wing bigots has massive shades of grey and large percentage of exceptions.
Not so Global warming.

So the question remains for those who are able to type without making gutter remarks.
Why are alarmist lefties and why are skeptics right wing?

I can't see how you can come to that conclusion, isn't it the cart before the horse. We have one party in the Liberals that says it believes in climate change but for various reasons wishes to progress slowly. you have Labor that also believes but wishes to progress at a faster rate. Doesn't it follow that those that favour a slower pace or no change will gravitate to the liberals and those that favour faster action gravitate to Labor.

For some time on the religion we had vocal Catholics such as Bob Santamaria leaning to the DLP, other than that how could we tell which of the other faiths leant in any direction, we don't mark religion in the ballot box and I have not seen any statistics that would indicate those with political views on the extreme end are religious, agnostic or athiest.

From the ABC website, although the carbon tax does not have wonderful support it would seem that the populations view on climate change is quite different with only a very small percentage that do not believe it exists.

Climate beliefs steady amid raging debate

Anna Salleh for ABC Science Online
Posted August 24, 2011 22:23:16
Photo: Most people surveyed believe climate change is happening but are divided on the degree to which humans are responsible (Giulio Saggin, file photo: ABC News)
Related Story: Combet accuses Abbott of climate change racism
Related Story: Turnbull decries war on climate science
Related Story: Carbon tax to be introduced to parliament

Map: Australia

New surveys suggest Australians have largely maintained the same attitudes about climate change in the past year, despite increasing controversy over the science and politics.
Professor Iain Walker of CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences in Perth says the findings fly in the face of concerns that debate in the media is unduly swaying people's attitudes.
"The data seem to indicate that heated highly visible public 'argy-bargy' has done little to shift the broad constellation of beliefs in the public," he said.
Professor Walker has just revealed preliminary findings from a national survey conducted over the past six weeks of just over 5,000 respondents.
In a similar survey last year, he found that the vast majority of respondents believe climate change is happening but are divided on the degree to which humans are responsible.
"Still almost 90 per cent of respondents this year accept that climate change is happening and they are very close to evenly split between those who say they think that humans are largely causing it and those that think it's [largely] a natural fluctuation," he said.
His survey also found the number of people who do not think climate change is happening is about 7.4 per cent.
The balance say they have "no idea" if it is happening.
Professor Walker says his preliminary findings suggest there is a slight shift towards people thinking natural causes play a greater role in climate change.
"But overall, people still think that climate change is important. It worries them. They believe that climate change will harm them personally," he said.
Professor Walker's findings on the robustness of attitudes on climate change in the face of high profile debate on science and policy are supported by other detailed surveys.
"If it has changed them it's changed them very modestly," said Dr Joseph Reser of Griffith University, who has just collected data from a survey of 11,000 people also first surveyed 12 months ago.
Dr Reser - who is participating with Professor Walker in a University of Melbourne climate change roundtable this week - says comparable European and North American research also supports these findings.
Last year Dr Reser found 90 per cent of people agreed there was "some level" of human causal contribution to climate change.
He says attitudes to the cause of climate change can be particularly tricky to survey because of the complexity of the idea of anthropogenic forcing.
He says it involves understanding that adding even a small proportion of human-induced greenhouse gas to the atmosphere causes a tipping point for climate change.
Professor Walker says given the uncertainty surrounding people's views on causation, his and Dr Reser's findings on this question are consistent, and show that very few people believe humans play no role at all.
Carbon tax issue

Professor Walker also asked 530 people this year about their views on the Federal Government's response to climate change.
The survey found 11 per cent thought the Government was doing too much; 21 per cent thought it was doing enough; 27 per cent thought it was not doing enough and 41 per cent thought it was doing the "wrong thing".
In 2010, Dr Reser found that only 16 per cent trusted the Government to take appropriate action.
He found people wanted big business and governments to be responsible for responding to climate change, and were happy to have taxpayers money spent on tackling it.
Professor Walker says a survey he carried out earlier this year suggested that people supported a price on carbon if it was associated with compensation for households.
"You can vary the degree of support for a proposed price on carbon from about a third up to a half of the population, depending on how you phrase the question," he said.
Dodgy polls

Dr Susie Burke of the Australian Psychological Society has written an article about surveying Australians' climate change concern in the Society's magazine InPsych.
She says surveys such as those by Dr Reser and Professor Walker are more reliable than many we might hear about.
"There are different quality surveys," she said.
She says the surveys conducted by Dr Reser and Professor Walker involve a representative population given time to reflect and consider questions.
People's answers are also validated by asking a number of questions on the same topic.
"That gives us greater confidence that this is truly reflecting their attitudes rather than being the way in which the question is worded that has influenced their answer," she said.
By comparison, she says well-publicised overnight media polls tend to be done on the telephone and elicit "off the cuff" responses.
She says the way questions are framed in these polls can be problematic because they can be a complex mix of science and policy and can arouse emotions at the same time.
One example, she says, is asking whether people agree with the statement: "Until we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not take steps that would have economic costs."
"It's totally loaded," she said.
"Doubt is being raised and arouses their fear and anxiety, risk and controversy.
"It can be an unfortunate mistake, but it can also be used deliberately to be measure a more fear based response in people rather than their underlying attitudes and beliefs."
Topics: climate-change, environment, science-and-technology, research, australia

You guys still going with this thread! Well at least you have stamina.

Has anyone thought to call Guinness book of records. This could be a contender for the longest running forum discussion in the history of the internet.

Originally Posted by Marc

Only the marginal and the extreme agitators remain to hold the flagpole up.
Not for long.
The business has dried up.

I am very interested in what will be next.

Too true mate.

Apologies to all our flagpole holders here who have no doubt been missing my factual and informative posts on the farcical failure once known as the AGW hypothesis hysteria.

I have been very busy helping to take down the inept few who would foist an environmentally useless and economically destructive TAX on us Aussies.

JuLLIAR's days are numbered, and they'll dump her stupid TAX when they dump her (it'll be called a "review to rebuild community consensus", or a similar spin). My money's on Crean, but there's late money for Smith and his nice guy image as a temporary stooge to cop the flak as "the man who knifed our first female PM".

I'll try to get the two dump scenario's up soon, then we can all see how this TAX scam will go the way of the dodo. The reason's for the Carbon Dioxide TAX dying are hilarious, because they are not the reality which is that the TAX is a farce.

But hey, why quibble over semantics, dead is dead.

Originally Posted by Dr Freud

"Green" aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. "These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets," the authors write.

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists | Science | The Guardian

I always thought they were called little green men because of their skin colour.

Geez I'm naive sometimes, I should have figured this meant they were aligned with the "greenies" on this Planet too.

I guess these guys never saw Aliens Vs Predator!

What's Arnie thinking in this photo:



That's right, he's thinking "Damn, I wish I had some Carbon Credit Certificates so I could show this dude who's boss!".

Originally Posted by Geno62

There is nothing decent about linking the Truckies protest with what is happening in detention centres.

You think this is not decent?

But you happily sit silently by while greenie propaganda pieces show children being swept away by raging storms, children being hung from the neck, children being blown up into bloody bits, all designed to terrify kids through emotional blackmail to "believe" in this doomsday cult. And psychologists across the country have indicated that Aussie children are being traumatised by the actual school curriculum that preaches more of this fear to our kids, all sanctioned by JuLIAR.

And yet when I try to clarify what our governments definition of "extremist" is when it starts accusing innocent Australian citizens of this for exercising their right to free speech, while not using this label for the other violent criminal behaviours I highlighted, you think I'm being indecent?

Luckily we live in a free country and you are free to express your opinion. I'll respectfully disagree.

Originally Posted by watson

I agree..however the original post was back in April (missed).....and its removal will require severe editing of subsequent posts.....bit too hard.

I learned long ago that arguing with the umpire is not a good idea.

I'll have to find some more creative ways of presenting my factually correct information in an entertaining way.

Aramaic perhaps?

Originally Posted by Geno62

The ridge tile thrower isn't a link, it is a paste. (bottom photo)

See now, if you describe in words what was in the picture, then people will still know what was happening after the picture is removed.

A picture paints a thousand words, but your thirteen words paints a picture.

You should have just said "Delete the bottom photo as it is a cut and paste".

Just trying to help as part of my penance.

Originally Posted by chrisp

In defence of Dr Freud, I thought the picture was okay. It certainly helped to show other readers that his interest in AGW is mostly (purely?) political and little (or nothing?) to do with the actual science.

You hit the nail on the head champ.

It should be apparent to all by now that this little AGW hypothesis scam is mostly (purely?) political and little (or nothing?) to do with the actual science.

I'm glad you are finally picking up on this.

Originally Posted by chrisp

SO, you agree that the recent temperature rise is quite high and something of the order of that last seen about 10,000 years ago?

Agree with whose opinion?

Why don't you take a look for yourself, then [S]answer[/S] correct your own question:

Originally Posted by Dr Freud

And I wonder what caused all the climate change that has happened naturally for billions of years? Hotter and colder, wetter and drier, windier and calmer, cloudier and clearer, all caused because us Aussies didn't pay enough TAX apparently!

You can read more about climate change here:

Natural Climate Cycles - Wry Heat


And specifically about some of the astrophysical contributors to climate change here:

Ice Ages and Glacial Epochs - Wry Heat

And you know how I hate being regularly and falsely accused of "cherry-picking" by the grossly misinformed, so here is some context to keep those accusations at bay:

Originally Posted by Dr Freud

The climate has been changing for about 4.5 billion years.

Here's the last little bit of that just in case you forgot:




So, how far back do they (and you?) want to turn it?

Back to when it was 10 degrees celsius warmer in the past?

Apologies for "cherry-picking" only 600 million years, we haven't really got a very accurate picture on what happened for the first 4 billion years.

But we can focus on the the last few hundred years as we naturally emerge from the little ice age if you prefer?

Geez, I'm such a helpful devil, aren't I?

Originally Posted by SilentButDeadly

Just because the tool is powerful but (occasionally) poorly used doesn't mean the central problem is always with the tool.

In the trades, we should never blame the tools.

But in politics, we should always blame the tools.

Originally Posted by chrisp

I'm sure the Doc will be back soon. I wonder if he is riding in a truck back to WA?

Nah mate, couldn't afford it.

Now that my big oil sponsors have stopped paying me, I can't afford the time off work.

They said that seeing as JuLIAR has done a better job of killing support for this fiasco than they ever could, there's no point paying me the big bucks.

Originally Posted by SilentButDeadly

Science is a trade. Models are a tool of that trade.

Politics is a trade. Words are a tool of that trade.

People are the common component to both. And where the weakness usually lies...

zoooooooommmm straight over his head.
But on a more serious note, I'm pretty sure pollys don't have a trade union & all us hard working tradies would fall over astounded at a polly doing anything physical to earn a honest crust. Boffins on the other hand have formed groups resembling this in antarctica, like the casey union of non trades, a well liked group just because of their name.
regards inter

Originally Posted by Dr Freud

[S]Luckily we live in a free country and you are free to express your opinion.[/S]

Let's see what happens to those who speak out against JuLIAR and her Carbon Dioxide TAX.

Her communist propaganda and censorial nature is now in full swing for who threaten her dictatorial regime, regardless of it's shameless ineptitude.

You wonder why no-one who needs their pay check dares to speak out against her inept Carbon Dioxide TAX farce.

Let's take a look at some of the treatment meted out by her our fellow "sceptics".

Brendan O’Neill on the sliming of the sceptics:
HAS any intellectual current ever been so disparaged and demonised, so ferociously harangued by the chattering classes, as climate-change scepticism?
Every slur in the book has been hurled at those who dare to question climate-change orthodoxies.
They’ve been compared to Holocaust deniers. They’ve been branded psychologically disordered. They only use their “reptilian brain”, says one eco-author, which means their outlook on climate change is not “modulated by logic, reason or reflective thought”, Al Gore says.
And now, putting the icing on this cake of abuse, Gore has compared climate-change sceptics to racists…
In their pathologisation, demoralisation and even criminalisation of dissent, greens unwittingly expose their deeply censorious, inquisitorial instincts.

Demonising dissent | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

And here's the thanks Bolta gets for his efforts speaking out against this fiasco:

The Prime Minister overstepped the line when she called the chairman and CEO of News Limited, John Hartigan.
Calls that look like an attempt at censorship have many sinister overtones, with threats of inquiries and forced sales left hanging in the air.
And I ask her: What are you so afraid of? What else would you stoop to in order to cling to power?
Yesterday morning I was considering resigning as a News Limited columnist.
I thought this company that I love, that I have long admired for its defence of free speech, had caved in to pressure from a Prime Minister to close down reporting of a matter of public interest.

This, then, is how news can be kept from the public.
Not being able to report on what I consider improper pressure by a desperate Prime Minister to kill a story meant I could not report fairly on the political scene as I saw it.
I could not do my job, and I consulted friends about resigning. I am now told that News Limited was just being cautious while it checked its legal position. Hartigan told me: “At no stage is my job to stop stories getting into papers.”
No, it was the Australian Prime Minister who, in my opinion, tried to do that.

I thank News Limited for defying the Prime Minister and letting me write as I have above.
I apologise for doubting its commitment to free speech.
But be aware how endangered is our freedom to speak as we find, especially of this Prime Minister.

Column - How Gillard tried to kill a story | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

The Australian and Andrew Bolt have been the most outspoken critics of the Carbon Dioxide TAX, and they are now being attacked personally and angrily over the telephone by the Prime Minister.

Read the full article, then wonder how much is kept from you about the Carbon Dioxide TAX?

How much pressure is being placed on journalists weaker than Andrew Bolt, who just capitulate without retort?

So much for free speech.

Just pay your extra taxes and shut up!

The irony is overwhelming!

JuLIAR said "There will be no Carbon TAX under the government I lead".

She lied!

This was very damaging but didn't lead to her political death.

The next big lies did.

Labor is in a dreadful state. Caucus is confused, frightened, demoralised. It's starting to fight over asylum-seeker policy and what should be done about manufacturing. Then there's the Craig Thomson affair. Bomb throwers are everywhere; some inside Labor, a lot in sections of the media.

Former Labor minister Graham Richardson, a media player who still fancies himself as a power broker, declared there was ''no way'' Gillard could turn the situation around. He predicted her government would fall next year, brought down by independent Andrew Wilkie over poker machines.

Gillard and Labor losing their head and their nerve

JuLIAR is gone, and with her will go the TAX, but not because of her lies about the TAX.

All of this is because of all her other LIES!

The Carbon Dioxide TAX is a huge disaster for this country, but it is now dwarfed by the scale of total political incompetence.

See where it fit's in:

Labor insiders said the discontent with the Prime Minister's leadership was deeper with the back bench than it was with the factional leaders.
"The people who put her in are struggling to admit that they made a mistake," one MP said.
Another MP likened the prevailing mindset among the federal party's leadership to a cult of denial.
"There is more Kool Aid being drunk up in Canberra that at Jonestown," one MP remarked.
The MP said that the calibre of the staff in the PM's private office was a matter of deep concern to MPs.
"The people around her have no political judgment," one MP said.
"The wattles they wore at the signing with the Greens, the carbon tax, the Malaysian solution ... it just goes on."
The majority of Labor MPs contacted by the Sunday Herald Sun conceded that Ms Gillard could not be assured of remaining as leader of the Labor Party in the long term without a radical reprioritisation of the Government's policies.
"We're like a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle, milling around, not quite sure where to go," one MP said.
"If someone fired a gun, we could all run in the same direction. "Or we could scatter. Something will probably happen, but I'm not sure what."
Another said: "The mood is black, depressed, resentful, solemn and hateful.
"There is gross disappointment at her performance and the way we lurch from mess to mess."

Several MPs believe that Ms Gillard needs to stand up to the independent MPs and the Greens, claiming the majority would continue to support Labor.
"The wider community no longer regards carbon tax as a critical issue because it rained, so the brown rivers and dried up plains went away," an MP said.

"Their concerns have been replaced by jobs. That's a much more critical feature, so our policy agenda is out of date."

Ousted PM Kevin Rudd upstages Julia Gillard | Herald Sun

Labor themselves are now admitting this TAX is TOXIC and CULTIST, and will dump it as soon as they dump JuLIAR!

They will all do this happily, just to negate Abbott's next campaign message of "A bad TAX based on a LIE!".

The primary vote is stuck in the 20s. The missteps and blunders are piling up. The party's leader is so despised by sections of the community that it can't even get credit for the things it gets right.
Speaking to Labor elders outside the Parliament this week, many were utterly bereft of hope. ''I feel absolutely despairing about the whole situation,'' said one. ''There's a fair risk that Julia will turn out to be the double bill of the first female prime minister and the last Labor prime minister.''
Think that's overly dramatic? Perhaps, but such is the level of despondency from people who have been around politics for a very long time indeed.

At her press conference on Thursday, there were puffy dark circles under her eyes. You could see she knew the scale of the damage.
As usual, Tony Abbott had a killer line to sum it up. ''This is a government which this morning is almost dying of shame at its own incompetence.''
The blow to Gillard had another dimension, though.
Labor MPs in marginal seats have long pinned hopes for a recovery on stopping the boats. They believe the issue has done more damage to them than any other - including the carbon tax.
This is not to say that there will be a leadership change. Many in Labor's ranks are still convinced it would simply compound the party's agonies. The party has to pass its carbon tax. But desperation and panic can set in rapidly as an election looms.

Labor losing its head

I personally think the Carbon Dioxide TAX lies will ultimately prove much more damaging than all the other lies.

But it amazes me that there are journalists out there that actually think ramming this rancid TAX down Aussies throats against their will after lying to them constantly will make JuLIAR popular?

If Labor does do this, they may be relegated to the dustbin of history.

This would be a tragedy, as this country needs a viable opposition. The current Labor iteration are a debacle, but at their best, they are a valuable part of our democracy.

God forbid if the Greens ever take over the left wing space.

The Australian, Andrew Bolt, and Glenn Milne.

Some of the strongest critics highlighting JuLIAR's lies over the Carbon Dioxide TAX, and the environmentally useless and economically destructive nature of it.

Labor and Gillard personally are at something of a turning point. The question dominating federal politics is will Gillard persist with her disastrous strategy of ramming a carbon tax down the throats of a resistant electorate? Or has she recognised her best chance of retaining her job is to show she is capable of addressing the issues that really matter to voters; economic uncertainty, cost of living and border security?


Gillard will not entirely vacate the field on carbon tax; to do so would be to admit humiliating defeat to Tony Abbott. But she now appears belatedly to be preparing to change the focus of the national conversation. If this is so, the reaction within the Labor caucus will be one of blessed relief. There is an emerging view on the backbench that anti-carbon tax sentiment is so entrenched among voters that to persist with the hard sell of the past two weeks will only further embed that sentiment, if that's possible. The caucus has come to the view the carbon tax is irrelevant to the everyday concerns dominating the electorate's psyche. Indeed its irrelevance to those concerns only serves to aggravate the anger towards it.


Get out of perpetual election mode and just govern | The Australian

Now Milne too gets his payback, direct from the lunatic raging from a desperate woman clinging to power for powers sake:

Sacked for something he said somewhere else? This is star-chamber stuff:

VETERAN political journalist Glenn Milne has been dumped from ABC TV’s The Insiders because of a column he wrote in News Ltd’s The Australian.

The column, retracted in full after furious demands from Julia Gillard, made claims about the Prime Minister’s one-time relationship with former unionist Bruce Wilson, the embezzlement of union funds and his eventual fraud conviction.

Milne was told he would no longer be part of future episodes of the program on Thursday evening after a meeting by the ABC’s news management team.
The ABC’s head of policy, Alan Sunderland told The Sun-Herald, last night that Milne had not been “sacked ... because we don’t employ him and never have” but confirmed the column had been the catalyst for the decision to cancel his scheduled appearance on the show this morning.

Disgraceful.
The ABC should at least answer this: were any calls made to the ABC about Milne by Gillard, Communications Minister Steve Conroy or anyone speaking on their behalf?
UPDATE
Professor Sinclair Davidson sums up:

Government owned media organisation bans government critic

UPDATE
Double standards, says Gavin Atkins, giving examples.
Indeed, why is Bob Ellis still allowed to write for and appear on this newly censorious ABC, given his own dishing of dirt?:

That notoriety was dramatically boosted by the case brought by Treasurer Peter Costello and wife Tanya, and Tony and Margaret Abbott, who alleged they were all defamed by a passage in Goodbye Jerusalem. It’s a story supposedly recounted to Ellis by former State Labor MP Rodney Cavalier, alleging that in the distant past of university days, a long-haired Peter Costello, and the young political firebrand Tony Abbott, were both in the right wing of the Labor Party till Tanya Coleman slept with both, married one of them, and induced them into the Young Liberals. The story was completely untrue.

Is the difference that Ellis merely slimed a Liberal politician, while Milne alarmed a Labor one?


ABC confirms: it was what Milne said about Gillard | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

The message is well and truly sent to journalists, if you criticise JuLIAR or her useless and inept Carbon Dioxide TAX, your livelihood will be personally threatened by the Prime Minister of Australia.

On the Insiders program on ABC this morning, 3 of the 4 journalists agreed that a PM personally shutting down legitimate stories they don't like is fine.


This is scary stuff.


One of these 3 journalists present used to think so:

John Howard has the loudest voice in Australia. He has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced NGOs, censored the arts, prosecuted leakers, criminalised protest and curtailed parliamentary scrutiny. Though touted as a contest of values, this has been a party-political assault on Australia's liberal culture. In the name of "balance", the Liberal Party has muscled its way into the intellectual life of the country. And this has happened because we let it happen. Once again, Howard has shown his superb grasp of Australia as it really is. In His Master's Voice, David Marr investigates both a decade of suppression and the strange willingness of Australians to watch, with such little angst, their liberties drift away.
"More than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what's done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard gets us nowhere." —David Marr, His Master's Voice


His Master

But maybe now that he realises his paycheck is threatened, like it wasn't under Howard, he's a bit more compliant?

The benefit: 1/4000 th of a degree.

The cost: Tens of billions and billions of dollars.

The best part: The benefit disappears in less than a day as the rest of the world increases CO2 emissions and laughs at us!

Congratulations. With your encouragement, the warmist Sunday Age is forced to answer The Question about tackling global warming.
It asked readers to help guide its coverage, and Jason Fong’s question topped its poll:

The very point of Australia’s carbon tax is to reduce global warming. How much will reducing 5% of Australia’s around 1.5% contribution of global CO2 emissions reduce global temperature by? If the amount is negligible (which it is), then given the present economic turbulence, what is the probability of Australia’s carbon tax inspiring major emitters like USA, China and India to make ACTUAL cuts to their C02 emissions (as opposed to mere carbon intensity) and economic growth? - -Jason Fong,

The Sunday Age today gives the answer:

Victoria University climate scientist Professor Roger Jones has calculated that if the rest of the world did not act and Australia reduced emissions until 2020, then did nothing else, Australia’s policy would knock 0.0038 degrees off the global temperature rise by 2100.

One-three hundredth Not quite one-four thousandth of a degree. Provided the climate really is as responsive to carbon dioxide emissions as claimed.
It really doesn’t seem worth the pain, does it, when China and other giant emitters won’t cut their own emissions?
(UPDATE: Thanks to the many readers who corrected my maths.)

Question answered by Sunday Age | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

If you want to buy that, just post your credit card details and I'll get you similar value for money bargains elsewhere as well.

The Craig Thomson scandal is likely to topple this government before it's term is up, which means if it happens soon enough there will be NO Carbon Dioxide Tax.,

But strangely, after attempts to stifle media coverage and public oversight of this TAX killing scandal, including leaving shovels and white powder with the people asking for an open investigation, the witnesses are now being silenced as well:

KATHY Jackson, the union leader at the centre of the controversy over Labor MP Craig Thomson, has had a breakdown and been admitted to the psychiatric unit of a Melbourne hospital.

Late last month, a dirt-encrusted shovel was left on the doorstep of Ms Jackson's home at 3.30am - an underworld-style suggestion that she dig her own grave.


Just hours earlier, another senior union office holder, Michael Williamson (Craig Thomson's mentor) had withdrawn her authority to speak to the media.


Union boss in Thomson probe has breakdown

And:

THE senior public servant ultimately responsible for the investigation into Craig Thomson and the Health Services Union is likely to avoid parliamentary scrutiny after being appointed as a commissioner of the workplace tribunal.


Tim Lee, appointed by Julia Gillard in 2009 to his current role of general manager of Fair Work Australia, has been embroiled in the Thomson affair due to his long links with Labor.


''One would also have to question just why Labor has, by appointing Mr Lee to the position of FWA commissioner, effectively shut down any possibility of him being questioned further at Senate estimates about the Craig Thomson inquiry.


The Coalition has jumped on a report that when Ms Gillard was workplace relations minister in 2009, her chief of staff, Ben Hubbard, had rung the Industrial Registrar to ask whether he was looking into claims against Mr Thomson.


Ms Gillard has said neither she nor Mr Hubbard has any memory of the conversation .

Former head of Thomson inquiry to avoid scrutiny

The cover up is always worse than the crime.

Once Thomson is gone, the Carbon Dioxide TAX will never be!

The strange thing is, at the time this debacle started, I thought it would be the most likely issue to kill the TAX.

But now if JuLIAR goes first because of her sheer incompetence, then the TAX will be long gone before Thomson even gets a chance to kill it.

See what treatment is meted out against those who speak out against this TAX and the oppressive government that want's you to pay it!

ABC Insiders disgrace

By Andrew McIntyre Not just Milne silenced, but they gag the talent too


Without having read the news about the silencing of Gillard government critic Glenn Milne by taking him off the Insiders that he was scheduled to appear on this morning, I was appalled at the behaviour of host Barry Cassidy, and David Marr and Annabel Crabb when Cassidy actually asked Michael Sutchburry to explain why The Australian had run the old story about Julia Gillard’s relationship with former unionist Bruce Wilson and his eventual conviction for the embezzlement of union funds .


Stutchbury tried many times to answer and was literally talked over and shouted down by the other guests as to why he thought the story, in context, was fair comment. Barry Cassidy, having asked the question, chose not to intervene, and having had Stutchbury’s answer satisfactorily obfuscated, then announced that they had to move on.


Not content at having got rid of one commentator for expressing views disapproved of not just by the Prime Minster, but by the ABC — many are wondering exactly why and by whom — Cassidy allows the stifling of the one view, the one explanation the viewers might just have been interested in listening to.


What a disgrace.

ABC Insiders disgrace « andrewmcintyre.org

Disgrace is an understatement.

Prime Ministerial driven censorship of free speech is closer, all to protect LIES like this massive tax we will all likely be paying soon.

What other information about this tax are we not being told?

Who else has been silenced from telling the truth by JuLIAR and her union thug cronies?

Just to make all of us innocent Aussies pay a useless TAX!

So will the rest of the world follow the USA, or us Aussies?

Is anyone still claiming the United States, inspired by Australia’s noble sacrifice, will hit its own economy with a carbon dioxide tax or emissions trading, too?
Alan RM Jones lays out a few new home truths:

The (US) job market hit a wall in August, signaling economic stagnation as government retrenches and businesses hunker down. The nation’s unemployment rate was unchanged in August. In addition, virtually zero jobs were added to the economy.
The U.S. economy neither added nor lost jobs during the month, the worst performance since last September, the Labor Department said.... The unemployment rate remained steady at 9.1%, but with such a poor pace of job creation it’s likely to move higher in the coming months.

So what did the Obama administration do in response?

President Barack Obama, citing the struggling economy, asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday to withdraw an air-quality rule that Republicans and business groups said would cost millions of jobs.
The surprise move—coming on the same day as a dismal unemployment report—reflected the energy industry’s importance as a rare bright spot in adding U.S. jobs. The tighter standards for smog-forming ozone could have forced states and cities to limit some oil-and-gas projects.

America put “a price on carbon”, too? Tell ‘em they’re dreaming.

US in no mood to follow our useless lead | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

The USA is winding back actual pollution laws for economic reasons.

What are the chances of them introducing economically crippling laws to reduce natural and healthy plant food that humans actually breathe out?

This cult has run it's course.

Reality triumphs yet again.

JuLIAR has been caught out frantically trying to silence debate from those who have been most critical of her Carbon Dioxide TAX lies and ineptitude.

She is failing miserably and has been shown to be a shrew of the highest order in her attempts.

But the fascientists started long before JuLIAR's frantic efforts.

Wolfgang Wagner resigns as editor-in-chief of Remote Sensing because a sceptical paper was published without warmists getting yet another chance to close it down. As he explains:

The managing editor of Remote Sensing selected three senior scientists from renowned US universities, each of them having an impressive publication record. Their reviews had an apparently good technical standard and suggested one “major revision”, one “minor revision” and one “accept as is”. The authors revised their paper according to the comments made by the reviewers and, consequently, the editorial board member who handled this paper accepted the paper (and could in fact not have done otherwise). Therefore, from a purely formal point of view, there were no errors with the review process. But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors.

This is not how peer review is meant to work in global warming circles. It’s generally been warmists reviewing warmists, and rejecting sceptics, to preserve the “consensus”.
To demonstrate, here’s an email revealed in the Climategate scandal, from the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones to Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann”

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

Another example:

When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley ("one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to ”get him ousted.”

As Professor Edward Wegman concluded after his committee inquired into the Mann hockey stick and the nature “peer review” in global warming circles:

One of the interesting questions associated with the ‚"hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published…
However, it is immediately clear that the Mann, Rutherford, Jones, Osborn, Briffa, Bradley and Hughes form a clique, each interacting with all of the others. A clique is a fully connected subgraph, meaning everyone in the clique interacts with every one else in the clique.

His report added:

Of course, if a given discipline area is small and the authors in the area are tightly coupled, then this process is likely to turn up very sympathetic referees. These referees may have coauthored other papers with a given author. They may believe they know that author’s other writings well enough that errors can continue to propagate and indeed be reinforced.

In the Mann hockey stick shambles, for instance, Wegman found there were just 43 climate scientists in the world acting as “gatekeepers”.
But now the clique’s power is breaking down. Who could have dreamed that the editor of scientific journal could accidentally send a paper to three reviewers who each share to some except the scepticism of the two authors?
Must be many more sceptics around than you are told.
Here’s what I’d like to know. Did it ever trouble Wagner when, in the past, the papers of warmists were reviewed only by fellow warmists, as in the Mann case? And why resign now when the paper itself has not been proven wrong?
Wagner says only:

…In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.

But Dr Roy Spencer says this is nonsense:

But the paper WAS precisely addressing the scientific arguments made by our opponents, and showing why they are wrong! That was the paper’s starting point! We dealt with specifics, numbers, calculations…while our critics only use generalities and talking points. There is no contest, as far as I can see, in this debate. If you have some physics or radiative transfer background, read the evidence we present, the paper we were responding to, and decide for yourself.

If some scientists would like do demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication. Instead, it appears the IPCC gatekeepers have once again put pressure on a journal for daring to publish anything that might hurt the IPCC’s politically immovable position that climate change is almost entirely human-caused. I can see no other explanation for an editor resigning in such a situation.

Professor Roger Pielke Snr is right:

Wagner also writes “three reviewers ….. probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors”. First, he fails to define what is a “climate sceptic”. If this litmus test was required of all referees (that they have to be “correct” in their views of climate science), then the review process itself has failed.

(Via Watts Up With That.)



http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/a...the_consensus/

Time is always on the side of truth.

I thought there were two moronic issues that would destroy this ridiculous TAX:

Craig Thomson; and

Andrew Wilkie.

But JuLIAR has made herself the third, and the hot favourite at that.

JULIA Gillard’s leadership could be over in just a few weeks. She’s suddenly out of tricks and out of time.

She is simply incompetent.

Another reputation Gillard will never shake is that she’s untrustworthy. No other Prime Minister has stolen an election with such a brazen fraud as her “there will be no carbon tax” promise.

In May, at the Victorian Labor conference, she told her already jittery party she just needed the two years before the next election to turn around the polls.



It was an appeal for time - time to destroy the Coalition’s scare campaign against her carbon dioxide tax, to be introduced next July.



Her theory overlooked two big problems. One is that it assumed Gillard would not make more mistakes in the meantime.



Oops.



The other is that it assumed she actually did have two years.



False.



Last Sunday, independent Andrew Wilkie said he was deadly serious about his threat to vote down the Government if it did not honour its promise to him by May to impose mandatory pre-commitment technology on poker machines to limit losses: “If they don’t pull off this reform I will withdraw my support.” There is no way Labor can agree to Wilkie’s demand.
Its MPs in NSW have been stunned by the anger of many Labor-voting punters in the massive leagues clubs, particularly ones in Labor seats, against this “licence to bet”.



This means an election within 10 months is likely, especially with the Liberals unofficially saying Wilkie would get their preferences, almost guaranteeing him his own seat.



Now calculate what shape Labor will be in at a June election with Gillard in charge.



Her promises will seem empty. Her achievements will be none. Her failures will be plenty. Her carbon dioxide tax will still be just a threat, not a reality.



Labor will be slaughtered.

Column - Gillard has less time than she thinks | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

I would have preferred that this ridiculous TAX died on it's own lack of merit, but this government is so incompetent, the TAX will just be collateral damage in the far greater destruction through ineptitude.