As politicians fiddle in Copenhagen, scientists offer some extreme ideas — from giant carbon filters to space nets — to help solve Earth's climate problems — and, we've rounded up eight of them.
Obama Changes Schedule, Citing Climate 'Progress'
President abruptly alters timing of upcoming appearance at Copenhagen climate summit, hoping to capitalize on steps by India and China, White House official says
GOP: 'Jobs' Mantra Hides Tax Agenda
Republicans charge Democrats' jobs strategies rely on new taxes, more spending and ballooning deficit
Amanda Knox: Guilty
Court sentences coed, 22, to 26 years in prison for murdering her British roommate in a brutal sexual assault.
Rudd considers quick Danish dash
KEVIN Rudd could do a quick trip to the opening days of the Copenhagen climate change conference next week.
Rudd Snubs Kristina Keneally
TWO days after becoming NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally has not heard from fellow Labor leader Kevin Rudd. The Prime Minister sent a warning to state Labor via the media this week "to get its act together". The US-born premier confirmed today that she has yet to speak to Mr Rudd but took time out to publicly praise him. When asked if she was disappointed over the telephone silence, she responded: "Not at all". "Kevin Rudd is a principled man," Ms Keneally said in Sydney.
WOMEN are not as scared of Tony Abbott as the Labor Party would like
WOMEN are not as scared of Tony Abbott as the Labor Party would like and just a small number of voters think he's an extremist, an exclusive Galaxy national poll has found. A large proportion of women want to know more about him, blunting expectations of an immediate backlash from female voters.
Teen charged with strangling brother, 10
STRANGLING his brother satisfied a craving "like a hungry person eating a hamburger", teen says.
Walk the dog or face time behind bars
PET owners could be severely punished for not walking their dogs under proposed laws.
Woman 'forced victim to eat dog food'
A WOMAN is accused of attacking a burns victim and forcing him to eat dog food because he was allegedly spreading rumours.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Steven Seagal Lawman!
Why the "Out for Justice" star is putting a chokehold on crime ... for real!
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Guest: Glenn Beck
What does Barbara Walters really think about Beck? Glenn has answers!
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Guest: Karl Rove
The president pushes his plan in Pennsylvania -- How will it go in the Keystone State?
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Full of Hot Air?
Why the Climate Change Conference could do the planet more harm than good!
=== Comments ===
What Are Global Warming Supporters Trying to Hide?
By John Lott
This is the age of computers and Web sites. If the institutions have the data sets available on their computers, they can easily be put up on a Web site for the world to see.
Why are global warming advocates so secretive about their data? So far, the spotlight has been on the University of East Anglia and its refusal to release their surface temperature data, by far the most comprehensive long-term worldwide surface data available, but global warming advocates reassure us that this shouldn’t really concern us because some other data sources reportedly show the same thing. Unfortunately, the problem of secretiveness is hardly limited to the University of East Anglia.
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Please Pay Attention: Your Money Is at Risk
By Bill O'Reilly
A big dog and pony show in Washington Thursday as President Obama hosted the so-called jobs forum designed to combat rising unemployment.
Anything that puts Americans back to work is good, but the government can't provide jobs on a massive scale. Thank God President Obama seems to understand that.
Now you may remember that I volunteered to be the president's top adviser. So far I haven't heard from the White House, but I'm still optimistic Mr. Obama will be checking in shortly. In the meantime, here's my advice on unemployment and the bad economy.
Mr. President, No. 1, stop the craziness and freeze government spending for two years. That will put some starch back into the U.S. dollar, which is falling apart.
No. 2, only the private sector can create meaningful jobs, so give companies that hire people tax credits for doing so. Encourage private business to hire more people by giving them tax breaks.
No. 3, because the federal deficit is now $1.4 trillion, which is completely insane, you need to institute a two percent federal sales tax on everything but food in the grocery stores. Let's call it a deficit-buster tax, and it could bring in more than $200 billion a year. Combined with the spending freeze, the policy would whittle down the deficit substantially.
Again, reversing the deficit would encourage foreign investors to put money back into the USA because the dollar would be worth more.
Next, do not raise income taxes and keep the capital gains tax at 15 percent. That will lead to more money being spent and invested in companies so they could hire more people.
Are you getting all this, Mr. President? I hope so.
It is very obvious that we simply cannot keep borrowing money and spending more than we take in. That will lead to complete economic chaos down the road.
Yes, some people will suffer with tough spending discipline, but the greater good is that the U.S. economy gets strong again. This is not the time for liberal spending policies and enhanced entitlements. It is the time to help the private sector prosper.
In the end, this is a national security issue. If the USA continues the crazy spending, every American will suffer — and soon.
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POPULATION EXPLOSION
Tim Blair
Baby Jihadis await their instructions:
When we grow up, we want to be dead!
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WARMIES AT WAR
Tim Blair
• Jones v Mann!
• Flannery v Hansen!
• UN v CRU!
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PIE FIGHT
Tim Blair
David Thorne is asked to design a logo. With pie charts. For free.
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DASH CONSIDERED
Tim Blair
Recent news:
US President Barack Obama has confirmed he will attend a major climate summit next month …Kaidra’s response:
Krudd is on the phone to his travel agent booking a ticket right now.And today:
Kevin Rudd is considering an unscheduled dash to Denmark next week in the opening days of the Copenhagen climate change conference …CLIMATE UPDATE. Global Warming was due to run in the fifth today at Rosehill … but it’s been scratched. Mick comments: “Apparently the stewards were confused with the barrier trial times. The trainer had used a regressive polynomial smoothing to get rid of some spurious times and submitted them to the officials as value added entries. When the stewards requested the raw stopwatch data the trainer told them he had thrown it out when he was moving to a new stable. They had no choice but to scratch poor old Warmy.”
CLIMATE UPDATE II. Gropenhagen!
CLIMATE UPDATE III. Attention, harried Prime Ministerial staffers! Wondering what to get the boss for Christmas? Wonder no more!
CLIMATE UPDATE IV. Why is the PM even bothering with any Carbonhagen Hopenchangen capering? The game is over:
India will not accept a legally binding emission cut nor a peak year of carbon emissions at the global climate talks in Copenhagen, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday.
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Penguin brains at work
Andrew Bolt
Only one of these two reports on deaths of Little Penguins on Phillip Island warns of a link to global warming. Guess which and why.
Report one, from the ABC’s PM program:
MARK COLVIN: Scientists monitoring Australia’s most famous population of Little Penguins have had a scare, after some chicks died of starvation because their parents had to go farther afield than usual to find food.Report two, from a leading Melbourne newspaper:
Approximately 1800 have died… There are only about 200 of the birds left on the island.Give up? Then read on below for a perfect example of confimation bias.
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Climategate: an Australian link
Andrew Bolt
Biritish Climategate scientist Phil Jones has stepped down pending an inquiry into emails in which he urged colleagues to destroy evidence and boasted of having used a “trick” to ”hide the decline” in world temperatures.
Graham Readfearn notes that a former close colleague of Jones now holds a key warmist job in the Rudd Government’s bureaucracy:
Professor Jean Palutikof, who worked alongside Professor Jones as a co-director of the CRU between 1998 and 2004… She’s also a senior federal Government scientist heading the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.Palutikof tells Readfearn the emails are innocent.
OK, he says.
UPDATE
Even the IPCC chief now concedes an inquiry is needed:
The head of the UN’s climate science body says claims that UK scientists manipulated data on global warming should be investigated. . . . Dr Pachauri told BBC Radio 4’s The Report programme that the claims were serious and he wants them investigated. . . . Jonathon Porritt, the former chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, called the developments ‘very worrying’ because the row threatened to undermine the integrity of the IPCC.UPDATE 2
Robert Greiner demonstrates how the Climatic Research Unit’s computer codes were rigged to make almost any data look like evidence of rapid warming.
UPDATE 3
Perhaps the most dramatic fall-out in Britain so far:
The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.So much for “the science is settled” argument.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
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How hotter it truly was
Andrew Bolt
Remember the “hockey stick” tricked up by Climategate scientist Michael Mann - and adopted by the IPCC report he cowrote? Remember how it claimed to show we’d never been warmer, when, as Steve McIntyre demonstrated, the world had in fact been much warmer in Medieval times?
JoNova makes clear just how baseless was Mann’s claim with this map of the many studies that contradict Mann’s false claim, which was so eagerly promoted by the IPCC to scare the world:
(This map is derived from this superb interactive version on CO2 Science, giving sources.)
Go to JoNova’s site to read the full post, and see how another Climategate scientist and IPCC author, Keith Briffa, tricked up another graph in much the same desperately misleading way.
And still I hear BBC reports on how this is a scandal about nothing, and does not affect the “fundamental” science. Listen to the true denialists.
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RSPCA should go walkies instead
Andrew Bolt
If Barney squeals on me, I’m gone:
PET owners could be punished for not walking their dogs, under radical new laws being proposed by the RSPCA. Under the legislation, they would have to regularly exercise dogs, ensure animals are not kept chained up and give their pets adequate food and water.
If the proposal becomes law, dog and cat owners across Australia would face prosecution, fines of up to $12,000 fines for animal cruelty and magistrates could consider jail in extreme circumstances.
Dr Hugh Wirth, head of RSPCA Victoria, is one of four experts the Federal Department of Agriculture’s welfare division has appointed to draft national animal welfare guidelines.
“The draft will tell people what they have to do rather than what they want to do,” Dr Wirth said… The proposed new laws are designed to formalise the national code, which states dogs must be walked at least once a day.
Now for some laws to punish bullies who don’t mind their own business.
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The myth of the Abbott-hating women
Andrew Bolt
What Tim Colebatch doesn’t add is that the myth of Tony Abbott’s unpopularity with women is promoted only by a certain kind of ideologically driven woman:
TONY Abbott unpopular with women? That was one theory going around this week, but the polls expose it unambiguously as another urban myth.The latest Galaxy poll tends to agree:
The Nielsen poll quizzed 3500 women about the Liberal leadership in the past six months. If anything, the answers suggest that Mr Abbott is more popular among women voters than men....The candidate who had problems with women voters specifically was Mr Turnbull, backed by 35 per cent of men but only 28 per cent of women…
Exclude the don’t-knows and the contrast between Mr Turnbull and Mr Abbott is striking. Of men who had a preference, 40 per cent wanted Mr Turnbull and 21 per cent Mr Abbott. Among women with a preference, only 33 per cent preferred Mr Turnbull while 26 per cent preferred Mr Abbott.
Within hours of his elevation to the Liberal leadership on Tuesday the Federal Government was calling Mr Abbott an “extremist”. There were also expectations that women would reject the man who has strongly opposed abortion and previously said wives should be at home, not at work…The spokeswomen for the sisterhood should at last realise that plenty of women are just as opposed as Abbott to abortion and just as keen for mothers to raise their own toddlers.
Galaxy found that 42 per cent of women felt they didn’t know much about him and that just 13 per cent of women thought he was an extremist.
UPDATE
Julie Szego says we shouldn’t forget that Abbott is sexy, and just the kind of boy that needs mothering:
It’s time to pour cold water on this Abbott-has-a-woman-problem theory....The uncomfortable truth is that Abbott stirs up weird, confusing and deliciously compelling emotions in the fairer sex… In fact, I’d wager that if you gathered a handful of inner-city, tertiary-educated women - the types who would sooner slap a carbon tax on their grandmothers than vote Liberal - plied them with a glass or 10 and asked how they felt about Abbott, the response, to bastardise an Abbottian phrase, would not always be pure of mind....
So what is it with women and Abbott? The love-hate magnetism between antagonists? Maybe. Peculiar fantasies about seminary boys? Err, let’s not go there....
But now we’re getting to part of Abbott’s endearing appeal: his tendency to screw up, misjudge and get caught out. Women more readily empathise with people who struggle to play the game, especially one so highly choreographed as politics with its bluster and posturing. It may sound counter-intuitive, but you can’t help feeling sorry for Abbott when he insults a dying man, gets caught on camera (again!) swearing at his (young and female) opponent and says loaded stuff that makes his colleagues cringe, such as calling for a ‘’new paternalism’’ in Aboriginal policy.
But what cements the crush is the mea culpa that typically follows. How many times have we seen him face the humiliating music?
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Me, too
Andrew Bolt
Where Barack Obama goes, suddenly Kevin Rudd wants to go, too.
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Climategate: Which one blew the whistle?
Andrew Bolt
Meet Tom Wigley, the Climategate insider who may finally have choked on all the deceit he witnessed.
It is almost certain that the leak of 4000 documents from the University of East Anglia was not the work of a hacker but of a whisteblower. The sheer effort of retrieving, itemising and sorting all those documents, and of weeding out any that were purely personal or irrelevant, required someone who had not just the computer skills and the access, but who knew what was important, and had the motivation to put in countless hours of work.
If the leaker was an insider, here are the candidates - named and pictured. The list also shows the extraordinary reach of the University’s Climatic Research Unit into climate science circles when judged even just by formal ties.
Of course, I’m sure none of these people did leak the emails, which they would know is probably an illegal act and one likely to make them a pariah in climate science. So let’s rule out immediately the suggestion that any of these people did their duty to the public and blew the whistle on a colossal scam. I wouldn’t accuse them of anything so serious. I especially wouldn’t accuse Wigley of being a leaker.
But imagine if one of them had indeed realised that enough was enough, and too many lines had been crossed by the Climategate scientists- including criminal ones. Which one of them might have cracked, and decided to blow the whistle? Or put it this way, which of them showed the greatest evidence of an uneasy conscience - or a growing sense of seeing a wrong that needed righting?
Again, I rule out that any of these people actually did leak the emails. This is purely hypothetical - an exercise in trying to determine the most ethical and principled of the CRU staff and associates, as evidenced by the emails.
And I’m proud to say that for me the answer is a fellow Australian, Adelaide-born Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and a CRU Visiting Fellow.
Here are three examples of his frustration with Climategate scientists hiding data, fudging results, covering up, making “dishonest presentations”, and presenting “deceptive” proofs of warming. All these protests are from this year - and two from just the past two months. All show his frustration, even anger or possibly fear, at the scandalous deceit and coverups he was witnessing.
Of course, you may wonder why he didn’t go public with the serious concerns he was raising in these emails to his colleagues…
EVIDENCE: Briffa must “be very, very careful”
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Climategate: why Google won’t auto-suggest
Andrew Bolt
To Climategate, add Googlegate. They really, really seem keen not to steer you to this news, don’t they? Better try Bing instead, if you want to be sure to get the full story.
A warning for the future.
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City of Melbourne scheme vanishes into hot air
Andrew Bolt
The market for hot air has collapsed in the US:
Eighteen months ago, the Chicago Climate Exchange was riding high as the planets seemed to be aligning for the only national carbon-trading venue in the US.And ouch for the poor investors:
Barack Obama, an enthusiastic supporter of cap-and-trade, was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination. John McCain, his Republican opponent, had introduced a series of cap-and-trade bills in the US Senate. The price of the carbon-emission permits traded on the exchange was at an historic peak of $7.40 a tonne.
This year, the prospects of a mandatory federal carbon regime look even better. President Obama heads to the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen next week vowing that the US will cut emissions…
Yet volumes and prices on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) have collapsed, with emissions permits now trading at historic lows of between 10 cents and 15 cents per tonne. That reflects the pervasive uncertainty over what kind of carbon regime the US might have and the CCX role within it.
As reader David notes:
The collapse of the CFI traded carbon price on the Chicago Climate Exchange may have a few casualties amongst those members who bought offset contracts at ridiculous prices.
But, David, who’d be so stupid as to invest in something so dodgy?
Australian participant list attached. Main player is City of Melbourne!!! How much cash have they used buying carbon offsets for the city’s vehicles etc at maybe $4/unit - price now $0.15!
And, indeed:
Participant MembersWorse news, I’m afraid. The City of Melbourne has been with the Exchange since its very peak:Electric Power Generation
AGL Hydro Partnership
Municipalities
City of Melbourne, Australia
Offset Providers
CO2 Australia
Monday, 18 December 2006But, who knows, we could have flogged carbon credits rather than bought them. Let the council open the books.
The City of Melbourne will join the prestigious Chicago Climate Exchange, the Lord Mayor John So announced today…
“Establishing a city-based emissions trading scheme is a key recommendation of our Zero Net Emissions by 2020 strategy…
The steps to becoming a member of the CCX are as follows:…
4. Make CCX reduction commitment
Join CCX and commit to emission reductions through to 2010;
6. Demonstrate progress through annual “true-up”
Confirm emission increases/reductions achieved and buy, sell or trade accordingly. If Council fails to meet its annual reduction target it will need to buy ‘credits’ to cover the shortfall.
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Climategate: CBC on the greatest scientific scandal of our times
Andrew Bolt
Rex Murphy of CBC gets it. A lesson for Australian TV talking heads on not just the importance of the scandal, but how it can inspire compelling TV comment, too.
More evidence on Monday of readers’ hunger for news that the mainstream media here is running dead on. It’s news I’m rather pleased by.
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Even its poll expert is called Green
Andrew Bolt
Who puts together ABC TV’s Melbourne news? We certainly know how they vote.
Tonight’s bulletin includes:
A report on an alleged Greens surge in tomorrow’s byelections in Higgins and Bradfield. Two Greens candidates, one Liberal and two Greens-leaning voters are interviewed.Please.
A long and loving promotion of a Google blog site that urges people to tell the Copenhagen warmist delegates how they want to be saved from global warming. Global warming preacher Tim Flannery, another warmist, and the warmist Google designer of the site are all interviewed. The reporter stand infront of Liberal Kelly O’Dwyer;s office and suggest this poll is a referendum on new Liberal leader Tony Abbott. (No mention of Climategate, of course.)
A UN official I’ve never heard of before lectures us again on refugees.
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