BUT SHE KNOWS ABOUT TAXES
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 17, 11 (06:13 am)
Yesterday’s NSW People’s Forum saw Premier Kristina Keneally face an interesting carbon question:
Asked what impact the tax would have on global temperatures and emissions, Ms Keneally replied she was not a scientist so she could not give an answer.
Oh, come on. At least Julia Gillard sent a stand-in. In other Keneally news, online empress Alene Composta keepsvalue-adding at the SMH:
As both a woman and victim of an abusive male behaviour, the bond I feel with Kristina is so deep it is almost spiritual.
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PAGING CAPTAIN PAUL WATSON
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 17, 11 (06:11 am)
Wind farms kill whales? Now I’m all conflicted:
A ground-breaking study has confirmed that sonar does disturb the navigation of whales but it has suggested thatoffshore wind farms, as well as oil rigs, and even passing ships, posed an even greater threat.
Scientists at the University of St Andrews studying beaked whales, a species that frequently becomes beached in Britain, concluded that they were extraordinarily timid creatures that were scared “by virtually anything unusual”, despite being the size of a rhinoceros and weighing the same as a London bus.
The findings suggest that more strandings can be expected as ministers are planning a major expansion in the number of offshore wind farms …
The Institute of Cetacean Research will love this. In wind farm future, whales come to you! China is also achieving great advances in wind farmery:
In 2010, China overtook the United States as the global leader in installed wind power capacity, representing yet another triumph in the much-hyped clean tech race between the world’s two largest economies. Looking beyond the numbers, however, the true nature of China’s wind energy development appears far more bleak …
The reality is that a significant share of China’s installed wind capacity is not connected to any grid.
So long as some more whales get offed, I’m good with it.
(Via Ganesh Sahathevan and Larry T.)
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LIE AVOIDED
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 17, 11 (06:05 am)
One way to dodge dishonesty:
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has refused to explicitly say that the Australian Greens forced her to introduce a carbon tax …
Bob Brown will be pleased. Others aren’t:
Ms Gillard’s appearance in Adelaide was marked by rowdy protest by members of the socialist youth group Resistance …
Also on hand to welcome the PM were about 20 anti-carbon tax protesters while three people also held up a placard welcoming the move to put a price on carbon.
Only three? Guess there wasn’t time to spontaneously organise anything.
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474 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S GIGGLE TAX
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (10:23 pm)
Paul Murray analyses Gillard’s giggle:
Have you noticed that the giggle always has the same number of notes? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Always five. Sometimes with a charming gurgle at the end.
Funny that. And always the same cadence that flows from high to low on each alternate note. With a girly toss of the red locks. Real Julia? Unlikely.
The cackling climate-taxer was in Adelaide tonight to list all the things that will happen unless we give her money:
“More extreme bushfire conditions and droughts, falling crop yields, loss of species, increased cyclone intensity, coastal flooding as sea levels rise.”
About $12 billion per year ought to fix things. Gillard was speaking in Adelaide, where other issues occupied local minds:
About 150 people who were protesting in support of gay marriage were earlier ordered away from the hall where Ms Gillard was speaking.
The ABC spots what it believes to be a telling detail:
Ms Gillard delivered the key note address on behalf of the Don Dunstan Foundation, which is named after theopenly-gay former South Australian premier.
No, he wasn’t. Dunstan remained properly closeted for most of his life, in the usual Adelaide way.
UPDATE. Further from our planet-saving PM:
“If Australia does not adopt a carbon price in 2011, we probably never will,” she told the crowd.
Drawing the only cheers of the night.
“This is the year of decision – setting Australia on the path to a high skill, low carbon future, or leaving our economy to decay into a rusting industrial museum.”
No, that would be the trade union movement.
A carbon price would kick-start Australia’s “journey of transformation” towards a low carbon economy where new technologies and job opportunities awaited.
She likened it to how Google or Facebook changed the world.
Remember when Google and Facebook made you turn off your air-conditioner and lights? Yeah, just like that.
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ROYAL ERROR
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (09:50 pm)
Guandong Enterprises is usually much better than this.
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Gillard will hurt you more than’s she’s admitting
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 17, 11 (06:21 am)
Be clear: Julia Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax may start low - so people don’t scream - but must end very high to do its job:
CHARGES on greenhouse gas emissions will skyrocket by between 118 per cent and 315 per cent when the carbon tax converts to an emissions trading scheme, according to new modelling conducted for the resources industry.
The research, undertaken for the Minerals Council of Australia by the Centre for International Economics, finds the carbon price would jump from $22 a tonne to $49 a tonne, assuming the conversion from the fixed-price carbon tax to an emissions trading scheme takes place in 2016-17…
The rise is based on an assumption that the government’s emissions reduction target is 5 per cent below 2000 levels, which is Australia’s current unconditional commitment. But a 15 per cent target would produce a price of $71 and a 25 per cent target—which the government could move to in the event of a global emissions reduction agreement—would see the carbon price jump from $22 a tonne to $93 a tonne.
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Gillard deceives again: I am not alone
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 17, 11 (05:46 am)
Once again, Julia Gillard tells an untruth in her speech last night on her carbon dioxide tax:
Ms Gillard said human-induced climate change was real and opinion polls could not change that. ‘’I ask, who would I rather have on my side?’’ she said. ‘’Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt?
‘’Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world?’’
“Every”?
Here are just some of the climate scientists who’d object to Gillard including them in her list of supporters:
Professor Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry, and has published more than 200 books and scientific papers.
Professor Nir Shaviv is a member of the Racah Insitute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests cover a wide range of topics in astrophysics. ...His studies on the possible relationships between cosmic ray intensity and the Earth’s climate, and the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms and Ice Age Epochs on Earth were widely echoed in the scientific literature.Professor Henrik Svensmark is the head of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research, at DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark.
Professor Willie Wei-Hock Soon is an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Professor Roger Pielke Sr is Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado in Boulder and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins.
Professor John Christy is Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In 1989 Christy and Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a NASA/Marshall scientist, developed a global temperature data set from microwave data observed from satellites beginning in 1979. For this achievement, the Spencer-Christy team was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991.Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.
William Kininmonth is a former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre.
Here are scientists in directly related fields who would object to Gillard’s statement:
Professor Bob Carter is an adjunct Research Fellow at James Cook University (Queensland). He is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than thirty years professional experience, and holds degrees from the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the University of Cambridge (England). He has held tenured academic staff positions at the University of Otago (Dunedin) and James Cook University (Townsville), where he was Professor and Head of School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999.
Professor Vincent Courtillot is professor of geophysics at the University of Paris Diderot and Director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris. He is past president of the European Union of Geosciences and currently chairs the scientific council of the City of Paris.
Professor Freeman Dyson FRS, a world-renowned theoretical physicist, is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton where he held a chair for many years. He is the author of numerous widely read science books.Professor William Happer is a physicist who has specialised in the study of optics and spectros-copy. He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
Professor Anthony Kelly, CBE, FRS is Emeritus Professor of Materials Science and presently Distinguished Research Fellow, Department of Materials Science, University of Cambridge, U.K. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Surrey from 1975 until 1994.
Here is a climate scientist who agrees man is heating the world but thinks Gillard’s plans won’t work:
Professor Roger Pielke Jr is professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Here are economists who says policies such as Gillard’s are ineffectual responses to a dubious problem:
Professor David Henderson was formerly Head of the Economics and Statistics Department of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.
Professor Ross McKitrick joined the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph in 1996. He received a BA in economics from Queen’s University and an MA (1990) and PhD (1996) from UBC. His main area of interest is environmental economics. He is currently working on projects relating to state-contingent environmental policy, econometric methods for measuring global warming, and evaluation of climate models. Journals in which he has published include the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Geophysical Research Letters, Energy Journal, Empirical Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Canadian Journal of Economics.
Here are hundreds of other scientists who’d say Gillard is wrong.
So against Gillard’s question, I’d put this:
Who would you rather have on your side, a proven liar, alarmist Tim Flannery and extremist Bob Brown, or Professor Richard Lindzen, Professor Roger Pielke and Professor John Christy?
UPDATE
Carbon pricing is supposed to create jobs by making fossil fuels appreciably more expensive, thereby creating a market signal that disfavors carbon-intensive industry and stimulates less carbon-intensive economic activity. The economic parts of theory seem sound enough.However, it is the political realities that the theory does not account for. Australia’s economy is very carbon intensive ... Thus, if carbon pricing were to work exactly as the Prime Minister describes, it will necessary lead to a great deal of economic dislocation and change—Consider that to meet the 5% emissions reduction target (from 2000 levels), without relying on offsets or other tricks, implies that Australia’s economy would need to become as carbon efficient as Japan’s by the end of this decade. How such a profoundly disruptive transitional period would be managed is the one issue that advocates of a high carbon price have never really dealt with—the market’s invisible hand will take care of it I guess....
The oft-stated idea that the proceeds of a carbon tax will be used to compensate those who fact higher costs does not address the issue of dislocation in the economy....
There are only two realistic outcomes here. One is that the carbon tax proposal is scrapped. With this speech it seems highly unlikely that Gillard will be the one doing any scrapping. So it would probably be via an election or a change in leadership, such as if Kevin Rudd becomes captain of the Brisbane Broncos. The second possible outcome is that the carbon pricing is watered down so far that its enactment allows Labor to claim success while limiting any actual impact from the tax on the economy. Of course, that would undercut its stated purpose—to transform the economy.
Either way, I do not see a good outcome here for Gillard or for carbon pricing.
IPCC boss says warming causes earthquakes: report
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 17, 11 (12:11 am)
If Pachauri really said this, he must be dismissed as a fool and rank alarmist who utterly discredits the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change he leads:
Given that human actions are increasingly interfering with the delicate balance of nature, natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and tsunamis will occur more frequently, said Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, director general of TERI, and the chief of the inter-governmental panel on Climate Change.
Addressing students at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham on the sixteenth Institution Day Celebrations here on Friday, he lauded the efforts of the administration, pertaining to their green drive.
“Unless we live in harmony with nature, unless we are able to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and adopt renewable energy sources and until we change our life styles, the world will increasingly become unfit for human habitation,” he said, adding that our ancestors put their emphasis on ethics and social morality and had less comforts perhaps but more fresh air and water.
(Thanks to reader Carrington.)
More people die of fear of nuclear power than of the power itself
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 17, 11 (12:01 am)
Associated Professor David Wigg, who died last year, was director of Clinical Radiobiology at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and in 2007 carefully explained the health risks of exposure to radiation.
With the risks of sickness so low, the only explanation he could think of for the kind of wild hysteria we see now is “radiation phobia” - a condition more deadly that the thing which inspires it:
If it is assumed that there are no threshold doses, estimates of the likely incidence of cancer in exposed populations will be extremely high when applied to large populations. Estimates of 50,000 or more deaths in the USA from minute doses from Chernobyl have been made. In reality the doses sustained by the USA population were well below threshold doses and the cancer risk was therefore negligible. Grossly exaggerated predictions like this are a major contributor to the exaggerated fear of radiation (radiation phobia) which is now so prevalent in the community. In the nuclear industry world-wide, before Chernobyl (1986), there were only 28 deaths from nontreatment related radiation injuries. These numbers are negligible compared with, for example, coal mining deaths.
At Chernobyl there were 2 groups that received high doses of radiation. 28 workers died within four months as a consequence of very high doses received in the emergency
clean-up procedures and 19 more subsequently died. Children, who are more sensitive to radiation, received high thyroid doses through concentration of radioactive iodine 131 (half life 8.0 days). By the year 2000 about 4,000 children had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer but only 9 deaths were attributed to radiation. Thyroid cancer is usually not fatal if diagnosed and treated early. There has been a total of 56 fatalities from Chernobyl as at 2004 .Apart from these high dose cases, large numbers received low doses from contamination of the environment by radioactive isotopes from Chernobyl but there has been no evidence of any increase in leukaemia or other cancers and no increase in hereditary diseases in this large population (2, p. 124).
Unfortunately because of widespread radiation phobia there were an estimated 1250 suicides and between 100,000 and 200,000 elective abortions in Western Europe (2, p. 128). The great tragedy of Chernobyl was that so much harm was done – not by the effects of radiation - but by the irrational fear of it.
(Thanks to reader Frank.)
Just in time for the next Christmas Island riot
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (07:01 pm)
The monsoon season is tapering off, and here come the boats again:
Another suspected asylum seeker boat has been intercepted off Australia’s north-west coast.
The Customs’ vessel Storm Bay, operating under the control of Border Protection Command, intercepted the vessel this morning, north of Ashmore Islands.
“Initial indications suggest there are 48 passengers and two crew on board,” a statement from Customs and Border Protection said.
And off they go to happy little Christmas Island.
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