472 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S BELIEF TAX
Tim Blair – Friday, March 18, 11 (10:40 pm)
Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham questions the need for a $30 million advertising campaign to promote the government’s carbon dioxide tax, leading to interesting responses from an ABC reporter:
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Well this carbon tax is a controversial policy. It’s a politically charged debate and there is no guarantee that it will get through the Parliament.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: You believe in climate change don’t you?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Look I absolutely accept the science and balance of scientific opinion.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: But there are some people in the community who don’t so would it be a good thing for the Government to spend money to convince people that climate change is real?
They must be made to believe.
THE EGGMAN’S GONNA BLOW
Tim Blair – Friday, March 18, 11 (07:47 pm)
A mighty Wall of Shame lists journalistic errors in coverage of Japan’s nuclear emergency. Fox News is featured for this remarkable gaffe:
Screen graphic showing the nuclear power plants in Japan; includes one called “Shibuya Eggman” which is actually a niteclub in downtown Tokyo!
Further here on the Shame Wall’s creation.
(Via s_dog)
AHMADINEJAD WAS BUSY
Tim Blair – Friday, March 18, 11 (07:45 pm)
Up in the sky:
Iran has conducted another experiment in its race to reach space, launching a rocket that bears a capsule that can contain an animal into the atmosphere Tuesday, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported. The Islamic republic plans to send a manned spaceship into space by 2022; in this experiment they made do with launching only amonkey doll.
Last year they launched worms, two turtles and a rat. Somewhere in Tehran, a kid is wondering why all his stuff keeps disappearing.
(Via Steve S.)
PAY NOW AND PAY LATER
Tim Blair – Friday, March 18, 11 (12:17 pm)
Reader Archer forwards a tax-mongering GetUp! email:
We may not have mining magnates, carbon czars nor polluters’ press on our side, but we do have the numbers. Together, each of us chipping in, our sum total will be far greater than its parts - and able to match the polluter lobby’s campaign where it counts: out on the streets and on the air. Will you fund the fight for our future with $10 a week until we win the battle for a price on carbon?
And when you win, you get to keep paying. Onward to victory!
ANGER RISING
Tim Blair – Friday, March 18, 11 (12:15 pm)
“Is fear stalking the streets of Tokyo?” asks RTE correspondent Paul Cunningham. “No. But there is a lot of anger being directed at the int media for scaring the public.”
How partisan is Garnaut?
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (06:48 am)
ABC1’s Lateline on Thursday:
Presenter Tony Jones: On Monday, [Tony Abbott] told a community forum the science is not settled, it’s not proven that carbon dioxide is not quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be . . . doesn’t that indicate that there certainly is a cloud on his mind over this issue at the very least?Climate change adviser Ross Garnaut: Oh, well, he was on the ignorant side on Monday night, but not on Tuesday. The Tuesday statement was consistent with the science.
Hold your horses. Garnaut in the Senate Hansard, April 16, 2009:There is uncertainty in the science. The uncertainty is in both directions. On the whole, the uncertainty adds to the case for strong and early mitigation.
Garnaut’s address to the annual conference of supreme and federal court judges, January 25 last year:No, the science is not settled on all of the dimensions of a complex natural system that are important to human society; science is never settled in an absolute sense, and in a complex system the detail will be adjusted continuously as more data becomes available.
Gillard’s hot air
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (06:42 am)
JULIA Gillard this week set you this challenge as she tried to sell her tax on carbon dioxide.
“I ask who I’d rather have on my side: Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt,” the Prime Minister said, “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.”
But now I’ll ask: Would you want on your side a woman so dishonest as to claim she’s backed by “every reputable climate scientist in the world”?
In fact, the reputable climate scientists who’d say Gillard is wrong on global warming include Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Professor Henrik Svensmark, head of Denmark’s Centre for Sun-Climate Research; and John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Among many.
But that isn’t all that Gillard got wrong in her speech on Wednesday to muster support for her tax, which won’t actually cut the world’s temperature by anything anyone could measure.
Here are a few more of her many falsehoods and exaggerations, and they raise another question: if the case for her tax is so strong, why tell such porkies?
Gillard’s claim: “We must embrace ... a decision to cut carbon pollution.”
False: This isn’t a decision to cut carbon but carbon dioxide, which isn’t a pollutant but essential for plant growth.
Gillard’s claim: “Protecting jobs is always our first commitment.”
Deception: No party committed to “protecting jobs” could want this tax.
Gillard’s claim: “Climate change is real.”
Red herring: We all agree the climate changes. Always has. Always will.
Gillard’s claim: “It is caused by human activity.”
Misleading: There is huge debate about how much man’s gases change the climate. By a little? A lot? Is it bad? Or good? No reputable scientist would say man causes all the change detected.
Gillard’s claim: “Global temperatures have risen 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century and continue to rise.”
False: It is true the temperature rose by 0.7 degrees, but it is false or simplistic to insist it continues to rise. The temperature, by most of the five main measures, has plateaued since 2001.
Gillard’s claim: “Globally, 2010 was the equal warmest year on record.”
Cherry-picking: In fact, most of the main data sets disagree.
A homeopathic cure for ABC bias
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (06:35 am)
TWO weeks ago, Jonathan Green, editor of the ABC’s online site The Drum, received an email from some woman from Seddon.
The writer, oddly named Alene Composta, asked if the ABC would like to publish her article exposing an obscene insult the NSW Liberal Party was using against Premier Kristina Keneally.
Her piece was spectacularly bizarre, and I have to omit some graphic details.
It said the Liberals had taken to calling the Premier “the Moose”,
which Composta claimed was slang for female genitalia.
And since a moose was Canadian and the Premier from America, Composta declared: “The sort of barrack room banter that Liberals obviously trade when they think no one will understand their private jokes also embraces racism.”
Already you’d think this was the work of a loon or someone pulling Green’s leg.
But in her email to Green, Composta pointed out how important it was that the ABC accept her piece - and this is where we’re talking not about a slip-up but an ABC culture of bias.
Wrote Composta: “It seems to be that if we can link the Liberals to this crotch talk then there is still a chance we can nudge the election toward Labor, or at least do something to limit what looks like it will be catastrophic damage inflicted by voters ...
“The important thing is that we do everything we can, use every tool we know, to help Kristina.”
And, bingo, Green - who has denied he was motivated by any bias - ran an edited version of her piece.
Anyone not blinkered by, say, ideological fervour might first have done the most basic check on the author of all this weirdness. Indeed, Composta urged Green in another email to “feel free to examine my other writings”.
If he’d done so, he would have started with her blog, a cornucopia of the most psychedelic Leftist hate. Imagine a cross between Catherine Deveny and Marieke Hardy.
Clawback detected
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (06:31 am)
Laurie Oakes disagrees, and says Julia Gillard is finding her feet:
So last Monday - again in dire trouble and desperate to turn things around in the carbon tax battle - Gillard faced the Q&A audience again. And again it paid off.
Gillard did what she should have done when she launched the policy. She acknowledged that she had walked away from an election promise and tried to explain why. “I did not intend to mislead the Australian people,” was the message.
She also tried to explain in understandable terms how her carbon tax and emissions trading plan would work and why she believes it is necessary....The performance at last gave some direction to the Government’s botched campaign to sell the policy.
Then the PM got a boost from a report prepared by the Government’s key climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut.
His suggestion that the carbon price proposal should be linked to tax reforms recommended by former Treasury head Ken Henry was seen as a breakthrough by some influential media commentators.
The reasoning was that a price on carbon would be a lot easier to sell if it was portrayed as a means of cutting income tax.
All must rise
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (06:22 am)
The bottom line must be that everything made with electricity or transported with petrol must be more expensive under Julia Gillard’s plans:
MANUFACTURERS are mocking the Prime Minister’s claim that “low-carbon” goods will cost less, with the carbon tax calculated to add $210 to the price of a new car…
Australian Food and Grocery Council chief executive Kate Carnell yesterday said grocery prices would rise between 3 to 9per cent - averaging 5 per cent - based on the carbon price proposed in 2008 of $10 a tonne in the first year, rising to $26 per tonne.
Ms Carnell said the carbon tax would fuel food prices as each part of the supply chain - from the farm to the factory and the supermarket - had to absorb higher prices for electricity and transport.
Referring to Ms Gillard’s claim of cheaper prices, Ms Carnell replied: “How can it be true? This makes imports cheaper because they are not subject to a carbon charge. Australian manufactured groceries will be proportionately more expensive.
“Does Australia want a food and grocery manufacturing industry in this country?”
A spokesman for Ms Gillard yesterday did not provide any examples of products that would be cheaper under a carbon trading regime.
Of course not. They don’t exist.
The fear of Fukushima is deadlier than the fallout
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (12:01 am)
The accounting begins. Here’s a wall of shame of just some of the journalists who have fed the hysterical fear of a nuclear incident that has killed no one and probably never will.
In the similar hysteria over Chernobyl, the disaster that killed 65 people, the media-whipped panic stampeded up to 200,000 women into having abortions for fear of birth defects.
Once again, it seems the fear of radiation is hurting people more than the radiation itself:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says it has received reports of people being admitted to poison centres around the world after taking iodine tablets.Fears about harmful levels of radiation coming out of the damaged nuclear power plant in Fukishima has seen panic buying of iodine pills in many countries.
Iodine is thought to protect the body’s thyroid and glandular system from radiation.
The French government has dispensed half a million tablets to its Pacific territories as a precautionary measure.
But WHO Western Pacific environmental officer, Steven Iddings, says there are already reports of overdoses in countries close to Japan.
“These would be from maybe frightened people who have self-medicated without the advice of a doctor,” he said.
And in China:
China tried to quell panic buying of iodized salt Thursday after grocery stores across the country were emptied of the seasoning by hordes of people hoping to ward off radiation poisoning after the nuclear accidents in Japan.
The clamor for salt reportedly started after rumors spread, possibly by cellphone text messaging, that China would be hit by a radioactive cloud from Japan’s Fukushima No. 1 (Daiichi) nuclear plant, which had been badly damaged during last week’s earthquake and tsunami.
Utter madness. The journalists who have whipped this up should be ashamed of themselves.
UPDATE
But then there’s Hidetoshi Tagasawa:
The highest radiation level that had been detected in Fukushima Prefecture by the evening of March 17 was 30 microsieverts (a microsievert is one-one thousandth of a millisievert) or lower, with most measurements at around 2 to 5 microsieverts. Compare that to a CT chest scan, a single one of which will expose the recipient to approximately 6,900 microsieverts. Even if a level of 30 microsieverts were to be maintained, one would have to stand outside for 230 continuous hours to be exposed to the same amount of radiation as a CT scan.
Ajnd the live geiger readings from Tokyo show nothing to worry about, with levels declining.
A brilliant video explanation of what really happened - that makes you astonished such an old plant could survive such an unimaginable challenge, not least the tsunami would took out its fuel tanks and soaked its electronics:
(Thanks to readers Gordon, Mark, Carrington, Geoff and Ian.)
The taxpayer-funded “save Gillard’s hide” campaign
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, March 19, 11 (12:01 am)
How can you trust this lot with an $11 billion a year carbon dioxide tax when you can’t even trust them with $30 million?
The ABC’s AM program has been told the Department of Climate Change is working on options for the Government on how to use the money set aside for a public information campaign.
(Thanks to reader Craig.)
As Americans rush to buy geiger counters….
Andrew Bolt – Friday, March 18, 11 (03:35 pm)
This can’t be right. Not after all the screaming headlines about a new Chernoby, nuclear explosions, feeling workers, panic at airports, clouds of radioactivity and more:
The World Health Organisation believes the spread of radiation from a quake-crippled nuclear plant in Japan remains localised and does not pose an immediate risk to human health, Michael O’Leary, the China representative of WHO said on Friday
We will need to make some people accountable for this monstrous scaremongering once the truth becomes undeniable.
(Thanks to reader Felix.)
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