THIS state election was meant to represent a historic political breakthrough for the NSW Greens - instead they have lost credibility, ground and influence, becoming even more ineffectual.Home Page: Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph
Who’s the extremist now?
Miranda Devine – Sunday, March 27, 11 (03:32 am)
WHOEVER put up a placard reading, “Juliar, Bob Browns bitch” behind Tony Abbott as he addressed the no-carbon tax rally in Canberra last week did the Opposition Leader no favours.
The opportunity was gleefully seized by his detractors and the government to divert attention from the Prime Minister’s broken promise not to implement a carbon tax. The fact that thousands of people showed up to anti-carbon tax rallies in Canberra and Melbourne was overlooked.
It is incumbent on conservatives who are prey to the mainstream media to take steps at such conventions to limit the inevitable criticism. Australians don’t like bigots and when such scum show up at such rallies, it is normal to dissociate ones self from them. Instead, we need to document them and show that they are not part of the movement. We cannot rely on the press to accurately portray such events, so we must do so. It isn’t enough to attract the cameras, we must be the cameras.
I am confident at least some of the worst examples are set ups. But I also know fools. There is a desire by some to break down their beliefs into simple axioms, and those don’t always express themselves commensurately with reality. It might feel liberating for some to have a potty mouth, but it isn’t always helpful.
Sun 27 Mar 11 (02:01pm)
Mon 28 Mar 11 (10:51pm)
How quickly we forget when S11 & S13 were wrecking the streets to protest against captalism. The behaviour of the Socialist Alliance and the DSP was acceptable as they crashed and smashed their way through Melbourne and fought running battles with the police to make a point about the evils of capitalism. This is acceptable is it? Whereas a poster alleging that Ms Gillard is in someway responding to the commands of Bob Brown is not. Sticks and stones dear comrades from the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist - whateverist part of the failed communist ideology you are from. You red to thicken your skin a little.
WAITING FOR THE WORLD
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (05:42 am)
An oldtimer filmed at a recent rally in favour of a carbon tax made the standard appeal to emotion. “I’m concerned,” she said, “about the kind of world we’re going to leave my grandchildren.”
Another rally granny at the Melbourne event – organised “spontaneously” by the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Beyond Zero Emissions, the Climate Action Network Australia, the Climate Emergency Network, Environment Victoria, GetUp, Greenpeace, Locals Into Victoria’s Environment, the Moreland Energy Foundation, Oxfam, the World Wildlife Fund and 350.org – offered a similar view: “I’ve got a new grandchild, two weeks old, and I think it’s really important that the world is made safe for him.”
Well, tough luck, ladies.
BACK THEN, THE ENEMY WAS 900 KILOMETRES AWAY
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (04:20 am)
Even in monochrome and shot from the sky – in the armaments sense, when it came to German attacks – old Britainseems so much more acceptable than new Britain.
CANTINA KRISTINA
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (03:55 am)
A local Mexican restaurant throws an employment lifeline to our ex-premier:
Via Rupert L., who emails: “These posters were along New South Head Road, Double Bay, on Sunday but seem to have been souvenired by Monday!”
462 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S LAVA TAX
Tim Blair – Monday, March 28, 11 (04:21 pm)
Tim Flannery and his band of Merry Climateers warn the people of horrors to come:
Geelong will swelter under intense heatwaves and the Great Barrier Reef will become a bed of algae should we fail to act on climate change, the Climate Commission warned …
Climate science expert Prof Will Steffen said the “mega-event” week of the 47C heatwave of 2008 would seem like a cool summer day by 2080 without action.
At the same meeting, one sceptic asked:
How much do you profit from all your scaremongering and alarmist false predictions?
Flannery’s reply:
Well, could I just ask you have you heard any, any sort of alarmist comments or false predictions this evening or what was scaremongering this evening?
You mean apart from Geelong going Saharan and the Great Barrier Reef turning into a swamp unless we have a new tax?
UPDATE. Bob Carter crunches the Climate Commissioners.
RIGGER AND FLARE
Tim Blair – Monday, March 28, 11 (03:05 pm)
Our sensitive friend Andrew Jaspan launches a new online venture – The Conversation, described as combining “academic rigour” with “journalistic flair”. Mark Day reports:
Jaspan is a former editor of Melbourne’s The Age. During his time there he could plainly see the crisis facing journalism …
You might say he had a front-row seat. Another ex-Age identity who is familiar with crisis, the ABC’s Drum editor Jonathan Green, is doing his best to raise standards. But his best isn’t very good:
Copy at the Drum often seems not to be spell-checked prior to publication, recently resulting in exciting new words like “comit” and “hids”. Still, Green makes up for any technical lapses with unerring news judgment. Also at the ABC:debate erupts over the meaning of a half-metre.
(Via Correllio)
EARTH HOUR WINNERS
Tim Blair – Monday, March 28, 11 (02:24 pm)
It’s a well-known fact that Adelaide names are already frightening and alien. But what happens when you take Adelaide names and subject them to an Earth Hour force multiplier …
The founders of a unique South Australian not-for-profit environmental organisation have won the Earth Hour Lifetime Achievement Award.
Burr Dodd and Lolo Houbein were announced as winners of the category during a national Earth Hour event …
Congratulations, Burr and Lolo. And in other South Australian news:
Euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke is in Adelaide today scouting for a spot for a euthanasia clinic.
ALENE: THE ACADEMIC VIEW
Tim Blair – Monday, March 28, 11 (12:42 pm)
Warmy academic Stephan Lewandowsky, one of many taken in by Alene Composta, considers his relationship with the fictional internet phenomenon:
It seems “Alene” is nothing but a sock puppet — a fake internet persona created by persons unknown. I understand that neither “Alene” nor her cat exist; “her” blog is actually someone else’s.
Let’s get our terms right, professor. So far as anyone can tell, Alene was not a sockpuppet but a hoax. Big difference.
This raises some interesting questions: Why would anyone go to the trouble of creating an artificial persona, only to engage in correspondence under the pretence of being a real person?
Perhaps this is just some juvenile fun, as the post-mortem post on “Alene’s” blog suggests ...
There is also something unfunny about this issue, which has now been taken up by a tabloid blog. There is much hilarity among commenters there about how anyone could be gullible enough to believe that a seemingly troubled and challenged person was actually, well, a troubled and challenged person. By some leap of logic this “gullibility”, in turn, somehow disproves the science underlying global warming.
There is nothing funny about global warming. Lewandowsky, who has plainly given this subject an enormous amount of thought, continues:
The use of sock puppets has demonstrably become a tool in Australia in what has often been described as a propaganda war on science and scientists. Second, there are surely ethical issues that arise when someone impersonates a distressed and disabled person for their own purposes, be it juvenile amusement or a failed attempt to cause embarrassment.
For whom was the late Alene a sockpuppet? The embarrassed academic doesn’t say.
Finally, it amplifies yet again what is obvious to most of us: the fact that the climate is changing and that human CO2 emissions are causing it is now unassailable by conventional scientific means, forcing some of those who cannot accept this discomforting fact to seek refuge in the ethical twilight of internet warfare.
There’s something delightfully Composta-ish about that paragraph. Her influence spreads.
UPDATE. Jo Nova sends Lewandowsky to the bench.
Tweeting to the left on the ABC
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (09:12 am)
Carrrington Brigham counts the tweets on the ABC’s Q&A:
Over the last season and this one it’s become quite apparent to a number of people the show has deep left wing roots of a political persuasion.
I thought it was time @DigitalMediaBoy put #qanda to the test and I went back and did the geeky thing of counting all the tweets, classifying the tweets that the ABC moderators screen on telly and then on the actual content of the tweets.
So here is what I found and let me warn there are no surprises!
* There were a total of 53 tweets screened by the ABC moderators.
* 6 tweets that were screened during #QandA were of the political Right.
* 14 were Centre, non-biased.
* 14 were Comical and quite naturally funny including a tweet by Chas Licciardello (ABC employee)
* However 19 tweets were of the Left political persuasion…It’s statistically evident that the ABC producers feel that their audience is of the left political persuasion or that they believe viewers need to be pushed to the left by viewing the overwhelming left tweets.
Hanson heaps shame on the Greens
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:56 am)
The Greens have so far failed to win either of the lower house seats they expected to win in the NSW election, and now even worse humiliation awaits:
PAULINE Hanson was in position last night to win a seat in the NSW Parliament’s Upper House.
After being written off after early counting on Saturday, the former One Nation Party leader and serial candidate crept ahead of Greens candidate Jeremy Buckingham yesterday.
(Thanks to reader Rosemary.)
Tim “1000 years” Flannery gives the government a millennium bug
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:39 am)
Climate Commissioner Tim “1000 years” Flannery has talked the Gillard Government into deep trouble:
TONY Abbott has leapt on a declaration by Tim Flannery - Julia Gillard’s hand-picked salesman for action on climate change - that emissions abatement is a 1000-year proposition to renew his attacks on Labor’s proposed carbon tax. ...In the radio interview, Professor Flannery said: “If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow, the average temperature of the planet’s not going to drop for several hundred years, perhaps over 1000 years."…
Mr Abbott quoted Professor Flannery as he ridiculed the tax as “the ultimate millenium bug”.
“It will not make a difference for 1000 years,” the Opposition Leader told parliament. “So this is a government which is proposing to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of households right around Australia. And for what? To make not a scrap of difference to the environment any time in the next 1000 years.”
Mr Combet said through a spokeswoman that the Gillard government believed in the science of climate change and was determined to act.
Asked whether Mr Combet backed Professor Flannery’s comment, the spokeswoman said: “Professor Flannery is an independent person who leads an independent commission.”
What Flannery said on MTR last week:
I just need to clarfy in terms of the climate context for you. If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years… Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
(Audio at the link.)
What Flannery now claims he said:
The Weekend Australian reported on a radio discussion between myself, Steve Price and Andrew Bolt about the impact of Australia’s ambition to cut greenhouse gas emissions, by 2020, to 5% below 2000 levels… The Australian reported correctly that I responded by saying that if humanity ceased emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, it would take centuries for their concentration in the atmosphere to return to pre-industrial (1800 AD) levels.
Tim Flannery has not told the truth.
UPDATE
An oldtimer filmed at a recent rally in favour of a carbon tax made the standard appeal to emotion. “I’m concerned,” she said, “about the kind of world we’re going to leave my grandchildren.” ...
Forget saving your grandchildren, eco-biddies. According to Flannery, the world won’t be safer until your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren are on the scene.
Gillard’s tax taxed NSW Labor worst
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:35 am)
A federal election on this tax would prove the point, I suspect:
In western and southern Sydney, mining areas and long-established industrial towns, factory workers, two-car families and low-income households swung more heavily against Labor than the NSW average.
Echoing their federal leader Tony Abbott, incoming Coalition MPs in NSW argue that traditional Labor voters were spooked by the prospect of job losses, higher petrol prices and rising household power bills from a carbon tax.
No more than the incompetence you’d suspect from NSW Labor
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:31 am)
On the one hand it’s standard politics for an incoming government, but on the other it strikes me as quite possibly the grim truth:
THE incoming NSW Coalition government is struggling with a budget “black hole” of $4.3 billion, prompting Barry O’Farrell to accuse his Labor predecessors of “deception and incompetence” and sideline the state’s top Treasury official. ..
Mr O’Farrell learned from NSW Treasury secretary Michael Schur that a surplus of $432 million in 2012-13, which was projected in the half-yearly review in December, has turned into a $405m deficit. The downgrade is the result of lower receipts from the GST and state taxes, and extra capital spending on Sydney’s rail network. Mr O’Farrell was also told there was a “slowing” of commonwealth grants to NSW.
Including a newly projected $2.3bn deficit for 2014-15, the Coalition claims the budget is in $4.3bn worse shape than suggested by the last set of accounts from Labor.
Luring them to the boats
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:26 am)
Yet more proof that soft laws and our wealth are luring boat people to Australia:
ASYLUM claims rose by a third in Australia, while in other industrialised countries applications fell ‘’significantly’’ overall, a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shows…
Overall, 358,000 asylum applications were lodged in 44 industrialised countries, a drop of 5 per cent.
UPDATE
So, how’s progress on the East Timor detention centre that Julia Gillard promised a year ago to deter the boat people?
EAST Timor has dismissed Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s proposal for a refugee processing centre on its soil on the eve of a multinational summit on people smuggling.
The rebuff comes as the fledgling nation’s foreign minister has shunned the Bali Process ministerial forum altogether, choosing instead to go to Fiji, a pariah state for Canberra, to observe a small gathering of Pacific nations.
East Timor’s chief diplomat, Zacarias da Costa, will be replaced by his deputy, Alberto Carlos, who gave the Australian government little cause for optimism in an interview with The Age yesterday.
‘’It is not a priority,’’ said Dr Carlos, when asked about East Timor’s attitude to the proposed centre. ‘’...At this stage, we don’t see any urgency to discuss this matter.’’
When will Gillard admit that her plan, announced with zero consultation with the East Timorese Government, is dead?
We can’t just send welfare to places where there is no future
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:21 am)
Yes, the welfare is a problem - as it is with any underclass. But the real problem here is offering welfare in towns where there is no real work and never will be:
Mr Wood, speaking before Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s visit to the territory, said the community had the right not be humbugged by drunken ‘’pests’’ who had no dignity for themselves because ‘’they have never had a job or an opportunity to learn, and their town is a dump’’.
‘’We are bringing up generation after generation of Aboriginal people who have never worked properly. Maybe they have worked a little, but on the whole they have never worked,’’ he said. ‘’Their kids see that as the norm and their grandkids see that as the norm. I am more and more convinced that we have got to get rid of welfare territory-wide.’’
It is as I warned then Prime Minister John Howard: we could gold-plate the taps at Wadeye and it would still be a sink of despair, with no work and no future. Hard though it is, many Aboriginal settlements must die - for the sake of the children.
Claim: If I am not stopped….
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (06:07 am)
A reason advanced in court yesterday by Ron Merkel QC for sueing me and having my articles destroyed:
ANDREW Bolt’s writings on Aboriginal identity were akin to an “eugenics approach” that ultimately led to the establishment of the anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws of 1935, the Federal Court has heard.
”The Holocaust started with words and ended with violence,” Ron Merkel QC told judge Mordecai Bromberg…
I cannot tell you what I think of this claim and this analogy.
I’m afraid comments must be closed.
Sea level rises are slowing: new paper
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (05:48 am)
Just three weeks ago, Ross Garnaut - the economist who advises the Gillard Government on global warming - claimed the seas were rising faster than ever:
SEA-LEVEL rises caused by global warming may be worse than predicted…Ross Garnaut, Julia Gillard’s climate change adviser, yesterday issued a gloomy review of the latest science on global warming, finding the “awful reality” is that previous research may have underestimated the impact of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…
While temperatures continue to rise around the midpoints of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range of projections, he says ”the rate of sea-level rise has accelerated and is tracking above the range suggested by the IPCC”.
A new paper in the Journal of Coastal Research disagrees with Garnaut. Sea level rises are actually decelarating:
Without sea-level acceleration, the 20th-century sea-level trend of 1.7 mm/y would produce a rise of only approximately 0.15 m from 2010 to 2100; therefore, sea-level acceleration is a critical component of projected sea-level rise. To determine this acceleration, we analyze monthly-averaged records for 57 U.S. tide gauges in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) data base that have lengths of 60–156 years. Least-squares quadratic analysis of each of the 57 records are performed to quantify accelerations, and 25 gauge records having data spanning from 1930 to 2010 are analyzed. In both cases we obtain small average sea-level decelerations. To compare these results with worldwide data, we extend the analysis of Douglas (1992) by an additional 25 years and analyze revised data of Church and White (2006) from 1930 to 2007 and also obtain small sea-level decelerations similar to those we obtain from U.S. gauge records....
Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. ...
It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.
(Via Watts Up With That.)
The answer Flannery refused to give: just 0.00005 degrees
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (12:03 am)
Remember how Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery refused to answer my very basic question?
Bolt: On our own, cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, what will that lower the world’s temperatures by?
Flannery: See, that’s a bogus question because nothing is in isolation…
Bolt: Everyone understands that that is the argument But we’re just trying to get basic facts, without worrying about the consequences - about what those facts may lead people to think. On our own, by cutting our emissions, because it’s a heavy price to pay, by 5 per cent by 2020, what will the world’s temperatures fall by as a consequence?
Flannery: Look, it will be a very, very small increment.
Bolt: Have you got a number? ....
Flannery: I just need to clarfy in terms of the climate context for you. If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.
Bolt: Right, but I just want to get to this very basic fact… I want to know the cost of cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and will it do the job: how much will the world’s temperatures fall by if Australia cuts its emissions by this much.
Flannery: Look, as I said it will be a very, very small increment.
Bolt: Can you give us a rough figure? A rough figure.
Flannery: Sorry, I can’t ....
Bolt: … Is it about, I don’t know, are you talking about a thousandth of a degree? A hundredth of a degree? What sort of rough figure?
Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
Bolt: That doesn’t seem a good deal…
But don’t despair! Lord Monckton has been kind enough to give me the straight answer that Flannery et al will not - and his answer explains exactly Flannery’s embarrassed silence:
Q. What is the central estimate of the anthropogenic global warming, in Celsius degrees, that would be forestalled by 2020 if a) Australia alone and b) the whole world cut carbon emissions stepwise until by 2020 they were 5% below today’s emissions?
Answer a). Australia accounts for (at most) 1.5% of global carbon emissions. A stepwise 5% cut by 2020 is an average 2.5% cut from now till then. CO2 concentration by 2020, taking the IPCC’s A2 scenario, will be 412 parts per million by volume, compared with 390 ppmv now. So Man will have added 22 ppmv by 2020, without any cuts in emissions. The CO2 concentration increase forestalled by almost a decade of cap-and-tax in Australia would thus be 2.5% of 1.5% of 22 ppmv, or 0.00825 ppmv. So in 2020 CO2 concentration would be 411.99175 ppmv instead of 412 ppmv…
So the proportionate change in CO2 concentration if the Commission and Ms. Gillard got their way would be 411.99175/412, or 0.99997998. The IPCC says warming or cooling, in Celsius degrees, is 3.7-5.7 times the logarithm of the proportionate change: central estimate 4.7. Also, it expects only 57% of manmade warming to occur by 2100: the rest would happen slowly and harmlessly over perhaps 1000 years (that’s the real meaning of Flannery’s 1000-year point, and it doesn’t do him any favours).
So the warming forestalled by cutting Australia’s emissions would be 57% of 4.7 times the logarithm of 0.99997998: that is – wait for it, wait for it – a dizzying 0.00005 Celsius, or around one-twenty-thousandth of a Celsius degree. Your estimate of a thousandth of a degree was a 20-fold exaggeration – not that Flannery was ever going to tell you that, of course.
Answer b) . Mutatis mutandis, we do the same calculation for the whole world, thus:
2.5% of 22 ppmv = 0.55 ppmv. Warming forestalled by 2020 = 0.57 x 4.7 ln[(412-0.55)/412] < 0.004 Celsius, or less than four one-thousandths of a Celsius degree, or around one-two-hundred-and-eightieth of a Celsius degree. And that at a cost of trillions. Whom the gods would destroy …
If you'd like chapter and verse from the IPCC's documents and from the peer-reviewed for every step of this calculation, which takes full account of and distils down the various complexities and probabilities Flannery flannelled about, you'll find it in this paper…
A cautionary note: the warming forestalled will only be this big if the IPCC’s central estimate of the rate at which adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes warming is correct. However, it’s at least a twofold exaggeration and probably more like fourfold. So divide both the above answers by, say, 3 to get what will still probably be an overestimate of the warming forestalled.
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