It is hard to be Christian in NSW public schools. There are many challenges from other members of staff who seem to feel that secular education means one doesn't admit to an understanding of Christianity. It was harder for me as I was only a young Christian when I first became a teacher and had been raised as an atheist. I didn't understand etiquette and I could not handle my own prayer life.
Some times I felt embarrassed by the work of my fellow Christians, and sometimes I felt resentful of the prosyletising of the Atheists on staff. I now feel it is like religion in politics. I prefer politicians who are Christians, and want them to be honest about their Christian life. But I want them to adhere to secular policy. I feel it is wonderful a girl might be able to pray with her teacher. I feel it is important that Atheist students don't feel obliged. But I want them to know that adults have made choices.
450 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S JOHN WAYNE SWAN TAX
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 09, 11 (11:22 pm)
They don’t come much tougher than Wayne Swan, the hard-headed hombre who’ll take on any trace gas with both fists:
“I say this government’s got the guts to deal with dangerous climate change, it’s got the guts to face up to the big reforms that are required in our economy,” he said.
“We’ve got to make the investments in infrastructure, we’ve got to put a price on carbon, we’ve got to do all of those things for a prosperous economy.”
Not sure about the guts, but this government sure has got the gots. It might not have Rob Oakeshott after the next election, however. Hit the video and scroll forward to 1:25 for a snap poll in Carbon Rob’s electorate.
FLANTASY
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 09, 11 (04:12 pm)
Tim Flannery might be exaggerating just a little:
The campaign [against the IPCC] was very much like the sort of media campaign that I’m used to when people try to discredit me. And the way that works is usually on a Friday they’ll run a front-page story saying what a ratbag I am. You know, front page, and that’s all right, interesting, someone’s been a bit, you know, corrupt or a bit rotten.
And then on the Saturday they’ll run a page three story, usually a much longer story, listing everything you’re supposed to have done, and all the reasons why you’re a ratbag.And then on the Monday they’ll put a little stinger in. A little reminder, just to remind people what a rotten person you are.
Flannery was speaking in August 2010. I’d love to see all the examples he has to that date of newspapers frequently attacking him on front pages – usually on Fridays, for some reason – then running extensive follow-up pieces immediately afterwards. The comments section is all yours, Professor. Hit us with links, PDFs, scans, whatever. Just to be clear, we’re looking for multiple front-page stories that attempt to discredit you (as per your claim) followed by longer page three stories and subsequent Monday sting items. Sounds like there’s lots of them.
STILL ICY
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 09, 11 (04:09 pm)
A new guessing machine pushes back the schedule for polar meltiness:
Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.
The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.
Now they are working with a new computer model – compiled partly in response to those criticisms – that produces a “best guess” date of 2016.
(Via Orange Punch and James Taranto, who writes: “Our best guess is that in 2015 they’ll have a new best guess of 2020; in 2019 it’ll be 2024.")
BORN TO SOLVE
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 09, 11 (03:53 pm)
Alec the WonderBoy launches a global Child March:
My name is Alec Loorz. I’m 16 years old, and I am a climate change activist. I’ve spent my entire teenaged life traveling around giving speeches and presentations about climate change because I believe my generation was born to solve this crisis. The iMatter March is our opportunity stand up and be heard on the most important issue of our time.??
It’s also an opportunity for Alec to walk for once instead of flying everywhere.
So on May 8, we will march. The youth will rise up in our communities and let the world know that climate change is not about money, it’s not about power, it’s not about convenience, it is about our survival. It’s about the future of this and every generation to come. And we are ready to do whatever it takes to change it.
Whatever it takes = walking around with a bunch of kids. Will these people stop at nothing?
We matter.
This is our time.
Shortly followed by bedtime.
Thanks very much, Barrie
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (10:48 am)
As I told him, Barrie Cassidy represents - in his commitment to debate - the ABC at its finest.
It’s rare finest.
Is Gaddafi fighting the heirs of Greece?
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (09:43 am)
Peter Jones provides a fascinating historical context to the civil war in Libya. Once again the country seems split along the old divide between the Greek half and the Phoenician.
Even a Manne now sees how deadly Labor’s “compassion” is
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (07:08 am)
Miranda Devine demands apologies:
IF the plight of asylum seekers weren’t so tragic, you’d be tempted to burst into derisive laughter at the 11th hour admissions by Robert Manne (on Q&A last week) that the hand-wringing Left got it woefully wrong on border protection…
Turning to Kevin Rudd, sitting beside him, Manne continued: “I think that what you did was humane but you didn’t calculate what you should have calculated, that the problem would return.
“ I think the Left is wrong to say and you’re wrong to say that your policy didn’t get the boats to return.
“I think it’s now a terrible problem for Labor.”
Yes it is. And much thanks to Manne, 63, and his fellow posturing compassionistas who used the plight of asylum seekers as a bludgeon to beat up Howard and slander his supporters…
Manne should now apologise to Howard, Phillip Ruddock, Peter Costello, Kim Beazley, the navy, Coalition voters and every rational Australian for branding them heartless racists....
Julian Burnside should apologise, too. And Tom Keneally and his sewn-up lips. We don’t hear much from them these days, with more than 6000 boat people in detention, including children, compared with just four at the end of the Howard era in 2007.
Why aren’t David Marr and Marian Wilkinson writing another book accusing the Prime Minister of having deliberately murdered boat people as they did Howard.
Why isn’t Hannie Rayson writing a play, Two Sisters, like her Two Brothers, a vicious slander of Costello, portraying him as a mass murderer who delighted in the drowning of asylum seekers…
Since 2008, when Rudd and Gillard decided to pander to Manne and the progressive Left by dismantling Howard’s painfully built but enormously effective border protection policies, almost 11,000 asylum seekers have arrived on more than 200 boats....While at least 220 people have died at sea and more than 1000 children have been put on boats, the number of special humanitarian visas provided to offshore asylum seekers has halved.
(Thanks to reader Grand Wizard.)
Gore and his fellow alarmists are on thin ice
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (06:28 am)
The Arctic ice refuses to go away, which forces the warmists to keep modifying their predictions. Take Al Gore.
In December 2008, he said “The entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years”…
In April 2009, after a big refreeze, Gore pushed out his prediction of a possible ice-free Arctic to 2014:
(R)esearchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution.
In October 2009, after a summer in which the Arctic ice hung around as per recent usual, Gore adjusted again, extending his prediction to 2019:
The North Pole ice cap is 40 percent gone already and could be completely and totally gone in the winter months in the next 5 to 10 years.
Back in 2008, plenty of other alarmists were also spreading fear that the Arctic ice would be gone by 2013. There was NASA’ Goddard Institute, for instance:
Marian Wilkson, reporting for The Age and the ABC’s Four Corners, faithfully passed on the hype as if it were deadly serious:
“There’s a group that makes a very strong case that in 2012 or 2013 we’ll have an ice-free (summer) Arctic, as soon as that. It’s astounding what’s happened,” said Ted Scambos, another research scientist from the Snow and Ice Data Centre.
And the ABC’s AM likewise uncritically reported the claims of the alarmists:
A US-based team has told a conference in California that the northern polar waters could be ice-free in summer by 2013… Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has been presenting his work to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.... As the world meets in Bali, Al Gore went on to repeat his calls for tough action on climate change. The trouble is, it looks increasingly like it may already be too late.
Ah, Professor Maslowski? Well, now, he’s back in the news this week, and events have forced him to stretch out his prediction, just as Gore has been doing:
Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.
The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.
Now they are working with a new computer model – compiled partly in response to those criticisms – that produces a “best guess” date of 2016.
Yeah, right.
Tell me: if global warming really is happening even faster than the warmists predicted, why do they need to keep readjusting like this?
The anti-tax crowd is winning, but you’d never know from the ABC
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (06:06 am)
Why did yesterday’s rally against Julia Gillard’s carbon tax gets a much more hostile coverage from the ABC than the simultaneous rally for it?
Here’s the ABC report on yesterday’s anti-tax rally:
The anti-carbon lobby is continuing its pressure on the Federal Government with over 1,000 people attending a protest at Blacktown in Sydney’s west.
It has been a smaller than expected turn out for the rally opposing, where once again there was a strong focus on the Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Some controversial signs from recent rallies at Hyde Park and Federal Parliament House made an appearance, but the rally’s co-ordinator Chris Johnson says the tone today was still angry, but much cleaner than at previous events.
“Today we’ve asked a few people to leave and we’ve had no trouble,” he said.
The rally at Blacktown Showgrounds is the third major protest against a price on carbon in as many weeks.
Mr Johnson, from the Consumers and Taxpayers Association, says despite a smaller crowd today, the campaign is far from finished…
In Brisbane’s CBD there was a similar sized rally in support of a price on carbon, where the acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan made an appearance.
Hundreds of people have rallied in Brisbane’s CBD to show their support for the Federal Government’s plan to price carbon.
Over 1,000 people packed Brisbane’s King George square to support the Federal Government’s proposed carbon tax.
Signs calling for cuts to pollution and more spending on clean energy were littered through the crowd.
Some people rallying say the Government is not doing enough to sell its plan to tackle climate change while others say they are glad it is trying.
The Acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan attended the rally with his family and said the time has come for action.
“This is a moral and economic question which can’t be put in the too hard basket, we can’t just stick our heads in the sand,” he said…
Meanwhile, an anti carbon tax rally has been held in Sydney’s west today, with more than a 1,000 people in attendance.
Reader Alan RM Jones asks:
So was it “hundreds” or “over a thousand”? Any “controversial signs”?
And he notes that there is no mention of the fact that the pro-tax rally also had a “smaller than expected turnout” - in fact, a much, much smaller turnout:
Thousands are expected to attend the rally, supported by the Australian Conservation Foundation, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Greenpeace, GetUp, Oxfam-Australia, QLD Conservation Council, Union Climate Connectors, WWF, 1 Million Women and 350.org.
Which actually makes the message of yesterday’s dueling rallies even more worrying for the Gillard Government. Despite the efforts of all those Big Green groups, and despite all the help of the ABC and Fairfax media, the amateurs of the no-tax rallies are still out-protesting the professionals of the yes-tax crusade.
Never mind what they’re selling
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (05:58 am)
(Thanks to reader Steve.)
Will the Greens kill off Gillard’s tax?
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (05:32 am)
I’ll say it again. Gillard may not even get the deal she needs with the Greens to get her carbon dioxide tax in place by July 1 next year:
THE Gillard government is on a collision course with the Greens over carbon tax assistance for big polluters, with the minor party angered at Labor’s enthusiastic embrace of the abandoned 2009 compensation package and its focus on trying to please big business.
In an interview with The Sunday Age, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet gave his strongest indication yet that he believed the Rudd government’s controversial levels of compensation for carbon-intensive industries were correct, describing the package as ‘’carefully structured’’ and ‘’conceptually a very sound basis for providing assistance for industry’’.
The generous compensation for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries - such as aluminium, steel, cement and coal - was a key reason the Greens withdrew their support for Labor’s emissions trading scheme…
This drew a sharp response from the Greens climate change spokeswoman, Christine Milne, who said...the old model of compensation was ‘’a victory of lobbying power over good policy’’.
On Friday, some of Australia’s biggest companies met with Mr Combet and Treasurer Wayne Swan in Canberra to discuss the carbon tax compensation package. They argued that the 2009 multibillion-dollar package was not generous enough, leaving the government wedged between big business and the Greens.
No deal, no Gillard.
Show us your face
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 10, 11 (04:38 am)
I consider the burqa oppressive, alienating and divisive, but do wonder how a ban would play out:
French officials estimate that only around 2,000 women, from a total Muslim population estimated at between four and six million, wear a niqab or a burqa, full-face veils that are traditional in parts of Arabia and South Asia…
Under a ministerial directive, anyone refusing to lift his or her veil to submit to an identity check can be taken to a police station. There, officers must try to persuade them to remove the garment, and can threaten fines.
A woman who repeatedly insists on appearing veiled in public can be fined 150 euros ($A205) and ordered to attend re-education classes.
There are much more severe penalties for anyone found guilty of forcing someone else to hide his or her face “through threats, violence, constraint, abuse of authority or power for reason of their gender”.
(Thanks to reader Grand Wizard.)
Jihadist link in Rio murders?
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 09, 11 (04:05 pm)
Eleven students shot dead in a school in Rio de Janiero. The man may have been mad, but his choice of faith is interesting:
The deputy mayor of the West Zone, Edmar Peixoto said that Wellington Menezes left a disturbing letter in which among mad rantings, and disjointed phrases he suggested to be HIV positive, and justified his actions as some kind of fundamentalist based revenge. “He was determined to commit suicide after the tragedy,” said Colonel Djalma Beltrami…
The gunman’s sister, Rosilane Menezes, said in an interview with Radio Band News, that her adoptive brother was strange, reserved and had no friends. “He was so focused on things related to Islam and had let his beard grow long. It was weird, was on the internet all day reading issues and it was very strange, very secretive,” she said.
Gillard’s new Tasmanian resort sounds nice
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 09, 11 (03:55 pm)
More than 50 suspected asylum seekers are being taken to Christmas Island after being stopped in the Indian Ocean by a border control vessel.
That should chill a warmist
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 09, 11 (03:46 pm)
Weather, not climate - but such unexpected weather nonetheless:
Remote Sensing Systems has released their satellite measured temperature data for the month of March 2011.
March 2011 ended up as the coolest March globally since March of 1994. The actual global temperature anomaly for the lower troposphere last month was negative 0.026 C.
This is also the first month since June of 2008 that the global temperature anomaly was in the negative.
(UPDATE: Link fixed.)
Of windy schemes and windless power
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 09, 11 (03:13 pm)
Who’d have thought that a trade in hot air might be rorted? The Sydney Morning Herald alleges:
Shift2neutral says it has made high-profile events such as the Australian PGA golf championship and the Sydney Turf Club’s world-first ‘’green race day’’ carbon neutral.
But deals to generate more than $1 billion worth of carbon credits by saving jungles from logging in the Philippines, the Congo and across south-east Asia do not seem to exist.
Even the legit green schemes seem a con, after all:
Britain’s wind farms produce far less electricity than their supporters claim – and cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on, a study from a conservation charity showed yesterday.
A damning report from the John Muir Trust found the UK’s heavily subsidised wind farms were working at just 21 per cent of capacity last year.Yet the renewable energy industry claims their turbines work at 28 to 30 per cent efficiency on average.
The Trust also found that for extended periods all the UK’s wind turbines linked to the National Grid muster less than 20 megawatts of energy at a given point, enough power for fewer than 7,000 households to boil their kettles.
Stuart Young, author of the report, said: ‘Over the two-year period studied, the wind farms in the UK consistently generated far less energy than wind proponents claim is typical.
‘Sadly, wind power is not what it’s cracked up to be and cannot contribute greatly to energy security in the UK.’
(Thanks to many readers.)
UPDATE
Greg Sheridan discovers that nowhere else in the world are politicians mad enough to do what Julia Gillard will do to us next year:
If the carbon tax goes ahead, to be replaced in due course by an emissions trading scheme with a fixed carbon emissions target, Australia will have among the most extreme climate-change policies in the world.
UPDATE
David Evans says carbon taxes are no solution to what isn’t actually a problem:
Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off…
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government - how exciting for the political class!
Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold -in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!
(Thanks to readers Pete and Gab.)
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