Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Tue 15th Jan Todays News


Happy birthday and many happy returns Hang Nguyen andMagda Kowalska. Born on the same day, across the years. Remember birthdays are good for you. Those with the most live longest.
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January 15Mattu Pongal (Tamils, 2013); Army Day in India; John Chilembwe Day in Malawi; Armed Forces Day in Nigeria
Aerial view of the Pentagon

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Events

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[edit]Holidays and observances


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Heatwave - it was hotter in 1790

Piers Akerman – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (12:03am)

Card-carrying members of the global warming brigade have paid for a fear-mongering advertisement warning about the dangers of coal exports on global temperatures.
I can only thank them for ensuring a positive cash flow for some in the media.
Their ad is self-serving load of cods wallop for all that.
None of these alarmists can explain the nexus between carbon dioxide and the inevitability of climate change nor can they account for the lack of global warming, or why their dire predictions are counter to those of the British Met Office which downgraded its predictions under cover of the Christmas holiday.
But they have been busily trying to convince Australians that the Tasmanian bushfires and others on the mainland are all linked to man-made causes.
Therefore it was instructional to receive a far more balanced view from Liberal MP Craig Kelly (Hughes), who follows the debate with a keen and astute eye.
This is what he sent: “It’s been a scorcher. With the mercury soaring to 42.3 C in Sydney last week and the city in meltdown, the papers screamed, ‘This is climate change. It is here. It is real. Even the taxpayer funded Climate Commission could not hide their excitement declaring, ‘it was hotter than before’ and that ‘climate change’ was responsible for the ‘unprecedented’ extreme heat Sydneysiders were experiencing.

And with the satellites unable to detect any global warming for the last 16 years, and the IPCC computer modelled predictions failing to come to fruition, Labor Government ministers were quick to exploit the situation to claim the ‘extreme heat’ was evidence of why the Carbon Tax was needed to ‘do the right thing by our children’. Yet they failed to detail how, when, or by how much (even to the nearest 0.0001 °C) that the Carbon Tax would change the temperature.

But I wonder if any of these people actually knew that Sydney’s so-called ‘record hot day’ on Tuesday 8th Jan this year, that had them screaming ‘Global Warming’, was actually COOLER than the weather experienced by the convicts of the First Fleet in Sydney way back in the summer of 1790/91?

For while the mercury peaked at 42.3 C last Tuesday at Observatory Hill in Sydney – more than 222 years ago at 1.00pm on the 27th Dec 1790 (measured at a location just stones-throw from Observatory Hill) the mercury hit 108.5 F (42.5 C) before peaking at 109 F (42.8 C) at 2.20pm.

The extreme heat of Sydney’s summer of 1790/91 is detailed by Watkins Tench (1758 –1833) in his book ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson’ published in 1793. (Available to download from the internet for free).

Watkins Tench was British marine officer whom accompanied 88 male and 20 female convicts on the First Fleet ship the Charlotte which arrived in Botany Bay 20th January 1788. Watkins then stayed in Sydney until December 1791 when we sailed home to Britain and later went on to fight in the Napoleonic Wars where after a naval battle he was taken prisoner by the French and imprisoned on a ship in Brest Harbor.

Of Sydney’s weather of 27th December 1790, when the mercury hit 42.8 C (109 F), half a degree Celsius higher than last Tuesday, Tench wrote: ‘it felt like the blast of a heated oven’. But the extreme heat wasn’t restricted to the 27th Dec 1790. The following day the temperature again surpassed the old 100 Fahrenheit mark, hitting 40.3C (104.5 F) at 12.30pm.  And later that same summer, in February 1791, the temperature in Sydney was recorded at 42.2 C (108 F). Tench commented;

‘But even this heat (of 27th Dec 1790) was judged to be far exceeded in the latter end of the following February, when the north-west wind again set in, and blew with great violence for three days. At Sydney, it [the temperature] fell short by one degree of what I have just recorded [109F]: but at Rose Hill, [modern day Parramatta] it was allowed, by every person, to surpass all that they had before felt, either there, or in any other part of the world. Unluckily they had no thermometer to ascertain its precise height.’

Tench also speculated on the cause of the extreme heat of the summer of 1790/91, and he didn’t blame global warming, coal mining, or failure to pay homage to a pagan god. Tench deduced: ‘Were I asked the cause of this intolerable heat, I should not hesitate to pronounce, that it was occasioned by the wind blowing over immense deserts, which, I doubt not, exist in a north-west direction from Port Jackson, and not from fires kindled by the natives.’

Now global warming devotees may be sceptical of Tench’s records. After all, scepticism is a healthy thing. They may even seek to deny Tench’s measurements and have them purged from our history, sent down a memory hole - as the global warming texts & prophesies deem it heresy for it to have been warmer in Sydney way back in summer of 1790/91 than it is in the ‘unprecedented’ extreme heat of Sydney’s ‘globally warmed’ summer of 2012/13.

However, Tench’s meteorological recordings were undertaken following strict scientific procedure using a ‘large thermometer’ made by Ramsden, England’s leading scientific instrument maker of the day. Tench also left a message for those that might seek to question the accuracy of the records: ‘This remark I feel necessary, as there were methods used by some persons in the colony, both for estimating the degree of heat, and for ascertaining the cause of its production, which I deem equally unfair and unphilosophical. The thermometer, whence my observations were constantly made, was hung in the open air, in a southern aspect, never reached by the rays of the sun, at the distance of several feet above the ground.’

It also worth noting that in 1790, Sydney (population 1,715) was still surrounded by mostly natural bushland, where modern day Observatory Hill in Sydney (population 4,627,000) is now surrounded by the concrete, steel and glass of a modern city, not to mention the tens of thousands of air-conditioners pumping out hot air into the surrounding streets, nor the 160,000 cars & trucks that cross the Sydney Harbor Bridge daily and pass within 100 meters of Observatory Hill.

Further, the contemporaneous notes of the day concur with the empirical measurements. Lieutenant-Governor David Collins (1756-1810), in his book ‘An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales’ published in 1798 also commented on the incredible effect of the extreme heat of 1790/91 summer on the local wildlife:

‘Fresh water was indeed everywhere very scarce, most of the streams or runs about the cove being dried up. At Rose Hill (Parramatta), the heat on the tenth and eleventh of the month, on which days at Sydney the thermometer stood in the shade at 105°F (40.6°C), was so excessive (being much increased by the fires in the adjoining woods), that immense numbers of the large fox bat were seen hanging at the boughs of trees, and dropping into the water… during the excessive heat many dropped dead while on the wing… In several parts of the harbour the ground was covered with different sorts of small birds, some dead, and others gasping for water.’

Tench also recorded the effects of the extreme heat of Feb 1791: ‘An immense flight of bats, driven before the wind, covered all the trees around the settlement, whence they every moment dropped dead, or in a dying state, unable longer to endure the burning state of the atmosphere. Nor did the perroquettes, (parrots) though tropical birds, bear it better; the ground was strewed with them in the same condition as the bats.’

And even Governor Arthur Philip noted the effects of the extreme heat of the summer of 1790/91: ‘from the numbers (of dead bats) that fell into the brook at Rose Hill (Parramatta), the water was tainted for several days, and it was supposed that more than twenty thousand of them were seen within the space of one mile.’

Yet 222 years later, reports of the mass death of birds and bats are more like to come from those sliced & diced by industrial steel wind turbines, than the heat.

Finally, Watkins Tench concluded on ‘climate change’ in Sydney back in 1790’s;

“My other remarks on the climate (of Sydney) will be short; it is changeable beyond any other I ever heard of.”

“Fortunately for the convicts and settlers of the new colony, Governor Arthur Philip and later Governors didn’t believe they could change that with a new tax.”
The clear message from Kelly and Tench is don’t be conned by those who claim to know what the weather is doing, let alone what the planet is doing! 

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Almost too cold to type this message to a warmist

Andrew BoltJANUARY152013(7:14pm)

The US-based Daily Kos gloats over some hot weather over in Australia - and suggests an embarrassed silence:
Australia is currently “sweltering” through a heatwave that has been ongoing since the beginning of the year. It’s been the longest run of above 39 degree Celsius days since 1973. Monday was the hottest average national temperature across the country since records began 100 years ago. Hundreds of fires are burning throughout Australia right now…

Andrew Bolt, one of the more prolific and vicious Australian denialists, hasn’t posted on his blog since 3 January...for some reason.
Well, the reason I haven’t blogged is, as a quick check of the blog would suggest, I am on holidays - and my children yell at me if I sneak away to blog.
As it happens, I am in Los Angeles, freezing my backside off in an unusually cold spell:
A week or two ago I was caught outside in Boston in the coldest weather of my life: 
While locally, lows ranged from the low 20s to near 30 (F.), there was some bone-chilling cold to our north. Parts of Vermont and upstate New York dropped from -10 to -20 , colder than anything experienced all of last winter. Boston even dropped to 7, just one degree warmer than its low in 2012.
I wouldn’t be so stupid or dishonest as to claim that weather in one part of the world says anything about the climate everywhere. In other words, I do not write for the Daily Kos. Or work for the Greens.
Fact: to measure what we call “global warming” we need global records, not anecdotes about temperatures in Australia or California. And what those global records tell us is that the rise in temperature paused 16 years ago. Now the Met even predicts basically no further global warming for at least four more years - giving us a total of 20 years of no additional warming..
The world is not warming as was predicted. And gloating over some bushfires in Australia does not changed that central truth. Indeed, it strikes me as dishonest.
But as the Greens made clear last week with their defence of climate activist Jonathan Moylan, who hoaxed Whitehaven shareholders, even lying brazenly to advance the warming cause is not just permissible but admirable. Makes me wonder what other lies have been excused as being for our own good.
UPDATE
Of all the many absurd evidences of global warming now advanced by warmists, none can possibly top this comic effort from Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation: 
In South Australia for a summer break, I saw an advertised opportunity for a game of golf at the famous Royal Adelaide Golf Club. So I put my name down to play on Monday, January 7.

In hindsight, it was probably not a smart move; the temperature in the shade reached 41 degrees as I finished my round in the blazing Adelaide sun. Wary of the risks of dehydration, I had consumed four litres of water and sports drinks on the course. I was still able to empty two of the largest glasses the clubhouse bar could provide as I recovered from the experience.

Of course, it has always been hot in Adelaide in summer. There have been days over 40 degrees every year since we abandoned the old Fahrenheit scale that gave us more impressive readings of over 100 degrees.... However, we should recognise that the overall pattern of more frequent and more severe extreme events is exactly what climate scientists have been warning about for 25 years. 
Yes, never mind the records showing no further global warming for 16 years now. Panic instead at the number of glasses of water a warmest chooses to drink after a game of golf on one of Adelaide’s routinely hot summer days.
I’m not sure if I should be depressed to be retuning to a country gripped by such unreason, or impatient to get back to exposing more such insults to our intelligence. 

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It takes more than one person to create a brawl

Andrew BoltJANUARY152013(6:45pm)

Police do their best to make the Logan racial brawl seem nothing much:
Logan District Superintendent Noel Powers said tensions remained raw in the community, and Monday’s unrest was sparked by one aggressor. 
Just one person sparked off the mayhem between rival groups of Aborigines and Tongans?
Hmm. On second thoughts, police accept maybe it took at least two to tangle: 

“It just takes one or two hot heads, a bit of alcohol and a bit of violence and it disrupts all the work we’ve been aiming towards,” Supt Powers said.
Maths isn’t my greatest strength, but I count a lot more than two people in this video who are looking for a brawl:

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Aussies have weathered nature’s extremes before

Miranda Devine – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (7:44pm)

CLIMATE alarmists have waited a while for a good heatwave to press their case that human activities are causing unprecedented catastrophic global warming. This summer the weather delivered. 

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Freedom to offend the Right, not the Left

Miranda Devine – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (1:51pm)

A left wing lobby group is offended by a politically incorrect column Julie Burchill writes in the supposedly liberal UK Observer.
A UK government minister calls for her to be sacked. Within 48 hours the Observer removes the controversial column about transexuals from its website and apologises for the “hurt and offence”.
And this is before the Leveson inquiry proposals are implemented.
Her friend Toby Young has the whole story here:
It cannot be said often enough that freedom of speech, if it means anything, must include the freedom to say things that some people find offensive.

I imagine the Observer’s decision to oppose Anthony Eden’s invasion of Suez in 1956 caused a great deal of “offence”, yet David Astor, the editor at the time, would never have dreamed of censoring any of his journalists for that reason. Or is it okay to offend the Right but not the Left? The Guardian, the Observer’s sister paper, has published plenty of things that I’ve found deeply offensive in the past 12 months – such as this piece on paedophilia or this anti-Semitic Steve Bell cartoon – yet I wouldn’t dream of petitioning its editor to remove them from its website…
This isn’t merely a black day for the Observer. It’s a bad day for journalism.

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Pants on fire

Miranda Devine – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (9:53am)

THE Greens love to rewrite history. They must think we have amnesia.
Here is Tasmanian Greens leader and cabinet minister Nick McKim claiming last weekend:
“The Greens, in all the history of our political party, have never opposed a fuel-reduction burn, ever.”
Here is his party in a post on their website this week: “The Greens have supported, and continue to support, fuel reduction burns as a vital tool in protecting lives and property in all land tenures including National Parks.”
The Tasmanian Greens today said that residents in and around Maydena deserved better than the intense smoke pollution from commercial forestry burn-offs that they were subjected to this week.

This practice has simply got to stop. It puts people’s health at risk and every time the state is swathed in commercial forestry smoke, our valuable ‘clean, green,’ brand is diluted just a little bit more.
“Greens strongly believe Tasmania must free itself from this smoke taint and end commercial forestry burn-offs . . . attempting to burn forest waste at this time of year is highly likely to have this unacceptable result.
“We’re all better off when this Neanderthal practice stops and disposing of forest by-products is done far more responsibly.
“The future’s bright without forestry’s smoke pollution,” said Greens Treasury spokesperson, Tim Morris MP.
And what about this, from the Tasmanian Greens’ health spokesperson, Paul ‘Basil’ O’Halloran MP on March 15, 2011: “FORESTRY BURN-OFFS CONTINUE TO THREATEN HEALTH AND WELL-BEING: COMMUNITIES, ANIMALS AND PLANT LIFE BEING THREATENED BY FORESTRY BURN-OFFS.”
It is a matter of public record that green groups have long opposed systematic prescribed burning, as is evident in their submissions to bushfire inquiries from as far back as 1992.
They complain of a threat to biodiversity, including to fungi, from “frequent burning” regimes and urge resources be spent on water bombers and early detection, as well as on stopping climate change - good luck with that.
The WA Forest Alliance, for instance, lodged a submission to the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the 2001-02 bushfires, claiming: “Frequent fires have a disastrous effect on many species of flora and fauna and their habitat structure.”
WWF Australia’s submission claimed: “Inappropriate fire hazard regimes can damage biodiversity leading to the loss of native species, communities and ecosystems.”
The NSW Greens stated on their website in 2002 as part of their bushfire risk management policy: “There is an urgent need to correct the common misconception that responsible fire management always involves burning or clearing to reduce moderate and high fuel loads…”
As I wrote in a previous column, in 2003, lightning strikes in fuel-rich national parks in NSW and the ACT sparked bushfires which swept into Canberra, killing four people.
Days later, the NSW Nature Conservation Council’s then chairman, Rob Pallin, described calls for increased prescribed burning as “futile” and a “knee-jerk reaction”.
“People who claim that hazard reduction burning is a cure-all for bushfire risk are either fooling themselves or deliberately trying to fool the public.”
It is another clever tactic of those who oppose broadscale prescribed burning to claim that it is not a “cure-all” for bushfire risk. No one has ever claimed it is.
The icing on the cake is that the NSW Department of Environment and Heritage has list controlled burning, or what it called “too frequent fire” as a “key threatening process to biodiversity” under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
UPDATE:
Six years before the deadly Black Saturday fires in Victoria in 2009, David Packham tried to warn Nillumbik Shire, where so many people were to die, about the “very dangerous fuel loads”.
Nillumbik Shire council was committed to reducing carbon emissions in its so-called “green wedge” area, where restrictions on removing vegetation around houses reportedly added to the dangers.
In St Andrews, where more than 20 people are believed to have died, surviving residents have spoken angrily of “greenies” who prevented them from cutting back trees near their property, including in one case, a tea tree that went “whoomp”.
Dr Phil Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO’s bushfire research unit and one of the pioneers of prescribed burning, said yesterday if the fire-ravaged Victorian areas had been hazard-reduced, the flames would not have been as intense.
Kinglake and Maryville, now crime scenes, are built among tall forests of messmate stringy bark trees which pose a special fire hazard, with peeling bark creating firebrands that carry fire five kilometres out.
“The only way to reduce the flammability of the bark is by prescribed burning” every five to seven years, Cheney said. He estimates between 35 and 50 tonnes a hectare of dry fuel were waiting to be gobbled up by Saturday’s inferno.
Fuel loads above about eight tonnes a hectare are considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire.
UPDATE:
Remember the Sheahans, fined $50,000 for clearing a firebreak around their house… which became one of the few in the area to survive Black Saturday’s inferno.

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HE KNOWS STUFF

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (12:20pm)

Insight from climate tax commissioner Tim Flannery
Record-breaking heat is, by definition, weather not experienced for as long as records have been kept. 
That’s why they pay him the big bucks.

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UNITED COLOURS

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (12:17pm)

The missus and I have a mild case of Benetton arms:

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THE SADDEST SMOKE

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (12:16pm)

Attention, Nicola Roxon. This would be a fine image for your next generation of government-designed cigarette packets. Available as a t-shirt, too.
(Via Lee A.) 

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DUBIOUS SOURCE

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (11:09am)

The Age reports: 
Within 24 hours of reports that Kylie Minogue, our original global pop princess, was to quit singing and focus on acting, the claim has been well and truly quashed. Twice …
The moral of the story? News breaks fast on Twitter, but like all media, take care with your sources. 
Quite so. For example, don’t believe the Age:

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UPDATE. In other Fairfax news, the Australian Financial Review last week fell for Jonathan Moylan’sWhitehaven coal hoax. Now it runs a full page ad railing against coal exports: 
We, the undersigned, call on Australia to cease the expansion of coal exports from this country and join efforts to prevent global warming running out-of-control and destroying lives and livelihoods here and abroad …
Our choice is clear: cease expansion of coal exports or wilfully threaten the future of our children.
Go tell it to Indonesia, “the world’s largest exporter of coal by weight”.
(Via Lank)
UPDATE II. This 1962 ad, shown larger here, is far superior:

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(Via lotocoti)

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THINK OF THE CHILDREN

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 15, 2013 (10:53am)

This is excellent:


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A human umpire has the advantage that any attacks on them can be classified as an assault .. -ed
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foot long 42 mm short .. Think of the calories you aren't having .. - ed===

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Hello, my name is DRUGS- I destroy homes, tear families apart, take your children, and that's just the start. I'm more costly than diamonds, more costly than gold, the sorrow I bring is a sight to behold. And if you need me, remember I'm easily found, I live all around you, in schools and in town. I live with the rich, I live with the poor, I live down the street, and maybe next door. My power is awesome; try me you'll see, but if you do, you may NEVER break free. Just try me once and I might let you go, but try me twice, and I'll own your soul. When I possess you, you'll steal and you'll lie, you do what you have to just to get high. The crimes you'll commit, for my narcotic charms will be worth the pleasure you'll feel in your arms. You'll lie to your mother, you'll steal from your dad, when you see their tears, you should feel sad. But you'll forget your morals and how you were raised, I'll be your conscience, I'll teach you my ways. I take kids from parents, and parents from kids, I turn people from god, and seperate friends. I'll take everything from you, your looks and your pride, I'll be with you always, right by your side. You'll give up everything... Your family, your home.... Your friends, your money, then you'll be alone. I'll take and take, till you have nothing more to give.... When I'm finished with you you'll be lucky to live. If you try me be warned this is no game, if given the chance, I'll drive you insane! I'll ravish your body, I'll control your mind, I'll own you completely, your soul will be mine. The nightmares I'll give you while lying in bed, the voices you'll hear from inside your head, the sweats, the shakes, the visions you'll see, I want you to know, these are all gifts from me. But when it's too late, and you'll know in your heart, that you are mine, and we shall not part. You'll regret that you tried me, they always do, but you came to me, not I to you. You knew this would happen, many times you were told, but you challenged my power, and chose to be bold. You could have said NO, and just walked away, if you could live that day over, now what would you say?. I'll be your master; and you'll be my slave, I'll even go with you, when you go to your grave. Now that you have met me, what will you do? Will you try me or not? It's all upto you. I can bring you more misery than words can tell... Come take my hand, I'll take you to hell. 
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"Daddy, why is England called a Kingdom?" 
"Because it was ruled by a King." 
"Oh... so that's why Australia is called a Country!"
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Hi everyone! Here's the MichelleMalkin.com newsletter for January 14th. Enjoy!

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