Rudd treats Australians with contempt

Why is it that Rudd rhymes with dud?

Our second most popular Prime Minister gained much of his popularity by handing out $900 and $1,000 bribes from taxpayers funds and borrowed funds. Loans all taxpayers will have to repay. He lied his way into office by stating that he was a fiscal conservative and told lies about his family background.

Now he has gone further, as the Canberra Times reports:

" Ministers are required to answer parliamentarians' questions on notice within 30 days. The document details questions about Resource Minister Martin Ferguson's overseas travel and the number of media and communications staff employed in his department. In one case, the Resources Department sent its response to the Department of the Prime Minster and Cabinet on November 21 last year, but MrRudd's office has still not cleared the answer.

The shadow Special Minister of State, Michael Ronaldson, said the Prime Minister was treating Parliament and the public with contempt.

'This is an absolute disgrace,' he said yesterday.'Here we have a Government preaching openness and transparency, but deliberately hiding embarrassing information. Once again, this Government demonstrates that it runs on spin and hypocrisy' "

Vote for Rudd - get a dud!

Professor Robert Manne gets his facts wrong again

In an opinion piece in the Anzac Day issue of the Australian, Professor Manne gets his facts wrong again. For some previous errors of truth by Manne see Paul Sheehan's excellent book "Among the Barbarians."

Some errors in his article:

• (Ian Plimer) describes the entire climate science community as "the forces of darkness"

Think about it, Robert. Is he calling himself a part of the "forces of darkness?" Are all the scientists that he refers to part of the "forces of darkness?" on the other hand, are you, Professor Manne (a non-scientist) part of the "Forces of darkness?"

• The work of these scientists has been summarised in four cautious reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the most recent, the IPCC argued that the evidence for human causation of climate change was unequivocal.

Well, not quite unequivocal, Professor. They actually said "very high confidence" which represents at least a 9 out of 10 chance
of being correct. Mind you in the same report they also said "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal." Warming is a bit different to man-made or as you say "human causation" warming.
These IPCC "scientists" also said in their AR4: "Carbon dioxide is the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas." That is correct, if they pay no regard to water vapour. Science tells us that the most important greenhouse gases are:
water vapor, which contributes 36–72%
carbon dioxide, which contributes 9–26%
methane, which contributes 4–9%
ozone, which contributes 3–7%

• Many regard the work of the tens of thousands of climate change scientists as fraudulent and the IPCC as a sinister and vast international conspiracy.

Hey, Prof, you got that right. If you read the fourth Assessment report, and the science in the reports behind the Summary for Policymakers, you will find that the Summary for Policymakers is not supported by the science. If you call that a conspiracy, then so-be-it. As to the "tens of thousands of climate change scientists" - how many of them are independant of Government Grants?

• In the other camp are a few dozen scientists.

Wrong again - As an example, Professor, just google "petitionproject.org" more than 30,000 scientists, look also at the International Climate Science Coalition, The Australian Climate Science Coalition, The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.
See also www.climatesceptics.com.au

How can one learned Professor get it so wrong, so often?

Peter Garrett keeps his head above water

Did Greg Roberts intend the pun when he said:

FEDERAL Environment Minister Peter Garrett has moved to water down his claim that sea levels could rise by 6m as a result of the melting of Antarctic ice.

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said Mr Garrett had been alarmist. "...but using alarmist and patently wrong information to back his case will do nothing to instil confidence in his arguments," hesaid. "If Mr Garrett is going to get it so wrong on sea-level rises, how can people have confidence in comments he makes on glacier melts?"

Interesting, because most glaciers in the world are now advancing

James Cook University geophysicist Bob Carter said Mr Garrett's claims were typical of the political misinformation surrounding the global warming debate. "Like Al Gore and the other dark greens that they seek to mollify, politicians completely fail to comprehend that we live on a dynamic planet Earth," Professor Carter said.

Definition from RITA (Research and Innovation Technology Administration):
Ice Shelf: Seaward extension of an ice sheet, floating but attached to the land on at least one side and bounded on the seaward side by a steep cliff rising 2 to 50 m or more above sea level.

If a floating ice shelf melts, sea level will not rise, Peter.

Facts from Landcare Research:
• Antarctica is the 5th biggest continent and 10% of the earth's land area.

• Antarctica's total area is 14 million km2 In summer, there is another 2.5 million km2 of sea ice, which increases to 19 million km2 in winter, more than doubling the size of Antarctica!

• Antarctic ice which at its thickest reaches 5 km in depth, comprises almost 70% of the earth's fresh water.

• Antarctica has the lowest recorded temperature; -90°C at Vostock in 1983. Inland, temperatures range from -70°C in winter to -35°C in summer. Corresponding figures for coastal regions are -30°C and 0°C.

It is a rare occasion when the temperature rises above freezing, so most melting must come from rises in ocean temperature.

Alarmists show cowardly colours

Marc Morano reports that after UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had flown from England to appear at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday.

Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

“The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

“The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the US Constitution. Congress Henry Waxman's (D-CA) refusal to expose Al Gore's sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear,” Monckton said from the airport Thursday evening.

As the science closes in on the hoaxing alarmists, they are getting more and more desperate. Will any reports be made about this in the Main Stream Media

Conflict between IPCC and NASA's GISS

In a report by The Associated Press 17 April 09 by Randolph E. Schmid.
IPCC lead researcher, Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona said:

As global warming progresses, the increases in temperature may make the normal climate pattern more extreme, producing even more severe and prolonged droughts than those of the past.

This contrasts directly with a paper published in Journal of Climate 10 (December 1997.)

This paper showed that increased heat warmed the ocean, causing more evaporation and hence more precipitation. Seems simple to me Jonathan - over to you!

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1997/ Dai, A., I.Y. Fung, and A.D. Del Genio, 1997: Surface observed global land precipitation variations during 1900-1988. J. Climate, 10, 2943-2962, doi:10.1175/1520-0442(1997)010<2943:SOGLPV>2.0.CO;2.

New Scientist doesn't know the Old Science

From a report dated 13Apl2009 by Douglas Fox in New Scientist:
We know that Antarctica froze 35 million years ago, when its detachment from South America unleashed a circumpolar ocean current that isolated it from warmer parts of the world. What we do not know is whether its ice sheets have stayed frozen or melted and reformed many times since then.

It is an urgent question. Understanding how Antarctica's ice responded to past climate swings will help us to predict how it will react as temperatures rise in the coming decades. The mighty ice sheet covering West Antarctica could unleash enough water to raise sea levels by 5 metres were it to melt.

Andrill's results reveal a breathtaking picture. They show how the West Antarctic ice sheet has collapsed and regrown at least 60 times in the past few million years. Andrill predicts that it could once again tip toward collapse by the year 2100.

Hello? Didn't Mr Fox learn in Science 101 that the melting of FLOATING ice makes no difference to sea levels.

Update: "Didn't the coward that left an anonymous message, learn in Definitions 101 that an Ice Shelf is a thick floating platform of ice?

Global Warmng Flushed down the toilet

From Skeptic's Corner - (See also http://www.climatesceptics.com.au)

"Notable Quotes"
"The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations."
Richard S. Lindzen -the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

That's Steam, don't pollute minds

From I Love Carbon Dioxide.com about

.. a story from Reuters that combines the worst of both worlds, media biased portrayal with political black mail. Let's start with the media part. There is a two photo slide show with the story, here is the first photo (left);

Now I don't know how many people know that those towers at power plants are cooling towers and coming out of the top is nothing more than steam. In England a survey showed that two thirds of people thought what was coming out was pollution. I would guess it is the same everywhere. This is done to protect the environment so as not to discharge hot water back into lakes etc.
The fact that the media uses these pictures constantly as an iconic representation of global warming is both misleading and ironic. The irony being that water vapor is in fact the number one greenhouse gas, though man's contribution is minuscule. Besides that is not what our purveyors of truth in the media are trying to portray anyway. When you see pictures like the above it is meant to represent pollution. The fact that it is not is obviously unimportant to them. Of course they are just following the lead of the most famous of such misdirection.

Visit the link above to see the photos. Australia's very even reporter (NOT) the ABC regularly use similar images of water vapour coming from cooling towers at power plants to support stories about the bogus fact CO2 equals manmade global warming.

MainstreamMedia at last looking at both sides?

In the Fairfax Paper - The Independant Weekly there is a report that challenges the "science" as quoted by Bob Brown, Penny Wong and, presumably, the IPCC. It talks about Professor Ian Plimer's new book "Heaven and Earth" and also the visit to Australia of Dr. Miklos Zagoni, Hungarian physicist, reviewer of the IPCC 2007 Assessment Report Four.

He is delivering a lecture in Mount Gambier on May 23 about how Greenhouse gases cannot cause climate change.

What the article fails to mention is that Dr. Zagoni and also David Stockwell are addressing a meeting at Newcastle University at 1pm tomorrow - 15/4/09. For details, call President "The Climate Sceptics" phone: (08) 87259561 or (08) 87235550.

Somehow, I think that the tide is turning.

The chair of the Australian Environment Foundation, Dr Jennifer Marohasy, was heard today on Sydney Radio.

What will happen to the IPCC and the "sell-out" scientists when the fraud is exposed?

Kyoto Box pulls wool over Pachauri's eyes

From Grist.Beta:

Kyoto stove wins $75,000 FT climate change innovation competition about a cardboard box that uses sunlight (global warming) to cook.


and one of the comments:

From RUserious
I thought new had to be new to be new?
I am all for solar cookers (I have designed and built several of them myself), but, I am not thilled about someone winning a $75,000 prize for an invention that has been around for several hundred years. This solar box cooker looks like the one Napoleon's troops were using in the mid 1800's. The only apparent difference is cardboard instead of wood and plexiglass instead of glass.

Also from the article

Methane from ruminants is estimated to be responsible for 20% of global warming;

From a recent paper by Dr Gerrit van der Lingen entitled "Ruminants not Kyoto villains."

Reducing methane emissions from ruminants has now become one of the major targets of anthropogenic (man-made)-global-warming activists. Recently, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called on people to give up eating meat, on the grounds that the digestive methane given off by cattle contributes more to greenhouse gases than all the world’s transport. Someone was wondering what Dr Pachaudri was going to do about the 400 million sacred cows in his homeland India. Being a vegetarian in India would not help to reduce its ruminant methane emissions. But then, India is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol.

and

All plants, including grass, require carbon dioxide to grow. Grass is eaten by ruminants and the carbon in it is used for the growth of the animal and for milk and wool production. A small part of the carbon from the grass is used to make methane through enteric fermentation. This methane is emitted by the animals into the atmosphere. It stays in the atmosphere for only about 10 years, after which it changes back to carbon dioxide, which in turn is being absorbed by the grass, which in turn is eaten by the animals, etc. It is basically a closed loop.

More of Dr Van der Lingen's paper can be found on the NZ Climate Scietists Coalition Web site.

Kevin 747 does a back-turn

Kevin 747 was on his way to Thailand to try and convince the Asean nations to set up an Asia-Pacific EU style common market. That's all we need. With our fragile environment, to open up our borders to all of Asia could swamp the place. To open our economy to the lowest of Asian wages could bankrupt the country (that is if he hasn't done it already!)

Meanwhile John Roskam has written an article that should be read by all Australian who have given our jet-setting PM his very high popularity.

Rudd can now mix it with the best of them. He's just resided over a government that's got 20 per cent bigger. According to the Treasury's own calculations, spending by the federal government will have gone from just over 23 per cent of gross domestic product in 2007-08 to about 28 per cent in this financial year. Saying this growth is of Whitlamesque proportions is not hyperbole. It's a statement that's literally true. Indeed, depending on how you measure it, government is now growing faster than it did in 1972-75 (under arguably our worst PM - E Gough Whitlam)

Perhaps our PM could stay in Austrlia for the greater proportion of the next year and, like his plane, do an about-turn on his empire-building..

Alarmists@Copenhagen vs Sceptics@ New York

From the Energy Tribune:

A good report contrasting the two conferences held last month.

Some Contrasts:

Copenhagen
•The climate alarmist conference in Copenhagen was attended by over 2,000 activists, mostly non-scientists.
• The conference duly warned of even higher sea levels and even higher global temperatures all presaging even greater catastrophes.
• The Copenhagen meeting was not about science, it was about politics and prophecy.

New York
•...some 700 climate “skeptics” many of them scientists...
• This was a wholly different kind of affair. It focused on the science of climate change, the latest scientific data, and climate trends.

The most distressing part of the article said:
As such, in dealing with the gritty reality of climate science, it got almost zero mass media coverage.

What happened to investigative journalism? With the current crop of reporters we would not have heard about Nixon and Deep throat nor Clinton and Levinsky.

The Confused Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen starts her blog entry "Dear Climate Change Deniers...." and then mentions climate change skeptics like the Heartland Institute.

I'm sure that, if she had attended the ICCC organised by Heartland a month ago, she would have learned that the 700 Climate Scientists at the convention all agree that climate changes through the course of history. She would have been hard pushed to find a solitary climate change denier.

She goes on to say the "evidence for global warming is unequivocal" and cites an UN IPCC report. Is she aware that the Assesment reports issued by the IPCC are prepared but less than 50 scientists? Is she aware that more than 31,000 scientists at petitionproject.org have said that it is all bunkum? Is she aware that the UN's IPCC is a political body, not a scientific body?

The IPCC report mentioned that IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachuari said the science has “moved on”
and he was right. The ice core samples show that rise in CO2 follows warming with a lag of 800+/-200 years.

She mentions that the world had experienced over 1 degree of warming in the last century, and can expect even more in the years to come.

She forgot to mention that the warmest decade, according to NASA's GISS, was the 1930's and that the warmest year in that century was 1934. Also, she exaggerated the warming - the official figure was only 0.6ºC

She goes on to say As people of faith, we have a moral obligation to protect the planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants, who stand to suffer the most from climate change and are already seeing its effects. Seems hard to deny...

Well, what about denying the third world the things that advanced her US, our Australia and the major G20 nations; things like Petrol and Oil and Coal Fired Power.

Or do we let these third world people tear down forests for fuel, have rotting food because of no refrigeration, etc etc. These are the most vulnerable inhabitants, who stand to suffer the most from climate change.

Thomas L Friedman lost the Ball

In the New York Times op-ed piece by TL Friedman (which I know is only an opinion piece) he seems to have lost the plot. He correctly mentions the failures of cap-and-trade - but poo-poos it anyway. He then goes on to say:

STRATEGY Since the opponents of cap-and-trade are going to pillory it as a tax anyway, why not go for the real thing — a simple, transparent, economy-wide carbon tax?

His next main point:

MESSAGE Climate change is a real threat to a healthy planet Earth — the only home we have.

Well, I would strongly dispute that! In fact he is wrong there. The climate of the healthy planet Earth has been changing since the beginning of time. The continuously changing climate has not harmed the healthy planet Earth in the past and I'm sure it won't in the future.

Does he mean the scurrillous use by globalwarming alarmist of the term "climate change" when they realised that the Earth had stopped warming? They did this because the Earth had stopped warming!

Global Warming in Australia - 1900 AD

In a report in the LA Times by Julie Cart dated 9 April 2009 noted that the drought in the Murray Darling Basin was due to AGW or climate change. (See link in title.)
When did this man-made Global Warming start, Julie?

On Jennifer Marohasy's blog she quoted a report re the year 1900 AD. (Chronicles of Australia, Ed John Ross, Legrand 1993.)

“THE oppressive heat was a major talking point of the vast and drought stricken country of Australia.

“While cyclonic winds have been lashing the coast off Townsville, the temperature today soared to 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44.4 C) in Adelaide and Broken Hill, and 104 (40C) in Melbourne.

“So dry is much of Australia that the riverboats on the Murray have come to a stand still. On a cattle station in central Queensland, it is reported that the kangaroos are too weak to hop and the kookaburras can no longer fly.

“In Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, the New Year sees these State’s battling to recover after recent bushfires. But if its not fires it would be floods, and if not floods it would be drought.

“In the north the odd cyclone adds a bit of interest by knocking down a few towns, or sinking the fishing fleet. Australians are used to having nature knock them off their feet every so often.

“The country has battled through the long droughts, and seen the downturn in the bush rush right to the doors of the city banks. But the crashes of the nineties are behind as the New Year [1900] comes near.”

Over to you, Julie, Was this the result of man-made climate change too?

Kevin Rudd/Belinda Neal: Who needs anger management?

From the Herald-Sun dated 3/4/09:
Kevin Rudd loses temper over in-flight meal.

This is the PM who made Belinda Neal submit to anger management. Should he now take himself off to anger management classes?

Pachauri appointed to Yale

Yale Daily News: Wednesday 1st April reported that Rajendra Pachauri appointed to the directorship of the newly formed Yale Climate and Energy Institute.

Dr Pachauri continues to spread untruths. When asked what he would say to climate change sceptics replied:

Well, look at the work of the IPCC. These are thousands of scientists who have functioned in a transparent, objective manner. Everything that is assessed by the IPCC, every draft at every stage is peer-reviewed. … It’s an extremely objective, knowledge-driven process.

There may have been thousands of scientists who contributed to the IPCC but the actual assessment reports for politicians and press numbered less than 50. As to peer-review, these 50 co-wrote papers and cross reviewed papers. It's an extremely subjective, outcome driven process.

Tell me, Dr Pachauri, how is it that after trillions of dollars of expenditure and more than 20 years spent trying to prove CO2 is to blame, your IPCC has not come up with one single item of proof?

Before you start another enquiry, I will give you the answer for free. There is none. CO2 is innocent.