Lost Glory Moral Decay
*
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/hotair.htm
n fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.
For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.
In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations.
As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.
Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.
It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.
Not only do humans not dominate Earth's current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.
In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.
Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.
The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/sealevel.htm
We have Venice. Venice is well known, because that area is tectonically, because of the delta, slowly subsiding. The rate has been constant over time. A rising sea level would immediately accelerate the flooding. And it would be so simple to record it. And if you look at that 300-year record: In the 20th Century it was going up and down, around the subsidence rate. In 1970, you should have an acceleration, but instead, the rise almost finished. So it was the opposite.
If you go around the globe, you find no rise anywhere. But they need the rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat. They say there is nothing good to come from a sea-level rise, only problems, coastal problems. If you have a temperature rise, if it's a problem in one area, it's beneficial in another area. But sea level is the real "bad guy," and therefore they have talked very much about it. But the real thing is, that it doesn't exist in observational data, only in computer modelling....
I'll tell you another thing: When I came to the Maldives, to our enormous surprise, one morning we were on an island, and I said, "This is something strange, the storm level has gone down; it has not gone up, it has gone down." And then I started to check the level all around, and I asked the others in the group, "Do you see anything here on the beach?" And after a while they found it too. And as we had investigated, and we were sure, I said we cannot leave the Maldives and go home and say the sea level is not rising, it's not respectful to the people. I have to say it to Maldive television.
So we made a very nice program for Maldive television, but it was forbidden by the government (!) because they thought that they would lose money. They accuse the West for putting out carbon dioxide, and therefore we have to pay for our damage and the flooding. So they wanted the flooding scenario to go on.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/swindle.htm
No one can show that a warmer climate would produce negative impacts overall. The much–feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend on short–term temperature changes, as the rate of sea–level increases has been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many economists argue that the opposite is more likely—that warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. Why do we assume that the present climate is the optimum? Surely, the chance of this must be vanishingly small, and the economic history of past climate warmings bear this out.
But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a non–problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human rights—not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of the world prefer to squander our limited resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real problems. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: the chief scientist of Great Britain tells us that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously!
I imagine that in the not–too–distant future all the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool—as it did during much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them.
What was once so far away, caught in tunnels and back lots, in a future that was never expected to arrive, is now upon us; and an immoral and self serving government wraps us all in paperwork. The great moral challenge of the age, global warming, is looking more and more like spin every day. The great moral challenge of the age is more likely to be how to get rid of an immoral and incompetent government and a vastly preened over-watered bureaucracy. They grow like weeds, but serve even less purpose. They feed off the masses, and give nothing back. They grow in the back lots, and no one asks why.
It's Jess's last day at the cafe A Little On The Side, just down the road from here, and she's heading off to Ios, the Greek Island, for three months. I've been there, I said, in 1975, and look at me, surprised. There was only one nightclub on the island, and it was closed while I was there. Now there are dozens. I was arrested for having peace signs on my shoes, it was the 70s, and they look even more startled. They think we were never young. They think the world is there; and yes it is; we've been pushed aside.
I click the coffee on my card and leave, the cold winter sun lighting up the inner-city terraces. There is nothing that can be gained, nothing condoned, as bad news mirrors everywhere and we wait, wait, for changes to come, for hope to water our ancient souls, for an irrigation scheme to change our crumbling psyches. Oh why, oh why, he asks, and there is no answer for the profoundly disappointed. The world didn't work out in our favour, as we had assumed it would, and we, in the centre of things, the only generation to have grasped the modern world, to have embraced and changed everything, grow old and bitter, destroyed by the institutions we helped create.
All the men who were such great supporters of feminism have had their homes and children ripped off them by the Family Courts they helped build - the corrupt bureaucracies they supported; the very ones they remained silent on, or ridiculed the critics of the day as right wing and backward. Now the manufactured crises compound upon us, and the politicians lie and lie and lie. They use false data and don't even blanch. They think we're fools and smugly climb into their limousines, speeding on their high moral ground, their high moral highways.
How farcical it all is. The young swallow everything, believe everything. My dad thinks global warming is a myth, my dear daughter said in class, and was howled down for even daring to suggest such a thing. Global warming sceptic is used as an epithet in parliament, as if to be a sceptic was in itself a bad thing. Serves them right, for the hysteria they promoted is now coming back to bite them. The emissions trading scheme the Rudd government has committed itself to will be a rolled gold disaster of the very first order, an insane bureaucracy bleeding business and destroying initiative.
It will be classic Labor, left wing lunatic ideologically driven Labor, the one we thought had died in the 70s and is now everywhere for all to see. It's hard to believe, the nonsense they promote. They claimed in government the other day that agriculture would contract by 20%, ignoring the industry figures who have pointed out that it will do nothing of the kind. Increasing carbon in the atmosphere increases plant production, not decreases it. Even if it's true the planet is warming, for which now there exists no evidence whatsoever, surely that's a good thing if you live in Siberia, or Tasmania for that matter.
But reality has nothing to do with the manufactured crises and the eternal hysteria now promoted by governments everywhere, and most particularly by our government here in Australia. They just can't help themselves. Domestic violence, that untouchable subject, is a classic example. They spend hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and funnily enough, the claimed problem just gets worth, justifying the spending of yet more hundreds of millions of dollars. This week the lunar left down in Victoria included financial abuse in the definition of domestic violence, so if you don't buy that couch when she asks you can be charged. This in the 21st century, when surely every one's perfectly capable of going out and getting a job for themselves. How much more insane will this country get? Much, I fear.
If social policy was a person, this week it would have been locked up. While they were busy including financial abuse in the ever expanding definition of DV, the government was using money owed by dead dads, thousands of dead dads, dating back to 1988, to justify their claim that one billion was owed by recalcitrant parents. If that is not morally bereft, nothing is.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/petrol-price-to-be-protected/2008/06/27/1214472770817.html
MOTORISTS will be spared an increase in the price of fuel under the emissions trading scheme being thrashed out by the Federal Government.
As a special climate change subcommittee of cabinet met again yesterday, followed by a full cabinet meeting, senior Government sources told the Herald that the starting point was that there be no net increase in the price of petrol.
"We are not going to do people over," one senior minister said.
The commitment came as the president of OPEC, Chakib Khelil, warned oil prices could jump by more than 20 per cent by September. The resulting shockwave pushed the price of crude over $US140 a barrel for the first time.
The chief economist at AMP Capital, Shane Oliver, predicted that oil at $US170 a barrel would mean unleaded petrol rising to between $1.95 and $2 a litre.
The Government's price commitment indicates that should fuel be included in the emissions scheme, petrol excise would be cut to offset the increase caused by the imposition of a carbon tax.
http://business.smh.com.au/expect-a-soft-landing-on-emissions-trading-20080627-2y3o.html
The T-word - transition - is much in vogue as business lobbies watch the growing shenanigans in Canberra over the looming introduction of an emissions trading scheme
If the Government is hesitant about flattening the economy with a sudden, sharp scheme in 2010 - as all the pointers, much less Coalition politicking on higher petrol prices, suggest - then the issue becomes the size and shape of the transition.
Climate change adviser Ross Garnaut's report next week is expected to recommend a broad cap-and-trade scheme embracing all sectors of the economy, including transport. Separately, a green paper from the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, will set the stage for final decisions on a trading scheme later in the year.
Betting is that the transition path, when it is thrashed out, will be relatively easy, with insiders expecting it will be aimed more at sending a signal about intentions than imposing tough emissions controls.
If the Government's penchant for spin is any guide, a carefully crafted package can be expected, giving all the appearance of doing something while treading water until the global picture comes into sharper focus with the next Kyoto agreement after 2012.
Promising an emissions trading scheme by 2010 may sound fine in Opposition, but delivering it in Government - with a federal and four state elections due that year - is another thing altogether. It would take a very courageous Labor politician to walk into a round of elections promising significantly higher petrol and electricity
charges.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aXktBX9CocTs&refer=australia
N.Z. Industry Says Emissions Trading Too Costly, Seeks Debate
By Gavin Evans
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- New Zealand industry has asked the government to re-open submissions on the nation's emissions trading laws, saying they are too costly and uncertain even after more than 1,000 amendments were made to the proposed rules.
Parliament is in the final stages of considering laws that will control emissions at four-times the per-unit cost of the European system, industry groups said in a letter to parliament. The process is being rushed ahead of elections this year and too many rules are being left to officials to formulate, they said.
New Zealand's plan to apply pollution caps to all industry by 2013 is the broadest of any emission trading program to date. BlueScope Steel Ltd. wants an exemption, saying its plant will be uncompetitive. Cement-maker Holcim Ltd. is ``perplexed'' that policy makers are trying to encourage investment in cleaner, more efficient plants while imposing a cap on emissions as severe as 90 percent of levels three years ago.
``We do want to see emissions trading,'' Holcim New Zealand Ltd. Energy and Climate Change Manager Michael Rynne said in a telephone interview from Christchurch. ``You just want to be careful to get it right because the implications are big.''
BlueScope and Holcim are among 15 companies that account for about 80 percent of the nation's emissions. Others include Fonterra Cooperative Group, the world's biggest dairy exporter, Rio Tinto Alcan Inc.'s Tiwai Point aluminum smelter and Fletcher Building Ltd.
Under the proposal before parliament, they will be liable for the equivalent of 10 percent of their 2005 emissions starting from 2010. That cap will tighten from 2018 with emitters meeting the full cost of their pollution by 2030.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/hotair.htm
n fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.
For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.
In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations.
As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.
Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.
It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.
Not only do humans not dominate Earth's current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.
In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.
Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.
The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/sealevel.htm
We have Venice. Venice is well known, because that area is tectonically, because of the delta, slowly subsiding. The rate has been constant over time. A rising sea level would immediately accelerate the flooding. And it would be so simple to record it. And if you look at that 300-year record: In the 20th Century it was going up and down, around the subsidence rate. In 1970, you should have an acceleration, but instead, the rise almost finished. So it was the opposite.
If you go around the globe, you find no rise anywhere. But they need the rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat. They say there is nothing good to come from a sea-level rise, only problems, coastal problems. If you have a temperature rise, if it's a problem in one area, it's beneficial in another area. But sea level is the real "bad guy," and therefore they have talked very much about it. But the real thing is, that it doesn't exist in observational data, only in computer modelling....
I'll tell you another thing: When I came to the Maldives, to our enormous surprise, one morning we were on an island, and I said, "This is something strange, the storm level has gone down; it has not gone up, it has gone down." And then I started to check the level all around, and I asked the others in the group, "Do you see anything here on the beach?" And after a while they found it too. And as we had investigated, and we were sure, I said we cannot leave the Maldives and go home and say the sea level is not rising, it's not respectful to the people. I have to say it to Maldive television.
So we made a very nice program for Maldive television, but it was forbidden by the government (!) because they thought that they would lose money. They accuse the West for putting out carbon dioxide, and therefore we have to pay for our damage and the flooding. So they wanted the flooding scenario to go on.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/swindle.htm
No one can show that a warmer climate would produce negative impacts overall. The much–feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend on short–term temperature changes, as the rate of sea–level increases has been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many economists argue that the opposite is more likely—that warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. Why do we assume that the present climate is the optimum? Surely, the chance of this must be vanishingly small, and the economic history of past climate warmings bear this out.
But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a non–problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human rights—not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of the world prefer to squander our limited resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real problems. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: the chief scientist of Great Britain tells us that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously!
I imagine that in the not–too–distant future all the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool—as it did during much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them.
What was once so far away, caught in tunnels and back lots, in a future that was never expected to arrive, is now upon us; and an immoral and self serving government wraps us all in paperwork. The great moral challenge of the age, global warming, is looking more and more like spin every day. The great moral challenge of the age is more likely to be how to get rid of an immoral and incompetent government and a vastly preened over-watered bureaucracy. They grow like weeds, but serve even less purpose. They feed off the masses, and give nothing back. They grow in the back lots, and no one asks why.
It's Jess's last day at the cafe A Little On The Side, just down the road from here, and she's heading off to Ios, the Greek Island, for three months. I've been there, I said, in 1975, and look at me, surprised. There was only one nightclub on the island, and it was closed while I was there. Now there are dozens. I was arrested for having peace signs on my shoes, it was the 70s, and they look even more startled. They think we were never young. They think the world is there; and yes it is; we've been pushed aside.
I click the coffee on my card and leave, the cold winter sun lighting up the inner-city terraces. There is nothing that can be gained, nothing condoned, as bad news mirrors everywhere and we wait, wait, for changes to come, for hope to water our ancient souls, for an irrigation scheme to change our crumbling psyches. Oh why, oh why, he asks, and there is no answer for the profoundly disappointed. The world didn't work out in our favour, as we had assumed it would, and we, in the centre of things, the only generation to have grasped the modern world, to have embraced and changed everything, grow old and bitter, destroyed by the institutions we helped create.
All the men who were such great supporters of feminism have had their homes and children ripped off them by the Family Courts they helped build - the corrupt bureaucracies they supported; the very ones they remained silent on, or ridiculed the critics of the day as right wing and backward. Now the manufactured crises compound upon us, and the politicians lie and lie and lie. They use false data and don't even blanch. They think we're fools and smugly climb into their limousines, speeding on their high moral ground, their high moral highways.
How farcical it all is. The young swallow everything, believe everything. My dad thinks global warming is a myth, my dear daughter said in class, and was howled down for even daring to suggest such a thing. Global warming sceptic is used as an epithet in parliament, as if to be a sceptic was in itself a bad thing. Serves them right, for the hysteria they promoted is now coming back to bite them. The emissions trading scheme the Rudd government has committed itself to will be a rolled gold disaster of the very first order, an insane bureaucracy bleeding business and destroying initiative.
It will be classic Labor, left wing lunatic ideologically driven Labor, the one we thought had died in the 70s and is now everywhere for all to see. It's hard to believe, the nonsense they promote. They claimed in government the other day that agriculture would contract by 20%, ignoring the industry figures who have pointed out that it will do nothing of the kind. Increasing carbon in the atmosphere increases plant production, not decreases it. Even if it's true the planet is warming, for which now there exists no evidence whatsoever, surely that's a good thing if you live in Siberia, or Tasmania for that matter.
But reality has nothing to do with the manufactured crises and the eternal hysteria now promoted by governments everywhere, and most particularly by our government here in Australia. They just can't help themselves. Domestic violence, that untouchable subject, is a classic example. They spend hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and funnily enough, the claimed problem just gets worth, justifying the spending of yet more hundreds of millions of dollars. This week the lunar left down in Victoria included financial abuse in the definition of domestic violence, so if you don't buy that couch when she asks you can be charged. This in the 21st century, when surely every one's perfectly capable of going out and getting a job for themselves. How much more insane will this country get? Much, I fear.
If social policy was a person, this week it would have been locked up. While they were busy including financial abuse in the ever expanding definition of DV, the government was using money owed by dead dads, thousands of dead dads, dating back to 1988, to justify their claim that one billion was owed by recalcitrant parents. If that is not morally bereft, nothing is.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/petrol-price-to-be-protected/2008/06/27/1214472770817.html
MOTORISTS will be spared an increase in the price of fuel under the emissions trading scheme being thrashed out by the Federal Government.
As a special climate change subcommittee of cabinet met again yesterday, followed by a full cabinet meeting, senior Government sources told the Herald that the starting point was that there be no net increase in the price of petrol.
"We are not going to do people over," one senior minister said.
The commitment came as the president of OPEC, Chakib Khelil, warned oil prices could jump by more than 20 per cent by September. The resulting shockwave pushed the price of crude over $US140 a barrel for the first time.
The chief economist at AMP Capital, Shane Oliver, predicted that oil at $US170 a barrel would mean unleaded petrol rising to between $1.95 and $2 a litre.
The Government's price commitment indicates that should fuel be included in the emissions scheme, petrol excise would be cut to offset the increase caused by the imposition of a carbon tax.
http://business.smh.com.au/expect-a-soft-landing-on-emissions-trading-20080627-2y3o.html
The T-word - transition - is much in vogue as business lobbies watch the growing shenanigans in Canberra over the looming introduction of an emissions trading scheme
If the Government is hesitant about flattening the economy with a sudden, sharp scheme in 2010 - as all the pointers, much less Coalition politicking on higher petrol prices, suggest - then the issue becomes the size and shape of the transition.
Climate change adviser Ross Garnaut's report next week is expected to recommend a broad cap-and-trade scheme embracing all sectors of the economy, including transport. Separately, a green paper from the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, will set the stage for final decisions on a trading scheme later in the year.
Betting is that the transition path, when it is thrashed out, will be relatively easy, with insiders expecting it will be aimed more at sending a signal about intentions than imposing tough emissions controls.
If the Government's penchant for spin is any guide, a carefully crafted package can be expected, giving all the appearance of doing something while treading water until the global picture comes into sharper focus with the next Kyoto agreement after 2012.
Promising an emissions trading scheme by 2010 may sound fine in Opposition, but delivering it in Government - with a federal and four state elections due that year - is another thing altogether. It would take a very courageous Labor politician to walk into a round of elections promising significantly higher petrol and electricity
charges.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aXktBX9CocTs&refer=australia
N.Z. Industry Says Emissions Trading Too Costly, Seeks Debate
By Gavin Evans
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- New Zealand industry has asked the government to re-open submissions on the nation's emissions trading laws, saying they are too costly and uncertain even after more than 1,000 amendments were made to the proposed rules.
Parliament is in the final stages of considering laws that will control emissions at four-times the per-unit cost of the European system, industry groups said in a letter to parliament. The process is being rushed ahead of elections this year and too many rules are being left to officials to formulate, they said.
New Zealand's plan to apply pollution caps to all industry by 2013 is the broadest of any emission trading program to date. BlueScope Steel Ltd. wants an exemption, saying its plant will be uncompetitive. Cement-maker Holcim Ltd. is ``perplexed'' that policy makers are trying to encourage investment in cleaner, more efficient plants while imposing a cap on emissions as severe as 90 percent of levels three years ago.
``We do want to see emissions trading,'' Holcim New Zealand Ltd. Energy and Climate Change Manager Michael Rynne said in a telephone interview from Christchurch. ``You just want to be careful to get it right because the implications are big.''
BlueScope and Holcim are among 15 companies that account for about 80 percent of the nation's emissions. Others include Fonterra Cooperative Group, the world's biggest dairy exporter, Rio Tinto Alcan Inc.'s Tiwai Point aluminum smelter and Fletcher Building Ltd.
Under the proposal before parliament, they will be liable for the equivalent of 10 percent of their 2005 emissions starting from 2010. That cap will tighten from 2018 with emitters meeting the full cost of their pollution by 2030.
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