Missing persons report

Although we’re getting say a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas of Australia, that’s translating to a 60 per cent decrease in the run-off into the dams and rivers. That’s because the soil is warmer because of global warming and the plants are under more stress and therefore using more moisture. So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that’s a real worry for the people in the bush.

Professor Tim Flannery, February 2007
(ABC Landline interview)

My house is under water here. Where the fuck is all this water coming from? Did someone say the dam’s full? Nah, can’t be. Can it?

(Probably) someone living downstream of the
Warragamba Dam in NSW, this weekend

The noted environmentalist and warble gloaming activist Professor Tim Flannery is currently presumed missing.

Concerns for Professor Flannery, named Australian of the Year in 2007 and appointed head of Prime Minister Gingery Dullard’s Climate Change Commission, have arisen since he can normally be relied upon to talk very loudly about warble gloaming whenever the weather does anything. His failure to put in an appearance and speak at length on how the rain currently falling and filling the dams proves his point that even the rain that falls won’t fill the dams has been described as ‘deeply worrying’.

Many have suggested that heavy rainfall filling dams in fact disproves Flannery’s prediction and that this may be the real reason for his silence. Meanwhile meteorologists have said that just possibly a mammologist/palaeontologist, even one who’s written books about warble gloaming and has campaigned very publicly on the issue, should leave the weather predicting business to them.

In response a Commission spokeswoman said that Professor Flannery, who is reportedly paid $180,000 a year for a three day week role as the impartial Chairman of the absolutely neutral body set up to sell the need for a carbon tax to the Australian public, is currently in Germany. Whether this was a particular part of Germany with no access to phones or internet and thus leaving him unable to explain why the rain has been caused by the drought was not said. The recent series of cold European winters has been ruled out as a possible cause of being unable to communicate from Germany, allowing speculation as to Tim Flannery’s whereabouts to grow.

Okay, joking aside now. I have to be fair here and say that Flannery is no doubt very busy on something or other in Germany and anyway it is only just the one dam that’s fil… oh.

Yeah, that’s a bit more of a problem, especially as this is of course the second year in a row that parts of Australia have experienced the kind of flooding rains that we were told wouldn’t happen again because of the kind of droughts we were having instead. Perhaps we shouldn’t be listening quite so much to predictions of future doom without bearing in mind voices of past observers, such as one I’ve mentioned here once or twice before.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
…
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die-
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my Heart, aka My Country – Dorothea Mackellar, 1911

Obviously there’s a difference between careful scientific observation (a whole other argument which I’m happy leave to folks such as Anthony Watts) and poetry, but really it doesn’t sound as if in a country supposedly ravaged by warbly gloamed climate change things have actually changed much at all. Droughts, check. Flooding rains, check. Cattle dropping dead, check. Steady soaking rain, check. Mackellar’s words are as relevant a century on as they were when she wrote them, whereas Tim Flannery’s talk of what rain we are going to get being inadequate to fill the dams seems debatable after only five. It wasn’t a prediction involving a specific date but nonetheless I’m adding it to the list of warble gloaming dates for your diary.*

• Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction – New York’s West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater – Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
• Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr – British children will not know snow in their own country – Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
• “Imminently” – loss of world’s coral reefs – David Attenborough in July 2009 (‘world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed’)
• By 2010 – 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program – currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
• Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier – ice free Arctic – Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
• British children “aren’t going to know what snow is” – article in The Independent written in March 2000 without the knowledge of the series of snowy winters that were less than a decade away
• Australian rainfall unable to fill dams – Tim Flannery in 2007, five years before flooding affects Queensland, New South Wales and northern Victoria for the second successive year
• 2012 – fields on fire and approximately two thirds of the entire planet’s population dead
• Late 2013 – ice free Arctic – Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years’)
• 2014 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – WWF.
• Dec 2016 – the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair – the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
• Dec 2016 – loss of ‘the levers of control’ for the climate – the Prince of Fails… again.
• Late 2019 – ice free Arctic – Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
• Late 2019 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – UK Met Office.
• Late 2029 – loss of Great Barrier Reef – marine scientist Charlie Veron (‘global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years’)
• By approximately 2040 – ice free arctic yet again – NSIDC director Mark Serreze

It’s been a few months since this list was updated and in all fairness to Tim Flannery it must be said that with a claim that four or five billion people will be dead by the end of this year his prediction is actually one of the more sensible ones on there.

 

* This is actually a double update because I’ve just noticed that I haven’t got that one about British kids never seeing snow again.

Ill windmills

In case either of my readers (hi, Mum) were wondering the lack of posts this week isn’t a sign of anything more than that I’ve been a bit busy. I certainly haven’t suddenly started believing that all is right with the world after all because clearly it isn’t. I just haven’t had the time to seethe about it at length in the blogosphere and have had to settle for occasional quiet seethe-lets in the car instead.

And I can’t offer much this evening either for the same reason, but I just wanted to point out this from The Daily Mash the other day:

Chairman Lord Turner said: “The only problem we can possibly foresee is if it’s not as windy as we think it’s going to be.

[…]

The report was welcomed by the large energy providers who said that if they were going to pick a figure of out of thin air for how much more they felt like charging people then they would probably have chosen £110 as well.

Lord Turner added: “It’s not that green technology is, in itself, massively expensive, it’s that if it doesn’t actually work then you have to get the energy from somewhere else. Usually from people who aren’t very nice.

“So you end up with an expensive thing that doesn’t work all the time plus expensive energy from horrid people. And that is massively expensive.

“But it’s fine, because it’s going to be windy.”

Yes, and just the other week we saw that they’re just as good when it’s a bit too windy, didn’t we?

Junket science

Dial up the euphoria and forget the failure of the last junket, er, meeting to agree anything because a major ‘climate deal’ has been done at Durban. So says the Graun, Age, Aunties Beeb and ABC, and all the rest. But forgive my scepticism when I read things like this:

A new global climate deal has been struck after being brought back from the brink of disaster by three powerful women politicians in a 20-minute “huddle to save the planet”.
[…]
… the 16-day talks were effectively over, with a commitment by all countries to accept binding emission cuts by 2020.

Or this:

Every single country in the world has committed to an agreement to take effect from 2020.

Or this:

Talks on a new legal deal covering all countries will begin next year and end by 2015, coming into effect by 2020.

Or this:

Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says it is an “historic breakthrough”.
“The idea is that after 2015 countries would start ratifying the new agreement and it would take effect from 2020.”

So – and I’m looking at this as I would if I were a true warmista, convinced of the danger of catastrophic warble gloaming – after this dramatic twenty minute huddle, followed by that equally dramatic two hours of tense negotiation, all of which had been preceded by more than a bloody fortnight of presumably equally tense negotiation, everybody agreed to kick the fucking can down the road for another few years. And that’s supposed to be a result? Jesus, what do you guys do for an epic failure? No, don’t tell me… begins with a C, doesn’t it? Cancun? Copenhagen? Email me if I’m getting warm, heheh. Sorry, that was insensitive of me.

Forgive my cynicism but having failed, even by what I’d call pretty low standards, in Cancun and Copenhagen and having just had the embarrassment of Climategate 2.0, which looked a lot like it was timed to damage the Durban circle jerk, there needed to be something positive and preferably scene stealing to feed to the media’s headline writers. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the very first thing that was decided, very likely behind the scenes and quite possibly before the conference even officially began. And fucking hell if a unanimous agreement to put off any hard decisions until later and otherwise maintain the status quo isn’t good enough if spun right, even if it’d spin the whole world right off its axis if done much harder.

So in practical terms the great success achieved at Durban is that everything stays exactly the same as it was before all those thousands of delegates got on planes and carbon belched their way through the sky to get there, and everyone has agreed to agree on something more meaningful in four or five years to take effect four or five years after that. Well, it might be good news for the campaigners, researchers, climate change departments and ministers, renewable energy companies, greenwashery makers and all the other rent seekers, but otherwise it seems like a resounding ‘Meh’.

Frankly I’m tempted to get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars and any deity that has even the faintest possibility of existing that I’m a climate sceptic. Because if I was a catastrophist warble gloaming believer I’d be shitting myself.

Free energy from the wind

Well, I suppose if it fell on your house like that it’d warm the place up.

Click for link

Yes, this is indeed a different one

Let’s be honest, if it wasn’t for the warble gloaming catastrophism and the way so many governments, not least the UK’s, have indulged various associated rent seekers these bloody things would be used in those rare locations where it’s not economic to connect to the grid. Instead Britain is expected to rely increasingly on a form of generation which, if it’s a bit too windy, can turn the generator into a £2 million sparkler. Or just knock it down. In fact the only positive thing I can think of right now is that they’re not as useless as they could be.

Give it a few years and and someone will scale this up

Taking the Pepsi challenge

Apparently Coke drinkers buying cans with polar bears on, all to promote the believed perilous situation of a species that has gone from 5-10,000 individuals half a century ago to about five times that number now and which must have survived warmer climates in the past, prefer the cans to be red rather than white. It’s not said whether they prefer the contents to be completely flat and fizzless so as not to release the few grams of carbon deathoxide that will escape genie like from the tin and rush north to hold the heads of a few bear cubs under water, but I suppose that’s less important than the look of the thing.

The cans featured the company’s iconic logo in red, set against an all-white background and featuring a picture of three polar bears plodding through the snow, in what the company described as a “bold, attention-grabbing” move to publicise conservation efforts by the World Wildlife Fund.

I think I’ll start buying supermarket own brand.

Hardly a ringing endorsement for Kyoto type polices

Click for linky

Global carbon emissions reach record 10 billion tonnes, an increase of almost 50 per cent in the last two decades, according to the team at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

I’m not going to go into the University of Email Context and the less said the better about beginning an article with an opening sentence that reads more like a headline.* Instead I’ll just note that the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to stabilise atmospheric levels of some ‘greenhouse gases’ by reducing emissions, that it was bloody expensive, and that emissions went up anyway. In other words even if you buy into the argument that CO₂ emissions are a problem the solution, although to be fair it was touted as an initial step, has been an abject failure.

And in case that’s not convincing a few days ago a post appeared on Watts Up With That entitled ‘What Didn’t Kyoto Do?‘ which made a similar point with some interesting additions.

The entire goal of Kyoto was to drop total country emissions (not per capita emissions) to 1990 levels. Since the population has gone up since 1990, to drop total emissions back down to 1990 levels means that per capita emissions have to drop even further, to well below 1990 levels. Kyoto was supposed to encourage the EU folks to undertake some serious reductions of emissions.

But at the end of the day, despite all of the noise and all of the fury, the US did a better job at reducing per capita emissions (down 14% compared to the 1990 values) than the EU27 did (down 12% compared to the 1990 values).

It is also interesting to compare the absolute values of the changes. In the EU27 with Kyoto, the emissions dropped since 1990 by 1.1 tonnes per capita. Remember that this includes Germany, which artificially decreased the average emissions. Bear in mind as well that one effect of Kyoto was to move energy-intensive industries outside the EU27, which also artificially decreased emissions.

In the USA without Kyoto, emissions dropped since 1990 by more than twice as much, a reduction of 2.8 tonnes per capita. The US had no Kyoto incentives and punishments, didn’t drive out energy-intensive industry, and despite all of that had larger emission reductions, both in absolute and in percentage terms, than the EU27. Go figure.

Indeed, but that’s only the half of it.

Meanwhile, Chinese emissions went up, not down but up, by a whopping 4.6 tonnes per capita … and there’s a whole lot more capitas in China than there are capitas in the US and EU27 combined. China by itself wiped out all the gains of the EU27, and all the gains of the US, and turned them all into a net increase. And that’s just China, doesn’t include Brazil and India and all the rest of the developing world.

So, hands up everyone who’s for more of the same? Those who’ve profited so handsomely off the back of Kyoto I don’t need to answer.

* Telegraph readers may guess that the article is by Louise Gray without following the link, and they probably won’t be surprised to hear that the photo beneath the subhead about carbon emissions shows some cooling towers emitting water vapour.

Heh

There have been a couple of suggestions made about Climategate 2.0 and what quote will turn out to sum things up. My favourite so far was spotted by the Pedant General over at Devil’s Kitchen:

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]

But “The Cause” comes up a lot too. Granted, it’s used without initial caps, but when it appears this many times does it really need them to get the message across? Some people from Minnesota don’t think so.

H/T WUWT.

Misanthropes speak

Yesterday I mentioned that there seemed to be disappointment in some areas – oh, alright, it was The Guardian – that 2011 has not seen record temperatures and warble gloaming is not baking us all to death in our revolting, right wing, miserable selfishness. It’s no great surprise that they’re not alone, being in the company of none other than Phil Jones. Yes, him again.

>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009

Tim, Chris,
I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug’s paper that said something like –
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
record, 1998!
[…]

When you profess a belief that warming will be catastrophic and kill millions that’s a really lovely thing to hope for, Phil, you great humanitarian, you. And did you even consider how unlikely this actually is to happen? At the time you wrote that, January 2009, you must already have been aware that in your own HADCRUT3 record the nine years 1999-2007 inclusive all failed to exceed your desired record, and since there are only sixteen years from 1998 to 2014 that was mathematically impossible even if 2009-14 all broke it. It should already have been crystal clear when you wrote that email that what you were hoping for simply would not, could not, happen. Expressing the hope that it would might suggest getting some primary school level maths wrong, or it might suggest that jigging the figures to make some of the years that weren’t quite warm enough just a little warmer was being considered. Wouldn’t be as good as real warming, which if I understand the warmist ideology is not good but bad yet is also good if it’s bad for people, but it might be good enough if it persuades people to support policies which are bad for them. Or something.

I’m not going to speculate which of those is more likely, but I will say this. A bloody good dose of global warming might be just the thing needed to help Phil Jones thaw out his fucking heart.

H/T Watts Up With That.

The sky is angry

Or so says Britain’s Meteorological Office and The Graun. In fact they’re telling us it’s almost as angry as it’s ever been in the history of everything (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold).

Is it me or do I detect a note of disappointment?

As spring bulbs burst into life in gardens around the UK, and plants break into a late second bloom, this autumn has seen balmy temperatures prevail across the UK and many parts of Europe.
Despite these unusual scenes, however, this year overall is not likely to be a global record-breaker.

Again, that slight sense that the Graun feel let down by this failure of Gaia to punish us more severely for our sins against her.

Figures from the Met Office published on Tuesday show that 2011 stands at 11th place in the list of warmest years ever, in global mean temperature records stretching back to 1850.

Ah, now did I imagine it or was 1998 declared the absolute hottest year it’s ever been in the history of everything ever (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold)? Why, thanks to a handy table on the Graun’s article I can see that it was no figment of imagination and that the Met Office did say exactly that, and presumably stand by it if it’s still going into articles now.

Today’s data confirms the overall warming trend, however: of the 10 warmest years on records, nine occurred since 2000.

But looking at that table I can see that it can be put another way: that 13 years after the hottest year ever (since 1850) it’s now the 11th hottest year ever (since 1850). There may be a warming trend, though of course arguments still rage over the reliability of measurements, especially when 2010 is listed as almost as big a scorcher as 1998 despite a bitter northern hemisphere winter which the warmists either forgot to mention or didn’t see coming (not for the first time), but there’s no getting away from the fact that the warmists themselves say that the hottest year was just over a decade and this year is ranked only 11. More interestingly every year of the last decade apart from 2008 was warmer than this year.

Naughty Gaia. People won’t be nearly frightened enough by this. My God, er, Gaia, they might even start to think temperatures have peaked. This just won’t do. I don’t know, you just can’t get the Earth Mother figures these days. Look, just move over and leave it to someone who gets paid for this.

Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said that[…]

Basic problem is that all models are wrong, not got enough middle and low level clouds.

No, Phil, don’t tell them that. You’re not supposed to let people know of uncertainties. Oh, look, now you’ll have to reassure everyone that all the research into warble gloaming is open and honest and transparent and that there’s nothing going on.

I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.
[…]
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.

Oh dear, this isn’t good at all. Even if Gaia carries on as she/it has for the last 4.5 billion years the Graun will be very sad if the whole warble gloaming narrative goes into a decline. Never mind – you can always ask Phil to hide it.

Quoted Quote of the Day

More from Climategate II: The Chinny Reckoning. At the Devils’s Kitchen the Pedant General has spotted an absolute gem:

The hunt is now on for the snippet that crystallises the whole thing, the “Hide the decline” moment if you will. My favourite so far:

<1682> Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]

Earlier I repeated Deep Throat’s advice to follow the money, but I’ve mentioned before when talking about Big Eco that there are several reasons to keep it going. Protecting a reputation that’s been nailed irrevocably to a particular mast is also a very strong incentive to keep holding that mast up no matter what.

Inconvenient untruth

Anyone who watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will remember the claim that the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting due to warble gloaming, though people who’ve done much reading of sceptical blogs and publications will have long been aware that this was complete nonsense. In fact even people who just watch news even from pro-warmist sources like the BBC should already have been aware that that particular claim was constructed on sand, as the reporting of this court case makes clear:

Mr Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming – the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

And from Son of Climategate we found that certain others were aware of it too.

5315.txt

date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones

subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff”

Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.

Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson”
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson 
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:

phil
<>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.

I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK

WUWT also points out that it’s interesting that Dr Lonnie Thompson’s opinion, as reported in emails, on the cause for ice loss on Kilimanjaro seems to have been quite different from that given in more public fora, such as a PR right before a big climate meeting in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.

Big Eco getting caught out again?

And in more ways than one. I’ve been blogging on other things so I’ve not mentioned the BBC as brought up by Bishop Hill here. And here, and here, here and here. Do go and have a read, though you might not be terribly surprised at what Auntie’s been up to. However, that looks like being overshadowed by what’s already being called Climategate II. Yep, more stuff that the R&D department of Big Eco would rather not have had out in the open has emerged and is being gone over by sceptical bloggers everywhere. Very early still, but Bishop Hill’s initial take is here, Jo Nova here, Watts Up With That here and here but mostly here, and in the MSM James Delingpole here. I’ll leave you with Delingpole’s summary and a few of his preferred quotes as I’ve got popcorn to make. Do go read the rest.

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.
[…]

<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
[…]
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive […] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC […]

P.S. a thought’s occurred, and I doubt I’m the first one it’s occurred to. The last time this happened as around this time last year, shortly before the COP15 climate junket/meeting in Copenhagen (will these fuckers lecturing us all about emissions from travel ever teleconference one of these things?) and here we have it all happening again just a few days before COP17 in Durban. Interesting timing. Does Big Eco’s R&D section have it’s own Deep Throat, unhappy at something going on there and carefully choosing content and times to leak for maximum effect? I can only speculate, but the advice of the original Deep Throat still applies: follow the money. How many of the people sending, receiving or CC’d in on these emails would be out of a job if man made catastrophic warble gloaming turns out to be nonsense? And that’s just the R&D parts of Big Eco – the same applies to those involved in marketing, admin and production. Hell, if my career and future income depended on everyone believing the sky was going to burn I’d be saying it too.

A perfect storm of stupid – UPDATED

So we’ve just had the Greens’ carbon tax rammed through with the support of the minority Labor government, and now it’s the plain tobacco packaging, which I read…

…will pass the Senate with the support of the Greens.

Is it speculative to wonder if the price for supporting Labor’s pointless plain fag packets – pointless not least because it follows recently introduced laws that generally prevent the fucking packets being on display anyway – was the carbon tax and vice versa?

Who knows? But what I am very confident of is that these two pieces of legislation, one extremely divisive and the other egregiously illiberal, will each achieve as near to nothing as makes no odds.

“If this legislation stops one young Australian from picking up a shiny, coloured packet and prevents them becoming addicted to cigarettes then in my view it will have been worthwhile,” Labor senator John Faulkner told the upper house today.

It won’t. Hell’s bells, I’m getting tired of saying this, but just look at the illegal drug trade. Just fucking look at it. Do they have trademarks? Do they have shiny, coloured packets? No. Does the trade have any difficulty in retaining customers? No, but of course the nanny screams of “Addiction!” will be starting any second, so let’s ask a different question. Does the drugs trade have any difficulty attracting new business despite the complete lack of trademarks and shiny, coloured packets? Again the answer is no. And the reason is that people want to take the bloody stuff. No, I don’t particularly get the attraction either, but there’s a very good chance that someone somewhere in this very suburb is getting wasted right now and we all know that whatever s/he’s on came in some kind of plain and most likely ad hoc packaging. Hell, even illegal chop-chop tobacco already comes in plain packaging, and I’m sure the suppliers are just delighted that their main competition, the legal and regulated tobacco trade, are taking one in the crotch and losing one more thing that distinguishes the legal from the illegal product. And, er, correct me if I’m wrong but they don’t even pay tax, do they? Christ, they must think all their Christmases came at once.

Via the Real World Libertarian

And if in return for that utter pointlessness, unless the idea really is to benefit the criminal tobacco trade, Labor brought in the carbon tax for the Greens it doesn’t seem to me to be any more likely to achieve anything noticeable. As I mentioned the other day other countries seem quick to praise Australia for the carbon tax but oh so reluctant to follow suit, and with such a small population we could cut emissions to nothing at the cost of utterly destroying the economy and going back to being a pre-industrial society, and the self-sacrifice would have a measurable effect on the climate of zero. And that’s making the assumption that the whole warble gloaming catastrophism bandwagon isn’t garbage to begin with. The reality is that we’re on our own.

Earlier this week Climate Change Minister Greg Combet rejected the idea that there are serious issues with international carbon trading and yesterday spoke rosily about the global carbon market’s prospects while the EU carbon price crashed.
To support his argument Combet cited the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit State and Trends of the Global Carbon Market 2011 report that the market has now grown to $US140 billion ($136bn). But he’s clearly only read it to recite convenient anecdotes.
According to the report “after five consecutive years of robust growth, the total value of the global carbon market stalled suffering from the lack of post-2012 regulatory clarity”.
Meanwhile the price of some emissions permits “fell by double-digits for the third year in a row” and “shrank as well in 2010”.
A carbon market recession should hardly come as a surprise.
[…]
Before its closure in the middle of last year, the price of voluntary Chicago carbon exchange permits plunged from $7.40 a tonne to a mere 5c.
And Europe’s carbon price has not been in parity with Australia’s $23 a tonne price since June and now sits at about $10 following a downward price trend.
As long as the EU’s emissions trading scheme accounts for 97 per cent of the global carbon market, the price will be set in Europe and a price drop there will significantly influence whether emissions cuts will be achieved in Australia.

And as that article also points out, arguments between the industrialised and developing worlds over a replacement treaty for the Kyoto Accord, itself not credited with achieving a measurable temperature change as far as I’ve heard, are deadlocked on the issue of whether the developing world is included this time.

Worse, like the tobacco legislation, it seems that criminals are going to gain from this too, or at least have a bloody good try.

The Australian Federal Police is preparing to investigate cases of serious fraud that could arise from Labor’s carbon pricing scheme, including the possible sale of bogus carbon credits.
The AFP’s deputy commissioner of operations Andrew Colvin said a working group had been established with the Department of Climate Change to discuss possible responses to carbon tax breaches.
Appearing before a Senate committee hearing today, Mr Colvin said the AFP’s efforts would focus on serious fraud offences, particularly those involving the sale of counterfeit carbon permits or credits.

And of course they’re quite right to if experience elsewhere is any guide.

Click for link – H/T to WUWT

So to recap, what we’ve got here is a couple of bits of legislation that will attract and likely benefit criminals, add to the workloads of the police, and achieve two-fifths of fuck all. But on the upside they’re ideologically sound, keep wealthy lobby groups onside, and of course Australia gets to say it’s leading the world even if the world isn’t all that keen to follow.

Marvellous.

UPDATE – Coincidentally WUWT has a post looking at Kyoto’s effects which concludes that it did nothing in signatory countries that didn’t happen in the US too, and did quite a lot less than the financial crisis. Now, about that carbon tax, Jules and Bob…

On taxing the sixth element

Or rather one of its oxides. Via the Real World Libertarian and quoted en bloc, a post by Viv Forbes of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Back to the Dark Ages

The passage of the carbon tax bills today is no reason for celebration. It is a step back towards the dark ages.

Just a few generations ago, humans lived in a “green” world. There was no coal, oil or gas providing light, heat, transport and traction power.

In this green utopia, wood provided heat for cooking fires and forests were felled for charcoal for primitive metallurgy; farmers used wooden ploughs and harvested grain with sickles and flails; the nights were lit using candles and whale oil; rich people used wind and water power to grind cereals; horses and bullocks moved coaches, wagons and troops; there was no refrigeration and salt was the only preservative for meat.

Towns were tiny as the whole family was needed to work the farm. For most people, the daylight hours were filled with heavy labour to produce, preserve and transport food. There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.

Humanity was relieved from this life of unrelenting toil by carbon energy – steam engines and electricity, machines, tractors, cars, ships and planes.

Today the pagan green religion celebrates the first step in their long campaign to destroy industrial society and reduce population.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For example, just a few more bitter winters in Britain will see their wind powered lights going out.

A British observer once said of the Whitlam government: “Any fool can bugger up Britain, but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia”.

The Gillard-Green Government is showing the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.

I would say that this should serve as a warning to those outside Australia to do their damnedest to prevent their governments joining this madness, but as I mentioned at the weekend it seems that no other governments are all that keen anyway.

Great work, Jules. Really fucking outstanding.

Big Eco advertising your forthcoming death… again

Via Watts Up With That.

Okay, this is not as bad as the 1010 mob’s gleeful explosive execution of anyone expressing ambivalence toward warble gloaming or that aborted video with hundreds and hundreds of airliners zooming towards a New York with smoke curling up from the World Trade Centre, but it’s still pretty nasty. “You, you evil sceptics,” goes the message, “You’ll get it first.” Not quite sure how that works – how can the climate tell who believed and us Untermenschen who weren’t convinced? Maybe it’s the same kind of magic by which the climate can tell difference between the evil CO₂ emitted by a power station or your breath and the benign and harmless CO₂ that’s puffed out from the blowholes of whales and dolphins to feed their dear friends, the trees. Or maybe the climate is relying on the warble gloaming believers to muck and help with a set of matches. I’ve no idea, but somehow or other we’re first in line for death despite the usual exhortations to cut down on our selfish energy use because poor people in developing nations are first in line for death. Consistency? Meh.

And so at this point I want to bring up my intermittently maintained list of warble gloaming dates for your diary, because a few weeks ago I noticed an addition spotted by The Filthy Engineer, who notes that in two-thirds of the spirit of reduce, reuse, recycle this has been reused and recycled since 2007.

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources.
Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

“Promises” does it? Then with less than two months ’til the start of 2012 we should see some signs of it already, shouldn’t we? And “literally burn-up”? Seriously? Actual fields actually on actual fire? 4.5 billion of the world’s 7 billion people dead (which still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the most extreme eco-psychos, such as this fucktroon)? As much as I’m prepared to believe that many warble gloaming catastrophists do actually believe what they claim when someone comes out with ridiculously over the top scare claims like this I suspect that even they don’t believe it. It’s the old tactic suggested years ago by the late Dr Stephen Schneider of offering up scary scenarios to get attention even if they’re vanishingly unlikely. I’ve no idea whether to blame overzealous PR of the kind Dr Schneider once suggested or journalistic license, but I suspect there’s probably only one thing that’s literally going to burn up.

Being generous and giving them ’til the end of next year the updated list now looks like this:

• Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction – New York’s West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater – Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
• Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr – British children will not know snow in their own country – Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
• “Imminently” – loss of world’s coral reefs – David Attenborough in July 2009 (‘world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed’)
• By 2010 – 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program – currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
• Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier – ice free Arctic – Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
• 2012 – fields on fire and approximately two thirds of the entire planet’s population dead
• Late 2013 – ice free Arctic – Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years’)
• 2014 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – WWF.
• Dec 2016 – the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair – the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
• Dec 2016 – loss of ‘the levers of control’ for the climate – the Prince of Fails… again.
• Late 2019 – ice free Arctic – Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
• Late 2019 – the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair – UK Met Office.
• Late 2029 – loss of Great Barrier Reef – marine scientist Charlie Veron (‘global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years’)
• By approximately 2040 – ice free arctic yet again – NSIDC director Mark Serreze

Warble gloaming – I refuse to use the term climate change when climate has always been changing since the planet’s ancient beginnings – warble gloaming might not need you to believe in it, but warble gloaming catastrophists very much do need you and everyone else to believe. Because they’re all out of a job otherwise.