Category: Climate Change

It’s the maths!

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I’ve long argued that Climate Change is ideologically based. The Left see doom and gloom with Pittwater 6 meters under and Tuvalu residents about to be flooded out of their homeland. Personally, I don’t subscribe to the doom and gloom scenario. I’ve lived through a host of such theories from our friends on the Left and my “Bullshit” meter soars whenever I hear or read their claims. The debate is laced with so many percentage figures, stats on temperatures of land and sea, graphs and maps of what would happen if…that the mind has problems sorting out hard scientific evidence from ideology. It has become difficult for the layman to argue or form a reasonable opinion. As part of the campaign to frighten us non-scientists in believing that we should accept everything at face value. those members of what I term the Church of the Latter Day Alarmists, introduced Modelling. Basically,if you enter all the data into a computer it will predict the future. Remember when spreadsheets come into play – similar type of software. Set up a spreadsheet for your business planning and see what happens when you enter another staff member in the expenses column…try two extra staff…look at what happens to your bottom line….make a decision. Back to Climate Change. Enter all the data and see what happens to sea levels….agriculture…the environment. Play with it…add another degree rise and then see what happens….add two…add six….watch sea levels rise. Turn it into a frightening pic of Pittwater where residents can track their street and house and see it is under water. Send it to the local council where you just know they paid-up members of the Church of the Latter Day Alarmists and let them start panicking the residents. The science doesn’t seem to matter anymore – just use the modelling to bring them into our church. A couple of problems here. Do we trust the data entry. Lies, damn lies and Statistics is still relevant years after Mark Twain first said it and whenever I read a stat I like to know the agenda of the person making the claim. Computer modelling is all about maths, not science. The climate will go it’s own way without help or hindrance from us puny humans. Sure, it will most probably warm up for a bit and then go cold again as it has for millions of years. While this happens it is prudent for us to look for alternative energy and to clean up our act but in the meantime we shouldn’t let the maths panic us.
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Climate Change, Politics

Leave him there!

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AN environmental activist has locked himself inside a box at a New South Wales mine in a bid to disrupt coal production and attack efforts by resource giants to “dodge” a carbon tax. I’ve just had a thought. Can we paint out the message, move the box out of sight and mind, put on extra external locks and just leave him there? One less noise maker.
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Climate Change

Sacrifices to the Climate Gods necessary says Gillard

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PRIME Minister Julia Gillard has warned that Australians face a decade of rising electricity prices and the risk of blackouts unless a carbon price is introduced next year.
“What we can really do is be really honest with people about the causes of sharply rising prices – and people have experienced sharply rising prices,” she said. “One of the causes is under-investment in new electricity generation and a reason for that is lack of certainty about carbon pricing.
Well, yes, that could be one of the reasons for under investment but if Julia wanted to be really honest about the cause she could also mention that infrastructure has taken second place to the ALP buying Green votes. And when she talks about lack of certainty about carbon pricing she is going to have to talk a lot more to sell the theory that offering financial sacrifices to the weather/climate gods will actually give a return. Never seemed to work for the Incas.
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Climate Change, General Musings

The Nuclear debate

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One positive I can see from the Greens having power in the Senate come July and a member in the House, is that their insane policies will now come under more public scrutiny. Senator Scott Ludlam is feeling the poorly after just a tiny bit of scrutiny as he opines on Nuclear Energy.
It is hard to identify where in the mainstream media this debate will be given a chance to develop beyond the juvenile anti-Greens spitting contest we’ve witnessed during the past 48 hours.
Poor diddams…get used to it Scott. Keep on submitting article like this one and you’ll get plenty more anti-Greens spitting He claims
*it is 40s technology – demonstrably wrong; *wastes a paragraph pointing out that 16 g of plutonium will reduce a city to ashes which has nothing to do with the debate; *claims the nuclear industry is military based which it isn’t, and *that these hybridised weapons plants [are] generating a shrinking fraction of electricity across the world. There was a slight downturn in 2009 mainly due to Japan closing the large Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan following the Niigata-Chuetsu-Oki earthquake. However, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency there are currently 27 nuclear plants under construction.
Scott mentions the astronomical liabilities of reactor accidents but there really hasn’t been too many accidents. The Three Mile Island partial core melt down resulted in radiation within a ten mile radius being equal to a chest X ray; no one died at the time and no one has proved conclusively that cancers increased in the area over the following years. The biggest outcome from The TMI accident is that it enhanced the credibility of anti-nuclear groups, who had predicted an accident, and triggered protests around the world. A lot of noise and colour but no health problems.
As an American friend once explained: In the US, more people have died in the Senator Kennedy’s car than have been killed by Nuclear accidents.
Chernobyl, built by the people who brought you the Trabant car is more of an example of what is wrong with communism rather than Nuclear reactors. We do need a debate on Nuclear energy and I welcome Scott’s input. It underlines the fact the the Greens-Marxist answer to the worlds problems have no basis in accuracy or fact.
1
Climate Change, Politics

Costello still talks sense

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With the Greatest moral challenge of our times now placed on the backburner by Rudd and Wong, Peter Costello ponders the reasons.
Now the legislation has become less important than getting 30 per cent of the GST from the states so the Commonwealth can rearrange financing in the hospital system. Can a momentous moral challenge fizzle out like this? Or are you beginning to suspect that all the crisis, all the urgency, was politically driven?
I’m damn sure it was. More;
The scientists who made exaggerated claims about the Himalayan glaciers and North African desertification undermined trust in the science behind global warming. And the politicians who made exaggerated claims about their policy proposals have undermined trust on the political issue.It would have been better had they been honest enough to admit the uncertainties, and acknowledge the downside of their policy.
And this on Earth Hour;
As it is, Earth Hour has become an apt metaphor for their tactical approach – a time to spread darkness rather than illumination.
The debate is not over, not by a long shot, and while people use emotive terms to describe us Skeptics as “Deniers” to liken us to Holocaust Deniers, and Flat Earthers, then it never will be.
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Climate Change

Wind Farms

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Image stolen from Greenpeace...

From todays Climate Change report in The Australian comes this little gem. EARLIER this month, the first Australian order for wind turbines for 2010 was made. It was also the first in three months and just the second since the bottom fell out of the market for renewable energy market in October.
The order was for just two wind turbines, with a capacity of 4 megawatts and a likely cost of $10 million. It was made not by a commercial wind farm developer, but by a 1100-strong community group in Victoria’s Hepburn Springs, who have decided to chip in anything from a few hundred dollars each to make their shire carbon neutral, at least on the energy front.
$10 million divided by 1100 comes to $9,090.90 per man, woman and child living in Hepburn Springs suggesting anyone chipping in a few hundred dollars is a tight arse. Whether they ‘chipped in’ out of their wallets or the council spent their rates on the wind farm is neither here nor there. The point is they are up for the cost and will have a long wait before their capital expenditure is regained. If we presume the winds at Hepburn Springs blows day and night 365 days of the year then they might get their money back just before they retire or die but it doesn’t. Weather patterns suggest Hepburn Springs is a windy town but the residents will still need base load power from the terrible coal fired power stations. So $10,000 capital investment and periodic base load costs. I’m obviously missing something here. Are the residents all Greenies, mathematically disadvantaged, endowed with more money than sense or just happy to see the wind turbine supply company make a lot of money at their expense. Maybe a Greenie dropping by this site accidentally (I wouldn’t expect them to deliberately visit) can explain in monosyllabic terms just what it is I’m missing.
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Climate Change

Penny’s preaching to the gullible

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In her opening address to the National Climate Change Forum in Adelaide yesterday, Senator Wong made some alarming predictions for Australia’s coast.
“Not only are our assets and environments at risk, many of our sandy beaches could erode away or recede up to hundreds of metres over the coming century,” she said. “It is possible that with climate change and without large and expensive nourishment programs, Bondi Beach, (Queensland’s) Sunshine Coast and (Victoria’s) Bells Beach may no longer be the beaches we know today.”
I admire consistency but jeez Louise, read the papers. I’m happy to concede that Climategate doesn’t necessarily prove that global warming doesn’t exist but it does leave us in no doubt that the believers of the faith, the members of the Church of Latter Day alarmists, have tended to gild the lilly. You see Penny, Australians react poorly to people who call wolf too often – we tend to wonder why you are trying to panic us and what your agenda really is. I hesitate to point out the obvious but a hundred metres in a century is one meter a year and that is just plain scare tactics. If the problem is real as you say, why exaggerate?
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Climate Change

Climategate and the retreat from Immediate

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Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata has his say on Climate Change
Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can’t leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.
It is a well thought out piece so do go and read. Now!
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Climate Change

Heard on radio

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Prof Professor Patrick McGorry, Australian of the year speaks to Monica Attard at the ABC. In a long interview he spoke compassionately on his subject of expertise; depression amongst the youth, and I laud him for this. The Professor, is an internationally renowned expert in adolescent mental health. However he needs to tighten up his comments in other fields, particularly Climate Change.
PATRICK MCGORRY: I just come back from Ireland and the day I arrived was about 40 degrees. It didn’t use to be like that in Victoria. Very dry. So obviously we could do more. The whole world could do more.
I can remember weeks of 38deg+ in Melbourne in the sixties. That’s not Climate Change, Professor, it’s weather. Monica Attard didn’t ask for his take on the recent freeze in Europe, she just agreed. It was the ABC after all.
Climate Change

IPCC report based on speculation

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First we had the emails detailing how contradictory evidence was suppressed from reports that were the basis of the IPCC report and now this;
THE peak UN body on climate change has been dealt another humiliating blow to its credibility after it was revealed a central claim of one of its benchmark reports – that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 because of global warming – was based on a “speculative” claim by an obscure Indian scientist.
Most of their predictions are speculative, based on computer projections that reflects the data entered by people who have the “faith” If the data is speculative then so is the IPCC report and yet the results are crammed down our throat every day by government and media who are of the same “faith”, as proven. Man is causing the change! Climate change is a given but man’s contribution isn’t and if we are to accept that then what of the billions of dollars being spent propping up careers in AGW.
Climate Change
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