Sacrifices to the Climate Gods necessary says Gillard

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.

6 comments

  • “Well, yes, that could be one of the reasons for under investment ” True and if they went with what the Liberals want “No new Taxes” not only would any uncertainty have ended, when the new infrastructure came online it would be delivering at a lower price because it would not have tax on. Personally I think the Liberals should go one step further and promise take the GST off electricity bills putting it alongside fresh food as GST exempt.

  • Kev

    Amongst hundreds of other scientific organisations, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

    Of thousands of different easily sourced recent papers all supporting warming evidenced in glacial change, I’ll direct you to half a dozen – none of these sponsored by the UN or the IPCC. They’ve all been published in respected scientific journals. You know – the ones in the boring reference section of any university library –

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v399/n6735/full/399429a0.html
    ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/NATURE03906.pdf
    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
    http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=more-proof-of-global-warm

    These articles strongly support the AGW hypothesis.

    Met offices responsible for measuring climate have come to the same conclusion –
    Australia -http://www.bom.gov.au/inside/eiab/State-of-climate-2010-updated.pdf
    USA – http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2009/bams-sotc-2009-brochure-hi-rez.pdf
    UK – http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20100728.html

    I’d prefer to get my information about the issue from these sources, rather than the shock jocks and tabloid media.

    Then there’s the IPCC, but of course they’re part of the global conspiracy, and ideologically driven bloggers know much more about climate science than scientists who have been researching the issue for years.

    If I get sick, I visit a GP who has studied medical science for seven years, and practiced for thirty. Generally, I believe what he tells me, rather than listening to my neighbour who is sure that medical professionals as a group are a bunch of quacks and charlatans. If I don’t agree with a diagnosis, I get a second opinion, but I expect that opinion to come from someone with MD after his (or her) name.

    Recently at Cancun, delegates from almost 200 countries agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, establish a multi billion dollar green fund and share technology. Given the difficulty in getting world leaders to agree on anything, this should indicate that they also don’t believe that global warming is a global left wing conspiracy and that they are prepared to take action.

    It would seem reasonable therefore, that our government (elected on a platform of action on climate change) should set about introducing some certainty on carbon pricing. The climate gods (and the Incas for that matter) have nothing to do with it.

    • Ha, ha, ha… So 17 bobby red-herring is an acolyte of the church of anthropogenic global warming, sorry climate change, whoops still not right – climate disruption. There that’s better. Gotta keep up with the thermogeddonist disaster tipping-point du-jour.

      Nothing in his post but ‘appeal to authority’ though, just like the argument spouted by most of his credulous wealth-distributing ideologically driven mates.

      Carbon-hating thermophobes, like bobby (appeal to authority) red-herring, have painted themselves into a corner. Their models are failures with no skill in hindcasting let alone forecasting, the global surface temperature record is corrupted by station moves, UHI and undocumented ‘smoothing’ and their extremist predictions of doom and gloom are repeatedly found to be fantasy.

      There are no islands disappearing beneath the waves, polar ice is within historic norms, sea levels have risen a miniscule 3mm a year at most since the early 1830s (still not reached the levels enjoyed by the Romans), glaciers continue to advance and retreat as they have for millennia, the frogs are back, the ‘hockey stick’ is broken, storm energy is at a 30 year low, the northern hemisphere is setting new records for cold and snow fall and from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming etc.

      But still they persist. Why? Because there is nothing so beloved by the alarmist crowd than a good long suck at the taxpayers’ teat.

      As IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer puts it: “The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War …one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

      There is no longer any pretence by the ‘hotter-than-hell’ crew. Their faux concern for the environment is just a ‘smoke-screen’ to cover their grab for our cash.

      Fortunately some governments have finally woken up to the scam and have declared they are no longer prepared to waste their resources playing the global-warming abatement game. “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances,” declared Jun Arima, deputy director-general for environmental affairs at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The USA, India and China openly share Japan’s distain for the alarmists’ shrieks of outrage and will not take any action on CO2 which might slow their economies either.

      But to Cantcon, where the Tequila slurping conga-dancers demand yet again that despite their gassy air-voyage to a place where people go to get warm the use of cheap reliable coal fired power generation is only for them because they are ever so important and they are after all going to save the planet at our expence.

      This is the mob who don’t want you to watch plasma TVs, use computers, or wash your dishes and clothes using machines. They want you on your hands and knees bashing your hemp frock against rocks in a creek bed. And as for a ‘carbon tax’, it’s got nothing to do with the environment. Witness the Irish government doubling its Carbon Tax so it can pay its bills. It’s all about the money, that is your money and how best to rip it out of your pockets.

      The alarmists deny the science which describes many different drivers of climate change and become self-described “true believers” singing the hymn “… the climate is changing (tautology) and it’s all the fault of CO2 so tax electricity and we’ll all be saved…”

      Amusingly the weather is climate mob now claim the recent rains in SE Australia are proof the climate is changing and it’s all our fault. Pity they don’t take the time to check a few historical records because they’d find that the current weather is little different to that recorded the last time the Indian Ocean Dipole and La Nina combined in their current state. The combination often causes Dorothea Mackellar’s “… flooding rains.” She, unlike the current crop of short-term thermometer-watchers recognised the extraordinary variability of Australia’s climate after witnessing the wet which followed the Federation Drought.

      But no matter, the “true believers” enjoyed a tax-payer funded ‘Tequila-Fest’ in ‘Cantcon’. But the only thing that pack of wasters is going to ‘cop’ is a two week hangover. They failed spectacularly to come to any meaningful agreement on anything except the time of each evening’s ‘happy hour’ and that they would try to respect each other in the morning. I might add, there were few if any “world leaders” at this year’s carbon-fest. After Hopenhagen’s wimpering failure no one turned up except drones like Combet.

      The comics which 17 bobby (call to authority) red-herring demands we take seriously have long lost their credibility. The peer-review process which once gave them prestige is broken and now resembles a ‘mates-review’ instead. They no longer have a place “in the boring reference section” of any library, instead they can be found alongside ‘New Idea’ and ‘Ralph’ on the toilet floor.

      “…I get a second opinion, but I expect that opinion to come from someone with MD after his (or her) name.” Better go to the USA then Bobby, because in Australia a qualified medical practitioner is granted the use of MBBS, BMed, BMBS or MBBS as a post nominal. MD is granted to those who complete a doctoral degree in medicine. Still I suppose Toowoomba could be overflowing with chaps and chappesses who managed that feat after 7 years study. Yet you’d still challenge their diagnosis – what makes you so skeptical?

      A tax on CO2 or more specifically electricity production using coal in Australia will not make one iota of difference to the planet’s temperature. Somewhere in the slight point seven of a degree of warming during the past 150 years there is an anthropogenic signature, but to claim it is all CO2 and that to tax it will save the planet is farcical. As farcical as the Cancun comedy fest.

  • Not having a science degree doesn’t debar me from the debate nor does it suggest that other bloggers are wrong to question the science and the methodology. I am old enough to be still waiting for the Ice Age and all of humanity to starve because of overpopulation.

    I accept that climate changes based on a non deniable evidence that once there was an Ice age and now there isn’t.

    I also accept that humans may have an impact in climate change.

    Two questions remain;

    How much effect do we have, and
    What to do about it?

    The first point has been tarnished with the extreme points of view put forward by the elders of the Church of the Latter Day Alarmists. We both know that the tactic has been used to alarm the people into accepting their view point.

    Hence reasonable people become wary and skeptical about the debate.

    The second point is answered by the ALP with a tax on carbon. We will suffer utility price hikes and see no gain for our sacrifice although The Greens will be somewhat sated if the tax is enough to fuck the country.

    You cannot take ideology out of the mix. The left of the ALP want a carbon tax, the right are iffy. The extremes (Greens) want coal mines and industry closed down and us conservatives want to see something done about R&D and look to us cleaning up our act without jumping into the pit of UN initiated best guess solutions.

    I’m on record as saying I would even consider say a 1 or 2% tax hike with all of the income going to R&D but I simply do not trust this government to handle any funds from a carbon tax.

    It would also be a good idea to look at ways of managing climate change rather than have the audacity to presume we puny humans can change it in the short term.

    I found some of the comments at Scientific American illuminating – didn’t you?

  • Let’s see what the ABC has found regarding an experiment on the likely outcome if carbon dioxide, that nasty pollutant,was increased and what affect it will have on plant growth?

    http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2010/s2851825.htm

    I’ll save you some time…..

    CHRIS CLARKE: The experiment’s in its third year.

    GLENN FITZGERALD: CO2 is called a fertiliser, it’s a CO2 fertilisation effect which means that carbon dioxide is a food source for plants if you will, that’s the carbon that goes into the bulk of the biomass of the plant.

    So raising levels of CO2 actually increases that growth, increases the biomass and in agriculture, increases the yield.

    Given, of course, that there’s sufficient water and sufficient nitrogen and that is what we’re seeing here. We have a number of different varieties in this trial and we’re seeing overall on average 20 per cent yield increase due to elevated CO2.

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