Australia

The Australian tells us "ENVIRONMENTALIST and former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has been appointed to a newly-created position as Australia's climate commissioner."

Unlike many who disagree with the global warming hoax, I do have respect for Tim Flannery. That doesn't mean that on "climate change" he isn't dead wrong. After a month of weather devastation in which everything that was predicted by the warmists about Australia's future climate was directly contradicted by actual events, one would have imagined the government would spend our money on helping the victims rather than appointing a brand new useless committee.

Australian Big Coal has had the chutzpah to put up a video boasting of their contribution to the climate scam. At the start of the video they tell us what thirty pieces of silver are worth these days:

Here's how the scam (really) works:

For the first time ever in Brisbane's climate record, the city has had an entire Spring season without a single temperature over 30C. Brisbane temperature records go back to around 1900.

It is now the last day of Spring and the temperature hit 26.8C at 3p.m. Now it is 5p.m. and the temperature has fallen to 24.7C. Although the final day of Spring has some seven hours to go, short of a volcano erupting in the Brisbane River, a new cold record has been set. September + October + November 2010: zero days above 30C.

By way of comparison, in October 2009 there were four days above 30C. In November 2009 there were 13 days above 30C, for a total of 17 days in all, or over a quarter of days of those months. Four of these exceeded 34C. Sorry, no September 2009 data: for some reason known best only to themselves, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology website doesn't have any daily data that ancient, being, apparently, unable to pop down to the local Harvey Norman and spring $100 for a new terabyte disc drive. Whether the September 2009 data is censored, deleted, or stored on floppies will remain one of those inscrutable cosmic mysteries.

But good news! They have a new "high-quality" data set suitable, they say, for climate change research. Here's a sample, the "Annual Maximum Temperature" for Brisbane Aero - presumably the airport. Maybe someone can enlighten me what these numbers are meant to be, because they certainly aren't Brisbane maximum temperatures which, as any Brisbanite knows, go infallibly way into the 30s every summer:

From The Australian August 18:

THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate. ...

Kurt Lambeck, immediate past president of the academy and a professor at the Australian National University's research school of earth sciences, initiated work on the document to clear up common misconceptions. ...

He said the fundamental principles of climatology, such as the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, were beyond dispute. But scientists were still arguing about the complex Earth systems feedback mechanisms, such as the possible cooling effect of clouds.

"If temperatures go up, there is going to be more evaporation, and that will produce more clouds," Professor Lambeck said. "That could produce a negative feedback, but to quantify that is a very difficult thing.

"How do we put that cloud cover into the models? That's where uncertainty comes in, but that's not going to change the basic outcomes."

Really?

A change of just 1% in cloud cover would account for all of twentieth century warming (Plimer's Heaven and Earth p 112). (And that's the claimed warming, including the uncheckable 'adjustments' made by people who have now lost the raw data - but that's another question.)

Postgraduate Diploma in Energy and Environment (Global Warming & Climate Science)

Contribute Towards the Demise of Learning and Scholarship

Reading my favourite websites today, I stumbled upon an ad. for this educational experience at Murdoch University:

What's wrong with this picture?

Last Sunday saw the very successful fifth Toowoomba Languages & Cultures Festival. Toowoomba, despite its low profile, is actually the largest inland city in any Australian state; it is the major settlement centre for Sudanese refugees to Australia, who have rapidly become valuable members of the local community and who provided many of the volunteers to run the Festival.

The following is the address given at the Festival by Gitie House, the other founder of this website. Gitie is herself an immigrant to Australia, having been born in Delhi, India, and was even there of mixed background of Indian and long-time Iranian immigrants to that country. As such she is very qualified to tell Australians (and other westerners) something they need to understand about their own culture. Here is her speech:

From the carbon sense coalition - couldn't have said it better:

This generation of pampered westerners is the first tribe in the history of the world that seems determined to destroy its ability to produce food.

The history of the human race has always been a battle for protein in the face of the continual challenge of natural climate change. Nothing has changed for this generation, except the wildfire spread of a destructive new religion that requires the sacrifice of food producers on a global warming altar.

Food creation needs solar energy, land, carbon dioxide and water. All four food resources are under threat.

Eons ago, long before ancient humans learned to use the magic warmth locked in coal, millions of woolly mammoths were snap frozen in the icy wastes of Siberia. They are still being dug out of the ice today.

That means, of course, it was warmer just before the mammoths were frozen than it is today. How fast the weather can cool if conditions are right! As I showed before, we are overdue for the next ice age.

I am convinced that peace needs more than a political solution - more than ideology, more than changed laws, better social security, and so on. The disgraceful behaviour of the Australian Prime Minister towards a hunger-striking farmer gives us an opportune example. Is the problem the lack of ethics - or the wrong ethics?

I am sure Mr Rudd doesn't think he did anything wrong by allowing someone to almost starve to death (it was good fortune that he didn't) just for want of a meeting with Mr Rudd to discuss his grievances. The 'big picture' undoubtedly demanded the death of one insignificant victim of government policies. Rudd is a utilitarian (or at least he acts and quacks like one). Utilitarianism, the near-universal ethic of our age, is particularly bad at the job most of us trust it for. Peter Spencer went on a hunger strike over de facto confiscation of his land without compensation. Justin Jefferson, writing in Quadrant had this to say about it:

The problem facing the Commonwealth government in Peter Spencer’s case is that on the one hand it’s embarrassing to have him dying of starvation up a pole because they denied him justice after forcibly taking billions of dollars worth of property in violation of the Constitution; and embarrassing to be caught out ignoring him, and lying to the population that it was all the States’ fault. But on the other hand, the Commonwealth has stolen too much property to be able to pay for it; and is too greedy to give it back.

It is no defence of this injustice to say that other environmental and planning laws also restrict people’s private property use-rights. That only begs the question whether they also represent unjust acquisitions.

It does not answer to assert that government acts in the national interest. That is precisely what is in issue. If it’s in the national interest for the government to take people’s property without their consent in breach of the law by threatening them with force, then presumably armed robbery and extortion might be in the national interest too.

Jefferson goes on to list various arguments that don't work: the laws are to protect native vegetation; native vegetation acts were done to protect biodiversity; ecological sustainability; and so on. But read between the text: a common feature in all the arguments that Jefferson demolishes is that they are based on bottom-line, "this is better than that, so do this" thinking. Indeed, we all imbibe this thought pattern from the moment we are born; many will ask: "But what else can there possibly be?"

I don't think the average person is yet aware that the era of freedom, the era of being able to do anything reasonable and say anything short of "fire" in a crowded theatre, is drawing to a close.

The Internet is arguably the greatest invention in the history of humanity, as it transcends the limitations of individual human minds and allows instant access to the thoughts (even the very recent thoughts, even the very sublime or the very base thoughts) of billions of other human beings. An era in which the world as a whole can start to think with the effective IQ of millions of minds reinforcing each other could be about to dawn.

But it will not, unless all freedom lovers do something about the totalitarians who now are on the verge of throwing the planet into a new dark age of secret control and knowledge restricted to the elites. From http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/329888/australian_federal_govern...

The Federal Government will introduce legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act to require all ISPs to block Refused Classification (RC)-rated material hosted on overseas servers.

I have written to the federal minister Stephen Conroy under the title "You are either stupid or a tyrant":

The red Australian dust storm: I stood at the window, looking out in amazement. I had never seen anything like this before in my life. The front gate, a mere hundred metres or so away, was close to invisible. The red, choking dust had forced us all indoors, windows shut fast, the dust slowly obscuring more and more of our view. The fine, red silt nevertheless managed to find its way in under the doors and through the smallest crack, coating the floor near the entrances in red.