Agmates

NASA scientist James Hansen [pictured] is at it again. This time in an open letter to US president elect Barack Obama he calls old-style coal plants “factories of death” and condemns Australia’s reliance on the resource. In the letter he writes:

“Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet,”

Hansen’s claim defies logic as Brendan Pearson points out .

Minerals Council of Australia deputy chief executive Brendan Pearson last night dismissed Professor Hansen’s comments as “characteristically long on hyperbole and short on facts”.

“If Australia disappeared off the face of the earth, our carbon footprint would be replaced by one country, China, within three weeks,” Mr Pearson said.

“As to his claim about the targets that Australia has set, in part that’s for the Government to respond to, but in our view, a 20 per cent reduction in Australia’s emissions by 2020 would reduce global emissions by 0.2per cent.

Hansen’s letter is of course nothing more than his own personal eco fundamental lobbying. He did exactly the same thing last year when on the 27th of March he wrote an open letter to new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Here is part of what he wrote:

“Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to …. progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.”

Since that time temperatures world wide have continued to dip, sea levels have stopped rising, the US just completed another low activity Hurricane season, water supplies in Brisbane have gone from 19% to 46%, the drought has eased across most of Australia and on and on it goes.

How does Hansen have any credibility left with the worlds media, let alone world leaders?

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Dr Jennifer Marohasy [pictured below], Chair of the Australian Environment Foundation writes.

GetUp’s global warming television ads are dishonest and inaccurate.

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For all sorts of reasons a number of groups, of which Internet campaigners GetUp.org.au are one, are pretending that the Rudd Government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme is a minor 5 to15 percent adjustment to our way of life.

In fact, the government’s ETS will reduce the amount of energy available to every man, woman and child currently living in the country by an extraordinary 35 percent, absent the discovery and implementation of an unknown source of carbon free energy in the next ten years.

This would be the equivalent of closing down all of Australia’s manufacturing and half its rural industries.

Or thought of another way, it is the equivalent of closing 72% of our current power generation capacity (stationary power).

Population growth masked the severity of the scheme. Our natural birth-rate plus immigration intake adds around 360,000 to the population every year, roughly the equivalent of another Brisbane every 5 years - 20 percent growth in 11 years - making 35% look like 15%.

It is understandable that groups like GetUp that stand for nothing and are opposed to everything would want to downplay the severity of the government’s proposals.

If GetUp has nothing to complain about they are out of business, so of course they want to portray the government’s decision in the ‘worst’ light.

The government also has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of their scheme. Kevin Rudd wants to convince Australians that it won’t hurt one little bit, so he’s happy for groups like GetUp to criticize him for being John Howard lite.

In fact, the proposed ETS will make Australians poorer; while it is richer, not poorer nations that are better able to protect their natural environment.

END
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Global Warming Alarmist Al Gore and IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri maintain that anyone who doubts the Global Warming science probably still believes the earth is flat.

So I’ve decided to introduce the community to a few of these ‘flat Earthers’. The second in our ‘flat earthers’ series is Jon Jenkins adjunct professor of virology specialising in computer modelling at Bond University QLD Australia.

In an opinion piece in today’s Australian Newspaper Jenkins starts out:

THE warmaholics are fond of using the phrase “official records going back to 1850″, but the simple facts are that prior to the 1970s, surface-based temperatures from a few indiscriminate, mostly backyard locations in Europe and the US are fatally corrupted and not in any sense a real record.

They are then further doctored by a secret algorithm to account for heat-island effects. Reconstructions such as the infamously fraudulent “hockey stick” are similarly unreliable.

The only precise and reliable temperature recording started with satellite measurements in the 1970s. They show minuscule warming, all in the northern hemisphere, which not only stopped in 2000 but had completely reversed by 2008 (see graph).

Graph Source: The University of Alabama in Huntsville

So you think that is a strong start, but no, the good professor is just getting ‘warmed’ up. Next he looks at those scary rising sea level predictions. Here is what  leader of the Australian Greens Bob Brown was spruking back on the 3rd of October 2008.

“The alternative-waiting for a lead from the rest of the world-will sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo Reef, Kakadu and the Australian Alps in the short term, and threatens a 10-metre rise in sea levels, obliterating the Sydney Opera House foyer, Melbourne’s Docklands, Hobart’s Salamanca Place and the current habitat of millions of Australians.”

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Jon Jenkins writes:

The warmaholics also contend that global mean temperature and sea level rises are at the upper range of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change’s projections. Well, no, actually they are not.

Sea level rises since 1900 are of the order of 1-2mm a year, which is indistinguishable from tectonic movement, and the IPCC computer projections are simply completely wrong.

Its a great articles as Jenkins gets stuck in, but I’ll leave you with one more gem,

So that’s the real consensus: about 44 scientist mates who have vested interests in supporting IPCC computer modelling agreed that “we did it”, and this has become the “consensus of thousands of the world’s meteorologists”. Compared with 31,000 (including 341 meteorologists) in the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine petition, the IPCC’s 44 have no right to claim consensus at all.

So which group here is actually the ‘flat earthers’ Gore and Pachauri are pointing at? My mum taught me the if you look closely at people pointing fingers and accusing, there is always 3 fingers pointing back.

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Debate rages over the science behind ‘alarmist’ claims on global warming. Continually those espousing the alarmist views maintain that the science is settled and any dissenting scientists is vilified as a ‘flat earther’.

For Example:

Former Vice President Al Gore (November 5, 2007):

“There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat.” Gore also compared global warming skeptics to people who “believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona.” (June 20, 2006 -)

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC view on the number of skeptical scientists as quoted on Feb. 20, 2003:

“About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members.”

The Man who hosted the Poznan Conference and is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said it was “criminally irresponsible” to ignore the urgency of global warming on November 12, 2007

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So lets have a look at who these ‘flat earthers’ are and what they are saying:

Meet our first ‘flat earther’ - Award winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer [pictured] , the Physicist that Al Gore Fired.

Dr. Will Happer is a Professor at the Department of Physics at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993.

Dr Happer has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Happer,  says he was fired by Gore in 1993 for not going along with Gore’s scientific views on ozone and climate issues.

“I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy,” Happer explained in 1993

This is what this ‘flat earther’ Physicist had to say to the U.S. Senate committee on the Environment and Public Works on December 22, 2008.

“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken. I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow.

Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth’s climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past.

Over the past 500 million years since the Cambrian, when fossils of multicellular life first became abundant, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been much higher than current levels, about 3 times higher on average. Life on earth flourished with these higher levels of carbon dioxide.

Computer models used to generate frightening scenarios from increasing levels of carbon dioxide have scant credibility.

Mistakes are common in science and they can take a long time to correct, sometimes many generations. It is important that misguided political decisions do not block science’s capacity for self correction, especially in this instance when incorrect science is being used to threaten our liberties and wellbeing.

We are currently in a warming cycle that began in the early 1800’s, at the end of the little ice age. Much of the current warming occurred before the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were significantly increased by the burning of fossil fuels.

No one knows how long the current warming will continue, and in fact, there has been no warming for the past ten years.

Carbon dioxide is a natural constituent of the atmosphere, and calling it a ‘pollutant’ is inaccurate. Humans exhale air containing 4 to 5 per cent carbon dioxide or 40,000 to 50,000 parts per million. Plants grow better with more carbon dioxide. The current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are about 380 parts per million, exceptionally low by the standards of geological history.

There is little debate that the direct effects of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations would be very small, perhaps 1 to 2 C of warming. To generate alarming scenarios, computer modelers must invent positive feedback mechanisms that increase the greenhouse effect of water vapor, which is responsible for over 90 percent of greenhouse warming.

Observations indicate that the feedback is very small and may actually be negative. Changes in atmospheric water vapor and cloud cover may diminish, not increase, the small direct effects of carbon dioxide.

END

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One of the worlds leading Soil Carbon activists and NSW farmer Michael Kiely [pictured] is the  Convener of the Carbon Coalition & Carbon Farming . Today he writes to the Agmates community:

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We wish to thank you for the part you played in 2008 to make it the “(Unofficial) Year of Soil Carbon” in Australia.

Your actions - though you may have been unaware of it at the time - helped elevate the issue to the point of consideration. The Government has been forced to take a stand on soil carbon and the Opposition has pushed them into a corner to. Such fun!

The success we had made the year just gone a very happy one for all who understand the value of soil. Your actions gave us the will to persevere. And this is the Year to Persevere as Australia becomes the “Crucible” in which the fate of the issue could be decided for other nations as well, by precedent.

For 2009, to coincide with the run up to the IPCC’s Copenhagen meeting, we would like to be staging a global event in the form of a “Virtual Real Time Webcast Conference”. It could link 5 continents and continue for 24 hours, with all sessions being streamed continuously from the moment they are held - creating a range of blog and discussion groups interactions that could go on for months afterwards.

• Imagine the first nation to speak as the dawn crosses the International Dateline - Tuvalu. An island nation that is sinking beneath the Pacific. The world needs to know about the refugee calamity that could dwarf anything seen before. And conflict between peoples for resources is what leads to genocide. That’s the downside.
• Next comes New Zealand - a country ’saturated’ in soil carbon, according to the scientific establishment.
• Then on to Australia where a new term has been coined for our ancient, degraded soils: “buggered.” But carbon farmers are registering 1% to 2% increases in soil carbon in less than 12 months -it’s all in the biology, the conventional soil scientist’s blindspot.
• Next we have the lead country in this unique global gathering. China can turn on a sixpence, as they demonstrated with the Olympics, and we would have world-beating examples of tillage engineering and mulches, etc
• Then on to South America for a stunning array of world’s best practice tillage and especially Maria Cristina’s pastures that grow so much carbon.
• Next stop Columbus, Ohio….

And on to Copenhagen where China, India and the US jointly announce that they will join the global effort from the next period if they can count the vast amounts of soil carbon they can sequester - in other words they insist on “special case” treatment for soil carbon because of the unique role it can play in buying us time (by sequestering large tonnages over 20-30 years while the low emissions energy alternatives gain critical mass).

“You have got to have a vision,” said William Albrecht. “Unless you do, nature will never reveal herself.”

Cheers

Happy Old Year- Michael

END

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Queensland farmer and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition Viv Forbes [pictured] writes.

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The Carbon Sense Coalition today congratulates  Senator Barnaby Joyce, Senator Ron Boswell, Senator Cory Bernardi and Dr Dennis Jensen MP for their principled stand against the Emissions Trading Scheme.

A new paper entitled ‘Climate Change in Perspective‘ reveals that changing climate was a permanent feature of Earth’s history. Man did not cause it and cannot change it.

All over the world, politicians, scientists, taxpayers and shareholders are waking up to the fact that they have been conned by the global warming story. All we need to do is read a bit of climate history to get things into perspective and realize how lucky we are today.

Within just the last 20,000 years, vast ice sheets melted from the earth’s surface, seas rose about 130 m, temperatures rose well above present levels several times, and as the seas warmed, they expelled their dissolved carbon dioxide.

Then just 300 years ago, the earth suffered from the bitter cold and famines caused by the Little Ice Age. Since about 1700 AD, warmth created by increasing solar activity has been driving back the deadly frosts, snow and ice. Carbon dioxide is naturally expelled from the warming oceans to the atmosphere. Humans have very little to do with it all.

All of these events were caused by and controlled by natural processes, and all life on earth was forced to adapt or die.

Despite continual increases in man’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the earth has not warmed since 1998. With unseasonal snow, bitter frosts, power failures and lost crops being reported every week, to send 10,000 pampered politicians and bureaucrats on a junket to Poland to discuss  ‘Global warming’  is surely a sick joke.

A growing number of politicians are now bravely stating what a large and increasing number of scientists have been saying:  ‘There is no global warming crisis, carbon dioxide is a benefit not a danger in the atmosphere, and the whole Emissions Trading industry is shaping up to be a bigger financial disaster than the sub-prime mess.’

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You have to love the Irish. Ireland Environment Minister Sammy Wilson [pictured] has had enough of the man-made global warming scam.

Spending billions on trying to reduce carbon emissions is one giant con that is depriving third world countries of vital funds to tackle famine, HIV and other diseases, Sammy Wilson said.

But while acknowledging his views on global warming may not be popular, the East Antrim MP said he was not prepared to be bullied by eco fundamentalists.

“I’ll not be stopped saying what I believe needs to be said about climate change,” he said.

The Irish Environment minister sounds exactly like our own National Party Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce. Wilson said -

“I don’t couch those actions in terms of reducing Co2 emissions,” he said. “I don’t care about Co2 emissions to be quite truthful because I don’t think it’s all that important but what I do believe is, and perhaps this is where there can be some convergence, as far as using fuel more efficiently that is good for our economy

If you want to express it terms of carbon neutral, I just express it terms of making the place more efficient, less wasteful and hopefully that will release money to do the proper things that we should be doing.”

In a recent article on Agmates Senator Joyce [pictured] wrote:

I have no doubt that as a world we must become efficient with the utilisation of our resources.

We must give the greatest number of people the greatest access to the highest standard of living, it is only fair.

Efficiency, more than emissions, must become the trading scheme that brings a cleaner, fairer future.

Thank god for rational, clear thinking men in politics like Wilson and Joyce. Whilst there is not enough of them, the tide is turning, but we are not at ‘the tipping point’ yet. Ninety percent of the worlds politicians are still bedazzled by the emperors new clothes.

(Thanks to Agmates member Jeff)

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The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been instrumental in working with CSIRO to build climate models to predict what our climate will be like in 50-100 years time.

It is these predictions on which Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has based his decision to fight climate change with an emissions trading scheme aka. carbon tax.

Back on the 26th of September we ran an article that showed the BOM’s prediction for rainfall and temperature for just the next 3 months (not 50 years).

Lets have a look how accurate they were.

The first was the probability of exceeding mediam rainfall  (1961-1990) between October and December 2008.

Map Source: Bureau Meteorology.

Now here is the Map of where the rain actually fell for that 3 month period.

Map Source: Bureau Meteorology

You’d have to say, they were not even close.

Now for the temperature prediction. The probability of exceeding average maximum temperatures ( again based on the average maximum from 1961-1990) between October and December.

And bloody hell they were predicting it would be hot.

Map Source: Bureau Meteorology

Now the results for the 3 months have not been posted yet, but here is the first month of Summer - December.

Map Source: Bureau Meteorology.

See the Green, that’s 1-3 degrees Celsius below the average. Thank God for Global warming or we’d be freezing to death - in summer.

The BOM can’t get anywhere near right with their 3 month predictions, but we’ll wreck our economy with an emissions trading scheme based on the Bureau’s 50-100 year predictions.

Apparently we are to believe that while they are hopeless at knowing what the weather will do right now, they are reliable with predictions that are 50-100 years into the future.

It would be ridiculous for anybody to believe that,  except if your Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who obviously finds it perfectly plausible.

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Syd Walker writes:

Syd Walker

This is not an account of the latest, very contorted international negotiations over climate change. Nor is it about the Rudd Government’s rather dismal progress on climate change policy so far.  If it was, I’d have chosen a different title.

This short essay is a general response to ‘climate change critics’, also known as ‘climate change sceptics’ and ‘climate change deniers‘. For reasons I explain, I prefer to say ‘climate change gamblers’.

Sceptics may well regard me as biased, because I worked for several years as an environmental activist in the past. But these days I work for no interest group and speak for myself alone. I write this simply as one human being to others. I do invite comments and criticisms.

I began lobbying for action on greenhouse emissions about two decades ago. I remember a session with a senior politician in his Canberra office during the late 1980s.

His reply to my initial pitch was what seems to me the basic case of  ‘climate change scepticism’ to this day. It was an argument along these lines:

“there’s no SOLID evidence that human-induced global warming is really happening, so it’s unwise to take action that might have negative economic impacts”

My reply to him at the time was that he’d missed the point.

I tried to summarize what I meant:

1. We know there’s been a STRONG correlation in the geological past between CO2 levels and global temperatures.
2. We ARE increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere - and the level of other important greenhouse gases. These measurable and quite rapid changes are not in dispute.
3. Given (1) and (2), the rapid changes were are bringing about in our atmosphere’s composition clearly has the POTENTIAL to cause devastating global changes to our climate. Of course, we don’t know the future with certainty, but we CAN reasonably infer that increasing levels of greenhouse gases increases the RISK of devastating climate change. At the very minimum, there’s no evidence to the contrary.
4. We only have ONE habitable planet.
5. It’s highly risky to conduct a gigantic, uncontrolled experiment on the whole of humanity’s habitat.
6. Even if there are economic downsides to achieving atmospheric stability, they’re offset by potential economic gains; in any case, they’re trivial compared with the potential costs of rapid climate change.

Twenty years later, I see no reason to change any of these propositions.

Personally, I very much hope ‘climate change sceptics’ are right.

(more…)

Alex Mitchell in an article published on Crikey writes:

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Alex Mitchell

Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce has drawn a line in the sand: he won’t be supporting Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme.

If Malcolm Turnbull’s shadow Cabinet decides to give critical support to the scheme, Joyce will oppose them on the floor of the Senate.

If his own National Party colleagues decide to give qualified backing to Labor’s ETS project, he will defy them and vote against — even though he is the Nationals Leader in the upper house.

In other words, Joyce is on a collision course with the Coalition leadership, the Liberals and his own Nationals over ETS. It could rock the Coalition: senior Liberals are demanding that the Nationals expel Joyce (and anyone who supports him).

If Joyce and his close-knit supporters are removed from the Nationals whip, they intend forming their own parliamentary grouping based on the principles of the old Country Party.

Joyce sets out his opposition to the Rudd plan in a lengthy article he has written for the Queensland-based rural website agmates.com edited by Steve Truman.

He describes the proponents of ETS as religious zealots who don’t have the science to back up their doom-laden claims.

“Those who dare to question are held as heretics,” he writes.

“I don’t pretend for one moment to be a scientist but in my role in the Senate it is implicit in my job to be a sceptic, to question and to consider all sides and be open to the views of many rather than one view.

“My current concern with the emissions trading scheme is that a religious fervour has built up around the altar of global warming. Those who serve at the altar have become ruthless in their denigration of alternate views.”

In old-fashioned populism we haven’t seen since Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson, he claims the scheme is nothing more than a tax-raising enterprise which will punish people’s pockets and jobs.

The trouble is that a large sector of rural Australia as well as climate change skeptics in the cities are listening: it is music to the ears of the mining industry too.

Meanwhile, the Labor Party can sit back and watch the squabble within the Coalition flare into civil war. As Malcolm Turnbull himself as acknowledged, Coalition disunity is electoral death.

END

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