Are we all looking forward to the Carbon Tax?

[damian]

Have a read of the fable about the ant and the cricket....

I have read the one about the boy who cried wolf..

Ron Dunn: Your point about who to sue is well taken, and precisely part of my point. The Bureaucrats and politicians are to some extent held responsible for their decisions and thus have an incentive to make them responsibly. Doesn't always work, in fact often doesn't work, but it's more incentive than Greenpeace et al who's only motivation is to get your money in their pockets.

rhancock:

Ironically food prices are not being driven up by shortages, but in fact by global warming panic Unfortunately it's become fashionable to make fuel out of food and that has driven up staples like wheat, corn and even indirectly rice.

We don't have acid rain on the scale we had it in the late 70's.

Big Shed:

Our emissions aren't actually the point. The reason it's important to get us in on the scheme is to put pressure on China to limit it's emissions beyond their commitments to date. In fact China has committed to greater cuts in it's rate of growth than anyone but they were made against extraordinary growth so won't be enough (4% PA as I recall).

I'll say it again, just in case anyone's forgotten. I don't advocate pollution, I do advocate reduced pollution. I don't advocate bad policy based on poor data, evangelism, special interest groups and media hype. I do advocate good research and appropriate sustained strategies to reduce our environmental footprint.

And sequestration is BS. Won't work. Nil.

You know when Jimmy Carter was president the US lead the world in renewable energy research. When cowboy Ron got in he shut it all down virtually overnight. So many missed opportunities.

[rod@plasterbrok]

For any of you who may think us trashing our economy might encourage India and China to reduce their emissions might want to take a look at the links from this http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/a...omments/draft/

Without Inda China and the US nothing the rest of the world much less Australia will mean jack S. Even if AGW were true (which there is absolutely no basis for truth) there is nothing we can do without China and India.

The claim is that there is already too much CO2 in the atmosphere. Inda and China will continue to increase CO2 even if they try to reduce it. If we stop producing CO2 right now just the increase in CO2 from China will replace ours in 27 days.

Now is Rudds plan in the best interest of Australians?

In the slimmest of slim chances that AGW is a fact, for the sake of argument, (and I am loath to even give it that much credibility), we would be far better off preparing to adapt rather than destroy the economy by attempting the impossible mitigation.

Most people of Australia don't have a clue about Climate Change, only what rubbish the media feed them. Now that some real costs are being put forward more and more people are starting to take note. Some sections of media have started to look at the cost/benefit of an ETS and they dont like what they see if China and India are not a part of it, (assuming most still believe in AGW) As the avereage Australian is starting to realise the risks involved they are starting to doubt this folly of Rudds ego.

As I get arround I hear more and more people starting to see this for the scam it is and they dont like it.

This will rightfully destroy Rudd as his ego will not let him back off, he has dug in too deep.

[Gingermick]

Let's just hope that AGW is happening as we are overdue for an iceage.

[Koala-Man]

I'm about a quarter of the way through the Garnaut Report released this week and I've been trying to work my way through the 4th report of the International Panel on Climate Change.

They are both very heavy going.

There is a lot of information there. Even, for example, chapter 6 of the IPCC report, on very long-term changes in the earth's climate, cites about 400 scientific papers. (I'm totally bemused by opeople who say "there's just no evidence.")

There is simply too much information to enable people like us to claim the experts are wrong.

My own view is, like Garnaut's, that the sensible thing to do is to work on the basis that the great weight of opinion of people who work in this field is probably about right, subject to further research being done.

I've also tried to follow, where references are given, the "sceptic" arguments that crop up from time to time, for example, the 31,000 "experts" who are supposed to have signed a petition saying global warming isn't happening, or the idea that there is some evidence that the world is actually cooling down, or that we are on the brink of another ice age.

My experience with these and other "climate chance sceptic" arguments is that they just don't stack up as soon as they're looked at closely, which is something people promoting these arguments tend not to do, unfortunately.

On that topic, I'd also agree with Garnaut that "climate chance sceptic" is a misnomer. People in this category, apart from experts with specific doubts about some aspects of the research, are typically not sceptical at all but have made up their minds. They simply believe it isn't happening. Any evidence in favour of global warming is discounted as the result of a conspiracy of some sort and any to the contrary is accepted uncritically. It's hard, and probably pointless, to argue against such aposition.

Other points:

There is a price to pay for mitigation efforts but there is no reason to believe it will "destroy the economy".

The cost of doing nothing in the hope that the scientists are wrong, then having to play catch-up later on when it turns out they're right, will be much greater than paying for mitigation now and finding it wasn't necessary.

IN view of that, and given that the weight of evidence is that climate change is happening, and will have dire consequences, paying the price now is the obvious choice.

It's clear climate change mitigation won't be successful if China, India and other late developers do not join in, but they probably won't unless the developed countries do, so we should.

We'll all be forced by circumstances to join in sooner or later and costs will just grow, and the benefits of being a technology leader will diminish, the longer we leave it.

Gaz.

[rod@plasterbrok]

Koala Man,

There is mounting evidence that AGW is not and can not happen this can not be ignored.

There needs to be a complete stocktake of the "evidence" of both sides by an independent scientific forum (if one can be found). Many of the claims supporting AGW are purely a therory that 10 years ago had some impirical support, eg. temeratures were rising. Then taken up as a cause by greens and politicians to gain popularity. They are now painted so far into a corner they cannot escape. Read this if you dare http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...9-ee9098538277.

Since then temeratures have not continued to rise as predicted by the models yet GHG's have. To the contrary new evidence has appeared that contradicts the AGW therory, yet this evidence is shouted down by the AGW crowed. You claim you can't find any! you obviously did not look very hard or you were looking through green coloured glasses.

It beggars belief that you think that we can have any influence over China and India where they have come out disputing the effects or existence of AGW in a similar report as that prepared by Garnaut's.

We produce 1.5% of manmade GHG in the world which is an even smaller % of all GHG Cant you see that attempt to reduce this is ONLY symbolic and will have NO effect whatsoever. A sybollic gesture that can only cause us harm while doing nothing PERIOD for the environment.

If you truly believed AGW exists then the most prudent course of action would be to have a CTS mapped out ready to go Then take it to the big emitters and convince them that they need to adopt a similar plan and that upon doing so we will bring into effect our plan. For the benefit of the world, for without them on board nothing, zilch, nadder, will stop GHG's from rising.

Putting our economy at risk just to prove a point is just about the most damaging and stupid thing any leader of a country could do. If this goes ahead (and I seriously doubt it will), it will go down as the most shameful mistake by an Australian Politician.

Nelson has got it right. He will never have to introduce an CTS because he knows dam well the other big emittes will not. If by the slender chance they do, all is good, because it will be a level playing field. This is the wedge that will see the end of the Rudd Government simply because it is the most logical course of action. We will see an advertising campaign to rival the Union workchoices campaign that makes sure it does. That is if the media don't start to see sense and start reporting it first.

I don't know anyone who is not a died in the wool green that can't see the logic of this course of action once it is explained to them correctly.

The longer we leave it the less likely it will be needed. Lets see who gets egg on our face.

[dazzler]

So just that I am not missing anything, just what effect do you think burning One and half thousand billion barrels of oil (thats 82 500 billion gallons) will have on our little barrell.

I have no idea, other than an increase in PPM of carbon in the atmosphere, but it cant be good.

Hell, if you spat in my beer I dont think I would drink, even though it aint toxic

Well.....nothing, heaps,.........dunno

[Ashore]

Melbourne university in 1986 had students for an exam / paper show that tomatoes are not fit for human consumption for the following reasons
1 Every convicted child molester had eaten tomatoes
2 If you took a goldfish and put it in a tank of tomato juice the fish would die
etc I can't remember all the stuff now but it followed the same line , you can make a case for anything by interperating the facts to suit your arguement and not using facts that dispute your arguement, both sides of the climate change arguement are guilty of this , only last week penny wong minister for whatever showed pictures of the murry river and implied that is was the result of climate change ... people get real talk to the aged in this country , those in their 90's who are still with their facilities and ask them if where now hotter than we have ever been ask them what the weather was like 60 or 70 years ago you may be surprised

As for our Carbon tax , what is it in reality a jesture by rudd to try and make him look taller so make no mistake this tax will make more people unemployed we will price ourselves out in any form of manufacturing and haveing more poeple unemployed many will lose their homes , family breakdowns will be a direct result and for what

Rudd got in on green preferences pure and simple and now he has to pay the piper, we have 0.3 % of the worlds population but rudd is trying to be a big figure on the world stage, why ego..small man syndrome , who knows, what I do know is its putting my children and their childrens quality of life in jepody, oh the pro GW lobby will say there will be no future for anyones kids or grandkids if we don't have this carbon trading tax because if Australia doesn't have it and reduce their citizens to a lower standard of living then no one else will and the polar caps will melt sea levels will rise and etc etc about time you woke up smelt the roses and took of your rose coloured glasses looked at the real world where there is a need to survive and to survive means feeding your kids tonight and tomorow and next week , providing shelter for them , education and a future and does not mean that you take the high moral ground and destroy our economy on the basis of unproven and disputed theories where we will be the only participents in this unthout out new tax ( bit like the alcopop tax that they didn't think through and now may have to returne but to who )

[Gingermick]

Ashore your whole argument is specious.
Families are breaking down now and people are losing there houses and teenagers are running amok. I sound like my grandmother now

[damian]

You know if you read newspapers from the turn of the 20th centruy there were stories about teh widespread concern in the community over the gangs of youths getting about with pistols committing violent crimes.

Point is there have always been teens running amok, families breaking down etc. If anything young people these days are a good deal more conservative than when I was young.

I'm always telling my freind's kids to experiment with drugs and sleep around more, buy faster cars....

The parents love it, but not as much as my friend who always slips the kiddies red cordial just before they leave...

[chrisp]

people get real talk to the aged in this country , those in their 90's who are still with their facilities and ask them if where now hotter than we have ever been ask them what the weather was like 60 or 70 years ago you may be surprised

Hmm, good idea! I wonder if grandma was calibrated? Gee it'd save the cost of doing all those tricky scientific measurements. Hell, why didn't we think of it sooner?

But come to think of it, it was rather cold in Melbourne yesterday, and I do remember it was warmer a few months ago. Yep, the global warming theory must be wrong!

[Koala-Man]

Read this if you dare http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...9-ee9098538277.

I dare, I dare!

OK I've readit and as an exercise have followed up a couple of the links. Not impressed so far. Will follow up with some comments tomorrow.

Gaz.

PS I am ignoring the fact that the guy who wrote the article is a Republican party PR hack who works for a creationist senator from Oklahoma. I'll blot that out of my mind altogether and just stick to the scientific arguments and any supporting evidence.

[Gingermick]

Republican party PR hack who works for a creationist senator

An eminently reasonable and sophisticated intellectual position to take.

[Koala-Man]

OK Here goes.

Some first impression of the article cited by Rod.

Part 1:

As I said in my previous post, my first impression is not good. The "climate declaration signed by the scientists at the conference" turns out to have been signed by "scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders".


How many of each? I can't find any reference to that, but the misleading reference to the people who signed it hardly put me on side. Having said that, perhaps there is something worth looking into so, in eager anticipation, I browse the article. I find an Aussie cited. That's a good place to start.


'Also last week, Geologist William F. McClenney, a California Licensed Professional Geologist and former Certified Environmental Auditor in Victoria, Australia, announced that he had reversed his views about man-made global warming. McClenney now says he has done the math and realized that you just can’t get to global warming with CO2.

Very impressive, I thought, and you can always trust an Aussie. But, I wonder, just what is a "certified environmental auditor in Victoria"?


Surely you'd need a PhD or something, five years of rigorous study, right?


Well, no, actually, you can get this qualification in just five days, as it turns out.

Oh well, I won't be sidetracked by his credentials, I'll just focus on the work he's done. He's "done the math", but unfortunately the article's link to it is broken. Oh Dear.


Not to worry, I hunt around and find his views in a multi-part article on the icecap.us site.


I'm looking forward to this because I'm sure his skill as a professional expert witness and contaminated soil consultant ( see the environcorp.com site ) for corporate USA, including Chevron, mean he really knows what he is talking about, even if his expertise is not really in the field of climatology.


OK, so I wade through the first part and so far it's just a longwinded and pompous (read it, you'll see what I mean) version of the old "climate used to change before humans were around so humans can't be having any effect now". No more logical than usual.

The section ends with the observation that the glacial/ interglacial changes of the past 400,000 years or so can’t have been caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs) because there's no source of GHGs on that scale. Not only that, but the rise and fall of GHGs followed the change in temperature, not the other way around!! Amazing!!

Now to the casual reader this might seem an impressive refutation of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but it isn’t.

As I said in my earlier post, I'd just waded through chapter 6 of the 4th IPCC report, which dealt with paleoclimatology, so I know that the glacial/interglacial cycles are generally thought (without much dissent as far as I can tell) to be the result of "orbital forcing".


That is, predictable changes in the earth's orbit and axis result in more or less solar radiation hitting the earth, causing changes in average temperatures and associated variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations related to the marine carbon cycle.


Now the way this guy presents his argument suggests the orthodox global warming theory says GHGs caused the previous ice ages. But it doesn’t. He's arguing against an idea that no-one supports in the first place.




(continued in part 2)


Gaz

>>

[Koala-Man]

Part 2

If you weren't familiar with what the IPCC report said, you'd think the guy was a great genius, tearing down the orthodoxy with a rapier thrust of logic. But he's just set up a straw man that no-one believes in anyway.

He writes as if he just discovered orbital forcing and its effect, through the glaciation/interglaciation cycle, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. It's ridiculous.

It's this sort of pathetic sophistry that annoys me when I'm trying to gather real knowledge and plain nonsense keeps popping up.

Maybe the other 4 parts of the series will make more sense, but please don’t blame me if I sound unenthusiastic.

(Stop press: I just read part 2. More of the same. Confronted with the well-known fact - only just now discovered by himself, apparently - that atmospheric CO2 concentrations rise and fall in response to global temperature changes through the glacial cycle, he asks the question "Could it be that C02 changes were reflecting temperature driven equilibrium concentrations between the ocean and the atmosphere?" Well, yes, William F., and you'd know this if you'd read chapter 6 of the IPCC report. There is a discussion on page 446 which goes into this and the various hypotheses in great detail. It's no great secret.)

The implication of the argument is that because global forcing causes temperature variations, which in turn cause CO2 concentration changes, then we must assume there is no other cause of CO2 concentration changes. We must also, the argument implies, conclude there is no feedback between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. Neither conclusion is logical, of course, but you hear them again and again.

You see my problem? I've started reading the thing, tried to follow up the arguments in good faith, haven't found anything of value, and wasted a lot of time in the process.

I'll keep plugging away though and keep an open mind.

In the meantime, still just getting first impressions, I'm not impressed by the use of this sort of quote:

"The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models." (See my next post for the rest of this.)

That's a quote from Dr Joanna Simpson, PhD in meteorology and former NASA scientist, so she probably knows what she's talking about. And the way her views are presented by Marano makes it fairly clear she believes anthropogenic global warming (AGW) isn't happening.

Let's look at what she really believes in a minute but first let's look at this whole issue of models.

A model is just a mathematical representation of a scientific theory. Without models there is no climate science or much of any other sort of science for that matter.

So what Simpson says is not a criticism of climate science as such, just a recognition that models of complex systems can never be perfectly accurate, because they can't include all relevant variables, can never be as complex as the real world, and use data which can never be perfectly accurate.

These limitations of climate science are repeatedly and explicitly acknowledged by such reports as Garnaut's and the IPCC reports. And that's why Garnaut spends a lot of time discussing the appropriate policy response to information which is known with a limited degree of certainty.

More in part 3

Gaz

[Koala-Man]

Part 3 from Gaz

My observation of climate change "sceptics" is that they often in one breath deride climate models, for the above reasons, then in the next come out with assertions which implicitly embody another (unspecified) model, usually with fewer (implied) explanatory variables, often only one. They don’t even seem to realise they are doing it either. You know how it goes - climate models are nonsense, they say, global warming's actually caused by sunspots or whatever. But that's just another model. Sigh.

Anyway, back to Dr Simpson, who actually doesn't appear to be in that camp.

Here is what I think is the illuminating bit in the full blog entry of hers, from which the selective quotes in Marano's article were taken.

'What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical."

Well she should be sceptical, as we all should. That's what science is all about, and we should deplore institutional bias in favour of whatever orthodoxy rules at any time. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Simpson shows some good honest scientific scepticism, but to include her in an article in a way that implies she's rejected all the evidence on global warming is misleading to say the least.

Her whole blog entry is worth reading. It's on the climatesci.org site.

And now I have to chose - should I continue investigating the content of this very polemical article by Marano when the two threads I have chased up have not been useful to say the least?

I will, but my patience is wearing thin.

Gaz.