You know that Canberra is different when a so-called Minister in the local government, Simon Corbell, can write in the Canberra Times today that
Measures to address climate change must not only be reasonably efficient, they must also be inspiring, and they must capture public imagination and empower individuals, communities and nations to make the shift to a sustainable future.
Unfortunately no, Simon. If you really believe that action must be taken to counter AGW – no matter how futile such action would be in Canberra – then efficiency must be the relevant test. What about an inspirational project that is ineffective and costly? Wouldn’t that – once understood – damage the credibility of the Government’s response to climate change?
What about this letter from Dr Bradford Sherman of Duffy, also in today’s Canberra Times.
The media is bending over backwards to give a voice to ignorant, misinformed (both innocently and wilfully) climate change sceptics and to promulgate the assertions of vested interests that to do something to mitigate our emissions would lay waste to the Australian economy.
The same thing is happening in the United States.
This is occurring despite the fact that there is no dissent within the scientific community regarding the cause (anthropogenic) of elevated GHG concentrations in the atmosphere nor the mechanism by which they act to warm the planet (fundamental physics) and to alter the pH of the ocean (fundamental chemistry).
The only debate surrounds interpretation of historical and contemporary evidence that the planet has warmed and how it should be attributed between natural and human-induced causes.
How about reprinting in full the editorials by recent Nobel Prize for Economics winner Paul Krugman on the subject?
Their relevance to Australia is striking. Especially as to how the merchants of economic gloom and doom don’t seem to be able to produce any credible evidence in support of their economic Armageddon hypothesis.
I noted in Professor Krugman’s editorial that my former employer, Pacific Gas and Electric Company – of the the world’s largest investor owned utilities – recently cancelled its membership in the US Chamber of Commerce in protest over “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.
Personally, I have chosen to purchase more than 100 per cent of my electricity from renewable energy producers through Actew’s Greenchoice program.
It costs me a few cents more than a dollar a day to fully cover my 15kWh average daily usage and represents a 30 per cent increase in my annual electricity expenses over the standard charges.
I encourage others frustrated with the slow pace of change to take similar direct action through the market.
Let’s encourage/compel our utilities to focus their investments in any additional generation capacity into 100 per cent clean and renewable technologies.
Despite asserting such statements as “fundamental physics” and “fundamental chemistry” Sherman seems to have an amazing lack of logic. To wit:
- asserting that everyone who is skeptical of AGW has a vested interest is most unhelpful, especially since it can be easily argued that the majority of vested interests lie with those that want to promote so-called renewable energy and emissions trading schemes due to their profits.
- the fact of increased atmospheric GHG concentrations and a link to humans may be right, but that does not prove that it is responsible for any warming
- the fact that CO2 can warm a planet (eg: Venus) is again not relevant to whether the concentrations observed on Earth (and their increase) are likely to cause significant warming
- acid is caused by the hydrogen ion, for example hydrochloric acid (HCl) where the ion H+ is the cause of low pH levels (< 7) – that is ‘fundamental chemistry’
- there has been no credible evidence produced in support of the climate change Armageddon hypothesis
- Buying energy from say the Actew Greenchoice program is stupid – all you’re doing is paying higher prices and not reducing emissions at all. If anything, under an ETS it reduces the price that “polluters” have to pay for their emissions. If anyone follows the advice to buy into these schemes, they are likely to be a person who is described by the statement “a fool and his money are easily parted”.
- To ignore the one technology that is both the future and solution to human caused CO2 emissions – nuclear energy – shows that the writer has little interest in really addressing emissions, rather than making pompous statements.
Good science requires sound logic. That seems to be missing in much of the debate. And that means that Australian (or Canberra) shouldn’t take unnecessary and expensive actions which are ineffective. And it means being wary of claims of doom which are just predictions of computer models that have various assumptions fed in. To do so means ignoring physical evidence which must always take primacy.
I wonder if all these people that suggest we have to do something ever wondered that “doing something” can also mean making carbon free carbon sources such as nuclear power cheaper than coal and then leaving people alone and stop hounding them?
This movement is basically a cult.
JC
8 Feb 10 at 1:33 pm
AGW agitprop must be “inspiring”? WTF?
C.L.
8 Feb 10 at 1:45 pm
Rather than Dr Sherman’s logic being at fault, your reading comprehension and logic are deficient.
1. He does not assert that everyone who is skeptical of AGW has a vested interest.
2. why would increased CO2 not be responsible for warming? You clearly do not understand basic physics.
3. more ignorance re. Venus, etc.
Pfft. The rest was as much drivel.
You should try educating yourself on the cost of nuclear before believing it is some energy utopia. Your fantasy is in for a rude interruption.
Jack Mildam
8 Feb 10 at 2:20 pm
Politics has become a branch of show business. It needs to inspire and capture the imagination, playing on all the emotions: joy, fear, envy and perhaps even love.
Nothing wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with King Lear or Home and Away. Just don’t get them confused with real life.
ken nielsen
8 Feb 10 at 2:21 pm
The AGW believers are sounding more and more like cranks and extremists as the World wakes up to the fact that the evidence has not been peer-reviewed by the only deciders that matter: lawyers. Scientists are only witnesses. We lawyers are the only ones capable of actually deciding the truth.
Rococo Liberal
8 Feb 10 at 2:22 pm
RL
Dude, you’re a tax lawyer. Although you do God’s work on earth I think may be getting a little ahead of yourself here.. Just a smidgen mind you.
JC
8 Feb 10 at 2:27 pm
Well check out today’s Nielsen poll. Abbott continues to close the gap, and the countries flight to skepticism continues apace.
During the 2007 election, I still thought that Australia had become permanent ‘Howard’s Battlers’ but had tired of the revolutionary leader himself, even if they wanted the revolution to continue. Rudd knew this is, and donned the emperor’s clothes.
But after 3 years, Howard’s Battlers have concluded, “F*** off, he is NOT the emperor; he has no clothes; he is the Naked Civil Servant”!
http://www.theage.com.au/national/abbott-leads-poll-revival-20100207-nksn.html
Peter Patton
8 Feb 10 at 2:58 pm
Is Samuel J questioning that ocean acidification is happening? A recent study on a large area of ocean confirms that it is at the rate predicted. (Previous studies have shown similar results for single locations.):
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2009GL040999.shtml
As to its effects, one other paper recently suggested that it won’t help phytoplankton bloom because of the effect on iron availability in the water:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/54451/title/Acidifying_ocean_may_stifle_phytoplankton
steve from brisbane
8 Feb 10 at 2:58 pm
This revolt against scientists – note this is not the same as a revolt against science – has an historical parallel. In fact climate scientists are becoming the new astrologers.
The shame of it is, is that it is not really the fault of the scientists themselves, than of the screeching infantrymen of Watermelon Greens, unreconstructed International Socialists, tenured radicals, and the clueless culture warrior Arts Ph.Ds, Fairfax journos etc. who just want to be loved and accepted by their intellectual betters.
Peter Patton
8 Feb 10 at 3:04 pm
Well here’s the problem Steve. How do you know by relying on the ‘studies”. How do you know it wasn’t ghost written by the WWF or Greenspeace or Bob Brown and inserted in a paper that Phil Jones peer reviewed just before he was attemtpting suicide.
Or perhaps Doc Pach funneled some money to a couple of advocates to put their name on a scary piece after which he goes off hunting for loot around the world.
See that’s where we are now by relying on deadbeats. We don’t really know whether anything is reliable or not, certainly in terms of putting trillions of dollars into mitigation projects.
When you hang around with too many dogs you end up with lots and lots of fleas, Steve.
JC
8 Feb 10 at 3:05 pm
ken nielsen
I think much of the debauchery of ‘politics as spectacle’ reflects the fact that politicians have too much power for the technologically and information savvy world of the 21st century.
We need a significant devolution of power to the citizenry via the establishment of more “direct democracy”. The electoral representative model and the Westminster system are inappropriate for 21st century Australia.
Peter Patton
8 Feb 10 at 3:08 pm
As always, Steve puts his finger on the pulse of the nation: phytoplankton. It’s what everyone’s talking about at barbecues and pubs from Broome to Ballarat.
C.L.
8 Feb 10 at 3:09 pm
My God, what a train wreck. Another climate scandal involving lies from Ratty Rudd.
C.L.
8 Feb 10 at 3:16 pm
Here steve, another blooper by the IPCC recounted numerous time by “love guru” and IPCC chairman, Doc Pach.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/02/07/leake-todays-ipcc-blooper/#more-10177
JC
8 Feb 10 at 3:17 pm
Tim Blair celebrates!
Remember, coal is evil – except when it restores the Triple A credit rating of a Labor state with volatile Federal seats.
Greatest Moral Challenge Of Our Time.C.L.
8 Feb 10 at 3:19 pm
Just because it is outside your limited range of interests CL doesn’t mean it might not be important. And it is pretty ridiculous to be celebrating huge coal sales in the current circumstances if (like Labor) you want to see decreases in CO2. No argument there.
steve from brisbane
8 Feb 10 at 3:31 pm
First they went for the cattle, then the sheep and now camels. You just don’t want to be an immigrant camel in Australia no matter how long your ancestry. They’re gunning for you. Literally.
I could well imagine in a few years time fashioning an apology for wiping out 1 million camels.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/save_the_planet_kill_the_camels/
JC
8 Feb 10 at 3:35 pm
CL, that study about the Murray Darling you (via Bolt) link us to is from 3 people at a School of Engineering? I suspect its conclusions will not be without controversy.
steve from brisbane
8 Feb 10 at 3:36 pm
So you’d prefer the Chinese to go back to rickshaws and candle power, Steve?
C.L.
8 Feb 10 at 3:36 pm
I just hope that reading that nonsense from Minister Corbell and Dr Sherman makes the rest of you, living in the real Australia, realise what an intellectual desert the ACT, and its local newspaper, have become. If I could afford to shift and live somewhere decent, I would. Even Melbourne looks attractive by comparison.
ACTOldFart
8 Feb 10 at 3:55 pm
Let them build innovative nuclear, CL. (They are advanced in testing pebble bed style nuclear reactors, which is a type I have been arguing is promising for a long time. The South Africans were going to build one, but appear to have run out of money and the will to push ahead rapidly with its development.)
steve from brisbane
8 Feb 10 at 4:04 pm
An interesting thing about that camel story, is that Penny has effectively outed herself as a skeptic.
After all, if you were really as concerned about carbon emissions as she claims to be – if you thought the planet depended on it – then the fact that a particular action doesn’t count towards Kyoto would not deter you from taking action.
So… welcome aboard, Penny!
Fleeced
8 Feb 10 at 4:10 pm
the fact that CO2 can warm a planet (eg: Venus) is again not relevant to whether the concentrations observed on Earth (and their increase) are likely to cause significant warming
.
Why not? I’m curious.
Adrien
8 Feb 10 at 5:08 pm
Measures to address climate change must not only be reasonably efficient, they must also be inspiring, and they must capture public imagination and empower individuals, communities and nations to make the shift to a sustainable future
.
By measures I presume he’s talking about laws. Since when have laws inspired anything but creative ways to get around them? I wouldn’t use the word inspriation but I’d like to see a shift in the ethos whereby people start deploying, say, planetary hygeine. Y’know just try not to treat the place as one big ash can if you can help it.
.
I’d say you’d be more likely to succeed if you used persuasion rather than the law to do it. Anyone who thinks governments are things that inspire has either never been near one or has no idea what inspiration is.
Adrien
8 Feb 10 at 5:13 pm
Why not? I’m curious.
.
It’s called the “it happened once in one particular set of circumstances, therefore it always happens everywhere” fallacy.
Otherwise known as the inductive fallacy.
daddy dave
8 Feb 10 at 5:23 pm
I’m starting to understand how a vulture must feel feeding on a rotten corpse.
dover_beach
8 Feb 10 at 6:31 pm
db
I think what is happening here is that were always a large number of skeptics in the closet too scared to come out lest they receive the full frontal assault of being called a ‘delusionist’ ‘insane’ ‘no better than a Nazi’ ‘anti-science’ and so on. But once a critical mass came out of the closet, now the deluge. Mark my words, Labor will drop climate change as a priority election issue.
Peter Patton
8 Feb 10 at 6:44 pm
This corpse can feed a multitude:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249035/How-Met-Office-blocked-questions-mans-role-hockey-stick-climate-row.html
dover_beach
8 Feb 10 at 6:54 pm
It’s called the “it happened once in one particular set of circumstances, therefore it always happens everywhere” fallacy.
.
So what circumstances are particular to Venus that’d differentiate it from Earth? I remember Carl Sagan citing Venus as cautionary tale. Surely he’d've been aware of this fallacy.
Adrien
8 Feb 10 at 7:08 pm
So what circumstances are particular to Venus that’d differentiate it from Earth?
.
I don’t know. I was simply answering your question at face value based on the logic of the thing. And indeed, induction, while fallacious logically, works quite a lot, so maybe we’re in for the Venus effect!
daddy dave
8 Feb 10 at 7:21 pm
I’m starting to understand how a vulture must feel feeding on a rotten corpse.
.
LOL! Yes it’s quite satisfying.
daddy dave
8 Feb 10 at 7:22 pm
A very logical, well argued and principled case put forward by Malcolm Turnbull for supporting the CPRS:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2813351.htm
Note the frequent references back to what was recommended to the Howard government, and how those reasons apply just as much now as then.
I think it’s a very fine speech that does him much credit.
By contract, from legs-astride-the-barbed-wire-fence Tony Abbott, we’ll just get “big new tax, big new tax” for the next 8 months. I really hated that sloganeering style of politics that Rudd and Labor used so much in the run up to the last election. But it looks like the Libs have decided to join the tactic, as it’s easier than having a logical and consistent position for 2 years at a time.
steve from brisbane
8 Feb 10 at 7:37 pm
It’s a cavalcade of dead corpses.
My take is that a bunch of lefties took this science over and started all the bullshiting turning the thing into a money grabathon and upping the scare stories in a sort of ponzi scheme.
To his discredit I reckon Doc. Pach was caught with his hands in the cookie jar because he isn’t as sophisticated as the others in terms of getting the loot and the fucker was as greedy as hell. He also thought that guru status in India and the cast system would sorta work elsewhere. However he’s ignorant of the fact that there is a large amount of disrespect for anyone in authority in the west. He just didn’t quite know the ropes.
I still maintain there is science there that ought to concern us in terms of dumping all this shit in the atmosphere and there is a reason to be careful.
However I think the days of the wild west in climate science are well and truly over.
I notice Gore hasn’t shown his face these days. A low profile is the best profile it seems.
The sad thing is that we may have to start again.
JC
8 Feb 10 at 7:38 pm
Steve.
Blame the ALP for that mindless sloganeering. What goes around comes around is my thinking.` Let Rudd get himself out of this mess now.
In any event, I have no idea why you’re so worried. If the big guys don’t do anything there’s no reason why we ought to wear a crown of thorns to assuage the Greens.
If you’re really that concerned you ought to be pushing hard for nuclear power over the next 20 years.
The ETS was an unworkable sludge. Coal plant owners aren’t doing shit in terms of upkeep and have basically written a great portion of the plants off. We could end up with serious blackouts over this sludge of a policy.
If the ETS was a policy to push for lower emissions without nuke in the suite of options then there’s no reason to have an ETS.
Furthermore both Rudd and Tanner admitted that they were using the ETS as a redistribution scheme to get money to their voting blocs.
I just don’t hope the ETS is dead. I hope it has terminal cancer.
JC
8 Feb 10 at 7:46 pm
Well, as I have said before JC, I do support nuclear and its basically Labor and Greens that are the hold up there.
I don’t like an ETS either, but it is being pushed by many, many economists and Turnbull’s acceptance of their advice is not unreasonable. It is far more principled than Abbott’s rejection of it.
But, in fact, I would like this political impasse might result in a price on carbon without a full blown ETS via a compromise with the Greens.
steve from brisbane
8 Feb 10 at 8:08 pm
Surely he’d’ve been aware of this fallacy.
.
I loved Carl Sagan once, but I now see that he was a champion of woolly thinking.
daddy dave
8 Feb 10 at 8:55 pm
CL, that study about the Murray Darling you (via Bolt) link us to is from 3 people at a School of Engineering? I suspect its conclusions will not be without controversy.
Yes, Steve, they are from the School of Engineering. They also happen to be hydrologists. Here are the research profiles of Kavetski and Franks:
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research/expertise/139118.html
and
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research/expertise/136652.html
Your initial response suggest you’ve learnt nothing from the last three months.
dover_beach
8 Feb 10 at 11:05 pm
Yes, another ad hom from Steve.
Isn’t the head of the IPCC a railway engineer?
C.L.
8 Feb 10 at 11:06 pm
And more.
The Great IPCC Meltdown Continues.
The most excrutiating train wreck in the history of science. What an irony that the man in charge is a railway engineer.
C.L.
9 Feb 10 at 1:44 am