Politicians And Liberal Policy Makers Take Note: Buying Into The Bad Carbon Myth Is Damaging To Your Career

Obama is behind the curve again.  His advisers (or his teleprompter) are putting out totally flawed ideas that other governments around the world are recognizing as abysmal failures.  Here, now, I am referring to the idea of carbon taxes, carbon offsets, or any other schemes to raise tax revenues on the backs of higher energy prices for consumers.
 
Politicians around the world who bought into the idea of fossil fuel-burning, carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate change are realizing what a mistake they have made.  It is costing not only the public in terms of lost jobs, higher energy costs, and a lowered standard of living, but now as near bankruptcy looms, politicians are the ones feeling  the heat.  It will only get warmer in the frying pan these self-serving clowns (politicians) find themselves in.  The following article describes the problems liberal politicians in Australia are encountering because they have bought into the climate fear-mongering.  I have no sympathy.  They should, and do know better.  They have allowed the greed of carbon taxes overwhelm the obvious.  Man's activities are not causing catastrophic climate change, and to try and alter the global climate is political folly, or even suicide.  Eventually, the truth prevails.
Peter

Australia's carbon mess a warning to the world: Clyde Russell

     

 

The evil Mr. Carbon scaring the children.

 

 Source:

• http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/17/column-russell-carbon-australia-idUSL4N0FN0ER20130717?feedType=RSS&feedName=industrialsSector&rpc=43

 

Wed Jul 17, 2013 1:47am EDT

--Clyde Russell is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own.--
By Clyde Russell
LAUNCESTON, Australia, July 17 (Reuters) - Any government thinking of introducing policies to limit carbon emissions should look at Australia for an example of how not to do it.
Australia's efforts to combat climate change have been poison to politicians from all sides of the debate, contributing so far to the demise of two prime ministers and an opposition leader, and there may be more to come.

The latest twist has seen Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decide to switch from a straight tax on carbon emissions to a floating emissions trading scheme (ETS) a year earlier than planned.

This has nothing to do with improving the workings of the scheme or limiting carbon emissions and everything to do with trying to win back voters angered by rising electricity prices and industries that have seen their international competitiveness eroded by the tax.

The theory is that power and other prices will decline as the cost of carbon permits is expected to be around A$6 per tonne - the level at which European permits are currently priced - compared to the tax of A$25.40 ($23.09) per tonne that had been planned from July 2014.

Assuming European carbon permits don't rise in price, which is a fairly big call given efforts to reduce the supply of permits, Rudd's changes will save the average Australian household A$4 a week in electricity costs.

Whether this is enough to assuage public anger and help Rudd's Labor Party win re-election will become clear in the coming months as he has to call a federal election by end-November.
But Rudd's efforts to remove the carbon tax as an election issue only serve to underline how badly the whole thing has been handled.

When Rudd was first elected prime minister in 2007 he called climate change the "greatest moral, social and economic challenge of our time", signed Australia up to the Kyoto Protocol and proceeded to design an ETS.

This even enjoyed rare bi-partisan support from the then leader of the Liberal opposition Malcolm Turnbull.

However, it was Turnbull's support for the ETS that helped undo his leadership and he was ousted by his colleagues in December 2009, being replaced by the more conservative Tony Abbott, who withdrew his party's support for Rudd's plans.

Rudd's own popularity fell as he struggled to gain public support for his carbon scheme and a controversial new mining tax, leading to his ouster in a party coup in June 2010.
His replacement as prime minister, Julia Gillard, scrapped the planned ETS, making a promise that any government she led wouldn't introduce a carbon tax.

This commitment came back to haunt her after the August 2010 election, in which she managed to hang on to power by cutting a deal with Australian Greens and two conservative independent lawmakers to form a minority government.

Part of her agreement with the Greens was the introduction of a carbon tax with a fixed price per tonne of emissions up until July 2015, at which point it would change to a floating, traded price.
The broken promise was seized upon at every opportunity by the Liberal opposition and conservative media commentators, and in turn contributed to Gillard's poor performance in opinion polls.
When these polls showed her Labor Party heading for a massive defeat in an election she scheduled for September, her colleagues once again ousted a prime minister, bringing back Rudd in a party room vote last month.

Rudd's popularity with the public has seen the Labor Party inch closer to the Liberals in opinion polls, putting pressure on Abbott, who courted ridicule as a climate sceptic earlier this week by describing the ETS as a "so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance".
However, the Liberals are still ahead in opinion polls and if they win the upcoming election, Abbott has promised to scrap the carbon tax and the move to an ETS, replacing it with what he terms "direct action" on climate change.

But even if his party does win the election, it may not control both houses of parliament, and the lack of a majority in the upper house Senate may cruel Abbott's plans, as legislation has to clear both chambers.

It's little wonder that businesses and the public want some kind of resolution to the issue, but the upcoming vote may not deliver this, at least not immediately.
Part of the problem with Gillard's carbon tax is that it was more of a welfare programme than a plan to reduce emissions.

The tax raised was used to fund a raft of welfare measures to compensate for the higher prices caused by the tax.
The plans of both Rudd and Abbott would see the revenue from the tax fall dramatically or disappear altogether, but the welfare payments would remain, leaving the nation's budget with the worst possible outcome.
Rudd said his plan to move earlier to an ETS would cost the budget some A$4 billion, which would be recouped through spending cuts and tightening rules around company-funded vehicles for employees.

Abbott has so far only promised to end a small portion of welfare payments and seek spending cuts across the government.
Absent from both plans is much talk about climate change and carbon emissions.
Australia is the world's 15th-largest polluter and the highest per capita in the developed world, largely as a result of 80 percent of power being coal-fired and the prevalence of carbon-intensive industries such as mining and liquefied natural gas plants.

The existing carbon tax may actually be able to claim some credit for reducing emissions, with Australia's overall greenhouse gas emissions dropping 0.2 percent in 2012 from the prior year, and those from electricity generation by 4.7 percent.
But this success, while modest, is completely drowned out by the political machinations.
What the Australian experience shows is that any government tackling climate change needs as broad a consensus as possible, and that it should be done for the right reasons, not political expediency

In Simple Terms: Why Man-Made Global Warming Is A Myth

The following article is a good summary of the basic, simple, logical failures underlying the concept of man-caused global warming. It is good that the email and data leak, now called Climategate, has surfaced in time for this joke of a climate change meeting in Copenhagen. I say people should educate themselves on the subject as much as possible so they ar not so gullible and accepting of the nonsense being issued by the United Nations and many (most?) of our politicians.
Peter

Four Colossal Holes in the Theory of Man-Made Global Warming
John Hawkins
Tuesday, December 08, 2009 (source)

Repeating the words "scientific consensus" over and over and telling sad stories about polar bears does not qualify as "science." So, why is it that the people who insist that Man-made global warming is based on science, not politics, always get shaky and defensive when people want to actually talk about the reasoning behind it?

When was the last time you heard a scientist get hysterical when you asked him to explain Einstein's theory of relativity? If you ask a scientist why nothing can move faster than the speed of light, he doesn't tell you a terrible story about how koala bears will die if you don't believe the theory is right, does he? Scientists who are confident and in command of the facts don't need to distort data and duck basic questions about the assumptions that are behind scientific theories.

So, why is it that the people who insist that man-made global warming is occurring right now can't come up with coherent answers to many of the most basic problems with the ideas that undergird their theory?

Climate change has been around as long as the earth: If you listen to global warming alarmists, you'd think the climate had been a flat line until mankind started industrializing, after which the temperature rocketed straight upwards. However, the reality is far different, as even the New York Times has been willing to admit:

In October, Dr. (Don) Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore's claim that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this" threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

So, the planet has had bigger temperature shifts than the one we're experiencing now. It has also been warmer than it is today:

The...warming before our last ice age was much warmer than anything we've had since. We had a warming that peaked 9000 years ago, another warming that peaked 5000 years ago. Both were warmer than today. Probably the Roman warming and the medieval warming were both warmer than today -- and we've had 8 warmings of the earth since the last Ice Age.

So how can we, given our limited knowledge of how the climate works, attribute the extremely limited amount of warming we experienced over the last century to mankind? The honest answer is: We can't.

The earth was cooling from roughly 1940-1976: Despite the fact that widespread industrialization was occurring during that 30 year time period, temperatures dropped so much that there were claims we were going into a dangerous period of "global cooling." If global temperatures are tightly bound to man-made greenhouse gasses and those gasses were being rapidly introduced to the atmosphere, then the earth should have been warming, not cooling during that period. The obvious conclusion is that global temperatures are not nearly as closely associated with man-made greenhouse gasses as some people would have us believe.

So, if it's global warming, why isn't there any warming occurring now? One of the many revelations from Climategate is that behind-the-scenes, scientists who buy into man-made global warming are admitting what skeptics have been saying publicly for years now: The globe has been cooling since 1998. Again, if global warming has its bootlaces hitched to the amount of man-made greenhouse gasses that are being produced and those numbers are increasing, why hasn't the temperature gone up as well? There's a simple answer: Man-made greenhouse gasses are not a decisive factor in raising or lowering the temperature of the earth.

Climate models can't accurately project the weather 100 years in the future: The truth is that we don't fully understand how our planet's climate works and thus, our climate models don't work very well. Since the climate models can't explain the climate over the last 25 years and they can't explain the leveling off of temperature since 1998, why would anyone believe they can predict conditions in 100 years? As computer programmers say, "garbage in, garbage out."

The Doomsday predictions from global warming alarmists are absolutely meaningless because they're based on climate models that don't work very well in the first place. As Dennis Avery, co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years has said:

I think they pull their predictions out of their hats and I don't think they have any validity whatsoever.

What the global warming alarmists are asking of people is no small thing. They want us to spend trillions of dollars, dramatically impact our economies, and change the way people across the world live for the worse. Those are not trivial changes and simply having scientists -- who've been put under enormous political pressure and make a living off global warming grants – say, "Trust us, it's real," isn't going to cut it for proof. If global warming alarmists can't even deliver plausible answers to the most obvious problems with their theory, then no one should take them seriously.

A Good Summary Of Current Thought On The Myth Of Man-Caused Global Warming

The following is a well written summary of the current status of the understanding of what I call the "myth" of man-caused global warming. It is particularly gratifying because it is written by a politician, a group of people we often assume to be the last to understand anything. GP

Time for Some Climate Realism
By Rep. Carl Gatto, Alaska
We try to stay informed, read the newspapers, watch the news on TV, and still we missed a major event that affects our future and our pocketbooks. 700 scientists, economists, and public policy experts from 20 countries met in New York City in early March of this year. They concluded that global warming, if it is ocurring at all, is probably natural rather than man-made.

The message from 700 of our best and brightest scientists who studied this issue, based on science and observation, was very different from Al Gore’s message and President Obama’s message. Gore claims that there is a crisis in our atmosphere, that a calamity is occurring, and in ten years the atmosphere may suffer irreversible harm. Gore and Obama offer their solution: cap the production of energy from fossil fuels, tax carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, create a “cap and tax” bureaucracy, make most forms of energy very expensive, and transfer our personal wealth to government wealth all to perform an absolutely worthless and unnecessary task.

The Gore-Obama plan is to collect CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground forever, spending trillions of dollars doing it. In return, we get nothing, unless you count the $645 billion in additional taxes, something that all Americans will pay every time they buy a product or fill up the tank of their car or truck.

Global warming alarmists want us to believe that the temperature of Earth would stay the same year after year, century after century, if not for “the human presence.” This is scientifically false. Huge climate changes have occurred before humans could possibly have played a role. More recently, global temperatures rose from 1900 to 1940 (1934 was the century’s warmest year), fell from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 1998, and declined from 1998 to 2008. How does “the human presence” account for this variation? It can’t.

Most people have noticed the recent cooling that is taking place: extended cold snaps, snow accumulations, snow falling in southern states where “it does not belong” and staying around way too long. Satellite data confirms that the Earth has been cooling since at least 2001, and probably earlier.

Al Gore says “soaring global temperatures will bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” “Global warmers” also predict no more agriculture in California, and in ten years the oceans will be toxic and all life could die. And yet, we’re halfway to the much-feared “doubling of CO2” in the atmosphere, and none of these disasters has even begun to appear.

Global warming’s true believers say trains carrying coal and other fuel to cities are really death trains carrying poisonous fuel to “coal-fired factories of death.” Whew, Hollywood horror films could not top this stuff. But there is more: hurricanes, melting polar ice caps, polar bear extinctions, dust bowls, and anything else about the weather than you can imagine.

Let’s look at the facts. Nearly 85% of US energy consumption is carbon-based, and reducing that figure by using wind, solar, and other renewable sources will take a long time, be very expensive, and may not even be technically possible.

Scientists (and farmers) know carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant.” The vast majority of it is produced from natural sources, not human activities, and plants and forests use CO2 to grow and produce oxygen for all living things. Ordinary air contains roughly 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, and a paltry 0.038% carbon dioxide. Scientists - including several who presented at the New York conference - are quite unsure that a tiny increase in that tiny amount of CO2 is having any effect on climate. Many scientists believe negative feedbacks more than offset whatever warming the CO2 might be capable of causing.

Our whole solar system is showing signs of climate change, including Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and even lonely Pluto. There aren’t any SUVs on those planets. What all the planets have in common, though, is that they receive heat from the sun and they are affected by cosmic rays and other galaxy-wide processes. Nothing we do can compare to changes in sun spot activity and brightness when it comes to changing our climate.

Our climate appears to be once again reversing course and cooling, repeating a cycle that has repeated itself thousands of times in the past. Glaciers advance when the Earth cools, then make up for all that work by retreating when the Earth re-warms. Human activities may have a little impact, but is it good or bad? Worth preventing? No one knows.

So for the time being, let’s accept that the Earth’s climate has been wide-ranging for five billion years. That’s our planet’s history, and we are here in spite of (or maybe because of) all those changes. Thank God for that. Read more here.
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SOME COMMON SENSE

In the debates about global warming on other blogs I read a lot of emotional nonsense. But occasionaly I encounter someone showing some rational common sense. Here is a comment from a non-scientist, but someone with a great deal of real life experience. I think he puts into words what many of us "feel" is going on concerning this issue of global warming and climate change. He smells something rotten, and like me, he doesn't like it. Read what he has to say.
Peter

Comment from: Christian [Visitor]
Honestly I have been a fence sitter on this subject (global warming)for a long time. I've read the books both scientific and "layman's terms" from both sides of the argument. I've seen Mr Gore do his thing on "An Inconvenient Truth" and I've read Crichton's novel "State of Fear" (and, YES, I put both of those in the same category. Actually, I've looked up the references mentioned in both and Crichton is more based in actual scientific fact. That's sad.) I've been to websites that advocate for both sides. After all that, this is what it has come down to for me...

I am in the US military and have spent a great deal of time dealing with people of all walks of life. Good guys and bad guys. I've learned that people who tell the truth don't try cover their tracks. People who are passionate in their belief of something are willing to get up and defend it at all costs even if they happen to KNOW they are wrong. The more passionate they are the less they are willing to look at reality and the greater their chances are of doing or saying outlandish things. (And Al Gore and many of his true believers are nothing if not passionate.)

With that said, Ive noticed that the folks "in-the-know" on the Pro-Global warming side are always evasive, frequently only speak to friendly audiences and friendly media, never debate ANYTHING with other folks who have solid scientific credentials, and are basically kinda slimey. Seriously, why would I listen to anyone from Hollywood on a scientific issue?? Same with Politicians, who are already known to twist truth to match their own agendas. I wouldn't.

So I listen to the scientists, and when you dig down past the BS, past the political obfuscating, and the media's poor ability to render fair and equitable coverage of the issue, the scientists for the most part are telling me that Global warming as put forth by the mainstream media and Presidential wannabe's IS FALSE. It's based on bad science, inaccurate modeling, and pushed by a media with an agenda that ISN'T about keeping the general population informed as to the truth.

PEOPLE WHO TELL THE TRUTH, DON'T NEED TO COVER THEIR TRACKS. PEOPLE WHO TELL THE TRUTH AND KNOW IT ARE WILLING TO GET UP AND PROVE IT WHEN CONFRONTED. That is all. Thanks. :)

From: http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=the_growing_rift_over_global_warming_can&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&template=popup#comments