An open letter to Cassandra Wilkinson

Dear Cassandra,

I am a big fan of your strait talking style and independent rationality, so it astounds me that you seem to have fallen for the anthropogenic global warming doctrine, to the extent that you defended the carbon tax in a recent Sky News debate.

You argue that even though the AGW doctrine might turn out to be nonsense, the tax is a good idea, because it will encourage people to use less energy and develop new energy sources (e.g. windmills or solar panels or other non-emitting technologies) that they can then market to the world. If that makes economic sense, I have another good idea that should be right up your alley. Let's have a wheel tax that will encourage people to travell less and develop new means of wheel-less transport (e.g. canals or hovercrafts or other non wheeled technology) which they can then market to the world. 

But maybe we should consider a few of the problems with such schemes:-

1. They depend on obsolete technology (e.g. windmills or canals), new but much more expensive technology (e.g. solar or hovercraft), or on not yet invented technology (e.g. carbon capture or beam me up Scotty technology). If such alternatives were better than CO2 emitting and wheeled technologies, they would be up and running by now, and if they ever do become economically sensible they will soon be running in the freest economies, from where they will spread to the rest of the world, just like the emitting technologies did. But in the meantime taxing existing technologies to subsidise less efficient and more expensive technologies can only shackle our economy to anchors it has to drag.  

2. Such schemes depend on the rest of the world shackling their economies to the same anchors. If other countries decide they want to gain what we have (e.g. China and India) or to increase their economic advantages (e.g. the US) they will not so shackle their economies, so our new technologies will have no market, and we will have lost our competitive advantage.   

3. The government's Orwellian named "clean energy future" depends on a world-wide CO2 emission detection, policing and trading scheme, to be administered by some UN type agency ! This plan, by the way, doesn't have us reducing our emissions; it has us buying carbon-credits from other countries, who are expected to reduce their emissions to reduce their own carbon footprint and then reduce them further to clock up the carbon credits to sell to us so we can keep emitting !! These countries will be doing this, mind you, without the incentive of our $23+++ carbon tax !!! While we continue to increase our earnings from our largest export - coal !!!! Where the hell will that go? Remember - practically every ounce of carbon extracted from the ground ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere !!!!! 

4. But let's assume, for a moment, that for the first time in history a government plan (in this case an inter-government plan) actually succeeded in achieving its objective (in this case a low emitting world, powered by windmills solar panels and yet to be discovered technology) - so that the coal and oil that raised the world's population from one to 7 billion and doubled life expectancy and offered most of us opportunities that pre-emitting generations never dreamt of, stayed in the ground. Can you begin to calculate the economic cost of such a success? In human livelihoods, lifestyles, and lives? And if this "clean energy future" does by some science fiction means keep the 6 billion people who wouldn't be here if it weren't for CO2 emitting energy alive, how much surplus energy would it produce to be used to adjust to detrimental climate change or capitalise on beneficial climate change - be it man or nature made? 

Climate has always changed. The 20th century changes were nothing unusual. The alleged consensus has failed to accurately predict changes two decades out. On the basis of its projections two centuries out, do you really want to consign the commanding heights of the world's economies to the tender care of Green senators, beholden PMs, UN energy Tsars, international carbon credit traders, third world emissions inspectors, Green lobby groups, Al Gore, Michael Mann, Tim Flannery et al?  If so, what is this destruction of the CO2 emitting world for?  If not, what is the carbon tax for? These are not rhetorical questions, I would really like to know. 

Pork Barrels & Green Pyramids

If the Australian government runs true to form and stuffs its carbon pricing scheme up we will lose and lose and lose; but if it actually makes its scheme work we will lose and lose and lose and lose and lose. When the ancient Egyptians squandered the toil of generations to build their monuments to the vanity of their Pharaohs, they at least left behind some pyramids for us to marvel at; but there will be nothing to show for the squandering of our productivity to Bob Brown’s and Julia Gillard's vanity except the wonderment of future historians that a country as sensible as Australia could have led the way down such a duplicitous, fallacious, despotic, inhumane, spin-doctored pathway.

Billions wasted painting pork barrels, by Don Argus 

Alarmist Arithmetic

Climate alarmists like to warn us that there is enough ice on Greenland to raise sea levels by 7 metres when anthropomorphic global warming melts it away, e.g. here.  So when the new Times Atlas depicted Greenland as having lost 15% or 1/7th of its ice during the last twelve years, and this claim was backed by a leading climate change scientist, alarm bells were sent a clanging e.g. here. 

How alarming is that? Well according to my primary school arithmetic: if all of Greenland’s ice would raise sea levels by 7 metres when melted, 1/7th of that would raise sea levels by one metre (actually a bit more due to growing expanse later, but let's not quibble)! Hmmm, I think I might have noticed that!

The Times, however, remains “categorical”. Some alarmists decided this one couldn’t “be winked away”. Their scientists claim that Greenland has lost 0.1% of its ice over the last 12 years – 1/150th of what the Times cartographers claim. The climate scientists who endorsed the cartographers, however, were just running true to form.
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Counting the cost down the garden “pathway to a clean energy future”

The Australian Government made its best sales pitch for its “carbon price package” when it distributed the "pathway" booklet to every Australian household. …The more that is understood about the pathway to that deceptively named “clean energy future”, however, the more negative the public’s reaction will be. The government knows this; that’s why it covers the pathway with such a prolific overgrowth of propaganda. But let us try to find our way through the undergrowth and discover where the pathway leads and what it will cost our lucky country…. read more here

By 2050 we will have purchased over 9,300Mt of carbon credits at a cost of more than $750 billion….This is a lot of money - if we could have put a million dollars in a piggybank every day from the day Jesus was born until today we would not have accumulated that much. No Australian receives anything in exchange for this $750,000,000,000, except permission to emit CO2 into the atmosphere….

The USSR used to predict strong growth and prosperity according to five year plans; plans that depended on no economic forces beyond its absolute control – except for the weather. The Australian government predicts strong growth and prosperity according to a thirty-nine year plan; a plan that depends on the economic forces of the whole world, which it has no control over whatsoever - the purpose of the plan being control of the weather. The Soviets were not smart enough to make their plans work. But our government is smart enough to make its plan work for our future and for the world’s weather? …

The carbon price package will not drain CO2 and bad weather from the sky, but it will drain productivity and prosperity from the earth; it will jam a faucet into the economy and siphon an accelerating flow of funds - half to be poured down the long drop at the bottom of Bob and Julia’s garden, the other half to be channeled to where they and their political progeny direct it….

How could a couple of self justifying social planners in search of a nobel cause on the anointed sides of history to attest to their moral superiority and vision resist?
Carbon pathway to disaster, by John Dawson

Insights of Václav Klaus

The Global Warming Doctrine is an ideology, if not a religion, which lives more or less independently of the science of climatology. Climate and temperature are used or more often misused in an ideological conflict about human society.

This doctrine, this new incarnation of environmentalism, is not a monolithic concept that could be easily structured and summarized. It is a flexible, rather inconsistent, loosely connected cascade of arguments, which is why it has so successfully escaped the scrutiny of science. It comfortably dwells in the easy and self-protecting world of false interdisciplinarity.

Everyone should read this - he knows what he's talking about
Climate Change the Dangerous Faith, by Vaclav Klaus

The rain on Flannery's parade

Tim Flannery was chosen for his $3,000 a week job as Australia's Climate Change Commissioner for his expertise, his communication skills, and his track record in the competitive business of sounding alarms about the dire consequences of our “carbon polluting” ways. But how can his teachings and preaching ever be tested? Most of his apocalyptic prophesies are projected far enough into the future for him to be well and truly beyond accountability when they are proved right or wrong. When it came to Australia’s rainfall, however, Flannery threw caution to the wind and declared that the apocalypse is now. Read some of his predictions here 

If governments hadn’t been swayed by fanatical counselors like Flannery and intimidated by Green politicians, they wouldn’t have wasted billions of our dollars on white elephant desalination plants; but they would have allowed more dams to be built which would have reduced the need for water restrictions when it didn’t rain enough, and reduced the damage from floods when it rained too much.

When it started to rain the Greens quickly recalibrated their spin, claiming that floods as well as droughts are evidence of anthropomorphic climate change – which makes their hypothesis un-falsifiable. If both more rain and less rain verifies it, the only way it would not be verified is if rainfall remained consistent year after year - which really would be an unprecedented climate change in this land “of drought and flooding rains” as the poet Dorothea Mackellar described it a hundred years ago.
Damp Profit of Doom, by John Dawson
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Vox Populi:

CO2 is world-destroying pollution. The tax will stop the pollution. And create a better economy. But it won’t cost you – just “big polluters”.  

Year right! You think we’re stupid?

Chorus
Get your hands off my wallet,
Take your hands off her purse,
Your ideas are a fraud and dishonest,
You think that freedom’s a curse
Back off just leave us alone,
Back off just leave us alone,
Back off just leave us alone,
Get out of the way
Convoy of no confidenec

Now that's a scare campaign!

Highlighting the cost of the carbon tax isn't a scare campaign. 

An ABC documentary portents a global warming meltdown that will return the world to Jurassic park; Professor Robert Manne pontificates that our step into the fossil fuel age was “the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind”; Professor Clive Hamilton intones a “requiem for [our] species”; Commissioner Tim Flannery crusades to save “life on the planet”; Minister Tanya Plibersek warns that we are “losing the Great Barrier Reef, losing Kakadu National Park, losing the ability to feed ourselves”; Senator Lee Rhiannon preaches that  man made global warming is “the greatest threat we face in human history” (Greens praise newcastle anti-coal direct action) Author James Lovelock sermonizes that man made global warming will kill ten billion people this century - now that’s a scare campaign! And yet even in Lovelock’s apoplectic Book of Revelations more people are left on the planet than it could sustain before the “big polluters” made our “most fatal misstep”.

PS: Ridiculous things may be heard on the skeptic side of the debate too - when amateurs sound off. But on the warmist side it's national broadcasters, professors, ministers of the crown, senators and authors who sound off with the most unfounded, irrational, fallacious, irresponsible, preposterous, hysterical alarmism imaginable.

Our Fossil Fuel Legacy

Our ancestors had hunted and gathered for hundreds of thousands of years, then farmed for thousands more before they started burning coal and oil to power industries. During those interminable pre-industrial millennia our numbers increased slowly, haltingly, vulnerably, until there were a billion of us spread across the planet. That milestone was reached about two hundred years ago - soon after James Watt invented his steam engine. Now there are seven billion of us, and most of us can expect to live longer, less painful, more enjoyable lives than our ancestors ever dreamed possible.

Our fossil fuel legacy, by John Dawson

Climate Alarmism

The anthropogenic global warming alarmist crusade for governmental and intergovernmental intervention to curb the activities of the “big polluters” who supply our power and transport and food is an atrocious travesty.

Its scientific argument is fraudulent, but even if it wasn’t, it would still be a travesty because of its economics.

Its economic argument is fallacious, but even if it wasn’t, it would still be a travesty because of its politics.

Its political argument is despotic, but even if it wasn’t, it would still be a travesty because of its morality.

Its moral argument is inhumane, but even if it wasn’t, it would still be a travesty because of its philosophy.

At root the AGW alarmism philosophy is: anti-liberty, anti-progress, and anti-human.
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Crowing

Donning my Pollyanna bonnet, I see one good thing about the financial crisis: the Chicken Little Left will be crowing so much about it that they might give their Global Warming beatup a rest for a while.