Friday, July 22, 2011

News items and comments

Call for media inquiry is just a witch hunt

Piers Akerman – Thursday, July 21, 11 (09:30 pm)

FEW issues are capable of drawing out and exciting the ignorant and the conspiracists as vigorously as discussions about the media.

As transparent as most media operations are and as open as most media employees tend to be, those who seek to create a distraction, sow confusion and reap the rewards like to flog the messengers when their own political support begins to flag.

Those who have something to hide fear exposure and generally attribute far greater powers to the press than those whose lives would not warrant public interest.

Enter Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Greens leader Bob Brown.

They had an excuse in Salem. Wheat with an LSD type mold may have created hallucinations. McCarthy had the virtue of being right, but wrong in the Way he prosecuted it. Gillard is only doing it to maintain a corrupt advantage

DD Ball of Carramar/Sydney (Reply)
Fri 22 Jul 11 (02:54pm)
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Not just a political broken promise

Miranda Devine – Wednesday, July 20, 11 (09:03 pm)

image

I DON’T like the “Juliar” meme any more than the next lefty. It’s rude and boring. But that doesn’t mean the Prime Minister didn’t win the narrowest election in 70 years on false pretences, when she famously declared, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”.

Julia Gillard’s lie, mis-statement, fib, unforeseen circumstances, inadvertent misleading, mistake, falsehood - call it what you will - wasn’t just any old broken political promise.

It was the mechanism that allowed Labor to scrape over the line last August.

No one who wanted a carbon tax would have voted for Tony Abbott. But a fair few in marginal Labor seats would have been reassured enough by Gillard’s vow to overcome their urge to vote for the climate realist Opposition Leader.

Carbon pricing is a vote killer, as politicians in the US and Canada understood when they scrapped their own plans.

It is electoral Ebola, as the defunct NSW Labor government found to its great cost at the March state election when internal Liberal Party polling in 20 marginal seats found only 25 per cent of voters saw the carbon tax as about the environment and 51 per cent saw it as a cost-of-living issue.

Carbon pricing was poison when Kevin Rudd’s polls were plummeting last year and that was the reason Gillard suggested he ditch the ETS on which he had staked his leadership.

“What I said before the election I can’t unsay now,” Gillard said last week.

Except that’s not what she told Kevin Rudd.

Don’t you know about the politicians, they just basically do anything to snatch the vote. Once they got elected then they didn’t care about the promises made to the people. Thats what it had been and will remains like this in the future.
removalists Sydney

Jeremy Heyes (Reply)
Wed 20 Jul 11 (09:23pm)
BILLYBOY replied to Jeremy Heyes
Thu 21 Jul 11 (10:14am)

There is no greater liar in politics than Abbott. He has just said he has never supported an ETS despite being presented with his own statements which showed he supported it.

LIAR LIAR LIAR.

DD Ball replied to Jeremy Heyes
Thu 21 Jul 11 (10:52am)

And yet I don’t see the LNP abusing due process in this way. I hear the allegations made against them, and see many inflations. Yet it appears to be the ALP which gets away with little media examination of their apparent corruption

Time for a Change replied to Jeremy Heyes
Thu 21 Jul 11 (01:28pm)

You miss one important point. Abbott went with part lines on the ETS until he became leader of the opposition. He is a global warming realist and will look at implementing solutions that do not impact unfavourably on Australian people and industry. He will also not do this, I would imagine, until the big businesses (notive they are not polluters, but employ most of the workforce) of the world fall into line, you will find very little done here. AS IT SHOULD BE.

Floyd replied to Jeremy Heyes
Thu 21 Jul 11 (06:25pm)

DD Ball the ALP gets away with little or no media scrutiny of corrupt activities because the mainstream media are left-biased organisations and practice disinformation tactics to suit their leftist agendas. Never let the truth or logical argument get in the way of a good story - another mantra of the leftist MSM.

I don’t use the meme Juliar often. But I do make the point the policies she espouses have ALP provenance, although they are also Green friendly. I understand she had treasury costing the policy as she and Swan were denying it last election. That is not the only dishonesty. She promised a new era in IR laws prior to the ‘07 election and she has never been held to account for that. She also promised an improvement on the Pacific Solution she never delivered. She promised Medicare Gold but because the ALP lost in that election she never had to address that failure. She tried to hurt wharfies with her dumb ideas, and failed there too. I don’t need the meme, I have the examples.

D D Ball of Carramar (Reply)
Thu 21 Jul 11 (07:35am)
Geoff of the Central Coast replied to D D Ball
Thu 21 Jul 11 (10:11am)

Don’t forget that when denouncing the opposition for raising the suggestion of a carbon [dioxide] tax before the election, Swan described them as hysterical.

Who is hysterical now?

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… is from the latest column in the Washington Post by the national treasure known as George Will:

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary ["left-" (i.e., "not-") -DBx] liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

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1,000,000 views and counting

by RUSS ROBERTS on JULY 21, 2011

in FILM, MUSIC

The Fight of the Century now has over 1,000,000 views. It took about 12 weeks. We have a long way to go to catch Fear the Boom and Bust, so please watch and share.

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Nick Gillespie interviews Vernon Smith

by RUSS ROBERTS on JULY 21, 2011

in ADAM SMITH, PRICES

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On the Somali Famine

by DON BOUDREAUX on JULY 21, 2011

in CURRENT AFFAIRS, HUNGER, MYTHS AND FALLACIES

Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:

It’s unspeakably tragic that thousands of Somalis are today starving to death (“U.N.: Famine in Somalia is killing tens of thousands,” July 22). And it’s true that one proximate cause of this starvation is drought. But blaming such starvation on weather conditions is lame; it is to confuse a proximate cause for a deeper cause – and a deeper cause that is avoidable through better policies.

The earth is full of people (such as residents the American southwest) who live in places that receive very little rainfall, or that endure prolonged droughts, yet who aren’t remotely at risk of starving. Understanding the starvation in Somalia requires an explanation of why Somalis enjoy no ready access, such as we have in America, to global supplies of food. (There is, after all, no global drought.) Such understanding demands also an explanation of why Somalis – unlike, say, farmers in rainfall-poor parts of California – don’t use artificial irrigation and other modern techniques to ensure against drought and to increase crop yields.

Reasonable people can disagree over the reasons Somalia’s economy prevents Somalis from escaping subsistence living conditions. But explaining today’s starvation in Somalia as being the result of drought is as helpful as, say, explaining growing world population as being the result of sex. Deeper thinking is needed.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

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The final version of Casey Mulligan’s important new paper is published; it appears in the hot-off-the-epress issue of the B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics. (An earlier version – the one I read – is here.) The abstract:

Factor supply increases (depresses) output for many of the same reasons that the government spending multiplier might be less (greater) than one. Data from three 2008-9 recession episodes—the labor supply shifts associated with the seasonal cycle, the 2009 federal minimum wage hike, and the collapse of residential construction spending—clearly show that markets absorb an increased supply of factors of production by increasing output. The findings contradict the “paradox of toil” and suggest that government purchases and marginal tax rates reduce private consumption, even during the recession [link added].

Speaking of the weaknesses of Keynesian ‘economics,’ in today’s Wall Street Journal Stanford University economist John Taylor writes:

Big government has proved to be a clumsy manager, and it did not stop with monetary and fiscal policy. Since President Obama took office, we’ve added on complex regulatory interventions in health care (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and finance (the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act). The unintended consequences of these laws are already raising health-care costs and deterring new investment and risk-taking.

If these government interventions are the economic problem, then the solution is to unwind them. Some lament that with the high debt and bloated Fed balance sheet, we have run out of monetary and fiscal ammunition, but this may be a blessing in disguise. The way forward is not more spending, greater debt and continued zero-interest rates, but spending control and a return to free-market principles.

Cato’s Sallie James makes a powerful case for ending the species of corporate welfare that is the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

EconLog’s David Henderson reports on yet more of his e-debate with proud protectionist Ian Fletcher.

Carpe Diem’s Mark Perry documents another instance of private markets doing what textbooks and popular notions hold can be done only by government: supplying unemployment insurance. (Markets earlier made headway into this business, only to be thwarted by, among other politicians, F.D.R. - that supposed great champion of working, and out-of-work, Americans.)

Dirk Mateer and Frank Stephenson explain how to use film clips to better convey to students the lessons of public-choice economics.

Bob Higgs on the debt-ceiling tussle.

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OTHER HACKS HACKED: HACK

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (02:37 pm)

A former Daily Mirror reporter adds his old paper to the News of the World phone disgrace:

James Hipwell, 45, told The Australian Online he saw show business reporters on the Daily Mirror regularly intercept voicemail messages when he worked there from 1998 to 2000.

Hipwell is the only Fleet Street whistleblower who is offering to go on the record with accounts of voicemail hacking at newspapers other than the News of the World, which was closed down by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation two weeks ago.

“I know that for one simple reason: I used to see it going on around me all the time when I worked at the Daily Mirror,” he said ...

The paper denies the accusation. It should be noted that Hipwell himself spent time in prison for market rigging via aMirror business column. Others point to a stablemate:

The New York Times yesterday reported that five former journalists at the Mirror’s stablemate The People had said that they regularly witnessed hacking in that newsroom in the late 1990s to early 2000, but they spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“I don’t think anyone quite realised the criminality of it,” said one of the unnamed former reporters at The People.

The judicial inquiry into all of this is going to be spectacular.

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HOT CHISEL

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (01:38 pm)

This rocks:

These days the bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll poke society in the eye through the politically incorrect practice of emitting carbon, or at least that’s what Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker seemed to be saying as the band announced a reunion tour of Australia and New Zealand yesterday. Walker, generally a quiet man who was a rocket scientist before music claimed him, said he wanted to make it clear the tour would be “carbon positive”. “We’re flying everywhere and we’ll be emitting as much as we possibly can,” he said to much applause.



Appropriately, the impending Chisel tour is called Light the Nitro, a reference to the practice of injecting nitrous oxide into a car’s carburettor to increase its performance, not to mention its carbon emissions.

(Via Andrew Bolt.)

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NUMBERS TURNBULLED

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (07:03 am)

According to the ABC, Malcolm Turnbull is apparently stupid:

Mr Turnbull said Chinese [carbon dioxide] emissions were one-fifth of Australia’s and India’s were less than one-tenth.

He’s relying on the old per-capita fakery. Fine, then. Let’s cut our emissions and let China and India carry on. Global warming solved!

UPDATE. As usual, Malcolm is in tune with a Labor Prime Minister:

Julia Gillard has seized on Malcolm Turnbull’s vigorous defence of climate science as Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce urged the former Liberal leader to practise better “self-management” …

The Prime Minister said Mr Turnbull’s position was in stark contrast to the Opposition Leader’s views on the “so-called settled science” of climate change.

Go for it, Laboreenies. Make the man an offer.

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SEVEN-YEAR SEARCH

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (05:36 am)

Another reason to be grateful that the internet didn’t exist in the 1980s:

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company, which is based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today.”

Key word: today. Job applicants may not enjoy online scrutiny, but they can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

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FRIENDLY COMPANY

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (05:20 am)

Posh-voiced leftist idiot Jonathan May-Bowles, the man who will forever be known as Wendy Deng’s bitch, speaks to a podcaster. The interview is utterly soft. Almost as soft as Jonathan, who pitifully claims to be “in the inside of the News International spin machine, and at its mercy.” Final exchange:

Podcast childman James O’Malley: Any regrets or are you still fully standing behind what you’ve done?

Jonathan: I’d have got him right in the face rather than getting his shirt.

Podcast childman James O’Malley: Ha ha ha ha ha! Brilliant!

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Post fixed to remove incorrect information: the interview program is not associated with the BBC.

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FORMULA PRIUS

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (04:43 am)

The cruel neutering of Formula One racing continues:

F1 cars will have to run on electrical power only in the pit lane from 2014.

The technical rules for 2014 published by the FIA state cars must run “in electric mode” with “no ignition and no fuel supply to the engine at all times when being driven in the pit lane.”

The eventual regulatory response to this sort of thing, forced by declining interest from numbed fans, is going to be fierce. The era of lame may yield to an era of helmetless death drivers aboard V12 nitro trikes with bodywork made from corn chips. Semi-related thoughts from Carol Iannone.

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VICTIM OR AGGRESSOR

Tim Blair – Friday, July 22, 11 (03:47 am)

Headline in the Australian:

Leopard attacks Indian village, shot dead

Headline in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Tragedy of a cornered cat: leopard killed after attacking 11

Once again, it depends whose side you’re on.

(Via David G., who emails: “Imagine if it was an Israeli leopard.")

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Business writes off Gillard Government

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (07:25 pm)

The verdicts alone are damning:

BUSINESS leaders have slammed the Gillard government’s handling of the economy, with corporate captains saying relations are the worst in recent memory with a government that is not on top of major issues.

Speaking at The Australian-Deutsche Bank Business Leaders Forum in Melbourne today, Transurban and incoming Westpac chairman Lindsay Maxsted said issues of both illegitimacy and execution were affecting the government’s performance.

“It’s probably the most difficult relationship I’ve seen between business and a federal government,” Mr Maxsted said.

He said everything the government was planning seemed to be about short-term gain, as opposed to what was in the long-term interests of the country.

Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford said the government did not have a good grasp of the major issues facing the economy, which he said were industrial relations, infrastructure, carbon and mining taxes and skills shortages....

Former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski, who is the chancellor of RMIT University, said there was a “whiff of illegitimacy” about the Labor government, in part due to how the carbon tax has been introduced, following an election campaign pledge by Prime Minister Julia Gillard that no such tax would be imposed.

Worse for Labor is that business leaders rarely speak out like this - unless they know the government is too weak or terminal to punish them.

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How many broken promises would that make?

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (07:10 pm)

Another backflip coming?

THE Gillard government is under mounting pressure to process 521 asylum-seekers currently in limbo on Christmas Island, with Malaysia refusing to accept them under its deal with Australia to be signed on Monday.

Sources familiar with the sector said Immigration Minister Chris Bowen would be soon be forced to overturn an earlier pledge that all arrivals after May 7 would be processed in a third country.

The government had hoped to send the group to Malaysia or Papua New Guinea for processing.But Malaysia has refused to make the deal retrospective and talks with PNG have stalled over the reopening of an Australian detention centre on Manus Island.

(Thanks to reader puzzled.)

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Pen man draws the line in this debate

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (10:34 am)

Man with pen first draws for sceptic Dr Roy Spencer, a climate scientist.

A week or two later, man with pen draws for alarmist Julia Gillard, a politician.

You decide. But beware the eight lies in Gillard’s effort.

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Cold facts and a bonus video

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (10:14 am)

Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker has no time for fashionable lies as he announces a reunion tour of Australia and New Zealand:

Walker, generally a quiet man who was a rocket scientist before music claimed him, said he wanted to make it clear the tour would be “carbon positive”. “We’re flying everywhere and we’ll be emitting as much as we possibly can,” he said to much applause.

Appropriately, the impending Chisel tour is called Light the Nitro, a reference to the practice of injecting nitrous oxide into a car’s carburettor to increase its performance, not to mention its carbon emissions.

“Much applause” is a cultural marker.

(Thanks to reader Bernard Slattery.)

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Has Flannery yet said sorry?

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (10:01 am)

Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery warned that global warming could leave Sydney parched:

In 2005, Flannery predicted Sydney’s dams could be dry in as little as two years because global warming was drying up the rains, leaving the city ”facing extreme difficulties with water”.

Instead:

SYDNEY has record its wettest July in more than 50 years

And:

Dam levels: 76.4%

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Labor fights free speech on the orders of the Greens

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (09:53 am)

Chris Merritt warns that Labor is trashing its claims to be defenders of the free speech:

THE federal government seems intent on allowing the Greens to destroy Labor’s credentials on free speech. After permitting the Greens to vandalise the federal shield law for journalists’ sources, the government has decided to embrace the thinking of the Greens on privacy law.

This will have the effect of reversing privacy law reforms that were enacted by Labor state governments just six years ago…

In its rush to placate Bob Brown, federal Labor has forgotten that Labor state governments took a completely different position in the last debate over privacy.

In 2005, when privacy was debated during the push for national defamation laws, every Labor state lined up on the free-speech side of the argument.

What a pity Julia Gillard and Privacy Minister Brendan O’Connor are prepared to repudiate that proud Labor history. Unless federal Labor returns to its roots and rids itself of the Greens influence, its plans for a statutory privacy tort will brand Labor as the party that wound back free speech.

Matthew Franklin agrees that the Greens are again driving Labor policies:

OPPOSITION claims that Bob Brown is the nation’s de facto leader face a stern test in coming weeks as Julia Gillard decides whether she will back the Greens’ push for tougher regulation of the media.

This is because a crackdown on media, including a push for governments to directly intervene to deliver greater media diversity, is a Greens—not a Labor—policy.

While Brown’s call for an inquiry into the media is ostensibly a response to Britain’s telephone hacking scandal, his proposed terms of reference read more like an attempt to have Labor embrace his party’s policies on the media.

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On the Greens

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (09:18 am)

image

Kevin Andrews launches a much-needed book that examines the true agenda of the Greens:

This book, The Greens – Policies, Reality and Consequences, unpacks much of the agenda of the Greens. In 21 chapters, the authors succinctly examine the Greens’ policies and their consequences for our national prosperity. The picture is not attractive.

As the editor, Andrew McIntyre, states in the introduction:

Taken as a whole, the impression given in reading these chapters is that the Greens have an uncontrollable urge to spend, almost everywhere and for everything; a mania for control – through legislation and regulation of both institutions and individuals; a disturbing and unwarranted confidence in central planning and belief that government knows best; an antagonism to initiatives by the private sector or individuals; and at best, a systematic and naïve misunderstanding, both historical and practical, of how the world works.

This conclusion is reflected in many of the contributions. James Allen writes of their “sense of naivety” about the constitution; Sinclair Davidson concludes that they are “economic reactionaries who image a far less prosperous economy and restricted choices”; Alan Oxley describes how living standards would fall under their policies; Greg Melleuish writes about the Greens “old-fashioned ideas of centralized state control”; and Kevin Donnelly observes their intolerance.

Alan Moran describes “their fundamental antipathy to the market system and individual choice”; while Aniello Iannuzzi observes that “the Greens want us to recalibrate the way we think about health into a mindset of rights rather than one of self-reliance and self-improvement.”

Indeed, as the contributions of Iannuzzi and David Smith indicate, the Greens oppose genetic engineering of the crops that would help feed the world, but have no problems with the genetic manipulation of human cells. Likewise, nanotechnology is a modern evil according to the Greens, and to be challenged, as Garth Paltridge points out.

Bob Day concludes that Greens’ policies would be disastrous for home buyers, while Wendy Francis describes how the Greens would transform marriage and family from a social institution centred on the well-being of children to one centred on the self-fulfilment of adults.

Individually and collectively, the authors of this book reveal the totalitarian impulse at the heart of the Green’s ideology. It involves the control over, and the crowding out of, other spheres of national life by the massive expansion of government.

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Faine defends press freedom even from his listeners

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (07:14 am)

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And that was that

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (07:09 am)

Do click the video:

You know how sometimes you get in a heated discussion and your opponent says something so completely stupid, if only you were quick enough to think of a clever riposte, but you weren’t? But you think of it later?

Well, Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks need have no regrets over his remote rhetorical confrontation this week with notorious MSNBC talker Contessa Brewer.

She was, of course, defending President Obama for bravely sticking by his deficit negotiation guns despite the obstruction of congressional Republicans stubbornly sticking by theirs.

(Thanks to reader Andrew V.)

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Solar-powered bull

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (07:02 am)

Bjorn Lomborg on the carpetbaggers and activists who have corrupted the debate on global warming:

AUSTRALIA’S carbon tax is being sold to the public with government-funded ads in which representatives from renewable energy companies make the case for the government policy.

Their arguments range from, “it’s got to be better to put wind turbines up”, to “other countries around the world are doing it”. One cites the example of Germany, which has led the world in subsidising solar panels.

Yes, Germany has spent more than $75 billion on inefficient solar technology delivering a mere 0.1 per cent of its total energy supply. And this will postpone global warming by how much? A whole seven hours by the end of the century....

The Australian government is not alone in touting renewable energy as a solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change made media waves with a new report on renewable energy. As in the past, the IPCC first issued a short summary; only later would it reveal all of the data.

The IPCC press release declared, “Close to 80 per cent of the world’s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies.” That story was repeated by media organisations worldwide.

Last month the IPCC released the full report, together with the data behind this startlingly optimistic claim. Only then did it emerge that it was based solely on the most optimistic of 164 modelling scenarios researchers investigated. And this single scenario stemmed from a single study that was traced back to a report by the environmental organisation Greenpeace. The author of that report, a Greenpeace staff member, was one of the IPCC lead authors.

The claim rested on the assumption of a large reduction in global energy use. Given the number of people climbing out of poverty in China and India, that is a deeply implausible scenario.

Very little of what this Government says about global warming is true, frank or realistic.

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Tax dead, so let’s move forward

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (06:53 am)

Dennis Shanahan says the pitch has failed and voters no longer wish to hear more:

THE initial political sales pitch for the detailed carbon tax with all its $15 billion in compensation and tax cuts has failed.

The grand plan, the great expectations and Julia Gillard’s four-week election-style campaign has not just stalled at the beginning but is actually going backwards. She is being assailed by members of the public, has been left without a full complement of supportive ministers and is falling further in public esteem…

Ministers are reporting difficulty in getting access to radio stations - metropolitan and regional - to talk directly to listeners about the carbon tax. Unless the Prime Minister is calling there is a resistance to having ministers as guests and perhaps a reluctance from some ministers to appear.

Even Greens’ leader Bob Brown, who negotiated the carbon tax with Gillard and has it as a condition of supporting the minority Labor government, has been on leave while the Prime Minister cleared her agenda for a month to wear out her shoe leather travelling the country.

(Thanks to reader the Great Waisuli.)

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More evidence that the CSIRO is just wrong on global warming

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (06:17 am)

Yet more evidence that the CSIRO is alarmist and that its models are flawed:

ONE of Australia’s foremost experts on the relationship between climate change and sea levels has written a peer-reviewed paper concluding that rises in sea levels are “decelerating”.

The analysis, by NSW principal coastal specialist Phil Watson, calls into question one of the key criteria for large-scale inundation around the Australian coast by 2100—the assumption of an accelerating rise in sea levels because of climate change.

Based on century-long tide gauge records at Fremantle, Western Australia (from 1897 to present), Auckland Harbour in New Zealand (1903 to present), Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour (1914 to present) and Pilot Station at Newcastle (1925 to present), the analysis finds there was a “consistent trend of weak deceleration” from 1940 to 2000.

Mr Watson’s findings, published in the Journal of Coastal Research this year and now attracting broader attention, supports a similar analysis of long-term tide gauges in the US earlier this year. Both raise questions about the CSIRO’s sea-level predictions.

Climate change researcher Howard Brady, at Macquarie University, said yesterday the recent research meant sea levels rises accepted by the CSIRO were “already dead in the water as having no sound basis in probability”.

“In all cases, it is clear that sea-level rise, although occurring, has been decelerating for at least the last half of the 20th century, and so the present trend would only produce sea level rise of around 15cm for the 21st century.”

Dr Brady said the divergence between the sea-level trends from models and sea-level trends from the tide gauge records was now so great “it is clear there is a serious problem with the models”.

It’s already clear that the CSIRO models claiming a halving of mountain snow cover by 2020 are absurdly alarmist.

Those models had the CSIRO first predicting “much of Australia will be drier in coming decades”, before the end of the drought forced the Climate Commission to this year concede ”Our capability to project future changes to rainfall patterns, apart from the drying trend in southwest Western Australia, remains uncertain” and “it is difficult from observations alone to unequivocally identify anything that is distinctly unusual about the post-1950 pattern”.

New research by the National Technical University of Athens into the ability of the CSIRO’s models and others to predict even the past show they are highly unreliable:

The quantitative results depict the inability of climate models to reproduce the actual (historical) temporal variation (e.g. of rainfall and temperature, in particular, the occurrence of extreme events).

And it’s also clear that the CSIRO has been highly selective in presenting evidence to whip up warmist fears, even endorsing Al Gore’s error-riddled An Inconveniet Truth, claiming ”its scientific basis is very sound”.

I suspect the CSIRO is an organisation that has committed itself too early to warming alarmism, relying on clearly flawed models, and is unable to concede that error, for either professional or political purposes.

UPDATE

Yet here comes Malcolm Turnbull, telling us that to doubt the CSIRO is not permitted:

MALCOLM Turnbull has urged people to speak out loudly on behalf of the science of climate change.

In a strong assault on sceptics such as Lord Christopher Monckton who attack the science, Mr Turnbull declared: ‘’We cannot afford to allow the science to become a partisan issue as it is in the United States.’’…

He said that the CSIRO and other science agencies were listened to with respect on most issues. ‘’Yet on this issue there appears to be a licence to reject our best scientists … and rely instead on much less reliable views.’’ he said

Is Turnbull saying that these other scientists criticising the CSIRO should not?

Just another example of the danger of believe “the science” on global warming to be monolithic and almost sacred.

(UPDATE: first link fixed.)

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Working beautifully

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (06:09 am)

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen three days ago:

IMMIGRATION Minister Chris Bowen says the government’s refugee swap deal with Malaysia has helped cut the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australian waters.

Yesterday:

A BOAT suspected of carrying 52 asylum seekers has been intercepted by the navy near Christmas Island.

Today:

A boat carrying 62 asylum seekers has been intercepted by the navy only 24 hours after another vessel was detected in Australian waters without permission.

And is that deal with Malaysia, announced three mon ths ago, signed yet?

Almost:

THE Gillard government has settled its refugee swap deal with Malaysia, with the documents to be signed on Monday.

It is expected that the Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, will formalise the agreement with Malaysia’s Home Affairs Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, in Kuala Lumpur, witnessed by representatives of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organisation for Migration.

Meanwhile:

ASYLUM seekers at Christmas Island’s detention centre lit fires and destroyed property for the third evening in a row last night.

Tensions boiled over about 8.30pm local time, with estimates around 100 detainees were involved in the destruction.

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To restrict Hinch’s supporters goes too far

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (12:12 am)

Some of this punishment strikes me as way over the top, and part of a wider assault on free speech that I consider sinister:

BROADCASTER Derryn Hinch has been sentenced to five months’ home detention for breaching suppression orders, but in perhaps a more punishing move, a magistrate has stripped the Human Headline of his public voice.

Hinch has been convicted of contempt of court for publicly naming two sex offenders on his website and at a rally outside the Victorian parliament in 2008.

Melbourne magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg this morning sentenced Hinch to home detention and imposed a number of conditions to stop him broadcasting or speaking to the media for the five month period.

Hinch, who has a drivetime slot on radio station 3AW, has been forbidden from working, publishing in the media, giving interviews or encouraging others to speak on his behalf.

The avid blogger and Twitter user has also been banned from communicating anything online.

Hinch’s example has enocuraged me to speak on his behalf. The magistrate’s ruling seems to affect my own right to speak, then.

Nor do I consider it appropriate for the magistrate to pass views on opinions Hinch has expressed on matters unrelated to this case:

He said that another irony was the fact that Hinch had campaigned for the abolition of suspended sentences and encouraged the passing of a “one size fits all approach which removed judical discrection” in sentencing.

Such an approach would lead to injustice, the magistrate said.

This kind of gratuitous mockery could lead some to suspect that Hinch’s political views were being held against him during sentencing. It’s certainly a danger I’m always conscious of, given how politicised the judiciary has become.

===

Ronaldson on Thomson

Andrew Bolt – Friday, July 22, 11 (12:02 am)

Senator Michael Ronaldson, speaking in Parliament, discusses claims made about Labor MP Craig Thomson.

No comments for legal reasons.

===

www.foxnews.com
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