Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been caught red handed erasing record-breaking cold temperatures from its data records.
The BOM has now been shamed by media investigations into ordering a review of its procedures. But it has yet to provide an explanation as to why it made these “adjustments” in the first place.
These “adjustments” seem to go only one way. The BOM is perfectly happy to record and announce it whenever Australia’s temperatures hit record-breaking highs. But when the temperatures reach new lows it’s a different matter altogether.
For some strange reason that the BOM has been unable to explain, when temperatures go below a certain point it either deletes them as if they had never been – or it enters them into its records at higher temperature than the one actually recorded by its thermometers.
‘The Great Barrier Reef is dying’ claims the Washington Post.
This is classic fake news.
Like the thriving polar bear, like the recovering ice caps, like the doing-just-fine Pacific islands, the Great Barrier Reef has become a totem for the liberal-left not because it’s in any kind of danger but because it’s big and famous and photogenic and lots and lots of people would be really sad if it disappeared.
But it’s not going to disappear. That’s just a #fakefakenews lie designed to promote the climate alarmist agenda.
Yes, if he didn’t exist you’d have to invent him. Tripp Funderburk describes himself as “a Duke football fan. Lover of coral reefs. Advocate for climate change solutions.”
There’s a big clue to where he’s coming from ideologically in that last sentence. Even so, it would be a mistake to dismiss him as just a random eco-loon with a funny name. As Tripp Funderburk thinks, so does pretty much everyone else in the entire greenie-left-liberal universe.
“Is the Great Barrier Reef dying due to climate change caused by man’s selfishness and greed?
I’ll lay money that if you asked this question to your kids’ biology teacher or to Bill Nye the Junk Science Guy or to that nice Richard Osman off Pointless or to Matt Damon or anyone else who would have voted for Hillary Clinton or to any Labour (and a good many Conservative) politicians or anyone who works for the ABC in Australia, the BBC, the Guardian, MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times or comedy Senator Al Franken or Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem science at Oxford University or pretty much any other science prof from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Yale or any marine biologist or a lawyer from a big City law firm or anyone who voted Remain in the EU Referendum, you’d get the same answer: “Yes.”
How do they know?
Have they been out there personally – as I have – to check?
No, of course not.
The reason all these people believe the Great Barrier Reef is dying is because they all get their fake news from the same green-left-liberal echo chamber.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is not being killed off because of “global warming” or any other allegedly man-made non-problem, the people who know the area best have confirmed.
Teams of divers in a joint two-week expedition sponsored by Mike Ball Dive and Spirit of Freedom surveyed 28 sites on 24 outer shelf reefs along a 300km section of the hardest-hit part of the reef from Bathurst Head to Raine Island.
Spirit of Freedom owner Chris Eade said reports of 93 per cent bleaching on the 2300km long Great Barrier Reef had made global headlines and damaged the reputation of the $5 billion reef tourism industry.
“Scientists had written off that entire northern section as a complete white-out,’’ Mr Eade said.
“We expected the worst. But it is tremendous condition, most of it is pristine, the rest is in full recovery.
“It shows the resilience of the reef.’’
Mike Ball Dive Expeditions operations manager Craig Stephen, who conducted a similar survey on the remote reefs 20 years ago, said there had been almost no change in two decades despite the latest coral bleaching event.
“It wasn’t until we got underwater that we could get a true picture of what percentage of reef was bleached,’’ Mr Stephen said.
“The discrepancy is phenomenal. It is so wrong. Everywhere we have been we have found healthy reefs.
“There has been a great disservice to the Great Barrier Reef and tourism and it has not been good for our industry.”
All right, so it’s local dive operators saying this stuff and, of course, they have a vested interested in keeping the tourist industry alive.
But if we’re talking vested interests, what about all the marine biologists and environmental activists whose funding is dependent on promoting catastrophism and junk-scientific environmental scares like “ocean acidification”?
According to one scaremongering report earlier this year only 7 percent of the reef remains undamaged by “coral bleaching” – one of the dire consequences, we’re repeatedly informed by experts, of global warming.
Let me tell you the worst thing about the climate change scam. It’s not the lies, not bullying, not the perversion of the scientific method, not the establishment cover-ups, not the needless scaremongering, not the wasted money, not the nannying overregulation, not the destroyed wildlife and ruined countryside, not the stymied economic growth — bad though all these things are. No one what really sticks in the craw is that the people making money out of it are the scum of the earth.
The other day, while out hunting, I met a man who ran a brothel. (Till he got busted, anyway). I liked and respected him for brothel-keeping is an honourable profession which supplies a vital need and makes the world a happier place.
This is something that never could be said of a single person working in the climate change industry. It is now worth an eyewatering $1.5 trillion per annum — not a penny of which goes on anything remotely useful. As I argue here at the Spectator, it is a Potemkin industry, a racket, a form of state-sanctioned organised crime.
No one, in a free market, would spend a penny of their earnings on wind turbines, solar panels, research grants for dubious climate science projects, local council sustainability officers, et al: the industry is entirely dependent for its existence on favours granted to rent-seeking troughers by the political class.
If you build a giant trough, the pigs will come. And they have. (No insult to real pigs, by the way. Bacon! Mmm)
I’m thinking, for example, of wind farm entrepreneurs like Dale “dog on a rope” Vince — the former new age traveller whose £100 million fortune derives from carpeting the British landscape with gigantic bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.
Rajendra Pachauri, the bearded, yogic railway engineer with wandering hands who, largely because he fitted the right ethnic profile, managed to parlay his way into heading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, jetting round the world for a succession of climatological shindigs in exotic locations, as well as making a tidy bit on the side thanks to his TERI research institute.
Professor Bob Carter, one of the world’s leading climate sceptics, has just dropped dead of a heart attack at the far too young age of 74. Perhaps it would be pushing it to say that he was driven to an early grave by the alarmist establishment. But there’s no question that his retirement would have been a lot more comfortable, less stressful and better paid if he’d hitched his career onto the Climate Change Gravy Train rather than doggedly speaking up for the cause of honest science.
Bob had known for years that man-made global warming theory was a crock. As a brilliant earth scientist – until 1998 he was head of the geology department at James Cook University in Australia – he understood perfectly well that on the geological scale our planet has experienced shifts in climate of a magnitude so vast as to make a mockery of the notion that humans can influence or control it.
His mistake was to admit this in public rather than keep schtum and take the money. As a result, Bob’s university decided to punish him for his heresy with a series of petty slights:
First James Cook University (JCU) took away his office, then they took his title. In protest at that, another professor hired Bob immediately for an hour a week so Bob could continue supervising students and keep his library access. But that was blocked as well, even the library pass and his email account were taken away, though they cost the University almost nothing.
James Cook University didn’t even bother to pretend to be interested in whether or not Bob was right. All that mattered to JCU is that Bob’s views were not politically correct – and that therefore this might jeopardise their image:
The only reasons given were that the staff of the School of Earth and Environmental Studies had discussed the issue (without any consultation with Carter) and decided that his views on climate change did not fit well within the School’s own teaching and research activities. Apparently it took up too much time to defend Carter against outside complaints about his public writings and lectures on climate change. (Busy executives don’t have time to say “Why don’t you ask Carter yourself?” or “We value vigorous debate here.” Presumably they are too busy practising their lines and learning the litany? )
The harrying of sceptics is commonplace in academe. (See, for example, the even more shocking treatment of Willie Soon).
“G’day mate, would you like fries with that? G’day mate, would you like fries with that? G’day mate, would you like fries with that?”
Classic cartoon by Josh.
Oh to be a fly on the wall at Tim Flannery’s waterside property as he practises in the mirror for a job more suited to his talents. This time last week he was Australia’s Climate Commissioner, on an A$180,000 a year salary which required him to work just three days a week. But incoming premier Tony Abbott’s night of the green knives has put paid to that. Flannery’s Mickey Mouse job has gone; so too has Australia’s Climate Commission, a multi-million dollar, allegedly “independent”, propaganda outlet set up by Julia Gillard to help give her climate alarmist policies – such as the hated carbon tax, which Abbott is also abolishing – a veneer of scientific credibility.
As Jo Nova notes, while it may be a good day for the Australian taxpayer, it is far too late now to recoup the billions which have already been wasted on the “expert” advice of Flannery and his alarmist chums David Karoly and Will Steffen.
This agency propped up billions of dollars in pointless futile government spending trying to change the weather. Nothing will bring back money spent on desal plants that were mothballed when the floods came that real scientists predicted. Likewise the money burned on solar panels and windfarms is gone for good too, and still going.
As you’ll see at this website, one of the few things that Flannery is indisputably brilliant at is making idiotic statements and alarmist, pseudo-scientific predictions which seem to bear no relationship whatsoever to observed reality. So what, exactly, were his qualifications for taking on this supremely well-paid gig?
We-e-ll, Flannery is that most dangerous of things – an English literature graduate. Yes, I know I’m an English literature graduate too, but I’m the exception to the rule: on the whole, it would not be unfair to say, English literature graduates have done more to promote the cause of climate alarmism than any other category with the possible exception of “University” of East Anglia environmental “science” graduates.
Reflect, for a moment, on this grotesque rogues’ gallery, every one of them an English Literature graduate.
Tamsin Omond (Westminster-educated cutie; baronet’s grand-daughter; dumper of manure on Clarkson’s doorstep; embracer of every loony climate activist cause going with her Trustafarian mates)
Caroline Lucas (Malvern-Girls-College-educated nightmare; Green MP; watermelon)
Roger Harrabin (BBC alarmist-in-chief)
Bryony Worthington (Friends of the Earth Activist; inspiration for Dave’s “greenest government ever”; architect of the Climate Change Act)
Now, as it happens, I consider the cult of credentialism one of the curses of our age. Just because you’ve got some initials after your name doesn’t mean you’re not a pillock. And as we saw with the Climategate emails, being a qualified “climate scientist” is no guarantee of expertise on – or even entry-level understanding of – the science of climate. So I’m certainly not suggesting that Flannery’s possession of an English literature degree should automatically have ruled him out of contention for the massively influential Climate Commissioner job. What I am definitely suggesting, though, is that if you’re going to entrust the tenderest parts of your national economy to some random beardie bloke’s sweaty grasp, the very least you owe all the millions of people who are going to be affected by his announcements is to do some due diligence, ask some basic questions like: “Does anything this random beardie bloke has ever said or done in his entire life render him suitable to comment definitively on an issue as complex, uncertain and contentious as climate change?”
To which the bleedingly obvious short answer is: “No.”
After his English degree, Flannery managed to land (H/T Philip Bradley at Watts Up With That) a taxpayer-funded gig digging up kangaroo bones, which got him that impressive-sounding and all-important science PhD (palaeontology) before landing a job as a museum bureaucrat cum author of bestselling environmental alarmist books like The Future Eaters. (Sir David Attenborough once described him as ‘in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr David Livingstone’ – which tells you rather more about the erratic judgement of David Attenborough than it does about the achievements of Tim Flannery).
Flannery, in other words, is a green activist who, like many of his kind – see Bryony Worthington; Roger Harrabin, above – has learned how to play the political system very much to his advantage. It is utterly inconceivable that anyone in the free market would ever pay someone so effectively useless so much money to do so little work for a job so utterly pointless as the one Flannery had as A$180,000 a year (for a three day week) Climate Commissioner.
If he were some weird aberration we could all, no doubt, have a jolly good laugh at the patent stupidity of it all and move on. Unfortunately, though we can’t because Flannery is not some weird aberration. He is just one of the more egregiously idiotic examples of a phenomenon which is rife throughout the Western world: environmental activists being paid eyewatering sums of money to promote junk science, ramp up green taxes and regulations, hamstring free markets, enrich rent-seeking scumballs, drive up energy prices and spout scaremongering drivel, all courtesy of the taxpayer who benefits from one jot.
Consider, for example, The Carbon Trust – a quango to which the taxpayer forks out more than £127 million a year, so as to benefit from its expertise on “low carbon issues and strategies, carbon footprinting and low carbon technology development and deployment.”
But hang on a second. Isn’t all that “low carbon” nonsense starting to look a bit overtaken by events? Aren’t we now fast reaching the stage where all the arguments in favour of committing suicide via “low carbon” have been torpedoed below the waterline? We know – as even the forthcoming IPCC report admits – that climate sensitivity has been overrated, thus making a mockery of all the doomsday scenarios fingering CO2 as a major threat. We also know – what with shale gas, shale oil, clathrates and thorium – that the fallback defence about “scarce resources” has been overdone too.
What we know, in other words, is that every penny of that £127 million we pay James Smith and his pals at The Carbon Trust to keep bigging up renewable energy and talking nonsense about climate change is money utterly and totally wasted. The same goes for the Department of Energy and Climate Change which could safely scrapped in its entirety tomorrow, without the slightest detrimental effect to anyone but the activists who staff it. The same goes for the £3.8 billion green investment bank. The same goes for much of the Met Office, the Royal Society, the British Antarctic Survey and the Science Museum, to name but a few of the once reputable publicly funded institutions which have been hijacked by political activists in order to further the cause of environmental alarmism.
It’s like this. The governments and their central banks make as much free money from thin-air through fractional reserve banking and other methods as they can get away with — it benefits those who “spend that new money first”. They spend it at current prices, and pay it back later, after inflation has decreased its value. The people who pay the difference are those who saved and held money while its purchasing power fell. Speculators grow rich, while retirees and savers get poorer.
In a free market this would quickly lead to inflation, and people would rush to the only currencies the government can’t inflate (or “print” for free) — they’d buy and hold gold or silver and keep their purchasing power. Remember, gold and silver are the currencies that evolved in the marketplace over the last 5,000 years and are not directly under the control of government. (And “so?” you say?). The point is, if the prices of gold and silver rise fast, people would abandon bonds and get into metals instead, thus correcting the situation by making the printing and speculating game vastly less attractive while saving and production became more attractive. Essentially, people dump the government money and go for the competitor, which means the government (and or Fed) has to increase the interest rate and pay more for its money, and nobody wants that: God forbid that Governments or Banks should pay people a fair rate for borrowing “their” money.
Bonds and “treasuries” (US Treasury Bonds) are fancy words for loans to the government. But if no one wants to buy them, then the government has trouble raising funds for its massive pork barreling vote-buying schemes, and the investment bankers pay higher interest payments which takes all the fun out of Grossly Huge and Obscene Mergers, the SubPrime Parties and the High Frequency Festivals.
I had a similar awakening a few months back when I went to see Detlev Schlichter talk to a small group of (somewhat terrified) MPs about his book Paper Money Collapse in a meeting organised by the Cobden Centre. Here is Schlichter explaining why Ben Bernanke’s, George Osborne’s and the European Central Bank’s money printing experiment will only prolong the depression.
Economies are not growing because of the massive imbalances that have accumulated as a result of years and decades of cheap credit. A cleansing correction – in balance sheets, state budgets and debt levels – is urgently needed. Present policy doesn’t allow it. So the economy won’t grow.
I riff on this theme quite a lot in Watermelons – or Killing The Earth To Save It (Connor Court), as it’s called in the Australian edition, which I shall be shortly visiting Oz to publicise. You should read it. There’s a great section in which my old Kathy-Bates-in-Misery admirer Blobby is invoked and where I liken myself to the Robert Redford character in Three Days of The Condor (“He reads”). Anyway, all is explained there, so I’m damned if I’m going to give myself RSI regurgitating all the best bits here. Suffice to say, yes I am an Interpreter of Interpretations. It’s what I do and do well. I should have a card printed, one day.
But why should climate sceptics also be sceptical of money-printing, fiat currency, fractional reserve banking and gold and silver market manipulation? It’s a question Jo has pondered too.
If you wonder how corruption in climate science could be connected, look no further than Climate Money. Without the printing presses running flat out at the Fed, which politicians would have had the luxury of glorious schemes to control the weather? How could they hand out grants to send, say, aquariums on tour to warn of impending storms? Underneath it all, if large financial institutions were not looking forward to a brand-spanking-new $2 Trillion market to trade carbon, who would have found millions to install 70 foot Carbon-Clocks, 50 page science reports and to donate and push into “green” education campaigns? Funny money makes for funny decisions. Shame no one is laughing.
If real people had to earn real money, investment bankers would need to make real decisions, scientists would have to find real evidence, and politicians would have to come up with real reasons.
Exactly, Jo. Welcome to the Austrian School – the only economic education worth having right now.
One thought on “Why money-printing is like ‘global warming’”
Philip Neal says:23rd March 2012 at 9:23 pmWhat you say here may well be right, but as one free market, less government conservative to another I appeal to you not to make a big issue of questions which divide our side. In Watermelons you rightly argue that the Green ideology isn’t really about science at all, that the heart of it consists of economic fallacy about limits to growth, the nature of scarcity and the relationship between wealth and knowledge. You will do much better to focus on areas where the Left is hopelessly wrong rather than arguing about exactly which free market school – Austrians, monetarists etc – has the exact truth. Also, there are right wing cranks aplenty with fringe views about central banks, gold and so on: propagandists on the other side would like nothing better than to tar you with that brush. You are a polemicist and one of the best in the trade. Please concentrate on attacking the enemy.
Today’s column is dedicated to Raymond Finkelstein QC. Raymond who? Well, he’s the kind of left-leaning activist lawyer I’d normally run a mile from – especially since he’s behind a scary new report which, if implemented, will kill what’s left of freedom of speech in Australia and pretty much criminalise climate scepticism. (H/T John O’Sullivan; Peter Dun)
Raymond – or Pinkie Finkie, as I’m sure he’d preferred it if I called him, because the Aussies do love a bit of informality, don’t they? – has produced a report on media regulation in Australia so terrifyingly authoritarian it makes the Leveson Enquiry look like a model of balance, sanity and restraint. (According to Mark Steyn – via Jo Nova – the Chinese have been eyeing Pinkie Finkie’s report with gobsmacked admiration, wondering whether they could ever get away with producing something quite so extreme…)
You can read the full 400 pages here, if you’re feeling masochistic. But Australian Climate Madness has a pretty good summary of the key issues of concern, starting with Pinkie Finkie’s proposal to create a new super-regulator called the News Media Council [missed a trick there, didn’t he? surely Ministry of Truth would have been more appropriate] which will impose its idea of fairness and balance not only on newspapers but even on blogs with as few hits as 15,000 a year.
But whose idea of fairness and balance?
It’s an astonishing fact that of the 10600 submissions received by the inquiry no fewer than 9600 were boilerplate submissions from left-wing pressure groups, led by Avaaz “a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, poverty and corruption.” (See Andrew Bolt for further details)
This bias is certainly evident in its attitude to climate change. It cites a December 2011 report by the left-leaning Australian Centre for Independent Journalism on media coverage of climate change policy in Australia. The report – A Sceptical Climate – had found that “negative coverage of government policy outweighed positive coverage by 73 per cent to 27 per cent” and that the preponderance of negative coverage was even greater among Murdoch-owned newspapers.
To which the only sane and sensible response is: “Yeah? And???” Of course a left-wing think tank is going to find climate scepticism objectionable. Of course it’s going to seize every opportunity to have a dig at papers owned by Rupert Murdoch. But had Pinkie Finkie been wearing his scrupulously neutral wig of blind justice – rather than his I HEART George Soros hat – it might have occurred to him that there was a much more plausible reason than media bias as to why the Gillard Government’s carbon tax got such generally negative coverage.
Pinkie Finkie, however, takes the view that any newspaper that takes a firm line against an iniquitous, wrong-headed, economically suicidal, unscientifically-based, activist-driven, morally bankrupt new carbon tax system must perforce be in need of stricter regulation.
4.38 However, to have an opinion and campaign for it is one thing; reporting is another, and in news reporting it is expected by the public, as well as by professional journalists, that the coverage will be fair and accurate.
4.39 Nonetheless, there is a widely-held public view that, despite industry-developed codes of practice that state this, the reporting of news is not fair, accurate and balanced.
“Widely-held public view”. Yes, well I suppose it really is “widely-held” if you ignore the fact that 86 per cent of those submissions were the result of leftist astroturfing, much of it – not unlike the Leveson Inquiry – motivated mainly by a desire to get Murdoch.
(Lest you doubt it, here’s what Avaaz said to its mob: (H/T Andrew Bolt)
The media inquiry we fought hard to win is under threat — Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are working to discredit and limit the investigation into his stranglehold on our media. But a flood of public comments from each of us will set an ambitious agenda and save the inquiry.)
Anyway, you get the idea. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, and all that. We’ve saw in the Andrew Bolt aborigines case that freedom of speech in Australia was already on its last legs, thanks to the way the system has been hijacked by activist judges. If Finkelstein gets his way, this could be the final nail in the coffin.
I personally don’t think it will be. I think the Carbon Tax, the Bolt trial and now this are going to lead to the mother of all political backlashes, and that when it comes to the next general election the avowedly climate sceptical Tony Abbott is going to be a shoo-in.
But let’s allow lefties like Pinkie Finkie and Gillard and Tim Flannery and Bob Brown their hour in the sun because the longer they stay there, the more damage they do and the more damage they will be seen to have done. This is important. (The same applies to Obama’s US; sadly it’s not going to work here, not with Cameron poisoning the wells for Conservatism for ever). If Australia is to get the government it needs (and deserves) it must first experience the full horror of the government it doesn’t deserve. The more easily ordinary people can see just how authoritarian, petty-minded, bullying, meddling and grotesquely biased the left can be when it holds the reins of power, the more enthusiastic they’ll be about throwing the bastards into the croc pit come 2013. (Or sooner, if we’re lucky.)
3 thoughts on “Why I owe Aussie QC Raymond Finkelstein a pint”
Nige Cook says:5th March 2012 at 10:15 pmJames, let me explain: anyone who points out the fact that the emperor’s clothes are threadbare is a menace to freedom of speech and needs to be muzzled. Freedom of speech cannot work in a dictatorship of lefties. You should know that, having seen the struggles good olf Brezhnev had to muzzle dissidents.
There is nothing illogical for a lying dogmatic orthodoxy to suppress freedom of speech when it disproves the lies. Quite the contrary, it would be criminally insane for them not to try to ban the facts. Fortunately, in England there is no need for a law to be passed by Parliament here, banning a scientific journal’s peer reviewers from permitting publication of facts. They’re sufficiently corrupt that it’s simply not needed. Oz is different…
Philip Neal says:23rd March 2012 at 9:23 pmWhat you say here may well be right, but as one free market, less government conservative to another I appeal to you not to make a big issue of questions which divide our side. In Watermelons you rightly argue that the Green ideology isn’t really about science at all, that the heart of it consists of economic fallacy about limits to growth, the nature of scarcity and the relationship between wealth and knowledge. You will do much better to focus on areas where the Left is hopelessly wrong rather than arguing about exactly which free market school – Austrians, monetarists etc – has the exact truth. Also, there are right wing cranks aplenty with fringe views about central banks, gold and so on: propagandists on the other side would like nothing better than to tar you with that brush. You are a polemicist and one of the best in the trade. Please concentrate on attacking the enemy.
Finbar says:
Openwifi says: