WoW …

In response to the tide of unwashed marchers in March today I will Work on Wednesday.

I will work hard, I will insult no one, threaten to shoot no one in the head, display no rude banners.

At some point in the day I will find time to reflect on the value of democracy, rule of law and the privileges I enjoy.

It is the millions of people that work that provide the wonderful standard of living this country of ours has. Without our taxes there would be no schools, health service, police force, garbage collection or welfare payments.

Join with us today and demonstrate your respect for Australia.

Such suspense …

Craig Thomson is sentenced …

Thomson was sentenced to one year in jail but the magistrate ruled that would include nine months suspended jail time.

Thomson, 49, showed little emotion as Victorian magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg handed down the sentence before an overflowing courtroom this morning.

Mr Rozencwajg said he was in “no doubt” imprisonment was the only appropriate sentence, referring to Thomson’s “blatant dishonesty” and “flagrant and insouciant” behaviour.

Mr Rozencwajg said Thomson had exhibited a brazen sense of entitlement and lack of concern for any accountability.

“These offences were committed by you in a position of trust,” he said.

Mr Rozencwajg said Thomson had been charged with protecting and advancing the interests of HSU members and his crimes were “a breach of trust in the highest order”.

The man that Labor propped up so that he might prop them up goes down. Not for  his insouciance but for using Health Services Union money for his own purposes, including paying for prostitutes. He will appeal and will apply for bail.

My first thought is that a suspended sentence ought to involve a noose, but that is a little harsh (especially since I await sentencing for denying the climate). But really what is the point of decorating an inadequate jail term with a few months of make believe jail time?

The cat …

Predators are relatively rare in a natural landscape, limited by, among other things, the availability of food.

Domestic cats … and dogs, as well, are maintained at artificially high densities because of supplementary feeding. But if they wander at large they do hunt and they do spread alarm amongst prey species. All in addition to the natural and feral predators already present in the environment.

The Shire of Yarra Ranges spreads from the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria eastwards into the foothills of the Great Divide. It includes some great forest habitat which is home to the iconic Regent Lyrebird and some less well-known beauties such as the Pilotbird and Olive Whistler, all three of these and many other bird species feed on the ground. The shire council have just proclaimed a 24 hour cat curfew. If you want a cat you must keep it in.

My attitude towards cats is very much like my attitude to the French. As a group they are detestable but as you get to know them you find some individuals are OK, really.

The cat owners are up in arms and are shouting about lack of consultation and demanding the law be repealed. Not one of them has a cat that ever killed anything and of course they all wear bells, the cats that is.

My attitude to cat owners is very much like my attitude to the French, except when you get to know them only a small minority turn out to OK. I have yet to meet a cat owner who consulted me before allowing their cat to piss in my yard or terrorise my budgerigar.

My congratulations to the Shire of Yarra Ranges. To the cat owners let me say that it is entirely possible to keep a happy cat indoors, you just need some imagination …

 

Slave

A good walk spoilt …

Robert McGee was at the golf club.  He began his round with an eagle on the first hole and a birdie on the second.
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On the third hole he had just scored his first ever hole-in-one when his mobile phone rang… It was a doctor notifying him that his wife had been in an accident and was in a critical condition in ICU.
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The man told the doctor to inform his wife where he was and that he’d be there as soon as possible. As he hung up he realized he was leaving what was shaping up to be his best ever round of golf.
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He decided to get in a couple of more holes before heading to the hospital. He ended up playing all eighteen, finishing his round shooting a personal best 61, shattering the club record by five strokes and beating his previous best game by more than 10. He was jubilant….
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Then he remembered his wife. Feeling guilty he dashed to the hospital. He saw the doctor in the corridor and asked about his wife’s condition.
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The doctor glared at him and shouted, “You went ahead and finished your round of golf didn’t you! I hope you’re proud of yourself!”
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“While you were out for the past four hours enjoying yourself at the country club your wife has been languishing in the ICU! It’s just as well you went ahead and finished that round because it will be more than likely your last! For the rest of her life she will require round the clock care.  She will need IV fluids,  you will have to change her colostomy bag every 3 hours and her tracheal tube twice a day. She will have to be spoon fed slowly and almost continuously, oh and not to mention  the hygiene care.”
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The man broke down and sobbed.
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The doctor chuckled and said, “I’m just messing with you. She’s dead.
What was your score?”

It could be worse …

The European Union is not renowned for the sanity of some of its regulations, straight bananas anyone?

With the willing collusion of the UK Parliament the British energy sector has become uninvestable. Npower is set to write off hundreds of millions of pounds on the value of its British power plants. Companies have stopped building new power stations amid a political and regulatory backlash, sparked last year by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices.But is there anything more insane than this?

The UK is committed by law to a radical shift to renewable energy. By 2020, the proportion of Britain’s electricity generated from ‘renewable’ sources is supposed to almost triple to 30 per cent, with more than a third of that from what is called ‘biomass’.

The only large-scale way to do this is by burning wood, man’s oldest fuel – because EU rules have determined it is ‘carbon-neutral’.

So our biggest power station, the leviathan Drax plant near Selby in North Yorkshire, is switching from dirty, non-renewable coal. Biomass is far more expensive, but the consumer helps the process by paying subsidies via levies on energy bills.

That’s where North Carolina’s forests come in. They are being reduced to pellets in a gargantuan pulping process at local factories, then shipped across the Atlantic from a purpose-built dock at Chesapeake Port, just across the state line in Virginia.

Carbon neutral because trees recently sequestered the carbon and will sequester it again as they grow again but …

Drax’s wood-fuelled furnaces actually produce three per cent more carbon dioxide (CO2) than coal – and well over twice as much as gas: 870g per megawatt hour (MW/hr) is belched out by wood, compared to just 400g for gas.

Then there’s the extra CO2 produced by manufacturing the pellets and transporting them 3,800 miles … when all that is taken into account, using biomass for generating power produces 20 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions than coal.

How will the environment tell the difference? Regrowth takes about 100 years.
Our whole business case is built on subsidy, like the rest of the renewable energy industry. We are simply responding to Government policy.
All this has required an investment of £700 million. Thanks to the green subsidies, this will soon be paid off. Even if all Britain’s forests were devoted to Drax, they could not keep its furnaces going. ‘We need areas with lots of wood, a reliable supply chain”.
Get that? Even if all Britain’s forests were devoted to Drax, they could not keep its furnaces going. Lunacy.
For the whole story read The Bonfire of Insanity.

Physics and the art of global warming …

In 2007 the American Physical Society leant its august weight to the consensus thus …

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Some of its members were less than impressed. 160 members of the APS protested. Some prominent scientists like Nobel Prize winning Ivar Gievar (“Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science“) and long-standing Professor Hal Lewis (” … the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist“)  resigned.

Under the APS rules such policy statements must be reviewed each half-decade. The review is underway. Perhaps with one eye on its membership and the other on the lookout for more climategates or Himalayan glaciers melting at impossible rates, the committee that it has set up is remarkably balanced, three climate modellers and three skeptical scientists. The proceedings are fairly transparent for instance the Workshop Framing Document can be read <HERE>.

It raises some excellent questions. For a moderately lengthy discussion read Tony Thomas.

A sample …

While the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) rose strongly from 1980-98, it has shown no significant rise for the past 15 years…[The APS notes that neither the 4th nor 5th IPCC report modeling suggested any stasis would occur, and then asks] …

To what would you attribute the stasis?

If non-anthropogenic influences are strong enough to counteract the expected effects of increased CO2, why wouldn’t they be strong enough to sometimes enhance warming trends, and in so doing lead to an over-estimate of CO2 influence?

What are the implications of this stasis for confidence in the models and their projections?

What do you see as the likelihood of solar influences beyond TSI (total solar irradiance)? Is it coincidence that the stasis has occurred during the weakest solar cycle (ie sunspot activity) in about a century?

Some have suggested that the ‘missing heat’ is going into the deep ocean…

Are deep ocean observations sufficient in coverage and precision to bear on this hypothesis quantitatively?

Why would the heat sequestration have ‘turned on’ at the turn of this century?

What could make it ‘turn off’ and when might that occur?

Is there any mechanism that would allow the added heat in the deep ocean to reappear in the atmosphere?

IPCC suggests that the stasis can be attributed in part to ‘internal variability’. Yet climate models imply that a 15-year stasis is very rare and models cannot reproduce the observed Global Mean Surface Temperature even with the observed radiative forcing.

What is the definition of ‘internal variability’? Is it poorly defined initial conditions in the models or an intrinsically chaotic nature of the climate system? If the latter, what features of the climate system ARE predictable?

How would the models underestimate of internal variability impact detection and attribution?

How long must the stasis persist before there would be a firm declaration of a problem with the models? If that occurs, would the fix entail: A retuning of model parameters? A modification of ocean conditions? A re-examination of fundamental assumptions?

Searching questions are also posed regarding climate sensitivity, climate modelling, the unexpected increase in Antarctic sea ice and the scale of anthropogenic forcing.

The questions are excellent but it’s how they are answered that matters. If the APS finds that the science is not settled, that observations do not match the model projections, that the evidence is not incontrovertible then their support for the AGW hypothesis must be withdrawn. In that case they will be the first significant scientific body to step back onto the path of science.

It will then be safe for the flat earthers, headless chickens and climate deniers to come out of hiding without fear of being tried for criminal negligence.

Electricity Bill …

Ms Gillard promised she would not introduce it.

She and Mr Swan heaped scorn on the then opposition for the suggestion that Labor would introduce it.

The nation saw Labor as liars when they did introduce it.

Energy prices and business costs have gone up because of it.

An optimistic forecast of its effect … restraining the increase in world temperature by 0.0034°C by 2100.

Prior to the last election Labor promised to abolish it.

The electorate certainly gave the Coalition Government the mandate to abolish it.

Today Labor joined with the Green to frustrate its removal.

It may be detrimental to the economy, useless for the environment but anything that hampers Australia’s recovery is good news for Labor because it reflects on Abbott.

 

Caution, offensive language …

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION ACT 1975 – SECT 18C

Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin

(1)  It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a)  the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b)  the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.

Being offended is really a very easy thing to do. If, for instance, I was called a pom, which accurately describes my national or ethnic origin, I could take offense and give the lawyers a call. The assumption seems to be that we are all peculiarly sensitive about our race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

On the other hand we are expected to be extremely tolerant of offensive language and behaviour in every other aspect of our lives.

The former arbiter of good taste, our ABC, can see nothing wrong in designating one of its critics a dogfucker and photoshopping a picture of him thus engaged and offering it on national TV for the amusement of the masses. The same organisation showed considerably more sensitivity by not showing any of these pictures in its extensive coverage of March in March.

marchinmarch-protestors-600The Fuck Abbott t-shirts were originally designed and produced by Clementine Ford, an Age columnist (calumnist?) and promoted in the Age newspaper. You will be relieved to know that they are are ethically produced …

It seems that there are a lot of people out there who are keen to speak freely, expect me to be very tolerant of their free speaking but are not happy to extend that courtesy to others.

As a foot note I do like Tim Blair’s explanation of March in March … because there isn’t a month called Stupid Whiny Bitching.