Australia

A picture is worth  thousand words. And here is the picture I am concerned about:

That's from Cosmos, "Australia's award-winning science magazine". And awards they have, too. Their editorial page tells us they have awards for, amongst other things, Magazine of the year, Editor of the year, Excellence in environmental reporting, Best analytical writing, and on and on.

But does something strike you as a bit fishy with this image? Gosh that's an awfully high sea level! If that is what is in store for us, we are all pretty much doomed. What does that say in the caption? Let's magnify it a bit (I've had to use false colours to show up the red on black of the original):

One small suppression of free speech in Australia, one giant leap towards the coming dark age.

Gillard's tame ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is threatening businesses with million dollar fines if they have pre-carbon tax sales, or blame price increases on the carbon tax.

A few things: First, to non-Australians, the ACCC used to be a service to the country, but I have seen nothing useful done by them since their former chairman Professor Allan Fels retired. Time and again they seem to be refusing to act for the consumer and making lame excuses for not doing so. They aren't anybody's servant, just another tame bureaucracy doing the biddings of their political masters.

Next, this might seem petty. It is far from petty. When this story was reported on Wattsupwiththat.com, a commenter got the entire thing backwards:

The Chairman was quite clear about the organisations’s position in his presentation, which is no different than it has been in the past about any other misleading advertising ... “Business costs increase all the time, and businesses are free to set their own prices. However, if a business chooses to raise their prices they should not misrepresent this as a result of the carbon price when it is not the case.”

Baloney. The cause of a price increase is not a misrepresentation of the same kind as pretending prices have gone down when they went up, for example (which has been happening in Australia with the ACCC as usual doing nothing). And everyone, yes everyone, should have special leeway in commenting on government policy simply because governments are so much more powerful than individuals, or even businesses. If you can't risk being wrong when talking about a government, then you can't risk saying anything. As the writer of the story, Willis Eschenbach, explained to the above commenter:

Anyone who is still in doubt that the era of freedom and tolerance is rapidly drawing to a close, please note this week's shocking news. From Menzies House, we hear of this behaviour completely unbecoming a government of any free people:

Four thousand, five hundred Australians have just been censored by the Gillard-Brown regime.

I thought I had seen everything. I thought after all the attacks on freedom of speech I have written to you about before, that nothing could surprise me.

I was wrong.

In a shocking and historically unprecedented suppression of political expression and abuse of democracy, 4,500 Aussies - all opposed to this unnecessary and destructive tax on carbon dioxide - have just been told that they don't count. That their opinions don't matter. That their thoughts are not allowed to be heard.

The background: As you will remember, last month, the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation asked for submissions about the carbon dioxide tax legislation. They specifically stated that they "encourage submissions to its inquiry from a wide range of individuals and organisations". There were no terms of reference.

Although they only gave us one week, four thousand five hundred of us took the time to write to the committee. Four thousand five hundred Australians took the time to read the over 1000 page legislation. Four thousand five hundred Australians wrote in depth submissions detailing the flaws in this proposed legislation.

Yesterday we discovered that their work will be suppressed. Will be silenced. Will be censored and stripped from the record without a trace.

On Friday we had the great privilege of hearing the Dalai Lama at his Brisbane audience. Human beings whose goodness goes all the way through are a rarity, and when you see the real thing, the difference is striking. The event started comically, with the Dalai Lama sitting with the Mayor of Ipswich and an ABC interviewer, who had probably never had their hands held in public before!

I wanted to mention just a few incidents from his answers to audience questions, first an important practical one, then an insightful emotional one.

The Australian tells us "ENVIRONMENTALIST and former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has been appointed to a newly-created position as Australia's climate commissioner."

Unlike many who disagree with the global warming hoax, I do have respect for Tim Flannery. That doesn't mean that on "climate change" he isn't dead wrong. After a month of weather devastation in which everything that was predicted by the warmists about Australia's future climate was directly contradicted by actual events, one would have imagined the government would spend our money on helping the victims rather than appointing a brand new useless committee.

Australian Big Coal has had the chutzpah to put up a video boasting of their contribution to the climate scam. At the start of the video they tell us what thirty pieces of silver are worth these days:

Here's how the scam (really) works:

For the first time ever in Brisbane's climate record, the city has had an entire Spring season without a single temperature over 30C. Brisbane temperature records go back to around 1900.

It is now the last day of Spring and the temperature hit 26.8C at 3p.m. Now it is 5p.m. and the temperature has fallen to 24.7C. Although the final day of Spring has some seven hours to go, short of a volcano erupting in the Brisbane River, a new cold record has been set. September + October + November 2010: zero days above 30C.

By way of comparison, in October 2009 there were four days above 30C. In November 2009 there were 13 days above 30C, for a total of 17 days in all, or over a quarter of days of those months. Four of these exceeded 34C. Sorry, no September 2009 data: for some reason known best only to themselves, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology website doesn't have any daily data that ancient, being, apparently, unable to pop down to the local Harvey Norman and spring $100 for a new terabyte disc drive. Whether the September 2009 data is censored, deleted, or stored on floppies will remain one of those inscrutable cosmic mysteries.

But good news! They have a new "high-quality" data set suitable, they say, for climate change research. Here's a sample, the "Annual Maximum Temperature" for Brisbane Aero - presumably the airport. Maybe someone can enlighten me what these numbers are meant to be, because they certainly aren't Brisbane maximum temperatures which, as any Brisbanite knows, go infallibly way into the 30s every summer:

From The Australian August 18:

THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate. ...

Kurt Lambeck, immediate past president of the academy and a professor at the Australian National University's research school of earth sciences, initiated work on the document to clear up common misconceptions. ...

He said the fundamental principles of climatology, such as the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, were beyond dispute. But scientists were still arguing about the complex Earth systems feedback mechanisms, such as the possible cooling effect of clouds.

"If temperatures go up, there is going to be more evaporation, and that will produce more clouds," Professor Lambeck said. "That could produce a negative feedback, but to quantify that is a very difficult thing.

"How do we put that cloud cover into the models? That's where uncertainty comes in, but that's not going to change the basic outcomes."

Really?

A change of just 1% in cloud cover would account for all of twentieth century warming (Plimer's Heaven and Earth p 112). (And that's the claimed warming, including the uncheckable 'adjustments' made by people who have now lost the raw data - but that's another question.)

Postgraduate Diploma in Energy and Environment (Global Warming & Climate Science)

Contribute Towards the Demise of Learning and Scholarship

Reading my favourite websites today, I stumbled upon an ad. for this educational experience at Murdoch University:

What's wrong with this picture?

Last Sunday saw the very successful fifth Toowoomba Languages & Cultures Festival. Toowoomba, despite its low profile, is actually the largest inland city in any Australian state; it is the major settlement centre for Sudanese refugees to Australia, who have rapidly become valuable members of the local community and who provided many of the volunteers to run the Festival.

The following is the address given at the Festival by Gitie House, the other founder of this website. Gitie is herself an immigrant to Australia, having been born in Delhi, India, and was even there of mixed background of Indian and long-time Iranian immigrants to that country. As such she is very qualified to tell Australians (and other westerners) something they need to understand about their own culture. Here is her speech: