A lot has been said to defend this tax, one of the reasons I’ve heard is because the youth of Australia want this tax. The people against this tax have been portrayed as a bunch of old people who are only worried about their power bills and don’t care about the future of the planet. We have been told that we should support this tax because it will leave the earth in a better place for future generations. Well I am here today to say I am a young person I am against this tax. This tax will not save the planet and it will hurt the youth of this country the most. Already young people face an uphill battle to make a living for themselves, home ownership is slowly becoming a distant dream, food, fuel, electricity and water are constantly rising and this is all before the carbon tax. This is tax will result in cost of living becoming even more expensive, pushing many Australians to the poverty line and threatens our economic prosperity and therefore our standard of living that we have worked so hard for.

One thing that needs to be said is that the taxes must stop. This government’s taxing is out of control, it’s time we stood up and said we are not going to bear the burden of all this taxing. So far we have seen the government introduce the flood tax, the mining tax, the luxury car tax, and the increases in tobacco and alcohol tax. Worst of all the Australian people have not benefited from any of these taxes, all we have seen is the government spend our taxes on wasteful projects like the school halls, the pink bats and the ever growing list of failed green schemes. So far all these taxes have done is increased the cost of various goods and services without achieving any of the supposed changes in behaviour that these taxes are designed for.

This brings me on to my next point; his tax is also being sold as the almighty solution to global warming, that if we don’t have this tax the planet will be doomed. This mindset ignores the very nature of how this tax will operate, it will not change people’s energy’s uses and will hurt those who least can afford it. The end result of this tax will the carbon tax will be passed on by electricity companies and business to consumers who will pay the tax through already expensive electricity and everyday goods and services. The alleged clean energy alternatives that people are meant to switch to when electricity gets too expensive are in no way ready to be rolled out in mass supply to consumers, wind and solar have not yet proven themselves as affordable alternatives. So what choices are households left with? If we do need to switch our energy sources then it should be left to private industry to make it affordable to the market place, if climate change is such a grave threat to us then we should wait for the free market forces to provide a solution. We should not proceed with an ill-though out destructive tax which will only hurt society.

It is important for us to keep up the fight against this tax and stay united as a movement. Whether you are against this tax because it won’t work, because you don’t believe in climate change, or because of the deceptive way it’s being introduced our strength is our unity. No matter who you are or where you come from we need to keep on fighting this tax until we defeat it. It will be hard to defeat this tax but we can, so far we have been smeared by the mainstream media as a bunch of right wing nutters who want to bring about a dramatic overthrow of the government. But what is so nutty about exercising our democratic right to protest our disagreement against an action a government has taken. The anti war protesters were allowed to express this right, so were the anti work choices protesters, and so are we. We were not given a right to vote on this tax, and we will continue our opposition until a chance to vote on this tax is given and we will defeat it. This only the beginning and with the strength of democracy behind us we can win this fight.

Doctors and medical societies often contribute to policy debates.  Medicine and science connote objectivity and the public may innocently assume that contributions from the medical profession are merely dispassionate facts which lack political and ideological intrusion. However, the medical profession, like every other human endeavour operates within the realm of the human condition. In this context it is wholly expected that there will be a natural tendency for the opinion and political agendas of doctors to be communicated as if they were based on science and research.

To coincide with the climate change meeting in Cancun, Mexico, The Lancet medical journal is promoting The Climate and Health Council (CHC) which was “established to enable health professionals around the world to take personal and collective action against the causes of climate change, and to insist that global health is central in climate change negotiations.” Implicit is an appeal  that based on “evidence” and research doctors have an obligation, if not moral duty, to support, amongst various actions, carbon emission reduction strategies.

However, is it ethical for doctors to be promoting such strategies under the guise of public health? The strategies to reduce to carbon emissions must, necessarily, force some people to adopt behaviour against their will in order for the benefit of others. This defines an ethical dilemma, trading the welfare of current versus future generations. In modern ethics the principle of autonomy reigns supreme. However, autonomy is legitimately overruled when there is a compelling argument under the ethical principle of justice. Is there a compelling case?

Many, including The Lancet, still unquestionably reference the Stern Review in order to justify the benefits of “action” now, despite significant controversy over Stern’s extraordinarily pessimistic assumptions. To be sure, within Stern’s review the supposed health effects have been factored in to the costs of global warming along with other non-market factors.  Yet many economists such as Indur Goklany demonstrate that even if we were to accept Stern’s questionable assumptions, tomorrows generations will still be far better off than we are today; even if we do nothing about global warming. For instance, inaction on climate change will mean those living in a hundred years will ONLY be 3 to 7.5 times better off than we are today instead of 3.2 to 8 times. If we do nothing, descendents of those living in the current developing world will only be 10 to 60 instead of 11 to 65 times better off.  The developing world is where children still die for want of food, millions of women continuously leak faeces and urine for the rest of their lives for want of a basic medical care at birth and where millions die from easily preventable diseases that are almost unheard of in developed countries. There exists the real potential that many in the developing world will be sacrificed on the altar of politically-correct ideology. In even the most pessimistic analysis, the potential health effects of climate change are dwarfed by those caused by lack of economic development.

Furthermore, is it ethical to justify “action now” to protect the welfare of future generations based on the following preposterous assumptions? Zero technological advances; future generations will make no attempt to adapt to climate change; no ways to better peoples’ lives will be discovered including no cures for cancer and chronic diseases and no development of social institutions to foster peace and freedom; and Stern’s use of a near zero discount rate which many incorrectly believe represents ethical parity between generations, but in fact values those in the future more than those now.

Common sense dictates that there is a relationship between the degree to which a system is complex and the opportunity for ideology to influence the reporting of the science. In clinical medicine debate can rage for decades over the effect of a single drug used in a single situation. Despite the fact that trials can be done and empiric data collected there are always factors and elements that can be disputed. Consider then, the difficulty in trying to predict the health effects of changing climates hundreds of years down the track in a world in which we cannot fathom the available technology and economic development.

In this context, to whatever the degree the climate science is “settled”, the evidence currently available to analyse the health effects of climate change is contemptuously feeble. Many of the supposed health consequences such as food and water scarcity, infectious diseases and exposure to heat relate to the developing world and are easily remedied by measures already available to those in developed nations. Much of that evidence conforms to anti-west ideology that ignores the elephant in the room concerning economic development. Much of the data relating to the potential effects on the developed world is already obsolete subsequent to the implementation of simple public health measures. Overall, is the health of those in the developed world severely worse than that of our ancestors 150 years ago because the world has warmed 1.5 degrees?

The Chasers would do well to set up a stall in Broadmeadows and ask people on the street to reduce their economic welfare so those in Toorak can avoid the catastrophe of being a mere 10 times better off than Broadmeadows residents instead of 10.5 times.

If we’re considering such an important issue as people’s health why do we continue to rely on the analyses of single, politically appointed economists with no significant history in climate economics such as Stern and Ross Garnaut? A Group of economists seasoned in many aspects of climate change economics (Copenhagen Consensus) have performed a far more compelling analysis that places carbon reduction as one the most inefficient ways to improve health and welfare.

Revealingly, the CHC declare on their “about” page: “Thirty years ago, health professionals from the USA and the former Soviet Union crossed borders to found the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War movement, an international body of health professionals dedicated to action against nuclear war. Today we will initiate an equally global movement of health professionals to tackle climate change.” (There is nothing wrong with the prevention of nuclear war; it is a noble goal, but it is not related to the health effects of global warming.)

In summary, it is legitimate to hold a political opinion regarding action on global warming. But from a public health perspective it would be equally valid to argue for as many coal-fired power plants to be built in Africa, India and China etc as is humanly possible.

SOLID-STATE lighting, the latest idea to brighten up the world while saving the planet, promises illumination for a fraction of the energy used by incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. A win all round, then: lower electricity bills and (since lighting consumes 6.5% of the world’s energy supply) less climate-changing carbon dioxide belching from power stations.

Well, no. Not if history is any guide. Solid-state lamps, which use souped-up versions of the light-emitting diodes that shine from the faces of digital clocks and flash irritatingly on the front panels of audio and video equipment, will indeed make lighting better. But precedent suggests that this will serve merely to increase the demand for light. The consequence may not be just more light for the same amount of energy, but an actual increase in energy consumption, rather than the decrease hoped for by those promoting new forms of lighting.

The light perceived by the human eye is measured in units called lumen-hours. This is about the amount produced by burning a candle for an hour. In 1700 a typical Briton consumed 580 lumen-hours in the course of a year, from candles, wood and oil. Today, burning electric lights, he uses about 46 megalumen-hours—almost 100,000 times as much. Better technology has stimulated demand, resulting in more energy being purchased for conversion into light.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a study published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics by Jeff Tsao of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and his colleagues. They predict that the introduction of solid-state lighting could increase the consumption of light by a factor of ten within two decades.

To work out what solid-state lighting would do to the use of light by 2030, Dr Tsao and his colleagues made some assumptions about global economic output, the price of energy, the efficiency of the new technology and its cost. Assuming that, by 2030, solid-state lights will be about three times more efficient than fluorescent ones and that the price of electricity stays the same in real terms, the number of megalumen-hours consumed by the average person will, according to their model, rise tenfold, from 20 to 202. The amount of electricity needed to generate that light would more than double. Only if the price of electricity were to triple would the amount of electricity used to generate light start to fall by 2030.

I especially like this at the end:

So, for those who truly wish to reduce the amount of energy expended on lighting the answer may not be to ban old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, as is the current trend, but to make them compulsory.

All the elements for a good old fashioned scare mongerin’:

• Poverty. Check.
• Scared Children. Check.
• Polar bears threatened. Check.
• Floods. Check.
• Drought. Check.
• Earthquake. Check.
• Storms. Check.
• Tornadoes. Check.
• “Expert” Testimony*. Check.

These people have no shame.

* Includes the renowned scientists, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and UN Chief Ban Ki Moon.

You can download this file here.

What I discovered is this (documents\harris-tree\briffa_sep98_e.pro):

; PLOTS ‘ALL’ REGION MXD timeseries from age banded and from huge
; standardised datasets.
; Reads Harry’s regional timeseries and outputs the 1600-1992 por
; with missing values set appropriately. Uses mxd, and just the
; “all band” timeseries
;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********

yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

Later in the code:

;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The fudge factor above does not seem to have a basis in any physical reality. I have done many computer models previously and I recognise that this is a classic example of the programmer trying to massage the data to their needs. What this code does is apply a rudimentary filter to the data. What effect this code actually has is unknown at the present. I am still analysing the code to try to get some sort of filter coefficients so that we can plot the frequency response of these filters to get a better understanding of what is actually going on here.

Watts Up With That has a list of source code comments describing the need to “avoid the decline”.

*Postnote about the program:

• program comments that start with ; or ! (these are FORTRAN comments tags)
• any text document with readme, read.me, read me or read_me in the filename is included
• .pdf’s and .docs are not included.

The world is considering a new financial market larger than any commodity, it’s “based on science”, but if you ask for evidence, you’re called names—“Denier”, and by our Prime Minister, no less. This is supposed to pass for reasoned debate?

In 6000 words Rudd uses ad hominem attacks, baseless allegations, argument from authority, mindless inflammatory rhetoric and quotes not a single piece of evidence that carbon drives our climate. He repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he can’t point out how any of them are wrong. It shows the depth of his own delusions—that he thinks merely questioning “the UN committee” is a flaw in itself.

It’s as if being a sceptic is a bad thing, yet the opposite of sceptical is gullible.

Rudd throws baseless innuendo when he claims vested interests are at work. The truth is the exact opposite. Exxon spent $23 million on sceptics, but the US government spent $79 billion on the climate industry. Big Government outspent big-oil 3000 to 1. Worse, carbon trading last year was $126 billion dollars. That’s for just one year. The real vested interests stand in the open like signposted black holes hidden in plain view by a legal disclaimer. The singularities at the centre of the climate change galaxy have names like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutche Bank, and HSBC.

The banks… want us to trade carbon.

Read on.