Bureaucracy will save us all!
Now there is a phrase I would never have thought I would save, but I believe red tape and the slow grind of bureaucracy will save us from doing untold amounts of damage to the world economy and throwing hundreds of millions of people into poverty and starvation.

Although UN aid and the U.S. are already experiencing pain over the foolish green push to use ethanol which has driven up basic food crops prices as well as being worse for the environment, it isn't too late to stave off even worse crises (I wonder if the high oil prices are more to do with OPEC trying to make money before someone cuts off their demand? That would be unexpected)

And bureaucracy is our only hope. Kevin Rudd, whilst talking big on Climate change, is, like most politicians, taking his time in doing anything real about it (Yay for bureaucracy!), and whilst the Democrats may win the US presidential elections, they too will be slowed by the inordinate amount of red tape involved in any massive political change. All this means is that in a few years, the weather will turn cold (just look at the last 12 months), and global warming will be dismissed as a concern and the red tape will appear victorious in the battle against stupid leftist scare mongering. The result will as embarrassing as the non implosion from y2k bugs, but will leave climate scientists happy they have had billions of dollars of funding for the past few years, and Al Gore and Tim Flannery as richer men from all their ridiculously high speaking fees and Carbon Trading scams. Oh well...Lets hope they at least revoke Gorey's nobel prize....
- posted by Alan Grey @ Wednesday, February 27, 2008 0 comments

 
Climate Change Reports and Science Update
Whilst most people have heard that the report on Climate Change and Australia by Dr Ross Garnaut recommended drastic cuts to carbon emissions to avoid climate change catastrophe, there are sections of the report that the media is strangely silent about. Andrew Bolt has a good roundup.

Professor Ross Garnaut has discovered a debate on catastrophic man-made global warming that Al Gore, and most journalists and politicians, keep claiming was over years ago.

In fact, he’s even wondering if some scientists have played funny buggers.

Garnaut, hired to tell Labor how to cut greenhouse gases, yesterday released his interim report, saying most scientists felt we were running out of time: “The world is moving towards high risks of dangerous climate change more rapidly than has generally been understood.”

This was honey to alarmists, but Garnaut also admits his review of the global warming science “takes the work of the IPCC as its starting point”.

That’s a problem. This Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change is the United Nations body that persuaded governments we’re doomed unless we get less gassy.

But Garnaut concedes the IPCC has in fact been accused - not least by an all-party British House of Lords inquiry into climate change - of using dodgy science, excluding dissenters and sexying up findings.

Or in Garnaut’s more polite words, of lacking “objectivity” and giving in to “political considerations”.

As Garnaut says, its critics include top scientists such as hurricane expert Chris Landsea, who quit the IPCC to protest (in Garnaut’s words) the “mispresentation of climate science” by colleagues.

What’s more, despite claims the “science is settled”, Garnaut found the science of man-made warming was of a “qualified and contested nature”, and he was in “no position to adjudicate on the relative merits of various expert scientific opinions”.

He just had to go “on the balance of probabilities” - with this controversial IPCC and the majority of scientists whose views it represented.

But he urged that the global debate be made “open to alternative perspectives beyond the IPCC”, and said he’d recommend a “strengthening (of) the pluralist character of the Australian research efforts”.

Debate not over? Check.
IPCC Reports not objective or scientifically created? Check
Still using scare tactics? Check.

Jonathan Lowe does the math and works out just what this excessive hardship of cutting our emissions by 90% would give us.

But how much is Australia's deadly greenhouse gas emissions killing the world? Well Australia emits around 326 million metric tonnes a year. That's compared to a world wide rate of 27 billion metric tonnes. Hence Australia emits around 1.2% of the worlds greenhouse gas.

Now lets assume that we reduce our emissions by 60%, and lets assume that 100% of all warming has been caused by greenhouse gas (note that this assumption is clearly ludicrous but hey for the sake of the example...). With the world increasing at a rate of 0.6 degrees per 100 years, this means that if Australia were to cut our emissions by 60% by 2050, we would cool the globe by around 0.000043 degrees per year.

Yep. Hundreds of billions of dollars, massive inflation and increase in poverty and hardship for almost all Australians, all for cooling the globe .000043 degrees per year, for a grand total of under .002 of a degree. And that is definitely an inconvenient truth for all the scaremongering fear merchants.

Finally, Anthony Watts, (The man doing the job that climate scientists should have done themselves by checking out whether weather stations are recording temperature without biases...hint: they aren't), reviews a recent scientific paper on correlations between temperature trends and CO2, Total Solar Irradiance, and Oceanic cycles. Anthony prints the conclusion of the paper

Clearly the US annual temperatures over the last century have correlated far better with cycles in the sun and oceans than carbon dioxide. The correlation with carbon dioxide seems to have vanished or even reversed in the last decade.

Given the recent cooling of the Pacific and Atlantic and rapid decline in solar activity, we might anticipate given these correlations, temperatures to accelerate downwards shortly.

It seems Oceanic cycles and Solar Cycles show far better correlation than CO2 with temperature. Don't expect to hear about it in the news though.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, February 22, 2008 0 comments

 
Why Science Tells us What We Already Know
Science Daily reports of a study titled Why The Web Tells Us What We Already KnowIn this study, using our tax dollars, the scientists have discovered the amazing truth that people are biased and don't change their views readily

"Our research shows that, even if search engines do find the 'right' information, people may still draw the wrong conclusions -- in other words, their conclusions are biased."

Yep....hard earned tax dollars at work. In other news, scientists have discovered that water is wet and girls lie.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, February 05, 2008 0 comments

 
Super Tuesday - Why the World Should Hold It's Breath
U.S. Politics are vital to the interests of the world. Why? Because the U.S. is really the only country able to project effective military power. Consider the paths of Afghanistan and Iraq. In one country the U.S. (with minor allies) has a large scale military presence. In another, NATO, has been responsible for military operations (with a very minor U.S. presence).

Whilst many believe the U.S. to be incompetent in their handling of Iraq, consider the mess of Afghanistan. War is messy business. Nothing goes to plan. Things are constantly changing. Those brought up on TV in the 80's and 90's may think that everything always works out first time without casualties (I call this 'A-team mentality'), but the reality is that they almost never do.

U.S. politics matter to the world. The far left recognizes this. This is why you see excess death reports for Iraq from the far left Lancet team (and another report just recently), but you will have to search far and wide for a similar study done on Afghanistan.

The next American president will have to decide how to handle Muslim extremism, Russian military and communistic resurgence and China's expected invasion of Taiwan. Additionally, the Supreme Court (who now essentially decide what law governs America), will have another retirement or two, enough to swing the power of the court either seriously to the left or right. It is indeed a big election.

Which brings us to Super Tuesday (today in the U.s.), the second most important date in the U.S. 2008 elections. It is the day when most of America decides who the democrat and republican candidates for the election will be. On the democrat side, the choice is between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. On the republican side, the choice is between John McCain and Mitt Romney (Unfortunately, Huckabee has slide out of contention, with his decline starting around the same time as Joe Carter stopped working for him..hmmm)

So who will be running for president? By the end of super tuesday, it will probably be very clear. I'm not sure I like any of the remaining candidates. Romney is essentially trying to buy the election, which makes me nervous (ever wonder why the democrats almost always seem richer than the capitalists on the right?), but McCain seems to be the least conservative option. But then, which of them can beat Hillary or Obama?

From my view, it will probably be McCain (and maybe Huckabee running for vice) versus Obama (with maybe John Edwards as vice)

So hold your breath, the future of the world is indeed on the line.

A Caveat - I realize that Australia has been able to effect some good in Timor and the Solomons, but these are minor fields of operations. Whilst the Australian military is very good, they are still small.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, February 05, 2008 0 comments

 
Abortion leads to infanticide
The UK has just released details showing how doctors are leaving born babies to die and indeed, are instructed by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to lethally kill any baby born who they were trying to abort. 66 babies were killed this way in the UK last year.

A slippery slope indeed. I only hope these 'doctors' are thrown in jail, but I expect they won't be, as arguments for abortion that relate to a human not being born yet are merely pathetic window dressing to the real reasons for abortion...

Next time someone tries to defend abortion, using an argument about the baby in the womb, mention this report, and ask them why the doctors weren't prosecuted....
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, February 05, 2008 0 comments