The Greens oppose the CPRS not because it is too weak, but because it will point Australia in the wrong direction with little prospect of turning it around in the timeframe within which emissions must peak, says Senator Christine Milne.
Liberals will pass ETS to avoid Ruddquake
|
The Liberal leadership will convince enough backbench MPs to approve the Coalition’s amendments to the Government’s ETS legislation in coming weeks. Contrary to a campaign by the right-wing media, and plenty of effort by the Government to undermine the chances of a deal, Malcolm Turnbull will get enough of his partyroom over the line to set up a dilemma for the Government — does it further weaken an already-ineffectual CPRS and get it passed, or hold out for a double dissolution trigger and allow the issue to continue to undermine Turnbull? There are two reasons why it’ll happen: the polls, and Turnbull’s tactics. No matter how you spin the current polling numbers, an election will be a slaughter for the Coalition. Forget the drivel in The Australian about a surging Coalition regional vote. This is the grim reality for the Coalition, as identified yesterday by Possum Comitatus and by several others subsequently: Labor is likely to win at least 100 seats on current polling numbers, in a Ruddquake that will leave any number of shadow ministers, including Christopher Pyne, looking for a new career. It would be a two-term defeat. Refusing to deal on the ETS doesn’t just hand the Government a double dissolution trigger, it hands Kevin Rudd the moral high ground: he can point to a simple pigheaded resistance to doing anything about climate change on the part of the Coalition. Ron Boswell and Barnaby Joyce might fantasise about a successful anti-ETS campaign but only because they can’t read the polls, which all show strong support for addressing climate change. The other number that’s of importance in Coalition thinking is zero. That’s the number of viable contenders there are for the Coalition leadership other than Malcolm Turnbull. That’s also the number of alternatives who wouldn’t adopt the same position on negotiating with the Government. Tony Abbott supports getting the issue off the agenda as quickly as possible. Joe Hockey strongly supports the Turnbull position and has attacked internal critics. Andrew Robb was the centrepiece of the entire strategy. Fatally undermining Malcolm Turnbull by rejecting his ETS amendments in the partyroom won’t pave the way for any change in approach, no matter how much a small band of diehard sceptics would like it to. Turnbull has also ensured that the ETS issue is handled within the Coalition not by Greg Hunt, whose support for genuine efforts to address climate change is well-known and long-standing, but by climate sceptics: first Andrew Robb, and now Ian Macfarlane. Macfarlane was a paid-up member of the greenhouse mafia during the Howard years. Macfarlane also played an important role in August as Energy spokesman in securing support within the Coalition — over National objections — for the Government’s Renewable Energy Target legislation. On the RET, Hunt led negotiations with the Government. This time around its Macfarlane, but it’s the same triumvirate of Turnbull, Hunt and Macfarlane. And when Macfarlane says the Coalition needs to work out a deal, even the sceptics within his party know he’s speaking from the standpoint of political necessity, not ideological conviction. Meantime Ron Boswell, whose statements are usually a simple confection of ignorance, innumeracy and stupidity, appears to have started on outright deception over whether the Coalition was committed to an ETS at the last election. “I don’t believe we took an ETS to the last election,” he said yesterday. “I don’t even recall it going through the party room to be truthful.” A quick check with Liberal sources indicated that an ETS was approved by the Coalition partyroom before the last election — and not “slipped through” as claimed by Boswell. In fact Boswell’s own leader back then, Mark Vaile, specifically talked about the benefits that could flow to agriculture from a properly-designed ETS, in the wake of the Shergold Report. The Nats can delude themselves all they like about what they said in 2007 and how successful they’ll be in 2010. Their Liberal colleagues live in the real world, and face a particularly unpleasant reality. The Turnbull strategy will succeed. |
|
|
22 Comments
Bernard,
Your comedic juggernaut knows no boundaries.
To wit:
“…Contrary to a campaign by the right-wing media…”
…is magnanimously munificent, Walkley-award winning stuff.
But I must’ve missed that “campaign”.
All I can find over the last few days are endless re-hashing of “Provincial Pussies Procure Pigskin Prize in Plucky Performance” and “‘Ravishing’ Kevin ‘Rude’ Reveals Real Reason Rein Reigns”.
Go on, be a sport and show us where this B I G moral conspiracy is wreaking havoc on your stream of consciousness and that of your fellow travellers.
He’s referring to The Australian ramping electronic media echoes for the last 36 hours you dolt.
MPM - You obviously don’t listen to Their ABC, or read News Ltd.
Why only this morning the lovely Alison Carabine was telling me how the ETS would never get passed and Malcolm would have to change his strategy.
In fact I’d be interested to know which media you have access to. Must be the same media that Gerard Henderson views through a most peculiar prism.
Oh, specifically aggregated News Ltd polling, noted by Michelle Grattan Fairfax Age (abc RN too) and Alison Carabine (Sydney abc mornings) based on article in the News Corp broadsheet, and the endless anti climate change postures of the same broadsheet (today it’s $billions lost to the coal industry over the next 10 years tucked away in the business section).
Good article BK. But I hope they do go for a DD. I surely do.
MPM, if you search by “Malcolm Turnbull” in the Australian’s website you’ll see how many stories have been announcing Turnbull’s imminent dumping as leader pretty much ever since he got the position. See also http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/09/15/a-letter-to-the-australian-only-crikey-will-print/
What I don’t understand is whom they hope to install as Coalition leader in Turnbull’s place now that Costello is out of the running. Or are they just slanted against Turnbull on autopilot now?
Maybe the ETS has always been a done deal with both parties. It is a little like warning labels on cigarette packets. The carbon generating energy industry screams, “Arggh! Ya killin’ me! Ya killin’ me!” But it really wants the controls. These controls enable the industry to claim compensation when global warming is taken seriously in the future. It would be better to have no controls for the present.
I hope you are right Bernard. Even though we are talking about an ETS you have often derided as being next to useless….. I do not however, wish to rake over those old coals for the moment…..I disagree with you that the government would romp in if a double dissolution were called on the issue, a similar view I might add was expressed by Paul Keating on the 7.30 Report about a week ago…..The political climate post Copenhagen at this stage is too difficult predict…..Never underestimate the ability of the Conservatives to run the mother of all scare campaigns on this issue.
These are desperate times. Turnbull has to go into the party room and tell them that if they don’t agree to his plan Rudd will blast them all to ruddy hell. However, losing Christopher Pyne might be an enticing prospect on both sides of the chamber.
Turnbull’s cowering villagers need a miraculous political reincarnation of the seven samurai to save them from the merciless Ruddocrats.
The big polluters know that this bill is so absurdly kind to them that the only alternative is a bill that will actually require them to do something instead of giving them billions. They know that they’ll never again be offered such a sweet deal. I’m absolutely sure they’ve been on the phone to their pal Ian Macfarlane begging him to get the bill through, it’s the best chance at delaying any real emissions reductions they have.
I wouldn’t be so sure, Rasta. The Oz today reports “Anglo-American chief executive Cynthia Carroll says the Rudd government’s proposed emissions trading scheme could cost Australia’s coal industry $14 billion in its first 10 years, … destroy $1bn of government royalties, 2000 Anglo Coal jobs and wipe $118 million from Anglo’s coffers — money she said was needed for investment in carbon abatement programs.”
Oh my God, Bernard, we’ve had them wrong all along! We must give big coal more money now to save the planet!
It is a pity, but the electorate believes in CO2 driven climate change, so denying it would lose the next election.
I for one don’t believe the science is settled. We had a medieval warm period followed by a mini ice age in a thousand year period when CO2 levels didn’t change. CO2 is avery minor component of our atmosphere and on its own a CO2 rise to 500 ppm would probably increase the temperature by 1 degree C.
The current predictions depend on amplification of the CO2 effect by water vapour. But more water vapour means more clouds. The computer models don’t include clouds, but low clouds have a cooling effect, not a warming effect. The science is equivocal, not certain.
I went through a similar scepticism, Nephron, and read several books on the subject which filled my head with information but left me no wiser. Eventually I realized (slower than most) that it’s not necessary for me to understand the whole theory and body of evidence. For me it comes down to a choice, either:
(a) the vast majority of scientists who have looked into the matter and have concurred with the main thrust of the theory and prognosis though they continue to refine the details, are telling the truth;
(b) the scientific community cannot provide any meaningful guidance on any question worth asking them, so it’s back to the drawing board with science and, for that matter, the Enlightenment.
For me the answer is (a). The alternative is to settle all big questions of truth by opinion poll or by consulting witchdoctors.
Unfortunately I think the difficulties we are seeing in this country of getting a very weak carbon reduction scheme passed is just a microcosm of the trouble the whole world will face in Copenhagen.
The developing countries will clearly not do anything until the developed world has, and it appears the converse is probably also true. The problem lies with the negotiations being couched in terms of percentage reductions per country. That is simply not how a global problem will be solved. The developing world will never agree to something on those terms, and nor should they, because to do so locks into law a permanent economic inequality per capita. Even if say China was allowed a 50% increase over some time period compared to say a 50% decrease over the same period by the developed countries, the per capita emmissions this implies would make Chinese second class citizens, by law, in terms of allowable economic activity. No one should be surprised that the Chinese (or for that matter the Indians, Brazialians…) will not be signing up to something like this.
A phased in global per capita allowance will be the only way to achieve agreement, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
James: It’s all about weakening any emissions reduction scheme as much as possible. There were a couple of Crikey articles* not too long ago that mentioned a court action being undertaken by the Australian Conservation Foundation against a number of the “greenhouse mafia” because of the disparity between their public remarks regarding the ETS and what they were telling their shareholders. Does anyone disagree that this is as good a deal as they could possibly hope to get?
*http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/07/01/polluters-tell-governments-one-thing-and-investors-another-the-oz-cheers-them-on/
*http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/06/15/boral-bluescope-caltex-rio-woodside-xstrata-giving-the-big-ets-lie/
Let’s overlook the fact that any (useless and completely unnecessary) ETS agreed upon BEFORE Copenhagen is an act of gross stupidity and economic larceny, the ‘evidence’ for Bernard’s vast “campaign by the right-wing media” is really only ONE newspaper.
A paper with a daily circulation of less than 140,000!!
And let’s not even talk about its demographics.
Is that the best the believers can do?
From a political point of view, it would be wise for Malcolm to still support the concept of an ETS, yet sell the ideaof just delaying a vote till after Copenhagen, as the entire political landscape could change if Copenhagen turns into a farce. The anti-ETS position could very quickly become the popular one.
Honestly, thats the only compromise position he’s going to get from the party room, and i guarantee you get some people crossing the floor if he insists on voting for it.
From Rudds point-of-view, he knows all of this, and is using this double dissolution bluff to get the Libs to vote for it, so it’s off his political radar for ever (and he gets that tick-in-the-completed-box that he loves). There’s no way he’ll call a double dissolution on the ETS issue, as any election will be post-copenhagen (again, a great unknown)
From an actual carbon reduction point of view, the bill will do SFA anyway, so there’s no winners no matter what happens.
Unless a champion comes forth to restructure theLiberal Party into the Libertarian Party, then the best thing those guys can do is to apply amendments which provide them with the ability to vary the scheme to meet the conditions in the future.
One thing is for sure no oligarchical system such as this is going to support free energy. This ensures that fossil fuels and their filthy consequences are going to be a round for some time to come.
The pity of it all is that we are held accountable for this and then made to pay.
The joke is that we are prepared to cop this crap!
Turnbull & Co could run a credible campaign based on an education of the population. The science is a LONG way from “done”, and little by little, people are becoming a wake up to the fact that nothing terribly unusual is happening at all. When that momentum builds past a ‘tipping’ point, I suggest we are going to have a load of angry punters wanting to know why the price of electricity doubled.
I have been pointing out for two decades that ‘Global Warming’ as a bad thing is pure kiddology, as is the presumption that CO2 will warm the planet. Never has done in the past, I can’t think of a good reason for it to start doing so now. What is your comment on this revelation from one of the chief climate scientists WITHIN the IPCC?
“Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.
Yet in Geneva, Latif was forced to admit that all those An-Inconvenient-Truth-style fantasy projections showing global temperatures rising inexorably with C02 levels were wrong.
The world is getting cooler, not warming. It will continue to cool, Latif reckons, till 2020 or possibly 2030. By how much he doesn’t know: “The jury is still out.””
COOLING. I repeat. COOLING.
Wong, Rudd and co tried to put a new spin on this nonsense by invoking “Oh yeah, we know the atmosphere is COOLING, but the heat is HIDING in the sea waiting to LEAP at us all”. What utter nonsense.
I believe that is the Greenie spin as well.
There has been a change in direction by global warming alarmists, as shown by “Synthesis Report – Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions,” published in Copenhagen and released in June.
In that report, those claiming there is a human-induced global warming crisis have abandoned air temperature as a measure of global climate and switched to ocean temperature. The change in focus from air temperature to ocean temperature was predictable given the sustained decline in global air temperature over recent years. The new report claims ocean temperatures are rising, and fast.This is rubbish, but it will take time to inform the public and politicians that it is rubbish. With the U.S. climate bill and the Copenhagen meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up, proponents of carbon dioxide restrictions need only to make the public believe these fables for a few months.
All the public education the climate realists have accomplished regarding air temperatures will have to start all over regarding ocean temperatures. Here are some key points to be made:
* Ocean temperatures can be measured adequately only by the Argo buoy network. Argo buoys dive down to 700m, recording temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. There are 3,000 of them floating around all the world’s oceans.
* The Argo buoys have been operational only since the end of 2003. Before that, ocean temperatures were gathered by various methods – usually collected by ships in popular commercial shipping lanes – that lacked uniformity, sufficient geographical coverage, and the ability to measure temperature much beneath the surface. The Argo buoy system has added uniformity and greater reliability to ocean temperature measurements.
* According to Argo temperature measurements, the world’s oceans have shown a slight cooling since Argo became operational in 2003. In sharp contrast to model predicted heat build-up
In short, if one studies the OBSERVABLE DATA for but a moment and ignore the output of rather poor computer models, the planet has been COOLING for a decade and is predicted to continue to COOL for the next two decades, perhaps longer.
The atmosphere is COOLING, the sea is COOLING, the ice in the Arctic INCREASED by another 10% this year, what is the major problem?
WHY DO WE NEED A NEW TAX TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING? IT DOESN’T EXIST!
The Greens are stumbling along, still mouthing the same tired Watermelon mantras. As if the current state of “URGENT” action being required to fix a problem that frankly doesn’t exist isn’t bad enough,we find that the science used as the basis for underwriting all this childish nonsense was wrong.
Treemometers: A new scientific scandal
By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author
Posted in Environment, 29th September 2009 16:03 GMT
A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.
At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC’s assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.
At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a “reconstruction” of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.
Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called “divergence”. The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist’s biases.
Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.
In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.
How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.
At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal’s mystery is no more.
From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.
In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.
Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper by Keith Briffa at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia asserted that that the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa relied on just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.
Three years later Nature published a paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes based on temperature reconstructions which showed something similar: warmer now, cooler then. With Briffa and Mann as chapter editors of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this distinctive pattern became emblematic - the “Logo of Global Warming”.
Hokey hockey sticks
Mann too used dendrochronology to chill temperatures, and rebuffed attempts to publish his measurement data. Initially he said he had forgotten where he put it, then declined to disclosed it. (Some of Mann’s data was eventually discovered, by accident, on his ftp server in a directory entitled ‘BACKTO_1400-CENSORED’.)
Tree data was secondary in importance to Mann’s statistical technique, which would produce a dramatic modern upturn in temperatures - which became nicknamed the “Hockey Stick” - even using red noise.
Similarly, all the papers that used the Yamal data have the same point to make. All suggest recent dramatic warming. Having scored a global hit with a combination of flawed statistics and dubious dendrochronology, the acts repeated the formula.
“Late 20th century warmth is unprecedented for at least roughly the past two millennia for the Northern Hemisphere,” wrote the two authors of Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2003 - Mann, and Phil Jones of CRU.
For example, Briffa’s 2008 paper concludes that: “The extent of recent widespread warming across northwest Eurasia, with respect to 100- to 200-year trends, is unprecedented in the last 2000 years.”
It continues to this day. A study purporting to show the Arctic was warmer now than for 2,000 years received front-page attention last month. Led by Northern Arizona University professor Darrell S Kaufman, and including dendro veteran Mann, this too relied heavily on Yamal, and produced the signature shape.
And when Yamal is plotted against the wider range of cores, the implications of the choice is striking: The warming goes away.
http://www.addinall.net/rcs.gif
(The alarming red line we are all familiar with is created by cherry picking 12 samples as data points. The black line is created using ALL of the data collected.)
A comparison of Yamal RCS chronologies. red - as archived with 12 picked cores; black - including Schweingruber’s Khadyta River, Yamal (russ035w) archive and excluding 12 picked cores. Both smoothed with 21-year gaussian smooth. y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1 (as are subsequent graphs (but represent age-adjusted ring width).
“The majority of these trees (like the Graybill bristlecones) have a prolonged growth pulse (for whatever reason) starting in the 19th century,” wrote Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre on his blog on Sunday. “When a one-size fits all age profile is applied to these particular tries, the relatively vigorous growth becomes monster growth - 8 sigma anomalies in some of them.”
McIntyre’s determination to reproduce the reconstructions has resulted in the Yamal data finally coming to light.
All the papers come from a small but closely knit of scientists who mutually support each other’s work. All use Yamal data.
What went wrong?
The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC’s mission is to reflect the science, not create it.
As the panel states, its duty is “assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data.” But as lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment.
When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did here?
The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged persistence of a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results. Steve McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained elusive for almost a decade.
from:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/page3.html
Australia should do NOTHING in regards to an ETS or other Carbon tax. We are a LONG way from “the science is decided”. The concensus shrinks daily, the atmosphere is cooling, the seas are cooling, the seas are not rising alarmingly….. In short, NOTHING out of the ordinary is going on, and this whole movement is based on bad science and a lot of psuedo-science claptrap from the Watermelons.
The traders love it. The Carbon market in Europe last year was around $80 billion dollars. This is swapping IOUs for fresh air remember. Nothing collected or manufactured. Nothing delivered. A perfect scam.
Mark Addinall.
Why doesnt Malcolm just do what Rudd did to win election,
Rudd pretended to be a carbon copy of Howard only with more utopian (yet never to be heard of again) ideas.
Just pawn himself of as Rudd, a more successfull version, someone who will put solar in everyhome, save the rainforests, cut taxes, save the world, make australia a stronger middle power….
just promise all these things and never do them…
shit, thats how Rudd got in, he was infact a younger John Howard….with better ideas…
to bad we have never seen any of them. Turbull should take a leaf out of Rudds boat…
Bullshit to the electorate and then keep bullshitting while nobody notices.
I think the answer there Made is that the part of the political cycle strongly favours a second ALP victoryand Turnbull really can’t affect that. He grabbed the leadership too soon but having got it he now needs to play the long game and see how the next Rudd led parliament progresses.
In the next term, caucus disaffection with Rudd’s facism should start to be obvious and that will lead to better times for the libs. I think Turnbull needs to exert himself. If he doesn’t he’s mince meat but if he does and he succeeds, the libs will go as floppy as Scarlet O’Hara after Rhett kicked the door in. That’s the kind of party they are.
I’m with you SBH. Rupert Murdoch has proven to me that despite being wrong you can still win as long as you are 100% persistent. Nobody digs “floppy”.
My belief is that if the Liberals ignore the controlled media and stick to any point of view for long enough, people will come to believe that maybe everything isn’t just as Il Duce says. I can tell you now that the way for the Liberal leader to handle all this assault is to decry the fact that Rudd has sold out to the UN because I believe that it is the UN that is running our policy on a myriad of issues now; whether it happens to be climate change, the economy, health or education; and the US is running defence. If people knew that we are becoming nothing more than a UN satrap under this regime then they may start to see the Libs in a different light. As I said, nobody likes a “floppy”.
This of course assumes that the Libs wouldn’t do exactly the same and that may be a very lofty assumption.
Gee, I don’t know about the level of control the UN is able to exert over anyone. I’d be more worried about resource companies who seem to get are national govt’s to dance like trained pups, our stae governments of course are controlled by property developers and casino owners.