Bob vs Gore

Miranda Devine offers a wonderful quote.

Bob took the long view: “I am a life member of Bronte Surf Club. I am 76yrs of age and I have not seen the sea level change at all.

“In fact as a child I remember one year with the Xmas tides the water came right up through the park. How come these alarmists can predict that the beaches are going to be swamped in the next 75yrs when nothing has altered in the past 75yrs?”

Bear Attack

Climate change!

A polar bear mauled to death a British teenager and severely injured four other Britons in an attack on a camp site in the Norwegian Arctic before being shot dead, officials say.

This is not the first time.

Polar bear attacks are not uncommon in the archipelago, and according to its unique signs warning about the animal it is illegal to leave a human settlement without carrying a gun.

It is however unusual for so many people to get hurt.

Human settlement?

(Hat tip: Foxy)

Look Out! Carbon!

Ziggy Switkowski in The Australian:

Water vapour, as seen billowing from the hyperboloid cooling towers much favoured by photo editors, is not pollution unless we include clouds and rain in that definition, which few do.

HRT writes:

Go to: www.climatechange.gov.au/ and click on the No 2 photo on the top left of the page. It is called Carbon Price Announced.

Note the photo of cooling towers emitting steam.

Coming soon - A tax on Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Global Warming - Worse than Hitler

An absurd letter in today's Melbourne Age:

When sacrifice is the right thing

HOW many of us are so selfish that the first questions we ask when confronted with change, are along the lines of: why should I have to pay a carbon tax? Why do I have to look for another job? Who's going to look after me? Why isn't my compensation higher? Who says $150,000 a year makes me so rich that I should have to pay this tax? Why should I change my lifestyle?

Obviously, these people are unwilling to make any kind of sacrifice. Did our forefathers question why they should fight Nazism and fascism? No, they put aside petty arguments and self-serving questions and went off to fight the enemy. Not because they wanted to, but because it was the right thing to do. Today, we are fighting a different and infinitely more dangerous enemy - global warming. This enemy will kill millions of people through famine, flood, drought and other disasters, unless we start fighting it now.

Tony Abbott is like Neville Chamberlain, who refused to believe that there was an enemy who must be defeated until it was too late. Abbott is just as blind when he says we shouldn't have a tax on carbon. Abbott will go down in history as being just as foolish and misguided as Chamberlain.

Chris and Jacki Burgess, Port Melbourne

Meanwhile, in the Sydney Morning Herald, a letter argues:

If a demonstration outside a chocolate shop, and a crucifix appearing in an anti-Abbott advertisement, are the worst examples of anti-Semitism and sectarianism that the ever-vigilant Gerard Henderson can garner, we should rejoice in Australia's tolerance (''Jews know acceptance still has its exceptions'', July 12).

Jack Sumner Eastwood

So there you have it. Global warming is a bigger threat than the Nazis, yet a bunch of antisemites forming a violent mob outside a Jewish business is no big deal.

I'm not a Teacher, but...

Andrew Bolt points to the concerning dialogue between Jonathan Holmes and a smug school teacher, Fran Barlow.



Despite her apparent penchant for large words (for which Holmes calls her on her condescension), Ms Barlow describes herself as: "A green and leftwing schoolteacher" [sic].

Let's hope she's not teaching English.

Now, I'm no Climate Scientist, but in her rush to appear smarter than everybody else, I'm pretty sure she used the word stoichiometrically inappropriately as well. It refers to chemical reactions, not terminology.

Opposites Attract

A letter to the editor in today's Australian:

Thanks for the photo of Cate Blanchett's home. Now go ahead and publish photos of the homes of the billionaire mining magnets [sic] such as Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart.

The mining (ahem) magnates' wealth is immaterial. They are not the ones calling for a tax on other people. Cate Blanchett (worth around $53M) is.

Moreover, whilst it's trendy to complain about 'fat cat' mining companies raping the Earth and laughing all the way to the bank, it's easy to ignore the huge commercial risks they take searching for minerals. Plenty of mining companies go broke.

The only thing we have to fear...

In Doug Cameron's speech on the future of the Australian Labor Party, he said:

In the next year or so, overcoming the politics of fear and disinformation on climate change and mining taxation will be fundamental to the short term political future of the Party.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, trying to promote her Carbon Dioxide tax accused Tony Abbot similarly:

"All of these figures have been made up by the leader of the opposition in pursuit of his fear campaign," Ms Gillard responded.

Excuse me?

Complaining about a new tax, which Ms Gillard said she wouldn't introduce, and which hasn't been properly costed (nor proven to have any real effect) is not a fear campaign.

Telling kids that the world will end. Now that's a fear campaign. And it's already contributing to mental illness in youth, with young kids feeling guilty for daring to sit with the lights on.

Last year a 17-year-old boy in Melbourne became the world's first person to be diagnosed with "climate change delusion".

Dr Robert Salo at the Royal Children's Hospital reported that his patient believed his water consumption would deplete water supplies, leading to the deaths of millions of people, and that he had internet research to prove this.

He had attempted to stop drinking and checked for leaking taps to prevent the catastrophe.
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The boy had a major depressive disorder with delusions specifically relating to climate change.

There are many more people with delusions specifically relating to climate change. They just haven't been diagnosed yet.

The Australian and Andrew Bolt Lamberted and PPed on

Australian Lefties are obsessed with News Ltd in general and Andrew Bolt in particular so it's no surprise that both Tim Lambert and Pure Poison – actually some guy named Wayne guest posting – attack Bolt and The Australian for quoting from a peer-reviewed study. The objectionable quote:

Applying both [conventional and alternative] methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss [provided by Munich Re], in general we find no significant upward trends in normalised disaster damage over the period 1980-2009 globally, regionally, for specific disasters or for specific disasters in specific regions.

Both Lambert and guest PPer Wayne accuse Bolt and The Australian of intentionally deceiving readers through omission of the following sentence:

Due to our inability to control for defensive mitigation measures, one cannot infer from our analysis that there have definitely not been more frequent and/or more intensive weather-related natural hazards over the study period already.

So Bolt and The Australian on the face of it look silly for concluding, contrary to the study's disclaimer, that weather-related natural hazards have increased in neither frequency nor intensity.

But since we're dealing here with notorious fact-manipulator Lambert, and the perennially iffy PP boyz, it's a good idea to take a closer look at the quoted study, the first sentence of which is shaky indeed:

Climate change is likely to lead to an increase in the frequency and/or intensity of certain types of natural hazards, if not globally, then at least in certain regions.

That sentence would more accurately read, "Models predict that climate change is likely to..."

But there's more if one looks beyond the study's abstract:

Existing scholarship comes to the conclusion that while natural variability in weather patterns can explain some of the variability in disaster losses (Pielke and Landsea 1998; Katz 2002; Pielke et al. 2008; Schmidt, Kemfert and Höppe 2009), there is no evidence for a rising long-term trend in so-called “normalized” disaster damage, which is the damage after adjustments for wealth changes over time. To be sure, even if a trend was detected, one needs to be careful in attributing such a trend to anthropogenic climate change, i.e. climate change caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, since natural climate variability could provide an alternative explanation.

Thus this latest study confirms prior studies failing to find an increase in natural disasters – if anything Bolt and The Australian understated reality in not noting that a series of studies fails to link climate change to natural disasters.

This is yet another example of Lefties engaging in the intellectual dishonesty they claim to abhor.