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26 March, 2012

Piers Corbyn: the Sun Warms the Earth, and How


To say that CO2 drives global warming, “is utter madness, and fraud”.
“We are heading for a Dalton-type minimum of cold temperatures which will affect Europe considerably: there will be more very cold winters and more lousy summers.”


19 March, 2012

Droughts May Lead to Droughts!

In “We’re likely to be a land of increasingly severe droughts and floods”, the mendacious lackey of the Australian Government’s Office of the Propagation of Awarmist Faith, Prof. Will Steffen, asserts (with the supporting evidence, as always, of axioms and appeals to authority):
Extended dry periods are expected to increase in southwest and southeast Australia by the end of this century, increasing the risk of drought.
So, to be clear, extended dry periods, or droughts, will increase the risk of extended dry periods, or droughts.  No!  Clearly, we need a new, ruinous tax on the air we breathe, instanter.
The magnitude of these risks [of Climate Change!] ultimately depends on the effectiveness of global emission reduction efforts, including by Australia.  The transition to a clean energy economy, which is gathering speed in many parts of the world, gives us great hope that we can minimise these potential risks.
So, to be clear, the world must reduce the emissions of gases, which have not been proven to warm the world dangerously or to cause more floods and droughts, lest the world warm dangerously bringing more floods and droughts; and the enforced use of more expensive forms of energy production by corrupt, incompetent governments should make us more optimistic that we can avert the risks which are not real risks.

UPDATE:  see also “A Land of Severer Severities”.

02 March, 2012

A Submission to the DPP

I sent this submission today to Mr. Tim Ellis SC, the Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutions:
I write to suggest respectfully that you give serious consideration to investigating Prof. Tim Flannery (the Australian Climate Commissioner) and, should you find sufficient evidence—as I’m sure you will—I advocate that you prosecute him for conspiracy to defraud the people of Tasmania, for fraud, for acquiring a financial advantage, and for numerous other crimes.
I was present in the audience recently (at the Hobart Town Hall, on Wednesday, 22 February) when Prof. Flannery and several other malfeasant accomplices presented false, manufactured, deceitful, specious arguments in favour of the fraudulent, pseudo-scientific conjecture of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  It is obvious wherefore Prof. Flannery promotes the silly, unfalsifiable (and therefore unscientific) conjecture of CAGW: he makes a great deal of money therefrom and clearly expects to make much more; he already receives a handsome salary (plus, I imagine, other benefits) extracted from taxpayers (by way of incompetent governments); he also stands to extort more funding for his self-interested proposals for the development of geothermal energy.
I shall gladly provide contact details of real scientists who can explain how greatly mistaken Prof. Flannery’s predictions, analyses and explanations are.  It is my contention, of course, that Prof. Flannery is more than mistaken: he must know by now that CAGW is a scam, but he relentlessly continues to spread alarmist, nonsensical claims of likely doom for all mankind from slightly rising seas and insignificantly increased average temperatures because of his egregious greed.
Prof. Flannery and his fellow conspirators need to be prosecuted for their willfully criminal attempts to defraud, and for their related, alarmist scaremongering, so I beg you to investigate this mendacious, mercenary, lucripetous, alleged scientist (and to acknowledge this request) as soon as possible.
From the Tasmanian Criminal Code Act 1924:
252A.  Acquiring a financial advantage
(1)  Any person who by any deception dishonestly acquires for himself or for any other person any financial advantage is guilty of a crime.
297.  Conspiracy
(1)  Any person who conspires with another [...]
(c)  to commit any crime;
(d)  to cheat or defraud the public, or any particular person, or class of persons;
(e)  to extort, by any means, any property whatever from any person;
(f)  to inflict by any unlawful means any injury or harm upon the public, or any particular person or class of persons;
(h)  to do any act involving, and known to be likely to involve, public mischief; [...]
is guilty of a crime.
UPDATE I (3 March):  I sent today a request to Mr. Chris Craigie SC, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, recommending that he too investigate and prosecute Prof. Flannery (under provisions of the Criminal Code Act 1995) “for obtaining a financial advantage by deception, for general dishonesty, for conspiracy to defraud, and for numerous other crimes.”

UPDATE II (5 March):  I received this message from Cathy Granger, Executive Assistant to the DPP:
Mr Ellis SC has read your letter and has asked me to advise you that he has no investigative function or power.
UPDATE III (5 March):  I sent today a request to Tasmania Police recommending that the police investigate and prosecute Prof. Flannery.

01 March, 2012

FrackNation


See the first clip.

UPDATE (3 March):  see Frack nation”, by Phelim McAleer, in The New York Post:
Thanks to the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland,” many people believe fracking—a process of getting natural gas out of rock—pollutes water and creates wastelands wherever it is used.
But like so many documentaries nowadays, Gasland is high on anecdote and emotion but low on science and fact.

One of the most dramatic images in “Gasland” is footage of a resident lighting his tap water with flames shooting out of the faucet.
As a journalist, I wanted to learn more, so I went to a Q&A with Gasland director Josh Fox.  As I questioned him, Fox eventually admitted that he knew people could light their tap water in these areas decades before fracking came on the scene.
But he did not include the fact in his documentary because, he said, “It was not relevant.” That was quite an admission, so I quickly threw a recording of the Q&A up on YouTube, and, to my shock, Fox got a Manhattan law firm to write to YouTube threatening it unless the video was removed immediately.

Quicker than I could say “fair use,” Fox and his lawyers pursued my little clip across the Internet, and using threats, shut it down wherever it appeared.  [...]
I decided to make my own documentary, called “FrackNation,” dedicated to telling the kind of stories Josh Fox seems to want to suppress.  But, unlike Josh Fox and “Gasland,” I couldn’t rely on corporate financing from HBO—or wealthy Hollywood actors.
So we decided to use KickStarter, a crowd-funding Web site.  We put our FrackNation pitch up just three weeks ago, and already we have raised more than $140,000 in small donations from ordinary members of the public.
We’ve interviewed farmers in New York and Pennsylvania who are angry.  One elderly farmer cried as he told me how it upset him that urban elites, such as Josh Fox and the actors Marc Ruffallo and Robert Redford, said they didn’t care about their own land.  [...]
Most of all, the farmers know that in some areas there has always been methane in the water—it occurs naturally and not as a result of fracking.  Lighting your tap water has long been a party trick in some of these rural areas.
We want to tell the truth about fracking, but we need the public’s help.  The Hollywood/enviro establishment only wants to tell one (untrue) side of the story.
If you want to help tell the truth about fracking and restore some balance to the documentary world, go to FrackNation.com.  I and the ordinary people of New York and Pennsylvania really need your help.
As I say elsewhere:
It’s simple:  when you
have to lie, then your claims must
be perforce untrue.
DISCLOSURE:  I have donated to the FrackNation fund.