In The Interval

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Contemporary fear of warm weather is in dramatic contrast to our forebears - who loved warming climates and hated the mini-ice ages. It was during the cooling Dark Ages that the Roman and Mayan empires collapsed, after they had thrived during a warming that was hotter than it is today. And it was during the cold of the Little Ice Age that Europe had its worst-ever floods and famines...

Why have humans chosen to panic about the planet returning to what is very probably the finest climate for human civilisation the planet has known in all its millions of years? Is it simply guilt because climate alarmists claim we humans are causing the damage? If so, then it becomes all the more important to check all the evidence.
Singer & Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming.



If in darkness and in health, if passed from here to another place, if cold old bones began to creak, if the passage to another realm was clearly defined, would we take the pass? Would we walk through the valleys and celebrate our lives? Would we be free at last, finding our remote home, clawing our way to freedom? The surprise was that he had found his own escape, his own remote mountain village, in such a peculiar, unexpected place.

We were being signalled, all was not lost. Another future lay ahead. The sins of the past would remain just that, sins of the past. There would be no consequence, except a happy release. The streets are still full of pilgrims, many of whom are lingering in Sydney after the end of World Youth Day. They travel in packs, or excited herds, and suddenly a hundred or more of them will burst into song, as the cold wind whips around the traffic lights and all the normal pedestrians, donning our grim mantles, go about our days, startled, for a moment, into surprise ast other people's happiness.

I am fascinated by the whole global warming climate change debate. The government is now launching a multi-million dollar campaign to convince us that it's true, and that an emissions trading scheme is a sensible thing to do. It's not. Another nightmare Labor bureaucracy, this time with serious power to destroy our lives and our economy, will ride rough shod over all reason. They don't care. They'll be gone and someone else will be there to clean up the mess.

The global warming hysteria infecting the country has out gunned all other government manufactured crises, obesity, domestic violence, drugs, all shrink into insignificance in contrast to a global threat to a global world. Although how Australia's blind allegiance to ideology will make the slightest difference no one really knows. The sceptics are out there, and finally finding the gumption to come forward. But standing up against the noble whitewash, the religious fervour, the apocalyptic hysteria of ridiculous predictions, is anyone's guess.

We're free now. Morsels collect, of other stories, even of other grand projects. But days have to be got through, children fed. He's shrinking now, the incredible shrinking Kevin 07, and John Howard, who wilfully destroyed the conservative side of politics by blatant, arrogant stupidity, shrinks further and further back into history. Once, not so long ago, it seemed impossible that there could be anyone else.

Australia had been governed by the so-called conservatives, John Howard, for what, in our speeded up realm, seemed like centuries but in fact was only 11 years. But much had changed in that period, mobile phones, computers, music, film, an increasing sophistication of the masses. The conservatives twisted and turned in order to stay in power, adopting many of Labor's misguided social policies and dishing out vast amounts of money in welfare payments. Indeed, it was during the conservative years that the welfare mentality really took root - people realised there was no other way, no other path.

Freedom was at the end of a Centrelink queue. And that was the hypocrisy, the double sided double cross. Stand on your own two feet and get swept aside; taxed into oblivion.



THE BIGGER STORY:

JAYANT PATEL has few friends in Queensland and no ties to the state other than a history of botched operations at Bundaberg Hospital. But the surgeon walked from the Brisbane watch-house last night to take up lodgings at the expense of state taxpayers until his trial.

Federal immigration rules require Queensland Police, the authority that sought Patel's extradition, to pay the cost of bringing him to Australia, keeping him here and removing him. That extends to covering his rent and living expenses until the trial, which is at least 12 months away.

As Patel's $20,000 bail was posted yesterday, allowing him to walk free for the first time since his arrest on March 11 in Portland, Oregon, the cost of his case had already exceeded $1.2 million - and that does not include the commission of inquiry into Bundaberg Hospital after his disastrous tenure came to light, or its cost to patients and the community.

The state Liberal leader, Mark McArdle, said the case could cost more than $3 million, and Queensland Health had added to the total by paying for his air fare following the scandal's mention in Parliament in 2005.

Police, prosecutors and the Government have treated the case with great sensitivity this week, following intense media coverage and a furious public reaction to the release of the pedophile Dennis Ferguson on the grounds that widespread adverse publicity prevented him from receiving a fair trial. (A Government appeal against that finding was heard yesterday, and the decision was reserved.)

One vocal Patel supporter, Vijay Mehta, a US surgeon, said yesterday that there was a
"frenzy that I have not seen since O.J.Simpson" surrounding Patel.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24062552-5000117,00.html

The Rudd Government is already struggling to sell its multi-billion-dollar Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which is meant to cut the gases it claims cause a global warming.

The scheme, which from 2010 will force big factories and power plants to buy permits for the carbon dioxide they emit, will drive up prices, cost jobs and do little to actually cut gases in a country that produces less than 1.5 per cent of world emissions anyway.

Already the Government is so scared of voter anger that it promised to effectively exclude petrol and farmers from its scheme until after the next election. And before the election it will hand out free permits to companies that might struggle under its scheme, in the hope of stopping job losses and damaging headlines.

With even senior Labor ministers wondering why the hell Rudd is doing this, Nelson believes the Liberals are crazy to keep their present policy, which is to support an emissions trading scheme, but to wait two more years, until 2012, to "get it right".

The weakness of that line has been demonstrated repeatedly by Turnbull and Hunt, who last week boasted that "the Coalition . . . proposed just such a scheme prior to the last election", but in the same breath attacked the ETS as "a tax on everything and everyone". So is he for it or against?

And the Liberals' demand that Rudd simply wait two more years to implement an ETS just makes them seem ditherers, and Rudd decisive.

Knowing this, Nelson tried last week to change his me-too policy - saying he supported "moving to" an ETS, but would not impose it without promises by the world's biggest emitter, China, and other gassily booming economies to make similar sacrifices.

Nelson's argument, backed by many economists, is that cutting our gases on our own won't do anything but cost Australian workers their jobs. Why close our gassy plants, only to see them reopen in Beijing, which says it has no intention of cutting emissions?...

Many Liberals, like some senior Labor politicians, are sceptical about claims that man is heating the world to hell, but fear that an evangelical media will kick them to pieces if they say so.

But suddenly there are signs of a shift in the debate. More reporters are finally mentioning a once-taboo fact - that the world hasn't actually warmed over the past decade, and over the past couple of years has even cooled.

Is it a blip? Well, two months ago, 31,000 scientists signed a petition warning there was no proof man was heating the world to dangerous levels.

Many Liberals were also struck by a confession in The Australian last week by a former Australian Greenhouse Office consultant, Dr David Evans, that he'd become a sceptic. Evans had once promoted warming alarmism, but now said the latest science showed the world was not warming where greenhouse theory said it most should - about 10km above the tropics.

"There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None."

http://business.theage.com.au/business/climate-science-is-never-settled-20080721-3ivh.html

Cities and even countries vie with one another to become carbon neutral; as a nation, we are contemplating emission controls, taxes and carbon-trading schemes that will have a profound effect on individual households and the national economy.

When linked with the other great crisis of our times — peak oil — it has become not only socially desirable to embrace all of this, but sustainability has achieved the status of a higher morality. It has become politically unacceptable to doubt any of the current dogma.

It is said that we are now beyond the science and that the science of global warming has been finalised or determined and that all scientists agree. Sceptics and deniers are simply cynical pawns in the pockets of the big oil companies. This is unfortunate.

Science is rarely determined or finalised. Science evolves and the huge complexity of climate science will certainly continue to evolve in the light of new facts, new experiences and new understandings.

For example, early in the 1900s, Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents were once joined up; their coastlines seemed to match, there appeared to be great rifts and tears in the continental fabric.

This view was ridiculed; how could the continents move? What possible force could transport the unimaginable mass of Africa or Australia hundreds and thousands of kilometres across the earth? Today, of course, plate tectonics is well understood. We know that continents move and we know the consequences.

Global warming seemed sewn up as well in the year 2000. Michael Mann's hockey-stick graph showed centuries of modest change culminating in an explosive temperature growth in recent decades, leading to terrifying projections of a climate out of control, with the sea rising to drown us all. Al Gore's apocalyptic images of tsunami-like flooding and dying polar bears brought global warming into every home.

Today, the hockey stick has gone. Its basic data was flawed and the statistical processes inadequate; it failed to describe known climate changes from the historically recorded past, so how could it be a reliable predictor? Although Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize, his celebrated documentary has been shown to be riddled with inaccuracies, distortions and misrepresentations; it cannot be shown in British schools without a comprehensive explanation of its mistakes and an acknowledgement that it is advocacy, not science.

We can afford to wait. There is no point in decimating our economy in the pursuit of carbon neutrality if carbon is not the main culprit or if the climate is now on a new trend.

Instead, now is the time to moderate the pseudo-religious and uncritical belief that global warming is still as we once thought it might have been.

Professor Geoffrey Kearsley is a geographer developing a program in environmental communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand.