The Person He Was Meant To Be

*



http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/8/19_Cognitive_Dissonance.html

Cognitive Dissodance

I must ask a very serious and urgent question of our media. Why do you continue to talk glibly about current climate ‘warming’ when it is now widely acknowledged that there has been no ‘global warming’ for the last ten years, a cooling trend that many think may continue for at least another ten years? How can you talk of the climate ‘warming’ when, on the key measures, it isn’t? And now a leading Mexican scientist is even predicting that we may enter another ‘Little Ice Age’ - a ‘pequeña era [edad] de hielo’.

Such media behaviour exhibits a classic condition known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. This is experienced when belief in a grand narrative persists blindly even when the facts in the real world begin to contradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, our media have come to have a vested interest in ‘global warming’, as have so many politicians and activists. They are terrified that the public may begin to question everything if climate is acknowledged, on air and in the press, not to be playing ball with their pet trope.

Cooling Period

But that is precisely what is happening. Since 1998, according to all the main world temperature records, including the UK Met Office’s ‘HadCRUT3’ data set [a globally-gridded product of near-surface temperatures consisting of annual differences from 1961-90 normals], the world average surface temperature has exhibited no warming whatsoever. Indeed, the trend has been a combination of flat-lining and cooling, with a particularly marked plunge over the last few months. Many parts of the world, including Canada, China, and the US, have just experienced their worst winter in years (as is currently Australia), while skiing in Scotland has benefited from the trend, and the summit of Snowdon carried snow even up to the end of April.

To put it simply, since 1998, there has been no ‘global warming’, despite the fact that, during this same period, atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise, from c. 368 ppm by volume in 1998 to c. 384 ppmv in November, 2007. Moreover, another ‘greenhouse gas’, methane, has also been rising, following a period of relative stability, by about 0.5% between 2006 and 2007.

Of course, little can be gleaned from a short data run of only 10-years, a fact, I might add, which ‘global warming’ fanatics have too often failed to stress. Nevertheless, recent work demonstrates that the Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for at least a further decade through the impact of a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). The cause of this oscillation, which is related to the currents that bring warmth from the tropics to Europe, is not well understood, but the cycle appears to have an effect every 60 to 70 years. It may well prove to be part of the explanation as to why global mean temperatures rose in the early years of the 20th Century, before then starting to cool again in the late-1940s. Thus, according to the new model, cooling remains on the cards for another ten years at least, making a potential 20 years of cooling in all.

Spotting Another Factor

But the sun isn’t playing ball either. The big question is: “What has happened to Solar Cycle 24?” Solar-cycle intensity is measured by the maximum number of sunspots. These are dark blotches on the Sun that mark areas of heightened magnetic activity. The more sunspots there are, the more likely it is that major solar storms will occur, and these are related to warming on Earth; the fewer the sunspots, the more likely there is to be cooling. The next 11-year cycle of solar storms [Solar Cycle 24] was predicted to have begun in autumn, 2006, but it appears to have been delayed. It was then expected to take off in March last year, and to peak in late-2011, or mid-2012. But the Sun remains largely spotless, except for an odd fading spot. This delayed onset has somewhat confused the official Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel, leaving them evenly split as to whether a weak or a strong period of solar storms now lies ahead.

However, some other scientists are deeply concerned, including Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, who comments: “Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.”

Chapman then explains why the absence of sunspots might exacerbate this cooling trend: “The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 [see picture] was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.”

Thus, all the immediate signs and portents are pointing in the direction of a cooling period, not a warming one.

Vested Interests

So, why are newspapers, magazines, radio, and television not telling us all this? Because they have invested so much effort over the last ten years in hyping up the exact opposite. Moreover, it is especially pathetic sophistry to claim, as dedicated ‘global warmers’ are wont to do, that ‘natural forces’ are having the temerity to “suppress” ‘global warming’. The fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor is as misguided as it gets.



There were soot covered camelias along the edge of Broadway, remants from some optimistic council worker who had tried to introduce beauty into a very unbeautiful spot. It didn't work. They were covered with black dust and the pollution of countless thousands of cars. He was immersed in his own despair, and could barely look up to see the story. The ragged, physically displaced concrete building, which just looked wrong, as if it had been cast sideways out of time and space, occupied the entire block.

After, when the Sun journalists slowly stopped coming to spend their days in that string of pubs, and the presses had gone west, a broken sign buzzed down the side of the concrete, speaking out in sadness. He couldn't have been more malfunctioning, taking kindness as weakness, keeping hidden his sore predilections, telling no one what happened after he logged off, after the bourbon took hold, after he left for the day. The secret rituals, the pained and expensive sources of comfort, the darkness that was at the heart of his soul, the cornered dysfunctions, the malpractice that was his brain, all of it came together in secret moments, in places he never shared.

These sole moment of lucidity, of rushes of pleasure, of feeling sane and integrated, a single person not a scattered soul, no longer a festival of voices and unresolved angers, obsessions that never went anywhere, producing cyclical, unhealthy preoccupations, all of it went in a single shattering moment of lucidity, a rush of warmth, of unity, even of pleasure. Suddenly God was in the fabric of everything, he could feel the prickling spirit moving through the garden, catching light in the tree, radiating upwards, outwards to the sky.

The tree that overshadowed his back garden at the back of his apartment in Darling Point, the giant jacaranda which became such a part of his life for so many years, leaned over and protected him. Ritual sadness. Ritual self-destruction. It became the only security he knew, the lost warmth, the tragic destiny, the path towards oblivion which would leave a trail of poetry and brilliance in its path. If it was possible to decipher the hieroglyphics he left behind, the snails trail of images, discordant, disconnected, making sense to almost no one.

Even he could not read his own writing a few days hence. So scattered had he become, so dislocated in his head, so out of touch with the normal functioning of mankind, that he had to take detailed notes on every story just to make sure he got it right. The door was blue. The ceiling grey. They had a moustache. She had blond hair. The children were three, five and ten. The car was maroon. The sun was setting. The trees formed skeletons against the sky. The wooden house, painted white, with a ramshackle fence and daisies in the garden. Everything, he took it all down, filling out note pad after note pad, and in the office, regurgitating too much data, caught by his own thought disordered way of operating.

Stories did come. The double shot of bourbon he always had before he began filing for the next day always helped. He looked at cars, searched every car yard within walking distance. Now he was a real journalist, a real person, now he had an identity as a reporter on the city's best newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, he needed to dress and act like a person of substance. He looked at a blue second hand BMW, and thought this might be the car of his dreams. Instead, after a while, he bought an old shiny green car EJ holden, registration RCK 542, and loved it. Everything came together. Everything was right. For once he did not think he was dying, a doomed tragedy on an awkward path, waiting for an embarrassed end, humiliated, dysfunctional, disconnected, sad to the core. He belted down another bourbon and laughed, this was everything he had ever wanted, finally he had become the person he was meant to be.



THE BIGGER STORY:

March 2 - March 4, 2008
Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel
1535 Broadway
New York City, NY U.S.A.

Joseph L. Bast
Conference Host
President, The Heartland Institute

Opening Remarks delivered Sunday, March 2, 2008

Welcome to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.

This is a truly historic event, the first international conference devoted to answering questions overlooked by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We’re asking questions such as:

how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?

how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?

how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and
is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

Obviously, these are important questions. Yet the IPCC pays little attention to them or hides the large amount of doubt and uncertainty surrounding them.

Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all. A 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found

82 percent said global warming is happening, but only

56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only

35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.

Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years.”

That’s a long ways from “consensus.” It’s actually pretty close to what the American public told pollsters for the Pew Trust in 2006:

70 percent thought global warming is happening,

only 41 percent thought it was due to human causes,

and only 19 percent thought it was a high-priority issue.
The alarmists think it’s a “paradox” that the more people learn about climate change, the less likely they are to consider it a serious problem. But as John Tierney with The New York Times points out in a blog posted just a day ago, maybe, just maybe, it’s because people are smart rather than stupid.

And incidentally, 70 percent of the public oppose raising gasoline prices by $1 to fight global warming, and 80 percent oppose a $2/gallon tax increase, according to a 2007 poll by The New York Times and CBS News.

I’ve got news for them: Reducing emissions by 60 to 80 percent, which is what the alarmists claim is necessary to “stop global warming,” would cost a lot more than $1 a gallon.

Al Gore, the United Nations, environmental groups, and too often the reporters who cover the climate change debate are the ones who are out of step with the real “consensus.” They claim to be certain that global warming is occurring, convinced it is due to human causes, and 100 percent confident we can predict future climates.

Who’s on the fringe of scientific consensus? The alarmists, or the skeptics?

These questions go to the heart of the issue: Is global warming a crisis, as we are so often told by media, politicians, and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural, and unstoppable, as we are told by many distinguished scientists?

Former Vice President Al Gore has said repeatedly that there is a “consensus” in favor of his alarmist views on global warming. And of course, he’s not alone.

Two weeks ago, Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, when told of our conference, said, “You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” (Denver Post, February 12, 2008).

RealClimate.org predicted that no real scientists would show up at this conference.

Well ...

We have with us, tonight and tomorrow, more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change, from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United States.

They come from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton, Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University.

From George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook, John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics.

From The University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

And from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I apologize if I left anyone out.

These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?

Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?

Hey RealClimate, can you hear us now?

These scientists and economists deserve to be heard. They have stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time.

And they must be heard, because the stakes are enormous.

George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined.”

It takes more than four Norwegian socialists to win a Pulitzer Prize, so I’ll put George Will’s Pulitzer Prize and his recent Bradley Prize up against Gore’s Nobel any day.

You’ve probably read some of the attacks that have appeared in the blogosphere and in print directed against this conference, and against The Heartland Institute. Let me repeat for the record here tonight what appears prominently on our Web site:

No corporate dollars were used to help finance this conference.

The Heartland Institute has 2,700 donors, and gets about 16 percent of its income from corporations.

Heartland gets less than 5 percent of its income from all energy-producing companies combined. We are 95 percent carbon free.

And let me further add to the record:

The honoraria paid to all of the speakers appearing at this conference add up to less than the honorarium Al Gore gets paid for making a single speech, and less than what his company makes selling fake carbon “off-sets” in a week.
It is no crime for a think tank or advocacy group to accept corporate funding. In fact, corporations that fail to step forward and assure that sensible voices are heard in this debate are doing their shareholders, and their countries, a grave disservice.


We’re not doing this for the money, obviously. The Heartland Institute is in the “skeptics” camp because we know alarmism is a tool that has been used by opponents of individual freedom and free enterprise since as early as 1798, when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with population growth.

We opposed global warming alarmism before we received any contributions from energy corporations and we’ll continue to address it after many of them have found ways to make a fast buck off the public hysteria.

We know which organizations are raking in millions of dollars a year in government and foundation grants to spread fear and false information about climate change. It’s not The Heartland Institute, and it’s not any of the 50-plus cosponsoring organizations that helped make this conference possible.

The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say--over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films. They have dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the views of many people. Some of them have even grown very rich in the process, and others still hope to.

But they have lost the debate.

Winners don’t exaggerate. Winners don’t lie. Winners don’t appeal to fear or resort to ad hominem attacks.

As George Will also wrote, “people only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”

We invited Al Gore to speak to us tonight, and even agreed to pay his $200,000 honorarium. He refused. We invited some of the well-known scientists associated with the alarmist camp, and they refused.

All we got are a few professional hecklers registered from Lyndon LaRouche, DeSmogBlog, and some other left-wing conspiracy groups. If you run into them over the course of the next two days, please be kind to them ... and call security if they aren’t kind to you.

Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always, everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.

No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to be true. Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are falsified by data that can be better explained by a different theory. And it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances, not by consensus.

The claim that global warming is a “crisis” is itself a theory. It can be falsified by scientific fact, just as the claim that there is a “consensus” that global warming is man-made and will be a catastrophe has been dis-proven by the fact that this conference is taking place.

Which reminds me ... the true believers at RealClimate are now praising an article posted on salon.com by Joseph Romm--a guy who sells solar panels for a living, by the way--saying “‘consensus’? We never claimed there was a ‘consensus’!”

And notorious alarmist John Holdren a couple weeks ago said “‘global warming’? We never meant ‘global warming.’ We meant “‘global climate disruption’!”

I’d say this was a sign of victory, but that would suggest their words and opinions matter. It’s too late to move the goal posts, guys. You’ve already lost.

It is my hope, and the reason The Heartland Institute organized this conference, that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of people, in the U.S. and also around the world, will not be passed into law before the fake “consensus” on global warming collapses.

Once passed, taxes and regulations are often hard to repeal. Once lost, freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve.



River gums on the edge of the Darling River, far western NSW, Australia. Due to dry conditions, the river has stopped flowing, again.

No nirvana, no relief, no destiny, no apocalypse

*




I dreamt of satori a sudden crystal wherein civilisation was
seen
more truly than with cameras but it was your world not ours
yours is a glut of martyrs money and carbon monoxide
I dreamt of next week perhaps then we would eat again sleep
in a house again
perhaps we would wake to find humanity where at present
freedom is obsolete and honour a heresy. Innocently
I dreamt that madness passes like a dream.
Michael Dransfield


http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20080303154249.aspx

I think the question you’re asking is who’s behind the scare. There’s been a long history of scares recently and scientific frauds of various kinds. It began, I suppose, with the eugenics movement in the 1930s which led to Hitler. It followed on with the Lysenko movement in Russia under Stalin. It went on with the great leap back under Chairman Mao which led again to tens of millions of deaths. The point you’re making is that this kills people if you get the science wrong.

You sell far more papers by saying, ‘Gee, wow – World to End; Shock; Sensation’ than you do by saying ‘Climate Continues to be Changeable,’ which is the truth. So where the media is largely closed on this, but the courts are not and that is the place where if you go and make a reasoned argument based on the science, you can always beat the other side, because their science – and we heard it over and over again today – is simply incorrect.

Now here we are once again with another scare. It’s the same people behind it. It’s the international left. It’s the media wanting a scare story. … It’s not so much a conspiracy I think, as a coincidence of outer interests who is set to take and advance their causes collectively by getting behind this nonsense.

They’ve got the science wrong and it will gradually penetrate to the general public that they have got the science wrong and once the penny drops – that will be the end of this scare too. We’re not far away from it now.
Lord Christopher Monkton



There was the smell of ink and the eiry rustle of paper, scraps of newspaper floating in the wind, the dock empty now, the shouts of men, the roar of the trucks, the thump of the loads as they hit the tray, it was all gone. He was in an ethereal place. Everything he did was in the abstract. The headlines rolled down the street with the random sheets, business man exposed, worst winter in 12 years, Ronald Reagan in hospital, a generation at risk. He was at risk, he could feel it, the erosion of time, the lack of peace, the constant tension. No one was going to save him, no one.

This sense of abandonment haunted him throughout his 30s and 40s. Where were they all gone? Why had the party stopped? How had he been so badly betrayed? What was once an adventure settled into a steady, shameful, overwhelming decay. It reflected everywhere, in the sweaty smell of his clothes, in the dank feel of his skin, in the condescending smiles as he became just another management issue, another alcoholic journalist. For years nothing was written without a double shot of bourbon. He would time himself some days. It would take him 12 minutes to get from his desk, down the lift, across the six lane highway, order a double bourbon and coke, down it and be back at his desk, waiting for the words to flow.

He remembered, always, the day when he entered the mainstream, those days when he went from hapless outsider knocking on the gates, a hapless outsider whose drug and alcohol consumption made him an unlikely candidate for success. He became even more silent. Nothing was given away. He would awake on the cold floor of remote public toilets, his car still idling and its door still open outside. He passed out, it seemed, wherever it was possible to pass out, frightened of success, they said, determined to failure. And it was failure that wreathed his every move, his every expression, his every word.

There wasn't going to be a happy ending, of that he was certain. Cold rafts of icy water spilled down through the grey stone steps, the depths hazy with lichen and the smell of decay, the bracing freshness of the water concealing the darkness that lay in the back of the cave. Oh rescue me, rescue me, he pleaded with no one as he crossed the traffic, dodging cars and breathing in pollution that was killing his lungs. He smoked. He drank. He joined in the eternal party. And they smiled knowingly as they pored him another drink, those quaint old queens behind the Australia Street Hotel.

Sometimes he would join the old guard, who, except on special occasions or free drinks on offer elsewhere, gathered each lunchtime for silver side and white sauce and beer after beer, flowing into the scotch. For months after the closure of The Sun the old warriors, journalists and subs who had drunk in the string of pubs down Broadway, that dreary pollution stained stretch of Sydney, the endlessly flowing artery that opened up to the even greater dreariness of the west, lost souls suffering the retirement they never sought would show up for long drinking sessons along the strip. He watched them with fascination and awe, these old men who knew the media industry inside out. Life was crimped, contained. He said nothing in case he made a mistake. He sat in groups, silently drinking, only answering when spoken to.

He gave nothing away, and nothing was given. This was the planet surface and these were his dying days. He could feel his spirit decaying by the day, dying under the weight of the alcohol, unable to stop. It was a brutal drug to be addicted to, and increasingly he was. They shouted, hey soldier, hey Stapo, his nickname, and nothing mattered as these shouts, far above the surface, never reached him. The world's not going to end today, people said, when they saw his long face. He grimaced what was meant to be a smile, and grew even more silent. They weren't struggling everyday to survive, not to die. They were born naturally happy, and he never was.

The world had been ending throughout his childhood, the coming apocalypse and the second coming inching closer by the day. But before paradise, before God remade the world, before he stepped in and saved the believers, he was to make mankind suffer with pestilence and disease, his wrath would wreak havoc amongst the non-believers, teach humanity an unambiguous lesson they could never forget. And yet in all this, the days kept coming afresh. He woke up each morning and the world had not ended. No matter how drunk he got he woke up the next day. No matter how bad the hangovers, he had to go to work. No matter how wicked the nights, how troublesome the orgies or crazy the person he woke up with was, he still came to consciousness in the frightening glare of morning, he still showered and dressed and started again. There was no nirvana, no relief, no destiny fulfilled, and certainly, no apocalypse. Was Revelation wrong after all, or had they just misinterpreted the timing?



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/scientist-predicts-ice-age-within-10-years.html

As evidence builds of the earth entering a dramatic cooling trend, another scientist has gone public with his conviction that we are about to enter a new ice age, rendering warnings about global warming fraudulent and irrelevant.

Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico states that “In about ten years the Earth will enter a “little ice age” which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity,” according to a report in the major Mexican newspaper Milenio Diario.

Herrera slammed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) stance on global warming as “erroneous” because of their failure to factor in the impact of solar activity.

The models and forecasts of the IPCC “is incorrect because only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity,” said Herrera.

Herrera states that the earth is entering a natural phase of climate transition during which solar activity will diminish considerably, “so that in two years or so, there will be a small ice age that lasts from 60 to 80 years.”

Herrera cited the growth in glaciers observed at the Andes, Perito Moreno, Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, and Franz-Josef Glacier, New Zealand.

A dramatic cooling trend is being observed across the planet even as people like Al Gore continue to claim that the threat of global warming mandates the poor and middle class be hit with CO2 taxes in order to prevent climate change.

Both anecdotal evidence and hard data indicates that the planet is in the beginning stages of a significant downturn in global temperatures.

Following the end of the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/arctic-ice-grows-30-per-cent-in-a-year.html

Alarmist scientists who predicted that the North Pole could be “ice free” this summer as a result of global warming have been embarrassed after it was revealed that Arctic ice has actually grown by around 30 per cent in the year since August 2007.

Back in June, numerous prominent voices in the scientific community expressed fears of a mass melting of the polar ice caps, including David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, who told National Geographic Magazine, “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history].”

“This summer’s forecast—and unusual early melting events all around the Arctic—serve as a dire warning of how quickly the polar regions are being affected by climate change,” adds the article.

In February, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, told Xinhua, “If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions.”

As per usual, the reality has failed to match the hype of the climate doomsayers.

According to collated data from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Illinois, Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater on August 11, 2008 than it was on the August 12, 2007. This is a conservative estimate based on the map projection.

But what of the Antarctic down south? Figures tell us that ice coverage in the year since August 2007 has grown by nearly one million square kilometers.

As The Register article notes, “The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn’t even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss.”

A general cooling trend across the planet is now clearly apparent as sunspot activity, the main driver of climate change, dwindles to almost nothing.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2008/20080303175301.aspx
Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/5/2008 9:00:18 AM

The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.

Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”

The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the “scare” of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.


Mural, Redfern Station, Sydney, Australia.

The Smell Of Ink The Sound Of The Presses

*



THE LAST OF HIS TRIBE

He crouches, and buries his face on his knees,
And hides in the dark of his hair;
For he cannot look up to the storm-smitten trees,
Or think of the loneliness there --
Of the loss and the loneliness there.

The wallaroos grope through the tufts of the grass,
And turn to their coverts for fear;
But he sits in the ashes and lets them pass
Where the boomerangs sleep with the spear --
With the nullah, the sling and the spear.

Uloola, behold him! The thunder that breaks
On the tops of the rocks with the rain,
And the wind which drives up with the salt of the lakes,
Have made him a hunter again --
A hunter and fisher again.

For his eyes have been full with a smouldering thought;
But he dreams of the hunts of yore,
And of foes that he sought, and of fights that he fought
With those who will battle no more --
Who will go to the battle no more.

It is well that the water which tumbles and fills,
Goes moaning and moaning along;
For an echo rolls out from the sides of the hills,
And he starts at a wonderful song --
At the sound of a wonderful song.

And he sees, through the rents of the scattering fogs,
The corroboree warlike and grim,
And the lubra who sat by the fire on the logs,
To watch, like a mourner, for him --
Like a mother and mourner for him.

Will he go in his sleep from these desolate lands,
Like a chief, to the rest of his race,
With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,
And gleams like a dream in his face --
Like a marvellous dream in his face.

Henry Kendall.



If in memory, in those dark streets. It was his time in jail, he often thought that, as he crossed the six lanes of ceaseless traffic that was Broadway in Sydney. This Broadway had none of the glamour of its American counterpart; and all was lost, lost, as he gazed up at that misshapen concrete building and knew he was an insect in a strange land, that he would be lucky to make it through the day. When he first started work there the printers were still downstairs, and the whole building shuddered as they started up in the late afternoons. The place smelled of ink and when he arrived for work on a Sunday morning the docks were full of drifting paper and the chaos left over from loading hundreds of thousands of papers.

It all changed. Technology changed not just the nature of journalism and the nature of newspapers, but the nature of the buildings themselves. Once they were self contained factories, with management on top, editorial in the middle, and production downstairs. There was a sense of creating something, or making something, which is lost now when fingers fly across the keyboards and send buttons transmit whole newspapers down the line to printing facilities suburbs away; sometimes even half a continent away. The smell of ink no longer permeates newspapers.

And with instant communication via computers, the offices are no longer creative firments full of people shouting and smoking at their desks. Oh how celebrated we were. In a tiny town in a tiny place, in a city of barely four million people, in what was virtually a one newspaper town; if you were looking at the quality end of the market. There was The Sydney Morning Herald and then there were the tabloids. He had come with a sniffy upper air, thinking the tabloids were for peasants and real art, real intellectual endeavour, only took place on the broadsheets.

But over time he learnt to differ. When he first went on staff at Fairfax in the mid 1980s perhaps Sydney's most famous tabloid of all, The Sun, was in its final throws, eventually closing in 1987. The Sun was an evening newspaper, a tradition now lost, and when he arrived to begin work at the SMH the old soldiers from The Sun were just winding up their shift, and soon would be decorating the surrounding pubs, where journalistic legends finished their days in what was everyone else's morning with that great tradition of the era, getting plastered.

He watched in awe as the ancient subs finished off the edition, working and joking, excited, at last, to be inside the citadel. And citadel it truly had been. He had knocked so often, had tried so hard. And then one day, the old trick worked. I've just got back from overseas and I'm looking for work. It was true, he had just got back from overseas and he was looking for work, but that was hardly unusual. But this time, with a great deal of assistance, it worked. Thomas Little, the editor of the weekend features edition, started to give him assignments. And recommended him to the hierarchy.

And finally, after months of casual shifts, they reached across the news desk and said: congratulations, you've got the job. It was the same day he got his first front page, thanks to a picture of a cute young woman in overalls and a story on women in unusual jobs, and, that terrible old cliché, he thought his heart would burst, he was so dammed proud. In those days, sadly no longer, The Sydney Morning Herald was regularly listed as one of the Top 20 newspapers in the world, and to have arrived there after so many attempts, after so many years of eking out a living as a freelancer, was indeed an achievement.

Now the Sydney Morning Herald is on strike, and yet another purge, perhaps the purge of purges that Stalin was preparing before his curious death, is being enacted. It has been a sick, dysfunctional and unhappy institution for years now, and its many failures are clear for anyone to read. It's eternally soft left non-questioning and unauthoritative coverage has betrayed its readers, its focus on wealth and lifestyle at odds with its eternally platitudinous greener than green ideology, and it tells people now exactly what they want to hear; and pitches its coverage at the Turramurra doctors wives. It's a sad relic of its former self, when layers of old men, legendary journalists, legendary drunks, made the paper great.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/29/2350333.htm

It was an angry scene outside the Sydney Morning Herald's headquarters this morning.

Fairfax journalists across Australia are on strike until Monday in protest at the company's plans to cut 550 jobs from its operations in Australia and New Zealand.

The Sydney journalists were told of another big-name casualty in their fight against the latest round of job cuts announced by the company this week - prominent broadcaster and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton.

The crowd was told that Carlton had announced on air this morning that he was not filing his column for the Herald tomorrow because the journalists were on strike.

But cheers from the crowd turned to boos when they were told that the minute Carlton got off air, he took a call from Phil McLean, one of the senior executives of Fairfax, who sacked him.

The crowd was told Mr McLean asked Carlton where his column was and when Carlton replied that the journalists were on strike and that he was not filing it, he was told the paper didn't want one of his columns ever again.

Sydney Morning Herald journalist Ruth Pollard says the job losses will erode journalistic quality.

"The Sydney Morning Herald and the other newspapers that Fairfax covers are part of people's everyday life," she said.

"People rely on us to tell them what is happening in their community, to tell them what is happening in business and government.

"We are not going to have the opportunity to do that if they cut a third of the staff."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24258094-30541,00.html

UNTIL today, the most significant aspect of the job cuts at Fairfax Media have been overlooked.

The destruction of that company's in-house legal unit in Sydney -- and the departure of top media lawyer Mark Polden -- speaks volumes about the new Fairfax.

Unless the legal unit is replaced, Fairfax must be planning to outsource its legal advice on defamation, contempt and other aspects of media law.

There are two possible reasons for doing this: Fairfax might want to dramatically increase its legal bill, or it might believe it won't need as much legal advice.

It seems safe to assume that Fairfax is not attracted to the idea of spending more money. So that suggests the group believes its demand for legal advice is about to fall.

There are another two possible reasons for that: it might be planning to rely on the legal knowledge of its senior staff, or it might be planning to reduce the number of contentious stories in the group's Sydney papers. There might also be a combination of the two.

Such a system provides a strong incentive for the type of journalism that is unlikely to trouble anyone.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24264739-2702,00.html

JOHN B. Fairfax paid more than $4 a share earlier this year to take control of his family's birthright.

When he bought 212 million shares in the company that bears his name, Fairfax Media, it was a bullish vote of confidence in the future of Australia's oldest newspaper company.

But within months, that optimistic picture for the owner of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review had turned sour. Fairfax took a paper loss of $300 million on his family's stake after the company's share price fell, at one point, to an 11-year low of $2.64.

Something had to give. Yesterday, Fairfax Media journalists were on strike and old friends were engaged in hostile exchanges at picket lines outside the company's Sydney and Melbourne headquarters.

On Tuesday, using the Orwellian title "Business Improvement Program," Fairfax chief executive David Kirk and deputy Brian McCarthy said they would cut 550 jobs to save $50 million a year.

Almost a third of these staff losses, or 165 jobs, were to come from the ranks of journalists.

Fairfax journalists refuse to accept the company's edict, declaring that standards will be badly compromised if management's plans proceed, and are on strike until Monday. They are talking about a war of attrition, if necessary, to uphold a culture of journalism they value dearly.

It was the dominant shareholder, John B. Fairfax, and his right-hand man, McCarthy, who drove the cuts. McCarthy has an enduring relationship with Mr Fairfax, having been his main manager at regional newspaper group Rural Press, the company he had controlled. It was famed for its cost-cutting, and ability to run local newspapers with tiny journalistic teams.

Over the past year, McCarthy had been asking increasingly difficult questions about why things could not be done more cheaply at Fairfax as well. When the company's Australian metropolitan newspapers last week revealed a 9 per cent fall in profit, McCarthy's moment had arrived.

It was time to roll out a program of significant job shedding dubbed by the staff as "the new McCarthyism".

For Fairfax, the crisis escalated yesterday with the sacking of Mike Carlton, one of the SMH's most high-profile columnists, after he refused to send his regular article for Saturday's strike edition.

Two days earlier, The Age's editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, was sacked without warning.



Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.

Cast Amongst The Believers

*



Climate alarmist theory has collapsed’ - Compares Climate Models to the Nigerian e-mail scams

By Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters.

Dr. Alexander’s Key Quote: “I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account. These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs.”

Excerpt: These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Remaining silent is a deliberate decision for which they can be held accountable. Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs). To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.

This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago. I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account. These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.

Environmental terrorism

by Will Alexander

We are now witnessing the descent from climate alarmism, to extremism, to terrorism. The predicted flooding of parts of Cape Town is an example. The public are not easily fooled.

Sunday Times letters to the editor

“Your story that the Cape coastline would disappear in 25 years, would cause alarm and despondency here in Cape Town, but for two things. Firstly, the writer is better known for his political satire and secondly, the study appears to have been written with the help of the South African Weather Bureau, notorious for giving the wrong weather forecasts for the Cape. Is this perhaps the trial run for next year’s April Fool’s day?”

“I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle.”
Credibility

While the globe was still warming and environmentalist claims were modest, the IPCC’s case was impregnable. In these modern times the environmentalists fed the media with scare stories in order to advance their cause. The media in turn had little interest in repeating the same warnings month after month. So, climate alarmists were forced to increase the level of alarmism. Environmental terrorism is the result.

Examples are the fraudulent predictions of the destruction of the animals and butterflies of the Kruger National Park, and the imminent loss of our Proteas (South Africa) and Quiver Trees (Namibia) as a result of climate change. These claims are included in the IPCC’s reports where they were accepted without question by the gullible advisory panels.

The latest example is the direct threat to the habitability of South Africa’s coastal areas including flooding of the Cape Town harbour area and the Peninsula towns by a 20 m rise in sea level and two storey high waves. This time even the media were sceptical. A cartoonist in East London’s Daily Despatch illustrated the public reaction in his cartoon. An interesting comment elsewhere is that Bloemfontein is considering appointing a harbourmaster!

These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Remaining silent is a deliberate decision for which they can be held accountable.
The basic problem goes much deeper. The following is the sequence that drives climate alarmism at both international and national levels.

1.Undesirable emissions (principally carbon dioxide) are discharged into the atmosphere.
2.The emissions create the greenhouse effect.
3.The globe warms as a consequence.
4.The warming results in a number of undesirable effects, including increases in floods, droughts, desertification, and threats to our unique plant and animal species.
5.These pose threats to the habitability of our planet.
Search for proof

Our concern is in Step 5. The direct causes are in Step 4. Where then, should we concentrate our search for evidence? The obvious answer lies in Step 4. Therein lies the proof of the pudding.

If no evidence of adverse consequences can be found in Step 4 then the whole IPCC edifice must collapse. This investigation requires a sound knowledge of the natural, multiyear variability of these processes before changes can be attributed to human activities. This is where I concentrated my efforts during the past 30 years. Despite a diligent study I could find no such evidence.

Unexpected confirmation is in Step 3. Global warming ceased 10 years ago. The globe is now starting to cool.

The vultures are already feasting on the IPCC carcass. At present they are concentrating on Step 2 - the greenhouse effect. The IPCC scientists obviously made a serious mistake when linking increasing carbon dioxide emissions with increasing global temperatures. What is it? What is interesting, is that just as in the real world, these vultures are already squabbling over several alternative reasons for the failure. The alarmists no longer have a case.
Failure of alarmism

Climate is a regional (1), multiyear (2), multi-process (3) phenomenon. Also, in the case of environmental processes, causality (4), has to be demonstrated (5), by concurrent changes (6) in the driving processes (7), typically rainfall (8) and to a lesser extent, temperature (9).

Claims based on observations over a period of less than 30 years, that a single plant or animal species is under stress in a single district, without numerical evidence of concurrent changes in rainfall and temperature, is altogether inadequate proof of climate changes in the wider region. Yet this is the basis for the alarmist claims in the IPCC reports. I have not seen a single report on regional, concurrent, multiyear, multi-process analyses. Our joint paper on this subject is a world first.
Where did they go wrong?

Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs).

To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.

This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago.

I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account.

These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.

There was a time in my life when spreading alarm and despondency was a punishable offence. Cowardice in the face of the enemy could result in facing a firing squad. I swore an oath of allegiance to my country. Today there are no such legal or moral standards.
Prediction

All the signs point to the failure of the Accra conference to reach a meaningful conclusion. There has been no mention of this conference at all in the South African news media. The gaps are widening on several fronts. I believe that the future existence of the IPCC is under threat. We should have the verdict by the end of this week.

This whole climate change issue is about making sacrifices to avoid serious global consequences. But sacrifices will not fall evenly between the rich and poor nations. Now global cooling has cast serious doubts regarding the effectiveness of any sacrifices. The combination of the two makes a substantial agreement increasingly unlikely.


http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/4648



Cast amongst the unbelievers, the long discussions with the priests had been excruciating. It had caused great concern in the family, particularly with his mother, that as he turned 13 he began to express doubts. Their family had been ridden with the deep fears and insecurities that came with fundamentalist Christianity; and had swallowed whole the propaganda from the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W Armstrong and Garner Ted Armstrong. They had been blessed by God, and told the truth, here at the end time. The bottles of stored water mounted in the cupboards. And all was lost, lost, when he couldn't reconcile his own stirrings with the strict proscriptions being hailed down upon them.

Was he really going to go to hell? For what exactly? Why was God so unmerciful, so cruel. Why didn't he care about those he was condemning to death. He wrote his first major poem, about this fearful God and the queues of the condemned. They snaked out through stone pillars and under arching stone walls, they spilled down mythical steps and they kept on coming, hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses. Oh if only they had been good, instead of being here, facing their destiny, their death, their judgement.

Was he really going to die, just like them, just because he had the precocity to doubt. Just because he demanded to be convinced. Just because God didn't make sense to him any more, in his young, adolescent, longing brain. He didn't want to go the church on Saturday's any more. Saturday was yet another point of difference with the mainstream churches. They had chosen Sunday, the Roman day for worshipping the Sun God, and had betrayed the Lord. All around them was corruption. Mini-skirts were creating headlines. The Rolling Stones really were of the devil, even worse than the Beatles. Licentiousness surrounded them.

He would be beaten, yet again, until crying and shivering from the pain, he would be forced into a suit. He would sit in the back of the car, silent, tearful, the welts stinging on his legs and on his back, inside a gale of tears and regret, unable to see any way out of this living nightmare that was his life. He hated the suit he had been forced to wear. He hated his parents, who kept beating him so badly, all because he didn't want to go to church. And he hated God, for being such a fascist, forcing him to believe when he just didn't want to. Why so cruel? What did he care whether he believed or not?

But the belts snaked out until he was forced, literally forced, to recant and don the suit and get in their Holden, and sit in the back with those storms of tears inside him, and watch sadly, sullenly, as the brick green and red colours of the suburbs flowed by, as they exited their narrow winding street with its demonic trees and eternal rusting, its sandstone caves and the heat filled secrets of the bush. The only time he began to rally was when the suburbs became the city, and his interest sparked up. What would it be like to live here, or here, what was it like behind that door, or that one, were they happy?

And after the beatings and the long drive and an insanely boring service, where Ezekiel and Isaiah and a thousand other ancient horrors thundered from the pulpit of the Petersham Town Hall, after the thunderous virtues and the neatly dressed families sitting ram rod strait, their hair combed and their ears clean, after it all his concerned mother would drag him around for a special conference with the priest. He was excruciatingly embarrassed. What business of anyone's were his own myriad doubts?

He sat there and had what he thought were relatively advanced theological discussions, where he set out to prove that God did not make sense, that he shouldn't be imposing all this suffering on mankind, that if he really was a kind and compassionate and all knowing being he wouldn't be inflicting all this pain. The priest quoted scripture, and together with the priest, in a back room of the town hall, the family knelt and prayed for his salvation, for him to be rescued from evil thoughts, from doubt, from the wider world.

He didn't want to be rescued from evil thoughts. He wanted to escape the nightmare that was his life; the beatings, the brutality, the overwhelming despair, the gusts of emotion that crippled him. It was here in these painful days that he developed the philosophy that was to live with him throughout much of his adult life: he didn't want to feel anything at all, because to feel anything was to be hurt.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://wdwnewsletter.com/2008/08/27/disneys-new-hannah-montana-album-features-global-warming-anthem/

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, are big fans of Hannah Montana – and maybe there’s a reason why. Teen star Miley Cyrus, known as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel TV series television of the same name, is now crusading for global warming alarmism. But she admits she isn’t really sure what it means. Disney also owns ABC, a network that often hypes climate change alarmism. On the 15-year-old singer’s recently released album “Breakout,” she sings that she wants America to wake up and deal with global warming. The song, “Wake Up America” is about taking care of the earth:

Oh, can you take care of her
Oh, maybe you can spare her

Several moments of your consideration
Leading up to the final destination

Oh, the earth is calling out,
I wanna learn what it’s all about,
But everything I read – global warming, going green
I don’t know what all this means, but it seems to be saying

Wake up, America, we’re all in this together
It’s our home so let’s take care of it
You know that you want to
You know that you got to wake up, America
Tomorrow becomes a new day and everything you do
Matters, yeah, everything you do matters in some way

Cyrus is one of the current jewels in the Disney crown. But she isn’t alone. Disney purchased ABC in 1995, but the network recently has acquired a taste for global warming coverage.

The network’s weatherman Sam Champion and reporter Bill Blakemore are two of the consistent voices for hyping the issue. A recent Business & Media Institute study of media climate coverage highlighted a particular low in the network’s reporting. The ugliest treatment of a climate skeptic during the study period came from ABC’s Bill Weir on Nov. 18, 2007, “Good Morning America.” He was interviewing Democratic state representative Jim Gooch from Kentucky.

http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=73452

The only way the U.S. energy problem can be solved is to remove the obstacles that caused it. The taxation, regulation, litigation and tax subsidies that government has placed on the back of the American energy industry must be repealed. Free men with private capital in a free market will then be able to build the energy industry we need. Similar action should be taken for our other industries.

As the cost of energy rises, as imported energy becomes a luxury, and as American prosperity falls, the American people are going to become very unhappy. Current fuel prices are only a taste of the inevitable privations that are coming.

There is only one, simple, central question in the energy debate: As their suffering increases, will the American people realize that their diminishing prosperity is the direct result of the taxation, regulation and litigation their government has created?

Will American voters throw out the politicians who are still creating more of this tyranny and replace them with representatives who will repeal the laws that are impoverishing them?

If they do, if they restore the fundamental human right of freedom to produce to the American people, the needed U.S. energy capacity can be built in record time – without the expenditure of a single dollar of tax money.

If, on the other hand, Americans are convinced by the demagoguery of self-interested politicians who urge them to hate industrial producers such as oil companies, use tax money for useless and wasteful schemes such as the ethanol debacle, and blame their troubles on essential free market institutions such as commodity markets –

If they allow continued oppressive regulation of energy producers, continued regulatory prevention of nuclear power plant construction and of oil and gas exploration and development –

If they allow the dead hand of government to continue to drive industry away from the United States –

Then the great experiment in human freedom begun in the United States more than two centuries ago is over.

As our human right to produce dies, killed by the dead hand of government tyranny, so will die the prosperity and remaining freedom of our country.

Winston Churchill said that Americans always do the right thing – after they have tried everything else first. In allowing our politicians to stifle American industry for more than 30 years with tyrannical taxation, regulation and litigation, we have completed the "everything else."

It is now time for us to do the right thing.

http://www.stillwater-newspress.com/local/local_story_239112827.html

Go slow on climate control

State group says economic costs will be too high
Jacob Longan - NewsPress

Americans For Prosperity is an organization that says it is non-partisan and non-political but admits to having a conservative message.

That message was on display Monday when the group held a forum called “Beating Climate Alarmism: Cost is the Key” at the Stillwater Community Center.

The group was represented by Stuart Jolly and Pam Pollard, the state director and associate state director.

Also speaking was U.S. Rep. Frank Lucas, a Republican who represents Oklahoma’s Third District.

The forum was about what AFP calls the “dangerous” Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act. The Senate bill introduced by Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., is designed to reduce carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system that would set a limit on the emissions of a company with businesses that are going to exceed their limit able to buy more credits on Wall Street.

Pollard said the point of the forum was to explain the issue in a way people could understand.

Her first complaint was with the name of the act.

“Anything that has to do with security we immediately think about national security, 9/11, oh my goodness, that’s something we have to do!” Pollard said. “I personally take offense to that and think they are trying to deceive the average voter who doesn’t have the ability — may not be connected into all the blogs, all the networks to get this information.”

Jolly called it a hidden tax as increased costs will be passed on to consumers.

The presentation showed estimates for how the law would affect Oklahoma by 2020 if it were passed. It estimated 21,000 job losses, disposable incomes dropping $2,625, energy prices rising 147 percent, etc.

“Climate hysteria is the biggest threat to freedom and prosperity in the United States right now,” Jolly said. “Legislators around the country are passing laws based on global warming and it is getting worse.”

He said he would not debate the science of global warming but added, “They are increasing taxes based on data that may not be true.”

Lucas took a similar position.

“The bottom line remains, before you embark on something as aggressive as cap and trade, you need to make sure the facts are accurate, you need to know the goals you intend to achieve actually will do something positive and then you’ve got to do one other little thing,” Lucas said. “You’ve got to make sure the whole world plays by the same rules. Right now, that’s not the case. That’s absolutely not the case.”

He added, “Pretend for a moment that the global warming advocates are completely right. Pretend for a moment that the concept of cap-and-trade is right. It should frighten you that the bureaucratic federal government would set down and allocate among the various industries, various sections of the country, who got to use energy and who did not and that the federal government would decide who would pay for the privilege of using more energy and how the money would be transferred between various parts of the country.”



Countryside near Dungog, NSW, Australia.

A Shiver Looking For A Spine

*



So Clancy rode to wheel them -- he was racing on the wing
Where the best and boldest riders take their place,
And he raced his stock-horse past them, and he made the ranges ring
With the stockwhip, as he met them face to face.
Then they halted for a moment, while he swung the dreaded lash,
But they saw their well-loved mountain full in view,
And they charged beneath the stockwhip with a sharp and sudden dash,
And off into the mountain scrub they flew.

Then fast the horsemen followed, where the gorges deep and black
Resounded to the thunder of their tread,
And the stockwhips woke the echoes, and they fiercely answered back
From cliffs and crags that beetled overhead.
And upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way,
Where mountain ash and kurrajong grew wide;
And the old man muttered fiercely, "We may bid the mob good day,
No man can hold them down the other side."

When they reached the mountain's summit, even Clancy took a pull,
It well might make the boldest hold their breath,
The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full
Of wombat holes, and any slip was death.
But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,
And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,
While the others stood and watched in very fear.

He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet,
He cleared the fallen timber in his stride,
And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat --
It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.
Through the stringy barks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground,
Down the hillside at a racing pace he went;
And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound,
At the bottom of that terrible descent.

He was right among the horses as they climbed the further hill,
And the watchers on the mountain standing mute,
Saw him ply the stockwhip fiercely, he was right among them still,
As he raced across the clearing in pursuit.
Then they lost him for a moment, where two mountain gullies met
In the ranges, but a final glimpse reveals
On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet,
With the man from Snowy River at their heels.

And he ran them single-handed till their sides were white with foam.
He followed like a bloodhound on their track,
Till they halted cowed and beaten, then he turned their heads for home,
And alone and unassisted brought them back.
But his hardy mountain pony he could scarcely raise a trot,
He was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur;
But his pluck was still undaunted, and his courage fiery hot,
For never yet was mountain horse a cur.

And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
And where around the Overflow the reedbeds sweep and sway
To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,
The man from Snowy River is a household word to-day,
And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.
Banjo Patterson, The Man From Snow River




How was that then that nothing worked, that strange misshapen plasma kept shooting from his skull, that his heart sank and his belly despaired, and all was lost as he went about his daily duties. All day the leaden aquarium that was the air kept crushing down on him, as if born beneath mercury seas. Nothing made sense. All sound was distorted. Light came through in shafts of grey and sickly green. He couldn't have felt worse if he had spent a century plotting to achieve this finely calibrated despair. Oh how cruel you are, he shrugged, grinning madly through broken teeth.

We all grew up, or grew old, with the former Prime Minister Paul Keating preening through our lives. Women adored him, he cut a fine figure in a suit. Perhaps their ardent, pseudo-intellectual desires were misplaced. Mr Keating, Mr Keating, I'm an academic from Sydney University and I agree with everything you say; they chanted at endless, pointless symposiums and forums at the National Library, or some other tax payer funded institution. There was no doubt he had the gift of the gab. Wind him up and away he would go, a string of impressive sounding words. Women loved him. Men watched him with raised eyebrows, cynicism or outright dislike.

He was astonishingly arrogant, of that there was little doubt. He was admired for his invective. "You're nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up. I'd put him in the same class as the rest of them: mediocrity. We're not interested in the views of painted, perfumed gigolos. I was nearly chloroformed by the performance of the Honorable Member for Mackellar. It nearly put me right out for the afternoon. Brain damaged...gutless spivs." He spent years stalking the corridors of Canberra in a Spegna suit, undermining Bob Hawke, perhaps the best Prime Minister we had had, certainly the most popular, for many a year. When he finally undermined him, and knocked the old rooster off his perch, he didn't know what to do when he got there.

He was like many ambitious people. Once they arrive at that place they fought so hard to get, they don't know what to do. Their raison d'etre, their purpose or being, has gone; and they sit in their grand offices with their fabulous views, their drivers, their secretaries, all paid for by the sweat of ordinary working people, and in their vast, vacant days they have no idea how to behave. The former Prime Minister had rung him once, unhappy over a story. It had been a conference on town planning, which although he had left school when he was 15 Keating regarded himself as an expert at. Simply because he adored Paris and the great boulevardes of Europe. Er, who didn't want to wander down the Champs de L'see?

It was to a captive audience of Keating adorers, town planners and council heavy weights, all sucking on the public tit. How could a person on a mere $100,000 a year resist the blandishments of developers, he asked. Considering the average wage in Australia is around $50,000, perhaps by acting like everyone else, perhaps by showing a shred of integrity, decency, honesty. But that's by the by. He was, as usual, pouring invective on everyone in range, the then Prime Minister John Howard, the man he appeared to hate most in the world, the man who had his job. Journalists, oh how he loved to pour out his contempt for journalists.

I'll speak to them last, he declared. Yet they were the only ones in the room working for a living that day, and he was determined to treat them with the contempt he seemed to think was their due. And then wondered why he got such poor coverage. His astonishing arrogance was in full flight. He poured contempt on the town planners, on the council system, which he declared had derived from the rotten borough system of the English, and on those brutal neanderthals, developers, brigands who build things, he called them.

He wrote this up in a straight newspaper report; and the result made Keating look like an abusive malcontent who still couldn't get over the fact the Australian people had tossed him out of office. And then, at ten to five, filing time, a week later, came this soft, sibilant voice on the phone. Why did you write such a nasty story about me? Keating asked. I didn't write a nasty story about you, he responded, it was just a straight news report. Let me take you through the points, he said. As if the world didn't know, you don't ring a journalist at five o'clock, they're filing for the next day. His fingers rested, itching on the keyboard. I didn't say the Australian council system was corrupt, I said it was based on the corrupt English council system, he began. Yes? The next point was equally obscure. Paul, he said, you're notorious for ringing up and abusing journalists, and I don't have to put up with it. He slammed the phone down. The chief of staff looked up, startled. Who was that? Paul Keating, he answered, and went on about his duties.

A week or more later the paper finally succumbed and ran an opinion piece by Keating. It declared that his only mistake at the speech was not to issue a press release before hand, so that even the most simple minded of journalists could understand the points he was making. As is commonly said: astonishingly arrogant.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/rudd-follows-the-family-way-of-artful-dodging-20080827-442d.html

KEVIN Rudd always knew he had a convict in the family tree, but only recently did he discover that at least seven of his ancestors were transported to Australia.

They were a light-fingered lot. Old Thomas Rudd, it seems, was transported twice to Sydney town — once for lifting shoes, the second time for pinching food.

And yesterday, at a ceremony to bequeath the Rudd family history to the National Library, the PM discovered that a newspaper article in 1806 had the early Rudd, by then emancipated, complaining that his house in Parramatta had been burgled.

"Perhaps he was covering his tracks over a third felony," Mr Rudd chuckled as the family story, pieced together by the world's champion genealogists, the Mormons, was turned over for posterity.

The Opposition had its own theory. Brendan Nelson and his troops made clear they reckon burglary has run down the family tree and re-emerged in the guise of the Prime Minister himself.

Why, they grizzled in Parliament, he had clean-stolen their policies on education and simply repackaged them as the Rudd Education Revolution.

Mr Rudd didn't deny it. He merely transformed himself into the Artful Dodger. He said his department had counted 24 reports on teaching quality prepared for the Howard government.

"And I would ask the people of Australia: What happened to those 24 reports?" he thundered.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24252057-663,00.html

MASKING her own disappointment, vanquished Democrat Hillary Clinton yesterday rose to the challenge of playing healer to her divided party.

In a barnstorming performance that raised the roof of the Democrats' Denver convention, she called on all of the 18,000 delegates to rally behind the man who stalled her presidential ambitions.

"Barack Obama is my candidate and he must be our president," she said, reinforcing the message that she was "a proud supporter of Barack Obama".

In one of her most important speeches, in which her every word and expression was scrutinised, Senator Clinton said Democrats had worked too hard over the past 18 months to suffer four more years of failed Republican leadership under John McCain.

"No way. No how. No McCain," she said, as the stadium erupted with deafening cheers.

"Whether you voted for me, or voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose.

"We are on the same team and none of us can sit on the sidelines," she told Democrats. "This is a fight for the future. And it's a fight we must win."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24253185-2702,00.html

AS he prepared to leave the editor-in-chief's chair at The Age, Andrew Jaspan sent an email calling staff together. It was headed "That's all folks!" Like Porky Pig in the Looney Tunes cartoons:

"Th-th-th-that's all, folks!"

Some of those who attended Jaspan's farewell described it as "pugnacious" and "graceful and dignified under pressure".

Four months ago, more than 200 journalists at The Age unanimously voted against Jaspan in an effective no-confidence motion. Yesterday, many editorial staff members were running a very different line, saying he had been a beachhead against the cost-cutting culture introduced to Fairfax by its Australian newspapers boss, Brian McCarthy.

Reporters explained their mixed feelings at his departure: "It's sort of 'Hooray' and 'Oh shit' in the same breath," one senior journalist said.

At the start of a brief exit speech, Jaspan asked that it not be recorded, a pointed reference to a humiliation on the newsroom floor in April when his attempts to appease staff concerns over the paper's treatment of certain stories were recorded and broadcast online.

Since his arrival from Glasgow four years ago, Jaspan has remained l'etranger of Australian journalism. He said yesterday he had made The Age a better, sharper newspaper and expressed hope that print journalism had a future. He said there were no such things as bad newspapers - just badly managed and badly edited ones. He was given sustained applause.

Announcing his sacking, Fairfax management said Jaspan had done "a magnificent job in reinvigorating The Age", although Fairfax chairman Ron Walker, one of his most ardent supporters, last night refused to comment.

It was not quite the speaking slot at the national convention that, 18 months ago, Senator Clinton had hoped for.


Countryside near Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.

What Was Unforgiveable

*



Sculpting the South Pillar

Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and unstable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, has a profound effect on its environment.

Found in the South Pillar region of the Carina Nebula, these fantastic pillars of glowing dust and gas embedded with newborn stars were sculpted by the intense wind and radiation from Eta Carinae and other massive stars.

Glowing brightly in planet Earth's southern sky, the expansive Eta Carinae Nebula is a mere 10,000 light-years distant. Still, this remarkable cosmic vista is largely obscured by nebular dust and only revealed here in penetrating infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Eta Carinae itself is off the top left of this false-color image, with the bright-tipped dust pillars pointing suggestively toward the massive star's position.

Image Credit: NASA, SSC, JPL, Caltech, Nathan Smith (Univ. of Colorado), et al.


Bias is an inevitable consequence of the belief we must have to be successful in
whatever we do. Where there is a wide diversity of beliefs and the freedom and
resources to pursue them, bias is less of a problem. In most scientific controversies the
timescales and risks are such that we can let the passage of time settle them. In some,
like medicine and climate change, we cannot. In medicine, despite centuries of study,
there are few things absolutely safe or efficacious but we assume that most medical
professionals would not propose medicines or procedures that they knew were poor in
either respect. However, we have learnt through experience that it is unwise to allow
pharmaceutical manufacturers, or others with a conflict of interest, to be the judges of
these qualities. Carefully controlled studies are mandated specifically to avoid bias in
the judgements as to which medicines and procedures are appropriate. High standards
of record keeping and disclosure are enforced. It is inconceivable today that the
developer of any medicine or procedure would be allowed to conceal test data or take
a leading role in a review process that approved it. In comparison, climate research is
in its infancy and almost entirely unregulated.
Many, particularly the conscientious young, have been persuaded that
anthropogenic global warming is a very serious problem for mankind and one which
governments can and should do something about. Sir David King, the UK’s chief
scientist said it was a more serious problem than terrorism1. So strong is the beliefamong some that they are prepared to resort to civil disobedience, shut down power
stations and disrupt major airports. It is by all measures as important a field of research
as medicine, and ought to operate to standards at least as high, but it does not. On the
contrary, it is steeped in bias, concealment and spin. The Stern Review2 said “The
causal link between greenhouse gases concentrations and global temperatures is well
established, founded on principles established by scientists in the nineteenth century.”
This is both disingenuous and plainly wrong. Until the 1950’s climate research was
largely a branch of Meteorology, and what limited data were collected were largely to
assist in weather forecasting. Similarly, the computer modelling that now dominates
the climate debate evolved from the development of weather models. The dispute that
has emerged is not over the basic science of the nineteenth century, or that a causal
link exists between greenhouse gases and global warming, but concerns our ability to
detect the contribution that a minor human increase in particular greenhouse gases
makes to current climate change, and the possibility and economics of attempting to
reduce it. Strong and well-founded scientific disagreement remains between those who
say the limited observations since the beginning of the industrial era indicate a
sensitivity of the Earth, to a doubling of carbon dioxide, of around 1°C or less, to
which we can and should adapt, and those who say, based solely upon theory
developed in numerical models, that the sensitivity is several times larger and that we
must drastically reduce emissions.
This paper focuses on one strand of the dispute, the so-called “hockey stick” study,
which suggested that little change occurred in global temperatures over the
millennium that preceded the industrial era. Until recently, the “hockey stick” was
strongly promoted as proof of human interference in the climate. The “hockey stick”
story demonstrates that, contrary to what may be said elsewhere in this journal, much
of the climate science in which we are invited to place trust is biased, sloppy and
protected from exposure by concealment of the underlying data and methodology, and
by a well organised “spin” process....

BIAS AND CONCEALMENT IN THE IPCC PROCESS:
David Holland.




The violence against him continued to escalate throughout his 15th year; right up until his 16th birthday, when he was legally free and could walk off down the road, albeit in a gale of tears, to begin a new life. But there was only one moment, it must have lasted almost a month, perhaps even a little more, he stayed home or his father was away, when the beatings ceased. But for most of that terrible year the pattern was the same. He came home from school on a Friday, changed out of his school uniform, and headed down the road to the bus, where he would sit cold frozen and watch the suburbs slide by, frozen in fear, expedition, sadness.

Or often enough, there would be a car waiting for him, just out of sight of his parent's house. The men who picked him up had preyed on unhappy boys for thousands of years, but he wasn't to know that. He was flattered by the attention. And diverted. Anything to escape the appalling battery that he was enduring at home; accompanied by an appalling silence, a silence thick with his father's anger and his mother's crying. All the men wanted to do was give him a blow job, it wasn't exactly demanding sex. And in return, he got lifts into town, money, alcohol, attention. He was, briefly, infamous, the available boy.

And each Monday morning he would return at about two, three, even four am. No matter how late he returned, his glowering father would be waiting in the kitchen for him, the belt laid out in a geometrically precise fashion along the table. Did the men who dropped him off know how bad those beatings were. Was there anything that could be done to stop them. The beatings escalated in intensity throughout that year, until they became psychotic, vicious, brutal and unforgivable attacks, when he was left cowering and sobbing in the corner with welts all over him, on his back, on his arms, on his legs, everywhere, as the belt went whack whack whack whack whack and he shivered and cried and his father hit and hit and hit.

The monster. The vicious brutality of it all was completely out of proportion to the crime, whatever that was, being different probably, and the worst day, the very worst day, when both his father and his mother, thinking she was doing her good Christian duty, joined in, both snaking the belts out towards him as he dodged around the house until they cornered him and hit and hit and hit. And he never forgave them. The level of brutality was so extreme that once he walked down that road, he never looked back. Apart from a few odd things, it was more than 30 years, more like 40, before he spoke to his father again. And no one ever beat him again.

Lingering, even to a man in his 50s, was the memory of that belt laid out so neatly on the patterned 1960s kitchen table. The way he felt as he got out of whichever car it was, there in that remote winding road surrounded by those demonic trees, and looked down at the house to the light on in the kitchen and the shape of his father through the window. The way he would say goodbye to whatever adoring queen had driven him home, the way he would brace himself for the beating you could never brace yourself for, and his feeling of absolute terror as he opened the door. The way they would look at each other. And the way the attack would begin. Again. And how the extreme brutality of it escalated, to the point where he could barely walk to school in the morning. And how he became the silent, abused child, plotting his escape. And the way he never, ever forgave the bastard for what he did. It was unforgivable.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24248135-5013871,00.html

THE political day together for Brendan Nelson and Peter Costello began yesterday as they strolled across Parliament House to see their new Liberal colleagues being sworn in.

After the Coalition partyroom meeting finished, the Opposition Leader and the man who could be Opposition leader casually wandered together to the Senate chamber.

As they sat in the visitors' gallery on the floor of the Senate they exchanged jokes, comments, wry smiles, funny faces and moments of meditation as the focus in the Senate switched from the ceremony to the two who control the fate of the Liberal leadership.

As Dr Nelson is being dismissed as a lame duck because of poor polling, Mr Costello is not only the bulwark supporting him but could also be the instrument of his downfall.

Liberal MPs are urging the former treasurer to change his mind about retiring and expect Dr Nelson to step down if he does, so there was a sense of the old Abbott and Costello comic line of "Who's on first?" as they joked between themselves.

Later, in the first question time in the House of Representatives for the spring session, the synergy between the two continued in every sense.

News.com.au

IT was intended to boost the birth rate, but a legal loophole means the $5000 baby bonus can be claimed for late-term abortions.

The loophole arises because abortions after 20 weeks' gestation are recorded by doctors as stillbirths.

Parents of stillborn babies receive the maternity benefit on compassionate grounds.

The Federal Parliamentary Library, which examined the issue for Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, confirmed the anomaly.

Senator Bernardi said: "This is not a debate about abortion. This is about the baby bonus being misused and misapplied to women who do have terminations.

"Clearly that is not the intention, it's not in keeping with the support of mainstream Australians for the baby bonus."

National Association of Specialist Obstetricians and Gynaecologists chairman Andrew Pesce said there was no legal difference between stillbirths and abortions after 20 weeks.

Dr Pesce said most late-term abortions were prompted by fetal abnormalities.

When it came to women who had a late-term abortion, he said: "I think it is a very humane gesture from society to say, 'You are going through enough already, we're not going to withhold the bonus'."

A spokeswoman for Families Minister Jenny Macklin maintained the baby bonus was not available for aborted pregnancies.

"If there is any evidence of this occurring we will follow it up immediately," she said.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/relationships/the-big-dry-its-not-raining-men/2008/08/25/1219516418963.html

An exodus of single women from rural areas has led to a shortage of eligible bachelors in Australia's main cities, a new study has found.

Demographer Bernard Salt published an analysis of data from the 2006 census in a new book Man Drought yesterday, showing that a shortage of 30-something women in Australia during the 1970s has been reversed.

The news is not all bad for single women. They outnumber men every year of their lives until the age of 34, in a shift that Salt describes as "the tipping point".

In 1976, there were 54,000 fewer men than women aged in their 30s but by 2006 men in the age group outnumbered women by 9000.

Salt said a tendency of older men to "raid the stocks" of eligible young women, who tend to marry earlier, accounted for the shift, as well as higher rates of men emigrating and a more even mix of men and women entering the country than before.

But the most important shift in the past three decades has been the widespread movement of women away from rural areas into major cities, which Salt said has accounted for a "gender imbalance".

While 40-something single women outnumber their male counterparts in Sydney, they are outnumbered by seven-to-one in Wakool in southern NSW, six-to-one in Durras and Stanwell Tops and two-to one in Murrurundi.


Countryside near Tambar Springs, central NSW, Australia.