Bishop Hill Bob Carter on carbon tax
In the same issue of Quadrant as the Walter Starck article I mentioned in the last post comes a piece from Bob Carter on the Australian government's hopes for a carbon tax. Bob is not impressed.
Bob has also sent me the following letter, which he submitted for publication in the Australian. It wasn't published.
Combet's hot air tax: no seasonal break for the climate commissars
To the degree that statements such as those made by BMO’s Dr. Sligo represent the views of the professional meteorological community, that community has now moved beyond parody and demands to be ridiculed. Can it really be the case that amidst the hurricane of Green spin about global warming, not a single bureaucrat or government politician in Canberra has retained a functioning bullshit detector?
Remarkably, in enunciating their “eleven principles”, the Canberra MCCC managed to evade entirely any mention of the underpinning scientific justification for introducing a tax on carbon dioxide. That is, of course, because there is none (which is doubtless why only one, tame, scientist was included as a member of the committee in the first place).
As the government will discover from its focus groups over the next few months, no matter how hard Mr. Combet tries to spin it as beneficial, they will introduce a carbon dioxide tax at their considerable electoral peril.
For where global warming alarmism is concerned, the good news is that the bullshit detectors of the Australian electorate are both alive and activated.
Reader Comments (17)
Hmmmm. I don't think that's unique to Canberra.
Robinson:
I don't think there are more than a few politicians in the UK who know what bullshit is. They have lived a very sheltered life protected from the realities of the world.
Talking of BS, it's all our fault that the country was not prepared for winter!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1343863/Met-Office-knew-Decembers-big-freeze-coming-hushed-up.html
@Lord Beaverbrook: (Just a little OT) the Mail story looks like spin from the MetOffice, although we won't know until we've checked, but they claim to have told the Cabinet Office we were in for a cold winter when their own website forecast a mild winter. They're in trouble because they've become a laughing-stock in the meteorolgical world and may well lose the BBC which would be disastrous for them. I suspect Harrabin is helping them out.
@geronimo
Potentially embarrassing for all three parties.
If the claim in the story is true then why didn't the government have better preparation?
If the claim in the story is not true then why is the MET still a viable institution?
If the story is not true then the Mail has some explaining to do.
We do live in interesting times!
The MCCC is not supported by the Conservative Coalition, so what Bob Carter is effectively saying is that the Labor Party will be thrown out in every state.
Most politicians are stupid creatures, with an attention span that only extends to the next election.
The DT has picked up the MET office spin story, have they got Alistair Campbell on their payroll, seems like they are spinning back up their own backsides for which he has form.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8237397/Met-Office-kept-winter-forecast-secret-from-public.html
I'm waiting for the first mention that the floods in Australia are due to AGW, that will really take the biscuit.
BOM has been blaming ‘global warming’ for its failure to get accurate predictions. At the same time,
CSIRO/BOM have been pushing for a monopoly on forecasting using techniques that require expensive supercomputing facilities. And the Computer Model that CSIRO/BOM want to buy is the one from the UK Met Office. FAIL!
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/isi/weather/report.htm
8.57am Today, BBC Radio 4- I have just hear a woman from the Royal Meteorological Society say that the extreme weather in Australia was due to La Nina.
Wonders never cease.
Philip Bratby,
As far as most UK politicians are concerned, they have the same awareness of BS as fish have of water, they live in it, they can't live without it, they couldn't imagine a world without it, but the underlying assumption is that it's always there and the question of doing without it doesn't arise.
I hope in Australia that they still have an opposition party. It seems that here in the UK all the major parties are now centre left and whichever we decide to elect has to encompass the European directive of green rules.
The article in the Mail states:
‘It did forecast in November that December would be bitter, but many of us may have taken the prediction with a truckload of salt.’
The reporter should have asked the Met Office when exactly in November that forecast was made. The very cold weather started before the end of November. One place in Wales had a record low temperature for November of -18 degrees centigrade.
Was the Met Office forecast made after the weather had turned cold in November? Even if it had been made a few days before the cold weather started it would still not be all that impressive compared with the forecasts of Piers Corbyn, Joe Bastardi, and Positive Weather Solutions who had all been predicting a cold winter.
Shame the detectors in the UK electorate seem to have been warn down, probably due to over use...
warn = worn. I overslept this morning...
Cosmic: I was referring to the real stuff that we have in the countryside.
El Gordo
'Most politicians are stupid creatures, with an attention span that only extends to the next election.'
I think you are being overly generous to the little sycophants; its until their next orders from the whips.
Messenger - you said "8.57am Today, BBC Radio 4- I have just hear a woman from the Royal Meteorological Society say that the extreme weather in Australia was due to La Nina."
That's not extreme weather we're having. It just weather of an unusual kind.
Perhaps we should not expect the BBC to understand that an event (eg massive floods in Queensland) happens every few decades or so.
That's what chaotic systems do - fluctuate irregularly around a poorly defined mean over a randomly changeable period or timescale.