“We have policy-based evidence making – we need evidence-based policy making.”

Christopher Monckton

A statement by Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

27 March 2010

The Carbon Sense Coalition today said that Earth Hour should be renamed “Blackout Night” and be held outdoors, for the whole night, in mid-winter, on the shortest and coldest day of the year – 22 June in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that all supporters of alternative energy should spend just one night in the cold and the dark, emitting no carbon dioxide from coal, oil, gas, petrol or diesel for lights, TV, hot coffee, barbecues or cars. This will be good practice for the blackouts and shortages to come if Penny Wong’s rationing of carbon products and carbon energy is attempted.

“Winter nights are usually still and cold, so the candles crew can experience what it was like depending on alternate energy in the recent snowstorms in the Northern Hemisphere when wind turbines froze and solar panels were covered in snow. The back-to-nature brigade can also try living without iron roofs and concrete walls, both of which require coal and emit carbon dioxide during their production.

“To hold a candles-and-champagne party indoors, on the mildest night of the year, for just one hour, shows that the whole thing is green tokenism. Moreover both candles and champagne emit carbon dioxide. Let the true believers try the real thing in one of the extreme seasons so they can appreciate the great benefits we take for granted when using all of our carbon fuels and foods.

“Instead of sneering at human achievements they should salute the people who keep the lights on for the other 364 days of the year.

“Our salute will be to turn on every light on our property, and we urge all supporters to do the same.

“Australia gets almost 90% of its electricity from hydrocarbon fuels – black coal, brown coal, gas and oil. If the German Greens close their coal and nuclear power they can fall back on gas from Russia, nuclear power from France or hydro from Scandinavia when the lights go out.

“Australia has no prudent neighbours to bludge on if we gamble our future electricity needs on sunbeams, sea breezes and ceiling insulation. If we attempt the massive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions demanded by the deep greens we will see Australia headed for the Romanian power rationing experience – during the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, each house was limited to ONE 25 watt bulb for all of their light.

“All over the world we have aging power stations and an orchestrated campaign by a few warm and well-fed agitators to harass, delay and deter construction of new power facilities.

“Such a campaign can only have one result – many ‘Earth Night’ blackouts are assured.

“So we support ‘Blackout Night’ to prepare our population for the dark days ahead.

“Take a look at a place that celebrates ‘Earth Hour’ every night – Stalinist North Korea. Compare it to free South Korea that keeps its people warm, well fed and working (with the help of Australian coal):

PDF version: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/earth-hour-2010.pdf [PDF, 102KB]

By Sandy McClintock & Rick Dean

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has presented data for Echuca Aerodrome that shows no change in temperature for 100 years. However the widely promoted Australian “high-quality climate data set” shows an apparent increase in temperature of 1.2 degree centigrade per century for exactly the same location. How can this be explained?

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/echuca-temperature.pdf [PDF, 97 KB]

You may have heard of Peter Spencer, the desperate Australian farmer who went on a hunger strike to draw attention to the fact that government bans on clearing vegetation had stolen his assets and destroyed his business. Peter is just one of many Australian farm families reduced to desperation and even suicide by seizure or sterilisation of their land to satisfy the voracious green god.

The most massive injustice occurred a couple of years ago, when, as a sacrifice to the Kyoto god, the federal government conspired with state governments to ban vegetation clearing on all property, even freehold. This was done in an underhand way to allow the government to seize carbon credits from landowners without paying compensation.

Many well meaning people, while not happy with the tactics and the refusal to pay compensation for property seized or devalued, think that there will be some environmental or climate benefits to come from all this.

Generally there are none.

Even if extraction of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was a good idea (and it isn’t), no tree can keep extracting it on a long term basis. Every living thing (including trees, grass, cows and humans) borrows carbon from the environment as it grow, stops extracting it at maturity, and hands the valuable carbon back to the environment when it dies and the body rots. Net life time extraction equals ZERO. It is absolute scientific nonsense to believe that trees can have a long term effect on so called greenhouse gases. Like everything politicians touch, short term appearances and secret agendas are preferred to long term reality.

Banning the clearing of scrub regrowth in our grasslands is also a backward step environmentally. Everyone can see and understand tree forests, but no one appreciates the grass forests beneath their feet. Natural fires created our grasslands long before humans occupied Australia. They are valuable environmental landscapes far more important to humans than the stupid carbon credit forests and eucalypt weeds now invading them. With closer settlement and excessive areas locked up by governments, fires no longer protect our grasslands and landowners must use machinery to maintain their grass. Preventing this is like telling a market gardener he is not allowed to chip weeds invading his vegetable patch. Every landowner tries to guard the long term value of his land. No one has a monopoly on knowledge on how to do it. Some properties may need more trees, some less – if more trees are a benefit, landowners will grow them without coercion.

Does anyone seriously believe that a few green politicians and activists can devise one dictatorial land plan for every property from Longreach to Wagga and then use legal bludgeons, land confiscation and a desk bound bureaucracy to enforce the co-operation of landowners?

The Senate is currently carrying out an enquiry into some aspects of this massive land mismanagement. It is a bigger scandal than the home insulation scheme, and few politicians are free of blame. The Senate will be surprised at the injustices that will be revealed by this enquiry.

The Carbon Sense Coalition has (in some haste) made a Submission to this enquiry. We urge you to read it and print it out for friends. See it at:

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/grasses-trees-climate-food.pdf

Even if you don’t read it, open it and look at the pictures.

We must not let them sweep all this under the table again. We need your help to get this short note to every landowner, every media outlet and every politician. Please help us spread it around.

And remember to tell everyone “Grass is also Green”.

Media Release
21st March 2010

Can’t see the Grass for the Trees?

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian Parliament to repeal the vegetation clearing bans before Australia’s productive grasslands are lost to woody weeds.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the Kyoto bans were introduced deviously by state governments acting as stooges for the federal government to deprive landowners of potential carbon credits without paying compensation.

“Now they are creating a growing public liability as trees invade ancestral grasslands.

“Every continent in the world had vast native grasslands, often treeless, kept free of trees by lightning fires, and supporting huge populations of herbivores and their dependent predators. The treeless Prairies supported bison and antelope; the Pampas supported deer and camelids; the Veldts supported wildebeest, zebra and antelopes; and Australia’s grasslands supported kangaroos and emus.

“Trees and grasses are in continual competition for soil space and access to solar energy. Old journals, diaries, sketches and photos can attest the fact that there are now more trees in Australian grasslands than there were 100 years ago. Some properties can document the substantial tree invasion even since the first aerial photos were taken in the 1950’s. This invasion has accelerated since governments started meddling in vegetation control.

“Human settlers, both black and white, have learned that fires were essential to re-invigorate the grasslands and control their invasion by trees. But with closer settlement, there are reduced opportunities to use fires to control trees and landowners must use machinery to protect their grass.

“White settlement in Australia has brought two major changes to vegetation. Firstly, in the forests and scrubs along the coast, timber getters and small selectors cleared the fertile soil for crops and farms. Human development and infrastructure ensure that these forests seldom recovered. Secondly, scrubby regrowth and trees have invaded much of the grassland and open forest.

“If governments want to turn back the vegetation clock, they should be removing towns, roads, railways, schools, orchards, housing developments, cultivation and market gardens from the once forested coastal areas to allow coastal forests to re-establish. But this would lose too many votes, so they advocate accelerated destruction of our ancient grasslands. Their hope is that this will gain more votes from tree huggers than will be lost from grass farmers, where there are few votes to lose.

“Today the grasslands support domesticated grazing animals and farms of cultivated grasses and legumes that are essential food sources for humans. Invasion of Australia’s grasslands by eucalypt weeds is destroying our ability to produce food, which will show up in the cities as rising food prices and declining jobs.

“These bans can have no long term effect on greenhouse gases. They will reduce food production and slash property values. They are cynical exercises in vote buying and international grandstanding which should be immediately abandoned.”

“If action is not taken we will soon reach a state where we can’t see the grass for the trees.”

For a fuller discussion of “Grasses, Trees, Climate and Food” see:

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/grasses-trees-climate-food.pdf

Disclosure: Viv Forbes and his wife own and live on a freehold sheep and cattle grazing property at Rosevale in Queensland. The tree population on this property has increased greatly during their occupation. The property is affected by vegetation management plans prepared without any consultation with the owners.

A submission from The Carbon Sense Coalition to the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration in response to their requests for submissions on the “Inquiry into Native Vegetation Laws, Greenhouse Gas Abatement and Climate Change Measures”.

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/grasses-trees-climate-food.pdf [PDF, 653 KB]

“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Stephen H. Schneider, author of the book Global Warming (Sierra Club), in an interview in Discover Magazine, October 1989.

“The idea that raising the cost of energy will induce the emergence of new technologies could only be proposed by people completely ignorant of economic history and the history of technology. I cannot think of a single instance of this happening. Taken to its logical conclusion we can argue that the Romans would have developed the steam engine — if not the car — if only the emperors had have had the foresight to put a heavy tax on horses and bullocks…

“And if taxes are all that is needed to bring about technological progress why haven’t heavy petrol taxes in Europe led to new transport technologies?”

Gerard Jackson, Economics Editor Brookes News
http://brookesnews.com/100103alternativenergy.html

The right response to the non-problem of global warming is to have the courage to do nothing.

Christopher Monckton

1. Solar Panels – another Silly Roof Scheme

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for the immediate suspension of another of Mr Garrett’s silly roof schemes – the Roof Solar Panel Scheme.

“This scheme is driven by the Renewable Energy Target Scheme, Renewable Energy Certificates and obligations on power companies to buy the inconsistent dribbles of electricity produced by solar panels on domestic homes.”

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that like the roof insulation scheme, the Roof Solar Panel Scheme was dangerous, ill planned and a massive waste of community funds…

2. Petition on the Flawed Carbon Trading Scheme

Liberal MP, Dr Denis Jensen, has drawn up a petition on the Flawed Carbon Trading Scheme.

To sign go to: http://petitions.listentous.org.au/signatories/index/pid/16

3. The Big Picture on World Temperature Swings.

Jo Nova has published a set of graphs produced by David Lappi, an Alaskan Geologist.

4. Tampering with the Temperature Records

Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts have produce a masterful analysis of the state of the world instrument temperature records that have been used to support the claims that the world has warmed alarmingly since man started using large quantities of carbon fuels…

5. Chief Warmist Surrenders

Faced with the above and other fast mounting evidence, Professor Phil Jones of CRU, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair and a key promoter of the Global Warming Scare, has conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in world temperature since 1995…

6. Big Business gets Nervous

The collapse of the so-called Consensus, the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Confab, the emerging evidence of the foolishness of wasting tax payers funds on wind/solar “power” and ethanol production, the Climategate Scandal, the roof insulation fiasco in Australia, the Carbon Credit frauds, the lack of evidence to support the weekly scare forecasts and the rapid change in public opinion is having an effect on big business support for the Global Warming Scam…

7. The Carbon Wall of Shame

We need a list of the chief promoters of the Ration-N-Tax Scheme and the Climate Change Industry in Australia so that shareholders, customers, employees, tax payers and voters can start putting pressure on directors, politicians, academics and officials who betray us all by refusing to do their homework…

Full newsletter: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/silly-roof-schemes.pdf [PDF, 205 KB]

Al Gore’s Lament

One thin December Moon
A floated hypothesis disappears
In scrambled shame.

The broker cries
The Market dies
They are the fools

Geoff Brown
Ourimbah NSW