The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on Australians and Americans to join the world in celebrating Climate Fools Day on October 27th.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that Climate Fools Day was named by protestors outside the British House of Commons on 27th October 2008 when the house was debating the Climate Bill.

Forbes explained: “As the first October snow in 70 years blanketed the House (and a big swathe of Europe), MP’s droned on about the need to fight global warming. “For six hours MP’s reassured one another about the desperate need to be the first government in the world to saddle its unfortunate people with a burden estimated at £15 billion a year. As snow continued to blanket Westminster, only two MP’s questioned the huge cost and dubious benefits from the energy taxes and green
energy rorts they were imposing.”

Read more: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/climate-fools-day.pdf [PDF, 136KB]

Senator Bob Brown stated that his Greatest Achievement was blocking the Gordon-below-Franklin Hydro-Electric Scheme

In June 1982, Tasmania’s Parliament passed legislation approving the development of the Gordon-below-Franklin (GBF) scheme for a dam and 300 MW power station which would have generated annually well over 10 million MW hours of electricity, costing then only about 2 cents per KW hour.

The scheme was supported by Tasmanians and passed by both Houses of their Parliament. Construction commenced.

Tasmania’s Dr Bob Brown opposed the scheme based on the false assumption that the scenic Rock Island Bend would be flooded and therefore unseen by canoeists down the river. But this site would have been above the dam water level.

Then Dr Brown circulated a picture of Rock Island Bend, taken by Peter Dombrovski, and a false statement by the Tasmanian Wilderness Society which deluded the public into believing that the scheme should be abandoned. This caused the Federal Government Labor Party to refer the matter to the High Court, where three judges supported and three judges opposed the scheme. However, the seventh judge, Senator Lionel Murphy, opposed it. This enabled the Federal Government to use its External Powers to stop the scheme with the result that all this valuable water flows out to the sea.

The scheme would have obtained most of its water discharged from the Gordon Power Station, powered by water from the Lake Pedder and Gordon Dams which have a capacity of 16 million cubic meters (over three times the capacity of Snowy Hydro’s Lake Eucumbene). There is usually little flow from the Franklin River.

The GBF scheme is very economical and environmentally sound and is well worth supporting. It should be built regardless of the High Court decision and the possibility that it might lie within a World Heritage listed area.

I am deeply concerned by the damage, deliberately inflicted by Dr Bob Brown. To me, Dr Brown should be made to pay for the damage he has caused.

E.C. “George” Fox

PS This ‘blockage’ resulted in the Federal Government having to provide about $500 million for other more costly hydro-electric schemes.

3 August 2010

PDF version: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/greens-oppose-green-power.pdf [PDF, 73KB]

The proposition that the average temperature of the earth’s surface is warming because of increased emissions of human-produced greenhouse gases cannot be tested by any known scientific procedure.

It is impossible to position temperature sensors randomly over the earth’s surface (including the 71% of ocean, and all the deserts, forests, and icecaps) and maintain it in constant condition long enough to tell if any average is increasing. Even if this were done the difference between the temperature during day and night is so great that no rational average can be derived.

Measurements at weather stations are quite unsuitable since they are not positioned representatively and they only measure maximum and minimum once a day, from which no average can be derived. They also constantly change in number, location and surroundings. Recent studies show that most of the current stations are unable to measure temperature to better than a degree or two

The assumptions of climate models are absurd. They assume the earth is flat, that the sun shines with equal intensity day and night, and the earth is in equilibrium, with the energy received equal to that emitted.

Half of the time there is no sun, where the temperature regime is quite different from the day.

No part of the earth ever is in energy equilibrium, neither is there any evidence of an overall “balance”.

It is unsurprising that such models are incapable of predicting future climate behaviour, even if this could be measured satisfactorily.

There are no representative measurements of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over any land surface, where “greenhouse warming” is supposed to happen.

After twenty years of study, and as expert reviewer to the IPCC from the very beginning, I can only conclude that the whole affair is a gigantic fraud.

Vincent Gray
Crofton Downs
Wellington, New Zealand

This letter was also published by Scientific American at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for an end to deceptive advertising regarding Global Warming Policies.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that those calling for a “Price on Carbon” should speak the truth and call it a “Tax on the Production of Carbon Dioxide”.

“Similarly the CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) had nothing to do with pollution but everything to do with imposing taxes and rationing on economic activity.”

Forbes explained:

“The new green mantra chants: “We need a price on carbon”.

“Carbon is the most useful substance on earth and there is already a price on every product containing carbon – coal and oil, bread and butter, beef and bacon, oil and ethanol, beer and whisky, coffee and tea, cotton and wool, diesel and fire wood, methane and carbon dioxide, petrol and rubber – all are carbon products with an established market price.

“Those who chatter about “a price on carbon” are hiding their real aim which is to reduce human activity by taxing the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The Office of Fair Trading should be investigating this deceptive election advertising.

“If this tax attempted to cover all releases of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it would indeed be “A Monster New Tax”.

“Every man and beast, every car and train, every ship and plane, every cement plant and blast furnace, every power station using coal, oil or gas, every wood stove and gas barbeque, every swamp and termite nest – all emit carbon dioxide and thus recycle carbon. Carbon feeds, powers and clothes our world. Any attempt to stop that is suicidal.

“Every producer of carbon products is already taxed – income tax and payroll tax, royalties and resource rent tax, excise and levies, permits and quotas.

“Another carbon tax would just add to the costs of everything, increase poverty, bloat the bureaucracy and send more jobs to China. The only people promoting more taxes on carbon are the anti-growth crowd and the vested interests in the alternate energy promoters.

“We didn’t want the deceitfully labelled Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and we don’t want a new tax labelled “A Price on Carbon”.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

For a brief report by Ray Evans on the unholy alliance of “Baptists and Bootleggers” supporting more taxes on carbon see: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/07/the-price-of-carbon

PDF version of this article: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/carbon-price-means-tax.pdf [PDF, 62 KB]

By Dr. John Happs

It would appear that climate alarmists and associated vested interest groups might have decided that an increasing number of politicians and members of the public no longer see the trivial amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide as having much of a role to play in our ever-changing climate and the weather extremes the planet has always experienced. (more…)

A Corollary of the Principle of Uniformitarianism

By Howard Dewhirst, Geologist

This document aims to contextualise the scientific debate concerning Climate Change (CC) and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Examining Earth history, it is indisputable that CC has been operating for many hundreds of millions of years, in cycles that span many different time-scales (millennial-plus to decadal), all without human influence. Understanding the causative factors in past CC provides a solid basis for framing the present debate. AGW is a notion which says that human activities, notably the addition of CO₂ to the atmosphere, are causing an increase in the global heat budget. That higher-energy state of Earth’s environment it is argued sets the stage for damaging CC effects. Political and economic decisions have been influenced by this claim. Some of those decisions harm efforts to better the health and welfare of the world’s population, including both the poorest and those who are better off. If the CC and AGW arguments are incorrectly based, as we outline here, there is a need to re-consider those decisions.

CC in Earth History

• Paleo-temperature (of atmosphere and ocean) is taken as a proxy indicator of climate, since climate is a complex concept that includes precipitation amounts and patterns, wind, etc whose history and future cannot be extracted or classified in a satisfactory way
• Earth’s equatorial region has had a consistent temperature during the climate swings over hundreds of millions of years, but the polar areas have varied, thus altering the pole-to-equator gradient of heat energy, which is the principal driver of climate on the planet
• Causes of CC (changes in temperature gradients) are dominated by orbital and solar effects, with added signals from volcanoes (both dust and chemicals), tectonics and plate motions, and biological feedbacks
• Oceans (which cover ~70% of the planet) are the main heat reservoir, but with patterns of warmer and colder water distributions that reveal decadal and longer cyclicity that is not understood

Global Warming

• • Earth’s temperature has been generally rising since the end of the last ice age, with an apparent acceleration during the last century, but not since
  • Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have also been rising more uniformly, now reaching 410ppm or 0.04% of atmosphere
  • CO₂ has been identified as a ‘greenhouse gas’, based on an argument that it traps and reflects heat
  • The physics of CO₂ heat retention are over-stated, as only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths of heat energies) can be captured by this molecule
  • Because CO₂ concentration is rising and is implicated in global warming, and because CO₂ is a by-product of combustion, energy sources from fossil fuels have been demonised – via social and political suppression of their use, and a push towards 100% renewable energy
  • There are three key challenges to the idea that CO₂ is the primary cause of GW:
    •    Long-term records of CO₂ and temperature show good correlation, but the CO₂ concentrations lag behind temperature increases by thousands of years. Thus, CO₂ increase is the consequence of rising ocean temperature, not the cause
    •    Numerical models of climate systems, which involve simplifying assumptions and methods that are associated with serious artefacts, consistently fail to ‘predict’ the known past temperature patterns. Such models cannot justify the suppression of hydrocarbon fuels.
    •    Average temperatures are no longer increasing despite the inexorable rise of CO₂

Human activities are not the driver of global warming (or cooling). Earth’s systems are governed by processes that operate over a wide range of time- and length-scales, many of which far exceed the usual scope of human perceptions. The demonization of carbon is scientifically unjustified.

Howard Dewhirst

Read the open letter: https://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/gsl-open-letter-dewhirst.pdf [PDF, 312 KB]

By Sanjeev Sabhlok  Senior leader and overseas coordinator of India’s Swarna Bharat Party

The Modi government has been shovelling scarce taxpayer resources into solar energy, with a further $6.5 billion promised till 2022. This is over and above indirect subsidies that people pay through higher electricity bills because of renewable energy certificates. And while Donald Trump did the right thing by walking out of the Paris Agreement, Mr Modi unthinkingly remains committed to it and Niti Ayog has been touting subsidised electric vehicles.

Our party disagrees with this approach. First, because we oppose subsidies for any industry. But second, because we believe there is a strong case to impose Pigovian taxes on solar energy given the economic and environmental harm it causes.

Solar energy can do a few useful things. It can power a radio in an off-grid location. But it can’t support our day-to-day life.

Read the full article:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/seeing-the-invisible/solar-energy-badly-harms-the-environment-it-must-be-taxed-not-subsidised/

On Monday 13 August 2007, the House Standing Committee on Science and
Innovation tabled its report on the inquiry into Geosequestration Technology
entitled Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

Dr Dennis Jensen MP, Hon Jackie Kelly MP, Hon Danna Vale MP, Mr David
Tollner MP have written a dissenting report:

“We do not believe the evidence unequivocally supports the hypothesis of
anthropogenic global warming (AGW)
“1.1 We dissent from some of the statements made in the report “Between a
Rock and a Hard Place” by the Standing Committee on Science and Innovation
on its investigation into the Geosequestration of Carbon Dioxide.
“1.2 We disagree with the report’s unequivocal support for the hypothesis
that global warming is caused by man-so-called anthropogenic global warming
(AGW).”

Dissenting report is available here:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/geosequestration-dissent.pdf [PDF 211KB]

Source: Inquiry into Geosequestration Technology Web page:
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/scin/geosequestration/report.htm

Germany’s Energiewende – Lessons for Australia from Germany

In March 2017, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy published a brochure announcing that the Energiewende, its renewable energy revolution, was ‘a success story’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Energiewende (Grand Plan) has the goal of making Germany independent of fossil fuels in the long term. Coal, oil and gas were to be phased out, allowing drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. However, these goals have not even begun to be achieved.

The Energiewende was only driven forward in the electricity sector, which, accounts for only one-fifth of energy consumption. There were hardly any successes in the heating/cooling and transport sectors.

And so carbon dioxide emissions in Germany have been rising since 2009, even though well over a hundred billion euros have been spent on the expansion of solar and wind energy over the same period. The financial obligations undertaken in the process will continue to burden taxpayers for another two decades and will end up costing German consumers a total sum of around 550 billion euros.

Despite this enormous effort, security of supply is increasingly under threat. At the same time, people and the biosphere are suffering; wildlife protection has become subordinated to climate mitigation, even though the possibility of achieving the goals of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is becoming increasingly distant and the measures for the energy transition seem to become more and more questionable from a constitutional point of view.

800 regional associations in Germany commissioned a report on the achievements of the Grand Plan, supported by 24 German experts in all relevant fields.

“In this review we would like to inform a public debate and set out a reasonable course for energy policy in Germany.”

It details stark lessons for Australia. They have produced a very clear readable summary of all aspects of the German electricity disaster.

Read more: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/1-6-_kompendium-der-energiewende_englisch_1.pdf [PDF, 2.7 MB]

Source: https://www.vernunftkraft.de/