ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is pretty incensed that the Rudd government knew of the failures and dangers of their madcap "home insulation" scheme months before they took any action over it





GREENIE ROUNDUP

Three current articles below

Australiagate: Now NASA caught in trick over Aussie climate data

In this article we look at the findings of two independent climate researchers who analyse climatic data used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to show warming of two degrees per century for Australia without explanation. We find that an earlier study by Willis Eschenbach in an article on What’s up with That (WUWT) is wholly substantiated by Kens Kingdom’slatest analysis of Ken Stewart at his ‘kenskingdom’ blog. As a consequence, absent any other justification from NASA, we must conclude that the NASA data has been fraudulently cooked.

GISS, based at Columbia University in New York City, has adjusted over a century’s worth of temperature records from the vast Queensland State (the Sunshine State) to reverse a cooling trend in one ground weather station and increase a warming trend in another to skew the overall data set.

Independent analysis by Aussie blogger Ken Stewart exposes a deplorable smoking gun of cynical manipulation of raw temperature data.

The process of adjusting raw data to create a “homogenised” final global temperature chart is standard practice by climatologists whose work is relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and world governments. This homogenisation process of temperature data has fallen into disrepute since the Climategate scandal where scientists were proven to have unlawfully used a “trick” to fake climate data and then destroyed their calculations rendering it impossible for independent auditors to examine and justify the methodologies used.

Ken Stewart has his own take on these latest findings from Down Under: “Wow- when they adjust, they don’t muck around!”

GISS combines GHCN data from all urban stations applying the same inexplicable two degree temperature increase as shown below to reveal the shocking disparity between ‘raw’ data and the ‘cooked’ GISS data:

Ken proves that the GISS homogenised older data to make the climate appear cooler a hundred years ago and then ramped up modern data to artificially make recent years appear warmer. Thus climate scientists have artificially created a steep trend line to falsely give an impression of a 2 degrees rise in Australian temperatures over a 100 year period. Ken found that if climatologists had stuck to the raw data the trendline would have been as low as 0.2 degrees per 100 years – thus the overall temperature rise has been magnified by a factor of ten for no apparent reason other than to cause alarm.

Ken explains how he undertook his research: "I decided to have a look at the temperature records of the weather stations closest to where I live, near Mackay in North Queensland. The Bureau of Meteorology lists 3 current stations: Mackay MO, Mackay Aero, and Te Kowai Exp Station, plus the closed station Mackay Post Office. GISS has a list of nearby stations… Te Kowai is an experimental farm for developing new varieties of sugar cane, run by scientists and technicians since 1889. It has a temperature record of over 100 years with only a couple of gaps. So in fact it’s an ideal rural station for referencing a nearby urban station, as it should have a similar climate."

Ken found that the “Mackay Sugar Mill Station” was far hotter in the 1920’s and 30’s but GISS “disappeared” this data. However, if we add the warming period back in we find that the warming trend almost disappears to become less then 0.2 degrees per 100 years! Ken concludes, “How can GISS justify their manipulation of the data, which they claim not to do?”

Upon closer examination of GISS methodology it appears that accidentally on purpose they used a “trick” whereby they turned “Mackay Sugar Mill Station” into a small town rather than a rural station even though it’s been nothing much more than cane fields for the last 130 years. There are different procedures applied to homogenising data between urban and rural weather stations.

I have examined Ken’s findings and can concur with him that there exists inexplicable anomalies that, without exception, appear concocted (homogenized) to create a warming trend when no evidence in changes in the local environmental conditions warrants any such manipulation. Moreover, GISS does not publish any explanations of why they chose to make cooler those temperatures in the first 40 years of their sample and then ramp up the temperatures for recent years. Absent any explanation from them, we may draw our own conclusions that the GISS lowered the older temperature records and raised the temperatures of recent years to create a fictitiously steeper homogenised warming slope to fit a pre-conceived warmist agenda.

Ken says this is fraud, “And it’s happening in my own backyard! I’m furious!”

This finding, when compared to those from other independent observers shows further attempts by government and government-funded agencies to fraudulent create a man made warming signal in Australia from natural events and data.

Ken’s findings tie in really well with the anomaly exposed by WUWT where Willis Eschenbach found similar dodgy data for Darwin, in the Northern Territory ( a vast Aussie state of 1,349,129 square kilometres (520,902 sq mi):

Here is Eschenbach’s comment on the data about Darwin: "YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celsius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C."

The similarities in degree and extent of fakery found separately by Eschenbach and Stewart proves a consistent fraudulent objective: make older temperatures appear artificially cooler and exagerrate recent temperature data.

Climategate.com has built up a close affinity with Australian skeptics who have worked tirelessly to expose the climate scam still being brainlessly plugged by Aussie Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Further similar contributions submitted to us for publication are most welcome. We intend to continue to expose such fraud relying on the technical and analytical skills of gifted amateur bloggers to fully expose the greatest scam in the history of science. Our aim is to bring forth criminal and civil proceedings against all those involved.

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Top science body 'in denial' over policy debate

THE CSIRO and the Rudd government are in "a state of denial" if they believe science can be separated from public policy, says eminent economist Clive Spash. He's hit back at criticisms his controversial paper on emissions trading read like "weak polemical journalism" and that the quality of his writing was substandard.

Professor Spash resigned in December following a long-running and bitter dispute over his report - The Brave New World of Carbon Trading. In the paper, Prof Spash suggests emission trading schemes, like the one the federal government hopes to introduce, are not the answer to climate change. It could even exacerbate the problem of human-induced global warming.

But the CSIRO blocked the paper's publication, arguing employees are restricted from commenting on public policy. CSIRO boss Megan Clark told a Senate estimates committee today she stood by the company charter. "I make no apologies for maintaining the standards of the CSIRO." She again defended the CSIRO's treatment of Prof Spash, saying she made every effort to convince him to make changes and thereby ensure its publication.

But Prof Spash was quick to return fire, and in a long list of grievances accused the CSIRO of harassment, intimidation and censorship over the course of several months. He was also gagged from talking publicly about his situation, he said. "My co-author withdrew from the paper feeling their job was under threat and I myself was harassed," he said in an email to AAP.

"Inappropriate mention of disciplinary action and implied dismissal were cited. "I was promised senior management would work with me. "Instead, I was given a substantially altered document without any input on my part. "I was then given an ultimatum to accept the changes or have the paper banned."

Prof Spash, a leading ecological economist originally head-hunted by the CSIRO, resigned two weeks later. He savaged the new charter as an attempt to micromanage CSIRO researchers, leading to self-censorship and preventing them from having any personal views made public. That was an infringement on free speech.

The CSIRO was wrong to think science could remain separate from public policy, Prof Spash said. "Open debate amongst researchers and in society is required to inform public policy, not manipulation of results due to fear of annoying political paymasters. "New information changes society in unpredictable ways and requires open public debate. "Management seems to be in a state of denial as to (this) reality."

He also took aim at Science Minister Kim Carr, who referred the Senate committee to an external review which labelled the paper "weak polemical journalism". "As a former school teacher I really wondered whether or not this was the sort of thing we were employing people to write on behalf of the CSIRO," Senator Carr also said. "The quality was just not there."

But journal New Political Economy, which was prevented from publishing the report, agreed the CSIRO was trying to censor it. It was "clearly improper" for the CSIRO to browbeat employees into changes which alter its conclusions, an editor wrote to Senator Carr in November. The unamended report was released publicly two days later.

SOURCE

PM left alone and exposed as big business backs away from Warmist laws

THE Rudd government has lost the last fig leaf on an emissions trading scheme that starts ahead of the rest of the world: "business certainty". The Business Council of Australia no longer considers the introduction of an ETS as providing business certainty and has put a caveat on support for an Australian scheme that cannot be met.

Given the fiasco of Copenhagen, the BCA has urged the government to change its scheme "in line with other international responses". Further, it has demanded the unconditional target of cutting greenhouse gases by 5 per cent by 2020, the same target as the Coalition's, not be lifted "before we have clear and credible commitments, and actions, from both developed and developing countries that are verifiable and monitored". That's impossible for nations such as China and India to meet: the BCA may as well have urged an ETS be set up on the moon before Australia lifts its target.

For more than two years, Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong have argued that there needed to be an early start for an ETS in Australia -- not just because climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time but also to give business certainty for planning. That's why Labor originally argued for a 2010 start date and pushed it back only one year. It's also why the Prime Minister argued passionately for ETS legislation to pass last year when the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill first went to parliament and why he said it had to be passed before the climate change conference in Copenhagen .

Yet business and industry were not united on this need for "certainty"; even Malcolm Turnbull, as a Liberal leader supporting an ETS, argued for Australia to wait until after the UN conference.

Rudd consistently quoted the BCA as supporting his position. While some individual members were alarmed at Labor's plan, the BCA continued to support the government's position. That support's no longer there: the infant ETS is exposed on a hillside.

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Queensland public hospital complaints go unanswered

But the light of publicity suddenly gets some action!

A YOUNG mum who can't hold her baby because of a botched hospital birth is among more than 20 Queenslanders whose complaints have been ignored by the independent patient safety watchdog. The Health Quality and Complaints Commission yesterday admitted that 22 online complaints about public hospital incidents had sat unread for up to five months because of a computer glitch.

The commission, which legally has 90 days to act, issued a receipt to patients but the complaints sat in a computer system until inquiries by The Courier-Mail alerted the HQCC to the problem.

One of the complaints was from Toowoomba mother Dawn Kelly, 20, who nearly died from a flesh-eating infection after having a caesarean. Her family believes the infection was caused by sloppy surgery and poor monitoring. Ms Kelly, who is allergic to latex, was given an epidural with a latex catheter. She has required 14 operations to repair damage to her uterus and abdomen since delivering her first child, Tyler, last April.

Ms Kelly and a neighbour who was visiting her in hospital say the surgeon said: "That's the way the cookie crumbles and this time the crumbs landed on you."

Ms Kelly's mother, Julie Parsons, said she had lost $25,000 in income while taking care of her daughter and Tyler, while Mrs Parson's husband David was working four jobs. "We've been kept in the dark on so many issues. There's nobody taking responsibility for anything," Mrs Parsons said. She had asked the HQCC to investigate in October, but was later told her online complaint was lost.

After being contacted by The Courier-Mail, the HQCC claimed the complaint was one of 22 unopened after being received online. The Courier-Mail understands the HQCC averaged one email every two days before the online complaints were shut down in November. "We apologise for the technical issue and wish to assure these complainants that we will manage their cases as quickly as possible," an HQCC spokeswoman said. The Parsons said their daughter had acute pain several times a week.

Queensland Health acting district chief executive officer Dr Peter Bristow said staff at the hospital "were sorry for the pain and suffering Dawn Kelly has been through. I realise that Ms Kelly's health problems have had a huge impact". Queensland Health said it was arranging an appointment for Ms Kelly to see a pain management specialist at a private hospital and to get surgery to permanently mend her abdomen in the near future.

SOURCE





You can’t debate immigration without being called a racist

by Scott Morrison, Australia's Federal opposition spokesman on immigration and citizenship

Last week I returned from a visit to Christmas Island to Parliament where the Labor Member MP, John Sullivan, from Longman in Brisbane, interjected during a speech and called me a racist. At the time, I was speaking to an Appropriations Bill that was seeking additional funds to make up for shortfalls in this year’s budget. Included in these shortfalls was $132 million for off shore processing of asylum seekers. We were supporting the Bill.

I noted that the 100 per cent plus blow out in costs demonstrated the Government had failed to appreciate the impact of their policy changes on the detention population on Christmas Island, that is now at unsustainable levels. Apparently, criticising the government’s poor budget management these days is also grounds for being called a racist by Labor MPs.

Reflecting on John’s classy contribution, it occurred to me just how lazy arguments against stronger border protection can become. Rather than engage in the debate, some self appropriate piety and indulge in moral hectoring as a substitute.

It would seem easier for some to think that those who don’t agree with them are simply evil racists and unable to comprehend, let alone share, their own self assessed high minded capacity for human compassion, than listen to what they have to say.

The pro-boats doctrine pedalled by some and adopted in practice by the Rudd Government has no monopoly on concern for the world’s dispossessed. To suggest otherwise is simply arrogant. Here are some things to think about.

There are reports that more than one hundred Afghans – men, women and children – perished at sea last year in their bid to come to Australia. Their families in Brisbane will probably never know what happened to them. They’re still waiting for the call.

Where are the public protests about the fate of these 105 Afghans and the policies that encouraged them to get on that boat? We have no idea how many others have died on vessels that never arrived. We do know that last November 12 people drowned after their boat sunk west of the Cocos Islands, and on Saturday afternoon 45 people were rescued after drifting for four days without food or water. And then there were five people who were killed when their boat, SIEV36, was set alight and dozens more injured, also in an attempt to gain entry to Australia.

In each case people smugglers profit. The ticket price is between $5,000 and $20,000 per passenger.

Some will say, but what about those who arrive by air? Well, when was the last time you heard of an asylum seeker drowning on board a 747?

Then there are those in refugee camps. Around 140,000 Burmese refugees are in nine camps along the Thai-Burma border. They began arriving there in the early eighties. Today people who were born in these camps are now raising their own children there, where rape, domestic violence and substance abuse are commonplace. During the past five years Australia has granted almost nine thousand off shore humanitarian visas to Burmese refugees. This enjoys bi partisan support. I have no issue with taking 13,500 people under our humanitarian programme each year.

Where we differ is allowing places in our humanitarian programme to be exhausted by those who pay for the services of people smugglers in preference to those offshore in camps. I believe it violates our sense of fairness.

While there are many other reasons, saving lives and helping those who will never be able to pay a people smugglers ransom to come to Australia, strike me as good reasons to stop the illegal arrival of boats coming to Australia.

Since the Rudd Government started rolling back the border protection regime inherited from the Coalition in August 2008, 79 boats have illegally arrived carrying more than 3,600 passengers. Not even the monsoon and the threat of cyclones have been able to overwhelm the magnetic impact of the Rudd Government’s failed border protection policies. This summer, 23 boats have illegally arrived in our waters, compared to just four during the same period last year.

Rather than take action, the Rudd Government has been content to blame the rest of the world and hope the problem will just go away. Worse still, they cynically hope we will just get used to it.

Faced with an overflowing Christmas Island, the Rudd Government has already rolled over and transferred people directly to the mainland from Christmas Island before assessment of their asylum claims has been completed. This not only sends the worst possible message to people smugglers, but it opens up murky legal ground regarding the status of individuals transferred. It only takes one judge in one court with jurisdiction to hear a case and the dominoes will fall.

And then there was the Government’s special deal for the Oceanic Viking. Mr Rudd guaranteed fast track processing, spent Australia’s diplomatic favours around the world to guarantee resettlement and most significantly compromised our national security by bringing four people rejected by our security agencies to Australian territory. This is simply unforgivable. Mr Rudd still maintains the Oceanic Viking arrangement was ‘non-extraordinary’. He should try telling that to the 200 plus people sitting in the port at Merak, the Indonesian Government who no longer trust us on these issues and, for that matter, the 140,000 refugees in Thailand. The Rudd Government blinked and have now lost control.

The Coalition had no such difficulty when it came to dealing decisively with these issues in Government. Our views and resolve have not changed. We will not compromise the off shore processing regime. While Nauru and Manus are closed, if necessary, other alternative options will be found. Boats will be turned back if circumstances allow, as Mr Rudd promised he would do. And we will begin the work of recalibrating the policy settings unravelled by Labor, starting with the creation of a new temporary safe haven visa.

Some will not like these policies, but people smugglers will understand them. You will also be spared the hypocrisy of the Rudd Government pretending to be one thing while failing to be another.

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Victorian governor abuses his office



VICTORIAN Governor David de Kretser must give up his political activism ... or resign. On Sunday, this supposedly bipartisan official will launch a divisive "civil campaign" with radical green activists and Marxists. That campaign is explicitly political, with organisers declaring on their website they will be "targeting individuals, community organisations, business and government".

Has de Kretser forgotten he has a day job? For him to help whip up a political campaign against politicians is an astonishing breach of a governor's duty to stay above politics and remain a neutral "umpire". As former governor, Labor stalwart and judge Richard McGarvie wrote, a governor or governor-general must be a "respected person who remains entirely above partisan politics and exerts a unifying influence".

Yet de Kretser is listed as keynote speaker at a "mass convergence" at the Melbourne Town Hall organised by the Transition Decade Alliance, a collective of four far Left and radical green groups, including the Climate Emergency Network. The word "convergence" and the plethora of new and grand-sounding organisations behind it are in fact the calling cards of anti-capitalist groups behind such often violent demonstrations as the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in 2000 and the demonstrations against George Bush and George W. Bush. Their aim is to suck in more reputable groups in a "convergence" which they then try to take over.

And, indeed, the Climate Emergency Network's members include the usual Marxist and revolutionary Left parties, such as Resistance, Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative and Solidarity, as well as law-breaking green protest groups such as Greenpeace and Rising Tide, behind the illegal blockade of coal trains at Newcastle.

Nor is this the only sign that should have warned de Kretser he was being used to dignify a militantly political rally. Joining him at the microphone will be David Spratt, who speaks at conferences organised by Marxist groups and demands we switch to a "war-type economy" and spend "more than 30 per cent ... of the economy" to "save most humans and species from a global warming apocalypse". Another co-sponsor is Friends of the Earth, an anti-corporate green group that helped to organise the S11 blockade and insists "wealthier people need to consume less".

Still not enough warning for de Kretser? Then surely he noticed that neither Labor nor the Liberals had sent a speaker to the convergence? Surely he knew that the only politician billed to appear on the stage with him was Christine Milne, the most extreme Greens politician in Federal Parliament? Can't de Kretser see just from this alone how inappropriate it is that he be there? This "unifying" and "bipartisan" official will seem to be siding with the Greens against the big parties.

This is the most extraordinary breach of a governor's duty I've seen. Just ask yourself. Would you expect the Queen to turn up to such a rally, aimed at "targeting ... government"? Then what is the Queen's man in Government House doing there?

It's ludicrous I should have to remind de Kretser why a governor should keep out of politics. Yet clearly I must. Political meddling by an unelected governor is undemocratic, for a start.

Even more important is that the essential role of a governor is to make sure the constitution works as it should. Usually that's uncontroversial work. But as we saw with the sacking of the Whitlam government in 1975, or of NSW premier Jack Lang in 1932, sometimes a governor-general or governor must act in ways that can have us at each other's throats, screaming that democracy is dead. It will then be absolutely critical that no one can prove the Governor a partisan. It's even more vital he isn't.

It is obvious that de Kretser is passionate about the issue of global warming, and even preached on that subject - inappropriately, thought some guests - at his reception last month for Prince William. He's entitled to such opinions, but he is not entitled to abuse his position to advance them - especially not when they are highly divisive and intended to influence the biggest issue now in Australian politics.

If de Kretser wants to become active in politics, he's perfectly free to do so. But he must first quit as Governor, or be made to.

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NOTE: My QANTAS/Jetstar blog is getting frequent updates.