A Greenie tool hits blowback

I have no sympathy at all with the dead Greenie described below.  He was the tool of oppressive Greenie regulations that were interfering with a farmer's livelihood.  He knew that the regulations he was enforcing were causing great grief in the farming community but he continued being at the cutting edge of those regulations.  One hopes that a decent man would have resigned instead of continuing as an instument of tyranny.  But he continued in his role and paid a just price for it.

And there was no need for the heartburn.  If Greenies and their representatives had always insisted that farmers be compensated for financial losses inflicted on them by new regulations, there would have been very little anger.  But Greenies hate people and treated farmers as if they were cockroaches to be trodden on.  In their great arrogance they were as contemptous of farmers as they are of people generally.  To them, farmers were not people with feelings and interests but noxious pests interfering with their dreams of a new Eden.

Greenies depend on the peacable nature of ordinary decent people to get their regulations obeyed but on this occasion one elderly farmer cracked.  I would be delighted if there were more incidents like it.  We had enough Fascism in the 20th century to put us off all Fascism forever, including Ecofascism


ROBERT Strange is a haunted man. Hunted like an animal for 20 minutes by a man hellbent on killing, as his mate and colleague slowly bled out through three gunshot wounds, he lived a nightmare which still shocks him from his sleep.

It’s two years since Rob cradled dying environment protection officer Glen Turner in his arms in the dark on the dirt of a remote road outside a property at Croppa Creek, near Moree.

Glen had been shot three times by 78-year-old farmer Ian Turnbull: a man hellbent on revenge, and who will die in prison.

“He shot an innocent man, twice,” Robert, the only witness to the murderous 20-minute game of cat-and-mouse Turnbull played with the pair, tells Sunday Night journalist Steve Pennells, who has also gained the first interview with Glen’s wife, Alison.

“He went there with the sole intention of killing Glen.”
Glen Turner died in his colleague’s arms, survived by wife Alison, and two children. Picture: Channel 7

Glen Turner died in his colleague’s arms, survived by wife Alison, and two children. Picture: Channel 7Source:Supplied

In his first media interview since the murder, Robert fights tears as he reveals in chilling detail the panicked, macabre cat-and-mouse chase as Turnbull took down the man he had been fixated on after a long-running dispute with the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Glen’s employer, over illegal landclearing.

Land was a valuable commodity to Turnbull, the patriarch of a rich and powerful farming family in an area which boasts some of the most fertile land in Australia.

It was Glen’s job to police the clearing of native forest the area. Turnbull had done just that, illegally, and wound up in court.

By the time Turnbull had been fined $140,000 plus costs over the illegal clearing in 2011, Glen had become, in his mind, his nemesis, the focus of a hate bordering on obsession.

And Turnbull was to prove a merciless, and deadly enemy.

The pair hadn’t seen each other for almost two years until that fateful day on July 29, 2014, when Glen and Rob headed to Croppa Creek to take pictures of stacks of burning vegetation, evidence of fresh land clearing.

Late afternoon, Turner got wind they were there, picked up a pump action shotgun and got in his ute.

And the bloody nightmare began.

Rob fights tears recounting the horror as Turnbull got out of the ute, shotgun pointed, and advanced on them wordlessly.

He was 15 metres away when he fired. The first shot struck Glen’s cheek. The second hit high in his left shoulder. First the head, then the heart.

The gun swung towards Rob. Turnbull told him to get back, and drop his camera.

Cowering with his stricken mate behind their own vehicle, Rob pleaded they were unarmed. “I need to get him help, I need to get him out,” Rob begged.

Turnbull replied the only way Glen was leaving was in a body bag.

And the stalking began. Rob would encourage a heavily-bleeding Glen forward or back behind the vehicle to shield them. Turnbull would follow.

At one point Rob felt the gunshots whistle past his ears ands the words: “I told you to f****g get back. I will kill you.”

It went on for 20 minutes as the life sapped from Glen. “He was croaky, but still doing everything I told him to. Every time I told him to move forward or back and crouch, he did,” says Rob.

As darkness closed in, Turnbull seemed “frustrated” he hadn’t “done what he wanted to do”, Rob says.

“If he’d any sense of compassion he would have let us go,” he says. “He went there with the sole intention of killing Glen Turner, and he wasn’t leaving until he did.”

As the light slipped away, Glen knew he was dying, and made a break for it. Turnbull raised the gun. “I just said ‘oh no’,” Rob says, as Turnbull shot Glen in the back as he ran towards a line of trees.

He lowered the gun, looked at Rob and said: “I’m going home to wait for the police. You can go now.”

In the darkness, Rob turned the vehicle lights on Glen. “I sat down with him, poured some water over him and said “come on, we’ve got to get home’,” he tells Pennells.

“I knew he was dying.”  Hearing a car on the road, convinced it was Turnbull coming back to finish them both, Rob stood in the glare of the headlights, arms raised, eyes closed.

It wasn’t a shot that came. It was help.  As Rob cradled Glen in his arms, a neighbour gently told him his mate was gone.

SOURCE





Editorial: Eco madness strangling Queensland’s economy must stop

THERE is a reason Queensland lags behind the rest of Australia in job-creation and economic growth. Many blame the State Government and Labor must accept some of the blame for the economy’s lacklustre performance.

But the biggest contributor to this state’s lack of progression and prosperity is the litigious way the green movement fights big projects through the courts. More than $34 billion of projects are being targeted. Between them, they would generate more than 26,000 jobs.

The projects being stalled include: The Adani and GVK Hancock mines in the Galilee Basin; Brisbane’s West Village development; the city-changing Queen’s Wharf project; a proposed $3 billion casino-integrated resort development on the Gold Coast; and the nearby Mariner’s Cove, which was this week deferred by developers for a year after fierce opposition.

The greenies have already helped scupper a cruise ship terminal on the Gold Coast and the planned $7 billion Wandoan coal mine. Delays have already cost Adani more than $150 million.

Tourism is at stake at the Great Barrier Reef as marine conservation groups ramp up pressure over perceived coral bleaching.

There are also planned land-clearing laws and opposition to dams, which will stymie the growth of agriculture. It is a dangerous cycle and it must stop.

Our political and judicial hierarchy needs to take a stand and say enough is enough.

The Sunday Mail does not advocate a development-at-all-costs attitude and a free-for-all.  We understand the need for sustainable development and we acknowledge there are needed and justifiable legal safeguards in place to protect the environment.

But there are forces in the conservation movement that use legal stalling tactics against projects, particularly coal mining and residential development.

Queensland is fast developing a reputation among international and interstate consortiums as a tough place to do business.

Faced with the prospect of lengthy court delays before a sod is even turned, those bankrolling major projects now look elsewhere.

Money in the global economy is fluid. It is not available on tap and if Queensland develops a reputation as a difficult environment to have projects approved, financiers will go elsewhere.

It is time the Federal Government stepped in and rid Queensland of these delays. It is the biggest issue facing the Queensland economy.

Our children and their children depend on it.

SOURCE






Australia's west, south losing vital rain as climate change shifts winds, study finds

Some amusing stuff here.  Ozone depletion is doing something new and nasty?  What about the 1989 Montreal Protocol and the ozone hole?  Hasn't the ozone hole mostly healed up by now?  Instead of depleting, shouldn't the ozone be increasing?  Is this report undermining the ozone hole story? It would appear that it is. 

And in one way, that's reasonable.  The ozone hole waxes and wanes as it always has and its greatest extent was in fact in September last year.  So the Montreal convention of which Greenies are so proud has in fact achieved exactly nothing. But by the same token ANY systematic change in the ozone levels is a fiction, including ozone depletion.  So the claims below are  rubbish.

I could go on but I like a sentence from the Abstract too much to quarrel further with it:  "climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible with the observed trends"

Translating that into plain English:  "The global warming theory is wrong.  It does not predict reality".  How's that for today? 

Journal abstract follows the summary below


Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion over the Antarctic are increasingly pushing rain-bearing storm fronts away from Australia's west and south, according to a new international study.

The research, which involved the Australian National University and 16 other institutions from around the world, has just been published in the Nature Climate Change journal.

It found Southern Ocean westerly winds and associated storms were shifting south, down towards Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of rain.

ANU Associate Professor Nerilie Abram, the lead Australian researcher, said this had contributed to a decline of more than 20 per cent in winter rainfall in southwestern Australia since the 1970s.

"That band of rainfall that comes in those westerly winds is shifting further south, so closer towards Antarctica," Dr Abram, from the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said.

The study attributed this shift directly to human-induced climate change, primarily from rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion.

Dr Abram said the loss of rain combined with "2016 being on track to smash the hottest-year record was ominous for communities and the environment".

"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are remote but this region influences Australia's heatwaves, affects whether our crops get the winter rainfall they need and determines how quickly our ocean levels rise," she said.

The international research team examined how recent Antarctic climate trends compared to past climate fluctuations using natural archives such as ice cores drilled into the Antarctic ice sheet.

They found the bigger picture of the region's climate trends remained unclear because of Antarctica and the Southern ocean's "extreme fluctuations in climate year to year".

Dr Abram explained the climate measurements were not yet long enough "for the signal of anthropogenic climate change to be clearly separated from this large natural variability".

Lead author Dr Julie Jones, from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, said there was still an enormous amount to learn about the Antarctic climate.

"At face value, many of the climate trends in Antarctica seem counter-intuitive for a warming world," Dr Jones said.

"Scientists have good theories for why, but these ideas are still difficult to prove with the short records we are working with."

SOURCE

Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate

Julie M. Jones et al.

Abstract

Understanding the causes of recent climatic trends and variability in the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere is hampered by a short instrumental record. Here, we analyse recent atmosphere, surface ocean and sea-ice observations in this region and assess their trends in the context of palaeoclimate records and climate model simulations. Over the 36-year satellite era, significant linear trends in annual mean sea-ice extent, surface temperature and sea-level pressure are superimposed on large interannual to decadal variability. Most observed trends, however, are not unusual when compared with Antarctic palaeoclimate records of the past two centuries. With the exception of the positive trend in the Southern Annular Mode, climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible with the observed trends. This suggests that natural variability overwhelms the forced response in the observations, but the models may not fully represent this natural variability or may overestimate the magnitude of the forced response.

Nature Climate Change 6, 917–926 (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3103






Australia's knowledge revolution goes unnoticed

I am not much inclined to share the celebrations below.  Getting more people into university costs a lot of money and wastes people's time.  Jobs such as teaching that now require a 4 year degree were once entered into via apprenticeships. And there is no doubt that educational standards were higher in the past.  I have lived long enough to see it -- and I have spent most of my working life in education.

Chief Scientist for Australia Dr Alan Finkel believes Australia has a strong history of innovation but will need to build on it€™s successes in order to move forward.

Morgan Housel, from venture capital firm The Collaborative Fund, wrote in a blog this month that the first references to Wilbur and Orville Wright in The New York Times came in 1906, three years after their historic first take-off.

Housel pointed out that world-changing inventions, like the Wright Flyer, often take a long time to catch on. The same sort of thing happened with the telephone and the car.

We're especially prone to overlooking important changes in the economic realm. The global financial crisis was a telling example. The disastrous lending practices that emerged in the US in the early part of last decade got little attention before triggering the most serious financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

The mining boom that has reshaped our economy is another case in point.

At the turn of the century it became fashionable to view Australia as an old-fashioned "smokestack" economy too reliant on mining and agriculture. That perception sapped confidence in the Aussie dollar in 2001 as it crashed to an all-time low around US48c.

What the critics hadn't factored in was China. Before long "smokestack Australia" was riding high on a once-in-a-century commodities boom driven by China's historic expansion.

Australia is now in the midst of another momentous change that gets very little attention. Since 2005 the proportion of Australians aged between 20 and 64 with a Certificate III qualification or higher has jumped from 47 per cent to 60 per cent (a Certificate III recognises advanced technical skills and knowledge, such as a tradesman's). The share of 20-to-64-year-olds with a bachelor degree or higher has climbed from about 21 per cent to nearly 30 per cent in the same period.

One of the few indicators to capture the benefit from this investment in "human capital", or know-how, is the Fairfax-Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index, which tracks quarterly changes in national welfare.

The index's measure of human capital (which includes adult education and skills, schooling and early childhood development) has ballooned from $10.9 trillion in 2005 to more than $16.99 trillion this year, an increase of about 55 per cent in 11 years.

The index's author, economist Nicholas Gruen, says this has been a "huge driver" of national wellbeing that will pay long-term dividends as more and more jobs become knowledge-based.

"If you compare human capital to all other forms of capital in the economy, the amount by which human capital has grown in the past decade exceeds all other kinds of capital put together," he said. "This is a massive part of our economy ... but are people thinking about it? Not very much."

The latest index report showed the value of human capital rose by $661 billion in 2015-16, which was 12 per cent more than the previous financial year. The biggest contributor was investment in adult formal education.

There's been a know-how revolution but we've hardly noticed.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here