Junk climate "science" an excuse to bilk the public

Christopher Booker notes that the public is being had by players with vested interests in hyping global warming hysteria:

As the great global warming scare continues to crumble, attention focuses on all those groups that have a huge interest in keeping it alive. Governments look on it as an excuse to raise billions of pounds in taxes. Wind farm developers make fortunes from the hidden subsidies we pay through our electricity bills. A vast academic industry receives more billions for concocting the bogus science that underpins the scare. Carbon traders hope to make billions from corrupt schemes based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2. ...

And focuses on the likely grand-daddy of them all - the re-insurance industry.

... no financial interest stands to make more from exaggerating the risks of climate change than the re-insurance industry, which charges retail insurers for “catastrophe cover”, paid for by all of us through our premiums. ...

Booker refers to a study recently published in Nature and to Willis Eschenbach's dissection of it in a guest post at WUWT.  Eschenbach concludes that the study is junk and faults Nature for publishing it:

The problem is not computer models. The problem is Nature Magazine trying to pass off the end results of a long computer model daisy-chain of specifically selected, untested, unverified, un-investigated computer models as valid, falsifiable, peer-reviewed science.

But Booker sees another problem noting that two of the junk study's coauthors work for the insurance industry:

Two of their co-authors are from Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a California-based firm which is the world leader in advising the insurance industry on climate change...

... this is not the first time that this leading adviser to the world’s re-insurance industry has been involved in a controversial bid to heighten alarm over the consequences of climate change. ...

... In October 2005, in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, RMS held a meeting in Bermuda with four hurricane specialists, all of the alarmist persuasion, to quiz them as to how they thought hurricane activity was likely to be affected between 2006 and 2010, thanks to climate change ...

Junk climate science, working in the service of screwing us over.

[Via where there are some good comments from Christopher Booker]. See also.

Defunding KAIROS (aka the Oda "scandal")

Peter Foster: "Bungled but justified".

... As for all those shocked accusations about “lying,” what Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff this week called a “reputable church organization” has told Parliamentary-sized whoppers in pursuit of its own leftist agenda.

Kairos is supported by a grab bag of terminally declining religious denominations searching desperately for current relevance by adopting the commandments of the Church of Greenpeace. It speaks for the weasel concepts of social justice and sustainable development. ...

Humongous civil service pay hikes

The Post:

Wage increases doled out to federal and provincial public servants have nearly doubled those given to private-sector employees in the past decade.  ... federal public servants’ wages rose by 59%, far outpacing the average worker. [And 59% approaches triple the official inflation rate.]

"... there are some theories ... Economic forces could be driving talented staff into the public sector and thus increasing the value of their work ... [Bwaahahahaaa..!!] But political scientists and economists have said there are political reasons for government workers getting “unusually large annual raises.” [That's better.]

... The common view that government is a cushy place to work is misguided and unfair, said John Gordon, national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents 180,000 federal workers. ... “The workload increases every day, and politicians ... buy into that ‘fat cat public service’ perception.” Public employees deserve the pay raises, he said, and they face many of the same strains as private-sector workers — if not more. [Predictable propaganda from a union honcho - but utter bullshit. There is no way that civil service employees deserve pay increases that are double those in the private sector.]

As a former military officer with years of experience working in Ottawa along-side the federal civil service I find it impossible to accept these exhorbitant increases.  That's not to say that there aren't a lot of highly talented civil servants working very hard to meet or exceed their job descriptions. But it is highly dubious that they are more talented and/or work harder than their private sector counterparts.  Also, unfortunately, large numbers of civil servants are employed doing work that doesn't need doing (and we'd all be better off if it went undone).  Talented people working hard at these jobs is just more government waste - not justification for huge pay increases.

Smack-down!

Peter Foster executes a masterful smack-down of Post columnist Dan Gardner who recently penned this loopy column accusing the Harper government of being "communists" because they reject the GHG emissions cap-and-trade approach:

... claims Mr. Gardner, their proposals to deal with the problem by regulation represent a level of economic ignorance unseen outside the University of Havana!

... Mr. Gardner claims that “pricing” carbon via cap-and-trade is “efficient because it isn’t some bureaucrat in Ottawa who decides who will reduce emissions and how they will do it.”

Has he been vacationing off the planet?

... I had never come across anybody before Mr. Gardner who dared to suggest that it was a “free market” solution. In fact, cap and trade is to free markets what Sophie’s Choice was to free choice. It corresponds to the Stalinist definition of initiative: finding the best way to carry out an order.

... Cap and trade’s “market” is entirely artificial, based on government-created scarcity. It isn’t a market in freely traded goods, but in bureaucratically regulated “bads.” ... At whatever level of regulation, however, cap and trade promotes the sleaziest of mixed-economic concoctions, supported by officials who would do the capping, and the private-sector operatives who would do the trading, and/or reap the benefits of a system that is doomed to be rigged.

... Meanwhile, the main issue remains whether there is a climate crisis in the first place. Mr. Gardner devoutly believes so, but one can’t help wondering if his grasp of science is as dodgy as his grasp of ­economics.

Classic Foster.

Update: Joanne at BLY caught Gardner's Tweet which promises a reply to Foster.  Heh, can't wait.

Sensible gun control ...

... in Switzerland (unlike Canuckistan):

... voters overwhelmingly rejected proposals that would have obliged some two million gun owners in the country to keep their weapons in public arsenals rather than at home.

.... 3,000 gun clubs, which function as key social centres in hundreds of villages.

... no national firearms register in Switzerland. ... unofficial estimates suggest there are between 2 million and 3 million guns kept in Swiss households.

[via]

Why wind power sux

From the Carbon Sense Coalition submission to the Australian Senate Enquiry into Wind Farms:

Wind Power is Dilute ... require a huge land footprint.... needs a wide network of roads, transmission lines and turbines which degrades any area containing wind farms.

Wind Power is Unreliable ... also intermittent and hard to predict. ... large backup or storage systems are required. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.

Wind Power is Ugly, Noisy and Hazardous ... Wind farms are uniformly hated by neighbours and will not be willingly accepted without heavy compensation payments. Their noise, flicker, fire risk and disturbing effect on domestic and wild animals are well documented.

Wind Power is Expensive ... Its cost is far above all conventional methods of generating electricity. It requires a huge land footprint and needs a wide network of roads, transmission lines and turbines which degrades any area containing wind farms.

Furthermore:

Wind Turbines kill [huge numbers of] Bats and Birds
Big Wind is pushing a Carbon Tax
Wind Power creates Paupers not Jobs
Global Warming Justifications are Bogus

... and then some. So, by all means, force taxpayers to cough up even more subsidies for this boondoggle.

[via FOS]

Related. And.

Atlas Shrugged, the movie

Part I  Trailer



Movie website.

[h/t]

Background, cast, etc. (What, no Jon Voight?)

Apparently it's going to be a trilogy.  Looking forward to it.

Democracy

Throughout the Egyptian revolt against the Mubarak regime over the past two weeks there has been a lot of talk about the goal being "democracy".

Worth considering is Daniel Greenfield's article on "The Democracy Fallacy":

... [people] failed to understand that democracy is a tool. A means not an end. Used correctly democracy can create a republic of free men invested with rights and responsibilities. Used incorrectly democracy can lead to political bloodbaths, anarchy or a genocidal madman.

... The fundamental error ... in messianically embracing democracy as an ultimate good, is that we contrast it with tyranny as the ultimate evil. We falsely assume that tyranny is evil because it is undemocratic.

... Democracy and freedom are not the same thing.  ...

Debating the multicult

The Globe and Mail's resident nitwit, John Ibbitson, doesn't want Canadians to debate multiculturalism:

Whether we like it or not – and there’s not much to like – events could force a national debate on whether multiculturalism is working in Canada.

... The country will survive a debate over multiculturalism, even if we may not be able to prevent one.

He'll no doubt be shocked when he finds out from the nearly 1400 comments that almost everyone thinks he's a moron. As Blazing Cat Fur put it, he got "his poncy ass kicked".

Mark Steyn on Ibbitson's column.

And over at Climbing Out of the Dark, Hunter comments on the growing list of national leaders who've declared the multicult a flop/disaster.

Orwellian food fascism

The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute (CAPI) has produced a new report. Predictably it's loaded with fashionable eco-buzzwords and bureaucratic bullcrap.  From Peter Foster's scathing critique:

... a steaming shovel-ready pile of policy titled Canada’s Agri-Food Destination, which amounts to a non-fiction rewrite of Animal Farm for the 21st century: a self-parody of bureaucratic pretension.

... The CAPI report produces grand Soviet-style targets before getting down to the nitty-gritty of planting new gobbledegook-fertilized bureaucracies as far as the eye can see.

... three pieces of numerical mysticism, two anti-economic mercantilist fallacies and subscription to an established policy disaster before we’ve even left the first page of the executive summary.

... The path to agri-nirvana requires five bureaucratic “Enablers of Change.” ...

... Here is the media’s role: “Link the important issues to prompt change ... [as for global warming, eco-brainwashing and badgering]

... It’s uncertain what the Harper government thinks of this Liberal-created bureaucratic monstrosity or its latest report.

And you can't miss Mr. Foster's exasperation with it all in his closing recommendation:

... [Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry] Ritz should take the whole organization, now ensconced in pseudo-agricultural splendor on the grounds of Ottawa’s legendary experimental farm, out to a more remote rural location with a long gun and a shovel.

Bravo, Peter!

Dispensing injustice

Good editorial today in the Post highlighting yet another "human rights" travesty:

... Following a four-day hearing in 2009, a tribunal adjudicator sided with [the complainant] and ordered Ms. Telfer to pay her former employee $36,000, a sum Ms. Telfer says she does not have.  ... When she failed to pay, the plaintiff's government paid lawyers placed a lien on the home of Ms. Telfer.

... At the hearing, [the compainant] was represented by governmentpaid lawyers, while Ms. Telfer represented herself because she could not afford counsel (and no government aid was offered to her). During the proceedings, a key witness for Ms. Telfer was prevented from giving evidence, while no such exclusions were made from [the complainant's] witness list.

... Sadly, these are all-too-common tactics employed by federal and provincial rights commissions and tribunals ...

The good news is:

Last week, a three-judge Ontario Superior Court panel struck down the adjudicator's decision in Ms. Telfer's case, saying it was "fatally flawed" and explaining that it was "simply not possible to logically follow the pathway taken by the adjudicator" to arrive at his conclusions.

Which was promptly followed by some more bad news:

The court ordered another hearing before a different adjudicator...

Along with some slightly better news:

... and told [the complainant] to pay for Ms. Telfer's lawyer.

 But:

Naturally, the Ontario human rights tribunal has already said it will pay on [the complainant's] behalf ...

Arrrggghhh!

In conclusion:

["Human Rights" Commissions] have evolved into modern-day Star Chambers. Commissioners and investigators all too often act as though they have -- or should have -- the same authority as judges. Yet given their biases and the lack of safeguards for defendants' rights, they seldom dispense true justice. It is long past time that politicians found the courage to rein them in. [Amen!]

Dear Mr. Prime Minister and provincial Premiers:
Please get together on this, use some common sense and try to locate your gonads!

O'Reilly's Obama interview

Part 1


Part 2

False prophets

David Warren sees Marxism/socialism, economics and environmentalism as bad parodies of Biblical religion:

Marxism was an elaborate, and really bad, parody of Christian and Jewish teachings. (To say nothing of idolatrous.)

.... in the latest permutations -- "green" ideologies have been replacing "red"

... Marx, Engels, and all the other luminaries of the left, have persistently cast themselves as prophets, pointing the way to this radiant future.

... At Davos, Switzerland, this week, where the world's most self-regarding prophets were assembled for their annual Pentecostal parody, which they call the World Economic Forum, a session was devoted to discussing why economic forecasts always turn out wrong.

... the Messianic prophecy, that "no man can know the day or the hour" -- nor even the angels -- is not a prediction, but a statement of deep fact. It is the way things are. There are more things in heaven and Earth, than economists can dream of, and there is no model that can begin to incorporate all the "geists."

And yet we have constructed vast bureaucracies, that work on the premise that these forecasts will come true. The sheer idiocy of it, takes one's breath away. Centuries of "the triumph of reason," and it comes to this.

All too true.  Friedrich Hayek called it "the fatal conceit".

Update: Speaking of "the fatal conceit", Hunter (in the comments) recommended this rap video:

No evidence of CO2 influence on climate

According to Dr. Noor van Andel, speaking at the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI):

● The atmosphere has become more transparent to IR radiation in the past 60 years. The “greenhouse effect” has become less.

● Solar constant and the properties of water determine our climate

● Rising surface temperature is tightly controlled by increasing wet convection and concomitant upper tropospheric drying

● No observational evidence for influence of CO2 on past or present climate

● Strong observational correlation of solar magnetic activity with climate temperatures,  presumably via cloud condensation nucleation and albedo

It's oceans, clouds and cosmic rays, not CO2.

[via FOS]

Socialist big-shot abuses Adam Smith

Peter Foster takes IMF Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to task for his distortion/misinterpretation of Adam Smith's views on inequality and the distribution of wealth.  Strauss-Kahn attempts to recruit Smith to justify the redistribution of wealth as a solution to "poverty":

... I would venture that Smith’s eyes would pop out were he to witness the level of “poverty” about which Mr. Strauss-Kahn is rending his garments.

The notion of a “welfare state” was utterly alien both to Smith’s political times and his own moral inclinations. Smith lived in an age of personal responsibility. Poor relief was a local, personal affair, as was the “beneficence” that Smith praised as the highest virtue. “Beneficence,” wrote Smith, “is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.” ...

Strauss-Kahn's speech is another example of the left's obsession with income "gaps".  Absolute poverty, which has been dropping spectacularly thanks to the global free market economy, doesn't interest them.  Their interests are either useless emotional bleating about the poor or stoking envy as a means of boosting votes - not about practical, proven solutions which they constantly berate.

An interesting debate - gas v. wind,etc

on-line debate at the Economist:

This house believes that natural gas will do more than renewables to limit the world's carbon emissions.

While it's highly doubtful that there's a need to "limit the world's carbon emissions" anything that limits taxpayer subsidized environmental abominations like wind farms has my vote.

[via FOS]

Carbon trading scandal (number 4)

From the UK Telegraph (and the twighlight zone):

Carbon allowances, Europe’s main weapon against climate change, have an impact on every household, yet the scheme is open to fraudsters and profiteers.

... thieves behind the heist had made off with 500,000 carbon allowances – intangible products worth around €14 each that are the European Union's main weapon against climate change.

... this is the fourth time that the carbon market has been hit with a major scandal.

Hmmm. A scam to steal the intangible products of the global warming scam. Seems fitting.

[Via FOS]