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.