Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for April 2013

Greg Hunt’s Carbon Buy-Back Scheme for Australia

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THE Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Greg Hunt MP, was in Brisbane yesterday explaining the Coalition’s plan to tackle climate change post September 14, 2013. You can download the manifesto as presented at the seminar here:

The Coalition’s Direct Action Plan, 29 April 2013 (9.8MB)

Clearly the Coalition has no intention of showing leadership on this issue with Mr Hunt explaining that:

“We agree with the Government on the science of climate change, we agree on the targets to reduce emissions and we agree on using markets as the best mechanism.”

But I can’t see how this “Direct Action Plan” can possibly work as detailed, in particular the economics of revegetation for carbon sequestration and soil carbon sequestration don’t add-up. Yet Mr Hunt claims:

“The fund will not only reduce our emissions, it will improve Australia’s environment through a range of measures including revegetation, better land management and enhanced soil quality.”

But hang on. Mr Hunt is claiming the price of carbon will climb to $350 per tonne by 2050. Ha! Hasn’t anyone told Mr Hunt that the carbon market recently collapsed in Europe?  Only a fool or a politician could write:

“This simple, straightforward approach is a vastly better way to tackle climate change than the blunt instrument that is the Carbon Tax, which has already inflicted economy-wide pain and will continue to do so as it climbs to its own predicted price of $350 per tonne of C02 by 2050. That is why we will repeal the Carbon Tax and replace it with a classic reverse auction system, based on incentive and innovation.”

What a crock!

Consensus and Controversy: The Debate on Man-Made Global Warming

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‘IN open societies where both scientists and the general public are equipped with critical skills and the tools of inquiry, not least enabled by the information revolution provided through the Internet, the ethos of science as open, questioning, critical and anti-dogmatic should and can be defended also by the public at large. Efforts to make people bow uncritically to the authority of a dogmatic representation of Science, seems largely to produce ridicule, opposition and inaction, and ultimately undermines the legitimacy and role of both science and politics in open democracies.’

That’s the final paragraph in a new report by Emil A. Røyrvik; a social anthropologist and senior research scientists at SINTEF Technology and Society, Scandinavia’s largest independent research organisation.

The report about “the debate on man-made global warming” including an analysis of “the four myths of climate change”, “the hockey stick”, “climategate” and surveys and petitions of dissenting and contrarian positions.

Dr Røyrvik comes at the issue from an academic perspective and very clearly articulates the strength of the consensus position but also the logic of the contrarians – as he labels us.

[Read more…] about Consensus and Controversy: The Debate on Man-Made Global Warming

Sarah Ferguson Defends Abattoir Footage of Dubious Origin

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IN June 2011 the Australian government halted all live cattle exports to Indonesia after ABC Four Corners broadcast disturbing footage of Australian cattle being mistreated in Indonesian abattoirs. As I wrote in May 2012, Australians were lead to believe that this footage, that shocked the nation, was typical of what occurs inside many abattoirs in Indonesia and that the footage was taken by Lyn White from Animals Australia [1]. However, according to British filmmakers Gem and Ian from ‘Tracks Investigations’ they were responsible for the footage that sparked massive public opposition [2]. Nowhere in the Four Corners program is the involvement of these professional filmmakers declared; activists who for a fee “offer a comprehensive global investigation and film production service to conservation, environmental and animal protection groups.”[3]

In the following email, which Sarah Ferguson from ABC Four Corners has asked me to publish, she explains that my recent column in The Land on the same topic is “mischievous” [4]. In particular she claims a first hand knowledge of the situation in Indonesia and that half the abattoir footage in the program was filmed by Four Corners.

[Read more…] about Sarah Ferguson Defends Abattoir Footage of Dubious Origin

Remembering Why There Are Carbon Markets

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CARBON is the key building block for all life on earth. We are made of it, we eat it and we breathe it. To label carbon dioxide, which is a component of the natural carbon cycle, a pollutant as the US Supreme Court did in 2007, is absurd. So, is the concept of trading carbon and taxing carbon.

Yet carbon markets have developed not because the Catholic Church requested them, but because they were justified and promoted by leading scientists in cahoots with well meaning economists.

These markets and trading schemes are part of a new vision for a different world, a world based in essence on junk science and the new religion of environmentalism.

[Read more…] about Remembering Why There Are Carbon Markets

Why to ‘Like’ a Legal Rhino Horn Trade

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I’M often confronted, via my Facebook News Feed, with grotesque images of butchered animals and an expectation that I participate in the emotionally satisfying activity of clicking ‘like’ and thus demonstrating that I’m against animal cruelty and for conservation. I’ve never once seen something in my Facebook News Feed that promotes the sustainable use of wildlife. Yet this is more likely to contribute to the long term survive of species like the Rhinoceros.

The last few years has seen a dramatic rise in the incidence of rhino poaching. Previously secure populations are now being targeted by aggressive poaching operations, backed by international crime syndicates. Part of the problem is that the legal trade has been banned following campaigning by the ignorant self-righteous.

[Read more…] about Why to ‘Like’ a Legal Rhino Horn Trade

Thatcherism and the Climate Catastrophe

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With the passing of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, much will be heard from the conservative side of politics about all the good that she did. But for the sack of truth, something she cared much about [1], let us also consider her role in helping to build the illusion of catastrophic climate change.

Margaret Thatcher was no friend of science, but she was a friend of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that was established in the School of Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1972.

This is the same institution that Climategate exposed as being up to its neck in scientific fraud.

The establishment of the CRU only just preceded Thatcherism. With Thatcher’s market economics applied to public science none of the scientists at the CRU were ever guaranteed a salary. They had to generate their own income through grants and contracts.

Much of their money did end up coming from government but it had to be earned, they had to show their value to the politician and this is now par for the course [1].

It was following the miner’s strike in the UK and Prime Minister Thatcher’s increasing impatience with Arthur Scargill, then president of the National Union of Mineworkers, that the first tentative links were drawn between coal mining and the possibility of a climate catastrophe.

Various luminaries from that time have told me that Prime Minister Thatcher was keen to reduce Britain’s dependence on coal. She drew the connection between rising carbon dioxide emissions and coal mining before it was fashionable because she thought there was perhaps some scientific justification, and because she was keen to find justification for alternative energy sources, particularly nuclear.

Indeed her government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s. Mrs Thatcher visited the CRU and assembled her entire cabinet to hear a seminar on climate change at which Tom Wigley, then director of CRU, was the star performer.

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[1] “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” – on her election as prime minister in 1979

[2] Bob Carter explains in ‘Science is Not Concensus’ how during the 1980s there came a restructuring of the way in which government science operated. Public-good programme funding for the activities of government science agencies shrank, to be replaced by funding for individual projects with limited lifetimes.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/IPA-RMC-03Reviewr.pdf