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Australia unveils a controversial plan to tax carbon emissions at 500 firms from next year...
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Sunday, July 10, 2011, 6:38 AM ETAustralia unveils a controversial plan to tax carbon emissions at 500 firms from next year starting at A$23 ($24.70) a ton. Coal miners like BHP (BHP) and Xstrata (XSRAY.PK) would be eligible for some of the A$1.3B ($1.4B) earmarked to help the most polluting mines adjust, but there are worries this isn't enough.
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This news story has 41 comments:
"The leader of the Australian Greens party, Bob Brown, has infuriated coal miners by saying he would like to see the industry shut down altogether"
The Australian coal miners and power generators should give Bob Brown exactly what he wants - tomorrow. Let the Aussie government see exactly what happens if the productive members of society simply stop working when singled out for punishment.
Who is John Galt?
How many people's lives have been saved in Europe from their carbon tax?
Or: Has life expectancy and lung cancer rates improved with carbon reduction?
How much cleaner are the oceans and streams?
The gap between the expense and the (non) results would be comical were it not tragic.
FYI: Not much reported, but very active in Virginia is a lawsuit from Ken Cuccinelli (sp?) vs. the Univ. of Virginia, demanding the release of the scientific notes and research of one of their resident "chicken little" /true believers. Stay tuned!
What governments would never understand is that oppressing taxes cuts the incentive to grow and lowers aggregate demand, thus the outcome is lower jobs growth.
According to the article Australian thermal coal is selling for $122 / ton and the tax will increase costs by $1.80 ... seems manageable.
That being said, the most important way to reduce future carbon emissions is to get China and India as wealthy per capita as Australia (or better yet Japan, with their mass transit) ...
It's so easy for the socialists to pull off these scams when they control the education of impressionable young minds and fill them with pure claptrap.
Is there a better explanation for the rise in 20th century temperatures than CO2 forcing? The temperature record and consensus model are shown here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Global warming is a scam designed to raise taxes and impair people's freedoms, the never-ending mission of socialists and Marxists.
www.skepticalscience.c...
2) The current climate models reconstruct the temporary cooling in the early 70s; in fact, they overshoot, which suggests that CO2 sensitivity may not be as high as feared.
Models are no more than academic exercises. Having worked on supercomputer development and visited national labs in the US, UK, and Germany in the process I can tell you that real scientists understand this and will tell that to you up front. Mann and his collaborators on this hoax aren't real scientists. They were in search of fame and government funding and they knew what those deciding the funding wanted to hear. We can't even predict the weather out the next month reliably, let alone on climatic timeframes (and it's a joke that they even try to claim that a decade or few indicates a climatic trend).
The climate record shows warming through the first half of the 20th Century, cooling through about the next 40 years, and a short uptrend that peaked in the late '90s followed by a downtrend since. None of that fits your CO2 forcing claim. Water vapor and Sun activity are much larger forcing functions but ignored by the key models supporting the AGW hysteria.
Remember how the hole in the antarctic ozone layer was going to extinguish mankind?
There's always some new, fabricated, fear-mongering pseudo-science right around the corner, like the next bus, all aimed at raising Government taxation, enriching a few and constraining our liberty. It's that, and nothing more.
I'm not sure what you're referring to -- the blade on the "hockey stick" is 100 years long, and it's a reconstruction of a temperature record, not a model prediction. Also, weather and climate are certainly rather different things, otherwise we would have an Ice Age every year like a bad winter.
Anyway, I'm not as interested in the science politics as the science. I want to know how *current* consensus models fail to match up with the data or are non-predictive, and what alternatives out there work better.
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kcr357,
You're probably right. The problem is that many humans will die and suffer in the transition, because most rely on subsistence farming to feed themselves, and don't have the capital to be mobile.
kcr357,
"You're probably right. The problem is that many humans will die and suffer in the transition, because most rely on subsistence farming to feed themselves, and don't have the capital to be mobile. "
The concern is that the places with the highest population density also have the most people living hand-to-mouth, as well as the warmest climes already -- central and sub-Saharan Africa, South and southeast Asia. If they suffer droughts and lowered food production, a *billion* people will become refugees. Even on a generation timescale (~30 years) there's just no way to handle that.
A temperature reconstruction is a model - specifically a statistical model (something that Mann had no expertise in which in part was a force in him being discredited). The graph is the output of that model. There are no temperature records going back a thousand years or more, thus they're reconstructed via models from what are called temperature proxies such as tree-ring data. The problem with the Mann hockey stick, which you still haven't addressed, is that it shows a sharp spike in temperature over the last couple of decades that hasn't occurred, and more importantly isn't present in the temperature proxies used. (This led to the famous Mann email quote of "hide the decline" as they manipulated the code and data in the model to make the blade spike up where the proxies were trending down.)
The numerous failures of the Mann's work are well beyond what can be addressed here. This Guardian article is a good start. Note that one of the revelations of the East Anglia emails was that many of Mann's colleagues privately discredited his work although publicly they appeared to position themselves in his camp. Also keep in mind the existing temperature data is manipulated in various ways and highly suspect as the second link provides one example of.
www.guardian.co.uk/env...
washingtonexaminer.com...
Another fault of Mann's graph is he manipulated his data and model to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and other warm periods from his graph, making the "stick" absurdly flat. This is quite contrary to other research findings.
www.springerlink.com/c...
“The late-twentieth century, however, is not exceptionally warm in the new record: On decadal-to-centennial timescales, periods around AD 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were equally warm, or warmer. The 200-year long warm period centered on AD 1000 was significantly warmer than the late-twentieth century (p < 0.05) and is supported by other local and regional paleoclimate data. The new tree-ring evidence from Torneträsk suggests that this “Medieval Warm Period” in northern Fennoscandia was much warmer than previously recognized.”
Now, the reason I guess you care so much about Mann is that his "hockey stick" is used to validate current climate models -- is this true? Does the data used by climatologist these days ignore the Medieval Warm Period, or use his other assumptions which you disagree with?
Again, I'm not interested in climate science politics, I'm interested in the science.
Also, you are referring to the so-called Milankovich cycles. That time scale is 10,000 years, not 100 years like CO2-driven climate change. And, the sunspot cycle only changes the solar output by 0.1%, which affects climate but not nearly as much as increasing CO2 concentrations enhancing the greenhouse effect.
Same with making ethanol, unfortunately.
Here's a passage from a nasa article indicating SS can and do have quite a measurable effect on the climate
" "Historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," he said."
www.giss.nasa.gov/rese.../
Here is an article showing there was a 22f temp increase over 50 years 11k years ago, man had NOTHING to do with that, so abrupt climate change is not proof of human cause.
www.sciencedaily.com/r...
I really gotta get back to work, will continue later.
CO2 is a good proxy for pollution in general. Cut back on CO2 and you also cut back on all kinds of toxic nasties. As long as Australia can handle the added tax (it really isn't onerous) then why not go through with the plan??
CO2 has another nasty effect besides enhancing the greenhouse effect, which is ocean acidification. This one is beyond dispute, and is bleaching corals and may disrupt fish stocks.
There's another explanation and that's that numerous papers conclude that temperature changes precede (rather than follow) CO2 level changes. Given the properties of the oceans as CO2 sinks/sources as they cool/heat-up it's not difficult to understand why this would be observed.
You raise an interesting point (that I heard elsewhere) that temperature usually start to rise before the CO2 levels pick up in the historical record, and the simplest explanation is indeed that CO2 is released from natural reservoirs. However, as I understand it, the point is that this CO2 release then provides positive feedback to the warming, making it much greater.
We don't simply take actions because something might be causal. Just because I might be killed in a car accident if I get in a car today, doesn't mean I refuse to get in a car for the rest of my life. We only take actions based on risk/benefit analysis.
Do you think climate models fail to capture the dynamics of water vapor and cloud formation?
Also, do the climate models miss large fluctuations in solar irradiance? My understanding is that fluctuations are quite small small, even during sunspot cycles.
BTW, not driving is one of the best ways to increase your expected lifespan :) Of course, if you like the lifestyle it may be worth it to you. I'm not sure the same felicific calculus can be applied to whole civilizations, esp. when the benefits and costs are not commensurately distributed.
From wikipedia: "A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could have an uncontrolled release of as much as 5.2 metric tons per year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 metric tons per year of thorium."
Personally I'm not too worried about global warming but I'm all for cleaner air and water. Also keep in mind Australia gets the vast majority of its electricity from coal.