'Daring to Doubt' Tony Abbot GWPF Annual Lecture 2017 - Cartoon notes by Josh

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Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia, gave an excellent GWPF annual lecture last night. 

The text of the lecture is on the GWPF website here and the video is below.

Cartoons by Josh

Comments

[The Dork of Cork]

Sorry but after watching all 4 seasons of Rake which is a sort of hybrid Rumpole /Yes minister with added sex guns drugs & high farce I can no longer take Australian politics seriously.

At best these characters act as a weather vane for changes of the states wind direction but hold zero intellectual value by themselves.

[Ross Lea]

Reading the text it is and excellent lecture; I look forward to the video.

[Robert Christopher]

My favourite quote:

"Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause."

Probably because of this:
"For decades, we’ve been losing our religious faith but we’re fast losing our religious knowledge too. We’re less a post-Christian society than a non-Christian, or even an anti-Christian one. It hasn’t left us less susceptible to dogma, though, because we still need things to believe in and causes to fight for; it’s just that believers can now be found for almost anything and everything."

It reminds me of Mike Haseler's post (here, from long ago):
"Social science has only two problems: it isn't science and it isn't social.

Indeed it combines the worst aspects of both areas. It takes as a dogma the dispassionate "uncaring" attitude that science needs to be impartial, and throws away the impartial bit and replaces it with a sloppy agenda driven attitude toward data and methodology which is common in society.

[TinyCO2]

Good lecture although I resent the reference to Christianity. I've never seen a survey but in the UK and Australia there is almost certainly no connection between Cristianity and belief or not in climate change. It is entirely possible to abandon main stream religion and not take up some weird belief system instead. True atheism is as obsessive as any religion. I'm a 'can't be arsed in imaginary crappist' a small but growing sect of apathetic evangelists. Our first commandment is 'you can believe what you like but don't come whining to me about it'.

[Graeme No.3]

The speech is discussed on
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/10/dangerous-abbott-unleashed-speaks-the-truth-critics-froth-and-flounder/

and wonder of wonders, the ABC is quoting parts of it. True, they think they are debunking it but allowing dangerous ideas about climate on air is a distinct departure from the dogma. Even some politicians are now muttering about the effects of making bread more expensive when the circuses have become much less popular.

[TinyCO2]

Quality cartooning as usual.

[golf charlie]

The Ashes 2017-2018 starts before Christmas, offering Australia the opportunity to record the first "Power Cut Stopped Play" in Test Match history.

If they don't take this sporting record for all time, I fear England will.

[golf charlie]

Josh great cartoon, thank you, the title "The Politics of Power Cuts Blackouts Cost" is brilliant.

Within the UK and EU the reality of Green dogma has been dodged by politicians. It is time that Green dogma was challenged as part of political debate and in the media, allowing electorates to vote on the costs that they they are suffering now, in the knowledge that things will get worse for themselves and their grandchildren.

[golf charlie]

Australians are learning about daylight Green Blobbery

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/09/aussie-revolution-mounting-high-level-attacks-against-renewable-energy/

This comes on top of a MSM story a few days ago by noted economist Judith Sloan, comparing renewables to the Bernie Madoff and Enron scandals;

Taxpayer support for renewable energy simply cannot be justified

12:00AM October 7, 2017
JUDITH SLOAN

Move over, Ponzi; forget Bernie Madoff; ignore Enron; and dismiss collateralised debt obligations ­associated with subprime mort­gages. Without a doubt, the biggest scam perpetrated against taxpayers and consumers is ­renewable energy.

[Beth Cooper]

Guvuh-mint imposition of taxes on efficient fossil fuel energy cannot justified.

[BLACK PEARL]

Good to see you back golf charlie with your clear cut comments :)

[Mique]

And now, coming into summer, the brain-damaged fools running Australia are proposing to pay people not to use their air conditioners and other high power-consuming appliances/machinery to avoid blackouts. Brilliant! Pay subsidies to the "renewable" producers to compete with the fossil fuel producers (and drive them out of business) and then pay the public not to use the renewable power that the renewable producers cannot reliably produce, and for which there are no longer sufficient reliable fossil fuel producers to make up the shortfall.

And all this is bipartisan policy.

Yet still Tony Abbott is hated by the political class and the media.

Poor fellow my country.

[Russell]

Congratulations to Josh as his fan base grows ever closer to two digits.

[Paul Matthews]

The Grauniad has very kindly given Abbott and the GWPF publicity by attacking him in no less than three separate articles (links can be found here). These attacks are, as usual, entirely with* substance. For example Karl Mathieson, of the notorious "Climate Home" propaganda outfit, wrote this:

'Abbott went on to deny many of the central findings of the UN’s climate science body and claimed, without providing evidence, that climate records had been “adjusted” and data sets “slanted”.'

The fact that climate records have been adjusted is of course not in dispute. It's ironic that Mathieson accuses Abbott of not providing evidence, when he himself fails to provide any evidence of Abbott denying the IPCC findings.

One climate scientist claims to have a peer-reviewed paper 'showing his claims do not stack up with the science':

https://twitter.com/aviandelights/status/917957830073880577

Oh, and Russell, your numbers are a bit off. Josh has 1800 twitter followers. You have 5, I believe.

[* without? TM]

[Paul Matthews]

The video is now up at GWPF.

[golf charlie]

One climate scientist claims to have a peer-reviewed paper 'showing his claims do not stack up with the science':

Oct 11, 2017 at 9:02 AM | Paul Matthews

Nothing stacks up with the claims of Climate Scientists, apart from their "earnings".

[Radical Rodent]

Mr Matthews – oooh… meeeooww!

If I could be bothered opening a Twitter account, Josh would certainly have one more follower.

[golf charlie]

Radical Rodent, vvussell is not worth the effort of displaying 2 digits.

Sporting rivalries between England and Australia have been confrontational over the years, and now Australians are being challenged to decide whether they could give a 4X about whingeing Climate Scientists. Hopefully they won't try to deport them back to England as a consequence of their convictions.

[The Dork of Cork]

What is not understood in this era of full globalized monopoly is the gas producing regions must be forced into extreme mercantilism to service other dash for gas regions.
The UK has seen a 37% swing toward gas exports in Q2

[The Dork of Cork]

I reckon the Amish have a much higher real standard of living when compared to your mean American.

Peasant societies do not do waste in contrast to capitalist societies which typically destroy energy and then attempt to resell scarcity.
This former PM seems to think wealth has increased in the community and I use this concept in its broadest term

Ireland had some aspects of peasant culture up until the 1970s which was hard won after the land wars.
I associate the dash for gas period of 1980 and beyond with brutal technological energy monopoly operating obviously in the wider sphere of financial oligarchy.
From this period onwards the economy become a dragon to feed with no other purpose.

[golf charlie]

Australians have already suffered the consequences of Green stupidity, yet some of their politicians still believe that they enjoy powerlessness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Tasmanian_energy_crisis

Even The Guardian reports accurately about Australian Green Politicians
https://www.theguardian.com/world/julia-gillard
Julia Gillard is a former Australian politician who was country's 27th prime minister and the leader of the Australian Labor party.

If only more politicians, tainted by Green, would become "Former Politicians".

[The Dork of Cork]

When Kinsale gas field came online in 1980 ~ the population could not absorb its surplus.
Wasteful steel scrap and fertilizer factories did the dirty work until a new customer arrived ,gas turbine electricity plants.
The purpose was not to service demand but to flare the surplus via transformation loses.
To this day the gas sectors role remains essentially the same.

A interesting Irish data point is the rise of domestic residential inputs during 2009&10 as all other sectors got crushed.
Only after the 2010 bailout of the consumer war economy could scarcity be restored.

[The Dork of Cork]

Net gas imports down 39% in Q2 2017

Source : energy trends uk.

I suspect the decline of Sterling is the major factor resulting in decreased imports and increased exports . Residential gas consumption is down -15.7 %

[The Dork of Cork]

I imagine Christian societies economic goal is to reduce forced scarcity to the very minimum.
At least to a point where Mammon no longer defines our physical reality and daily existence.
To do this Mick must kill the Dragon.........

[The Dork of Cork]

If anyone looked, they see that the supply/demand scenario means nothing to those without the consumerist standpoint. How else could such recourses be fritted in an extreme mercantile situation? Add the affect of market interest rates and world oil crashes and you have the perfect paradigm shift of Keynsian capitalist folly.

[The Dork of Cork]

The last thirty years of Celtic boom and bust have confused many that will not look to see. The bankers have cashed in on this wilful myopia, leaving the poor struggling to compete. You only have to ,look - if only you will - at the reverse in diesel sales over the last few months.

[TinyCO2]

Dork "a much higher real standard of living". A matter of opinion. Personally I'd rather not be Amish or any version of historical peasant and given that you are wittering at us using 21st century equipment, neither do you. The lower gas consumption is in large part due to the mild winter we had.

[The Dork of Cork]

Why 'wittering'? The wisdom of those than can see for looking should not be scoffed at. Those whom live in penury know the way the world is. How the bankers and the illuminati keep the fuel supply/demand system in such a balance that very little flexibility exists to allow the breakway of the few.

[TinyCO2]

A witterbot.

[The Dork of Cork]

Not a bot , a imposter.

The Dork from 3.32 onwards is not me.

I got a bit flowery near the end mentioning a certain archangel but most of my posts were grounded in recent energy balance observations.
Notice the change in style to pure gibberish although I concede most cannot tell.

[Supertroll]

The problem is that the change of style happened at 10.42am from Dorkish to Paranoid Dorkish

[The Dork of Cork]

I think its quite flattering really.
That somebody would make that effort and all.

But my observations are obvious.
You simply cannot witness such absurd and wasteful mercantilism without a global monoply controling all life.
It reminds me of that Christmas board game ,you know that one when the kids whack those popping plastic creatures again and again.
The lack of equilibrium in systems is extreme.

[The Dork of Cork]

That was the imposter again at 12.51.

[TinyCO2]

People often mistake greed and wastefulness for capitalism. There is an overlap but there is an overlap with every world view. The Amish lifestyle is as pointless as the most shopaholic snowflake can come up with. There is a happy middle ground but you have to grow up to reach that point. The shopaholic doesn't want to grow up and the Amish never let themselves.

[The Dork of Cork]

OK Dork doppelganger
Do your worst for a while as I must go back to my church in the sky.

But there is something more absurd then this Alice like Dork conversion.
That is British nationalism and its defenders.
I imagine EU footsoldiers acting in the very same manner in 100~ years.
In defense of free/forced trade and all that jazz.

Its completely alien to my Daniel Corkery distributionist nationalism which was destroyed by the globalist free state and subsequent EU dystopia.

[TinyCO2]

So there are two garrulous twits called Dork out there? Does it matter when you sound the same?

[Bitter&twisted]

Once a dork, always a dork.

[Supertroll]

"So there are two garrulous twits called Dork out there? Does it matter when you sound the same?"
Surely it's a matter of simple mathematics - it's twice as bad or worse: Dork in stereo.

[Russell]

What a blast from the past!

"Much of the nonsense here is a rehash of what he presented in an interview with Roger Harribin.

He's added a few more errors and blog science: James Hansen in 1988 said that by the year 2000, “the West Side Highway will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there.”

Only out by a few decades (Hint:Matt, journalists are meant to fact-check their sources)

“We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change,” said three professors at the University of Colorado in an email to their students recently.

Yes, Matt they are Professors of English, Sociology and Chemistry teaching a course on Medical Humanities, stating that students are to take climate change as a 'given' for the purposes of the course, much as a Biology course would not entertain debate about natural selection, as it would be a distraction.

'Champion of Science'. LOL.

Golf Charlie Oct 18, 2016 at 12:09 PM |

Much of the complete bollocks that Phil Clarke has posted is just a rehash of the same old failed global warming rubbish that has been droned on about for 20+ years.

Cut taxpayers funding of climate science by 97%. If the science is settled, why bother to fund it? Why do we need yet another falsification to prove that the Hockey Stick was falsified? Climate science CANNOT forecast or predict, so why fund it?

Josh, brilliant cartoon! I hope our politicians take note."

[Supertroll]

Whatever happened to dear ol' Phil Clarke? I miss his "complete bollocks". We must treasure EM.

[TinyCO2]

Are you getting lonely on your site Russell? Let me tell you how WUWT gets so many page views. Firstly, it's been going over 10 years and built up a reliable readership, never mind those who post regularly. Page views includes those who arrive at the main page and then jump in and out of the stories for the day. People searching for graphs often end up at a WUWT article or they might jump straight to the pages with links. One of my favourites is the sea ice page. Sometimes you follow the links to other sites but come back to read more at WUWT. There are pingbacks where people who want to distribute climate news or discuss a story flag pages up to their viewers. If people do comment they don't just visit that page once they might visit several times to see replies and anyone might return to read new comments. On a big news story people might visit hourly to see the latest update. On those days there will be hundreds of temporary/new visitors following links from other sites. If it was just bots, you'd have loads of page views too.

[golf charlie]

Is vvussell suffering split identity delusions?

[Supertroll]

GolfCharlie, No, but the Dorkmeister is suffering badly.

[golf charlie]

Economic reality is setting in all over the World.

Now would be a good time for Climate Scientists to prove something that Politicians can trust, because the public have already given up waiting.

http://joannenova.com.au/2017/10/another-meaningless-survey-shows-4-in-5-australians-want-clean-energy-if-someone-else-pays/

"In the UK half of Brits don’t want to pay a cent on changing the climate. In the US 42% of US adults don’t want to pay even $12 a year to stop climate change — that’s one piddling dollar a month. (Has anyone seen a Canadian, New Zealand or EU survey? Please let me know.)"

[Phil Clarke]

"The Grauniad has very kindly given Abbott and the GWPF publicity by attacking him in no less than three separate articles (links can be found here). These attacks are, as usual, entirely without substance. "

Nope. The Guardian links to substantive rebuttals from climate scientists.Some examples:

Professor Steven Sherwood of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales refuted Abbott’s claim that climate models were wrong:

“In fact models are nearly dead-on in predicting overall global warming so far. They don’t predict every detail, but were never expected to.”

At one point, Abbott said that because he had seen historical photographs of Manly Beach near Sydney, he thought reports of dangerous sea level rise “from climate alarmists” might be wrong.

Sherwood said of all the false claims, this was Abbott’s “funniest.”

“A few photographs of the beach taken from his neighbourhood are a more accurate record of global sea-level than the global network of tide gauges and satellite altimeters! In a way, that says it all.”

Professor Andrew Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, said many of Abbott’s claims were misleading or irrelevant.

Abbott claimed that because the climate had changed in the ancient past before humans, this meant that current changes could also be natural.

Pitman said: “This is misleading. The fact that climate changed in the past due to cause ‘A’ does not mean it can only change through cause ‘A.'

“The fact is that it is changing now due to increasing CO2 on very rapid time scales. When climate changed in the past more slowly, it still caused mass extinctions. Not a happy thought!”

Pitman said Abbott’s suggestion that rising CO2 levels were helping plant growth was also misleading.

He said while in some cases in controlled greenhouse environments “you seem to get bigger plants” with raised CO2 levels, “the nutrients in the plant decline.”

“So you do not actually get more food,” said Pitman, “you just get a bigger plant, so it’s a myth that higher CO2 helps lift yields, in the sense that those yields reflect food.”

Abbott spent time in his lecture attempting to undermine the scientific method on climate change, saying people who claimed the science was “settled” were part of the “thought police.”

Henley added: “By implication, Abbott superstitiously questions the foundations of science, and in doing so, he questions the same scientific method which discovered wifi and penicillin, and proved the earth was not flat.”

Abbott also deployed another favourite talking point from climate science misinformers – that warming (which, remember, he thinks might not be happening) will cut the number of people dying of cold.
Pitman said this argument, too, was misleading, saying: “It is true that in rich countries which tend to be in the mid to higher latitudes, some warming might help reduce deaths from cold. In the lower latitude countries – the subtropics and tropics – people rarely die of cold. In contrast they die of heat and lack of clean water.

“So, countries responsible for global warming might gain a minor benefit from warming while those least responsible will wear the consequences.”

Dr Liz Hanna, an expert on the impacts of climate change on human health, said human-caused warming was already implicated in the deaths of many thousands.

“In 2003, 70,000 people died in western Europe, and in 2010 a further 55,000 people died in Russia and eastern Europe. These figures far exceed deaths from cold snaps. The decade 2001-2010 saw a 2,300% increase in heat deaths above the previous decade. Mr Abbott’s assertions don’t tell the whole story, as they’re based on what has happened in the past rather than what is projected to happen in future. While more people die from cold than heat in Melbourne at the moment, this will reverse as more summer days reach the high 40s.”

Source 1

Source 2

Elsewhere in The Guardian

"The grownups have finally won and everyone in the UK, from those in cold homes to those on polluted streets and in flooded towns, will benefit. The most important aspect of the UK government’s new clean growth strategy is its unequivocal statement that tackling climate change and a prosperous economy are one and the same thing.

[...]

The new strategy published on Thursday signals a new, if belated, beginning. It is the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel age: it is highly notable that the government plan omits any mention of fracking, having previously been its cheerleader.

[...]

However, while many of the details are missing, the clean growth strategy marks an important and vital step forward for the UK. As the prime minister Theresa May says in the plan’s foreword: “Clean growth is not an option, but a duty we owe to the next generation. Success in this mission will improve our quality of life and increase our economic prosperity.” The strategy is now crystal clear – it is time to deliver.

Source 3

[Supertroll]

All is right with the world; "complete bollocks" (aka Phil) has been restored to us spouting Guardiaanese.

[golf charlie]

Phil Clarke, quoting articles by "Graham Readfearn is the Guardian’s Planet Oz opinion columnist" hardly makes it science, but if that is the best that The Guardian, desmogblog, skeptical science and other affiliated outlets can manage, combined with John Cook's fabricated 97% Consensus, then Abbott is at least 97% correct.

When John Cook published his fabricated consensus to such rapturous applause from President Obama and other pretend Climate Scientists, it just confirmed that Climate Science is 97% politics and public relations. Politicians and the Public are now realising that.

If Mann can't prove himself correct, and Climate Scientists keep failing to prove his Hockey Stick correct, it is only natural that Politicians and the Public realise that Green is not sustainable.

[golf charlie]

Phil Clarke, quoting economics imagined by "Damian Carrington is the Guardian's Environment editor" is not really credible either. As the economics of The Guardian's business plan involves losing other people's money whilst ensuring salaries and pensions for the unelected elite, it is understandable why The Guardian preaches with such hypocrisy and can't see the problems with Climate Science political dogma.

Will Climate Science run out of other people's money before The Guardian does? They seem to be linked.

[Phil Clarke]

No substantive response to my substantive critique.

Just ad hom and noise. Situation normal.

[golf charlie]

Oct 15, 2017 at 9:47 AM | Phil Clarke

Nothing new from Climate Science either.

Your "substantive" critique just consisted of a copy and paste of ad homs and noise from an opinion columnist and Environmentalist, devoid of science.

97% of Climate Scientists are predicting financial collapse of the Global Warming economy. If only they hadn't collaborated with rescuing Mann's Hockey Stick, there might have been something worth saving.

Obviously if that level of substantive critique was all that has been applied by the Peer Reviewers of the IPCC, Climate Science and their models for 20+ years, it would explain the consistent pattern of failure.

Climate Science still can't find its own mistakes.