As another followup to recent posts on Barnaby Joyce’s egofest (driven by the Howardian egofest), Lawrence Springborg has weighed in – in the Barnaby corner:
Queensland’s Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg said the comments helped highlight the faults in Labor’s scheme.
“Nobody should be surprised with Barnaby’s colourful language and original language, you always get that from Barnaby and that’s fine,” he said.
“One thing he’s actually addressed…is the cost of this to Australian families, who are already struggling in very uncertain economic times.”
So it looks like The Borg and the LibNats are signing up for the denialist club. Or sort of. Springborg’s position is somewhat obscured in the death by a thousand rhetorical questions maneouvre. And what, I wonder, does this mean for the CPRS’ path through the Senate?
Malcolm Turnbull, who is yet to announce a position on emissions trading, played down the differences between the Coalition.
He said the Coalition would speak with “one voice” on emissions trading.
“We’re very committed to action on climate change that is economically responsible and environmentally effective,” he said.
“We work as a very close coalition and I’ve no doubt that we will be responding to this legislation with one voice.”
It could be that Turnbull is hoping to pull the Nats into line. But given sentiment in many parts of his own party (including that of his Senate Leader, Nick Minchin, and of course, the recently prominent former Dear Leader), it may be that the Libs’ get pulled in the direction of Barnaby’s stand. Will the government end up having to negotiate with The Greens? This could get interesting. In a way, there’s nothing Kevin Rudd would like more – the political markers for painting the Liberals as sceptics, wreckers and denialists on Climate Change have well and truly be laid down already. But if he can’t blast the Coalition into submission rhetorically, how does his “balance” line survive having to negotiate with The Greens? … Of course, there’s always the other possibility – perhaps the most likely one – that the Coalition could split every which way in the Senate.
I’ve said before that this CC policy is a lemon. It gives free permits to big business at the expense of small business, so it’s no good for the economy. It also gives 97% of all money raised back in compensation so it’s bugger all good for the environment.
The Libs won’t like it because of the small business disadvantage, and the Greens won’t like it because it does nothing. In the end I don’t see how the gov can compromise with anyone with the lemon they’ve got.
IMO it’s a waste of time. If you’re going to introduce a trading system then it’s all or nothing. What we’ve been given is barely anything, and will in the end be simply a pointless exorcise in pushing money around gov depts that will accomplish nothing environmentally.
The problem with the “negotiate with the Greens concept” is that he not only needs the Greens, he needs both Xenophon and Fielding, or at least one Coalition senator to support it.
Xenophon looks like he could be brought into a deal that makes the Greens happy – see this. But Fielding?
well smokey:
The coal industry is going to be happy because it isn’t going to happen.
Labor is going to be happy because the Liberals are going to get the blame.
The Greens may be politically wise enough to not share the blame with the Liberals; we will see.
Getting started would have been better than nothing.
smokey: just because it gives the money back doesn’t mean it won’t cut emissions.
Essentially, it puts the price of carbon-intensive goods and services up more than other goods and services. Therefore, there will be a financial incentive to choose the less carbon-intensive ones.
I’m with Barnaby.
If Krudds CPRS gets the go ahead and the Greens will claim a moral victory, but the biggest losers will be the people of Australia who will suffer in the process.
This country needs to remain economically competitive on a global scale. Australia has a population of 21.5 million, China’s headcount is more than 1.3 billion. Why then should Australia be looking to lead the way on addressing carbon pollution when bigger economies are not?
I am neither a climate change sceptic nor a climate change denier.
However, I am a practical person. And I don’t buy the arguments of the socialist chardonnay set, the doctors’ wives, or the likes of Al Gore and Kevin Rudd that if we don’t act now on climate change we’ll all be doomed.
The climate on planet earth has been going through a cycle of changing from icehouse to hothouse and hothouse to icehouse since the planet was formed billions of years ago.
There’s little you or me, or anyone else for that matter can do to stop or even slow nature and its naturally occurring process. I freely recognise humankind has contributed to an increase in carbon pollution output, but our contribution is small when compared with nature’s. It doesn’t matter if we live in Australia or elsewhere on the planet. Nature will do what nature will do. So why then should Australia head down the path of a carbon pollution reduction scheme at the cost of jobs and livelihoods if it will make bugger all difference at the end of the day? Surely Kevin Rudd knows that, and he if doesn’t then he should get some new advisers!
If our globetrotting Prime Minister was fair dinkum about his commitment to a CPRS what possessed him to give $150m to Holden for a ‘green car’ build at Elizabeth? Jobs! Oh, and unions too! I’m told it’s not even a green car that’s on the drawing board, it’s a diesel that will punch out twice as much greenhouse gas as a Toyota Prius. Nice one Kevin.
!!!
2k9 Climate Denier Soup:
1) repudiate the title ‘climate denier’ (as eg. ‘religious’) and yet
2) demonstrate an ignorance of the key findings of some 20 years of comprehensive, inclusive, international scientific research
3) garnish with a version of the litterbug argument
@5 – you’re with Barnaby, and you’re also off topic.
What I’m interested in discussing here is how Barnaby’s stance affects the political prospects of the ETS.
Rob @ 2 – The alternative to Fielding is peeling off one Coalition vote, which on the evidence of their pre-Christmas farce, may not be too difficult if they’re split anyway in how they want to approach the bill (as they are). Having said that, negotiating with the Greens would change the shape of the bill.
This is an oft-heard argument from the Opposition, the commentariat, big polluting businesses and their mates in the less enlightened sections of the union movement. It can be rendered pithily in one sentence:
If we don’t fuck you, someone else will.
dk.au:
4) Do a little cut-and-paste edit of the resulting pap, and post it in full on someone else’s blog.
Don’t feed, etc., please folks.
As to the politics of it all, it remains my view that most of the key business peak bodies and emissions-intensive sectors realise that they are currently doing quite well from the ETS as proposed, and would not be doing so well out of an ETS which had to be negotiated with the Greens. Further, business groups would not be putting many of their eggs in the leaky basket of a prospective return to Coalition government at the next election, and would realise that the most probable alternative to the current form of the ETS getting through the current Senate with at least some Coalition support, is the kind of ETS which will get through a Senate in which the Greens hold the balance of power in their own right (which is the most likely outcome of the next election).
In short I would be far from surprised to see one or more Liberal Senators cross the floor to support Labor on the ETS, and shortly thereafter announce a career move to a plum job in the private sector.
There is another issue here on which Mark may well be able to shed some light. Rudd was a key figure in the Goss government, which was given much grief by the Queensland Greens and allied forces during its second term (1992-95) and, famously, at the 1995 Queensland State election. Wayne Swan was Queensland ALP State Secretary for much of that period. It is interesting to speculate on the extent to which that experience may have strengthened whatever previous aversion people like Rudd and Swan would have had to negotiating with the Greens.
I have also noted an increasing querulousness in Peter Garrett’s responses to criticisms by Bob Brown and the Wilderness Society. On the former:
On the latter:
Paul – it may have, but I suspect their aversion is typical of most right wing Labor types anyway.
Meanwhile, Warwick McKibbin is outflanking Labor on its left.
Blessed be the Possum. He articulates exactly what I was trying to say:
I’ll add that Springborg is a fool if he doesn’t realize the damage Barnaby is doing to the LNP. Most voters know what cliches are, and they know that’s what they’re getting from the man. And “original language” my ass. His language wouldn’t be out of place on an USENET thread circa 1989.
Why is it that the ‘we-don’t-have-any-influence-anyway-so-why-go-broke’ opponents of action never mention that we have something like the 14th or 15th largest economy in the world, and that most economies below us aren’t going to leapfrog over us anytime soon? And just whom is going to surpass our medium-sized power when the Europeans–the people with the currency of the 21st century–are also taking action?
Perhaps the denialists are concerned that China will build more DVD recorders than we currently do here…
(Also, are these creeping nations also going to surpass our not inconsiderable military power? Not likely. And there’s a source of influence with nowt to do with AGW.)
Also of relevance is Liberal right-winger Tom Switzer in today’s Sydney Morning Herald.
I read that, Paul, and heartily endorse it.
My advice as a Labor stooge to the stooges of the Liberal Party would be identical: go on, keep going Right. You don’t want the centre, you want the Right right. No, further. Heaps of room over there.
Hmmm, Switzer’s advice to Brendan Nelson as a staffer was *so* effective, wasn’t it?
Switzer, let us not forget, during the fag end of the Howard regime, was editorial page editor of the Government Gazette, now Opposition Orifice.
If the Liberal Party goes left, everything he has publicly stood for is in the very public toilet. No wonder he’s stroppy.
Back to Barnaby Joyce — Tony Windsor has today called him the Sarah Palin of the North. How very apt.
Jesus, for Switzer it’s all kulturkampf and strawmen when it comes to defining Australia’s magical conservative “centre of political gravity”.
Maybe the person who eventually rolls Turnbull can do a Nixon-goes-to-China with climate change policy and therefore win over the brainstemless Right to sanity?
I’d rather see Rudd negotiate with the Greens than the Lib nutters. They might actually be able to do something with it to make it work.
I am also with Barnaby. The science of the causes of climate change does not support the “true believers” and other like minded crackpots, or self srving individuals who can seem more than a few dollars in it for themselves, as well as political power. Once signed up to we will be committed to huge expenditures which will have no impact on the climate but will suppor the lifestyles of those who have positioned themselves appropriately to gain from such nonsense (the Y2K scare was a good example but the ETS is uch bigger and of long duration). Its not a football match and you can’t just go home afterwards if an ETS is implemented. And Australia is particularly positioned to suffer if an ETS is implemented. Of the G20 nations Australia is the only one not to use nuclear power, which can be used to offset the enormous costs and impacts on our economy. France, which generates about 80 percent of its power from nuclear, is pushing for the ETS because it is particularly well positioned to gain from the credits available under the ETS as a low emitter. The ETS regime has more to do with political power and money for jam than about averting any risks to the climate or the world population. If you doubt this consider all the money government purportedly raise for health, education, or the roads, and how little is actually spent on any of these worth endeavours. Do you really want to give more of your hard earned money to the state governments in Australia? They haven’t spent what you have given them wisely now they want to take you for the air you breath – and thats what this ETS actually is. Climate may change – it alweays has but humans do not cha ge it and there are far cheaper means of offsets in any case if you are that way inclined: plant trees.
I am with Ron Boswell when he said on the ABC that “the CPRS is a dog and will always be a dog” no matter what we do with it. However, this doesn’t mean that opposing CPRS=opposing climate act.
What is really relevant right now is what we do in the short term. We need to rethink the action plan instead of trying to make the CPRS a little less doggish. We need something much much simpler than CPRS that focuses on what we are going to do between now and 2020 to reduce emissions by at least 25%.
We would go close to achieving 25% reduction by simply converting coal fired to gas and/or partially replacing coal fired with low emission technologies such as wind, solar or nuclear. So plan A is to simply focus on cleaning up electricity generation.
Plan A would be a bit more costly than necessary. A more logical plan might involve replacing some of the power clean-up with lower cost alternatives such as improving energy efficiency etc.
The opposition still has to do more than declare CPRS is a dog if it is to get voter support.
John D, Bob Carter has recently retired his university position as a professor of marine geology, specialising in paleogeology. He’s just completed speaking tours in Queensland and WA, but has done gigs in NSW and Victoria. He was one of the four scientists Fielding took to see Penny Wong and gave a plenary address to the Heartland Conference of sceptics in the US attended by Fielding just before he went to see Wong.
I had the pleasure of attending one of Carter’s sessions in Rockhampton recently. He is an excellent communicator and actually a nice bloke. He prefers to be known just as a scientist rather than as a sceptic/denialist etc. He was scathing about the CPRS but the first part of the presentation and a lot of the questions were on the science of AGW. His approach is that, yes, humans cause warming, but not much and the signal is lost in natural variability. On what natural variability can do to the climate he is actually quite alarmist.
The net result of all that is that the anti-AGW message just adds to the sense of frustration and in their view the wrong-headedness of the CPRS in trying to solve a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. One of the prize pieces of evidence is this graph, which is meant to demonstrate that extra CO2 has virtually no effect. I think it is a bodgie graph, but then who am I?
So they are just as appalled by what AGW mitigation will do to the coal industry as they are to its effect on farming.
So the anti-AGW message is integral to the attack by the Nats on the CPRS and as far as I can see they are having a lot of political success with it in provincial areas.
Carter, BTW, is on a gig with American scientists for the next few months. They are on a ship drilling holes in the sediment around the Pacific trying to work out what the sea level was back in the Miocene. Here I would respect his expertise, no probs.
Logical, why do denialists always bring up Y2K mitigation? Surely you realise that it actually damages your case, as Y2K was an example of the whole world (just about) getting its collective shit in one sock and avoiding a catastrophe. If it looked like AGW was going to be as effectively addressed as Y2K, I’d stop feeling terrified.
Its not a football match and you can’t just go home afterwards if an ETS is implemented.
Actually, that is completely wrong. A properly constituted carbon reduction scheme (of course as others have pointed out repeatedly, the one currently on the table is completely inadequate) would be a win-win. In the event that predictions of climate change turned out to be wrong – and wouldn’t we all wish that – all that we have done is work towards a renewables economy, thus solving the other problem – which you can’t very well deny – the fact that fossil fuels and resources are finite. (I’m not the first to point this out on this forum either, and I bet I won’t be the last *sigh*).
Helen, I have a brick wall here that you can bang your head against. I can guarantee it will be less painful. ;P
and of courese Helen, there are also all the other impositions on the commons associated with the whole CO2 emissions thing that we tidy up as well when we scale back net CO2 in a rational, orderly and maintainable way.
All that toxic bilge from coal plants and cars, all those hours wasted sitting in traffic, a reduction in oil-based wars, greater global equity …
Brian: You are right. Some of the objection to CPRS is coming from AGW deniers who find it much easier to convince people that CPRS is flawed than it is to convince them that AGW science is fundamentally flawed. Part of my problem with CPRS is that it is a godsend to anyone who wants to confuse the argument.
On a related note The Australian ran a story today about CSIRO trying to block a paper that one of their senior environmental scientists had had accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed. To quote The Australian :
We badly need more serious discussion of alternatives to CPRS before the government tries to bulldoze it through parliament. We don’t need to give the Barnaby’s of the world an easy target. And we certainly don’t need to see those that are qualified to make serious contributions shut down by CSIRO or the government.
John D, I picked up the CSIRO story on Radio National today. Thanks for the link to The Oz. I’ve done separate post on the issue, which I think deserves highlighting.
Brian,
I checked out your CO2 graph, one of the prize pieces of evidence. It was put together by David Archibald who used the online MODTRANS teaching program for calculating changes in forcing due to CO2. Apparently, according to David (Archer?), Archibald ran the model with a climate sensitivity of about 0.4C for CO2 doubling. So he got the results based on his priors.
David complains about Archibald’s misuse of his model being used for deception here.
The model itself is here.
Archibald’s paper is here. Interestingly, for a scientific paper, it contains some delightful assertions:
If the contention of a sensitivity of 0.4C for doubling were true, then pretty much all the past climate change would have to explained by albedo changes, caused by ice changes (can be fast), water vapour, cloud feedbacks and CO2-vegetation feedbacks (slow). Palaeoclimate would look very different if that was the case. No scientist has ever been able to reliably show that these alone could explain past climate. CO2 absorbs radiation in the lab, so why not in the atmosphere? Also the natural greenhouse effect would have to depend solely on water vapour and clouds, otherwise the Earth would be -18C. The sceptical Lindzen estimated that these comprised 98% of the natural greenhouse effect in 1991 and the other gases presumably 2%. This is not supported by experiment and observation, and the operating estimate is 9-25% of natural greenhouse is due to CO2. Change it, and climate will change.
The problem with all of the skeptic arguments going around is that they cannot be used to build an internally consistent picture of climate, past present and future.
Roger @32: “…every member of the Lavoisier Society”
Have you looked at a list of members of that “society”?
A more choice selection of stiff-legged old farts would be hard to find…
Elise, isn’t being a Force of Darkness so much more fun?
Roger @34, now there’s a thought!
“Lavoisier was tried, convicted, and guillotined on 8 May in Paris, at the age of 50.”
Wonder if that society of superannuated old farts have considered the outcome for their eponymous hero? Subconsciously perhaps?
Roger @ 32, that’s fantastic. The graph features in Joanne Nova’s The Skeptic’s Handbook as one of “The only 4 points that matter”. The handbook was launched with a 150,000 print run in the Heartland Conference and has been selling like hot cakes ever since, including at the Rockhampton meeting.
My memory is that Carter gave the forcing effect of CO2 as a very small value, it may have been 0.1C, so with the water vapour multiplier effect doubling CO2 meant stuff all and trebling it virtually the same.
So blaming coal for global warming was seen as just plain nuts.
I have a question as to whether the decreasing warming effect as CO2 increases conforms strictly to a log curve, or is it a natural phenomenon that is best described by a log formula in the range we are dealing with?
My suspicion comes from the way we used a log formula to allocate grants to school libraries back in the 1970s. For larger schools you could have fewer books per child still giving you a larger collection. Using the average price of a book you could take a bulk grant and divide it up equitably in individual grants to over 1000 schools in a few hours work using a mathematical formula and the computers available at the time.
It was magic and everyone thought it was scientific, but we knew that it only worked in a satisfactory way across the range of schools we were dealing with, once we introduced the concept of a “minimum collection” for schools with an enrolment of less than 100 (because the formula gave small schools next to nothing).
We found an essentially arbitrary formula with the right shape that gave us an outcome that made sense to the professionals working in the field.
Not sure all that makes sense, and no sweat if it doesn’t. But the basic question is whether we have an absolute law here or just a reasonably convenient way of modelling what is observed in nature.
An implication is whether climate sensitivity from 280ppm to 560ppm has the same value as it would if you were going from say 1000ppm to 2000ppm.
Brian,
in rough terms, that’s about right. It’s because the bands of absorption within CO2 bonds become saturated through the atmospheric column as short-wave radiation is absorbed and re-transmitted as long wave (e.g., infra-red). This actually means that most of the absorption occurs in the upepr atmosphere. So the relationship you see in Archibald’s graph with increasing CO2 is right but the scale because of misapplied climate sensitivity is wrong. This can be played around with in the MODTRANS model. The number that you heard from Bob Carter was 0.1C per Watt per metre squared and CO2 doubling is about 4 Wm-2, equivalent to the 0.4C that I quoted. That number came from Idso and before that (tho’ I haven’t confirmed this) from Lindzen I suspect (the 1991 paper)). Lindzen’s numbers have no experimental data to back them up, whereas Tyndall’s (19th century) do. That means there is an internally consistent “science” amongst the sceptics that has no origin in experiment and verification. The base is conjecture. The rejoinder from that mob is that all of AGW is similarly conjecture. Not so – the physics are well understood and climate sensitivity is very uncertain but much higher than applied by the skeptics (palaeoclimate supports this for reasons I outlined above).
The trick is, if you’re Carter, you can say the increase is 0.1C per Wm-2 and sound very authoritative, and there is likely no-one in the audience who can gainsay this. If they do and jump up in a room full of farmers and say “There’s a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that totally disproves this assertion,” how will that travel do you reckon?
I think Carter honestly believes the ’science’ he quotes so he wouldn’t himself make anything up, and when he doesn’t know he says so. But he’s quick-witted and would have some kind of plausible response.
Basically I think he’s a marine geologist who has roamed out of his patch and in doing so is far too ready to think he has mastered someone else’s patch. So we were assured that the Great Barrier Reef was fine and would always be fine.
This makes the reef specialists some kind of dills.
Someone asked him about Plimer’s book. Carter recommended it without reservation, which is a worry. Sceptics don’t seem to be very sceptical of each other.
His main line was that there is a lot of natural variability and the AGW signal is not strong enough to distinguish above the noise. He also quoted various incidents of abrupt climate change (Younger Dryas etc). But he’s very definite about what will NOT happen. Expect just about anything except warming, is what he said.
And except sea level rise. The ice is growing in Antarctica balancing anything that might be happening in the Arctic. So don’t worry!
That’s right about Carter – he is quoting the 0.1C per Wm-2 from a reputable source. And I’m sure he believes what he says. As sure as I am that Daggett on the 1,000+ post Truth is Out There thread believes what he says.
Backing his belief is the social construction of science as the handmaiden of economic progress.
I’ll just say this, Roger. Having had the chance to have a chat over coffee and port after the meeting at my brother’s place (as a third of the conversation group contributing much less than a third of talking) and then over breakfast and afterwards the following morning, Carter is ideologically in a very conservative place.