Damn Hockey’s soul

 

He has thought medium and long term, as well; if after a Senate inquiry he then tries to fashion his own ETS policy for an election, the likes of Wilson Tuckey and Barnaby Joyce would be straight into it again, because they don’t believe in one at all. Hockey has imagined an election campaign with the Nationals threatening already spooked Liberal climate change sceptics in their seats. It would be a debacle.

He’s even toyed with the idea of not taking any ETS to an election, simply saying he’d bring one in when he came to government. Then he’s remembered the example of Peter Shack, the shadow health minister under Andrew Peacock, who, confronted with the same divisions rending the Liberal Party now, but over health, went to the 1990 election without a policy. He was laughed out of politics.

The whole disaster of Turnbull will, at this rate, be replayed under Hockey, only this time as farce.

How many leaders will the Liberals churn through, and how many years will it take, before they get to someone of sense and the courage to fight on the only platform that makes sense: fight this great green tax on everything.

UPDATE

JR Dunn, in a brilliant anaylsis of Climategate and the corruption of the climate science, gives Hockey all the reasons he now desperately needs to change his mind on man-made global warming.

First Dunn lists just some of the incredible “mistakes” made the Climategate scientists and their allies that suggests not just atonishingly sloppy work, but an entire culture of exaggeration and evangelism that is utterly hostile to good science:

The Y2K Glitch. This episode involved the NASA/GISS team led by James Hansen, possibly the most fanatical and unrelenting of all warmists… While examining a series of NASA temperature graphs, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre ... uncovered a discontinuity occurring in January 2000 that raised temperatures gathered over widespread areas [of North America] by 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit… When the corrected figures were at last released, ....vanished was the claim that the past few years were “the warmest on record [in the US].” Now 1934 took precedence. A full half of the top ten warmest years occurred before WWII, well prior to any massive CO2 buildup.

The Arctic Ice Melt. We’ve been informed for the better part of a decade that Arctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate, and that the North Pole would be ice-free in twenty, thirty, or forty years.... In truth, ice thinning was due to a cyclical weather pattern in which winds blow ice floes south into warmer water… Worse yet, when the weather returned to its normal pattern two years ago, large numbers of scientists put in considerable effort to suggest that the “new” ice was thinner than usual and would vanish in a flash as soon as the temperatures went back up.

The Poor Polar Bears. Closely related is the saga of the polar bears, staring extinction in the face due to warming… Out of the twenty major polar bear populations, only two are known to be decreasing. Estimates of bear population (there are no exact figures) have increased over the past forty years, from 17,000 to 19,000 to the current number of 22,000 to 27,000....

The Hockey Stick That Wasn’t. The “hockey stick” is a nickname for a chart prepared by Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University professor and leading warmist. The chart purports to show temperature levels for the past millennium, and consists of a straight line until it reaches the late 20th century, when it suddenly shoots upward, creating the “hockey stick” profile. This chart was a major feature of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming and is a commonly used media graphic.. It developed ... that Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers…

Tree-Ring Circus. ... Tree rings have played an important part in the warming controversy as evidence backing the claim that temperatures have been consistently lower worldwide until recently. A crucial series of measurements utilized by Mann, among others, involves trees located on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. How many trees were measured, you ask?… The answer is twelve: a number perfectly adequate to trigger international panic… But it turns out that further measurements were in fact made in the area, involving at least thirty-four other trees. And when this data is added to the original twelve, then the warming evidence disappears...

And now come the Climategate emails, which reveal how the world’s leading warmist scientists, including key authors of the IPCC reports, corrupted scientific procedures to create their alarm:

These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. And then…

Well, first, let’s cover what you don’t do.

You don’t manipulate data (as CRU chief scientist Phil Jones stated he was doing in the now-famous “Mike’s trick” e-mail, not to mention throughout the now-famous source code).

You don’t fabricate data (as one CRU scientist did while compiling weather-station data. Running into problems, he states, “I can make it up. So I did.” He adds an evil smiley face...)

You don’t deny data to other investigators (as Hansen, Jones, and, it appears, everybody else in the warming community has done at one time or another).

You don’t destroy evidence (as the members of the CRU did following a Freedom of Information request).

You don’t bury contradictory data (as Jones and several colleagues did in an attempt to undercut the impact of the Medieval Warming Period).

You don’t secretly manipulate the argument from behind the scenes (as the CRU staff did with the website Realclimate.org., screening comments to allow only those that supported the warming thesis).

You don’t secretly undercut your critics (as Mann advised the CRU to do concerning the scientific journal Climate Research: “I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.").

You don’t try to get a journal editor critical of your case fired (as the CRU staff evidently succeeded in doing with an editor for Geophysical Research Letters).

Joe, consider: even Tim Flannery, the greatest climate alarmist in Australia, now admits this:

In the last few years, were there hasn’t been a continuation of that warming trend, we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate, so there are some things we don’t understand… These people (climate scientists) work with models, computer modelling, when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that’s when science gets engaged. What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, “We have to get on our horses and find out what we don’t know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it”.

Even Flannery admits this decade of cooling is occuring, wasn’t expected and contradicts the climate models which the warmist scientists used to predict our gases were heating the world disastrously.

How can you now, in all conscience, pass a great green tax on everything that wouldn’t stop warming even it were occuring anyway? Is such science, produced by such methods and so contradicted by real-world data, good enough to impose a giant green tax to change the way we live?

(Thanks to reader John.)