Climate Conversation Group

Taxing mothers’ milk and our daily bread

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

13th September 2012

Two lies are used to promote the world’s highest carbon tax – the lie that carbon dioxide is “pollution” and the lie claiming that Australians are “the world’s biggest carbon polluters”.

Calling carbon dioxide “pollution” makes no more sense than calling mothers’ milk “poison”. Yet Australia’s Climate Commissioners continue to propagate this outrageous lie.

Carbon dioxide is “mothers’ milk” to all plants, and plants are “the daily bread” to all animals. Life is a carbon cycle. No life could exist on Earth without adequate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Current levels are well below those optimal for life, and below levels which have prevailed for most of Earth’s history. If there is a crisis regarding CO2, it is the question: “where has it all gone?”

And to say that Australians are the world’s biggest carbon polluters (per capita) is lying with statistics. Read more… »

Climatists not Fair Dinkum?

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

27th August 2012

A “greenhouse gas” is one capable of absorbing infra-red (IR) radiation.

The most common atmospheric gases with such properties are water vapour and carbon dioxide (CO2). Water vapour is far more abundant with an average of 20,000 parts-per-million (ppm) in the atmosphere compared to just 395 ppm of CO2. Moreover water vapour is more effective as a greenhouse gas because it can absorb IR radiation over far more bands of the IR spectrum.

Therefore, if man-made CO2 causes dangerous global warming, (a dubious proposition anyway), then man-made water vapour is far more dangerous. Read more… »

Greens rediscover hydrogen car

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

19th August 2012

I saw my first and only hydrogen car in Brisbane City Square in the 1960′s. No one saw it work, but now, fifty years later, the “hydrogen economy” has become green gospel.

Hydrogen combines readily with oxygen to produce energy via combustion engines, gas welders or fuel cells – there is nothing new about this process. And the sole exhaust product is pure water, another greenhouse gas.

Hydrogen is an abundant element. However, pure hydrogen gas is very rare on earth – it is almost always combined with other elements, commonly oxygen or carbon.

Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy. Read more… »

Why Bury the Essentials of Life
in Carbon Cemeteries?

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

3rd August 2012

We are told that carbon dioxide is such a dangerous gas that we must capture and “bury it deep down below”.

Carbon is the building block for every bit of organic matter on earth – bread, butter and bitumen; coal, cauliflowers and cows; men, microbes and mulberries.

When oxidised by combustion in fires and engines, or digested in stomachs, or decayed in soil or compost, every bit of organic matter is recycled into the harmless natural atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide. Plants extract this plant food from the atmosphere, reuse the carbon, and recycle the oxygen for use by all forms of animal life.

Every tonne of coal burnt produces about three tonnes of carbon dioxide containing over two tonnes of oxygen and under one tonne of carbon. Thus with every tonne of carbon buried, more than twice as much life-sustaining oxygen must also be sacrificed. Read more… »

Taxing Termites, Wetlands, Volcanoes and Sacred Cows

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

9th July 2012

Australia’s tax on carbon dioxide now applies to big power stations, rubbish tips, steel works, cement plants, refineries and coal mines. But many of them have been given exemptions or compensation packages. Naturally they will pass all net costs onto consumers, but our government says that most voters will be compensated and will feel no pain. So it all looks like achieving a net nothing. Read more… »

Carbon lies

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

11th March 2012

The Australian government’s plan to sell their un-saleable carbon tax has hit a snag – their pollsters have discovered that the word ”carbon” provokes anger in the electorate.

This is no surprise. Most decent people hate liars and the carbon tax campaign has been mired in lies from the start. Read more… »

Will Tony Abbott leave Australia Legless
and Powerless in the Global Storms?

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

22nd December 2011

Some at the big end of town are worried that Mr Abbott may keep his promise to repeal the carbon tax. No doubt they and their smart lawyers fear losing the clever green schemes that rely on ripping off tax payers, consumers and other businesses.

Australia’s wealth and jobs have always rested on three legs – mining and farming, making and processing things, and rich foreigners; in short, resources, manufacturing and money from tourists and investors.

The Gillard carbon tax will white-ant all three legs. Read more… »

– by Doug Edmeades

The Editor
NZ Listener

Dear Sir,

I was not going to bother to respond to your editorial (Listener Dec 17) forewarning us of the impending catastrophe of man-induced dangerous global warming; in any case there was no time — I have been like everyone else caught up in that state of human-induced seasonal silliness.

Today is different. All the shopping is done, all the last-minute reports completed. I am at home now in relative peace on Christmas Eve. I reach for my weekly palliative dose of intellectual fare — my Listener (dated Dec 31) has arrived. It contains two long letters beating the the same dangerous human-induced global warming drum. We are all doomed! We are destroying planet earth!!!! Spare me, I thought, it’s Christmas.

So, in the spirit of the festive season, I offer your readers the following facts:

1) There has been no global warming for 13 years despite increasing emissions of carbon dioxide.
2) The earth was warmer during the medieval warm period than it is today, long before man discovered oil!
3) The earth’s climate has always changed, both up and down, relative to the present and long before man appeared on the scene — maybe something else apart from carbon dioxide drives the earth’s temperature?
3) The only evidence now for the theory of dangerous carbon dioxide-induced global warming is the IPCC models, which assume, incorrectly it now appears, that clouds exacerbate the warming due to carbon dioxide.
4) NIWA tells us that NZ has warmed by about 0.9 °C in the last 100-odd years but they have been unable to put forward the crucial supporting evidence.

So my New Year wish to all is: relax, enjoy life, be glad and proud of what mankind has achieved. Mother nature will continue to do what she has always done, both good and bad. All we need to do is what all life on earth has done for eons: to continue to adapt and evolve. Go well.

Dr D. C. Edmeades
Managing Director
AgKnowledge Ltd
www.agknowledge.co.nz

Finalist Agribusiness Person of the Year 2011

“The only antidote to pseudo-science is science itself”
Carl Sagan

Carbon Tax – still a Foolish Thing

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

14th October 2011

Even if 74 prominent people in Parliament say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

Viv Forbes

Carbon Tax Mk IV flimsy, cancerous

To the Editor
Climate Conversation
10th July 2011

Carbon Tax Mark 4 is flimsy but dangerous.

Because of public opposition to a new tax on everything, the tax has been gutted. The PM hopes to buy public support by giving exemptions to almost everyone and offering widespread bribes to voters. It is now feeble and ineffective.

But the Green-Gillard coalition is desperate and such people cannot be trusted. They will say or promise anything in order to get this new tax introduced.

Once on the law books, the exemptions will be whittled away, the tax rate will increase and the tax bribes will disappear. It is a stealthy cancer in the gut of the Australian economy.

The cost of electricity, food, fuel and travel will increase, but few people will recognise the root cause. Politicians will blame “Woolworths, power suppliers and Big Oil” for the pain.

This new stealth tax is the thin edge of the wedge.

It will have no effect on the climate, but is a fiscal weapon too dangerous to be left in the hands of green extremists.

Letting Bob Brown loose with the vast powers of a carbon tax is like leaving the grandkids alone in the hayshed with a box of matches.

“Abolish the Stealth Tax” will be the next election slogan.

Viv Forbes

An excellent sceptical letter sent to the NZ Listener on 14 May and copied today to Climate Conversation.

Rupert Wyndham in New Zealand

To the Editor
NZ Listener

14th May 2011

Dear Ms. Stirling,

I am a visitor to New Zealand, and only yesterday had sight of your 14 May edition of the New Zealand Listener with its entertainingly fanciful lead story, accompanied by appropriately lurid graphics.

Since this is a topic which raises much controversy, let me try and see if I can encapsulate in a few lines what it is that you would wish your readers to believe. You propose, it would seem, that marginal increases in the concentrations of what is no more than a trace gas, amounting in total not to 10% of the earth’s atmosphere, not even to 5% — nay, not even to 1%, can bring about cataclysmic changes in global climate.

So, what exactly is the percentage concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Why, to be sure, it is a gasping, asphyxiating 1/27th part of a single percentage point. But even that’s not the complete picture, is it? After all, as someone (such as you) who has addressed the data for herself will know, even human-induced climate change proselytisers acknowledge that, by itself, the radiative potential of CO2 (vanishingly small anyway) fails to account for the “scenarios” promoted by them and by unquestioning and compliant organs of the media — such, indeed, as The New Zealand Listener.

So, to get over this little inconvenience, what should be done? Read more… »

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

27th December 2010

If global warming is so bad, why do people try to escape winter in cold places like Aberdeen, Boston, Tokyo and Moscow by flocking to warm places like Acapulco, Bali, the Black Sea and the Greek Islands?

Maybe a bit of global warming may be welcome in some places right now?

Viv Forbes

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

14th November 2010

When the Australian PM says “we need a price on carbon”, she is just sprouting another misleading Wongism like “we must reduce carbon pollution”.

Most forms of carbon already have a price – coal, oil, gas, petrol, diesel, beef, bread, butter, diamonds and whisky all have a price (which usually includes a few taxes).

What Ms Gillard wants, but dares not say, is another tax on our usage of many carbon products.

But who wants a tax on carbon?

The Greens do. They hate humans and their farm animals, crops, coal, oil, cars, power generators and heavy industry. They would like to see the end of most mining, farming, fishing and forestry. A carbon tax will hit all of these people so the Greens support it. Read more… »