Posts Tagged climate change

Stop hurting Australia

Last night I saw it.

I had heard about it. I have even really stories that confirmed it really did exist. But even in my wildest dreams I never imagined that it could possibly be real (and quite this bad).


The carbon price is going to lead to the great hairdresser collapse of 2012. Just you wait. Historians will be writing about it for centuries. They will write of the once great cities built on back of fashionable haircuts, leg waxing and tanning that crumbled as their salon economy was crushed by the weight of the carbon tax and the evil socialist government. Civilization as we know it will fall thanks to the bowl cuts and poor quality hair foils that will start flooding the streets. THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY WILL TEAR APART AROUND US AND WE WILL ALL FALL INTO A FIERY PIT OF MAGMA AND BURN SLOWLY TO DEATH.

Or… not.

Turn some fucking lights off and open a window, Angela. Perhaps hair could dry out naturally instead of blowdrying with every single cut. Unplug your straighteners when you’re not using them. And if that doesn’t work, and your power bills still rise “over a thousand dollars in the first year”, I reckon you could maybe knock the price of a cut and colour up a few bucks.

Maybe, just fucking maybe, you will be okay.

And then:

“For no environmental benefit”

Get. Fucked.

And the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance can do the same.

Australia is the largets per capita emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world: if we don’t have a moral responsibility to reduce our carbon emissions, who do you think does?

You can’t, as your website claims, “support action on climate change” and then go running around with your hands in the air screaming “BUT NOTHING WE DO WILL HELP ANYWAY” at the same time. Any policy that reduces greenhouse emissions is going to make a lot of high polluting companies less profitable in the short term. It happens when you reorganise a business. But last I checked, the mineral and energy companies were doing okay, so I’m sure you will find a way to deal with it.

But don’t claim you support action on climate change because you fucking well don’t. You could start reducing emissions tomorrow if you wanted to. You’ve had plenty of time to do it, but you haven’t, so now you get the stick.

You avoided the stick last year when your self-interested bullshit took down a Prime Minister. Who knows, you might bring down another PM with more of your self-interested bullshit.

And thanks you groups like The Australian Trade and Industry Alliance, we’ll get fucking Tony Abbott.

Then will the fuckers be happy?

No. They’ll need more tax cuts lest economic armageddon reigns down upon us. They’ll need more skilled labour provided to them free of fucking charge by the tax payer.

Train your own fucking workforce, you cretins. We’re already giving you our mineral wealth.

And maybe you can start polluting less too. Seeing as we’re giving you our land, maybe we can keep the air.

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Caption competition: Barnaby edition

Best caption wins a year’s supply of carbon.

Barnaby at the carbon tax rally

Have at it!

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Carbon is plant food

No tap

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The ideal Julia

More of this, thanks, Julia:

Greenhouse gas levels are one-third higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures have risen 0.7 degrees celsius over the past century and continue to rise. The last decade was the world’s hottest on record, warmer than the 1990s which were in turn warmer than the 1980s. In fact, globally 2010 was the equal warmest year on record, tied with 2005 and 1998. 2010 is the thirty-fourth consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th Century average. In Australia, average temperatures have risen almost one degree since 1910,and each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the one before.

That warming is real. Its consequences are real. And it will change our lives in real and practical ways. More extreme bushfire conditions and droughts. Falling crop yields. Loss of species. Increased cyclone intensity. More days of extreme heat. Coastal flooding as sea levels rise. Bleaching of our coral reefs. And a substantial decline in alpine snow cover. Indeed, Professor Garnaut’s latest report indicates that the need to act is greater than ever. And the scientific consensus is stronger than ever.

Given these realities, I ask who I’d rather have on my side: Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt. Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world.

(My bold)

Continue to call out the trolls. Continue to do it loudly and publicly.

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I think my irony meter just exploded

Nick Minchin proving once and for all that he lives in an irony black hole:

Simon_Cullen
Sen Nick Minchin on Ross Garnaut: “he’s not a climate scientist. I don’t think he has any authority whatsoever to speak on the climate”
11/03/11 10:24 AM

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One Nation radio

Last night I had cause to drive around Sydney for a couple of hours in a car generously borrowed to me by a close friend. As I flew through the streets I searched through the AM radio band for something to listen to. Landing on one particular frequency, I was assaulted by the voice of ex-One Nation supremo David Oldfield who is now apparently doing an evening show for 2UE. I decided to listen for a while and, solid gold as it was, I’d like to paraphrase for you what I heard. Here was his first segment:

I don’t want to patronise anyone, but earlier today I asked my wife what air was made up of. My wife is a university-educated woman but she couldn’t tell me the gasses that were in air. I reckon she’s like most people who don’t really know that sort of thing. Anyway, air is made up of — and excuse me for rounding the percentages here — about 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. The nitrogen is a useless, filler gas, and oxygen is the stuff we need. There are also a bunch of trace gasses like argon. There’s also carbon dioxide, which is the gas we’re told is responsible for global warming, and it’s found in air in about the concentration of a tiny fraction of a percent. That’s air.

Now, when we breath in we take in a lungful of air — 80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and a range of trace gasses including carbon dioxide — and our bodies use about a quarter of the oxygen. When we breath out can you guess how much carbon dioxide is in our breath? Remember, only a fraction of a percent of this global warming gas went it. Well, we breath out 4% carbon dioxide. That’s right, our bodies actually produce carbon dioxide which we’re told causes global warming. There are seven billion of us on the planet, each of us breathing ever five seconds, or three seconds for children, and each time we breath we produce carbon dioxide.

And you know what? I’ve never heard a single scientist talk about this.

Flushed with pride after pwning the world’s entire scientific community, Oldfield took a call:

Caller: I just think that if they come here they shouldn’t try to make it like it was at home.

Oldfield: Yeah, well you’d think that if things were so bad at home, and things are so much better here — which is why 99.999999% of them apply to come here in the first place — then they wouldn’t want to change this place once they got here.

Caller: Yep. This is not a Muslim country and they should stop trying to make it one.

Oldfield: Well, I don’t think that it’s so much Muslim culture as it is Middle East culture, and people shouldn’t come over here and try to build Middle East culture in the place of Australian culture.

Then Oldfield brought a news story to the attention of his listeners:

Four men have been charged over a credit card skimming scam. Three of them, it turns out, are boat arrivals who are now either citizens or have permanent residency. The government says that its vetting procedures are sound but obviously they’re not.

I just can’t believe this because what we have here is a case of three people accepting Australia’s compassion and then turning around and biting the hand that feeds them.

And finally, Pauline Hanson’s ex-colleague took a call and jumped on the dump button.

Oldfield: We have [caller] on the line. Hello, [caller].

[Caller] (with thick accent): Hello, David. I just wanted to talk about the Jews killing the Muslims.

Oldfield: Um, well, we won’t be allowing that call. We can’t broadcast racism. Racism is when you make sweeping perjorative statements about one group of people instead of restricting those statements to only those individuals for whom those statements might apply.

Got that?

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Your ABC and climate change balance – a tale of two pricks

In 1998, while living in London, my 18-month-old daughter wasn’t feeling well and came out in a strange rash. The local GP had no idea what she had and referred her to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of the world’s leading children’s clinics.

The doctors were unfamiliar with Sarah’s condition, but further investigation showed she had measles. The delayed diagnosis wasn’t due to any shortcomings in the National Health Service, but because a vaccine had all but wiped out the disease and none of the doctors, including experienced pediatricians, had actually seen it before. Luckily Sarah had that vaccination, as part of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) injection, and while she showed the symptoms she never suffered the full effects, which could be deadly.

So why did my daughter get measles in a first-world city, two decades after a vaccination had all but eradicated it? The BBC’s policy of giving all issues and views equal measure regardless of their credibility had something to with it.

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Does you like pointless graphs to illustrate your point?

At the tafe Internets course I learnt that on the Google there is a function called Google trends. You type things in to see their relevance to other things and you can separate them by what is called a comma.

Behold the graphs I made below:

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Her Genocidal Majesty

I reproduce this Citizens Electoral Council press release that lobbed into my inbox this arvo (I subscribe to a lot of shit, okay?) without comment.

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Media Release 1st of December 2009

Queen flexes muscle to demand Copenhagen genocide treaty

Just as the climate change hoax is about to derail completely, Her Britannic Majesty herself, Queen Elizabeth II, whose family spawned the modern green genocide movement*, has pulled rank on the Commonwealth group of nations—her repackaged “Empah”—to demand they deliver a treaty at Copenhagen.

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The ETS for Dummies

What is the ETS?
ETS stands for Emissions Trading Scheme, which means that companies will have to pay for credits to create pollution.

Why?
To combat climate change caused by man-made carbon emissions. The idea is if companies have to pay to pollute they will pollute less; the climate will stop changing and baby polar bears will live to become big polar bears allowing them to scavenge through Alaskan rubbish tips.

But companies pollute because they make things or produce power. How will they be able to keep providing us with their important products and services?
This is the smart bit. They will pay the ETS and the government will give them the money back so they can continue what they’re doing to protect jobs and working families. At the same time they will pass the ETS costs to the consumer which means some polluting companies and industries will be better off under an ETS despite not actually reducing their carbon footprint.

That’s sounds ridiculous!
That’s your interpretation, but at least the government will look like it’s doing something to stop climate change.

But will an ETS stop climate change? Surely once the Antarctic sheds millions of tons of ice and sea levels rise there’s not much we can do to stop it. It’s like trying to stop a freight train with a wet kipper.

You know, for a dummy you’re quite the smart arse! Listen, this isn’t about stopping climate change it’s about feeling good that we’re doing our best without having to actually give up anything that causes pollution. We’ll still use electricity and drive cars, but we’ll do it safe in the knowledge that it really gives conservatives the shits.

You’re a deranged lefty idiot. This isn’t about climate change at all, it’s about idealism.
Oh dear, is that the time… ?

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