Carbon Tax Mark 4? A Stealthy Cancer

Dr T G Watkins, I have to disagree with your assessment of Bob Hawke, a very good head of a very good government, to which I was an economic policy adviser. However, it’s been all downhill for the ALP since Keating first challenged Hawke.

Come on Australia, Vote Gillard OUT. You know it makes sense.

Peter Miller says:
July 11, 2011 at 1:23 am
“On behalf of all expensive and pointless bureaucrats everywhere, I welcome this new tax……
We need more professional politicians in power and I fully support the move to outlaw anyone with business experience or the so called ‘real world’ to ever again be allowed to hold high political office.”
Is that you, Mr. Obama?

Here is an e-mail my father (a retired project engineer) received from Julia Gillard.
“Dear Colin,
The time has come to move from words to deeds – from a climate change debate to action on climate change.
That’s why I have announced the Government’s plan for a clean energy future.
Under our plan, five hundred big polluters will start paying $23 for every tonne of carbon from 1 July 2012. By 2020 this will cut pollution by 160 million tonnes.
Some of the cost will flow to consumers, which is why we will provide nine in 10 households with permanent tax cuts, pension increases and higher family payments, plus 20 per cent extra for most lower-income households and pensioners.
The carbon price will drive huge investments in clean technologies like solar, wind and geothermal – bringing $100 billion worth by 2050.
Pricing carbon is a big change for our country, so please continue your activism and commitment because it has never been more important.
Keep telling your friends and family about why climate action is so important for our environment and for creating the jobs of tomorrow.
Make sure they get the facts by visiting our cleanenergyfuture.gov.au website where they can find details of the Government’s plan and what it means for them.
Australians are a confident, creative people. Together we can build a brighter future for our nation.
Julia”
Here is his response:
“Dear Julia,
Thank you for your message below. As a self funded retiree I will happily receive whatever allowances your plan provides for me. However, I despair over the way your carbon tax issue has arisen. I guess it’s been driven by your perceived need to reduce Australian emissions of carbon dioxide. I think your conclusions are premature,
I understand your perception that anthropomorphic emissions are causing global warming (AGW). But despite what your advisors say, the SCIENCE IS NOT SETTLED. It never is on any subject. In the case of climate science there is a lot of evidence that global temperatures have stopped rising (despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels) and that the impact of CO2 may not be as severe as the IPCC would have you believe.
Before using the state of knowledge as it is currently known in order to make far reaching policy decisions, you need to carry out Due Diligence studies in order to verify that what you are being told is correct. The level of detail required to execute proper Due Diligence for something as complex as the dynamics of climate change is truly enormous. Peer review is not due diligence. Neither are the IPCC reports. Certainly not the Garnaut reports.
Peer review of published papers is in general a coarse filter to ensure that if the evidence which the paper examines is valid and if the writers have done their sums correctly and if the results appear to make sense and add to the body of human knowledge then it’s OK to publish. Peer reviewers are unpaid experts in the same field as the writers of the paper. They seldom see all the basic data, the computer codes, the corrections, deletions and adjustments, the instrument calibration details, full details of all assumptions, etc, and their judgements are often coloured by their personal prejudices. Also they don’t get to see the experimental equipment and test environments or the actual samples that form the basis for the paper being reviewed. Usually none of this matters because scientific progress is self correcting. If a rocket scientist gets it wrong the rocket may crash or wander off course or fail in some other way. Oh dear, what a shame. Well, we’ll get it right next time round.
Predicting climate change is not rocket science. It’s much, much more difficult. And the consequences of getting it wrong may be much, much more costly. So what do you do, given that there may be something happening that could cause humanity immense harm unless we change something? You conduct proper Due Diligence studies – engineering quality, not academician quality.
You need to get the protagonists – those who claim we have a severe, looming problem – to assemble their best arguments and evidence to support their case. They should only offer papers which have been published with full public disclosure of all the data and computer codes so that the claims made within the paper can be reproduced by others. Then you appoint a Due Diligence Team (DDT) and give it a proper briefing (a Scope of Work). In the commercial world DDTs are usually independent disinterested contractors. They will need to see all of the things that peer reviewers usually don’t see as described above. In fact for proposals which will cost the community billions, the DDT will want to see a lot more. For example, many academic papers cite other previously published papers. These citations may have to be examined too. They will want to see the ‘bad’ data as well as the ‘good’. Also, published papers and other evidence may be invited for positions purporting to be contrary to the protagonists case. There is plenty of evidence which appears to throw doubt on many aspects of the IPCC case for climate change (the politically acceptable expression for AGW) and this will need to be subjected to DDT examination too.
Unlike the authors of the IPCC reports who are nearly all climate scientists, the DDT should comprise physicists, economists, engineers, mathematicians (especially statisticians), geologists, biologists and climate scientists. But no more than 25% of the team should be climate scientists. It’s doubtful if the DDT will ever be able to achieve certainty on any matter but they should be able to come much closer to the truth than has the IPCC.
Contrary to what you may have been told, the IPCC reports comprise the assessment by no more than 40 or 50 climate scientists, of all the published papers that in their opinion support in some way, climate change outside the realm of natural variation. Reviewers of each chapter in the reports were not permitted to see data which was not expressly provided in the relevant papers. In fact one reviewer was threatened with dismissal because he kept asking to see data. There is no audit trail for positions taken by authors of each chapter. None. In the business world, if a financier were asked to commit billions for some project on the basis of a report of the quality of any of the IPCC Assessment Reports he would tell you to “Go away – don’t waste my time”.
I’m a retired engineer with a background in project management. Many of my peers agree with me about this.
Colin”

Brian H,
“As Lindzen observed to Bolt, it’s really an attempt to make people WANT to give the gubmint more money. Nice scam, if you can sell it.”
And they just might succeed. In a recent experiment, a lady set herself up in the parking lot at a Californian shopping mall, with the task of selling ‘carbon offsets’ to gullible shoppers. Amazingly, the shoppers were falling over each other to give away as much money as was asked of them, in order to relieve the terrible guilt they suffered after being lectured on the size of the carbon footprints their purchases had inflicted on the poor planet. One shopper insisted on giving even more than was asked.
Carbon tax to offset guilt? It’s a shoe in.