The Stupid Anti-Carbon Tax is Gone!

Finally

The Greens, of course, are aghast,
the ABC is downcast;
reality-deniers
must give ‘deniers’ a blast.

The act was by no means fast
but the legislation’s passed:
Gillard’s stupid ‘carbon’ tax
has been abolished at last.

Carbon Dioxide Is Innocent

See “Water is the Weather Wildcard” by Viv Forbes at The Pickering Post:

The climatists claim that atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global warming. But the past seventeen years of rising CO₂ without rising global temperatures shows this to be untrue.
So now they say that carbon dioxide causes wild weather.  This too is untrue.
Water covers over 70% of the globe, is about fifty times more abundant than CO₂ in the atmosphere and it is a far more effective “greenhouse gas”.
There can be no rain, snow, hail, ice or floods without water.  And the absence of water produces deserts and droughts.
And it is water, not carbon dioxide, which plays a crucial role in the feared climate tipping points.
During periods of global warming, water plays a mainly moderating role.  As oceans, seas and lakes are warmed by solar radiation, water drives three cooling feedbacks.
Firstly, increased evaporation cools the surface water and the adjacent atmosphere.
Secondly, the moist warm air rises, cooling as it expands in the lower atmospheric pressure.  Eventually this cooling air releases its moisture as rain, hail or snow which cools the surface on which it falls, and then cools it more by renewing evaporative cooling.  Or the extra moisture forms clouds that shade the surface and also reflect solar radiation.
Thirdly, the moisture in the air releases its latent heat when it condenses high in the atmosphere. Much of this surface heat then gets radiated to space.
Water thus reduces the chances of runaway global warming.
Water, however, can magnify any cooling trends.  A covering of snow and ice quickly reflects more incoming solar radiation, thus increasing the initial cooling.  Not even the feeble warming effect of carbon dioxide will prevent this.  In fact, when oceans cool, they dissolve more carbon dioxide thus reducing the ability of the atmosphere to retain atmospheric warmth.  Ice ages are precipitated once winter snow is not melted by summer sun.  They have never been prevented by high carbon dioxide levels in ancient atmospheres.
These are all proven processes, not theories in computer climate models.
It is water in all its forms, not carbon dioxide, that is the heavy-hitter in all weather processes.
Carbon dioxide is the side-show.

The Awarmist “Putting a Price on X” Game

In “Clear link between climate change and bushfires: UN adviser warns Tony Abbott”, by the credulous Judith Ireland, we learn that the useless-when-it’s-not actually-destructive UN is still hoping to persuade people that slightly warmer weather is catastrophically dangerous, and that we must therefore lavish even more money on the already bloated bureaucrats who have lied to us for so long about the alleged dangers of very slight global warming.

A senior United Nations climate change official says there is “absolutely” a link between climate change and bushfires and has warned that the Coalition government will pay a high political and financial price for its decision to scrap carbon pricing.

There is, of course, no link at all between supposed anthropogenic global warming—which is what these venal buffoons mean when they refer to “climate change”—and bushfires.  That is a self-serving lie—or, to be charitable, perhaps yet another wondrous case of the modern flexibility of language whereby “absolutely” means “not at all”.

In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Monday, the head of the UN’s climate change negotiations, Christiana Figueres, said there was a clear link between climate change and bushfires such as those raging in New South Wales.
She noted that the World Meteorological Organisation had not yet established a direct link between the NSW fires and climate change.
“But what is absolutely clear is the science is telling us that there are increasing heat waves in Asia, Europe, and Australia; that these will continue; that they will continue in their intensity and in their frequency,” Ms Figueres said.

Uh huh; there’s no direct link, and no proof, but we should base all our spending on the notion that there is a proven link, anyway. This loony is allowed outside to walk among us.

Ms Figueres described the NSW fires as an “example of what we may be looking at unless we take actually vigorous action”. The UN adviser said the Abbott government would not only pay a high political price but a “very high financial price” for stepping away from a price on carbon.

A price on carbon, by the way, is code for a neo-Luddite tax (on industrial emissions of beneficent carbon dioxide, for the most part) which can do nothing to stop any global warming, or cooling, but further enriches banks, middlemen, and the misanthracist, malfeasant UN, predicated on the deluded, pseudo-scientific conjecture that man’s puny contributions to the atmosphere are warming the world dangerously.

“What we need to do is put a price on carbon so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of carbon,'' she said.

Christiana Figueres, clearly, is seriously deluded, but her “What we need to do is put a price on x so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of x” game seems like fun. I’ll have a go:

What we need to do is put a price on the silly but expensively corrupt UN so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of the silly but expensively corrupt UN!

Furthermore:

What we need to do is put a price on those deluded, misanthropist, enviro-mentalist lunatics who won’t allow burnoffs but then have the gall to blame preventable or deliberately lit bushfires on non-existent AGW so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of those deluded, misanthropist, enviro-mentalist lunatics who won’t allow burnoffs but then have the gall to blame preventable or deliberately lit bushfires on non-existent AGW!

Or, logically enough:

What we need to do is put a price on putting a price on things so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of putting a price on things.

See also Tim Blair’s “Tell It to Ixchel”. 

Originally posted at all right, all right.

The Stupid ‘Carbon’ Tax

The Tax Which Does Nought

Though many claim that
global warming’s a great threat,
there’s no proof as yet;

some politicians,
despite feigned support, are wise
to awarmists’ lies

for, if they believed
in this “man-made climate change”
they’d surely arrange

sound, wise investments
which were quite properly planned
to save threatened land;

we could, say, have built
canals and levees, dams and walls—
not costly school-halls.

That we have a tax
to solve AGW
confirms it’s not true.

 
The Tax Which Will End

Kevin Rudd lately
claimed that he will take an axe
to the “carbon” tax

but, as ever, he
deceives; he plans to finesse
with an ETS.

UPDATE I:  see Larry Pickering’s “Why Rudd’s ETS Is A Super Con”.

UPDATE II (15 October):

Murry Selby: Greenhouse Gases and Global Temperature

CO₂ does not drive climate change.

The New but Dying Lysenkoism

See “The Disgraceful Episode of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory”, by Peter Ferrara, in “Forbes”:

Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming.  That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy.  Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries.  Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.
Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award.  Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory.  Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?
Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

See also, by the same author, “To the Horror of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here”.

Twenty Facts

“Twenty Facts about Carbon Diodide”, by Dr Darko Butina, at Principia Scientific International:

1. We know everything about physico-chemical properties of CO₂ there is to know since its discovery 200 years ago, and categorical statement can be made that the physico-chemical properties of CO₂ in its pure state, including IR properties, have nothing to do with its properties as part of the mixture called air.
2. We know that no gas molecule of the open system, as our atmosphere is, can possibly control temperature.
3. We know that there are two very different mechanisms that drive dynamics of CO₂ exchange between air-waterand air-biomass and therefore there is no such thing as global levels of CO₂.  Levels of CO₂ above the water mass, covering 70% of the Earth surface is controlled by solubility of CO₂ in water which is solely driven by temperature; while levels of CO₂ above the biomass that covers most of the land surfaces is solely driven and controlled by photosynthesis.
4. We know that the only way to know exact numbers about CO₂ concentrations above the water and biomass surfaces is to measure them at the surface levels, which we do not do, and therefore use of CO₂ levels measured at a single point on the globe and at 4,000 meters altitude (Mauna Loa Observatory, MLO, at Hawaii) represents one of the most miss-used high accuracy dataset in the history of modern science.
5. We know that the total emissions/reabsorption of CO₂ by nature makes emissions of CO₂ by burning fossil fuels totally insignificant and lost in the instrumental accuracy levels.
6. We know that the levels of CO₂ that we live amidst in our everyday lives have nothing in common with the observed CO₂ levels at MLO based at an altitude of 4000 meters above sea level.
7. We know that there is no difference between CO₂ levels accurately measured 200 years ago and last year—they all go up and down depending when and where you measure them.
8. We know that there is no possible correlation between CO₂ levels dissolved in water in its liquid state and CO₂ levels found in ice, i.e., water in its solid state.
9. We know that it is CO₂ that makes major contribution to the width of tree rings.  So, no CO₂ means no tree rings and no life.
10. We know that the human body ignores CO₂ levels in air when breathing in and the only function of breathing out is to get rid of CO₂ that is created in every cell of the human body by the complex bio-chemical process that maintains life.
11. We know that CO₂ levels would need to reach concentration in air of 60,000 ppm (from current levels of 390 ppm) to become toxic for humans.
12. We know that every single molecule of CO₂ is surrounded by 2,500 molecules that are not CO₂ and therefore any theoretical blanket built from CO₂ fibers that supposedly is surrounding the Earth is practically made of nothing.
13. We know that every single molecule of CO₂ is surrounded by 2,500 molecules that are not CO₂ and therefore one has to offer some explanation as to what those 2,500 ‘other or NOT-CO₂’ molecules are doing while one molecule among them is receiving and ‘back radiating’ all that heat energy.
14. We know that every molecule of CO₂, irrespective of which source it comes from, can go up-and-down (in Z-axis) due to its molecular weight, its heat capacity and its solubility in water (rain or snow) and along (X-Y space) carried by wind.  Therefore, someone has to be able to explain: how does a molecule of CO₂ generated by an SUV in Los Angeles gets transported across 2,500 miles of water mass to Hawaii and then go up another 4,000 meters, while avoiding all the biomass available within few miles of land surface in California and all the water mass along its journey to the CO₂ detector at MLO, Hawaii?
15. We know for certain that at 200 ppm of CO₂ plants stops growing and that the optimum levels for plants grow is between 1,300 and 1,500 ppm, and yet the advice to all governments around the globe is to commit mass suicide of all species by reducing CO₂ concentrations to 200 ppm levels.
16. We know that there is no difference whether we grow or dig fuel in terms of CO₂ emissions, we know that CO₂ emissions from burning fuel are irrelevant to the CO₂ dynamics of emissions/absorption and yet we use our precious food-growing surfaces to grow fuel and thus create famine and kill life.
17. We know that there is no such a thing as self-heating greenhouse and yet new theories have been invented to argue something that cannot be argued.
18. We know that there is nothing in common in IR spectra between CO₂, methane and water and yet they have been classified together as ‘greenhouse gasses’ because they absorb infrared radiation, together with millions of other molecules.
19. We know that CO₂ in the atmosphere could not be detected by a standard IR-spectrometer and yet that property of CO₂ has been used to argue for the existence of a greenhouse effect.
20. We know that all the knowledge about the physical world comes from experiments that can be validated and not from calculations that cannot be validated.  And yet, everything about man-made global warming is about calculations and nothing about measurements.

In Defence of Carbon Dioxide

See “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide”, by Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, in The Wall Street Journal:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide.  Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant.  That’s simply not the case.  Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.
The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.
The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history.  Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago).  For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a “pollutant” in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants.  […]
We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times.  The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

A Query

A Question for Supporters of the Supposedly Scientific but Self-Serving, Partisan Propagandists of the Failed Conjecture of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

It’s “ipcc
this” and “ipcc that”
all across the land;

the argument from
authority is getting
wholly out of hand.

Do tell us: what part
of “intergovernmental”
don’t you understand?

Even the very silly Prof. Tim Flannery—in The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (Melbourne, 2008)—notes that:

the pronouncements of the IPCC do not represent mainstream science, nor even good science, but lowest-common-denominator-science—and of course even that is delivered at glacial speed.  [p. 246]

Immediately, however, the professor, in assuete denial of consecutive thinking, observes:

If the IPCC says something, you had better believe it—and then allow for the likelihood that things are far worse than is says they are.  [loc. cit.]

UPDATE I (7 May):  see “Two Views on Science, Pollution & Pristine Lakes” by Donna Laframboise (of Delinquent Teenager fame):

Today’s moral lesson: scientists aren’t holy men, pronouncing the gospel truth.  They may, in fact, be closer to circus performers. 

UPDATE II (9 May):  see “Secret UN ‘ZOD’ climate deliberations: UK battles to suppress details” by Andrew Orlowski:

It’s a common misconception—a sign of the media’s deference to scientists, perhaps—that the IPCC consists of a properly appointed actual panel somewhere.  As [Peter] Stott [of the UK Met Office] cheerfully confirmed, beyond a small technical administrative support team called the TSU, there isn’t really “an IPCC” at all.  Self-selecting scientists kick off the assessment process, often gatekeeping material by their friends and colleagues, hard-green campaign groups etc.  From the Second Draft stage of the review process the room is full of government officials—the international bureaucracy effectively takes over.  The rules are set by the participants, making it up as they go along, Lord of the Flies-style.  The Osborne-Stocker exchange illustrates a normal example of one scientist colluding with another in an attempt to prevent the public finding out how the process works.  Stott described in court the process which allows any member of the public to “self-certify” as an Expert Reviewer and join the process at the First Order Draft (i.e., the second) stage.

UPDATE III (24 May):  download a PDF of What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for a Radical Reform, by Ross McKitrick.

Carbon Dioxide Blamed Again

Speak of noxious fumes and a modern researcher’s first thoughts fly to carbon dioxide.  In The Daily Telegraph, we may read that “Archaeologists have uncovered ‘Pluto’s Gate’, an ancient gateway to Hell, in Turkey”:

A group of Italian archaeologists have announced they have found the legendary “Pluto’s Gate”, a portal filled with foul-smelling noxious fumes which inflicted a quick death on any person or beast that was driven into its embrace.
The temple complex in Hierapolis, now the volcanic-spring restort town of Pamukkale, featured in many ancient legends and historical texts.
“This space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death,” the Greek historian Strabo wrote in 24AD*.
“I threw in sparrows† and they immediately breathed their last and fell.” [quoting Strabo’s Geographica, XIII, iv, 14]

Now, “foul-smelling noxious fumes” can’t be carbon dioxide because carbon dioxide is odourless. What were unspecified noxious vapours, however, are swiftly identified:

Francesco D’Andria of the University of Salento said the “visions” were probably hallucinations caused by breathing diluted fumes wafting up from the Gate to Hell.
And the portal is still a killer, he said.
“We could see the cave’s lethal properties during the excavation,” D’Andria told Discovery News.
“Several birds died as they tried to get close to the warm opening, instantly killed by the carbon dioxide fumes.”

*  Strabo died, at the latest, around the year 24 when he was 87 or so; I doubt that he wrote the thirteenth of his seventeen books of Geographica in the last months of his long life.

†  Strabo’s word, στρουθία, appears to refer to unspecified small birds rather than to sparrows in particular.

Roy Spencer with John Stossel

“To shut down CO₂ is to shut down civilisation.”

See also “Global Warming Agenda, Bad Policy” and Dr. Spencer’s own site.

Piers Corbyn: the Sun Warms the Earth, and How

To say that CO₂ drives global warming, “is utter madness, and fraud”.
“We are heading for a Dalton-type minimum of cold temperatures which will affect Europe considerably: there will be more very cold winters and more lousy summers.”

Richard Feynman on Pseudo-Science

Greenhouse Theory Melts Away

See “Water Vapor Feedback – Is it positive or negative?” at Carl Brehmer’s “Greenhouse Effect” Research.

(Thanks to The Hockey Shtick.)

UPDATE I:  see “The Experiment that Failed which can save the World Trillions: Proving the ‘greenhouse gas effect’ does not exist! by Berthold Klein” at Climate Realists.

UPDATE II (17 March): see “What The ‘Skeptics’ Of Climate Catastrophe Are Skeptical Of:  Nordhaus Reconsidered”, by Eric Dennis:

The most frustrating thing about being a scientist skeptical of catastrophic global warming is that the other side is continually distorting what I am skeptical of.  [...]
The object of our skepticism, catastrophic global warming, means warming caused by greenhouse gasses that would so dramatically heat up the earth that despite the proven climate adaptability of hydrocarbon-powered civilization [...], populations the world over would experience impoverishment, mass suffering, and death.
Why are we skeptical of this claim?  Because there is radically insufficient evidence for it.
This may seem implausible, because the news media bombard us with stories of new studies, new findings, new models, new international summits allegedly confirming catastrophic global warming.  But what these stories leave out is the evidential status of these developments—what any given study or model actually proves.  And the answer is, little to nothing, because the present ability of scientists to understand, model, and predict the climate is far, far lower than we are led to believe.

Global Warming: How to Approach the Science

The Campaign to Repeal the Climate Change Act:  Prof. Richard Lindzen’s Seminar, “Global Warming: How to Approach the science”, held at the House of Commons Committee Rooms Westminster, London on 22 February, 2012.

A PDF of the presentation is available (from Bishop Hill) hence.  Alternatively, the presentation’s slides in the form of JPGs are available here.

Climate Change Cure May Be Worse than the Disease

Listen to an audio (21:39) of Matt Ridley explaining “Why the cure for climate change may be worse than the disease”.

Ian Plimer on His Climate Primer

From the awarmist ABC comes “Plimer launches kids’ climate sceptic book” wherein Matt Peacock tries his best not to discuss the substance of Prof. Plimer’s book:

Matt Peacock:  To the geology professor and climate sceptic whose book, How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents and Punters, was launched last night by the former prime minister, John Howard.

Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide, claims that much of the concern about global warming’s the result of political activism, opportunism and is unrelated to science.  But that’s not his only controversial view.

Professor Plimer also argues that white asbestos, known as chrysotile, is not really asbestos, and three years ago he even asserted that it was not a carcinogen.

Earlier, I asked him whether his new book really would see kids expelled.

Ian Plimer:  It’s going to teach them to ask the fundamental questions: is climate change normal? And once climate change has established as being normal, terms such as “denier” and “sceptic” have no validity and the teachers then have to deal with the key scientific questions like, which part of the last 330 years of warming is natural and which part is due to human activity?

Matt Peacock:  The Science Teachers Association and others have taken exception to your book already.  Does that worry you?

Ian Plimer:  Not at all.  I see the products of the science teachers.  I see 500 of them every year.  I have for the last forty years.  These kids coming out today have the lack of basics of chemistry, physics, mathematics, logic and English.  These kids today are being taught environmental activism and they have to be retaught the basics before they can understand how the world works.

I’m not surprised at people who are probably activists are a little bit concerned.

Matt Peacock:  Well you’re a professor of mining geology, simply put a rock expert.  How does that quality you on meteorological and climate sciences?

Ian Plimer:  Every rock you look at you ask a simple question.  What was sea level doing?  What was the climate doing?  And every geology textbook, going back hundreds of years, deals with past climate.

And we’ve only got to our present climate from past climates.  The climate industry ignores the past.

Climate science is a very new science.  Geology is a great part of climate science.  You cannot ignore geology.  If you do, you get a completely different view of the way the planet works.

But that’s the way that the climate industry wants us to look at climate because geology has those really uncomfortable questions.  It shows that sea level goes up and down and climate goes up and down and the land goes up and down and it’s much more complicated than traces of a trace gas in the atmosphere.

Matt Peacock:  Well can I ask you a simple question about your expertise, rocks?  A few years ago you told me chrysotile was not asbestos, is that right?

Ian Plimer:  Chrysotile’s a serpentine mineral.  That is absolutely correct.  Mineralogically it’s a serpentine mineral.

Matt Peacock:  So it’s not asbestos?

Ian Plimer:  It is called commercially “asbestos”. The mineral chrysotile is a serpentine mineral.

Matt Peacock:  Even the asbestos industry calls it “asbestos”.  I mean the town Asbestos mines chrysotile.

Ian Plimer:  As I said it’s called commercially “asbestos”.

Matt Peacock:  But scientifically...

Ian Plimer:  However—

Matt Peacock:  With respect, Professor, it’s called “asbestos” scientifically too.

Ian Plimer:  I’m sorry.  You are just a journalist.  I have spent my life studying minerals.  Look up any basic mineralogy textbook—the sort of thing that we give to 18-year-old students at university—and you'll see that chrysotile is a serpentine mineral.

Matt Peacock:  Called “asbestos”.

Ian Plimer:  A family of serpentine minerals—

Matt Peacock: Called “asbestos”.

Ian Plimer:  whereas asbestos minerals are amphibole minerals.

Matt Peacock:  Amphibole like crocidolite and amosite, but chrysotile is part of the family called “asbestos”.  Is it not?

Ian Plimer:  I am sorry.  You are demonstrating mass ignorance.  You are out of your depth.  I invite you to come to some elementary first year mineralogy lectures and you will learn—

Matt Peacock:  And isn’t chrysotile...

Ian Plimer:  the difference between amphiboles and—

Matt Peacock:  Well, another simple question: is chrysotile a carcinogen?

Ian Plimer:  The literature is quite varied on this now.  There’s been a lot more work done.

Matt Peacock:  You told me it wasn’t.  You told me it wasn’t, three years ago.  Do you still have that view?

Ian Plimer:  I’m sorry, I’m sorry you are letting your ideology run loose.

Matt Peacock:  Well, let me quote this letter that you wrote me three years ago.

Ian Plimer:  Let me just say that the mineralogy and the epidemiological work has been done since then and it is now quite equivocal as to what chrysotile does.  Three or four years ago we had a different view.

Matt Peacock:  Professor, in 2008 you wrote to me that ... excuse me, can I ask you this question?  In 2008 you wrote to me and you said chrysotile is not a carcinogen.  Do you still stand by that view?

Ian Plimer:  The literature now has changed.  There has been some more work done.  Now there happened to be three years of scientific work done between 2008 and 2010—

Matt Peacock:  And in 2008 the WHO (World Health Organisation) said it was a carcinogen, so did medical authorities throughout the world, but you said it wasn’t.

Ian Plimer:  No, I’m sorry.  It was equivocal.  It is probably less equivocal now.  And, again, you are allowing ideology to actually overrun your logic—

Matt Peacock:  And you're saying in 2008, Professor, that asbestos was not viewed as a carcinogen?

Ian Plimer:  Well, I’m sure that has a huge amount to do with climate change.

Matt Peacock:  But, Professor, it goes to your credibility does it not?

Ian Plimer:  It certainly goes to your credibility when you are trying to—

Matt Peacock:  How could a geologist such as yourself say that chrysotile is not a carcinogen?

Ian Plimer:  you are trying to claim that mineral chrysotile is an asbestos mineral when you know full well that it isn’t.  And it is no wonder that people have lost faith in the ABC because you know very well—

Matt Peacock:  And the entire industry in Canada, the town of Asbestos that mines chrysotile, they’ve all got it wrong?

Ian Plimer:  You know very well that crocidolite is an amphibole.  You know very well because you could very simply call up Mindat.  You could call up any website on mineralogy and you could be shown to be quite misleading and deceptive.

Matt Peacock:  Final question, Professor.

Ian Plimer:  I don’t know why you want to spend your time totally and absolutely out of your depth and you are only reporting what (inaudible) ABC.

Matt Peacock:  A final question, with respect Professor, have you ever taken any money from the coal industry or the asbestos industry or their lobbyists?

Ian Plimer:  Not at all.  But have you, sir, ever taken any money from the taxpayer?  And that is what you are doing to paint an ideological picture which in most cases can be regarded as misleading and deceptive.

Matt Peacock:  Thanks for your time, Professor.  The University of Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer.

UPDATE (21 December):  according to mattpeacock.net:

Matt began his career in 1973 as a trainee with Australia’s first TV current affairs program, “This Day Tonight”, before joining the ABC Radio National’s Science Unit, where he produced a pioneering radio series on the asbestos industry.  [...]
More recently he authored a book on the former Australian asbestos manufacturer James Hardie, “Killer Company” (HarperCollins, 2009), which is soon to become a dramatic mini-series.
Matt has contributed articles for a range of newspapers, magazines and books and is Adjunct Professor of Journalism with Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS).

Lord Monckton Drops into Durban

At CFACT:  “Climategate 2.0 parachutes into COP17”.
See also “Group of scientists dismiss climate change scare”.

Plimer, Laframboise, Lea & Ridley: Reconsidering the UK’s Climate Change Act

Hateful Greens

By Their Actions Ye Shall Know Them

Slightly more warming
would be better for mankind
than global cooling;

misanthracist Greens,
though, would rather spend billions
on schemes for fooling

ordinary folk
that the world is doomed if warmed
by a few degrees

instead of helping
poorer peoples of the world
to prevent disease,

and have better lives,
by the sort of progress
richer nations had.

I say “had” instead
of “have” because Greens believe
that progress is bad

when it brings greater
prosperity to nations.
The “progress” they crave

is one which Noble
Savages might plan for a
solar-powered cave

if, somehow, solar
panels could be created
by magic.  The best

for these “progressives”
would be the full destruction of
the civilised West.

Ignore the pious
words of carbon-hating Greens,
who ignore the hopes

of poorest peoples;
their actions* shew that they are
hateful misanthropes.

*  see “Killing Us to Save Us”.