Maurice Newman was the former head of Deutsche Bank, the ABC and ASX so you’d think he might know a thing or two about economics and business. Maurice doesn’t mince his words about these things: calling wind power “a crime against the people” (see our post here).
Maurice has also previously made the connection between spiralling power costs – being driven by the insanely expensive and utterly pointless Renewable Energy Target – and the death of manufacturing in Australia (see our post here).
Before Malcolm Turnbull’s coup did in Tony Abbott as PM, Maurice acted as chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council.
One notable feature of Turnbull’s time in office is his reluctance to appear on Alan Jone’s Breakfast Show. Probably due to Jone’s ability to go for the jugular, it’s a case of Malcolm ‘Timid’ Turnbull.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“The Earth has cancer
and the cancer is Man.”
– Club of Rome,
premier environmental think-tank,
consultants to the United Nations
***
IT’s time for sensible, democratic governments to push back and vigorously question the motives of unelected, bureaucratic behemoths at the UN, stealing corralling global taxpayer money to fund their ruinous globalist, Leftist agendas that have absolutely nothing to with “saving the planet” or helping the environment.
QUEENSLAND One Nation leader, Steve Dickson conveying what most Australian’s are feeling, in stark contrast to the major ruling parties who are both pandering to the UN climate gods …
It's time to follow Trump's lead, stop sending Australian money overseas and withdraw from the United Nations.
A MUST read opinion piece on the corrupt United Nations by Maurice Newman, former head of Deutsche Bank, the ABC and ASX…
“Australians are at that point, sick of being lectured to by UN “special rapporteurs”. They are crying out for leaders to stare down faceless bureaucrats in Geneva. They are angry at meaningless gestures and slavish obedience to pointless emissions targets that are crippling our industry and causing personal hardships.“
Corrupted UN must never be allowed to lecture us
US President Donald Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters last month.
If the leaders of some nation states were citizens living in a civilised society, they would be in jail for perpetrating, or being accessories to, murder, torture, theft and corruption.
Yet they and their chosen representatives shamelessly take their place in the hallowed chamber of the UN General Assembly as arbiters of how the rest of the world should behave.
Take the Human Rights Council, which counts among its members the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Joseph Kabila’s unconstitutional rule features massacres and gender-based violence among a long list of atrocities; and Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro strangles political opposition by carrying out hundreds of arbitrary killings under the guise of fighting crime.
There’s The Philippines, whose President Rodrigo Duterte condones policies that result in extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers; and Cuba, where President Miguel Diaz-Canel, in true Castro style, allows beatings, public shaming and termination of employment to quell political opposition. China’s President-for-life Xi Jinping oversees the holding of about a million Muslim Uighurs, including women and children, in re-education camps.
Yet this year Australia celebrated its membership of the UNHRC, while the US commendably withdrew, saying the council “has provided cover, not condemnation, for the world’s most inhumane regimes”.
Australia is also a member of the Economic and Social Council which, “to find effective approaches to ending poverty”, believes “those experiencing it must have a seat at the table’’. And so they do. The leaders of Algeria, Chad, El Salvador, South Africa, Sudan, Togo and Venezuela, to name a few, all believe in wealth redistribution. They practise authoritarian central planning and asset confiscation.
Not too many champions of competition and market economics there. Australia acts as a good global citizen, lending support for “collective action” that rewards bad behaviour.
Unsurprisingly, the UN’s Ecosoc readily accepts that “climate change and environmental crises are the result of vastly unequal levels of development in the last few centuries. The countries which are now rich became so by ignoring the consequences for the environment which now threaten the entire planet.” Ecosec reminds us of Agenda 21, put to the UN’s 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, which recognises that the burden of climate change (whatever that may be) “falls most heavily on poor countries”.
The United Nations headquarters in New York.
Masterminded by Canadian socialist/Marxist and multimillionaire Maurice Strong and held under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Rio summit was the largest political gathering in history. Strong believed the UN should become a world government with “environmentalism” the key driver. He believed: “The concept of national sovereignty … will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental co-operation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful.”
Journalist and long-time UN expert Claudia Rosett observes Strong understood how the “UN’s bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors”.
Strong exploited this culture to ensure climate change became so embedded in global politics that few Western politicians would have the courage to challenge it, no matter how exaggerated its claims, or the financial cost. And so it has proved. His successor and fellow Marxist, Christiana Figueres, led the Paris climate conference that captured Australia.
Enter US President Donald J. Trump. In his second address to the UN General Assembly in September, Trump said: “America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism.”
He said the UN Human Rights Council had become a “grave embarrassment” and that countries admitted to the WTO “violate every single principle on which the organisation is based”. He said: “We will not allow our workers to be victimised, our companies to be cheated, and our wealth to be plundered and transferred.” He withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, calling it a “massive redistribution of United States’ wealth to other countries”.
In the 26 years since the Rio summit, no world leader has posed such a comprehensive threat to UN hegemony. Not only does Trump reflect disillusionment with globalism at home, he also taps into growing disenchantment with supranational governments in many places around the world, particularly in Europe.
Brexit was the first example. Italy’s defiance in the face of Europe’s rejection of its draft budget is the latest. While acknowledging Italy violates EU rules, Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio says: “This is the first Italian budget that the EU doesn’t like. I am not surprised. This is the first Italian budget that was written in Rome and not in Brussels.” A recent poll in Poland found a third of the country now backs an EU exit.
It is clear serious cracks in the relationship between the people and governing bodies like the UN and the EU are emerging. People may not fully understand the way remote, supranational governments work, but they can recognise authority which is harmful and lacking in integrity.
Australians are at that point, sick of being lectured to by UN “special rapporteurs”. They are crying out for leaders to stare down faceless bureaucrats in Geneva. They are angry at meaningless gestures and slavish obedience to pointless emissions targets that are crippling our industry and causing personal hardships.
The latest Australian Institute of Company Directors survey confirms the desperation corporate leaders feel over the government’s inept response to climate change, the No 1 issue they want addressed.
The UN and agencies like the IMF have been exposed as hypocritical emperors without clothes. If this is a preview of world government, we face a grim future.
GLOBAL warming alarmists want to change us, they want to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences. They want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate or the environment. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. Therefore, what is in danger is freedom, not the climate.
FORMER head of Deutsche Bank, the ABC and ASX, Maurice Newman, writes a must read opinion piece in the The Australian providing further evidence that the “global warming movement is really the triumph of ideology over science”…
MAURICE NEWMAN
The Australian
You have to hand it to Peter Hannam, TheSydney Morning Herald’s climate change alarmist-in-chief, for his report last month – “ ‘Really extreme’ global weather event leaves scientists aghast”.
Hannam is often the canary in the coalmine (er, wind farm) when there is a sense that public belief in man-made global warming is flagging. With Europe in the grip of a much colder winter than predicted and with the abnormal chill spreading even to Africa, he did his best to hold the line.
Earlier this year, Climate Council councillor Will Steffen also climbed on board — for The Sydney Morning Herald of course. Extreme cold in Britain, Switzerland and Japan, a record-breaking cold snap in Canada and the US and an expansion of the East Antarctic ice sheet coincided with a Bureau of Meteorology tweet (later retracted) that January 7 had set a heat record for the Sydney Basin. Steffen told us these seemingly unrelated events were in fact linked. “Climate disruption” explained both. Whether fire or ice, we’re to blame. No ifs, no buts.
Now a warming Arctic provides the perfect opportunity for Hannam to divert attention from the latest deep freeze. He ominously warns: “Climate scientists are used to seeing the range of weather extremes stretched by global warming, but few episodes appear as remarkable as this week’s unusual heat over the Arctic.”
It’s true, warm air has made its way up to the high Arctic, driving temperatures up to 20C above average. But Anthony Watts, who runs a climate change website, puts things into perspective. He observes: “Warm moist air from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans has warmed the Arctic above the 80th parallel. It should be noted, however, that the Arctic Circle actually starts at 66 degrees north, meaning the record heat is over a much narrower area.”
Cato Institute atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue reviewed high Arctic temperature data going back to 1958 and says: “Data before the satellite era … has some problems, so it’s hard to say the current spike is for sure a record.” He says that if the baseline is 1973, when the polar-orbiting satellites began recording the data, there is not much difference between today’s ice extent and then.
Indeed, we now have satellite confirmation that global air temperatures are back to the same level they were before the 2014-16 super El Nino event and, this January and February, the decline accelerated. Since 2015 satellites also have detected a fall in sea surface temperatures.
Solar expert Piers Corbyn, of British forecasting group WeatherAction and famous for his successful wagers against the British Met Office forecasts, predicts Earth faces another mini ice age with potentially devastating consequences. He notes: “The frequency of sunspots is expected to rapidly decline … reaching a minimum between the years 2019 and 2020.” Indeed, the present decline in solar activity is faster than at any time in the past 9300 years, suggesting an end to the grand solar maximum.
Critics say while “it might be safe to go with (Corbyn’s) forecast for rain next Tuesday, it would be foolish to gamble the world can just go on burning all the coal and oil we want”. That’s the nub of it. The world has bet the shop on CO2 warming and the “science” must be defended at all costs.
But while spinning unfalsifiable “climate disruption” slogans may sway readers of The Sydney Morning Herald and resonate with believers in their centrally heated halls, those in the real world, witnessing hundreds of people dying of the cold and thousands more receiving emergency treatment, will consider they’ve been duped.
Not feeling duped are successive Australian governments that have become committed members of a green-left global warming movement promoted by the UN. On dubious scientific grounds they have agreed to accept meaningless, anti-growth, CO2 emission targets that enrich elites and burden the masses.
And, true to label, a Green Climate Fund supported by Australia and 42 mostly developed countries will redistribute $US100 billion ($128bn) annually to poorer nations as reparation for the unspecified environmental harm the West has allegedly caused them.
Big emitters such as China, India and Russia are conspicuously absent.
Policing Australia’s targets and helping to spread confirmatory propaganda is a network of international and local bureaucracies. The world’s academies and meteorological organisations, frequently found to be unreliable and biased, keep the faith alive. They reject debate and starve nonconforming researchers of funds and information. Students are indoctrinated with unproven climate-change theories that an unquestioning media gladly reinforces. Meanwhile, the country ingenuously surrenders its competitive advantage by refusing to embrace its rich endowment of affordable baseload energy. This it happily exports while lining the pockets of renewable energy rent-seekers with generous taxpayer subsidies.
Should the world enter a period of global cooling, we should expect concerted denial. Too many livelihoods, too many reputations and too much ideology depend on the CO2 narrative. Having ceded sovereignty over our economies’ commanding heights to unelected bureaucrats in Geneva, the West (Donald Trump excluded) repeatedly turns to expensive vanity projects to paper over this folly. If the iceman cometh, there can be no quick fix. Yet we know it takes twice as much energy to heat a home than to cool one. So pity the poor and infirm who respected medical journal The Lancet says are 20 times likelier to die from cold than heat.
While even to mention a mini ice age risks scorn and derision, recent research has shown a close correlation between solar activity and climate on Earth. That possibility alone should cause shivers. But it will take time and experience before we accept the global warming movement is really the triumph of ideology over science. Until then we will continue to commit life’s cardinal sin of putting too many eggs into one questionable basket.
Institutionalised data bias is a handy default for radical-left eco-catastrophists who have a tendency to extract worst-case scenarios from every weather event. | THE AUSTRALIAN
GLOBAL warming alarmists want to change us, they want to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences. They want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate or the environment. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. Therefore, what is in danger is freedom, not the climate.
FORMER head of Deutsche Bank, the ABC and ASX, Maurice Newman, writes another insightful piece in todays Australian maintaining that “it’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with extinction but blind ideology dressed up as science.”
*
The inconvenient truth is that catastrophists are wrong
It should come as a great relief to know the freezing temperatures recently experienced in the northern hemisphere do not signal an end to global warming.
Imagine if mankind’s increasingly costly attempts to arrest CO2 emissions were unnecessary. That the misallocation of productive resources, prolonging the misery of the world’s most vulnerable people, was nothing more than a cynical ideological exercise?
Hopefully, those global warming doubters in Florida watching frozen iguanas falling stiff from the trees now know that while they were freezing, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, little old Penrith in Sydney, Australia, was the warmest spot on the planet, recording its highest temperature ever, having “broken the all-time maximum temperature record for … the Sydney metropolitan area”.
Well, perhaps in all that excitement the bureau can be forgiven for overlooking the fact Penrith Lakes started recording temperatures only in 1995 and for missing a much higher temperature recorded in nearby Richmond in 1939. But they were right. It was hot.
In a hurried piece in Fairfax publications, the Climate Council of Australia’s Will Steffen throws hot water on any misconceptions that may have been drawn from abnormal snowfalls in Britain, Switzerland and Japan, the record-breaking cold snap in Canada and the US, and the expansion of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
He says: “Terms like ‘global warming’ and the mental images they trigger can be misleading when people attempt to understand what is happening to the climate. A far better term is ‘climate disruption’, which captures the real nature of the vast array of changes, many of them abrupt and unexpected, that are occurring.” So fire and ice, it’s to be expected.
Of course you won’t be surprised to learn Steffen claims “the climate disruption we are increasingly experiencing is not natural. It is caused by the heat-trapping gases we humans are pouring into the atmosphere primarily by the burning of coal, oil and gas.”
On the day Steffen’s opinion piece appeared, this newspaper republished Matt Ridley’s article in The Times claiming “the Earth is very slowly slipping back into a proper ice age”. This confirms research by Henrik Svensmark, Australia’s David Evans and others, who correlated low solar activity (fewer sunspots) and increased cloud cover (as modulated by cosmic rays), with a cooling climate.
Indeed, last year scientists submitted 120 papers linking historical and modern climate change to variations in solar activity.
Steffen wasn’t among them. He says: “Whole ecosystems are succumbing to (human-induced) climate disruption. In 2016 unusually dry and hot conditions triggered massive fires in Tasmania’s World Heritage forests, while ocean circulation patterns have moved unprecedented underwater heatwaves around the world, driving the tragic coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.’’
Yet the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt, dismisses many of the claims that he says “misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”
Peter Ridd from James Cook University goes further, saying: “We can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. The science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated, and this is a great shame.”
Steffen’s work could fit this description. He spends much time pushing eco-catastrophism. “Climate disruption” he says “brings growing risks of large-scale migration and conflict as people, particularly the most vulnerable, are forced to deal with increasingly difficult conditions where they live. Some security analysts warn that climate disruption will dwarf terrorism and other conventional threats if present trends continue or worsen.
“Had enough of climate disruption? Then let’s leave our 20th-century thinking behind and get on with the job of rapidly building innovative, clever, carbon-neutral 21st-century societies.”
But Ridley questions the influence of carbon dioxide. He reminds us that: “In 1895 the Swede, Svante Arrhenius, one of the scientists who first championed the greenhouse theory, suggested that the ice retreated because carbon dioxide levels rose, and advanced because they fell. If this was true, then industrial emissions could head off the next ice age. There is indeed a correlation in the ice cores between temperature and carbon dioxide, but inconveniently it is the wrong way round: carbon dioxide follows rather than leads temperature downward when the ice returns.”
But where would manmade global warming “science” be if it relied on just facts? For decades, climate science has been plagued by scandals, deceit and the confessions of whistleblowers.
Penrith’s hyped recording is not new. Scientist and long-time BOM critic Jennifer Marohasy has been calling for an audit and urging Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg “to inform the World Meteorological Organisation that the temperatures recorded by our bureau are not consistent with calibration, nor any international standard”, and, to “direct the bureau to desist from announcing new record hot days”.
Still, institutionalised data bias is a handy default for radical-left eco-catastrophists who have a tendency to extract worst-case scenarios from every weather event.
But despite their best efforts, in the public’s eyes their story is wearing thin. There have been too many false predictions and unwarranted alarmism. People are wising up to the reality that climate science has become an unfalsifiable ideology and resent having their moral conscience questioned should they disagree.
If Ridley is right and the earth is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age, it will be literally cold comfort, not to mention lethal, to keep passing it off as climate disruption.
To survive such an event, our successors will need a plentiful supply of cheap, reliable energy, impossible given today’s intelligentsia’s religious objection to low-cost fossil and nuclear fuels.
It’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with extinction but blind ideology dressed up as science.
Same story with Australia’s public broadcaster – the Leftist ABC. Its former boss Maurice Newman noting the broadcaster had been “captured” by a “small but powerful” group of people when it came to “climate change groupthink.”
Great work:
Piers Corbyn
Richard Courtney
David T C Davies MP
Philip Foster
Roger Helmer MEP
Alex Henney
Paul Homewood
Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
John Whitfield
Rupert Wyndham
A major new and serious complaint has been sent to the Director General of the BBC, regarding the Corporation’s persistent bias in reporting of climate change issues. The complaint is a massive 163 pages long, and is a joint submission from ten complainants. In addition, there are several technical annexes, totalling 125 pages.
Below is the letter sent to the DG:
—————————————————————————————————————————-
22nd April 2016
The Director General BBC 180 Great Portland Street London
Complaint of BBC prejudice in covering of climate change and warning of potential judicial review
We enclose a complaint from all of us about persistent partiality in the BBC’s coverage of climate change. From the outset, on the climate question the BBC has tended to reflect only one view – that of the climate science establishment who are promoting a view that man is causing significant global…
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
“Themodels are convenient fictions
that provide something very useful.”
– Dr David Frame,
climate modeler, Oxford University
The hysteria of Mann-style alarmism is going nowhere with the public, as one of the hysterics, Graeme Richardson, acknowledges here:
The sceptics and deniers have turned the 70 per cent-plus belief in climate change into a minority because no one has engaged them.
As my distinguished co-author on Climate Change: The Facts, Jo Nova, responds:
That’s right Graham, we unfunded bloggers and the few surviving skeptical scientists not evicted and blackballed from our universities (yet) have tricked 20% of the population because no one has put forward the climate change arguments except for: The Climate Commission, CSIRO, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, The ABC, The BBC, The Guardian, Fairfax, The Australian government, most universities, The EU, The UN, The World Bank, and the IMF.
Not to mention President Obama and the US Coast Guard, and George Clooney and his crappy floppo movie. Given that everyone from Hollywood to Washington to the Royal Society to half the churches and every elementary school in the western world is on Graeme’s side of the argument, their inability to sway public opinion must be ranked one of the most spectacular failures of the age – a veritable upside-down hockey stick.
UPDATE
Why did the head of the Bureau of Meteorology give a Senate committee information that was – in my opinion – highly misleading?
Maurice Newman, the chairman of the P.M’s business advisory council, daringly wrote in The Australian:
“It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error.”
If Maurice Newman was wrong, he was far too generous to the climate modelers. Instead of a 95% failure rate, it’s well up over 98%. Hans von Storch et al published a paper nearly two years ago comparing models and observations of a 15 year long pause. Statistically von Storch could find no justification for people saying the models matched the observations — there was a less than 2% chance of that. Last year Ross McKitrick estimated the pause was really 19 years long, so the odds are now less than 0.5%. Newman was being kind, suggesting that 5% of models might be called “right”.
Speaking before Congress, Professor of Atmospheric Science John Christy illustrates the gross inaccuracy of the 102 climate model simulations relied upon by the United Nation’s in the latest IPCC AR5 climate change report. Professor Christy describes his chart: ‘That is the trend in the atmospheric temperature that has happened since 1979. That’s the target that you want to hit with your climate model. So, it’s like we give someone 102 bullets to shoot at that target… Not a single one of these climate model projections was able to hit the target.’
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“China’s ability to weather disastrous climate change vindicated the necessity of centralised government … inspiring similar structures in other, reformulated nations.”Naomi Oreskes
•••
Maurice Newman, chairman of the Australian Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, boldly narrates the real workings behind the United Nations’ “Climate Change” agenda…
The UN is using climate change as a tool not an issue
By Maurice Newman
It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error. It’s not surprising.
We have been subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years.
In January 1970, Life magazine, based on “solid scientific evidence”, claimed that by 1985 air pollution would reduce the sunlight reaching the Earth by half. In fact, across that period sunlight fell by between 3 per cent and 5 per cent. In a 1971 speech, Paul Ehrlich said: “If I were a gambler I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Fast forward to March 2000 and David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, told The Independent, “Snowfalls are now a thing of the past.” In December 2010, the Mail Online reported, “Coldest December since records began as temperatures plummet to minus 10C bringing travel chaos across Britain”.
We’ve had our own busted predictions. Perhaps the most preposterous was climate alarmist Tim Flannery’s 2005 observation: “If the computer records are right, these drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia.” Subsequent rainfall and severe flooding have shown the records or his analysis are wrong. We’ve swallowed dud prediction after dud prediction. What’s more, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which we were instructed was the gold standard on global warming, has been exposed repeatedly for misrepresentation and shoddy methods.
Weather bureaus appear to have “homogenised” data to suit narratives. NASA’s claim that 2014 was the warmest year on record was revised, after challenge, to only 38 per cent probability. Extreme weather events, once blamed on global warming, no longer are, as their frequency and intensity decline.
Why then, with such little evidence, does the UN insist the world spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on futile climate change policies? Perhaps Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change has the answer?
In Brussels last February she said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.”
In other words, the real agenda is concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook.
Figueres is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. This is not about facts or logic. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.
Figueres says that, unlike the Industrial Revolution, “This is a centralised transformation that is taking place.” She sees the US partisan divide on global warming as “very detrimental”. Of course. In her authoritarian world there will be no room for debate or disagreement.
Make no mistake, climate change is a must-win battlefield for authoritarians and fellow travellers. As Timothy Wirth, president of the UN Foundation, says: “Even if the (climate change) theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
Having gained so much ground, eco-catastrophists won’t let up. After all, they have captured the UN and are extremely well funded. They have a hugely powerful ally in the White House. They have successfully enlisted compliant academics and an obedient and gullible mainstream media (the ABC and Fairfax in Australia) to push the scriptures regardless of evidence.
They will continue to present the climate change movement as an independent, spontaneous consensus of concerned scientists, politicians and citizens who believe human activity is “extremely likely” to be the dominant cause of global warming. (“Extremely likely” is a scientific term?)
And they will keep mobilising public opinion using fear and appeals to morality. UN support will be assured through promised wealth redistribution from the West, even though its anti-growth policy prescriptions will needlessly prolong poverty, hunger, sickness and illiteracy for the world’s poorest.
Figueres said at a climate summit in Melbourne recently that she was “truly counting on Australia’s leadership” to ensure most coal stayed in the ground.
Hopefully, like India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Tony Abbott isn’t listening. India knows the importance of cheap energy and is set to overtake China as the world’s leading importer of coal. Even Germany is about to commission the most coal-fired power stations in 20 years.
There is a real chance Figueres and those who share her centralised power ambitions will succeed. As the UN’s December climate change conference in Paris approaches, Australia will be pressed to sign even more futile job-destroying climate change treaties.
Resisting will be politically difficult. But resist we should. We are already paying an unnecessary social and economic price for empty gestures. Enough is enough.
Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. The views expressed here are his own.
The United Nation’s top official on climate change has described comments by Tony Abbott’s chief business adviser Maurice Newman that global warming is a conspiracy against democracy as a joke.
And the opposition has weighed in as well, with Bill Shorten calling on the Prime Minister to disavow the views of his outspoken business expert….
Christiana Figueres who is visiting Australia to discuss progress toward a global deal said Mr Newman’s claim that climate change was an UN “hoax” designed to lead to world domination, was a joke.
Now meet one of the Pope’s advisors on global warming:
… in April, the Vatican invited representatives from the world’s religions… to a symposium discussing climate science and the ways religious leaders might lead on the issue. More than a dozen faith leaders heard from one of the world’s top climate scientists, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber…
[The] much-anticipated encyclical on climate change by Pope Francis … will be presented to a press conference by Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Metropolitan John Zizioulas of the Orthodox Church, and – most controversially – Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research…
Schellnhuber … said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today — well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming — Earth’s population would be devastated….
“In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” said Dr. Schellnhuber…
Let me conclude this short contribution with a daydream about those key institutions that could bring about a sophisticated—and therefore more appropriate—version of the conventional “world government” notion. Global democracy might be organized around three core activities, namely (i) an Earth Constitution; (ii) a Global Council; and (iii) a Planetary Court….
– the Earth Constitution would transcend the UN Charter and identify those first principles guiding humanity in its quest for freedom, dignity, security and sustainability;
– the Global Council would be an assembly of individuals elected directly by all people on Earth, where eligibility should be not constrained by geographical, religious, or cultural quotas; and
– the Planetary Court would be a transnational legal body open to appeals from everybody, especially with respect to violations of the Earth Constitution.
China, the top emitter of greenhouse gases, is also the country that’s “doing it right” when it comes to addressing global warming, the United Nations’ chief climate official said….
China is also able to implement policies because its political system avoids some of the legislative hurdles seen in countries including the U.S., Figueres said.
Key policies, reforms and appointments are decided at plenums, or meeting of the governing Communist Party’s more than 200-strong Central Committee… The political divide in the U.S. Congress has slowed efforts to pass climate legislation and is “very detrimental” to the fight against global warming, she said.
In fact, there’s a bit of crowd of warming activists railing against democracy and even embracing a one-world government:
The Greens’ hero was met with a standing ovation when he delivered the 2012 Green Oration, which called for a single global and democratic parliament.
“Let us create a global democracy and parliament under the grand idea of one planet, one person, one vote, one value,” he said.
Senator Brown said he would call on the world’s 100 Greens parties to back his “earth parliament” at the third global Greens conference in Senegal next week.
Curiously, he went on to propose a bicameral (two houses) parliament with “equal representation elected from every nation”. Thus China—a nation of some 1.3 billion—would presumably have the same number of seats as, say, the Cook Islands, with less than 20,000 inhabitants.
Brown is gone, but Professor Clive Hamilton is still on our Climate Change Authority:
Very few people, even among environmentalists, have truly faced up to what the science is telling us. This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of “emergency” responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.
For example, in an interview about her new book The Collapse of Western Civilization, Naomi Oreskes argued: “If anyone will weather this storm it seems likely that it will be the Chinese.”
In the book, Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway imagine a future world in which the predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change have come to pass. With respect to China, the authors predict:
China’s ability to weather disastrous climate change vindicated the necessity of centralised government … inspiring similar structures in other, reformulated nations.
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
“In all the talk about climate change, one compelling fact is often overlooked,” Australian Conservation Foundation president Geoff Cousins writes. “Just a handful of companies are responsible for nearly one-third of our nation’s greenhouse pollution through their production and consumption of energy.”
Man-made “carbon pollution” has become the shorthand rallying cry that unites global warming believers. The notion is a figment. It is made up. It is rooted in anti-capitalist, anti-growth green ideology that, for too long, has been bullied into our consciousness as science. It is shielded by censorship and falsely cloaked in the authority and respectability of science. But the hypothesis that supports it is collapsing.
Six months into his role at the ACF, Cousins wants to make his mark as an advocate for the cause. His constituents expect it. After all, the December climate conference in Paris is approaching and global warming hysteria has to be ramped up to preserve the endless flow of dollars that sustains it. Nothing must be allowed to rain on that parade.
But no matter how many times Cousins recites his political mantra, carbon dioxide will remain colourless, odourless and a non-pollutant. To quote Massachusetts Institute of Technology emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences Richard Lindzen: “We are demonising a chemical, a molecule essential to life.” Indeed; a molecule that, throughout Earth’s history, has fluctuated in its concentration. Higher temperatures have coexisted with lower CO2 levels than today, and the world has been colder at higher concentrations. There is no reliable correlation between temperatures on Earth’s surface and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Cousins also repeats that other old chestnut: “Already pollution is leading to more frequent and more intense droughts, bushfires, heatwaves and other extreme weather. Hot days have doubled in Australia in the past 50 years.” But what does he mean by hot days? How do the past 50 years compare to the 50 years before 1910, the convenient start date the Bureau of Meteorology adopts to avoid the extreme heat of the Federation Drought years?
Is he taking his drought trends from the same BoM source that maintains drought increased in the seven areas researched, even though an independent expert review of the data showed a declining trend in five of the seven? Is it the same BoM source that asserted Queensland was suffering the worst drought in 80 years when its own website declared it was the worst in nine? And what about James Cook University’s Jon Nott, who found Queensland is experiencing fewer cyclones than at any time in the past 500 years?
Should Cousins wish to look further afield, no point looking to the US for support because, for the first time since 1969, there have been no tornadoes reported in March, usually a big month for severe weather. What’s more the US has experienced fewer tornadoes in the past three years than any similar span since accurate records began in the 1950s.
The absence of any solid scientific evidence to connect extreme weather events to human activity has required the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reluctantly concede no correlation exists. This hasn’t stopped Cousins perpetuating that myth or naming, shaming and blaming respectable companies.
“We must consider,” writes Cousins, “how to start retiring the most polluting and outdated coal plants and replacing them with clean energy.” He must be aware of the job losses this would cause. The economics on that is settled. The renewable energy obsession has come at a cost to growth and employment, especially in South Australia, California, Ontario, Britain and Europe.
In partial capitulation, from 2017 the EU will become technology agnostic and feed-in-tariffs will be phased out. While Cousins is urging us to dump coal, Europe is providing payments to make sure coal-fired power stations stay online. In fact, the EU’s package being worked up for Paris will not specifically target coal. No wonder the Financial Times referred to renewables as a fad. But it is a fad with consequences.
Lindzen says: “World leaders are embarking on costly policies that have no capacity to replace fossil fuels but enrich crony capitalists at public expense, increasing costs for all and restricting access to energy to the world’s poorest populations that still lack access to electricity’s benefits.”
Cambridge University’s Prince Philip professor of technology Michael Kelly reckons: “The project to solve ‘the climate change problem’ is a modern version of the biblical Tower of Babel. We do not know how much it will cost, when it will be completed nor what success will look like.” Only someone who controls other people’s money could sign up for something so ethereal. Only those who have lost touch with reality, or have some ulterior motive, could embark on a project so reckless.
Whatever the ACF’s motives, advocating policies that will destroy jobs and growth cannot be condoned. That includes campaigning against reductions in the renewable energy target when it is causing energy-intensive industries to close.
For more than 17 years satellites have recorded an unexplained hiatus in global temperatures. We don’t know whether the future direction will be down or up. Yet Paris delegates will proceed as if they do. Sanctions may even be recommended against countries deemed non-compliant. Better for Australia to await that outcome than impose unnecessary burdens on an economy struggling for growth.
Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. The views expressed here are his own.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
17 years of no global warming Climate Change later, more dud-predictions from the climate cartel …
Richard Kerr in Science, flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, talked to warmist scientists convinced global warming would resume within five years:
The blogosphere has been having a field day with global warming’s apparent decade-long stagnation…
The latest response from the climate community comes in State of the Climate… [in] the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Climate researcher Jeff Knight and eight colleagues at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, U.K., first establish that—at least in one leading temperature record—greenhouse warming has been stopped in its tracks for the past 10 years… But natural climate variability in the model has its limits. Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and “we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,” the Hadley Centre group writes.
And that resumption could come as a bit of a jolt, says Adam Scaife of the group, as the temperature catches up with the greenhouse gases added during the pause…
Solar physicist Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and climate modeler David Rind of GISS reached the same conclusion in a peer-reviewed 15 August paper in Geophysical Research Letters…
Researchers may differ about exactly what’s behind recent natural climate variability, but they agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer. “Our prediction is that if past is prologue, the solar component will turn around and lead to rapid warming in the next 5 years,” says Rind.
Climate modeler David Smith of the Hadley Centre, who was not involved in the State of the Climate analysis, says his group’s climate model forecasts—made much the way weather forecasts are made—are still calling for warming to resume in the next few years as ocean influences reverse…
Time’s up. Kerr wrote that five years ago. And sill no warming.
What would it take for warmist scientists to admit they were wrong?
The IPCC was bound to be captured by the green movement. After all, it is a political body. It is not a panel of scientists but a panel of governments driven by the UN. Its sole purpose is to assess the risks of human-induced climate change. It has spawned industries. One is scientists determined to find an anthropogenic cause. Another is climate remediation. And, naturally, an industry to redistribute taxes to sustain it all. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, this cartel will deny all contrary evidence. Its very survival depends on it. But the tide is turning and Mother Nature has signalled her intention not to co-operate
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
Former ABC Chairman, and newly appointed chief business advisor to the Abbott Government, Maurice Newman, lays out the ugly cost of the Carbon (dioxide) Tax and the delusional green socialist agenda, implemented by the former Labor/Greens coalition.
GRAHAM LLOYD – THE AUSTRALIAN – DECEMBER 31, 2013 12:00AM
THE unprecedented cost of energy driven by the renewable energy target and the carbon tax had destroyed the nation’s competitiveness, Tony Abbott’s chief business adviser has declared.
Maurice Newman also says climate change policies driven by “scientific delusion” have been a major factor in the collapse of Australia’s manufacturing sector. “The Australian dollar and industrial relations policies are blamed,” Mr Newman said. “But, for some manufacturers, the strong dollar has been a benefit, while high relative wages have long been a feature of the Australian industrial landscape.”
In an interview, Mr Newman said protection of climate change policies and the renewable energy industry by various state governments smacked of a “cover-up”.
He said an upcoming review of the renewable energy target must include examination of claims made in federal parliament that millions of dollars were being paid to renewable energy projects that allegedly did not meet planning guidelines. Mr Newman’s comments follow those of Dow Chemicals chairman and chief executive Andrew Liveris, who said Australia was losing its natural advantage of abundant and cheap energy.
“As far as new investments go, our primary energy sources of natural gas and electricity are now or will soon become negatives to any comparative calculation,” Mr Liveris said.
“Average prices of electricity have doubled in most states in recent years and the unprecedented contraction in consumption threatens a ‘death spiral’ in which falling consumption pushes up prices even further, causing further falls in consumption,” he said.
Mr Newman said Australia had become “hostage to climate-change madness”. “And for all the propaganda about ‘green employment’, Australia seems to be living the European experience, where, for every ‘green’ job created, two to three jobs are lost in the real economy,” he said.
“The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling. Global temperatures have gone nowhere for 17 years. Now, credible German scientists claim that ‘the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the little ice age of 1870’.”
Mr Newman said the climate change establishment, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remained “intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money”.
“When necessary, the IPCC resorts to dishonesty and deceit,” he said.
In Australia, Mr Newman said, Victorian Democratic Labour Party senator John Madigan had told parliament how politicians and bureaucrats were paying tens of millions of dollars annually to wind turbine operators that had not received final planning approval.
“It could be hundreds of millions of dollars and we have a government that is keen to rein in the budget deficit,” he said. “If you can save a million dollars that should never have been spent, we should be doing it.”
Senator Madigan said the issuing of renewable energy certificates to one of the non-compliant wind farms, at Waubra in Victoria, reflected “a culture of noncompliance arising from systematic regulatory failure that impacts every wind farm in Victoria”.
He said the issue involved “the pain and suffering of little people living in rural Australia, environmental damage, fraud on a grand scale, deception, lies and concealment“.
change policies? Perhaps Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change has the answer?
Climatism 
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