Carbon Price announced today

Yes, because hacked code (well, snippets of code comments actually) isn't very credible and shouldn't form the basis of a reasoned argument. I've got no idea whether those programmers were "blindly fudging" the numbers or whether they knew what they were doing and can explain what each line of code does. It isn't really that relevant anyway, because unless you can read the code and understand what it does (all of it) you just have to take some expert's word for it that the code does what its supposed to do and that it does it accurately...

...in exactly the same way that every one of us who isn't a climate scientist has to take the word of some climate scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real. Fortunately for us, the vast majority of them concur that it is and we can therefore make a reasonable assumption that they're correct.

The only thing that's really left for us normal people to ponder over is what to do about it and now we have a tax designed to reduce carbon emissions. We can either sit around bitching about that, or spend some time and effort thinking about all the ramifications of putting a new economic factor into play.

 

Are you completely incapable of rational, critical thought? The solution is right there, in black and white, in plain english: the free market. Supply and demand. If you want the price to come to down, then either the demand must decrease of the supply must increase.

Now the reason the supply of electricity has not been increasing in pace with demand, and thus rising faster than wages, is because of government interference. Soooo, the solution, which I clearly outlined for you but you seem to be too stupid to notice, is for the government to GTFO of the electricity generation industry and leave it to private companies. That is the only way to ensure competition and innovation and efficiencies etc.

 

Does hacked code have more, less, or the same credibility of a sourceless chart?

No, we should not give in so easily. There is lots to ponder still. For example, we could ponder over how the carbon tax is simply a prelude to a global ETS. And who would run this system - the banksters like the IMF. Then, we can have a think about their track record and modus operandi. The role they play in bankrupting nations via bribery and loans, and how they then strip the people's resources & utilities for their own corporate gain. The top dogs pushing for an ETS tells me plenty.

 

Normal people know the science is in, the debate is over, shut up slave.

 

The atmosphere is not mechanistic either. The whole bioshphere is a dynamic system which constantly alters itself and moves towards equilibrium and homeostasis. If we emit more CO2 than would normally occur under natural conditions, guess what? The biosphere adapts. I garauntee, life goes on, it improves, it advances. CO2 emissions are not evil, that is a scare campaign, otherwise if it were evil then every moral person must commit suicide to prevent themselves from exhaling. Mass murders would actually be saints, and health-care professionals would have to be imprisioned for crimes. That is the logical conclusion of thinking that CO2 emissions are evil.

BUt they are not. The biosphere is in a constant state of flux. Embrace change. Let change enlighten you. Don't run from change all scared, what a cowardly attitude.

 

Ahhh, yes - the infamous hockey stick which was supposed to be a historical global temperature reconstruction. A couple of people (McIntyre and KcKitrick) pointed out what they thought of as methodological errors, some of which were disputed and some of which were accepted. In any case the writers of the original "hockey stick" paper later published an amended version and as far as I'm aware McIntyre and McKitrick haven't challenged that one. So as far as I can see, another case of the scientific method working correctly. Incidentally, there are a number of other temperature reconstructions by a number of other groups and using a number of methods that all show approximately the same results.

I'm not sure what Al Gore has to do with it though. Yes, he used the graph in "An Inconvenient Truth", but he wasn't the writer. I would guess that he was just using what was probably the best knowledge he had at the time. In general, most of the information in the movie has held up reasonably well over time. Yes there are some differences in the detail of some of the claims, but the big picture has turned out to be, if anything, worse than he depicted.

 

Wow, you must be great fun at parties

Ironically I agree with most of what you said - and yes, I watched that video several days ago.

 

hahaha still laughing here !!!! wasnt the thread about the carbon tax?& my post asking for a solution ? how would u propose we fix the problem.I cant see a reduction plan there anywhere, now whos stupid? getting the gubmint out of the equation does nothing about the actual problem. you are in a place of ever decreasing circles with your arguement. your arguement is just keep adding to the problem burn that coal !!! just pass the buck to private enterprise ... oh good plan

 

Luckily, there is a group at the University of California, Berkeley who are starting afresh trying to create temperature reconstructions from all the available data in a completely transparent way - open data sets and open source code.

 

You are the one saying that carbon dioxide emissions need to be reduced. I don't accept that premise, because I think that higher amounts of carbon in the atmosphere would be a good thing.

Fundamentally this is an issue regarding the symbiotic relationship between plants and animals. Plants breathe CO2 and emit Oxygen, Animals breathe Oxygen and emit CO2, and the cycle continues.

When an imbalance develops, it automatically corrects itself. So as we see atmospheric concentrations of CO2 increasing, well thats fine, because that means plants will be able to thrive better, in in their thriving, they will be storing more carbon and emitting more oxygen. The problem solves itself. The cycle continues.

As for the issue of climate change, well, the climate is changing, it always has changed, it always will change, and the models saying that the climate is going to get hotter are wrong, last winter was absolutely freezing throughout the whole Northern Hemisphere, as was the winter before that, as will be the next winter.

But more to the point, there are things we can do about the climate which have nothing to do with taxing CO2 emissions~ read 'Superfreakonomics' for a taste of what I'm talking about.

 

And besides, the carbon tax as proposed by our government does nothing to solve climate change anyway...

 

yes i know it doesnt & im not convinced about the climate change arguement either in 1 of my earlier posts i said it was the biggest crock of shit ive heard or did you miss that? i was hoping to get some others ideas about reducing carbon for pollution more than climate change or do you want your grandchildren to grow up breathing air like china's. something needs to be done about the amount of toxins & pollutants in the atmosphere which generally involves burning fossil fuels = carbon

 

Yes, and the latest science seems to point to the prospect of the biosphere "adapting" by wiping us out with floods, hurricanes and droughts.

No humans, no excessive CO2, homoeostasis is restored.

 

Yes, there is lots to think about but that doesn't mean we should get caught up in a "people's revolt" and ignore the whole process of introducing a carbon tax.

All the political parties have committed to reducing emissions: the Greens have taken a hard line and essentially want the coal companies put out of business, Labor has decided to start with a government backed tax and then transition to a market based mechanism in a few years and the Liberals have a policy of "direct action" which involves paying big polluters to not pollute as much as they are now.

One of the strange things in all that is that the Liberals are advocating welfare (which is typically something favoured by Labor) and Labor have opted for a public-private partnership arrangement (which is typically something favoured by the Liberals). I happen to think this has come about because Tony Abbott is so keen to oppose everything the government does, the only position he can take is the direct opposite of where the government is even if that means not supporting a policy he'd normally be in favour of. That kind of thinking is, in my view, short sighted because it ignores the chance to make a positive contribution to he process and the opportunities that can come from completely changing the way we live.

Frankly, I'd rather have an opposition that scrutinises the government's policies and goes through them in detail to find out where the potential problems are. Instead, we have an opposition that doesn't believe in bipartisanship and opposes everything for the sake of it, regardless of whether the ideas behind the policy are any good.

An opposition that was paying attention would be asking things like whether there will be business grants to help people establish green energy manufacturing and consulting jobs, whether there will be better training and oversight of the army of wind and solar power installers we're going to need over the next decade (as opposed to the roof insulation scheme), whether we can put tariffs on dirty imports from countries who don't meet our emissions standards, how can we foster better relations with the people who make all the low energy technology we're going to be buying, etc. You know, holding the government to account.

Who's going to run the system? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows yet. Would it be bad if big financial interests got involved? Then say they shouldn't, or that they should be heavily regulated. I think everyone here knows what happens when you let people like JP Morgan loose in the commodity markets, so lets design a system from the ground up that they can't manipulate instead of just throwing it open and then trying to patch it up later when it becomes obvious they're screwing with the market. If we give BHP the cash equivalent of a billion dollars in the form of carbon credits, are they going to reduce their emissions? I don't know. Maybe. Is the risk they don't outweighed by the certainty (but heavy-handedness) of a tax?

Remember that the establishment is on the back foot here. Anything that causes the possibility of change upsets the status quo for them and they don't like that because they're quite comfortable where they are now. Transitioning to a low carbon economy represents one of the biggest shifts in power and influence that we've had in generations and like I said earlier, the sooner we start the further ahead of everyone else we'll be.

 

lol. There's precedent. It was the precursor to the liberals that got the protectionist bandwagon going in the late 1800's.

 

In terms of just purely reducing carbon emissions, the only viable option at the moment is nuclear fission.

 

An awful lot of fossil fuel gets burned up finding, extracting processing and disposing of nuclear fuel!
It's actually been calculated to consume more in these efforts than is returned in electricty.

 

that doesn't sound right, but I don't really know. do you have a reference for that?

 

What a load of BS. Quote sources please.

 

Why are people so keen to create nuclear waste to get rid of CO2? Jesus christ, all the trees in the world won't get rid of the nuclear waste we already have.