Sunday, December 13, 2009

Joyce hoist on his own petard

One of the most useful sayings that French, that fabulous language, has given us is 'hoist on his own petard' - to be blown up by your own bomb (pronounced 'bembh' for ze Pink Panther fans).

Petard also handily translates to 'fart' -- the same noise emanating from Malcolm Turnbull's opposition backbench whenever he tried to push the Coalition's promised bipartisan message on climate change action. One of the main culprits was the National's climate change denier-in-chief, Barnaby Joyce, and for his noisy efforts in the plot to install Tony Abbot as the new opposition leader in his recent climate denier coup, he has been promoted to the shadow cabinet.

You would think Barnaby would now conduct himself with polite restraint, but no. He wasted no time farting in the general direction of China, and America, only to be told by Abbot to now stop his public emissions.

Ironically, one of the best outcomes of promoting Barnaby to the front bench, is that he may finally prevented from airing his more off-tune, odorous odium.

UPDATE - it ain't gonna work out...

Phillip Coorey on the dillema facing the retail Liberal party:

Joyce rose with the full imprimatur of Minchin and Abbott but he drove a hard bargain. He wanted the key portfolio and demanded the shadow ministry be expanded by one so his entry did not result in a fellow National being punted. There are 14 Nationals in Parliament - nine MPs and five senators. Nationals make up 15 per cent of the Coalition caucus and 20 per cent of its shadow cabinet.

If the idea of promoting Joyce was to get him into the tent to curb his excesses, it failed miserably in week one.

....

There will be no reining in of Joyce. As he told the Herald on Tuesday: "It's not as though you have a personality transplant when you go into cabinet."

Being a practical peoples, I think Australians would just settle for a brain-transplant.

1 comment:

VangelV said...

Cracks in Plimer's credibility appeared, when he claimed this is the "biggest scientific fraud in history".

Why would you consider the claim to be a crack in Plimer's credibility? Anyone who has followed the debate will agree with Plimer.

There was never any consensus on the subject and there were never any legitimate polls taken to support the claim.

The ice cores showed that it was chages in the temperature trend that was driving CO2 levels, not the other way around.

The hockey stick was dismissed by the Wegman commission as the output of a close group of individuals who were not well versed in advanced statistical techniques. When the errors were corrected the hockey stick went away.

The IPCC reviewers knew about the problems with the hockey stick reconstruction but decided to use a trick to cut off the dendro data as a way of hiding a divergence that showed that trees were incapable of being used as thermometers.

The IPCC's expected warming signature in the equatorial troposphere was found not to exist.

The IPCC tried to hide the Medieval Warm Period and Holocene Climate Optimum because they showed recent temperature volatility that had nothing to do with human CO2 emissions.

The raw surface data shows no significant warming sine the 1930s.

The satellites show no warming for more than a decade. The models never predicted the recent cooling and the CRU e-mails show frustration because the proponents of warming are incapable of explaining it.

Empirical observations show that solar activity can effect cloud cover, which is far more important in influencing temperatures than changes in CO2.

IPCC modellers have suggested that we may not see warming for at least another decade due to natural factors (cool ocean currents) that were dismissed as capable of contributing to the temperature increase when they were in a warming phase.

The IPCC still uses a 0.05C per century UHI effect even though the credible literature overwhelmingly supports a number that is significantly higher. (Jones himself just had a 1C per century effect for China.)

The e-mails and code shows much greater private uncertainty among the leading AGW proponents than was disclosed by them publicly or acknowledged by the IPCC.

The e-mails and code also show data manipulation and the use of statistical tricks to hide inconvenient results.

The leaked code shows the use of fudge factors and statistical manipulation to come up with a predetermined conclusion that is not supported by the actual raw data.

CRU, after a decade of stalling, now claims to have lost its original data and is unable to replicate its results. Science does not look kindly on claims that cannot be replicated independently.

Michael Mann and Keith Briffa are unable to replicate their results by using valid statistical techniques and the full data sets.

Analysis has shown that most of the warming signal came from a single tree and that the proxies used by the palaeoclimatologists could only produce the desired outcome by cherry-picking the data.

There is more but I trust that I have made my point.

Plimer was right. This is as big a fraud as the scientific community has ever fallen for. That is why we need a transparent review of all of the data and methods that were used to produce the reconstructions used by the IPCC.