Prominent New Zealand politician opposes Warmist laws

Speech to Public Meeting, Franklin Centre, Pukekohe by Rodney Hide, M.P. (Hide has degrees in both science and economics)

The Emissions Trading Scheme was rushed into law in the dying stages of the Clark/Peters Government - which has only vague ideas of how it will affect our economy. National opposed Labour's ETS - and is going to produce its own. ACT is the only Party that has opposed the ETS from day one.

Whatever your view on climate change - and I'm sceptical - the ETS is a bad idea. It will put huge cost on Kiwi fami lies and big costs on every business - and it will do so for no gain. We could shut New Zealand down and it would not make a difference to world weather.

The National Party has always supported an ETS - just not the one Labour came up with. National thinks you can have an ETS without costing business and households, but that's not possible. The purpose of the ETS is to put a cost on greenhouse gas emissions and force up costs. That's its point: you will pay and pay and pay. For nothing.

ACT has always opposed the ETS. The science doesn't justify it, the costs are large and there are no benefits. National MPs have sidled up to us to agree with us - and to complain that Nick Smith as hijacked National's policy. They agreed with John Key when he said climate change was a hoax. Now he too is backing the ETS. The National Party is selling New Zealand out for bad politics.

The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research stated in its 2008 study, 'The Impact of the Proposed Emissions Trading Scheme', that dairy land values would fall 40 percent, and beef and sheep land values would fall 23 percent. The annual incomes of household would fall $3,000, and the average hourly rate would fall $2.30. Every year we will forgo 22,000 new jobs.

Even our enemies in war time haven't done this to us, and here we are doing it to ourselves with National agreeing with Labour to put big costs on busi ness and squeeze households even more. It's wrong. I've been to successful businesses exporting around the world that won't survive the ETS. They will shift to Australia and dodge the costs. That's a further loss of jobs and income. For nothing.

We need Smart Green policies - not dumb ones like the ETS. There is no evidence that CO2 drives climate or that industrialisation is warming the world. In fact, the evidence is the reverse. The world temperature has increased in the past 150 years by about half a degree. But the bulk of that increase was in the first half of the 20th Century - before the post-war economic boom. During that boom, the world temperature dropped.

When I started out as an environmentalist the fear was global cooling. There are many anomalies in the evidence. Ice-core samples show that CO2 levels lag temperature by 800 years. And the increase in temperature in the past 150 years has been at the Earth's surface - not the troposphere, as the theory of CO2-induced temperature change predicts.

The only thing going for the man-made global warming theory is the computer models - but they're just a direct result of the assumptions fed into them. Their predictions are the result of what's fed in, and the e vidence doesn't back the models' predictions....

That's why ACT is campaigning this election to dump the ETS. We should dump the ETS and withdraw from Kyoto. We should not have to send our hard-earned dollars to the Russians.

We were told in Parliament that Europe was also rushing ahead to have an ETS. Well, here's a newsflash: German chancellor Angela Merkel last week backed an almost total exemption for German industry from new rules to force companies to pay for greenhouse gas emissions. Merkel said that, although she supported the need to tackle climate change, she "could not support the destruction of German jobs through an ill-advised climate policy". So why are we?

We need a change of government this election. But we need something more: we need a change of direction. There's only one way that you can vote for a change of direction: You can be the difference: Party vote ACT - and dump the ETS.

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Another meteorologist says the sun, not man, changes climate

Dave Dahl, backed up by his boss Stanley Hubbard at the Twin Cities channel KSTP says in fact that the earth has been cooling in recent years.

Listen to him here




Terrorized kids -- terrorized by the Green/Left, not Muslims

My 12-YEAR-OLD supports Barack Obama, and after the Democratic National Convention, I expected euphoria, but he surprised me. "Actually," he said, "Schwarzenegger is the one I really want for president." "What? You want the Terminator in the Oval Office?"

"Who's the Terminator?" my son asked. "Schwarzenegger's good on the environment, and that's my number one issue. It doesn't really matter as much for you, because you'll be dead," he explained, "but I'm going to have to live through global warming, and I'm afraid by the time I can vote, it will be too late."

My son's fatalism amazes me, but he's not alone in worrying that time is running out. Recently, one of my friends told me that her son can't sleep because he is so anxious about global warming. Other friends try to shield their children from watching storms on the evening news. Was it so long ago that weather was the safe subject for conversations? For our children the forecast evokes the horsemen of the apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. It's not clear to me that global warming causes every natural disaster, but in a child's mind, climate change and horrific weather go together. Icebergs are melting. The sea level is rising. Entire island chains are disappearing. Tsunamis wipe out villages.

"I take out books on global warming from the library," my friend told me, "and I always turn to the back and show my son the section where it says 'How you can help.' But he doesn't find any of the suggestions comforting."

No, our children are not easily comforted, and our attempts - Reduce, reuse, and recycle! - don't speak to their profound fear. During the Cold War, children worried about nuclear annihilation. Today they believe we will destroy the planet before we have a chance to destroy each other. I'm impressed by the time frame of their nightmares. My son is convinced that in his l ifetime he will see the world thawed, warmed, and thoroughly cooked.

Where does environmental awareness come from? The Internet, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," lessons about ecology at school. Yes, all of these play their part, and I'm proud of my children for knowing and caring about the planet. But where does environmental anxiety come from? That's a more complicated question. Storms and sudden earthquakes are terrifying in themselves, but I think it's the aftermath that really frightens children. Tsunamis drown families in Indonesia. Classrooms bury students in China. Levees fail. The evacuation plan doesn't work. Billions in federal funds cannot fix New Orleans, where the mayor admitted to citizens that there were no safeguards in place against Hurricane Gustav. Apparently the best recourse for natural disaster is to run for our lives. Our government proves ill-prepared. The junta in Burma looks downright evil - refusing international aid after a cyclone, and starving its own citizens. Watching the resulting chaos erodes our children's belief that adults will protect them.

What's a parent to do? Ironically, even as we become fastidious on the micro-level with seat belts, and supervised play, we can't secure the climate or supervise the planet. Some parents become politically active. Some join their children in consciousness-raising bike rides. As for me, I began writing a novel imagining the world after global warming, and how children might survive. I told my son the book was just an experiment, and he couldn't tell anyone that I was writing it. He said, "We need a code. I'll call the book laundry." Occasionally, over the next year, he would ask me, "How's the laundry coming?"

I always forgot the code. "We're behind again. Why do you ask? Are you out of clean clothes?" "No, the laundry," he repeated, and I realized he meant my book - his book.

Now, if I were also logging miles on a major bicycle trek, and composting, and advocating for reduced emissions, I'd do more good. But my son knows that I'm a lousy biker. Anxious about his anxiety, I reacted like Astrophel in Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet. "Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite / Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write."

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BS Alert: Polar bear hearing affected by global warming?

From the BBC, a video report so absurd, you wonder if it is an April fools joke. The premise? Noise from excessive ice calving and cracking due to "climate change" would affect the bear's hearing. I wonder what agency was gullible enough to provide a grant for this load of rubbish? Like polar bears have never heard ice floes cracking and calving before? Give me a break. Plus, the polar bear they are using for a test subject isn't in it's natural environment, it's at a zoo and who's to say this bear establishes a credible baseline hearing test? This is just unbelievable stupidity in the guise of bad science. What next? Hearing aids for polar bears?

The video of the BBC story is here

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More doom: Climate change could haunt humanity forever, says Australian academic prostitute

A 25% emissions cut? A 10% cut? A 5% cut? You want it, he's got it. But if a 5% cut is OK, what about a 0% cut? Shouldn't make much difference

Failure to deal with climate change now will "haunt humanity" forever, the nation's top greenhouse adviser has warned as he issued a rallying cry for action. Professor Ross Garnaut has warmed to the idea of a deep, fast cut to Australia's emissions in his final report, released today. After infuriating green groups earlier this month by calling for a 10 per cent cut in Australia's emissions by 2020, he's now more open to a deeper 25 per cent cut.

Prof Garnaut issued a blunt assessment of the dangers of climate change as he launched the 620-page report. "If we fail, on a balance of probabilities, the failure of our generation will haunt humanity until the end of time," he told reporters in Canberra. "We are entering territory here that humanity has not been in before [He obviously knows nothing of climate history]. "We will delude ourselves if we think that uncertainty about the climate change science... is a cause for delay." And Australia would probably be "the biggest loser" among developed countries from climate change, he said.

Prof Garnaut has recommended Australia push for a strong global climate pact, which would mean a 25 per cent cut in emissions by 2020. "Strong mitigation, with Australia playing its proportionate part, is in Australia's interests," the report says. This ambitious target would be in the context of a global deal to keep atmospheric carbon concentration to 450 parts per million (ppm).

However, Prof Garnaut is pessimistic about the possibility of the world agreeing to this "strong mitigation" deal. If his scepticism proves correct, Prof Garnaut wants the nation to push for a global atmospheric carbon concentra tion of 550 ppm, which means Australia cutting emissions by 10 per cent by 2020. And if no climate deal is forged out of the United Nations process, Australia should cut emissions by five per cent, Prof Garnaut says. "There's no point in hiding from reality," he said about the possibility of a strong global climate pact....

Prof Garnaut said the global financial crisis, which worsened overnight, was no excuse to delay acting on climate change. "Financial crises are short-term phenomena ... climate change is a long-term structural issue." He also lashed out at various business groups and industries which have warned they will have to shut plants, cut jobs and move offshore due to emissions trading. "Why would you expect public policy advice in the national interest from the chief executive of a business who's responsible to his board and shareholders for maximising the profit of that business?" Prof Garnaut asked. "I think you are just looking at the world through the wrong end of the telescope if you think that that's where you go to for objective public policy advice."

More here

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