Friday, November 26, 2004

 

Swan sets sights on winning the wealthy, too

By: Steve Lewis, Katharine Murphy

LABOR'S future economic policies will be tailored to enrich the affluent as much as the poor, opposition Treasury spokesman Wayne Swan has declared. In his first major speech since taking over the portfolio, Mr Swan said he hoped to "proudly reclaim" Labor's economic reform agenda of the 1980s, including further opening up the Australian economy.

As a downpayment on this plan. Mr Swan said Labor would back international tax reforms introduced by the Howard Government and consider further tax relief to entice foreign executives to Australia. Business has campaigned to scrap the punitive capital gains tax treatment faced by foreign executives working in Australia, and last night welcomed Mr Swan's remarks. "Given the pressure we will face over the next 30 years, Australia must remain competitive over the longer term," a spokeswoman for the Business Council of Australia said.

But Mr Swan ridiculed calls from business for a total deregulation of the labour market or a radical overhaul of the tax system. Instead, he said the "only criteria" Labor would follow is whether proposed reforms add to economic growth. "My first principle in reshaping Labor's approach to economic policy is that whatever we do it must be to the ultimate benefit to the lives of all my fellow Australians - the affluent and the not so affluent," Mr Swan said in his speech to the Sydney Institute.


Labor will spend up to nine months reviewing its economic policy framework following its disastrous election loss, in which it failed to counter the Howard Government's interest rate scare campaign. After Mark Latham said the Opposition had to reach out to the "new middle class" of consultants and independent contractors, Mr Swan insisted that he would not be framing economic policies to favour any particular sector or constituency. "The number one goal of Labor and the number one expectation of the Australian people is that policy must be based on what is right for the nation as a whole," he said. "When we are developing alternative policies we examine all the options, not with an eye to whose support they might attract, but with an eye to their overall impact on our economy and society.

He reiterated a core Labor goal of working on policies to reduce poverty traps - but signalled a stronger emphasis on wealth creation, rather than a traditional redistribution model.

The above article appeared on p. 2 of "The Australian" newspaper of November 25, 2004

posted by JR 1:01 PM

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

 

SCIENCE ROUNDUP BY LOUIS HISSINK

This was originally published in the SMERSH section of the Henry Thornton website but has since been taken down

This week's science round up continues in the climate area (what else) though interested readers are advised not to do a Google on "Climate Change" lest they become depressed with the overwhelming doom and gloom peddled by the Greens and the mesmerised media that Googling seems to dredge.

Ronald Bailey writing here noticed that climate science has become increasing politicised, (which suggests to your lowly scribe that climate science and sound science have drifted apart).  Bailey mentioned two issues, one which I touched on last week, the melting Artic ice scare, and now a significant reduction in "krill" in the Southern Oceans reported in Nature Magazine (Krill is basically whale food).

Bailey then wonders why the authors of a Greenland Ice Cap is melting scenario did not cite a recent paper showing hat average temperatures in Greenland have been falling at the rather steep rate of 2.2 degrees Celsius since 1987?

Facts suggest temperatures are dropping, but fantasy asserts that the Greenland ice cap is melting.

Of course the CO2 Centre also spotted the Krill Issue, (Krilling the Messenger) and unlike your lowly scribe, spent some hours trawling the internet for some "facts" (this is an F word for the Greens by the way), only to discover that the authors omitted a pertinent bit of evidence showing that krill numbers seem not to be related to fast ice variation - and more on the CO2 site here which I won't repeat.

The US Media Research Center did a statistical analysis of media reporting on  Climate change, and surprise, surprise, there is a bias.

Which brings me to an interesting remark made by a scientist in the plasma physics field in answer to a question I posed on a restricted discussion group, concerning greenhouse and temperatures. I repeat it here verbatim:

"The fallacy with this (LH - Greenhouse effect) is the confusion of the visible-light radiation surface with the infrared-light radiation surface. The first is the ground, the second is the top of the atmosphere. Reducing "radiation loss" at the ground-with-atmosphere can't be compared with the radiation loss of the ground-without-atmosphere. The proper comparison would be radiation-plus-convection loss (with atm) against radiation loss (without atm), or, equivalently, radiation-from-atmosphere-top (with atm) against radiation-from- ground (without atm). The atmosphere doesn't "trap" heat, it just adds a "convection" step in the transfer process. To get "global warming" from that, some mechanism would have to slow down convection- -a true greenhouse (glass roof) effect. The amount of atmospheric absorption (amount of "greenhouse gasses") would be irrelevant.

Of course, the primary fallacy is the assumption that total energy input is known--exclusively from insolation. The presence of plasma circuits--and the evidence of most planets radiating more than they receive from the sun--renders the entire argument frivolous."

And that, like all Green Assertions, makes human induced global warming rom the burning of fossil fuels entirely frivolous.

The reason a greenhouse works is because it stops circulation of the air - but the earth's atmosphere circulates and as John Christie shows with his satellite data, the earth is not warming up, so the Greenhouse effect so beloved of our fact-challenged Greens does not exist. The excess energy trapped in CO2 is simply radiated out to space by convection.

One other factor which seems not well understood is that, apart from fossil fuels not being based on fossils, it is clear that under present day climatic conditions, organic matter is continually recycled in the biosphere. There are no fossils being formed at present, so ancient fossil accumulations, whether brown coal or fossilised dinosaurs, represent carbon that has been accidentally removed from the biosphere, resulting in a significant reduction in carbon levels. So burning fossil fuels merely returns the accidentally removed carbon back to the biosphere.

And then we have "We hear them in nearly every broadcast, or read them in nearly every report on 'global warming' - phrases that make no sense scientifically.  Yet, these have become the mythical language of the age, especially in the UK and Europe" which is further discussed on Emeritus Professor Philip Stott's site here which also includes an update posted on November 12, so you need to scroll down to November 10 first. Phil Stott also links an important comment on Melanie Phillips Diary which is worth a read.

Oh and his post on nasty Louisiana crayfish eating French frogs and tadpoles seems to be serious, at least for the French, is also linked on his blog.

Which brings me to another froggy story on the ABC: "Corroboree frog's last dance"

"Could global warming be responsible? Although it's too early to be conclusive, the record series of hot dry years in the past few decades are having a huge impact on egg and tadpole survival" and this gem on the ABC's site here   where anything environmental has to be somehow linked to global warming.

"If astronomy were a science," a famous astronomer has said, the Big Bang would have been discarded decades ago instead of having become the touchstone of faith and funding".

This suggests "If Climatology were a science," a famous Climate scientist has said, Global Warming would have been discarded decades ago instead of having become the touchstone of faith and funding".

And Ice cores - some interesting observations here where it seems that the current interglacial warm period is, from a geological perspective, distinctly abnormal.

And now the religion of astronomy - where scientists have discovered the age of the universe is 13.7 Billion years, and "They also found that a mysterious force called dark energy is inflating the universe at an accelerating rate. Article here in the Age

Dark Energy? According to the WMAP probe, 73 per cent of the universe's mass is dark energy, which means it's the most common "stuff" in the cosmos - not that scientists have ever directly captured any.

Well, one reason scientists have not yet captured dark energy is because it doesn't exist. And this statement is totally contradicted by other scientists who state that 99.999% of the observable mass in the universe in is the plasma state. More can be studied here

Finally there is concern in West Australia north of Meekatharra that rock wallabies are dying from lack of water on a CALM (Conservation and Land Management) managed station. This was reported in the West Australian Newspaper, which you cannot read online. The reason of course is that CALM has turned off the windmills and water bores.

The science which is missing in this report is that with the arrival of pastoralists and their habit of creating extra water resources, the native wildlife population exploded in numbers in reaction to the increased water availibility. Cut that water off and wildlife numbers need to come down in order to cope with the reduced resources.

The dead rock wallabies is simply mother nature readjusting wallyby numbers to a sustainable level. But it makes for a good news story.

Update: The Greenie Watch on the 14th November post writes:

"The Center for Biological Diversity ("CBD") filed a lawsuit today against Florida energy producer FPL Group, Inc. (NYSE symbol: FPL) and Danish wind power company NEG Micon A/S for their part in the illegal ongoing killing of tens of thousands of protected birds by wind turbines at the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area ("APWRA") in the San Francisco Bay Area of California"

posted by JR 11:25 PM