This Man is not all bad.

The White House • February 13, 2019

Not one more person should suffer under socialism Today, President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump welcomed President Ivan Duque Marquez and First Lady Maria Juliana Ruiz Sandoval of Colombia to the White House. “We’re working on many things together: the eradication of drugs in Colombia and outside of Colombia; and obviously, Venezuela,” President Trump said. “We want to work together to put an end to the brutal dictatorship that has been affecting the Venezuelan people,” President Duque added. Three weeks ago, the United States officially recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela. “We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom, and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair,” President Trump said in his State of the Union address last week. To keep its word, America has imposed tough sanctions on Maduro and his corrupt associates. The Trump Administration is blocking assets in the United States controlled by Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, disconnecting Maduro and his cronies from their needed revenue sources and protecting crucial assets for the future of Venezuela. Here at home, mainstream Americans are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our own country. From Venezuela to the historic horrors of Maoist China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, socialism turns modern prosperity into primitive scarcity. Even Europe’s Nordic countries—often held up by American liberals as socialist “success stories”—reveal the failure of state control: Today, living standards in the Nordic countries are at least 15 percent lower than in the United States, according to the Council of Economic Advisers. “America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control,” President Trump told Congress last week. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

Murray Darling Debate-Summary of My Key Thoughts

"I represent no one except myself.My background is grazing including flood plain grazing, dryland farming and irrigation, mostly cotton. Geographically it is mainly influenced by experience in the Lake Eyre Basin, the Darling Basin, but also includes the Lower Darling and the Murrumbidgee (Tandou). 

My only motivation is not to see  Australia's future productive capacity damaged by environmental over-reach.

I believe the Plan/Act is deeply flawed (Briscoe). Given the massive variability of MDB river flows the statistics thrown about are non-sensical, including setting single figure Sustainable Diversion Limits (SDL's), albeit they are claimed to be averages. There is widespread misunderstanding about the 2100 GL.entitlements purchased by the the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (CEWH). Without allocations this is "phantom" water, yet people believe it is real water and that man rather than nature is in control (Menindee drama). I understand that when allocations against entitlements are made then what the CEWH does with its water is a big issue. I thought the environmental needs were to be covered prior to allocations being made. Thus the CEWH strikes me as a second environmental dip-but perhaps we are too far down that road and a lot of money has been spent.

The variability demands adaptive management and this can be achieved by the Allocation process. This is clearly demonstrated by the yearly variation in MDB diversions as produced by the Bureau of Stats."

Poverty Progress -How the Left Hate it.

Progressives reluctant to recognise poverty progress

Anis Rezae

08 FEBRUARY 2019 | IDEAS@THECENTRE

Is the declining rate of global poverty simply a neoliberal lie, spread by the likes of Bill Gates?According to a British-based academic, the answer is yes — because the data on global poverty only ‘looks’ better because of communist China’s rapid development.

This claim is blatantly wrong for several reasons. First, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty between 1981 and 2017 thanks to industrial development across the world, and the huge economic expansion brought about due to globalisation. Data from the World Bank shows that extreme poverty has still reduced dramatically — even if we exclude China from the equation.

In fact, China’s poverty rate only fell below the world average (living on less than $1.90/day) as recently as 2005. Therefore, prior to 2005, the inclusion of China made the global poverty rate look worse — not better.

Moreover, not only is his claim wrong, but — perhaps more importantly — there is no reason to exclude China in the first place.

Exclusion would suggest that reduction of poverty in China — the most populous nation in the world — is somehow less important than progress in other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa.

Measures of global poverty should include all nations; it should not be about cherry-picking nations to suit particular anti-free market agendas.

Furthermore, it was not communism that reduced poverty in China. It was only after the Chinese Communist Party adopted massive economic liberalisation and exploited global trade, that it managed to lift about 800 million people out of poverty.

The country took advantage of the rise of globalisation when, in 1978, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping kicked off the ‘reform and opening-up’ campaign. Over the past few decades, this has slashed extreme poverty rates from 88% to under 2%.

Undisputedly, this is much better than starving to death under Mao.

The bottom line is: redefining poverty and excluding the largest nation in the world from the equation is a deliberate attempt to encourage a pessimistic view of capitalism. Bill Gates’ efforts to acknowledge human progress should be praised — not discredited.

Anis Rezae is a Juris Doctor student, Mannkal Economic Education Foundation scholar, and a research intern at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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Climate hysterics skyrocket by Paul Driessen Posted: 20 Jan 2019 11:01 PM PST Increasingly absurd disaster rhetoric is consistently contradicted by climate and weather reality  Call it climate one-upmanship. It seems everyone has to outdo previous climate chaos rhetoric. The “climate crisis” is the “existential threat of our time,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her House colleagues. We must “end the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.” Former California Governor Jerry Brown solemnly intoned that America has “an enemy, though different, but perhaps very much devastating in a similar way” as the Nazis in World War II. Not to be outdone, two PhDs writing in Psychology Today declared that “the human race faces extinction” if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels. And yet “even people who experience extreme weather events often still refuse to report the experiences as a manifestation of climate change.” Psychologists, they lament, “have never had to face denial on this scale before.” Then there’s Oxford University doctoral candidate Samuel Miller-McDonald. He’s convinced the only thing that could save people and planet from cataclysmic climate change is cataclysmic nuclear war that “shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction.” All this headline-grabbing gloom and doom, however, is backed up by little more than computer models, obstinate assertions that the science is settled, and a steady litany of claims that temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts et cetera are unprecedented, worse than ever before, and due to fossil fuels. And on the basis of these hysterics, we are supposed to give up the carbon-based fuels that provide over 80% of US and global energy, gladly reduce our living standards – and put our jobs and economy at the mercy of expensive, unreliable, weather dependent, pseudo-renewable wind, solar and biofuel energy. As in any civil or criminal trial, the burden of proof is on the accusers and prosecutors who want to sentence fossil fuels to oblivion. They need to provide more than blood-curdling charges, opening statements and summations. They need to provide convincing real-world evidence to prove their case. They have refused to do so. They ignore the way rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide is spurring plant growth and greening the planet. They blame every extreme weather event on fossil fuel emissions, but cannot explain the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or extreme weather events decades or centuries ago – or why we have had fewer extreme weather events in recent decades. They simply resort to trial in media and other forums where they can exclude exculpatory evidence, bar any case for the fossil fuel defense, and prevent any cross-examination of their witnesses, assertions and make-believe evidence. Climate models are not evidence. At best, they offer scenarios of what might happen if the assumptions on which they are based turn out to be correct. However, the average prediction by 102 models is now a full degree F (0.55 C) above what satellites are actually measuring. Models that cannot be confirmed by actual observations are of little value and certainly should not be a basis for vital energy policy making. The alarmist mantra seems to be: If models and reality don’t agree, reality must be wrong. In fact, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed to 405 parts per million (0.0405% of Earth’s atmosphere), except for short-term temperature spikes during El Niño ocean warming events, there has been very little planetary warming since 1998; nothing to suggest chaos or runaway temperatures. Claims that tornadoes have gotten more frequent and intense are obliterated by actual evidence. NOAA records show that from 1954 to 1985 an average of 56 F3 to F5 tornadoes struck the USA each year – but from 1985 to 2017 there were only 34 per year on average. And in 2018, for the first time in modern history, not a single “violent” twister touched down in the United States.  Harvey was the first major (category 3-5) hurricane to make US landfall in a record twelve years. The previous record was nine years, set in the 1860s. (If rising CO2 levels are to blame for Harvey, Irma and other extreme weather events, shouldn’t they also be credited for this hurricane drought?) Droughts differ little from historic trends and cycles – and the Dust Bowl, Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other ancient dry spells were long and destructive. Moreover, modern agricultural and drip irrigation technologies enable farmers to deal with droughts far better than they ever could in the past. Forest fires are fewer than in the recent past – and largely due to failure to remove hundreds of millions of dead and diseased trees that provide ready tinder for massive conflagrations. Arctic and Antarctic ice are largely within “normal” or “cyclical” levels for the past several centuries – and snow surface temperatures in the East Antarctic Plateau regularly reach  -90 °C (-130 F) or lower. Average Antarctic temperatures would have to rise some 20-85 degrees F year-round for all its land ice to melt and cause oceans to rise at faster than their current 7-12 inches per century pace. In fact, the world’s oceans have risen over 400 feet since the last Pleistocene glaciers melted. (That’s how much water those mile-high Ice Age glaciers took out of the oceans!) Sea level rise paused during the Little Ice Age but kicked in again the past century or so. Meanwhile, retreating glaciers reveal long-lost forests, coins, corpses and other artifacts – proving those glaciers have come and gone many times. Pacific islands will not be covered by rising seas anytime soon, at 7-12 inches per century, and because corals and atolls grow as seas rise. Land subsidence also plays a big role in perceived sea level rise – and US naval bases are safe from sea level rise, though maybe not from local land subsidence. The Washington Post did report that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot.” But that was in 1922.  Moreover, explorers wrote about the cyclical absence of Arctic ice long before that. “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait,” Sir Francis McClintock wrote in 1860. “I was here at this time in [mid] 1854 – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.” Coral bleaching? That too has many causes – few having anything to do with manmade global warming – and the reefs generally return quickly to their former glory as corals adopt new zooxanthellae.  On and on it goes – with more scare stories daily, more attempts to blame humans and fossil fuels for nearly every interesting or as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon, weather event or climate fluctuation. And yet countering the manmade climate apocalypse narrative is increasingly difficult – in large part because the $2-trillion-per-year climate “science” and “renewable” energy industry works vigorously to suppress such evidence and discussion … and is aided and abetted by its media and political allies. Thus we have Chuck Todd, who brought an entire panel of alarmist climate “experts” to a recent episode of Meet the Press. He helped them expound ad nauseam on the alleged “existential threat of our time” – but made it clear that he was not going to give even one minute to experts on the other side. “We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it,” Todd proclaimed. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.” The only thing left to discuss, from their perspective was “solutions” – most of which would hugely benefit them and their cohorts, politically and financially. Regular folks in developed and developing countries alike see this politicized, money-driven kangaroo court process for what it is. They also know that unproven, exaggerated and fabricated climate scares must be balanced against their having to give up (or never having) reliable, affordable fossil fuel energy. That is why we have “dangerous manmade climate change” denial on this scale. That is why we must get the facts out by other means. It is why we must confront Congress, media people and the Trump Administration, and demand that they address these realities, hold debates, revisit the CO2 Endangerment Finding – and stop calling for an end to fossil fuels and modern living standards before we actually have an honest, robust assessment of supposedly “settled” climate science. Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of articles and books on energy, environmental and human rights issues.

Mathematical modelling illusions

Mathematical modelling illusions

By Jay Lehr and Tom Harris – posted Onlineopinion  Friday, 11 January 2019

For the past three decades, human-caused global warming alarmists have tried to frighten the public with stories of doom and gloom. They tell us that the end of the world as we know it is nigh as a result of carbon dioxide emitted into the air by the burning of fossil fuels.

They are exercising precisely what journalist H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, described early in the past century: "the whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

The human-caused climate change scare may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from a threat for which there is not a shred of meaningful physical evidence. Many of the statements issued to support these fear-mongering claims are presented in the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, a 1,656-page report released in late November. But none of their claims have any basis in real world observations.

What they do have are mathematical equations considered to be models of the Earth's climate. It is important to properly understand these models since they are the only basis for the climate scare.

Before we construct buildings or airplanes, we make physical, small-scale models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built. When dealing with systems that are largely, or entirely, beyond our control, such as climate, we try to describe them with mathematical equations. By altering the values of the variables in these equations, we then see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing, the very best use of mathematical models.

Today's climate models account for only a handful of the hundreds of variables that are known to impact climate, and the values inserted for the variables they do use are little more than guesses. Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysics laboratory lists the five most important variables in any climate model as follows:

(1) Sun-Earth orbital dynamics and relative positions and motions with respect to other planets in the solar system

(2) Distribution of sunlight intercepted in the atmosphere and near-surface

(3) The way in which the oceans and land store and distribute incoming solar energy

(4) How clouds influence climate

(5) How the biosphere reacts to the various climate drivers

Soon concludes that, even if the equations to describe these interactive systems were known (they are not) and properly included in computer models, it would still not be possible to meaningfully compute future climate states. This is because it would take longer for even the world's most advanced super-computers to calculate future climate than it would take for the climate to unfold in the real world. So, we could compute climate for, say, 40 years from now, but it would take more than 40 years for the models to make that computation.

Although governments have funded more than one hundred efforts to model the climate for the better part of three decades, with the exception of one Russian model which was fully 'tuned' and accidentally matched observational data, none have accurately predicted the known past.

In his February 2, 2016 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology, Dr. John Christy of The University of Alabama in Huntsville compared the results of atmospheric temperatures as depicted by the average of 102 climate models with observations from satellites and balloon measurements. He concluded, "These models failed at the simple test of telling us 'what' has already happened, and thus would not be in a position to give us a confident answer to 'what' may happen in the future and 'why.'" As such, they would be of highly questionable value in determining policy that should depend on a very confident understanding of how the climate system works."

Although one of the most active areas for mathematical modeling is the economy and the stock market, no one has ever succeeded in getting it right. Consequently, until recently, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions derived from equations that we think describe how nature works.

Yet today's modelers tell us they can model the climate, which involves far more variables than the economy and stock market, decades or even a century into the future. They then expect governments to make multi-billion-dollar policy decisions based on the outputs of their models. Incredibly, the United Nations and governments around the world are complying. We are crazy to let them get away with it.

Not Before Time the World is Alerted to the Evils of the World Bank

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Press Release 09/01/19 World’s Poor Better Off Without Dr Kim As World Bank Head London, 9 January: The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) welcomes the imminent departure of Dr. Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank. Appointed by President Obama in 2012, Dr Kim turned the World Bank into a green think tank, betraying its core mission of lifting the world’s most disadvantaged populations out of poverty. Under Dr. Kim, the World Bank imposed an almost total ban on the financing of coal-fired power stations, despite coal being one of the most cost effective means of generating low cost, reliable electricity. Subsequently the financing ban was extended to the upstream oil and gas industries. In October, Dr. Kim announced that the World Bank was pulling out of the long-planned Kosovo coal project, arguing that Kosovo could make do with wind turbines, thus destabilising that fragile state’s economy. Commenting on Dr. Kim’s resignation, Rupert Darwall, author of the GWPF report The Anti-Development Bank: The World Bank’s regressive energy policies (2017), said: "Access to low cost, reliable electricity is critical to transforming the lives of those in poverty. During Dr. Kim’s tenure, the World Bank lost its way and sacrificed the interests of the poor to green ideology. It is essential Dr. Kim’s successor restores the World Bank to its former role as the world’s premier development bank and ceases to pander to the green lobby."

More Good Stuff!

The Wentworth Report

Questions in response to climate hysterics

by David Archibald

17 December 2018

The Carnarvon Petroleum AGM this year was marred by a greenie woman repeatedly asking questions about climate, as it was last year. In response, the company’s chairman waffled on about this and that, as he is paid to do. The gathering was getting exasperated by this greenie hijacking the occasion for leftie indoctrination.

The MD in his presentation mentioned that the company had planted trees to offset its carbon emissions. That got my goat up, so when the opportunity came I asked him this question:

I am extremely disappointed that the board has chosen to squander shareholders’ funds by planting trees in order to fight a make-believe problem. Can you tell us how many trees are involved, the cost, the tree species, and can shareholders visit their trees?

The room erupted in laughter and the greenie woman remained silent after that.

Last week Westpac held its AGM in Perth, in order to have less interaction with disgruntled shareholders and customers. There were plenty of greenies in attendance and they rotated up to the microphone to make statements on the Paris climate agreement and lending to coal mines, which they don’t like. They became very tedious indeed. The chairman of Westpac waffled back in response, and like St Augustine, said they would do some lending to coal mines, especially the metallurgical ones, but would definitely stop such nefarious activity by 2030 or some such other moveable date.

The greenies got me agitated so I asked this question:

Mr Chairman, given that the dire predictions of the climate hysterics have not come to pass and do not look like they are going to happen, is the board considering the possibility that the bank’s adherence to the Paris agreement could be wrong in fact and that the bank is damaging the Australian economy for no good reason, and beyond that denying shareholders exposure to a profitable line of business?

I was only part way through before the room erupted in applause. In his reply, the chairman changed his tune and talked about how fossil fuels had lifted so many people out of poverty and done so many other good things. The greenies asked no more fake questions and the meeting proceeded with its business.

Next week ANZ is holding its AGM in Perth on the Wednesday — also no doubt to have less interaction with their disgruntled.  NAB’s AGM is on the same day in Melbourne. It is easy enough to predict that greenies will be out in force at both meetings. And they will be very tedious indeed.

To be forewarned is to be fore-armed.  If you want to have a shorter meeting, a less tedious meeting, then each time a greenie gets up to make a statement about the bank’s sins on climate respond by asking a question that will work towards getting them to see the error of their ways -– both the banks and the greenies. Following are five questions to that end:

Mr Chairman, given that the dire predictions of the climate hysterics have not come to pass and are not on track to come to pass, has the board considered the possibility that supporting Paris etc is harming Australia unnecessarily, and, beyond that, denying the bank’s shareholders exposure to a profitable line of business in lending to coal mines?

Mr Chairman, given that the new Brazilian foreign minister has called global warming a Marxist hoax designed to stifle western economies and promote the growth of China, do you think that the board should give further consideration to the consequences of following the Paris dogma and its impact on the Australian economy?

Mr Chairman, given that a former head of the UN’s climate body, Christina Figueres, has been quoted as saying that the purpose of the Paris climate agreement is to transform the world economy away from capitalism to some sort of centralised socialism, can the board be certain that it is not following an ideological agenda rather than something that is based on pure and unsullied science?

Mr Chairman, given that the bank has decided to support the leftist side of politics in Australia by undertaking not to lend to coal mines, can you inform shareholders just how much profit the bank is denying its shareholders by taking that ideological stance?

Mr Chairman, given that China, one of the signatories to the Paris climate agreement, is burning half the coal consumed each year in the world and continues to build new thermal coal power stations, please take us through the leaps of logic required to justify not lending to coal mines in Australia, thereby damaging the Australian economy and the interests of ANZ shareholders?

Like the poor, the greenies — and other parasitic, non-productive elements of society — will be with us to the end of time. So attempts to hijack AGMs of listed companies for ideological ends will be with us to the end of time. If you want a shorter AGM and don’t want your time wasted, be prepared!

David Archibald is the author of American Gripe: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare