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10 January, 2019
Not Before Time the World is Alerted to the Evils of the World Bank
30 December, 2018
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
16 December, 2018
Climate Change/Global Warming
Good news about Climate Change
My name is Dr John McLean. Some of you might know me from a landmark study into the main temperature data used by the IPCC. The report, which was published in October, revealed more than 70 problem areas in that data.
Since then I’ve been looking at other climate data and I have some good tidings and great joy for your Christmas or Holiday Season …
Climate change is nowhere near as bad as some people have predicted or claimed.
The amount of warming is tiny, regardless of what caused it, sea level isn’t rising fast, Arctic ice still exists all year and food production is increasing rather than decreasing. Details can be found at http://mclean.ch/climate/Xmas2018/ but here’s a short summary:
1. According to the most accurate temperature data, since 1979 (that’s almost 40 years ago) average global temperatures have risen about 0.4 Celsius (0.72 Fahrenheit). Most people wouldn’t notice this temperature change if it occurred over 30 seconds, so over 40 years it’s nothing.
2. The same temperature data shows that since 1998 there’s been very little warming, this despite more than 1/3rd of the CO2 emitted by man since 1958 occurring in the last 20 years. If we ignore the temperature spike in 2016, caused by a strong El Nino, the rate of warming is a tiny 0.4°C/100 years.
3. Temperature predictions from climate models far exceed the temperatures reported by observations. This means the models are not accurate and we should ignore their predictions and their estimates of the amount of man-made warming.
4. Sea level is NOT rising faster than it did 30 or more years ago. According to tidal gauges the average rise is just under 2mm/year. Unless you have very small hands, it will take almost 100 years to rise the distance from the tips of your fingers to the other end of your hand. In the 1990s we were told that Kiribati, Tuvalu and Maldive islands would all soon shrink and disappear. Not only are they all still with us but many islands in the Pacific are increasing in size.
5. Several years ago, we were told that Arctic would be free of sea ice during summers very soon. Arctic ice conditions have been fairly stable for the last seven years and there’s still ice there in summer.
6. We've often been told that higher temperatures will mean less food. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FOA) shows instead that annual production of four major food types - wheat, rice, coarse grains (all other cereals except wheat and rice, i.e. maize, barley, sorghum etc.) and meat – have all increased since 2001, and that’s through some supposedly warm years.
Data shows that the dire predictions about man-made warming are not happening. If there is any man-made warming at all then it’s very small, and its impacts are tiny too
22 November, 2018
Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?
Matt Ridley: Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?
The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2018
The world is in better shape than most people think, but we’re more inclined to focus on bad news than good. Psychology can help explain why.
Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.
Before his untimely death last year, Rosling (with his son and daughter-in-law as co-authors) published a magnificent book arguing against such reflexive pessimism. Its title says it all: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” As the author of a book called “The Rational Optimist,” I’m happy to include myself in their platoon, which also includes writers such as Steven Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shermer and Gregg Easterbrook.
For us New Optimists, however, it’s an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence, we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility, as if accentuating the positive was callous. People cling to pessimism about the state of the world. John Stuart Mill neatly summarized this tendency as far back as 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” It’s cool to be gloomy.
Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.
There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves. Herewith a few suggestions:
Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy. Battles, bombings, accidents, murders, storms, floods, scandals and disasters of all kinds tend to dominate the news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they used to say in the newspaper business. By contrast, the gradual reduction in poverty in the world rarely makes a sudden splash. As Rosling put it, “In the media the ‘newsworthy’ events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes.”
Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer, but each one now receives vastly more coverage.
This is part of what psychologists call the “availability bias,” a quirk of human cognition first noticed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.
Bad news usually matters; good news may not. In the prehistoric past, it made more sense to worry about risks—it might help you avoid getting killed by a lion—than to celebrate success. Perhaps this is why people have a “negativity bias.” In a 2014 paper, researchers at McGill University examined which news stories their subjects chose to read for what they thought was an eye-tracking experiment. It turns out that even when people say they want more good news, they are more interested in bad news: “Regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content,” concluded the authors Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka.
People think in relative not absolute terms. What matters is how well you are doing relative to other people, because that’s what determined success in the competition for resources (and mates) in the stone age. Being told that others are doing well is therefore a form of bad news. When circumstances get better, people take those improvements for granted and reset their expectations.
Such relativizing behavior affects even our most intimate relationships. An ingenious 2016 study by David Buss and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin found that “participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available.” Ouch.
As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news. This recent finding by the Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert, known as “prevalence-induced concept change,” suggests that the rarer something gets, the more broadly we redefine the concept. They found in an experiment that the rarer they made blue dots, the more likely people were to call purple dots “blue,” and the rarer they made threatening faces, the more likely people were to describe a face as threatening. “From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics,” they write, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.”
Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport.
We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School became a TED star for her research on the debilitating modern illness known as the “choice overload problem”—that is, being paralyzed by having to choose from among, say, the dozens of types of olive oil or jam on offer at the grocery store. North Koreans, Syrians, Congolese and Haitians generally have more important things to worry about.
The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2018
The world is in better shape than most people think, but we’re more inclined to focus on bad news than good. Psychology can help explain why.
Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.
Before his untimely death last year, Rosling (with his son and daughter-in-law as co-authors) published a magnificent book arguing against such reflexive pessimism. Its title says it all: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” As the author of a book called “The Rational Optimist,” I’m happy to include myself in their platoon, which also includes writers such as Steven Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shermer and Gregg Easterbrook.
For us New Optimists, however, it’s an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence, we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility, as if accentuating the positive was callous. People cling to pessimism about the state of the world. John Stuart Mill neatly summarized this tendency as far back as 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” It’s cool to be gloomy.
Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.
There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves. Herewith a few suggestions:
Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy. Battles, bombings, accidents, murders, storms, floods, scandals and disasters of all kinds tend to dominate the news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they used to say in the newspaper business. By contrast, the gradual reduction in poverty in the world rarely makes a sudden splash. As Rosling put it, “In the media the ‘newsworthy’ events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes.”
Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer, but each one now receives vastly more coverage.
This is part of what psychologists call the “availability bias,” a quirk of human cognition first noticed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.
Bad news usually matters; good news may not. In the prehistoric past, it made more sense to worry about risks—it might help you avoid getting killed by a lion—than to celebrate success. Perhaps this is why people have a “negativity bias.” In a 2014 paper, researchers at McGill University examined which news stories their subjects chose to read for what they thought was an eye-tracking experiment. It turns out that even when people say they want more good news, they are more interested in bad news: “Regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content,” concluded the authors Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka.
People think in relative not absolute terms. What matters is how well you are doing relative to other people, because that’s what determined success in the competition for resources (and mates) in the stone age. Being told that others are doing well is therefore a form of bad news. When circumstances get better, people take those improvements for granted and reset their expectations.
Such relativizing behavior affects even our most intimate relationships. An ingenious 2016 study by David Buss and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin found that “participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available.” Ouch.
As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news. This recent finding by the Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert, known as “prevalence-induced concept change,” suggests that the rarer something gets, the more broadly we redefine the concept. They found in an experiment that the rarer they made blue dots, the more likely people were to call purple dots “blue,” and the rarer they made threatening faces, the more likely people were to describe a face as threatening. “From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics,” they write, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.”
Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport.
We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School became a TED star for her research on the debilitating modern illness known as the “choice overload problem”—that is, being paralyzed by having to choose from among, say, the dozens of types of olive oil or jam on offer at the grocery store. North Koreans, Syrians, Congolese and Haitians generally have more important things to worry about.
11 November, 2018
Profound Comment from Angus Taylor -7th November,2018
"We also need a strong supply of affordable electricity when customers flick the switch. Electricity runs everything. Affordable electricity must be available on demand and not just when the wind blows and sun shines."
30 October, 2018
The Public Awakens
The latest British Social Attitudes Survey reveals that only around a quarter of the public has major concerns over the impacts of global warming and that only a third thinks that humans are the main cause of climate change. This is in sharp contrast to the BBC’s environmental journalists whose message of impending disaster is dominating its news coverage.
The BBC is not supposed to be a vehicle for its journalists’ prejudices. Unless it begins to reflect the views of the British public and the full spectrum of reasonable views on climate and energy the growing distrust of the BBC will only accelerate”.
05 October, 2018
A New Report From the IPCC-Here We Go Again!
Letter in The Australian, 4 October,2018
Climate mayhem ahead
Every year there is a meeting of the conference of the parties to the UN climate change convention. Every year, leading up to the COP meeting, we are softened up by media releases from so-called experts warning us of the ever-increasing danger from uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels as we supposedly are turning our planet into a living hell.
This year is no exception. Self-styled climate scientists and politicians are meeting in South Korea to finalise a report, to be released on Saturday that talks of “climate mayhem” and “a swift and complete transformation not just of the global economy, but of society, too” (“Less meat, coal key to cooler planet”, 2/10). And the solution proffered to avert this claimed human-caused catastrophe: the global economy must become “carbon neutral” by 2050.
Real climatologists become aware early in their careers that the oceans are the thermal and inertial flywheels of the climate system. The heat of the atmosphere is equivalent to that in the top 4m of the oceans and the mass of the atmosphere is equivalent to that of the top 10m. It is changes in ocean circulation, a factor not represented in climate models, that lead to changes in our climate.
Why am I reminded of the fabled King Canute, who is reputed to have taken his chair down to the shore and proclaimed, “Even I cannot stop the tide coming in”? Why can’t the UN and its acolytes take a leaf from Canute’s book and accept that no matter the extent of social engineering the climate will continue to change, as it has done in the past and will continue to do into the future?
William Kininmonth, Docklands, Vic
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