Common sense triumphs for the time being

Thanks to James Delingpole's blog on the Telegraph site (see, I do read some Clogs) we find out that the Australian Senate has voted Kevin Rudd's cap and trade bill out by 42 to 30 votes.

Why did those Senators reject Rudd’s scheme, despite their prolonged drought and their bush fires? Well some - the green ones - did so because they didn’t think its emissions cutting targets went far enough. But the majority did so - duh - because they didn’t want their coal-dependent heavy industry hamstrung by still more pointless taxation and regulation, their consumers fleeced and their economy ruined in the middle of a thwacking great global recession. And, in at least the case of Senator Steve Fielding, because they’d done their research and discovered that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.

Having consulted scientific experts including Ian Plimer [whom I interviewed in the Spectator a few weeks back and whose views are neatly summarised here] Sen Fielding was inspired to visit the US to assess at first hand what evidence the Obama administration was using to justify its radical Waxman Markey cap and trade measures. He was not impressed and issued a challenge, emailing graphs to one of the US president’s energy advisers showing that, despite rising CO2 levels the globe has not warmed in over a decade.

He concluded: “Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer… I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.”

We may add that the bush fires have been known to be caused by arsonists and have often spread fast because in many places control of the wilderness had been abandoned in response to Green demands.

Bloomberg points out that this is not the end of the story.

Rudd, who needs support from seven senators outside the government to pass laws through the upper house, can resubmit the bill after making amendments. A second rejection after a three-month span would give him a trigger to call an election.

“We may lose this fight, but this issue will not go away,” Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told the Senate in Canberra. “Australia cannot afford for climate change to be unfinished business.”

Five members from the Australian Greens party sought bigger cuts to emissions while the opposition coalition and independent Senator Nick Xenophon wanted to wait for further studies on the plan’s impact on the economy.

I can't help being pleased that someone called Xenophon should emulate his namesake and approach matters with an open and enquiring mind.

AND TALKING of Clogs or Corporate Blogs, I shall be spending a good deal of today and tomorrow writing about them for the Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging. There's glory for you.

Politicized science? Surely not

This summer is turning out to be fairly cold and wet in Britain, under average in North America and about average in Europe. Have not checked temperatures in Asia but shall do for an update. In other words, nothing to prove that the ever-threatened AGW climate change is having any effect on the weather as it has been promised for years.

Furthermore, ever more scientists are coming out of the closet, so to speak, and the whole theory of global warming is having a bad time, what with their spokespersons refusing to debate the subject openly but relying on smear tactics and ad hominem attacks on the messengers.

Not to worry. There is plenty of money from that patient (though ever less patient on the other side of the Pond) milch-cow, the taxpayer, as Dan Mitchell writes on his blog, International Liberty. (Well, I think my title is more stylish but each to their own.)

He calls the posting: "Probably Junk Science, Definitely Politicized Science". The two are often synonymous as the infamous Lysenko case in the Soviet Union demonstrated and as we have seen, on a lower level, with such disasters as the Foot and Mouth epidemic in Britain.

Let's face it, whenever scientific research is funded exclusively by government you are going to have problems. Firstly, there is no government in the world that will give money without strings. You could argue that it is right and proper as the money is the taxpayers' and it should be carefully husbanded but that brings me to my second point, which is that there is no direct link between the funder and the recipient. It is not the taxpayer those scientists are answerable to but to the functionaries who dole out the dosh and who decide, on the basis of their own political preferences, what outcome they want to see.

Finally, in scientific research as in all things, there should be competition. At the very least there should be competition in the funding and structures of the research organizations. One reason why scientific research, in general, has moved ahead faster in the United States (often thanks to British scientists who prefer to work there) is because there is no government monopoly in funding. Except for man-made global warming, unsurprisingly the least acceptable of all "sciences".