Two climate rallies in Sydney April 2

I imagine this bodes well for the inaction side -- how many talk radio listeners would join up for the rally on facebook? Have fun computing, Tim. I'm sure the folks who attend the rally will be sad for not having the opportunity to meet you.

I'd like to see a sign like:

Abbott! Dammit - dooo...

...support a carbon price!

or

Abbott: Monk-wrenching positive action on carbon emissions.

Heh... is "Bolt the Dolt" (apropos "[Ditch the Bitch](http://i52.tinypic.com/2rr5w8l.jpg)") sexist?

"I can't attend either one, I'm helping run a round in the Australia and New Zealand Algorithmics & Computing League."

I wouldn't be too upset, they sound like some cats who know how to party.

"Axe the Hacks" (preferably with unflattering pictures of Blot and Nova.

Interesting that the inactivists regard talkback radio as the key medium. On recollection I didn't see one iPhone at the Parliament House rally. The inactivists should put their names down in a Not Sorry book. Then read out during the next severe El Nino which can't be too far away.

I attended the pro-action on climate change rally at Belmore Park and can report that it was large (probably more than 5000), determined yet good natured. It was socially diverse in age -- I bumped into someone from the AYCC whom I'd last seen when she was in pre-school as one of my second son's peers -- and ostensible ethnicity.

There were many direct and indirect references to the legacy our action or lack of it will leave coming generations and in addition to the GetUp signs, many were obviously made by attendees themselves. My own personal favourite was "there's no Planet B".

I bumped into someone who had

An anti carbon tax rally including the one today will always get more media attention then a pro carbon tax rally despite the number of attendees. Media balance, that's called.

The anti crowd had a petition as well apparently. Wonder what the question was that the signers were asked to respond to. Perhaps something like: "Do you support a great big new tax that will be given to communist boat people to buy drugs?"

I realise it's a part of your job Tim.
But a league of computer geeks!

I love computers and was a software engineer for some 13 years.
But I did have a life (well almost).

Suggestion, get them geeks out into the fresh air, studying trees.

ATTN: Deltoid Ding Dogs

What warming in Oz?

Please goto:

http://www.wolframalpha.com

In query input box type "Weather Alice Springs. Click on the red box containing the "=" sign. The Wolf fetches and displays temp data for the present day.

Under the Section "Weather History and Forecast", click on the drop down menu. Then click "all". The Wolf returns a plot of the annual mean temp from ca 1940 and a OlS trend. For Alice Srpings trend is flat.

Then check Darwin. The trend is absolutely flat.

Beware the Wolf

You all have a nice day now.

Harold Pierce Jnr

Don't be a moron.

http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi

Quite clearly the average for Australia has been increasing since 1940.
Why on Earth would you just select Alice Springs? Or Darwin?

Odd question, Nathan, "why on earth would you just select...". The answer is easy: by cherry picking a few places, Harold Pierce can sooth his own doubts that maybe, just maybe those climate scientists got it right.

Tim,

Woohoo! Anyway, I think the next algorithmics challenge should include some sort of sockpuppet/troll detection task. Say, someone inside a defence contractor named HCGary Federalist (any resemblance to actual people or companies is purely coincidental) leaked a secret document detailing the natural language generation grammar used by its sockpuppets, and the task is to check if Harold Pierce Jr.'s blog comments follow this grammar.

Harold,

Please get a real job.

-- frank

Actually, Junior, I chose to punch in 'Forest Range, South Australia' instead, because they do a lot of cherry-picking up there.

Natham at 10

Classied as rural, Alice Springs is in the middle of continent and in a desert which has low specific humidity. It is field site to test the hypothesis that increasing concentraion of atmospheric carbon dioxide causes warming of the air.

The empirical temperture data falsify the enhanced AGW hypothesis at this site because no warming of the air has been detected by temperature measurements. But this is only one site. There are many more sites in the desert.

There is one little snag: The ever increasing amount of black carbon from rubber tires and asphalt. Once deposited in the enviroment this stuff does not decompose upon exposure to sunlight, air or microbes.

Factoid: A passenger car tire will shed about a pound of rubber dust over its rated service lifetime.

Nathan at 10

Goto: http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/

Ken Stewart has shown that the BOM has cooked the books.

The news reportings of the rallies last night were quite revealing. The pro-carbon price people were quiet, polite, and orderly, whilst the anti-carbon price demonstration was loud, brash, and displaying ignorance of science and economics.

And in one case at least, there was a plackard using the same despicable language of the Canberra rally - the word "slut" was apparent on one plackard in the background of a screen shot of the anti-price rally, although I was not able to make out the entirity of the message.

Nice folk, those opposing pollution reduction...

ATTN Frank at 12

I had job at Simon Fraser Univ in Burnaby BC for 30 years
Retired in 2002.

I come here to pull your tails so you Deltoid Dingo Dogs you have someone to snarl and bark at. Like Harold the Good Troll.

BTW Being a Good Troll is hard work. Like finding reports suchas:

"Climate Change and Long-term Fluctions of Commercial Catches: The Possibilty of forecasting" by K.B. Klyashtorin

FAO Fisheries Technical Report. No. 410. Rome, FAO. 2001

Available at:

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e00.pdf.

By analyzing climate data and fish catch data, Klyashtorin found the earth has a general climate cycle of 55-60 years with cool and warm phases of 30 years each.

HPJ said:

Classied as rural, Alice Springs is in the middle of continent and in a desert which has low specific humidity. It is field site [sic] to test the hypothesis that increasing concentraion [sic] of atmospheric carbon dioxide causes warming of the air.

The empirical temperture data falsify the enhanced AGW hypothesis at this site because no warming of the air has been detected by temperature measurements.

There are several points that need to be addressed in this nonsense.

First, one might cherry pick a particular location because of unevidenced assumptions that appearlogical to the assumer, but this does not mean that the assumptions actually hold. How have you accounted for other factors, HPJ, that might ameliorate, at a particular location, overall global trends?

Secondly, how do you go from cherry picking one site out of tens of thousands, to disproving the basic physics of infrared-absorbing/re-emitting (id est 'greenhouse') gases? If Alice Springs has no warming signature, how does this prove that there is no 'greenhouse' effect?

Thirdly, how do you account for all of the temperature records from many countries, and from many independent organisations around the world, that demonstrate a distinct warming trend?

Fourthly, how do you account for all of the empirical evidence of warming - melting ice and glaciers, rising sea level, altered ecologies and phenologies, changes in rainfall and in evaporation rates and in absolute humdities, increased frequencies of breakings of hot records and decreased frequencies of breakings of cold records, and in some regions a perceptible increase in extreme weather events?

There's more, but that'll do for starters.

By analyzing climate data and fish catch data, Klyashtorin found the earth has a general climate cycle of 55-60 years with cool and warm phases of 30 years each.

Except at Darwin and Alice Springs.

HPJ
In case you are in doubt about what Bernard said about changes in rainfall, here it is.

great maps showing changes in rainfall patterns in Australia over the past 50 years.

http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/andrew-bolts-hockey-…

I like how Alice Springs was classed as rural.....Harold really knows his sites first hand, I had always classed the Alice as inner city urban but stand corrected by Harold.

BTW, does anone have a source of hard figures for attendance at the two rallies. I saw one report that gace a firm no for the deniers and a smaller but vague for the pro carbon tax while other reports were putting them neck and neck.

I guess many journos will run with the figure at the denier rally as journos like to promote a bit of biff as it makes their boring day job go faster and the longer they can promote biff the more they have got to look forward to when they arrive in the morning and sit down at their computer screens.

Of course, Harold Pierce Jr also neglects to tell his audience that there actually is a trend of +0.66 degrees per century at Alice Springs. Only slightly lower than the global trend...

And I'll be so honest to note it is not statistically significant, but that is to be expected for single stations.

The Harold Pierce Jr bot has been telling people about Alice Springs for more than 3 years.

Yes, +0.66 degrees per century at Alice Springs looks pretty bad.

We need to immediately introduce taxation on industry amounting to billions of dollars per year to prevent this impending catastrophe.

Harold,

> > Please get a real job.

> I had job at Simon Fraser Univ in Burnaby BC for 30 years Retired in 2002.

In that case, please get a real hobby.

> BTW Being a Good Troll is hard work.

I know what a good troll is like, and you're not a good troll. You're just an transparently idiotic troll who spams links and hurls insults.

Get a real hobby.

* * *

Rick Bradford,

Will it kill you to at least make an admission along the lines of 'yes, Harold was wrong'?

-- frank

>Klyashtorin found the earth has a general climate cycle of 55-60 years with cool and warm phases of 30 years each.

In that case the global average temperature now should be the same as it was 55-60 years ago, around 1950-1955.

HPJ, go and look at [this graph](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.gif), then come back and tell us whether it confirms or falsifies your hypothesis.

[Dave R](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/04/two_climate_rallies_in_sydney_1…).

If one uses the John McLean/Grima Wormtongue method of removing the trends first, then one creeps closer to finding the pseudocyclical undercurrents. This is (of course) an entirely valid way of demonstrating that there is no AGW.

Remember:

There is no trend!

(...if the trend is first removed.)

On the weekend I heard a radio announcer mispronounce the term "global warming sceptic" as "global warming septic". It occurs to me that we would do well to start referring to climate change "sceptics" as "climate septics" because:

1. They are not sceptics in the true sense of the word.

2. They are full of the stuff that septic tanks contain.

3. They get all their ideas from American sources.

4. They are septically contaminated by their association with groups like the League of Rights and the Central Queensland Christian Free State.

I attended both rallies, the anti-carbon tax one only briefly. It's hard to judge numbers from on the ground but my estimate is that the area of Belmore Park covered in people (pro-climate change) was significantly larger than the proportion at Hyde Park North.

A few photos from each, starting [here](http://www.flickr.com/photos/newtown_grafitti/5581523918/).

ATTN: Tim, I reposting this comment because it didn't appear yeaterday. You should not delete it. *[Off topic trolling deleted. If you do it again I will have to moderate all your comments before they appear. Tim]*

NG. Am I right in thinking that there weren't too many littlies at the anti rally?

> Once you start paying hefty carbon taxes on fossil fuels, you will become a "skeptic" PDQ.

Thereby revealing that you make blindingly stupid assessments of science based on how much you perceive your wallet is being impacted by public policy.

That's mind-numbingly idiotic.

> It is a wealth transfer and redistribution scheme.

Er, no. You seem to be completely ignorant of the market forces that will inevitably come into play.

> On July 1, 2012 the the carbon tax will increase to $30 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

Er...I don't recall seeing anyone setting an Australian price yet. Did I miss it or are you bullshitting, or are you talking about somewhere other than Australia?

> This is a 50% increase of the above taxes.

Ah, so perhaps you're arguing it's really quite small beer in the scheme of things - nothing like the "big scary tax that will send all working people broke" that Tony Abbott is dog-whistling about?

Hi Tim, i also went to both events. The anti-carbon tax one in hyde park was about 1/4 to 1/5 the size of the climate action rally in belmore park.

Troll Bradford:

Yes, +0.66 degrees per century at Alice Springs looks pretty bad.

Not half as bad as 1.2 degrees C in the past 40 years.

Cubby,

If your counting is accurate (and I hope it is) then it looks like the political strategies of the LNP and their leader to bring down the labor government are gonna fail and the media will miss that right up until the moment it happens.

However, we can't be complacent because of the fanatics amongst the deniers will continue to spin their line.

Tim at 31

Moderate all you want to.

Your gov will use "The BC Climate Action Plan" as a quide to levy carbon taxes and to regulate the emission of GHG's from all sources. You can download the "Plan" from:

http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/cas/cap.html#cap

Since the BC gov now levys carbon taxes on fossils fuels (Phase One of the "Plan") and will soon regulate GHG emission from all sources in the prov (Phase Two of the "Plan"), the BC gov can:

1. Indirectly, sieze control of the means of productions of goods and services.

2. Indirectly, control of the production of goods and services.

3. Redistribute wealth.

4. Control of every aspect of the lives and affairs of the people. For example, banning incon. light bulbs.

This is what all of this global warming gobblygook and climate claptrap is really about.

Obviously, you Deltoid Dingo Dogs are too dumb to figure this out.

You can never trust goverments. There are infested with contol freaks!

OMG! The Junior Bot has rumbled us! Quick, destroy all the incandescent light bulbs before people realise that they are the only protection against the corruption of our precious bodily fluids. Curses! We would have got away with it, if it hadn't been for those damn meddling senile Canadians!

HPJr @37:

1.

Indirectly, sieze control of the means of productions of goods and services.
2.

Indirectly, control of the production of goods and services.
3.

Redistribute wealth.
4.

Control of every aspect of the lives and affairs of the people. For example, banning incon. light bulbs.

Got it in one - it's all about One Werld Guvmint, and us Lefty tree-huggers will be round to eat your babies the week after we succeed to the throne currently occupied by that greatest of all philanthropists Rupert Murdoch.

> This is what all of this global warming gobblygook and climate claptrap is really about.

It's a continuing wonder that right-wing paranoia complete with dog-whistling full of anti-communist tropes seems to be effective for some people. I guess I should attempt to cease my wonderment.

This effectiveness seems to be enabled by not being savvy enough to distinguish between "regulation of" and "control of", or to consider [the impact of market forces](http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/jokes-on-us-if-we-dont-read-the-…) that negates the idea that it's all about "redistributing wealth". It's a bonus that this is often done whilst simultaneously calling others "too dumb to understand".

Ah well, at least it's good for a small laugh every now and then.

>*You can never trust goverments. There are infested with contol freaks!*

Why so singularly focused on governments? Who controls governments?

I'm cynical about reflexive anti-governent deregulation ideologues. They often end up supporting control freaks who want no oversight from democratic counter balance and who want to be free to do what they want to the less powerful, and take disproportionate control of our common resources.

jakerman

Some people seem to think that it is a much better thing for the control freaks of the world to be kept out of sight in boardrooms and the like.

Soooooo much better than having any such people out in the open where we can see where they're taking us. And we can vote on whether we approve of their actions or otherwise.

So the rally will result in the "climate action" crowd emitting roughly 4x's the C02 than the "climate inaction" crowd...

That sounds about right.

[Snipped]

I presume you all will be quiet happy to pay carbon taxes on fossil fuels.

Yes

Now go away you silly man.

> So what does this carbon "sin" tax scheme boil down to? It is a wealth transfer and redistribution scheme.

So is commerce. And tithing. And employment too is a wealth transfer and distribution scheme.

Why then do you say this in a manner that seems hostile?

Are you against markets and would require that no transfer of wealth be done, which is what the Communist method seeks to ensure.

Is Harold PIerce Jr. a bot, or merely a sad attention-seeker? He seems to post [exactly the same comments](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/04/two_climate_rallies_in_sydney_1…) over and over again - even though they are OT and moderated. Maybe he just wants his own thread?

As [I said last time](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/04/two_climate_rallies_in_sydney_1…), Harold: your own figures indicate that a carbon tax is small beer. Thanks for clarifying that :-)

Reposting the numbers won't change that.

Loth @47: I think he's a senile trollbot of very little brain, though he could be a Canuk Bircher as well.