Time for an Australia New Zealand Royal Commission on Global Warming
A group of Australian and New Zealand organisations and scientists today called on the governments of Australia and New Zealand to set up an Australia New Zealand Royal Commission on the Science of Global Warming (to be known as “The ANZIG Royal Commission” – the Australia New Zealand Inquiry into Global Warming).
The chairman of Australia’s Carbon Sense Coalition, Mr Viv Forbes, said that many groups and individuals in Australia and New Zealand had listened with alarm and disbelief to plans of both governments to saddle their people and industries with the burdens of carbon taxes and the risks of carbon trading which he described as “an open invitation to massive fraud”.
Below is a copy of their press release:
Direct Online citizen law-making
Online technology could make citizen-initiated referendums much easier, and change the way we make law and govern ourselves.
While ancient Greek democracy did not permit women or slaves to vote, in one way their democracy was still in advance of ours: their system provided for each voter to be able to vote on each proposed law, which ours does not.
When you think about it, if it were practical for the entire electorate to vote on any given law, what would justify the continued existence of politicians or parliaments? Their whole justification is, or was, that they are needed to ‘represent’ the people in law-making. But Parliament itself is a kind of information-processing system, albeit a very clunky one, and prone to the institutionalised miscarrying of the people’s will. It is a system developed when the only practical way of getting input from people spread out over the countryside, was for one of them to physically get on his horse and go to some central place, and represent the others of his district.
Look Before You Leap
More from the excellent pen, or keyboard, of Viv Forbes. Point 16 alone shows the utterly vain tokenism of the whole hysterical exercise.
“Look before you Leap” – A Submission to “Climate Smart 2050” by The Carbon Coalition, June 2007
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st Century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections, combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.
– Professor Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Native Vegetation
‘Native’ vegetation simply means plant species that were in Australia before 1788. The distinction between native and introduced vegetation is therefore based on history and aesthetics, rather than on botanical or ecological science.
The idea that the aesthetics of native vegetation have some kind of specially deserving status, justifying confiscation of private property rights, is wrong. Our town and country landscapes have many introduced plant species, including wheat, rice, lucerne, and dozens of kitchen vegetables and garden flowers. Removing them from the landscape is neither practical nor desirable. It is too late to try to force society into acting as a ‘museum’ of native vegetation. Attempts to do so are unjust.
Skepticism on Global Warming
There are four distinct reasons for skepticism about political action on global warming.
The first ground is the positive question of fact whether the global atmosphere is heating up. Any given person cannot know this through his own senses. Everyone, including all the scientists, must rely on other tools of knowledge. Skepticism here notes the uncertainty in the astronomically complex data sets, the uncertainty in the many, various and complex models used, and the statistical uncertainty involved at every stage.
Poverty and the Welfare State Safety Net
Despite all the waste, dependency and vested interests generated by the welfare state, still many people of good will remain in favour of it, from a well-intentioned desire to provide a ‘safety net’ for the less fortunate.
However this desire for government to provide a solution tends to ignore the role of government in causing the problem in the first place.
By far the biggest single cause of poverty and disadvantage in Australia today is the welfare state, for a number of reasons.
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