Category: Current Affairs (Page 20 of 76)

There seems to be a large dose of confusion in some circles as to what the climate change debate is really about.

Firstly, no one doubts that climate change is happening. The climate is in constant flux. Temperatures are up and down like, well, the Assyrian Empire.

Secondly, there is no doubt human activity has some impact on climate, at least at a local level. The Urban Heat Island effect is one obvious example, and we also know that changes in land use can change local rain and snowfall patterns.

Third, there is substantial agreement that so-called greenhouse gasses are responsible for retaining sufficient of the heat from the sun to enable the earth’s temperature to stabilise at an average just over the melting point of H2O.

Substantial, not compete agreement on that point. Some scientists believe the chemical composition of the atmosphere has very little to do with temperature, and that warmth at lower levels of the atmosphere is a product of pressure. The same way a bicycle pump heats up when you use it.

There is also general agreement that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to about 700ppm would result in an increase of about 1 degree Celsius in total.

This mild warming would occur mostly in cooler parts of the world and mostly at night. It would have very little if any negative impact, and combined with the positive impact of increased CO2 (current levels are so low that they almost at starvation point for most plants) which include increased crop yields and resilience, increased forest growth and reduced desertification, would likely be a very good thing.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is the assumption that slightly increased CO2 would result in increased water vapour in the atmosphere, and that this increased water vapour would produce a run away warming effect, raising temperatures by much more than for CO2 alone.

In reality (much abused and ignored!) increased water vapour produces increased cloud cover, which has a cooling effect.

The large temperature increase from increased water vapour is a guess. Various levels of guesses have been programmed into computer climate models used by the IPCC and others. None of them produces results which match reality.

Thousands of scientists from around the world have been saying for years that this is a perfect example of GIGO – garbage in, garbage out, that the amplification effect of water vapour is much milder than that inputted into the models, or doesn’t exist at all, or is negative – that is, that increased water vapour is cooling rather than warming.

In Australia this includes Professor Ian Plimer, Professor Robert Carter, David Evans, and Murray Salby. There are many, many others, whose peer reviewed work is summarised in the work of the NIPCC (the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change).

Climate alarmism is a mixture of zombie science, profiteering and scams, and a failure of leadership in journalistic, scientific, and political circles. It is the worst and most expensive scientific fraud ever perpetrated.

I have always liked Apple products. Although they are a little expensive compared to other products, they are stylish and reliable.

I would love to be able to sell them. I recently signed up with a new wholesaler who is an Apple distributor, and began to go through the process of becoming an Apple reseller.

Normally Apple require a commitment to sell a minimum of $30,000 worth of their products per quarter. Our total IT sales easily exceed that, but Kangaroo Island is an isolated community with a very small population; less than 5,000 people, so I did not feel able to make a commitment to that level of sales from day one.

I explained this to the Apple rep, a pleasant seeming young woman named Charmaine. It was not necessarily a problem, she said. She asked me to send her photos of the shop and of the space in the shop where Apple products would be displayed. After I had done that she sent me a Reseller Application and told me that once that was completed and returned, we would be ready to go.

A week later I heard from a third party that my application had been declined. I emailed Charmaine to check whether there was anything in the form I had missed, or if there was something else I needed to do. No reply. A week later I emailed her again. No reply. Another week later I tried again. Still no reply.

I was beginning to think that if Apple treated its customers the same way it treated potential resellers, I was probably better off not selling its products. That is a decision we have made before with companies which do not keep their promises. See this earlier story about OKI printers.

Co-incidentally, at about the same time, I read about an Apple Store in Sydney which had been copying personal files and photos from client computers for the amusement of staff:

The Sunday Telegraph revealed last week that the inner-city store – an accredited and official Apple reseller – copied private pictures of the household-name star and his wife in numerous sexual acts.

He had taken the computer to the shop to be repaired…

The Olympian is among a number of celebrities – as well as members of the general public – caught out.

This was not an isolated incident, or one or two staff members who were swiftly dismissed:

Shop staff scan machines for intimate material under the encouragement of the store’s owner and upload sensitive photos and videos to a shared drive…

The store owner denied targeting sexual images but said: “If people choose to put photos and personal information on their computers that’s their decision.”

I was gobsmacked. That is a shocking betrayal of trust. People’s computers are their private property. The only time we ever look at client files or emails is if we are asked to recover and check particular files. Otherwise, client privacy is sacred. Even if there are photos on the desktop, we simply ignore them. I don’t even tell my wife what I have seen on client computers.

What was Apple’s response to this?

Apple spokeswoman Fiona Martin …  called on any customers who feared their privacy had been compromised at an Apple store to contact the company immediately. However, she would not guarantee Apple would take steps to protect its customers, or that it would withdraw the store’s licence.

What does that mean? Let us know, but don’t expect us to do anything about it? As far as I know the store is still operating, is still an Apple reseller, and existing staff are still in place. Nor has Apple revealed publicly which store it was.

So clients going into an Apple store and having their private files searched and personal photos filched for the prurient entertainment of staff is OK, but when someone with a long-standing interest in Apple products, a high level of technical qualifications, a commitment to customer service, and a solid trading history wants to introduce Apple products into a new market, that’s not even worth replying to emails about.

It seems an odd set of priorities.

Who could not be in favour of helping the disabled? Who wants to pay for that help?

The delectable Philippa Martyr writes in Quadrant Magazine:

The Federal government has recently committed $1 billion to start up a National Disability Insurance Scheme for as many as 20,000 people with serious lifetime disabilities, and their carers and families.

This certainly makes a nice change from cuddling up to a union that has plundered the wages of the very workforce that helps to care for these people.

However, here are some of the ways in which the NDIS – a scheme which is supposed to help genuinely disadvantaged people who are doing it really, really tough – could have been funded from as far back as 2007, when this government was first elected.

• Estimated cost of the unnecessary pink batts scheme, whose graft and waste is well-documented: $2.45 billion, followed by another $424 million to fix the dangerous installations
• Estimated cost of the Building the Education Revolution scheme, ditto: $16.2 billion
• Estimated cost (so far) of the National Broadband Network, as WiFi conquers the known universe: at least $36 billion
  
• Resources available to the Climate Change ministerial portfolio in 2010-2011, to fix a ‘problem’ whose tractability and indeed existence is questionable: $1.57 billion
• Labor’s ‘literacy and numeracy partnership’ (4 years) which has produced no measurable improvements in either: $540 million
• The dramatically unsuccessful Productivity Places Program which was so badly administered that it is impossible to tell who benefited from it, if anyone: $2.1 billion

Sadly, this catalogue of over-administered political bankruptcy tends to point to one conclusion: the NDIS will become just another unauditable and potentially tragic botch-up. Only time will tell.

Only $1 billion on the latest feel good scheme. That’s only $50 from every every Australian resident. We should probably be grateful. The NBN looks like costing more than $50 billion. That’s at least $6000 from every household – for an internet connection.

I have written about the utter madness of the NBN before, but let me say that again. A minimum of $6000 per household for an internet connection, an amount you will pay through taxation whether you need an internet connection or not.

Perhaps we wouldn’t mind the incredible cost if we were getting an incredible product. But the NBN relies on technology that was outdated before it even began. Most households, even those that connect to the NBN’s overpriced services, would have been better off with newer, mostly wireless, technologies that would have been introduced had the market just been allowed to do its thing.