Professor Ross Garnaut, the Federal Government’s official “climate change” adviser, says Sydney WILL suffer major inundation every year unless the government quickly imposes a “carbon tax”.

Not “might” but “will”.

That’s where he loses any support from most of us.

He knows it’s true. Other experts know that it isn’t true.

We nobodies know that neither side knows for sure.

* * *

Anyway the federal government proposing 5 per cent cuts to emissions by 2020 isn’t going to stop.

Not while the Greens want even bigger reductions.

They need the Greens on side to postpone their own removal from office . . . .

But they also need to please ordinary tax-paying householders and business people who provide the votes and donations that keep them in existence.

So they start talking “compensation”.

There they really give themselves away.

Either you want to reduce pollution or you don’t.  

Are they going to tax polluters — then give them their money back?

* * *

Try to remember how big the ocean is.

And how little we know about what makes it do what it does, temperature-wise.

El Nino and La Nina are mere words to cover our ignorance.

Humans over-rate themselves. Something is happening to the weather? It must be us — because we are so important.

Or are we?

The Bible says:  “O Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth! You have set your majesty above the heavens!  When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place — what is man, that you are mindful of him, mere mortals that you care for them?”

* * *

If we humans were less greedy and shared God’s gifts justly . . . .

And tried to be self-sufficient — producing as much of our food, clothing and shelter as possible within the family network . . . .

Then what?

It would be a different world.

Would there then be the kind of pollution that might conceivably cause climate change?

Probably not.

And you’d find your meals tasting a lot better.

“There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead,” said J. Gillard before last election.

Now she says she will introduce one next July.

Greens Party spokeswoman, Senator Milne, commented, “Majority governments would not have delivered this outcome.”

Correct. If Australia was a democracy, and majority opinion decided policy, the carbon tax nightmare could never happen.

Is our future to be determined by an ALP (which arguably lies) dictated to by a Greens Party (which arguably blackmails)?

Next election is a long time to wait.

* * *

Opposition Leader, Mr Abbott — warning of soaring power bills and petrol prices — is talking about a “people’s revolt”.

A trendy choice of words — but how to make it happen?

Will ordinary Australians arise from the sofa and sit outside Parliament House — making themselves a nuisance until the army is sent to shoot them?

It seems unlikely.

We know that rent-a-crowds can, indeed, be assembled in Australia.

For example, the APEC Australia 2007 meetings were disrupted by 5000 assembled protesters.

NSW Police erected a security perimeter around much of inner city Sydney. They allegedly had a list of 60 notorious “excluded persons”, to be kept far from any APEC activity.

Eventually 17 protesters were arrested. Two police officers were injured — one struck with an iron bar.

* * *

If we aren’t comfortable about semi-professional stirrers doing our protesting, what alternative is there?

Should the Church be doing something?

Cardinal Pell has made it clear that he is a “man-caused-global-warming” sceptic.

This prompted Bureau of Meteorology Director, Greg Ayres, to devote 10 minutes of his address to the Senate last week to criticising and belittling Cardinal Pell — trying to make him look like an ignoramus.

In fact, he simply made himself look like a would-be dictator.

Cardinal Pell must be doing something right.

His reputation for integrity means that his doubts re fundamentalist Climate Change dogma may hopefully encourage ordinary people to feel free to think for themselves.

The Australian Federal Government has set up a Climate Change Commission.

Chief Commissioner is 56-year old academic, Professor Tim Flannery — best known as 2007 “Australian of the Year”.

The responsible Minister, Mr Combet, says, “The Climate Commission has been established by the Government to provide an authoritative, independent source of information for all Australians . . . and will help build the consensus required to move to a clean energy future.”

The deception is pretty blatant . . . .

* * *

Either the Commission can be “independent” or it can “build consensus”.

Not both.

They are mutually exclusive.

If Professor Flannery is independent, he must ensure that all viewpoints get a fair go in public debate and the media.

Consensus means the opposite – getting everybody to adopt the one viewpoint.

It’s his job to soften up the public to accept ALP/Greens ideas on climate to the exclusion of all others.

If he was truly independent, he would get the sack.

The Professor’s role will include scaring people about how burning coal etc. makes Queensland-style floods and cyclones more likely.

Then when the Government “puts a price on carbon”, and everybody must pay more for electricity, they mightn’t complain.

Flannery and friends have been accused of “politicising” the recent Queensland and Victorian tragedies.

They seem to have trouble answering such accusations.

* * *

The media are helping Prof Flannery the best they can by giving big coverage to studies recently published in the scientific journal, Nature.

These claim to “prove” the link between “greenhouse gases” and rain events.

But reading the smaller print it turns out that the results come out of computer-modelling exercises.

Computer modelling can only ever support theories, never prove them.

Some things cannot be proved.

Evolution is another example. It, too, can be shown to fit conveniently with certain observations — but no experiment to test its falsifiability is possible to devise.

Scientists know this, but sometimes they can be coaxed into saying the opposite.                                       

Two years ago exactly, fires raged across the state of Victoria – killing 173 people, destroying  2000 homes and burning 1 million acres of land.

Memorial services are being held today to pay respect to the memory of the dead and to show those still grieving that the rest of us care.

These tragedies are terrible, yet some good always comes out of them . . . .

Two days ago, I was at the local SES depot getting sand bags and was so impressed by the many volunteers trying to help — filling sandbags for those not up to it, lifting bags into car boots etc.

Today I had to ring the SES on behalf of a friend.

The person answering the phone was cheerful, patient, attentive to detail — exhorting us to ring back if unable to get the help we needed.

* * *

Yet we still probably haven’t learned as much from past natural disasters as we should.

We still talk about Black Saturday.

We must learn to call it Green Saturday.

The damage would have been so much less had the political pressures of the Greens Party been ignored.

* * *

And the Greens want to abolish religion classes in schools.

The kind of thing Mary MacKillop (Saint Mary of the Cross) spent her life fighting against.

She told Pope Pius IX in 1885 that her Sisters were “convinced of the evils to their faith to which Australian children are exposed on account of the wicked secular education that is now general.”

Shortly before her death, she wrote, “I am of the same mind now as when the Institute was first formed. I have not changed with the times and with God’s help I never shall.”

The other day, Australian Prime Minister, Bob Brown, was saying the floods are due to global warming and global warming is due to the coal industry and the coal industry should be taxed out of existence.

Sorry, there seems to be a mistake in the above paragraph . . . .

I should have said, Australian Prime Minister, Mr Bob Brown . . .

Woops, I’m told there is another mistake. Apparently Mr Brown is not Prime Minister.

Sorry folks.

What Mr Brown says seems to be often trotted out later by Julia Gillard — who they say is occupying the post for the moment – so it’s all a bit confusing.

* * *

Many Australians don’t believe the coal-mining-global-warming-tax-on-carbon sequence to have any basis in fact.

Sure, if you put selected data into a computer you can make it cough out results sort of supporting the theory.

But computer-simulating skills don’t necessarily make one a reliable predictor of the real-life future, or a suitable formulator of policy.

* * *

A couple of weeks ago, wasn’t Mr Brown saying, “Burning coal is a major cause of global warming.”

If he said it’s a minor cause, we wouldn’t need to worry. It may even be true.

Before that, wasn’t Mr Brown talking about global warming causing “permanent drought”?

The town where I live received 143 millimetres of rain yesterday.

* * *

No new dams have been built in the Murray Darling Basin since 1979.

New dams would interfere with both droughts and floods, making them less disastrous and life-threatening.

Mr Brown and  and a number of his well-heeled clones are keen to avoid building new dams.

..

.

Australian Football League club, St Kilda, has suspended four players for an incident involving the taking of prescription drugs plus alcohol at a team training camp in New Zealand.

New Zealand radio is reporting that they were also involved in a brawl in which two local people were assaulted.

St Kilda club has suspended all four for six weeks and fined them $5000 each.

The AFL Players Association runs a first-year induction program for young players to try to avoid behaviours like this.

Program organiser, Steve Alessio, says St Kilda is one club that “probably hasn’t engaged in that program over the last three years.”

That seems a pity.

* * *

But St Kilda club CEO, Michael Nettlefold, plays the episode down, saying, “We are a mirror of the broader society . . . .”

What kind of excuse is that?

Young people look on sportsmen as successful people. They get plenty of money. They don’t seem to work for a living.

But mixing drugs and alcohol can be fatal.  Shouldn’t this kind of behaviour be rewarded with a life-long ban from belonging to any AFL club?

First offence, gone forever.

Australian sports personalities are often a bad influence — mostly through alcohol.

Too many of us follow their example.

Two-thirds of alcohol drunk in Australia is consumed in amounts hazardous to the drinker’s health.

In young men the proportion is 90 percent.

* * *

Meanwhile, the nation of Egypt is having to deal with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators against the regime of President Mubarak. They say they want “democracy”.

But if the present leadership is removed, the vacuum may well be filled with Islamists who despise democracy.

Such a regime might have the downside of providing a training ground for terrorists and suicide bombers.

On the other hand, under such a regime, young men getting drunk might find themselves in prison or flogged or short of an arm (or head). Arguably a reason to hope that Egypt ends up more like Iran, not less.

* * *

Is the 21^st century looking at a future dominated by either strict Islam or strict Catholicism?

One or the other?

Today’s present flaccid, celebrity-adoring, alcohol-tippling consumer societies look like proving unsustainable.