579: Any tax is BS. This tax will force change, no one is going to do anything about it until there is a disincentive.(tax)

Will they, or will it be business as usual & pass on the cost to us. Will they all opt for cleaning up their act. Whatever is the cheaper option for the business. Most likely the former.

Will the money collected by the Government (the tax money) be used solely for reimbursing us, the people, for the extra cost that business passes on to us.I very much doubt it. "Here, 'some' of you, (if you qualify) can have a token amount. Vote for me. ;-)"

No, the Carbon Tax collected will go into Consolidated Revenue & disappear, as usual. Governments are like that. That’s what happened to the Tobacco Tax, The Road Tax, the Ambulance Levy, Petrol Tax, etc, etc,.

Frederick Seitz, who is highlighted on the website Austin Powerless cites was the high priest of sceptical movements in more than the than just the AGW debate.

Oreskes and Conway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
were critical of Seitz's involvement in the tobacco industry where he stood against the scientific consensus that smoking was dangerous to people's health and created doubt about it.

Some people are guns for hire, naturally contrarian, or like media attention, so don't be too enamoured with all the merchants of doubt, Austin.

We live in a world where more and more people see massive conspiracies when they don't like what they see before them and they can't, or won't, try to understand the science or mechanisms underlying it. Everything, they believe, is creation or concoction.

The guiding principles underpinning the current environment governance are defined under the generic heading of “sustainable development”. The origins of these principles can be traced back to the Club of Rome through to Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) which was published in 1987, then to the Agenda 21 plan as part of the Rio Declaration in June 1992, under the auspices of the UNCED. The CSD was created in December 1992 with a five year review of Earth Summit progress in 1997. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) subsequently “strongly affirmed” the Rio principles in September 2002.

The sheer volume of United Nations organizational bodies, committee’s groups, sub groups, reports, papers, definitions and abstracts is nothing short of astonishing. In addition to the dozens of front line Sustainable Development bodies, almost every other UN body has adopted its own principles and charter in relation to Sustainable Development.

I cite the following example of one such body and of the level we humans, particularly the shrieking progressive left have fallen to in their quest to place humanity on the lowest rung of the biological ladder;

<< Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a program that has forcibly sterilized Indian women and men, the Observer has learned. The Department for International Development in 2010 cited the need to fight climate change as one of the key reasons for pressing ahead with such programs. The document argued that reducing population numbers would cut greenhouse gases, although it warned that there were "complex human rights and ethical issues" involved in forced population control. --Gethin Chamberlain, The Observer, 15 April 2012 >>

When we hear the hysterical squawks of those promoting peak oil, peak food, peak carbon dioxide, peak population or peak anything, we know we are listening to the dangerously gullible fellow travelers and useful idiots who promote a mantra that sounded sensible to recently sterilized Indians, “they seemed like they knew what they were talking about”

LONDON: Huge plant-eating dinosaurs may have produced enough greenhouse gas by breaking wind to alter the Earth's climate, new research suggests.

Like leviathan cows, the mighty sauropods would have generated enormous quantities of methane.

Sauropods, recognisable by their long necks, were common about 150 million years ago.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inherit-the-wind-dinosaurs-blamed-for-changing-climate-20120507-1y92q.html

you would laugh yourself silly if it was not tax payers money used for this kind of 'research'.

Luciferase

One out of 31,487 aint so bad is it?

If you can only discredit one of the petition's signatories, does that negate it? Who would you rather listen to - Tim 'a hard rain's a (not) gonna fall' Flannery? Or Peter Garrett?
Anyway, Seitz's actual statement was 'there is no good scientific evidence that passive inhalation is truly dangerous under normal circumstances'. While I disagree, there are many who would back him up. Being a phyicist, Seitz is much better qualified to comment on Man-made global warming than he is on the effects of passive smoking.
I don't know why you brought conspiracies into this thread. Do you see a conspiracy here?
What's the opposite of a 'merchant of doubt'? - 'person of blind faith'? Don't be too surprised if some people actually think for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
As for 'guns for hire', what would you call Gillard after she announced a carbon tax that we were promised we would not receive - just to keep the Greens on side?

Hi Belly,

Earlier you wrote: "Every month we see the wettest/hottest dryest day for ten, twenty, one hundred years."

No we don't. Every day, I check out the highest/lowest temperatures for each of the capital cities, by decade (records seem to go back to 1850, i.e. 16 decades). I check to see whether or not the number of 'highest' temperatures in the past decade is greater than the number of 'lowest' temperatures in the past decade. 'Highest' temperatures are just slightly ahead: today, for example, there was one 'highest' and one 'lowest', so a net zero either way.

What would one expect if temperatures were constantly rising ? Wouldn't one expect that the past decade would have witnessed, for every day, a 'highest', with very few, or no, 'lowest' temperatures ?

As an atheist, straight leftist, I crave to believe in catastrophic warming, like CC Steele's 32 degrees, a belief which has me green with envy. 32 degrees, wow.

If someone put forward the theory that sea-levels were going to rise by 3 metres in the next one hundred years, i.e. 1 cm/yr, I would metaphorically embrace them, even though the sea doesn not seem to have risen at all over this way in fifty years. Actually, the rate seems to be far less than this, more like 30 cm per 100 years, or much the same as it has been doing since the waning of the Ice Age 15,000-18,000 years ago (i.e. 150 ft in 15,000 years = one foot (30 cm) per 100 years).

I want to believe that catastrophe is about to overwhelm