Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

Sorry, bamalam but

...you are not aware that the capitalists had their arms twisted by governments (see Clinton) to grant housing loans to people who would otherwise not qualify - they were deficient in one or more of the 3 Cs: Character (thriftiness etc), Capacity (to pay back the loan), and Collateral (houses of poor value).

It was not a failure of free market capitalism, but the chickens coming home to roost after market-distorting government interference.

This time it's not different

Read the book.

Bankers behave consistently ... they know no other way.

Too bloody right! Minimum upkeep standards NOW!

" Whats more, most are so broke from their two mortgages that they can't afford to fix anything else."

Yeah, but they can claim EVERY BLOODY CENT THEY SPEND ON UPKEEP OFF THEIR TAX!

Sorry, I had to shout that bit, because it's the thing that every bloody landlord I've ever had seems too not be aware of.

ANY landlord (especially in Sydney) that whines about how poor they are can cry me a fucking river, and spend a couple of months in one of their fellow rich bastards properties, paying enormous rents and see how they like it.

Face it; if you own property in Sydney YOU ARE RICH make no mistake about it, "mortage stress" or not.

@Mark 65

Gillard is more like the Antipodean Brown. Howard was the Antipodean Bliar. ;)

Yes, I imagine the $18k figure wasn't arbitrary.

The tax man sat down and worked out how much it cost to propess a normal income tax claim and came up with a figure just south of $2k, then multiplied back.

Which is great, btw. I can think of plenty of things I would rather the govt. be doing with that $1.9k than blowing it extracting $516.90 out of some poor sod getting by on minimum wage!

Errr. No, you numpty.

CO2 is an essentially harmless trace gas, naturally occurring in the Earth's environment. It also happens to be an ESSENTIAL component for life on this planet. Without CO2 in the atmosphere we are dead. Please re-read that last bit several times until you get it.

pollutant [puh-loot-nt]

"any substance, as certain chemicals or waste products, that renders the air, soil, water, or other natural resource harmful or unsuitable for a specific purpose."

The suitability of "air" for it's specific purpose (which I would posit is the sustaining of life on the planet) is not enhanced by CO2's elimination or reduction.

Numpiess like you should be sent to remedial schooling, along with everyone else who thinks that CO2 is a pollutant in any real or linguistic sense.

Philip

Serious arithmetic problem

"only about a1% concentration of CO2 is enough to cause serious health problems"

The site says: "Symptoms may begin to occur, such as feeling hot and clammy, lack of attention to details, fatigue, anxiety, clumsiness and loss of energy, which is commonly first noticed as a weakness in the knees (jelly legs)." for 1%. Serious health problems? Symptoms are like having 2 pints of beer in half an hour.

Current CO2 levels are "officially" at about 390 ppm; much, much less than the 10,000 ppm that is 1%.

Venus is hot at the surface in part because the pressure at the surface of the planet is about 90 times that of what we have on our planet. At the altitude where the pressure is about 1 Bar - one Earth atmosphere, Venus' atmosphere is only slightly warmer than Earth. The rest of the temperature difference is due to proximity to the sun and very slow, retrograde rotation of the planet - it turns, very, very slowly - backwards wrt other planets, with its "day" longer than its year.

The "greenhouse effect" has no foundation in fact. Heat is not "trapped". CO2 doesn't form a "blanket" or a barrier to outbound radiation.

Although CO2 absorbs IR radiation, it re-radiates it very quivckly at altitude, and below about 6000 metres above the surface, the incoming IR transforms morereadily to kinetic temperature; which can transfer to surrounding molecules of vastly more O2 and N2. CO2's rate of expansion with heating is greater than that of the rest of dry air, so its bouyant action encourages natural convection, increasing the rate of heat transfer.

The higher density of CO2 compared to the rest of dry air tends to concentrate the trace of gas that is CO2 to near the surface; i.e. where it's absorbtion properties tend to promote convection and convective cooling of the surface by displaced ("falling", cold) air coming in contact with the warm surface. One would be able to observe that effect in the real world were the concentrations of the gas not so small that any attempt to measure it is lost in the noise of measurement.

80% of statistics are made up on the spot

As a working scientist, I can tell you that it is categorically untrue that 97% of scientists think that AGW is a fact, or that human CO2 emmisions are a pollutant.

There are a large number of "climate scientists" whose belief in AGW is a prerequisite for their funding, who believe in AGW to a greater or lesser extent. There are also a large number of scientists in the same and also related fields (particularly the hard sciences) who have spent considerable effort rebutting the poor "science" coming from the "climate science" community.

This is how science works.

Eventually the physicists will figure out how clouds work, and since clouds contribute about 95% of the issue, we will then be in a better position to actually model something that can be measured against solid science, rather than dodgy data.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html

Anonymous, obviously