Wholesale theft in the name of carbon by Australian Government

Imagine a third world nation was mired in corruption so deeply that the ruling class were able to stealthily steal the rights to vast acreage of private property from landowners without paying any compensation.

Imagine that one of the victims of this injustice had approached every court of the land and had not even had his case heard, even after more than 200 attempts.


In desperation, and with no other avenue available, having officially “lost the farm”, he starts a hunger strike, which has now gone for 28 days unbroken, threatening to starve to death if he has to.

Welcome to Australia — right on track for Third World Status.

Get ready to be shocked. This is an moving example of why “policy by accident” is a dangerous way to govern. In this case, innocuous feel-good laws end up crushing upstanding citizens. Peter Spencer is still alive (though he may only have 12 – 20 days to go) but how many other farming men were put through the environmental-ringer, and drowned themselves in brandy, picked up a gun, or crashed the car into the only tree near the road? None of these deaths would be recorded as victims of bureaucracy.

Every one of my projects is destroyed, every one of my…it’s just disgraceful

Peter Spencer bought a farm south of Canberra in the early 1980’s. In the mid 1990’s new laws rolled into action that prevented land clearing. That meant, even though the land belonged to him, Peter could no longer clear the regrowth. Eighty percent of what he paid for was effectively confiscated. He received nothing in return and there was no way out. He couldn’t sell the property — who would buy a piece of land they have no right to use?

But Peter still had a mortgage to pay, and no way of earning the money to do it. Recently, his last legal avenue was exhausted, and the sherriff gained a warrant to take the farm off him. That was the final straw…

Peter Spencer has issued the Prime Minister of Australia with a letter of his demands. He wants a Royal Commission and compensation for all the farmers who have lost the right to use their land.

Compensation would cost billions. But Kevin Rudd’s “stimulus package” (spend-for-the-sake-of-spending), was 42 billion dollars big.

This is what happens when big government gets your money. It gives a “free” handout of $950 per tax-payer to randomly “stimulate the economy”, and uses the rest to build school halls, even in schools which already had a hall, or in schools which desperately needed a library.
The long story

ABC Radio National (Counterpoint) has one of the best descriptions of his story in the transcript of an interview with Michael Duffy. It’s clear that Spencer has been willing to try to work around the laws, and be creative about managing his property. After the land-clearing laws came into effect, Peter paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up ponds for trout fishing. But new water laws ended that too (and also without compensation). Tenaciously Peter then set up a fine-wool breeding program, but the bushfires of 2003 (that destroyed 500 homes in Canberra, and native forest near Peter) meant that hundreds of wild dogs were forced out of burnt areas. They over-ran his property, killing hundreds of sheep.

Spencer: Every one of my projects is destroyed, every one of my…it’s just disgraceful, Michael, I just feel sick. I was just thinking last night, I can remember going off to court, day after day, sometimes the last eight or nine weeks I would come back, spend one night [unclear], change all my files, back to Sydney again. I spent nearly five weeks there non-stop the last two months. And I’d watch sheep dying in the paddock and I couldn’t go round and shoot them because I had nobody left to help me. I had to let them die on their own, just kicking and struggling because they couldn’t stand up anymore, nothing to feed them with, it was just unbelievable.

Spencer points out that the land-grab by the Australian Government meant the nation met it’s Kyoto commitments, a target that would otherwise have been blown away. The carbon stored in confiscated land amounts to about $10.7 billion in carbon credits. Probably the total value lost (with interest) from the productive use of that land would be many times higher.

The Australian has only covered this story as an attack Barnaby Joyce. The man who hasn’t eaten for four weeks, and who is a victim of a fascist government illegal action, doesn’t make a news story in his own right. (This spans both sides of politics). I can’t find a mention of the hunger-striking “Peter Spencer” in the Sydney Morning Herald, or in The Age. If you thought you were buying one of our major dailies because they would tell you all the news, think again.

A search of The Australian site over the last month reveals just the one mention of Peter Spencer within the piece on Barnaby Joyce, but 94 mentions of Tiger Woods. This is our national masthead?

If your property was stolen by a creeping cancerous form of government, and you are prepared to die for your rights, you might get a passing mention. But if you are a foreign sportsman who had … affairs (!), it’s front page news.

If we don’t have full meaningful ownership of our own land, then we have already been conquered by fascism. What use is the “free press” if they don’t warn us as it comes, inform us as it happens, or even bother to report the coup, post hoc?

This is the Alan Jones radio interview with Peter Spencer, and his lawyer with images overlaid. Listen to just how articulate and well spoken Peter is.



More information:

Peter Spencer’s site on Agmates.

A Current Affair visited Peter Spencer and got some moving footage of the tower and him speaking.

Carbongate (Crickey.com) – Steve Truman exposes The Great Carbon Heist: How 83.7 million tonnes of Carbon Credits was stolen from farmers.

Justin Jefferson in Quadrant looks at the legal side of the question, and explores the bigger picture of why both National and State governments are palming this off to the other.

Under the Australian Constitution, if the Commonwealth wants to acquire a person’s property, it must do so on ‘just terms’, i.e. pay fair compensation. Since land-use rights form part of the equity of a property, the taking of those rights, and vesting the control and benefit of them in government bodies, is in effect a compulsory acquisition of property rights.

In the High Court, the Commonwealth is arguing that the Constitution was not intended to protect against forced acquisitions of property by the executive arm of government! The absurdity, or dishonesty, of this argument should be obvious. If it were accepted, it would make the very idea of private property, and constitutional and limited government, meaningless.

The Alan Jones interview. The ABC “Rural News” coverage.

Peter Spencer has been fighting this since 2005. His thoughts back then are here.

To contact the PM Kevin Rudd about this shameful case

UPDATE1 : There is a fund developing to help farmers like Peter. You need to register as a member of Agmates to see this page.


Thanks to JoNovva for the post

The Church of Global Warming

This excelent movie made pre Climategate, hats off to James, hats off.


Movie trailer for "Church of Global Warming" - a comprehensive review of the science, politics and economics of Global Warming

James Follett

James Follett’s profession is within the Energy Industry and for the past 10 years he has been employed by a Renewable Energy company. His formal role has been as a Business Analyst with expertise in the design, creation and management of business risk models specifically related to Finance, Portfolio and Trading.

He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and then worked as a Neuroscience researcher at the Free University of Berlin. He has worked in various financial companies in London and now Sydney since 1995 as a financial modeller and IT developer.



High Res version of the film available for download here too.

Some selected reviews of this excelent film from the web site.

SD 12/17/2009 17:47
Great movie, definitely worth watching the whole thing. Gives a blow-by-blow account in a logical manner. Great alternative argument to popular thinking.

Sunday Cruising 11/22/2009 04:42
This was new. Well done. need more of the stuff. u need to updatye to mention the CRU email scandal too. looks like u got it right, like the music too


Rathtyen 11/20/2009 01:38
This is definitely one of the most sophisticated movie/YouTube presentations I have seen. The visual quality is excellent.

I wasn't sure what to expect with the intro (like the music), but it covers a hell of a lot of ground. Must say, I like the way it explains things. Some of these global warming concepts are well understood, and its not easy to find simple explanations. I tend to follow the debate fairly closely, and there are things in here that I found that were new. I especially like the way the graphs are focused: you can actually see what the point is!

The best part for me was Maggie Thatcher. I'd heard that story but never really believed it. Seeing her spelling it out herself it in film is a real gem. How many Global Warmers are going to choke when they see proof-positive that they've been sucked-in by the Iron Lady?

Climategate - Bloggers expose the emperors clothes

Al Gore sweating in the climategate heat...oink oink

Peer-to-Peer Review: How ‘Climategate’ Marks the Maturing of a New Science Movement, Part I


How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science – but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.

It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog – a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.

The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the file’s introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.

Not entirely the “death of global warming” as many have claimed – what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement – that of peer-to-peer review.

This development may horrify the old guard, but peer-to-peer review was just what forced the release of the Climategate files – and as a consequence revealed the uncertainty of the science and the co-opting of the process that legitimizes global warming research. It was a collective of climate blogs, centered on the work of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, which applied the pressure. With moderators and blog commenters that include engineers, PhDs, statistics whizzes, mathematic experts, software developers, and weather specialists – the label flat-earthers, as many of their opponents have attempted to brand them, seems as fitting as tagging Lady Gaga with the label demure.

This peer-to-peer review network is the group that applied the pressure and then helped authenticate and proliferate the story.

Now, as expected, the virtual organism that is the global warming establishment resisted release of the weapon. At the first appearance of the Climategate files, which contained a plethora of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, the virtual organism moved to halt their promulgation. Early on, a few of the emails were posted on Lucia Liljegren’s skeptic blog The Blackboard. Shortly after the post, Lucia, a PhD and specialist in fluid mechanics, received an email from prominent climatologist Gavin Schmidt from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It said in part, “[A] word to the wise… I don’t think that bloggers are shielded under any press shield laws and so, if I were you, I would not post any content, nor allow anyone else to do so.”

In response to my inquiry about his email, Schmidt posited, “I was initially concerned that she might be in legal jeopardy in posting the stolen emails.” Gavin Schmidt was included in over 120 of the leaked correspondence.

Gavin Schmidt

When asked if she thought the Climategate documents were a big deal at first sight, Lucia responded, “Yes. In fact, I was even more sure after Gavin [Schmidt] sent me his note.”

Remember these names: Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Jeff “Id” Condon, Lucia Liljegren, and Anthony Watts. These, and their community of blog commenters, are the global warming contrarians that formed the peer-to-peer review network and helped bring chaos to Copenhagen – critically wounding the prospects of cap-and-trade legislation in the process. One may have even played the instrumental role of first placing the leaked files on the Internet.

This group can be thought of as the first cousins to Andrew Breitbart’s collective of BIG websites – obsessively curious, grassroots investigators that provide vision to the establishment’s blind eye. Peer-to-peer review is the scientific version of the undernews.

To fully understand how this amorphous body came about, one has to press rewind – back to the introduction of the now famous “hockey stick” graph, and how this iconic image inadvertently gave birth to this group.

On October 14, 1998, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes, also known as Mann et al (1999), penned a paper entitled Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations and submitted the study to the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Given the acknowledged uncertainties and limitations expressed in the title, it is hard to believe that the graph showcased in the paper would later become the poster child of certainty for a scientific consensus on global warming – but it would become just that. The paper, an extension of a study published earlier that year in Nature magazine, included a reconstruction of global temperature variation over many centuries.



Part of the science of reconstruction claims that tree rings viewed in the cross-section of specific trees can be used to infer temperatures in the past. Subscribers to trees as temperature proxies believe that they provide a picture of past temperatures at times when thermometers were not present. The paper was published by GRL in 1999, and included the first hockey stick that stretched back to 1000 AD.

Read the rest of this post here

Thanks to Patrick Courrielche

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's EX-director

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.



Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Thanks to Christopher and The Telegraph

Phil Jones sacked... read more here