RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Australian Academy of Science has just honoured a fresh draft of boffins, including a pair whose names will be instantly familiar to all who marvel at Big Climate’s high-volume alarmism. Professors Neville Nicholls and Ian Allison, step forward and take a bow.
At Quadrant we respect winners, so hats off to newly-elected Australian Academy of Science Fellows, Professors Neville Nicholls and Ian Allison. Both are climate catastrophists, each seemingly oblivious to the empirical research which has downgraded the CO2 climate-sensitivity guesstimate (i.e. positive feedback number) from the IPCC’s 1.5-4.5 times to barely more than unity.

These real-world observations suggest that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels would generate, all things being equal, a beneficial increase of about 1degC in warming, not the supposed life-frying 4-6deg rise by 2100 on which the whole multi-trillion-dollar climate scare is based.

The IPCC’s fantasy figure for sensitivity to CO2 is one of the reasons why 111 of its 114 climate model runs over-estimated the negligible warming in the 15 years to 2013. However, the main reason why the climate models are duds is that the very notion of complex and chaotic climate forces being controlled by a simple CO2-emissions dial is laughable.[1]

As for the new Academy Fellows[2], I’m not even sure I’d accept a Fellowship, if beseeched. Who would want to be a co-Fellow with Tim “Desal Plant” Flannery FAA, for example,[3] or the ABC’s Robyn Williams FAA, the latter supporting the writing of horror fiction about global warming killing off families’ beloved kittens and spaniels in 2023?

The Supreme Court is divided 4-4 on many issues, but the good news is that all eight Justices can still agree that Americans deserve their day in court to challenge intrusive government. That’s the essence of Tuesday’s unanimous ruling that the Obama Administration’s expansive interpretation of the Clean Water Act can be challenged in court.

In February 2012, the Army Corps of Engineers told the Hawkes peat-mining company that marshy land it owns in Minnesota had a “significant nexus” to the Red River 120 miles away and thus could be regulated under the Clean Water Act. Hawkes tried to challenge this determination in federal court. But the Corps said the company couldn’t do so until it had finished the Corps’s permitting process, which the Corps said would be very expensive and take years (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes).

This amounts to a pre-emptive veto of private land use. The Army Corps said the company must wait to challenge the Corps’ decision. But if Hawkes develops the land on the assumption it would win its challenge many years hence, the company runs the risk of major penalties if it loses in the end. Heads the Army Corps wins; tails Hawkes loses. CONTINUE AT SITE

When the Israeli Ministry of Exterior invited me to visit Israel as part of a delegation of European-based Arab journalists and media representatives, I accepted without hesitation. The goal of the invitation was to provide us with an opportunity to freely explore the different dimensions to life inside the state of Israel. Located in the heart of the Middle East and one of the region’s central and enduring conflicts, Israel receives a large amount of attention from neighboring peoples curious about the state itself and its management. Although major developments in international communication and accessibility of knowledge have transformed the world into a connected community that now sometimes resembles a small village, Arab media coverage of Israel continues to be characterized by a lack of clarity and misrepresentation, making it difficult for Arab citizens to truly understand the country. The persistent and recurring problems in the West Bank and Gaza are of major concern to many Arabs, but media sources often conflate the State’s controversial foreign policy with life inside the the country itself and produce dystopian visions of life inside its borders.

While not an article or analysis, the following is an honest testimony of what I saw during my visit, without influence by any person or institution. I hope to present an alternative perspective from other Arab media outlets that I have found to exaggerate and mischaracterize the realities of Israeli life.

On my flight from Rome to Tel Aviv on Israel’s El Al airlines, I thought about what awaited me and what I would see. Although I had an idea of what Israel was like and friends who have told me of their experiences working there, memories of the accumulated assumptions about the place that I had gained throughout my childhood in Egypt presented a conflicting counter narrative. I wondered which was the truth: what I now knew, or what had been instilled in us Egyptians as children. Do the “Jews” in Israel actually hate Arabs? If they found out I was Egyptian, would treat me poorly? Would I be verbally or physically abused if Israelis heard me speaking Arabic?

Halting my train of thought, a man sitting next to me with his wife asked me something in Hebrew. In English, I explained that I didn’t understand the language. The man then apologized and asked in English, “Where are you from?” When I answered that I was from Egypt, he and his wife smiled genuinely and welcomingly. These were not the fake smiles our schools, society, television, and film had attributed to Israelis and Jews.

When I arrived in Israel’s financial capital, Tel Aviv, the airport’s clean atmosphere and facilities left me wondering whether I had left Europe. Its modernity left little doubt that I had entered a developed country.