US soap opera intermission and Trump conspiracies

I'm sorry for the gap in articles. I've been sidetracked by real life. Also WUWT seems tame compared to the soap opera that is taking place in the US election.

The Trump Conspiracy Theorists

In case you missed it, this from twitter. First of all, Donald Trump Jr, who gets his soundbites from the uber-conspiracy blog Prison Planet:

Australian politics - the Liberal National Coalition to form government

As a follow-up to my previous article about the "too close to call" election results, the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced he will form government. This announcement was made, as is convention, following a phone call he got from the leader of the Labor Party, Bill Shorten, conceding defeat.

It's still not known yet whether the government will have sufficient seats for a majority in the lower house, however Antony Green has "almost" called it, and the ABC website shows the conservative coalition probably will just scrape in the required 76 seats, maybe with one more (or less).

What this election result will mean for climate action remains to be seen. The trends in the weather would be more certain.

Jo Nova and Eric Worrall, racism, conspiracy theories and climate science denial

There is a lot of overlap between racism and right wing extremism. It seems to me to both are based on the at times deadly combination of extreme fear, ignorance and bigotry. Yesterday Eric Worrall was lauding the election of a person who has been inciting violence for a long time. Today it's Jo Nova. The people who are bigoted climate science deniers are Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts. The party of bigots is called One Nation, which is the opposite of what they are trying to achieve. What they stand for is a nation divided.

Pauline Hanson was voted in by people who probably claim to be Christians, but lack any virtues of love and tolerance, and who are scared to their back teeth of anyone of a different race or religion to them. Pauline wants to install video cameras to perve on people in Mosques and Islamic schools. She hasn't said the same about other churches and other schools. She's also an anti-vaxxer and stands up for men who want to get out of paying child support. Malcolm Roberts is an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist. Graham Readfearn reported Australian journalist Ben Cubby writing about Malcolm Roberts:

In considering your request that I identify errors in the report you sent to me – CSIROh! Climate of Deception? Or First Step to Freedom? – I find myself confronting an unusual problem: how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?

Australian Federal Elections - too close to call yet?

Australia has just held a double dissolution election, meaning people are voting for all the Senate positions as well as all the lower house positions (House of Representatives). Usually we vote for all the lower house but only half the upper house. It was a freezing cold day in this part of Australia, but voting is compulsory so that wouldn't have affected the turnout much. In any case, lots of people would have voted before today (by post).

The election is said to be too close to call. Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister (to the political right) is on the left, and the left (Labor leader) Bill Shorten is on the right in the photo below:D

Election too close to call as voters walk away from Malcolm Turnbull https://t.co/eqmw1v7tNr #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/mW9OGRhrEQ

— smh.com.au (@smh) July 2, 2016

However, at the close of counting this morning, the results for the 150 seats in the House of Representatives on the AEC website are as follows:

• Australian Labor Party (Bill Shorten leader) 72 seats
• Liberal/National Coalition (Malcolm Turnbull Prime Minister) 66
• Independent 2
• Other minor parties 3
• Not yet determined 7.

I'll let you do the arithmetic but be aware, the numbers are not final and can change.

Politics and financial turmoil

This is where you can clap with glee or express your disbelief that so many people in England and Wales want to try to go it alone. If you don't care about the political and trade issues, how do you feel about the impact on financial sector in the UK and the world.

"You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

Photo by @jeremiahtolbert. pic.twitter.com/20KuMJdKod

— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) June 24, 2016

Is this the end of the United Kingdom or did that happen some time ago? Will Scotland have another vote to separate, and to stay with the EU? What about Northern Ireland? Will it revert to civil strife? And will other EU countries follow suit, leading to a collapse of the union?

Post your thoughts here - and even better, speculate what Europe (including England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) and the world will look like in 2030.

HotWhopper rarely dips into politics, but this vote by the people of Britain to leave the EU could signal some massive changes. It will almost certainly upset the world of finance. The Pound has dropped to its lowest level since 1985. Stock prices have dropped quite a lot all around the world. This could be a kneejerk reaction from the markets, or the start of a bear.

One things seems certain, unwinding from the EU won't be easy or painless. England could sink into a long depression. The Bank of England is trying to talk things up, but will the world listen?

What's the bet that when reality sets in, the people who voted to leave will still blame the EU for their woes?

Update - I've added some links below the fold.

Biomass research is a dead giveaway of the politics at WUWT, with Agenda 21 conspiracy theories

Anthony Watts has an article (archived here) about a new paper in Nature. The paper was about how humans have altered the land surface so that the biomass is a net emitter of greenhouse gases, which was a surprise to them. The scientists looked at the net emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide from every region of land.

Source: Carnegie Science

Harper toppled - another climate procrastinator bites the dust

The Canadian election results so far seem to be a huge win to the Liberals, under Justin Trudeau, and a demolition of the Conservatives under Harper.

CBC has already called it a Liberal win, with some polls only just closed.

Australia's Antony Green is keeping everyone updated with tweets. He says that the polls underestimated the swing, that the larger than usual voter turnout is for Liberals, and that the Liberals have swept Winnipeg, along with the Atlantic provinces (which had the first results) and probably most other provinces.

It's not all good news. Justin Trudeau needs a lot of coaching to understand the importance of reducing carbon emissions.

Still, it's a big win just to topple the Harper government, which was not just dragging its heels on mitigation, it was silencing scientists.

The Tea Party in the USA is more likely to host deniers

There's a new study recently published that will probably not surprise anyone, but it's interesting nevertheless. The authors investigated views on environmental issues of US voters. Instead of just splitting voters into Democrats, Republicans and Independents, they split them into four. They split Republicans into Tea Party Republicans and mainstream Republicans.

What they found was that Republicans that didn't align themselves with the Tea Party were more likely to have realistic concerns and attitudes toward environmental issues. Similar to Independents. It was those who indicated they were Tea Party Republicans who were batty. And not just about the environment, but about lots of other things as well.

The paper, by Lawrence C. Hamilton & Kei Saito from the University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA, describes their findings:

Tea Party supporters are less likely than non–Tea Party Republicans to trust scientists for information about environmental issues, accept human evolution, believe either the physical reality or the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, or recognise trends in Arctic ice, glaciers, or CO2. Despite factual gaps, Tea Party supporters express greater confidence in their own understanding of climate change. Independents, on the other hand, differ less from non–Tea Party Republicans on most of these questions—although Independents do more often accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On many science and environmental questions, Republicans and Tea Party supporters stand farther apart than Republicans and Independents.

I bet you've heard that before. The part where the Tea Party supporters, despite factual gaps, "express greater confidence in their own understanding of climate change" sounds familiar, too. I wonder, if asked (and answered truthfully) how many WUWT-ers would admit to being Tea Party Republicans?

Local news - conservatives lose out, Greens gain in Victoria

Tides turn. We've just had state elections today.

It's no surprise that the Labor Party was elected back in after the conservatives, the Liberals in coalition with the Nationals, had been governing my home state of Victoria for a while. The Victorian Liberals aren't the same as the Federal Liberal Party - they are much less conservative here. However they had their problems and it was predicted they'd miss out today. Which they did.

A lot of the credit can probably go to our dismal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, even though this is a state, not a federal election. The interesting bits was the election of a Greens candidate to the seat of Melbourne. It's the first time a Greens candidate has been elected to the Lower House. And there could be more, but it's too close to call just yet. The other interesting result was the likely loss of a rural seat (Shepparton) from the conservative party, the Nationals. The swing against the Nationals in that seat is currently sitting at 32.5% - which is massive. It's not unlike what happened in my electorate of Indi in the Federal election, when Cathy McGowan was elected.

State elections are not really anything to get too excited about.  What the result does show is that pendulums swing. And governments can't count on conservative voters. The Federal government should be getting a bit nervous, as should the conservative government in Queensland, which from what I read is not very popular either.

Christopher Monckton urges WUWT deniers to play high stakes climate in Las Vegas

Christopher Monckton has written a PR piece for the Heartland Institute and got Anthony Watts to publish it at WUWT (archived here).  Anthony wouldn't have thought twice about it. Did he even have a choice? (He's very, very low in the hierarchy of the Society of Denialist Organ Grinders. So low that often it's he who's cavorting to the tune of the higher ups.)

The title of Christopher's marketing blurb is:

End of an error

...which is a fun play on words, but most misleading and sets the scene for the rest.

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