In which Jolly Joe does impeccable maths with the help of the pond, and Maurice Newman has a chully nightmare until the pond wheels out the two bar radiators ...

(Above: that's not funny Mr Pope, and more cruel raillery from the head Papist of mirth here)

The pond is outraged.

Let's do some simple maths, of the kind even leaners can understand.

Say a poor person is drinking a bottle of reconstituted, re-bottled cat's piss, at a cost of a dollar the bottle. Add a ten per cent surcharge, and it's a humble ten cent cost to a poor person. Now do the same for a filthy rich person tossing off a hundred buck bottle of French champagne - there's ten bucks right there, in the government coffers. Because rich people are lifters, not leaners.

Do the same with a pensioner eating a two buck can of dog food. Who can't afford twenty cents? Now imagine the stipend a rich person would pay on a chunk of caviare or black truffles or foie gras (someone please make the vegan in the corner settle down). Exactly.

Why each time Jolly Joe Hockey puffs on a fat Cuban cigar, he's standing solid with Cuban workers against the vicious American imperialists, and tickling the Commonwealth till with a handsome tithe.

What's that? Some pedants want to go back and bleat about the poor drinking cat's piss or pensioners eating dog food?

Well it just so happens that a tax might just turn them on to a can of cat food tuna, which is much more healthy for them.

Same as when poor people think about driving a car because they're stuck in the middle of nowhere, without public transport. (a) If they don't drive, there will be fewer road accidents; (b) if they walk everywhere, how much healthier they'd be. Why Percy Grainger would walk or run thirty miles between towns and gigs and still have time to give himself a good lashing with a pine tree branch; (c) if they drive just a little bit - just once every three years to vote Liberal - why they'll be part of the lifting community, instead of a bunch of dropkick leaners.

Happily the Murdoch press paid absolutely no attention to a Treasurer simply doing the maths.

Why there was Wran's daughter to fill the front page of the Terror and jihadist dole bludgers to take care of the HUN, and the Bombers and Iraq and a childcare Senate veto and the NBN to distract the reptiles at the lizard Oz. The currish snail featured a selfie at the top of the  page, while the 'Tiser was right on to Families SA (and the last we heard from WA, they were seceding because the Tasmanian apple munchers and the crow eaters ripped them off).

It was only those bludgers at Fairfax who displayed the faintest interest in Jolly Joe's impeccable maths.

Look at them. Well here's the news, Pravda by the Yarra. No one's got the slightest interest in what jolly Joe might have said. Sure he's supposed to be the Treasurer, but since when has that mattered or counted?

What's that?

He's stamped his petulant foot and threatened a new austerity budget, because his last austerity budget, just a few months ago, went down such a treat?

Thank the long absent lord Tony Abbott is returning from his statesmanlike world tour, meeting with the Bolter's countrymen and suchlike, to teach those ruffian Fairfaxians a lesson.

And while he's at it, he might like to introduce a little Laura Norder to that rabble known as the backbench:

Nationals senator John Williams has hit back, saying that could not be further from the truth in the bush. "The lowest paid people in our nation are in rural and regional areas in many respects, and they do have to have a car," he said. 
Queensland LNP senator Ian Macdonald also criticised the plan to increase the fuel tax. 
"Regional Australians don't have the alternative of public transport or other means of getting there," he said. "You have to have a car whether you are rich or poor. You need a vehicle to be able to get from one place to the other. To get to hospital, to get to school, to get to your daily work routine. 
"And unfortunately increases in fuel excises will impact more heavily on those who don't have an alternative." (here)

Outrageous stuff and nonsense. Let them eat bird seed, or bread crumbs, and just remember Jolly Joe, the pond is on your side and will happily eat cake, because we're munchers, not moaners ...

Hmmm, perhaps we've been approaching this the wrong way Jolly Joe. Perhaps what we need are a few distractions. Let's see how the reptiles do it ...

Come on down Dennis "the bouffant one" and explain how injecting athletes with substances to get a competitive edge is just a jolly good Lance Armstrong way to run the footballing business, and anyone suggesting otherwise is just interested in a bit of political grandstanding.

What's a few supplements between chums and players treated as pin cushions?

Lance, Lance, we hear the bouffant one would be happy to do a revisionist bio ...

Oh it's nicely played but what the pond always hungers for on a Thursday is a tidy bit of expert climate science, conducted by a man who is generally recognised as the second best climate scientist in the world - naturally there's no one who can displace the Bolter from first place.

Oh yes, there it is, a veritable bonus, number two on the rotating digital fickle finger of doom splashed at the top of the lizard Oz's rotating whirligig ...

Here's the splash:

And look, you can tell it's incredibly scientific. It's the sun wot done it, and "et al" proves it.

Why op cit, ibid, loc cit, sic, so and thus, sic erat scriptum, et alii, ibidem and opere citato to that... and hey, you can have a Grand maxima as a bonus ...

Oh hang on, the pond missed out Eric Lobbecke's most excellent illustration for We're ill-prepared if the iceman cometh (inside the paywall so you need the readies to be well-prepared):

Yes, yes, a world dripping in ice, and the sun what done it, and they think and hunt in packs, the silly wretches. Totally unlike Maurice.

Which is why the pond likes to get its science from reputable scientific blogs:

Eek, it's got footnotes too, along with the et al, sic, so and thus, and so it's incredibly scientific, and you, like the pond, can find graphs and all sorts of goodies at the climate denialist site, Watts Up With That?, here, and at a dozen other denialist sites, where the story has run riot like wildfire or a blizzard.

But back to Maurice, as the pond and jolly Joe get ready to tax blankets and heaters:

This mindset sought to bury the results of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark’s experiments using the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. For the first time in controlled conditions, Svensmark’s hypothesis that the sun alters the climate by influencing cosmic ray influx and cloud formation was validated. The head of CERN, which runs the laboratory, obviously afraid of how this heretical conclusion would be received within the global warming establishment, urged caution be used in interpreting the results “in this highly political area of climate change debate”. And the media obliged. But Svensmark is not alone. 
For example, Russian scientists at the Pulkovo Observatory are convinced the world is in for a cooling period that will last for 200-250 years. Respected Norwegian solar physicist Pal Brekke warns temperatures may actually fall for the next 50 years. Leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, found 24 occasions in the past 10,000 years when the sun was declining as it is now, but could find none where the decline was as fast. He says a return of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830), which included “the year without summer”, is “more likely than not”. In their book The Neglected Sun , Sebastian Luning and Fritz Varen­holt think that temperatures could be two-tenths of a degree Celsius cooler by 2030 because of a predicted anaemic sun. They say it would mean “warming getting postponed far into the future”. 

Uh huh. Now one of the favourite routines of the reptiles is to mock the alarmism and the fear-mongering of the warmists, and to charge them with hyperbole and exaggeration.

It turns out that the warmists don't have the first clue, not when it comes to Maurice bunging on a do about the cold snap that might be coming.

All you need is good old Isaac Asimov's "What If" ...

If the world does indeed move into a cooling period, its citizens are ill-prepared. 

Ah yes, the immortal sci fi "what if".  You could even get away with calling a sci fi magazine "If".

Now do go on, and fill the pond's breakfast bowl with snap, crackle, pop, fear and loathing:

After the 2008 fin­ancial crisis, most economies are still struggling to recover. Cheap electricity in a colder climate will be critical, yet distorted price signals caused by renewable energy policies are driving out reliable baseload generators. Attracting fresh investment will be difficult, expensive and slow.

Oh dear. That's terribly alarming. It's absolutely true cheap electricity won't be critical in a warmer climate. Who needs the luxury of air conditioners?

But stay soothsayer, how certain is all this? Before we spend squillions on a cold snap?

Only time will tell ...

Ah the old Jeffrey Archer Only Time Will Tell ...

Only time will tell (oh do go on Ancient Scientific Mariner, with the pointing gnarled finger)...but it is fanciful to believe that it will be business as usual in a colder global climate. A war-weary world’s response to recent events in the Middle East, Russia’s excursion into the Crimea and Ukraine and China’s annexation of air space over Japan’s Senkaku/Daioyu Islands has so far been muted. It is interesting to contemplate how the West would handle the geopolitical and humanitarian challenges brought on by a colder climate’s shorter growing seasons and likely food shortages. Abundance is conducive to peace. However, a scenario where nations are desperately competing for available energy and food will bring unpredictable threats, far more testing than anything we have seen in recent history. 
During the past seven years, Australia has largely fallen into line with Western priorities and redistributive policies. It is reminiscent of a family that has inherited a vast fortune constantly fighting over the legacy but showing little interest in securing the future. 
However, a country that is so rich in nature’s gifts should not be complacent or assume that in other circumstances there will not be adversaries prepared to take what we have. But, in times of peace and when government debts and deficits are growing daily, it is hard to persuade voters to trade off immediate benefits for increased defence spending, let alone prepare them, after all the warming propaganda, that global cooling is a possibility. 

Indeed, indeed. No doubt the silly geese think they might just keep burning all that coal, since it's coal, coal, coal for Australia, warming up themselves and the planet.

Oh wait, what if Gina and Clive have shipped it all to India ...

 Yet the global warming pause is now nearly 18 years old and, as climate scientist Judith Curry says, “attention is moving away from the pause to the cooling since 2002”. Anastasios Tsonis, who leads the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, talks of “massive rearrangements in the dominant pattern of the weather”. 
But the political establishment is deaf to this. Having put all our eggs in one basket and having made science a religion, it bravely persists with its global warming narrative, ignoring at its peril and ours, the clear warnings being given by Mother Nature. 
Voltaire was right when he said: “Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the Earth.” Indeed. 

Indeed, indeed, indeedy do, indeedy dah.

Mother Nature?

Is that like all the Gaia stuff? Is Maurice head of a Mother Nature religion? Are the trees and the plants and the oceans and the earth talking to him? Are they putting clear warnings in his head? Is he the Tony Perkins of global cooling?

Yep, the only answer to warmist alarmism, propaganda and hysteria about a warming planet ... is coolest alarmism, propaganda and hysteria about a cooling planet ... with bonus mumbo jumbo about Mother Nature and mealy mouthed mutterings about religion.

And so concludes another impeccable bout of climate science, and credit where credit is due, and not just to the reptiles for running Maurice.

Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. The views expressed here are his own.

Yep, this is the man with direct access to the ear of Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott ...

Well it's made the pond's Thursday and it's a great distraction from Jolly Joe, with Maurice blathering on about science for the reptiles without indicating at any time he has the first clue as to what he's actually saying, in his "what if", "only time will tell way", speculative, alarmist way, as if that sort of phrasing outlook is somehow scientific in its "et al" way ...

Well the pond has the movie for Maurice ... but please, no panic, the pond has a stock of two bar radiators to hand from China, so all will be well.

It goes without saying that jolly Joe is thinking about limiting poor people to using one of the bars, but that's because they're hardy folk, and anyway, too much heating would have them lolling around like lizards on a hot rock, and we can't have that ...

Now on with Maurice's nightmare ... and eat your heart out, along with your world covered in ice, Eric Lobbecke ...

Oh yes, as the Kiwis are fond of saying, it'll be a bit chully in Maurice's brave new world ...