The alarmist in chief is back on form in an interview for AFP, reported in the Brisbane Times, which clearly has no idea about Hansen’s well-known record for being a global warming fruitcake and massaging the GISS temperature record to fit his own agenda:

A half-dozen climate experts told AFP, ahead of international climate talks starting on Monday, that current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, would unleash devastating droughts, floods and huge increases in human misery by century’s end.

But the new studies, they say, indicate that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that would be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further.
…
“The most recent IPCC report was prior to … the measurements of increasing mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica, which are disintegrating much faster than IPCC estimates,” said climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Unlike the Arctic ice cap, which floats on water, the world’s two major ice sheets – up to 3km thick – sit on land.

Runaway sea level rises, Hansen said, would put huge coastal cities and agricultural deltas in Bangladesh, Egypt and southern China under water, and create hundreds of millions of refugees.

Were Greenland’s entire ice block to melt, it would lift the world’s sea levels by almost seven metres, while western Antarctica’s ice sheet holds enough water to add six metres.

Yawn. Next.

Read it here.

… published within 5 minutes of each other.

From the Melbourne Herald Sun at 5.08 am:

Climate change fight could create jobs

From the Newcastle Herald at 5.13 am:

Emission scheme casts shadow on jobs

It’s all so confusing…

Read it here and here.

“For ever” is a very long time in geological terms, yet the climate pseudo-scientists bandy it about as if it meant nothing. The moonbattish Canberra Times quotes Professor David Archer of Chicago University, who goes into full scaremonger mode:

”The climatic impacts of releasing fossil-fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilisation so far”.
…
In a paper to be published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, he says, ”The ocean is getting fed up with absorbing our CO2.” Surface waters which used to sop up the gas quite fast, are getting saturated with it turning acid in the process and, so, decreasing their uptake. They need to be replaced with fresh water from deep down, but this circulation ”takes centuries or a millennium”.

Global warming is expected to slow this down: the hotter the surface layer becomes, the longer the replenishment takes.

The paper says research shows this renewing process will not be enough to remove the vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Much will have to wait hundreds of thousands of years before being removed by another, much slower, process: the natural weathering of rocks, which incorporates the gas into other substances.

Two points:

• That would be the global warming that hasn’t happened since 2001, right?
• If the science is so settled, why is this all such a surprise?

Read it here.

The Government has backed down on setting a target for 2020 emissions reductions prior to the UN climate talks in Poznan.

The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, yesterday defended the decision not to announce the target before she left for the talks in the Polish city of Poznan. She refused to comment on whether cabinet was divided over the target, which is expected to fall significantly below the level called for by European ministers, climate scientists and environmentalists who will attend the talks.
…
Under intense lobbying from business and on the advice of senior officials, the Government is discussing setting a range of targets to cut greenhouse emissions by 2020. The target is now expected to be cuts between 5 per cent and 15 per cent of emissions, based on 2000 levels. This is significantly below the cuts of 25 to 40 per cent being called for by the European Union and climate scientists.

The reality of the effect of an ETS on the economy appears to be permeating even into the thick skulls of our blinkered government.

Read it here.