The old Maldives story rehashed for the umpteenth time by The Australian (see here and here). It starts off with the usual scaremongering nonsense:

AMONG the many grim predictions of climate change experts, the future fate of The Maldives stands out as a genuine doomsday scenario, with the island chain nation facing nothing short of extinction.

A 1m rise in sea level would almost totally submerge the country’s 1,192 coral islands scattered off the southern tip of India. Experts predict a rise of at least 18cm is likely by the end of the century.

Oh, please. I thought we’d moved on from this. Sea levels have been rising at 1-2 mm per year since the last Ice Age, so 18cm in a century is bang on target (which, by the way, has nothing to do with “global warming” or that evil trace gas CO2). Some experts go even further, such as Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University, quoted in The Australian just two weeks ago:

Our research data does not lend support to any such flooding scenario, however. On the contrary, we find no signs of any ongoing sea-level rise. Our results comes from visits to numerous islands … and includes coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating.

Present sea level was reached about 4500BC. In the past 4000 years, sea level oscillated around the present. In the past decade, there are no signs of any rise in sea level. Hence, we are able to free the islands from the condemnation to become flooded in the 21st century.

And none of this mentions the possibility of tectonic movement of the land itself downwards…

Read it here.

There appears to be a preponderance of climate sense at the moment – what’s going on? Another spot on article from Miranda Devine in the Sydney Morning Herald (how on earth does she get published?), which discusses Ian Plimer from the University of Adelaide:

Plimer said there is a division between those scientists who sit in front of super computers and push piles of data into the mathematical models that drive the theory of climate change, and those who take measurements in the field.

We are not sceptical enough about the data. For instance, Plimer cited differences between results from temperature measuring stations in urban and rural areas. Those in urbanised Chicago, Berkeley, New York, and so on, show temperature rises over the past 150 years, whereas those in the rural US, in Houlton, Albany and Harrisburg (though not Death Valley, California) show equally consistent cooling. “What we’re measuring is urbanisation,” Plimer said.

This is quite right, because if you look at the satellite records, there just isn’t any warming!

Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that “we’re dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational“.

Human-caused climate change is being “promoted with religious zeal … there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics. They have their holy books, their prophet [is] Al Gore. And they are promoting a story which is frightening us witless [using] guilt [and urging] penance.“

More of the same, please.

Read it here.

No time to summarise this article fully (it’s late), but read it anyway. It’s right on the money.

This will really put the cat among the blinkered alarmist pigeons of the EU. Vaclav Klaus, Czech president and noted AGW sceptic, is due to take over the rotating presidency of the EU, and the New York Times cannot resist taking cheap ad hominem pot shots (thanks to Andrew Bolt):

In the 1980s, a Communist secret police agent infiltrated clandestine economics seminars hosted by Vaclav Klaus, a fiery future leader of the Czech Republic, who had come under suspicion for extolling free market virtues. Rather than reporting on Marxist heresy, the agent was most struck by Mr. Klaus’s now famous arrogance.

“His behavior and attitudes reveal that he feels like a rejected genius,” the agent noted in his report, which has since been made public. “He shows that whoever does not agree with his views is stupid and incompetent.”

Decades later, Mr. Klaus, the 67-year-old president of the Czech Republic — an iconoclast with a perfectly clipped mustache — continues to provoke strong reactions. He has blamed what he calls the misguided fight against global warming for contributing to the international financial crisis, branded Al Gore an “apostle of arrogance” for his role in that fight, and accused the European Union of acting like a Communist state.

At least the last couple of lines are right. And it doesn’t stop there. The NYT digs up anybody they can find to slag off Mr Klaus:

But Mr. Klaus’s sheer will and inflammatory talk — the eminent British historian Timothy Garton Ash once called him “one of the rudest men I have ever met” — are likely to have some impact.

“Klaus is a provocateur who will twist his arguments to get attention,” said Jiri Pehe, a former adviser to Vaclav Havel, Mr. Klaus’s rival and predecessor as president.

To supporters, Mr. Klaus is a brave, lone crusader, a defender of liberty, the only European leader in the mold of the formidable Margaret Thatcher. (Aides say Mr. Klaus has a photo of the former British prime minister in his office near his desk.)

To his many critics, he is a cynical populist, a hardheaded pragmatist long known as a foil to Mr. Havel, the philosopher-dreamer, and a troublemaker.

Successful character assassination complete, I think. And finally, this gem:

Mr. Klaus declined to be interviewed for this article. His office called a list of proposed questions “peculiar.”

Now there’s a surprise.

Read it here.

Of course, weather isn’t climate, as we all know, but anecdotally it is hard to avoid the fact that there is a lot of cold weather about right now. From the Lithgow Mercury:

We know that Summer, at least according to the calendar, is only a week away. But across the Tablelands and much of eastern NSW at the weekend it might as well have been mid Winter.

In fact there were very few occasions during the official Winter when the weather was as severe as during the freakish conditions at the weekend.

The predicted cold front moving in from a deep depression off Victoria reached the Blue Mountains-Lithgow area early on Friday night, sending temperatures plunging and rapidly worsening.

On Saturday the Lithgow area had just about everything from the Winter weather book — gale force winds, sleet, snow showers, rain and single digit temperatures that were aggravated by the wind chill factor.

Read it here.

The Australian reprints an article originally published in the UK Daily Mail. If you missed it the first time (here) it’s well worth a read (link).

Bjørn Lomborg skillfully skewers the dumb argument that a “green economy” is the panacea for the world’s ills:

Many green pundits have, however, started saying that the financial crisis only makes the need for action on climate change greater. They urge US president-elect Barack Obama to pursue a “green revolution” with big investments in renewable energy, arguing that this could create millions of new “green collar” jobs and open huge new markets.

Unsurprisingly, such sentiments are strongly voiced by business leaders who live off such subsidies. But are such pleas smart investments for society?

The problem with the green revolution argument is that it doesn’t trouble itself about efficiency. It is most often lauded for supplying new jobs. But billions of dollars in tax subsidies would create plenty of new jobs in almost any sector: the point is that many less capital-intensive sectors would create many more jobs for a given investment of taxpayers’ money.
…
President-elect Obama is now facing countless people who claim that subsidies for renewable energy and CO2 taxes are great ways to tackle global warming and forge a new green economy. Unfortunately, this is almost entirely incorrect. Taxes and subsidies are always expensive, and will likely impede growth. Moreover, if we really want to tackle global warming, we shouldn’t spend vast sums of money buying inefficient green technology. We should invest directly in R&D to make future green technology competitive.

Read it all here.

But that’s what he did in a speech at the National Press Club, as reported in the Herald Sun.

Mr Turnbull’s speech coincided with the first anniversary of Labor’s election win over the previous coalition government, which held power under John Howard for more than 11 years.

Mr Turnbull praised Mr Rudd for making a national apology to indigenous people and for ratifying the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Odd that Malcolm Turnbull thinks it right to praise someone for an empty political gesture which achieved nothing.

Read it here.

The ABC exhumes a tedious old cliché from the alarmists’ handbook – the threat of increasing disease.

The head of the Public Health Association, Michael Moore, says emissions must by reduced by at least 20 per cent by 2020 to minimise disease, depression and health costs.

“What we’re really concerned about is if the Government doesn’t go for those bold emissions targets, we will see a significant spread of vector borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, like ross river fever – we’re already seeing some of it,” Mr Moore said.

Well, the increase you speak of can’t be caused by global warming, because there hasn’t been any for nearly a decade… yawn.

Read it here.

Another scaremongering article in The Age this morning, about how “global warming” could have a “devastating” effect on “hundreds of millions” of people in the Asia-Pacific region. But at least Allan Behm, a political risk and strategy consultant, has a sense of humour:

Despite calls in recent years for Australia to take a lead in working with regional governments, progress had been glacial, he said.

Does that mean “moving slowly”, or “disappearing fast”… ?

Read it here.