From The Daily Telegraph columnist Piers Ackerman, who rains on Rudd’s 1st anniversary parade:

A year in office and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s pre-election agenda is in tatters.

Australian schoolchildren don’t have their promised computers, FuelWatch is dead, GroceryWatch is dying and the states are not enjoying a new spirit of co-operation.

Signing Kyoto has done nothing but underscore the certainty that Labor’s insistence climate change is man-made will increase unemployment beyond the levels expected from the global financial mess.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s modelling, on which the overblown, apocalyptic Garnaut report is based, has been shot to pieces.

And the Treasury modelling on which the Government has based its planned emissions-trading scheme doesn’t take into account the current economic situation.

Read it here.

Glad to see that Rudd’s still obsessed with controlling the climate, despite the world entering a recession the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1920s. He has chosen the APEC conference to pontificate on climate change, as if the last 8 years of global cooling have completely escaped him:

“Some have said that the financial crisis means that governments should postpone acting on climate change, but the Australian government does not share that view,” he said.

“Climate change represents a very real threat to global economic growth, jobs and prosperity…taking strong and urgent action will help safeguard economic and environmental stability.” Mr Rudd said.

No, Mr Rudd, the only threat to economic growth, jobs and prosperity is your crazy and ill-conceived ETS, and all other similar emissions schemes hastily being enacted throughout the world.

Read it here.

As Andrew Bolt puts it:

How to push the warming scare. First, pick a loved icon and hold a gun to its head.

The Sydney Moonbat Herald chooses the koala, and claims that “climate change” will cause the cute cuddly koalas to die in greater numbers.

Dan Lunney told a conference of the NSW Nature Conservation Council that rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would push up toxins and lower nutrients in eucalyptus leaves.

As leaf quality dropped and bush fires intensified, koalas would be forced to roam further afield as they foraged for food in shrinking bushland surrounded by farms, housing developments and logging operations.

Koalas, like many other animals, have clearly adapted perfectly well to “climate change” in the past (when it couldn’t possibly be due to the evil emissions of unregulated capitalism), including periods of significantly lower temperatures, which would have made life far more difficult than the gentle warming we have experienced since the end of the Little Ice Age.

But this is the Herald we’re talking about, so unless there’s an alarmist angle, it won’t get printed.

Read it here.

An amusing article in the Daily Telegraph for your enjoyment this morning.

At that moment Dave’s son came up with the perfect slogan for the 2012 US election: Global Warming for President!

The boy’s a genius. How could global warming possibly lose?

Global warmings got 100 per cent name recognition, awesome fund-raising powers and the ability to kill anyone who opposes him. Global warming, should he choose to run, has a total lock on the White House. If he doesn’t flood it first, of course, or fill it with sad polar bears.

Read it here.

The Australian has an article from the Wall Street Journal which doesn’t rate very highly the chances of any of Barack Obama’s empty promises on climate change actually making it onto the US statute book:

“Funding has stalled,” says Ezra Green, chief executive of Clear Skies Solar. The New York company recently cancelled plans to build a one-megawatt solar plant in California’s Mojave Desert, unable to get financing even though a California utility agreed to buy all the output.

“We’ve cancelled the solar-panel order,” Mr Green says.

Hobbled by the financial crisis, power companies across the US are slashing capital budgets and cancelling projects for clean electricity. Financing for new nuclear power plants appears shaky. And some energy companies are even having trouble satisfying their short-term needs for cash.

Forging a new energy future by creating vast amounts of wind, solar and, possibly, nuclear energy is one of Mr Obama’s highest priorities. But enacting that policy depends to a large degree on the ability of energy companies and utilities to finance the massive new investments that would be needed. With many of those companies cutting spending, a lot of those investments are being pared back or eliminated.
…
Many utility-sector executives and analysts now expect Congress to water down any climate-change legislation out of fear that it would push up electricity prices for consumers.

Strange, because aren’t we always hearing that the transition to a green economy would be utterly painless and wouldn’t cost a cent?

Read it here.

Denial Alert Number 2: After Obama’s ignorant comments on “global warming” earlier in the week, there’s more barking nonsense emanating from the US. Once again, some moonbat senator thinks that the green revolution will cost nothing, will have no detrimental effect on an economy already weakened by a global financial crisis, and will be a panacea for the ills of the world:

“The time to start is now,” said Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, vowing to step up to Obama’s challenge to combat climate change and create millions of “green jobs” in the reeling US economy.

Yep, we have to “do something” and it has to be NOW!! And again, she uses the “D” word to brush off the thousands of scientists who believe that CO2 emissions have little to do with “climate change”:

“Instead of denial we will have resolve, instead of procrastination, we will have action. Instead of listening to the voice of the stagnant status quo, our committee hears the voice of our president-elect,” Boxer said.

“We are facing a sea change,” Boxer said, arguing that Obama’s election and the big gains in congressional elections for Democrats would transform the attitude of the United States to global warming, the world’s biggest polluter.

That’s the “global warming” which, er, stopped nearly a decade ago, right? Madness indeed.

Read it here.

Tenuous Link to Climate Change Alert: Here we have a typical non-story about the rare, but not unheard of, storms in Queensland this week, which some climatologist has hijacked to try to make a link with “climate change”. This story is so full of contradictions I had to read it about five times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. It reads like a “good news, bad news” joke. First the good news:

University of Southern Queensland professor of climate and water resources Roger Stone and Queensland weather bureau spokesman Gavin Holcombe said that while November in southeast Queensland had generally been a dry month over the past decade, big storms such as the last two were not unusual.

OK, not unusual. However, here’s the bad news:

“But this sort of violent weather activity is consistent with climate change predictions. We’re coming off a long drought in southeast Queensland, and that has been an extreme weather event. Now we’re getting these storms, and they’re also extreme weather events.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that there is no proven link between warming and more extreme weather… But then after getting us all excited, it’s all a damp squib, and there’s good news again:

He cautioned against reading too much into the storms, saying that a series of events by themselves did not “prove” climate change one way or the other.

But under what headline does the usually sensible Australian run this story?

Wild weather in Queensland ‘a sign of climate change’

This is just one of hundreds of examples of appalling journalism about climate change in the mainstream media – articles written by journos who have no understanding of science and are incapable of separating fact from fiction. No wonder the general public don’t have a clue what is really going on.

Read it here.

As usual, a great read.

If it was April 1, then this story would be a corker. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t April 1, and it’s genuine. From the UK’s moonbat Guardian (reprinted in The Age):

Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, appealed to British users of the class A drug [cocaine] to consider the impact on the environment. He said that while the green agenda would not persuade addicts to give up, the middle-class social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment might not take the drug if they knew its impact.
…
Santos said many middle-class Britons who used cocaine were unaware of its environmental impact. “For somebody who drives a hybrid, who recycles, who is worried about global warming – to tell him that that night of partying will destroy 4m square of rainforest might lead him to make another decision.”

Only the liberal coke-snorting intelligentsia that read The Grauniad and The Age would be more influenced by the effect cocaine use has on the environment than by more traditional reasons to avoid it, such as, you know, it’s illegal…

Read the Guardian article here. (Thanks to Tom Nelson)

As well it might, given the economic situation, and the fact that “global warming” hasn’t happened for nearly a decade and people are beginning to smell a large Gore-shaped rat. A recent survey of Asia-Pacific government leaders shows that “global warming” doesn’t even appear on the list of top priorities this year.

“We’ve been swamped by bad economic news and you don’t have to look at our survey results alone to see that the interest and focus on climate change has dissipated somewhat,” said Yuen Pau Woo, co-author of the report.

“You see the same shift in focus in the public away from climate change questions to questions of economic survival and growth,” said Woo, president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Yet again, this is simply a statement of the only too obvious.

Read it here.