Even the most devout anthropogenic climate change believer knows that Australia acting alone to reduce carbon emissions will not make a jot of difference to the climate. They also know that Australian industry and jobs will disappear overseas in the absence of a truly global agreement.

Under Labor’s CPRS, prices for everyday goods will rise and every power point will be come a tax collection outlet for a rapacious Government with an insatiable appetite for interfering in our lives. Worse still, acting ahead of the rest of the world might actually mean that Australia is stuck with a scheme that won’t make any difference except to damage our domestic economy.

It’s time for a reality check of the political action attached to the climate change debate.

Labor’s CPRS is so flawed that it should not be reintroduced into the Parliament until after the global climate change talks in Copenhagen later this year. To pass this Bill, or any incarnation of it ahead of the Copenhagen talks, is sheer folly. To do so, when Labor’s scheme is not even scheduled to commence until 2011, would suggest that politics and politicians have taken leave of their senses.

Any talk of accepting, amending, improving or adapting Labor’s scheme before then is to ignore our national interest.

AUSTRALIA just sweated through its hottest August on record.

But it’s not climate change, it’s just hot.

The Bureau of Meteorology says August was almost 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than normal across the country.

The bureau boffins described it as “most extraordinary” as temperatures crept above 38 degrees in some areas.

And winter as a whole came within a whisker of being the warmest of record – it was just 0.01 of a degree cooler than the record-holder, 1996.

Blair Trewin, a climate scientist with the bureau, said the warm weather was caused by a lack of large frontal systems sweeping up from the southern oceans, which would have brought cool air.

Instead, persistent high pressure systems hung about the subtropics.

Dr Trewin said the heatwaves were caused more by natural variability than by climate change.

Climate change [as a result of natural warming after the Little Ice Age, since most of it occurred before 1940, before carbon dioxide emissions were significant – Ed] had pushed up temperatures by about 0.8 of a degree over the past century but August came in at more than two degrees above average.

“The set-up we had this month would have given us an extremely warm month whether it happened 100 years ago or it happened now,” Dr Trewin said.

“There’s a lot of natural variability but you’ve got a climate change signal on top of that.“

And there’s no end in sight to the warm weather – the Bureau is forecasting a hot, dry spring.

That’s because of warm conditions in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Motoring from Lismore to Maclean yesterday, Senator Joyce told the Herald the most common discovery thus far was ”people hate the ETS, they hate it with a passion”. ”Now they understand it, they don’t like it.”

The Nationals are set to split from the Liberals on climate change because they do not share Malcolm Turnbull’s willingness to negotiate on Labor’s emissions trading scheme. Separately last night, but also on the east coast, Greg Combet, the Assistant Minister for Climate Change, was reassuring concerned citizens in his electorate and home of Newcastle about the ETS.

In a sign the locals in this safe-Labor coal region are nervous, Mr Combet pointed out the average household power bill would rise by about $6 a week, for which low and middle income earners would be given substantial assistance.