Just so you know what you have to look forward to when Rudd’s ETS becomes law. It looks like the US agencies have been “economical with the truth” about the cost of the US climate bill to households. Why would that be? Maybe because if they were honest about it, it wouldn’t have a chance of being passed [Sounds like the ETS – Ed]:

Documents (link to PDF) obtained from the U.S. Treasury under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute were released on Tuesday.

The U.S. Treasury Department admits that a “cap and trade” system for regulating greenhouse gas emissions could cost every household $1,761 a year. According to the CBS News story, “the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent”.

This comes in way over claims that the EIA says:

The Climate Bill Will Cost You Just 23¢ a Day, EIA Analysis Shows. This works out to $83.95 per year. Big difference.

Big difference? That’s a humongous difference. I wonder how big the gap between Rudd’s spin and reality is here in Australia? Hopefully, if the ETS sinks, we will never have to find out.

Read it here.

A slew of articles in the press about the ETS, brought on by the party room shenanigans earlier in the week, and also by Brendan Nelson’s speech to parliament. Tony Abbott has rejected Nelson’s call to reject the ETS:

Former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson urged Parliament to not support a carbon pollution reduction program before the world’s three major emitters had declared their position.

But Mr Abbott said the constituency opposing action on climate change was not wide enough.

“Yes, in the end politicians do have to be people of conviction but we also have to win elections,” he told ABC Television last night.

“There’s always a tension between those two objectives.”

Business people who wanted the coalition to “oppose the legislation to the death” needed to make their view “absolutely, crystal clear”, he added.

“People like myself feel very, very unhappy with the Government’s legislation but I’m not sure that’s the message we’re uniformly getting from the wider constituency.”

So in other words, we’re voting for the ETS because we don’t want to force an election? Sounds like bad politics to me. It’s bad legislation and should be opposed outright. At the same time, however, there are signs that the future for Turnbull will be very tricky:

Turnbull retains strong support in the shadow cabinet and the backing of the partyroom for his strategy of proposing amendments to the government’s laws when they are returned to the Senate in November.

His spokesman on emissions trading, Andrew Robb, has sought detailed submissions from business groups about changes they would support.

But the dissent within the Coalition is increasing: not just from the Nationals who are now almost certain to go their own way on the issue, but from many Liberals as well, who argue that by opposing the scheme the Liberals would be “standing for something”.

And just to finish off: Greenland ‘could melt faster than thought’ – I wonder when we’ll see the story “Greenland ‘could melt slower than thought’? Never, because studies like that never make the media.

Read it here and here.

It certainly is if you have to read all The Age’s hysterical alarmism every day. We predicted that the alarmists would get even more desperate as the planet continued to ignore the flaky climate models on which the whole AGW agenda is based, and we weren’t wrong. Now it’s the medical profession which has appeared to abandon its scientific objectivity (surely an essential component of medical research?), and has climbed aboard the global warming bandwagon:

FAILURE by world leaders to reach a strong treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions this year could be catastrophic for world health, doctors from six continents have warned.

In a letter published in two leading British journals, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and 17 sister associations described climate change as the ”biggest global health threat of the 21st century” [yeah, right, let’s just ignore, say, cancer, or poverty, or unclean drinking water, etc, etc … Ed] and called on doctors to pressure politicians to adopt more aggressive policies.

”There is a real danger that politicians will be indecisive, especially in such turbulent economic times,” the letter, published in The Lancet and British Medical Journal, said.

”As leaders of physicians across many countries, we call on doctors to demand that their politicians listen to the clear facts [what “clear facts” would they be? – Ed]… and act now to implement strategies that will benefit the health of communities worldwide.”

Hook, line and sinker.

Read it here.

The outgoing member for Bradfield, Brendan Nelson, former Opposition leader, has used his farewell speech to warn the Coalition against voting for an ETS:

Debate is raging within the Coalition over whether it should consider voting for an amended emissions trading scheme by the end of the year.

Dr Nelson has told Parliament it should not vote for the scheme until next year.

“An emissions trading scheme in a country responsible for 1.4 per cent of global emissions – before knowing what the three major emitters will do – defies not only logic, it also violates Australia’s best interests,” he said.

Right on the money.

Read it here.

It looks like Arctic sea ice extent has bottomed out for 2009, and it’s about half a million square kilometres up on 2008, which itself was about half a million square kilometres up on 2007. But don’t wait up to read about it in the mainstream media, because it doesn’t fit the alarmist agenda too well:

Read it at Watts Up With That.

UPDATE: And of course, right on cue, the ABC publishes a story about precisely the opposite:

The Northeast Passage, which for the most part follows Russia’s Arctic coastline, had seemed impenetrable to international commercial shipping.

Yet with rising temperatures melting the ice cover at a record rate, an opportunity literally opened for the ships this summer.

There’s no other word for it, I’m afraid: lies.

Read it here.

More desperation from the alarmists at Oxfam, this time tugging at emotional heartstrings by roping in “children” to ram their misinformation home:

AT least 4.5 million children could die if wealthy nations fail to provide more funds to help impoverished countries combat global warming [surely “climate change”? – Ed], development charity Oxfam has warned.

The organisation said in a report it was concerned that industrialised nations would take money out of existing funds dedicated to economic development in order to help poor countries battle climate change.

World leaders will meet in Denmark in December to negotiate a new climate pact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions [fat chance – Ed] blamed for global warming.

I don’t need to tell you what I think of this.

Read it here.

Why would that be, I wonder? Maybe the alarmists think they’d lose, perhaps? I guess that’s the only possible conclusion we can draw seeing they won’t be there to defend themselves. Thanks to The Unbearable Nakedness of Climate Change:

I am not at all surprised that George Monbiot (and by inference, Gavin Schmidt) have lost their public (virtual) debate against Ian Plimer even before having a public (real) debate. That’s because:

• I have been following Monbiot’s antics for quite some time, and have never been struck by the power of his at-times-downright-silly arguments
• Likewise concerning Schmidt, a known debate (sore) loser
• Skeptic vs. Climatechanger debates are few and far between, and not for the lack of willing skeptical debaters (one suspects, it’s because skeptics invariably win, just like against homeopathy practitioners, UFO believers, creationist/ID proponents, chemtrails counter-conspirators, etc etc)
• Plimer is no debate spring chicken, once described as having a “street-fighting style“

Why has Plimer won the debate? Because the end result is that Monbiot has refused to publicly debate with him. And in any sport, failure to show up automatically makes you a loser.

Funny, ain’t it? The science is so settled that alarmists won’t debate it. That’s not science, that’s religion.

Read it here. Also check out this post.

ACM has relocated to www.australianclimatemadness.com. If you go to the original blogspot address, you will be automatically be redirected.

Because it’s all our fault, you see. Nothing to do with the sun, or clouds or orbital eccentricity or cosmic rays. Our use of evil, capitalist SUVs and 4x4s has damaged the climate for poor developing countries (like China and India) so we’d better cough up, or else:

THE cost of climate change in the developing world will be up to $US470 billion ($547 billion) each year by 2030, and wealthy countries such as Australia should help pay to fix it, the World Bank says.

Calling climate change ”a deeply unfair issue”, the World Development Report 2010 finds that rich countries are responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. But it concludes that poorer countries in South Asia and Africa are expected to bear the brunt of the impact through drought, sea level rise and extreme weather [evidence, please? – Ed] which could permanently cut up to 5 per cent a year from their annual consumption and slash their food production.

The report’s co-director, Rosina Bierbaum, said yesterday that while the costs of coping with climate change were huge, ”we can’t afford not to address it. But it absolutely will not be cheap and it will not be easy.”

It’s all too convenient to blame climate change on CO2, because then we can punish Western economies for it and extract huge sums of money in a kind of global wealth redistribution. So much harder to do all this if it’s just natural climate variation caused by [insert extremely long list of possible causes here].

Read it here.

A few crumbs of comfort in this. Malcolm Turnbull has been forced to clarify his position on the ETS in order to stave off a rebellion from backbenchers (although the Australian headline somehow spins this as a victory for Turnbull…):

The federal Opposition leader today sought to reassure “trenchant” coalition critics of the Government’s emissions trading scheme he will not act unilaterally over the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

The CPRS legislation was defeated in the Senate earlier this year and is not due to be debated again until November, but the issue dominated a heated Coalition party room meeting today, with both National and Liberal MPs opposing an emissions trading scheme.

Former opposition leader Brendan Nelson told his colleagues in a valedictory speech public opinion was moving against the government on climate change.

Dr Nelson warned them against acting like “intellectual lemmings” on the issue [Great phrase! Suits the Kruddites perfectly – Ed].

Mr Turnbull and his climate change spokesman Andrew Robb were forced to restate the current Coalition position on the legislation.

The meeting confirmed Coalition opposition to voting on the CPRS ahead of the December Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change and before the final fate of emissions trading legislation currently before the US Congress is known.

The best result would be for the Coalition to come out wholly against the ETS (like the Nationals), a pointless and harmful political gesture which will make no difference to the climate of Australia or the planet. But that won’t happen, sadly.

Read it here.