Election 2010: Gillard devotes 12 words to climate

17 August, 2010 by

Quote of the Day

Drum roll please for Joolya Gillard’s contribution to the climate change debate in her campaign launch yesterday:

Yes we will work together and tackle the challenge of climate change. (source)

Er, that’s it. That’s how highly Labor, the party that was so desperate to push through the ETS before the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009, now regards the “greatest moral challenge since the dawn of time (or something)”. And where is the Labor-loving media on this shameless backflip? Nowhere to be seen, of course.

UPDATE: Tom Switzer at ABC Unleashed skewers the hypocrisy here. And one of the comments is priceless – wailing that he thinks he’s been “redirected to Liberal HQ”, when of course he’s accustomed to being “redirected straight to Labor HQ” thanks to the ABC’s blatant pro-Labor bias.

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The waning "Walk against Warming"

16 August, 2010 by

What does being vegan have to do with climate change (see top right)?

From 40,000 in 2006 to barely 10,000 in 2010. That’s the number of people who protested yesterday against “the greatest moral challenge since the dawn of time” or something (© KRudd). Maybe it’s because the population is slowly waking up to the spin and lies of the warmists. The march consisted of a few ageing hippies, commies who want to use climate change to bring in a new social(-ist) world order, and the “yoof” of Australia, many of whom, despite holding university degrees, have not the first inkling about critical thought, and blindly swallow whole the spin and misrepresentations of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Labor government. You just have to look at how many 18-24 year olds are planning to vote Green to see that.

Even the SMH, peddler of so much climate alarmism over the years, concedes it was a PR disaster:

MORE than 40,000 turned up in 2006, but just 10,000 people participated in the Walk Against Warming, an annual march through the city to protest against government inaction on climate change.

Pepe Clarke, the chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, had hoped to build on the 15,000 who marched during the Copenhagen Summit last year, but the rally shrank yet again.

”I don’t think it’s representative of people thinking climate change is no longer an issue,” said one protester, David McElroy, 27. ”I think there might just be a little bit of despair associated with it. I think people were so hopeful at the last election that things were going to happen and it just ended up being a whole lot of talk.” (source)

Yeah, the despair that global warming isn’t going to be the pathway to global socialism. And even 10,000 is probably wildly optimistic, given that the organisers of these protests are wont to inflate figures (like the warmists inflate global temperatures). The ABC says “more than 1,000” (source) – hardly 10,000 is it?!

And in news you won’t read on the ABC or SMH web sites:

It has been the coldest summer on record north of 80N, and temperatures have dropped below freezing ahead of the average date. (source)

I wonder if any of the protesters knew that?

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Alarmism overload

14 August, 2010 by

I’m having a break this weekend, thanks in part to the tidal wave of hysterical alarmism surrounding various severe, but perfectly normal, weather events that are happening around the world. They’ve happened for millions of years without any help from humanity, but now, because global warming is the scare du jour, they’re all blamed on us. Tedious, boring, predictable, and this weekend I have better things to do, quite frankly!

If you want to sample it, just go to www.smh.com.au or www.theage.com.au or www.telegraph.co.uk or any of a thousand other ignorant media outlets…

I’ll be back after the weekend.

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Weather disasters: global warming "the only logical explanation"

13 August, 2010 by

Because, er, we can’t think of anything else it could be (or more truthfully, we haven’t bothered really looking, ‘cos we’ve pinned it on global warming already). That’s the level we have reached. More moonbat nonsense from the alarmist reinsurer Munich Re (see here for previous scaremongering by this bunch). From the UK Times (regurgitated in The Australian – shame on them):

THE number of weather-related disasters has more than doubled in the past 30 years.

And global warming is the only logical explanation, according to a comprehensive analysis of storms, floods and droughts.

There were 828 “weather catastrophes” involving loss of life and major economic damage across the world last year, compared with 317 in 1980.

The analysis by Munich Re, the reinsurance company, found 385 such events in the first six months of this year – the second highest in any January to June period since records began in 1974. The report does not include this week’s flooding in Pakistan, landslides in China and wildfires in Russia. (source)

So “global warming” causes more severe weather? That’s odd, because accumulated cyclone energy is at a 30-year low:

ACE

Who cares? As long as we can continue to blame “global warming” for weather related death and destruction.

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China: one more "Australia" of emissions every year

12 August, 2010 by

One every year for 25 years

James Delingpole on the myth of the Chinese “green economy”. China is building power stations equivalent to one “Australia’s worth” of emissions every year for the next 25 years. Which kinda makes our ridiculous ETS (that will cut at most a few percent of “one Australia’s emissions”) seem even more pointless than we already knew it was:

One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply into Western culture is… No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to buy.

What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations. But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know exactly what the official view is.

Can you guess?

Read it here.

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Celebrate! UN chief "doubts climate deal" at Mexico

11 August, 2010 by

Moon(-bat)

Another pointless gab-fest with a carbon footprint the size of Liechtenstein will end without any agreement, predicts UN head Ban Ki-moon(-bat). The economies of the world will be spared, for the time being at least, from the ravages of a pointless carbon tax.

UNITED Nations chief Ban Ki-moon has voiced doubts that member states can reach a new global climate change agreement in December at a conference in Mexico.

Mr Ban, who pushed hard for a deal during the 2009 conference in Copenhagen, suggested that a better approach might consist of small steps in separate fields that build towards wider consensus rather than aiming for a sweeping pact.

”Climate change, I think, has been making progress, even though we have not reached such a point where we will have a globally agreed, comprehensive deal,” he said. (source)

Another bullet dodged.

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Shock: climate in ancient past "same as today"

11 August, 2010 by

See the correlation? No, neither can I. (image from WUWT)

… except with between 5 and 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere. What? How could that possibly be? We all know (thanks to government spin and media bias) that CO2 is the main driver of climate (© IPCC) and that powerful positive feedbacks would conspire together to spiral the earth’s climate over thousands of tipping points from which recovery is impossible, right?

An international team of scientists including Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester, and led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke, formerly of Leicester and now at the University of Lille 1 (France), has reconstructed the Earth’s climate belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years ago.

The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA – and show that these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.

The researchers state: “The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher – over twenty times as high – than those of the present. However, it is very hard to deduce carbon dioxide levels with any accuracy from such ancient rocks, and it was known that there was a paradox, for the late Ordovician was known to include a brief, intense glaciation – something difficult to envisage in a world with high levels of greenhouse gases.” (source)

Well, it’s certainly difficult to envisage if you’ve been brainwashed with the CO2 meme.

(h/t Climate Depot, WUWT)

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Rudd's foot on the first rung of the UN ladder

10 August, 2010 by

Off to the UN

Secretary General here we come? Tony Abbott rubbishes Joolya Gillard’s “part-timer”:

DUMPED prime minister Kevin Rudd has accepted a part-time role on United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s panel on global sustainability.

Tony Abbott immediately seized on the unpaid appointment to attack uncertainty over Julia Gillard’s front bench.

Labor dumped Mr Rudd as its leader in June, replacing him with Ms Gillard, who has said that if she wins the August 21 election her predecessor will have a senior role in a re-elected government.

Two of Labor’s most experienced ministers – Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and Defence Minister John Faulkner – have announced they will quit their positions after the election.

And speculation has swirled that the Prime Minister will offer Mr Rudd the plum role of foreign affairs if Labor is returned.

Mr Rudd said in a statement the UN job would not compromise his role as an MP, presuming he was re-elected later this month in his safe Brisbane seat of Griffith.

But Mr Abbott said the job would involve “significant time out of Australia” and “significant time on UN business”.

“It’s now official. Former prime minister Rudd does have a part time job with the United Nations and what it means is that this government’s ministry is in complete flux,” Mr Abbott said in Sydney.

“Not only do we have a situation where the prime minister can’t say who her finance minister will be, who her defence minister will be, who her foreign minister will be after the election.

“We’ve also got the prospect of part-time ministers in the Gillard cabinet should the government be re-elected.

“It’s just not good enough. Australians deserve a full-time government and they won’t get that if this government is re-elected.”

Read it here.

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Ed Markey

9 August, 2010 by

Stifling free speech weekdays

Free Speech Alert as the senator that gave his name to half of the doomed Waxman-Markey bill thinks sceptics should be transported to a place of their own:

“An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Markey said in a statement. (source)

Jerk.

UPDATE: Anthony Watts nails it with this comment: “If it were a race or class issue, he’d be vilified.”

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"Climate change" blamed for extreme weather

8 August, 2010 by

Moonbats

The environmentalists claim any extreme weather event that happens anywhere, ever, is now solely the result of climate change, because it will brainwash the public and frighten ignorant governments into desperately channelling even more precious taxpayer dollars to the scaremongers who claim they can “tackle climate change”.

Of course, extreme weather events have happened for billions of years, without any help from tiny anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. A quick search of an online news archive would reveal hundreds of extreme weather events, from floods, droughts, tornadoes, you name it, that had nothing whatsoever to do with climate change. [Update: You can do it for yourself here. Try searching “extreme weather” or “unusual weather” Update 2: Check Marc’s post at ABC News Watch here]

But it’s all different now. Any unusual weather event is blamed on climate change. It’s like the fact that extreme heat is “global warming”, but extreme cold is “just weather”. And the paper least able to distinguish climate fact from climate fiction is the Sydney Morning Herald, under the headline “Climate change whips up floods, fire and ice”:

CLIMATE change has been blamed for floods that have killed thousands and left millions homeless from Pakistan to North Korea, fires and a heatwave in Russia that have left 5000 dead and disrupted global food markets, and a severe tropical storm threatening Bermuda.

In Greenland, a giant ice island four times the size of Manhattan – about 225 square kilometres – has broken off the Petermann Glacier. It is the largest chunk of ice to calve in the Arctic since 1962. [So what caused the one in 1962? Was that global warming too? No, it couldn’t be because global warming hadn’t been invented then – maybe it was something called natural causes?]

Governments fear the devastation in Asia may stretch aid efforts as crops are destroyed amid soaring wheat prices, caused in part by Russia’s decision to ban grain exports until December 31.

”Mother Nature is playing a very evil hand,” Peter McGuire, managing director at CWA Global Markets, said in Sydney yesterday. ”It’s always the poor that suffer.” [At least this commentator realises it’s Mother Nature at work, not evil coal burning capitalists]

The weather drew comment from officials and activists [environmental headbangers] at international climate change talks in Bonn.

One US delegate said Russia’s heatwave and the recent floods that have devastated Pakistan are ”consistent with the kind of changes we would expect to see from climate change and they will only get worse unless we act quickly”.

But the environmental group Greenpeace [spare me] said negotiators at the talks were not getting the message.

”Russia is burning and Pakistan is drowning, yet they seem happy to continue as if they have all the time in the world,” said the group’s climate policy director Wendel Trio. (source)

It’s all nonsense of course. Whilst no-one could fail to have sympathy for the victims of such terrible events, even the alarmists don’t stoop so low as to blame such events on SUVs, but that doesn’t stop the Moonbat Herald. Journalism at its worst.

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