As you would be, if your source of information was Al Gore. Unfortunately, Obama’s source of information is Al Gore.

US president-elect Barack Obama said delaying action on climate change was no longer an option, after a meeting Tuesday with former vice president and Democratic Party bigwig Al Gore.

Obama welcomed Gore for a private meeting in his hometown of Chicago, Obama’s base of operations as he prepares to take office on January 20. His transition team rejected speculation that Gore could be offered a position in the new administration.

“D” Word Alert:

“The time for delay is over. The time for denial is over,” Obama said, flanked by Gore and vice-president elect Joe Biden after the meeting.

There’s no hope.

Read it here.

The Australian‘s science writer wins today’s ACM Idiotic Comment gong for an article about Marvin Geller and Richard Lindzen. Leigh Dayton was the author of a recent fawning article about Geller that was deeply patronising to anyone who dared dispute “the consensus” (see here).

In this article, however, Dayton goes further, portraying Geller as a gallant crusader, desperate to avoid the charge of alarmism, and defending the IPCC as more likely to downplay results than exaggerate:

As Geller says, that makes Lindzen different to other climate-change sceptics. Many vehement critics are retired from the field, never worked in it or seem indifferent to recent peer-reviewed research impinging on their area. This is a shame. If the planet is heating up rapidly and dangerously due to humanity’s penchant for burning fossil fuels, policymakers and politicians need solid scientific information. Distraction by misinformed sceptics does not good public policy make.

That’s a big “IF”, Leigh, and to call sceptics an annoying distraction is offensive and misguided. Yeah, shut ’em up – close ’em down. Hey, the debate’s over! The article is also just plain wrong in places:

Climate sceptics also commonly recycle inaccurate “facts”. The myth that global warming peaked in 1998 is a case in point. Yes, 1998 was a global scorcher, thanks to a heat-inducing El Nino. But after a dip in 1999, data collected by NASA and Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research show an upward trend, despite year-to-year variations. To claim otherwise is incorrect.

NASA = GISS = James Hansen = fudged figures. Just look at the satellite record. Surface stations measure urbanisation, satellites don’t – there has been no warming since 2001, and notable cooling in the last couple of years.

And finally, to suggest that scientists are going to cut their own funding by questioning the consensus is just idiotic. Follow the money. Many serious scientific journals have already made up their mind on climate change.

All in all, a well deserved winner.

Read it here.

And in rare moment of sanity, it appears that Australia is being blamed for taking a sensible approach, at least in comparison to other countries. The Age can hardly conceal its disappointment:

AUSTRALIAN diplomats have been accused of helping turn UN climate talks in Poland into “groundhog day” by failing to support a proposal that rich countries look to the advice of climate scientists when setting greenhouse targets.

It is believed that Australia has joined Japan, Canada and Russia in wanting changes to a proposed agreement that says greenhouse cuts should be “informed” by advice that the developed world needs to cut emissions by 25-40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

In other words, Australia does not want to acknowledge the role of “the published science” (which in effect means the IPCC) in setting targets, which is exactly right. The IPCC isn’t science, it’s political propaganda.

Read it here.

What, I ask, will the AGW brigade think of next? Former President of Ireland and honorary president of Oxfam, Mary Robinson, considers climate change to be an infringement of human rights. And no prizes for guessing which moonbat newspaper prints this nonsense… yep, The Age:

From increasing droughts to increasing floods, from lower agricultural productivity to more frequent and severe storms, many rightly fear that things will only get worse. Their human rights – to security, health, and sustainable livelihoods – are increasingly being threatened by changes to the earth’s climate.
…
Carbon emissions from industrialised countries have human and environmental consequences. As a result, global warming has already begun to affect the fulfilment of human rights, and to the extent that polluting greenhouse gases continue to be released by large industrial countries, the basic human rights of millions of the world’s poorest people to life, security, food, health and shelter will continue to be violated.

What about natural disasters? Earthquakes? Volcanic eruptions? Tsunami? They violate human rights far more than “climate change”, but we don’t pointlessly try to control them, because controlling such things is like herding cats – impossible. And, of course, the punchline is therefore we should “do something”:

Urgently cutting emissions must be done in order to respect and protect human rights from being violated by the future impacts of climate change, while supporting the poorest communities to adapt to already occurring climate impacts is the only remedy for those whose human rights have already been violated.

Are there no limits to the depths…?

Read it here.

As always, celebs are falling over themselves to appear hip and PC, and like nothing more than publicly exposing their green credentials (although most of us would wish they’d cover them up again):

In a letter to The Times, 19 signatories including broadcaster David Attenborough, actress Scarlett Johansson and singers Missy Higgins and Annie Lennox said developed nations must “show leadership” at UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland this week.

Don’t know about you, but I’m convinced.

Read it here.

… it ain’t as bad as camel, which we are told will be the next delicacy on the “Climate Change Menu”. Not only are camel numbers in Australia out of control, but they are huge greenhouse gas emitters. Really, this isn’t a joke:

Report co-author Murray McGregor, an agribusiness lecturer, said a good way to bring down the number of camels was to eat them.

“Eat a camel today, I’ve done it,” Professor McGregor said.

“It’s beautiful meat.

“It’s a bit like beef. It’s as lean as lean, it’s an excellent health food.”

I think we need a new motto: “A camel a day keeps Al Gore at bay.”

Read it here.

Australia’s own AGW-gasbag, Tim Flannery, is urging the federal government to “show leadership” on climate change, and has claimed that the world will “suicide” if it cannot agree a strong climate agreement soon:

Professor Flannery, who is attending a UN climate summit in Poland, expressed dismay at the slow progress.

He has called for Australia to take the lead on climate – or watch the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef through global warming.

“Resistance is a suicidal tactic,” the former Australian of the year, scientist and author told reporters from Poland.

Sounds like Star Trek: “Resistance is futile!” The GBR has been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years, and has survived numbers of climate minima and maxima far worse than the conditions we are experiencing now, so why does everyone think that it’s suddenly going to disappear? It’s pure hysteria. How on earth Flannely could have been voted Australian of the Year is beyond me. And then, without a hint of irony:

“This round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.”

No alarmism there, clearly.

Read it here.

Here’s a discipline I have never encountered before: “climate law”. However, it’s not surprising that such a discipline is emerging since most Western governments are hell bent on imposing legislation to try to control a harmless trace gas, and such legislation will need lawyers to interpret it. Anyway, the ABC gives Amanda McKenzie, who has just completed her honours thesis in “climate law”, free reign to spout the usual alarmist BS that we’ve come to expect from our national broadcaster. In an article entitled “It’s the Climate, stupid”, she opines:

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a grouping of over 2,000 of the world’s best climate scientists, 550 ppm gives us an almost certain chance of warming the planet by 2 degrees. While 2 degrees doesn’t sound like much, it is widely agreed to be a dangerous threshold that should not be crossed. Two degrees may trigger “runaway climate change”, that is, where natural systems start releasing greenhouse gases in such quantities that temperatures rise 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 degrees, leaving much of the planet uninhabitable.

Actually, it’s nowhere near 2000 – less than a hundred reviewed the key chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 report, and most of them regularly peer-review each others’ papers. And far from approaching a “tipping point”, the planet has actually cooled since 2001… She then quotes AGW arch-crackpot James Hansen, whose GISS surface temperature records demonstrate little about global climate, but show urbanisation very well:

He states that this target [400 ppm] is required if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed“. For Australia this means implementing targets of at least 40 per cent by 2020. While it will be substantially more costly now to set scientifically based targets, in the long term it is highly benefical as it gives us the best chance of sustaining Australia’s key natural, irreplaceable assets on which we depend.

She, like most writers on this subject, completely ignores the fact that Australia reducing its CO2 by 40% by 2020 will do nothing for global CO2 levels (actually a 0.6% reduction), and, even if CO2 does affect climate (which is far from certain, despite what those two thousand of the world’s best scientists at the IPCC say), will make not an iota of difference to global climate. What it will do, however, with absolute certainty, is destroy our economy and the standards of living that Australia has spent decades raising. All of which is irrelevant of course when it comes to “saving the planet”.

Read it here.

An editorial in The Australian today, with the sub-heading “Australia has no moral obligation to go it alone” puts the Sydney Moonbat Herald squarely in its place:

Naive media commentators advocating that Australia go it alone need to grow up before they can contribute something constructive to the debate. Yesterday’s editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, would have been more at home in Green Left Weekly than a mainstream paper.

Brushing aside concerns over unemployment and the global slowdown, the editorial slammed the Rudd Government for “compromise, back-pedalling and political expediency” over climate change. Anything less than a commitment to a 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, it ranted, would be “squibbing”. Australia, it advocated, should be out at the “forefront” cutting emissions, and not sitting around blaming China.

When Kevin Rudd appointed Professor Garnaut as his handpicked climate change adviser before last year’s election, the Herald, along with other green-leaning newspapers, applauded. But now that he has arrived at his meticulously researched conclusions, the Herald wants the Government to ignore his report and go ahead with deep but futile cuts, regardless of what the rest of world decides to do.

Read it here.

And presumably they will get off with a telling off and a slap on the wrist because, as we all know, if “preventing climate change” is involved, the UK courts will let you get away with virtually anything.

Dozens of flights were cancelled at Stansted Airport near London on Monday after activists demonstrating against global warming cut through a fence near the runway.

The airport reopened around 0800 GMT (1900 AEDT) after police arrested 57 people who had breached the perimeter fence using bolt-cutters under cover of darkness five hours earlier.

Cutting through fences with bolt cutters is what us old fogeys used to call “criminal damage”, not to mention the hundreds of other aviation and security offences that would have been committed at the same time. But that all goes out of the window when it’s justified by “saving the planet”… Airheaded Thinking Alert:

One of the activists, Lily Kember, 21, said the protesters were able to sit on a site near where aeroplanes taxi before taking off and landing.

“Being arrested is a terrifying prospect, but not nearly as terrifying as the threat of climate change,” she said.

The best thing about this story, however, is that the group involved has branded itself “Plane Stupid”, which just about sums up these protesters pretty well, wouldn’t you agree?

Read it here.