Spoof alert… In a shock new development, a climate change expert has proposed that Australia could solve its energy crisis by making billions of “lemon batteries” to supply endless renewable electricity. The suggestion follows the “lemon powered torch” that made its way across Australia to demonstrate support for a 50% cut in emissions by 2020. Speaking today, the expert said:

“I remember making a battery from a lemon in school science lessons. Recently, in a carbon-dioxide-induced haze, I realised that lemons are the obvious way to solve our energy crisis. Not only are they clean and green (yellow, actually, but you could use limes instead…) there will be millions of jobs planting and harvesting the lemons, then sticking bits of metal into them to make the batteries and wiring them up to the national grid. Not only that, but there will be plenty left over to squeeze into my gin and tonic after a taxing day at the office of my cushy climate-related corporation.”

Not really, but the actual suggestion isn’t much better…

Read it here.

Waterbirds in Victoria have declined by 80% over the past 25 years, but The Age has to concede through gritted teeth that it isn’t attributable to climate change:

Scientists from the University of NSW have taken to the air to criss-cross Australia over the next two months for what they say is the world’s largest waterbird aerial survey.

A team of 12 spotters flying in three light aircraft, mostly at treetop level, has begun counting the birds on every important wetland and river in the country.

They started in south-western Victoria and the findings are alarming. Team leader Professor Richard Kingsford said the 80% drop was not from climate change.

“It is mainly due to the alienation of the natural river flows and the over-allocation of river water to uses such as agriculture,” he said.

This must be some kind of record.

Read it here.

Thanks to Climate Change Fraud. Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” talks to FrontPage Magazine:

I have followed green politics for a while now. I was asked to make a documentary series for Channel 4 in the UK more than a decade ago (they got very cross with me) so I’ve been sucked into it in a way. It is transparently obvious that the greens sit squarely in the tradition of Romanticism. Like the romantics, they hate industry, love nature, idealise peasant life, they think capitalism is wicked, they think people in modern society lead depraved shallow lives and have forgotten the true value of things, they don’t like cars or supermarkets or lots of proles taking cheap long-haul holidays, etc, etc.
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Romanticism is in essence anti-Capitalist. Not in the sense of traditional Marxism. The Marxists wanted to go forwards not backwards. They wanted to build bigger factories than the capitalists, not folksy medieval craft workshops. No. Romanticism was a kind of reactionary anti-capitalism. And it was the ideology and aesthetic worldview of those people who lost most, or gained least from capitalism.
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You can easily tell that global warming is really a political idea rather than a scientific one. In any gathering in polite society you can tell who will be ‘pro-global warming’ and who will be sceptical, in the same way as you can guess who will hate George Bush, or who will be sympathetic to Sarah Palin.

Read it here.

Check out this post if you want to see how our ever-impartial ABC handled the showing of his documentary in Australia.

Stephen Matchett in The Wry Side discusses the demise of global warming hysteria now that the public actually have something serious to worry about – the economy.

Then the boom went bust and all of a sudden global warming was off the agenda. People became more interested in the state of their superannuation than greenhouse gases. And as for the damage done by economic growth, instead of worrying that there was too much of it the big issue became whether there would not be enough.

Instead of people promising pollsters that they would be willing to make using electricity a Christmas treat to save the planet, it’s unemployment, not the environment, that is now top of the polling pops.

This is all terribly unfair to people who invested decades of intellectual capital in warning us about global warming, but that’s the caprice of the market for you.

Read it all here.

Pots and kettles spring to mind here, as, without any hint of irony, Wayne Swan takes a swipe at Warwick McKibbin of the RBA, who yesterday criticised the Treasury’s ETS modelling (see here):

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan has dismissed the advice of a leading climate change economist to delay its proposed emissions trading scheme until international negotiations are completed.
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“He must have a crystal ball if he knows the outcome of the international negotiations,” Mr Swan said.

Is that the same crystal ball the Treasury used to come up with its predictions last week? If so, I think it’s got a crack in it…

Read it here.

… and told “don’t do it again.” Equality before the law, except where climate change is concerned. If you claim that your actions are justified by the need to save the planet, it appears that the judiciary will look the other way. In this case, even though they were ordered to pay over $23,000 in restitution and fined a pretty paltry $500, no convictions were recorded. Why not? If they had caused the same damage to a public library for example, they wouldn’t have been given such lenient treatment. I suppose coal-fired power stations are fair game?

Magistrate Haydn Stjernqvist said the activists had put a heavy emphasis on the need to act on climate change in their peaceful protest.

Why on earth did the magistrate feel the need to say this? Did he allow their cause to affect his judgment? It is only a matter of time until this becomes the norm, given Al Gore’s recent call to arms to the younger generation to engage in civil disobedience (see here) and the UK court’s insane decision to acquit the Kingsnorth Six (see here).

The latest advert for the Toyota Prius claims that by driving one for 10 years or 100,000km, you can save 7.5 tonnes of CO2 as compared to a regular petrol-engined car.

Let’s put that into perspective. If you drove a Prius for, say, 70,000 years, you would save the same amount of CO2 that a large coal-fired power station generates in a day.

Moral of the story: don’t fool yourself into thinking that driving a butt-ugly hybrid car is anything but a feel-good gesture.

There seems to be no end to the mushrooming growth of businesses making a quick buck from climate change hysteria. As reported here, revenues from such businesses worldwide is now $300 billion. An example of one in the news today is the “Carbon Reduction Institute”. Even its name has an error in it – carbon is not carbon dioxide, but hey, who cares about the details? It also has the amusing URL “noco2.com.au” – and although it technically refers to making businesses carbon neutral, it is ambiguous enough for many to think it refers to CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore, for the first time (drum roll please), a URL wins today’s “ACM Idiotic Comment of the Day” gong!

[CRI Managing Director] Mr [Rob] Cawthorne explained how the Federal Government’s proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme would affect their businesses.

He said everyone was involved “no matter what the personal standing on climate change was”.

“If we don’t curb climate change it will make the economic crisis now seem like a pittance,” he said.

And by the way, our business can relieve yours of substantial sums of money that could be far better spent on something else (anything else for that matter) for providing pointless “climate change consultancy services”, heavily relying on the principle that there’s one born every minute.

Read it here.

Clearly the RBA doesn’t think much of the Treasury’s economic models either, which will probably turn out to be about as reliable as the IPCC’s climate models (which spectacularly failed to predict nearly a decade of global cooling).

Warwick McKibbin, who sits on the RBA board and is a climate change economist, said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should not act before Australia knows what commitments other countries will make to reducing carbon output.
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“There is no way that at Copenhagen there can be a firm commitment on abatement because the US administration, whoever it is, won’t have the people in place to negotiate a rules-based system,” Professor McKibbin told the West Australian newspaper.

“What they will negotiate in Copenhagen is a set of principles – if you’re lucky – and hopefully they’ll separate mitigation or cutting emissions from investment in new technologies and forestry and land use actions.”

Read it here.

For anyone who is still deluded into thinking that there will be a utopian global deal on emissions in Copenhagen next year, and that the rest of the world will “follow Australia’s lead” in crippling their economies with pointless emissions trading schemes, the following from the Canada Free Press (thanks to Climate Change Fraud) should put you straight:

China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol— which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom note to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP—about $300 billion per year—to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.
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China, India, Brazil, and Mexico had already demanded—in July— that the developed countries cut their own emissions by 80–95 percent by 2050. Very unlikely. The EU has loudly boasted of trying to set an 80-percent cut in its emissions, but that now looks impossible. Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are part of a “blocking force” saying says they can’t afford to give up coal and oil during a financial crisis.

Even Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, who helped to develop the Kyoto protocol, has abandoned attempts to reduce emissions and is building more brown coal power stations. A global deal is so unlikely to happen that it makes Rudd, Wong & Co’s “plough on at all costs and the world will follow” position on the introduction of an ETS even more untenable than it was …

Read it here.