Terry McCrann, in The Australian, comments that two recent examples of economic modelling by the Treasury, on the financial meltdown and the impact of an ETS respectively, demonstrate how that department’s tenuous grip on reality has finally evaporated.

On Sunday, October 12, Treasury signed off on Kevin Rudd’s unlimited bank deposit guarantee.

On Thursday, the Treasury modelling on his emissions trading scheme was released. These events bookend the shredding of Treasury’s credibility over 18 days in October.

The first was inexcusable, creating a mess for markets and investors. The second was disgraceful, a statistical fraud on the Australian people. Apart from the sheer waste of time and resources — and balloons of carbon dioxide released.

And, rightly, he is particularly scathing about the ETS modelling:

It purported to show that we could have our low carbon economic cake and still get to eat more and more of it. That sharply reducing emissions would hardly dent our growth path out to 2050.

That broadly, instead of the economy growing at 1.4 per cent per person per year in real terms, it would grow between 1.2 and 1.3 per cent instead.

If an adult of reasonable intelligence and basic economic understanding can’t see immediately that this is sheer, utter rubbish, we really do have a problem at the centre of economic advice in this country.

And he concludes:

Treasury was one of the last bastions of reason. It has now signed on as official “statistician” in Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong’s First Church of Climate Apocalypse.

Read it here.

Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation gave the first Boyer Lecture at the Opera House yesterday. He made some comments about climate change, which the mainstream media picked up and spun in such a way as to indicate that he was a closet greenie, but that isn’t the whole story. This is the text:

Climate change is another area where Australia needs to lead. I’m not sold on the more apocalyptic visions of climate change.

Unlike too many policiticans…

But I believe the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt. I believe there will be great rewards for those Australians who discover new ways of reducing emissions or cleaning the environment. [He then briefly discusses his own companies’ emissions reduction programs.] Our emphasis should be on practical solutions. It is to take the lead in developing real alternatives to solve the problem by offering clean, cheap energy to meet the growing demand.

I don’t agree that the “benefit of the doubt” argument, but as much as the next person, I am in favour of reducing pollution and cleaning the environment – who wouldn’t be? Practical solutions means adaptation. But his next comments are the most pertinent (completely overlooked by the Herald and The Age, of course):

We cannot address climate change merely with emotion. The ultimate solution is not to punish the economy by imposing standards that the rest of the world will never meet.

This, unfortunately, is precisely what Rudd, Wong & Co intend to do. And finally:

It is to take the lead in developing real alternatives to solve the problem by offering clean, cheap energy to meet the growing demand.

Read it here.

Apologies for yet another Age story, but they just don’t give up!

Atmospheric concentrations of methane, “a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide”, have risen for the first time in eight years, prompting concern about the pace of climate change.
…
CSIRO senior climate scientist Paul Fraser said the data was in line with predictions that rapid melting of Arctic ice would create natural wetlands, one of the most common methane emitters. “This is not good news for global warming,” he said.

That would be the “global warming” that has run amok since 2001? And, as any fule kno, the Arctic ice recovery is over 30% faster than last year…

Tom Nelson sums up the response we should all adopt:

Would it be prudent to run for the hills every time methane rises by 10 parts per billion (with a “b)?

Read it here.

Glenn Milne spells out the hopelessly optimistic assumptions on which the Treasury modelling of the economic impact of an ETS was based:

Remember, these soft impact results of an ETS rely on two key projections; one is that next year’s UN-sponsored Copenhagen climate change summit, the successor to Kyoto, will actually reach universal agreement on a global response. And two, that as result all world players, from the US to China, will begin a concerted policy reaction by 2010.

Based on the chaotic and at times contradictory rejoinder to the current global financial crisis by the same players you’d be within your rights to say: “In your dreams”.

Not to mention the fact, which Malcolm Turnbull legitimately has done, that all this Treasury modelling was done prior to the collapse of global markets. Surely a key point if you’re looking to the future?

Opposition spokesman Andrew Robb is pulling no punches:

“I suspect the Government is hiding the truth – withholding the real impact of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, to help them blunt growing apprehension about their rush to impose their emissions trading scheme,” Robb said.
…
“Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd have said ad nauseam the ‘world changed three weeks ago’ and yet they are completely ignoring the effect of this financial crisis. It beggars belief.”

Read it here.

Celebs seem to have a thing about the environment, despite mostly having carbon footprints that would dwarf a small town themselves. Somehow, because they’re on TV, or kick a ball about on a Saturday afternoon, they feel the urge to pontificate on matters political (always from a Left-wing actorish perspective of course) about which they know little or nothing.

So here we have Kath & Kim, actor Michael Caton, ex-Collingwood footballer Shane Wakelin and musician John Butler all “pleading” to save their favourite places from “climate change”, based on the Australian Conservation Foundation report which this post discusses. For those of you who didn’t quite get it the first time, the ACF is the organisation in Australia which promotes Al Gore’s despicable Climate Project, whose sole purpose is to disseminate to the unsuspecting public the lies and propaganda contained in An Inconvenient Truth.

As one would expect, the Celebs are happy to associate themselves unquestioningly with this report, and, typically, end up looking foolish (imagine Britney Spears discussing the niceties of the Large Hadron Collider), although admittedly in this case she tries hard to make a joke out of it:

TV character Kim Craig, one half of television duo Kath & Kim, is championing the cause of the local backyard – at risk from rising temperatures, reduced rainfall and increased water restrictions.

“It makes me gropable to think that because of global warming, this back garden could soon be a dust bowl!” she said.

Read it here.

The Age really is my favourite newspaper. Every day, I can guarantee that there will be some nonsensical scaremongering rubbish ripe for pillory and ridicule. Today is no exception. I can only assume that their journalists live in a cave, when an article starts like this:

WE ALL know about the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from extreme climate change, but the Australian Conservation Foundation wants to ram home to Victorians that the effects of a hotter world will hit much closer to home.

As for the Barrier Reef, see here. It’s been there for millions of years, and will still be there in millions of years. As for “extreme climate change” and a “hotter world” has nobody pointed out to this deluded journo that there hasn’t been any “global warming” since 2001, and records for cold are currently being shattered all over the globe (e.g. snow in London in October for the first time for 70 years). And it gets worse:

According to Australian Conservation Foundation executive director Don Henry, the report, Saving Australia’s Special Places, has brought together scientific data from many sources to show that the dangers of a hotter world are widespread and personal.

“A lot of us probably haven’t realised how many of Australia’s iconic places and activities are at real risk,” Mr Henry said.

“When we go through the science, it’s deeply concerning.”

What science would that be? Let’s not forget that the ACF is the organisation that runs Al Gore’s despicable “Climate Project” in Australia, so they are probably treating the outright lies in An Inconvenient Truth as gospel. The article then lists the following effects of “global warming”:

• The Aussie barbecue will go, because it’s too hot (seriously, I’m not inventing this)
• Thousands will die from heat related deaths
• Wine producers will go out of business due to bushfires, rampaging weeds and pests
• Skiers won’t have any snow
• Beaches will suffer erosion and flooding ($150 billion of houses under threat, due to sea level rises)
• Kakadu wetlands in danger of inundation from a 59-centimetre rise in sea level (note a 59 cm rise, not a 60cm rise or a 58cm rise – these models are amazingly accurate, you know)
• Increasingly fierce bushfires
• Murray-Darling Basis will lose 92% of its agriculture (again, note 92%, not 91% or 93%)
• Thousands of tourism-related jobs and $37 billion in exports from tourism lost

And, as expected, Mr Henry plays the joker at the end:

The good news, he says, is that the situation can be redeemed with strong global action, and Australia can, and should, lead the way.

“Australia can play a leadership role in convincing other countries to cut their emissions only if we are doing the right thing here at home.

Idiotic, delusional, misleading – after the previous post, no wonder this kind of thing is making people sick.

Read it here.

It certainly makes me sick, but not in the way this article means. The constant media message about the dangers of “global warming” is causing people to develop a form of obsessive/compulsive disorder, and sufferers have been named “Carborexics”:

Australian anxiety expert Dr Mairwen Jones said there had been an increase in patients suffering from climate change-related obsessive compulsive “checking” disorders.

She said some patients had begun checking their gas and power meters constantly to monitor their usage.

“A person who says, ‘I constantly check the tap’ – it’s not that they’re worried about a flood,” Dr Jones said.

“They will say, ‘I don’t want to waste water . . . I’m worried about my impact on the environment.”‘

It’s tragic really – the public has been brainwashed by the media and government for so long about global warming that it’s now starting to affect their health.

Read it here.

Environmental activists managed to disrupt operations at one of the country’s largest coal-power stations at Muswellbrook, in the New South Wales Hunter Valley this morning.

Four protesters have attached themselves to conveyor belts while another 25 have been taken away from the site by police.

They’re probably following the lead of the Kingsnorth Six in the UK, the Greenpeace activists who, in a decision that has brought humiliation upon the UK judiciary, were acquitted of charges of criminal damage to the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, because they successfully argued the “lawful excuse” defence, and were acting to prevent a “greater damage”, namely the damage the power station caused to the environment. This was the case in which James Hansen, who is the ultimate AGW fruitcake (still paid very nicely by NASA, thank you), gave “expert” evidence in support of the activists. You can read the whole sorry tale here.

Fortunately, the Australian courts have not yet followed the UK’s moonbat judiciary down this dangerous path (as a further example of this madness, Lord Phillips, recently retired Lord Chief Justice cheerfully abandoned the fundamental and centuries old principle of “equality before the law” and said that Muslims in the UK should be able to use Islamic law in certain situations), so with luck, our home grown activists will get the criminal records they deserve.

Once the law allows protesters to mount a defence of “lawful excuse” for vandalism justified by “climate change”, you are on a very steep, very slippery slope towards anarchy.

Read it here.

ACM Idiotic Comment of the Day gong is proudly awarded to the Bureau of Meteorology, for linking increased temperatures in the Northern Territory to “global warming”:

The Bureau of Meteorology says high temperatures recorded across the Northern Territory this month may be indicative of global warming.

Indicative of the “global warming” that hasn’t happened since 2001, right? Nonsensical rubbish. Also, this is an interesting contrast, firstly from the same story above:

There has also been an increase of rainfall over Darwin, which recorded its wettest October in 10 years.

Due to “global warming” of course, but at the other end of Australia, from The Australian:

The decline in rainfall over southern Australia was “pretty much consistent with what we would expect with climate change”.

That’s what is so great about “climate change” – it’s so versatile!

Read it here and here.

Hot on the heels of the “frogs not being killed off by climate change” debacle (see here), The Australian reports that the barrier reef has the ability to adapt to changes in climate. Why this comes as a shock to anyone is beyond me, given that parts of the reef are millions of years old and would have gone through multiple ice ages, multiple interglacials, multiple climate optima and goodness knows what else, yet it’s still there.

University of Queensland marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said yesterday that sea temperatures were likely to rise 2C over the next three decades, which would undoubtedly kill the reef.

But several of Professor Hoegh-Guldberg’s colleagues have taken issue with his prognosis.

Andrew Baird, principal research fellow at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said there were “serious knowledge gaps” about the impact rising sea temperatures would have on coral.

“Ove is very dismissive of coral’s ability to adapt, to respond in an evolutionary manner to climate change,” Dr Baird said.

“I believe coral has an underappreciated capacity to evolve. It’s one of the biological laws that, wherever you look, organisms have adapted to radical changes.”

How many other scare stories about the ecology and environment of the planet being damaged “by climate change” are equally misguided? There are two points here:

• climate change happens, and has been happening since the dawn of time without any help from humans – get used to it;
• adaptation, not pointless “carbon reduction schemes”, is the key – if coral can do it, so can we.

Read it here.