EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso has plenty of problems in his own backyard with many EU countries understandably reluctant to cripple their economies with emissions reductions which will make virtually no difference to the climate (even if CO2 drives temperature). Add to that the problems of India and China (both of which have indicated that they put other things, like reducing poverty and increasing standards of living and health, ahead of nebulous climate change), and indeed the US, and he is clearly delusional if he believes a global deal possible in 2009.

The Age reports:

A crucial global pact on climate change is possible by next year, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said in Beijing following two days of talks between Asian and European leaders.

Speaking after two days of ASEM talks in Beijing that were dominated by the global economic turmoil, Barroso urged the world not to neglect the issue of climate change.

“The financial crisis is not a reason and it should not be a pretext to postpone our commitment to the fight against climate change,” he said.

“Because we have a financial crisis does not mean that climate change disappears.”

Read it here.

Exit CO2, enter CH4 and NF3, the new darlings of the climate change alarmists. Methane we’ve had on the radar for a while, but Nitrogen Trifluoride is the new kid on the block. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Methane comes from landfills, natural gas, coal mining, animal waste and decaying plants – but it is the decaying plants that worry scientists most. Thousands of years ago, billions of tonnes of methane were created by decaying Arctic plants. It lies frozen in permafrost wetlands trapped in the ocean floor. As the Arctic melts, the worry is that this methane will be freed.

In terms of global methane production (natural and anthropogenic), landfills contribute 7% and by contrast, ruminants contribute 19% and natural wetlands 37%. Also, given that the Arctic ice is over 30% greater than this time last year, that seems unlikely.

In contrast, nitrogen trifluoride has been considered such a small problem that it generally has been ignored. The gas is used as a cleaning agent during the manufacture of liquid crystal display television and computer monitors and for thin-film solar panels.

Earlier efforts to determine how much nitrogen trifluoride is in the air dramatically underestimated the amounts, said Ray Weiss, a geochemistry professor with Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and lead author on a nitrogen trifluoride paper to be published next month.

The level of nitrogen trifluoride in the air has quadrupled during the past decade, said Weiss, who is also a co-author of the methane paper. Nitrogen trifluoride is one of the more potent gases, thousands of times stronger in trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

Read it here.

Years ago, Tuvalu was one of the symbols of the evils of Western society, spewing endless CO2 into the atmosphere, causing the earth to warm, glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise (© IPCC and Al Gore). Given that Tuvalu was only just above sea level, this would force its inhabitants to evacuate the island. However, as always, the truth is somewhat different. Sea levels have been rising at 1 – 2 mm per year for hundreds of years, with no appreciable acceleration linked to CO2 emissions, and it is generally accepted that Tuvalu is itself sinking due to tectonic influences.

However, none of this prevents a Greens Senator in South Australia, Sarah Hanson-Young, proposing a “new class of visa for climate refugees”:

“We cannot deny Australia’s complicity in this environmental crisis that is now impacting most dramatically on those whose homeland is more vulnerable to sea level rise,” she said.

” As the wealthiest country in the Pacific, Australia can lead the global community on this humanitarian issue.

“Australia must be proactive in establishing a new class of visa for climate change refugees.”

Who cares if the story is out of date, as long as it can be used to advance the Greens’ agenda.

Read it here.

In a move likely to cause a big stir in Coalition circles, the National Party has dumped its support for an ETS until the rest of the world implements one. The Nationals are now the only party to have the courage to stand up against Rudd & Co’s ridiculous “carbon pollution reduction scheme”, given that the Liberals only plan to delay its introduction by a couple of years. Senator Ron Boswell said:

“We should not go down this track that is going to hit rural Australia and primary industry the hardest when it’s picked up in 2014. We should draw the line in the sand for this party and say that we will only go this far.”

Well said. Let’s start the timer, and see how long it takes for Rudd, Wong or one of their cronies to squeal “deniers” or “sceptics”. My bet is less than 24 hours.

Read it here.

Thanks to Tom Nelson. The Head of the IPCC has clearly been inhaling too much CO2 recently, when he comments:

“In the last year and a half, there has been a massive explosion of awareness; however, the media has not reported enough about the emergency and depth of action,” said Pachauri, who has led the United Nations panel since 2002.

What planet does Pachauri live on? Doesn’t he ever read the papers or listen to the radio or watch TV? Is he so insulated from the real world in his IPCC bubble that he hasn’t seen the thousands upon thousands of scare stories and alarmism every week in the media?

Pachauri suggested that major news agencies now rely too much on high-level science reports or large climate-related events for their stories, rather than examples of climate change’s ongoing effects. “We need to go beyond the cyclical coverage of climate change and emphasize the day-to-day relevance,” he said.

Heaven forbid that news agencies actually read the science reports (media coverage shows that they do nothing of the sort anyway – they just take the sound bite that will sell most papers/attract most listeners or viewers, irrespective of its scientific merit). I’m afraid this guy is well on the way to becoming categorised as an environmental whacko.

Read it here.

Thanks to Climate Change Skeptic.

There has been a lot of publicity about a recent alarmist WWF report:

WWF’s report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is accelerating far beyond the IPCC’s forecasts.

As an example it says the first tipping point may have already been reached in the Arctic where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years – something that hasn’t occurred for 1m years. This could result in rapid and abrupt climate change rather than the gradual changes forecast by the IPCC.

Climate Change Skeptic takes a cool look at these scaremongering claims, and finds that they are pure fiction:

Whatever the case, there are a lot of good reasons to believe we are not seeing an “acceleration” in global warming. And a lot of very, very good reasons to believe we are not reaching a “tipping point.” Tipping point implies that we have entered a regime where the climate is dominated by runaway positive feedback.

Read it here.

From Climate Change Fraud.

This will give the environmentalists something to cogitate on over their breakfasts. It has been disclosed that one of the biggest sources of the new evil trace gas, Nitrogen Trifluoride, is the production of that icon of “clean enegy”, the solar panel. So the reduction of CO2 emissions by using renewable energy sources such as solar will actually increase the concentration of a gas that is 17,000 times more potent in its greenhouse effect. Oh, the irony!

Read it here.

This time it is Nitrogen Trifluoride, which is apparently 17,000 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2 – which makes CO2 look a bit, well, innocuous, maybe? Fortunately, there isn’t much of it in the atmosphere at the moment, 5,400 tons.

“Isn’t much” turns out to be the understatement of the year, because given the mass of the atmosphere is 5×10¹⁵ tons, 5400 tons works out to be 0.0000000001% of the total, and at the current growth rate it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to reach even one hundredth of one percent, by which time technology will have found ways to reduce its use. However, scientists are already gearing up to make NF3 the next evil trace gas:

Michael Prather, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California at Irvine, noted nitrogen trifluoride is being used more commonly and predicted that more would be found in the atmosphere.

“It is now shown to be an important greenhouse gas,” Mr Prather… said in a statement. “Now we need to get hard numbers on how much is flowing through the system, from production to disposal.”

Read it here.

Andrew Bolt comments on Tony Jones’ world-renowned impartiality in last night’s Lateline on ABC, which interviewed three climate scientists and a UN official.

Showing his famed concern for balance, host Tony Jones presents a range of views from this:

PROF. ANN HENDERSON-SELLERS, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY: A lot of people like myself, and I believe many, many scientists now, who are frantically, hysterically worried.

To this:

PROF. DAVID KAROLY, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: The only way that I could see the climate system in 50 years time or 100 years time being cooler than at present is if the earth got hit by an asteroid and basically human civilisation was destroyed.

I think that covers the subject.

UPDATE

I’m unfair to Jones. He did cover the views of the thousands of sceptical scientists:

TONY JONES: Do you think they are flat-earthers, or akin to flat-earthers, people who believe the earth is flat?

RAJENDRA PACHUARI: …We still have a flat earth society in existence in the world somewhere or the other. So they clearly are looking at the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, and denying it. So in that sense they are flat-earthers.

What could be fairer?

Read it here.

The Head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, spoke at the World Metropolis Conference in Sydney, where his message was entirely as to be expected, namely “it’s not too late to save the planet, but emissions reductions must be even greater than previously thought”. He sprinkled his address with plenty of scaremongering and alarmism:

If you look at parts of Africa, by 2020 there will be 75 million to 250 million people living under water stress on account of climate change,” he said yesterday. “Are we going to ignore the welfare and, I would say, even the peace and stability of societies that are so vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and say ‘No, we can’t do it’?”
…
“There are a section of scientists and some analysts that are actually now saying that 450 [ppm] is a bit too high and what we should be targeting is 350.”
…
Dr Pachauri warned the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was already contributing to sea-level rise. If the world’s big ice sheets kept melting, “you are talking about well over a metre of sea-level rise and that, to my mind, is going to be disastrous for hundreds of millions of people.“

He, too, is guilty of sickening Schadenfreude at the current economic crisis, setting up the hackneyed straw man of “unregulated capitalism”, and then knocking it down, exposing the true agenda of the IPCC as a deeply political, anti-capitalist, anti-development front for the UN’s environmental extremists:

“I think unbridled capitalism without any regulation, without some control, is something people are not going to accept now.”

Where has there ever been capitalism without regulation? A truly idiotic comment which completely ignores the fact that capitalism as an economic model has raised living standards and wealth for billions of people throughough the globe, and to a far greater degree than any other such model (think Communism, for example, flourishing the world over, no, hang on…).

Read it here.