Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd seem to have a lot in common, such as:

• they are both good ol’ fashioned socialists, who believe in big government, taxing high and spending big,
• they will both be out on their ears at their respective next elections, and
• they have both bought one-way tickets on the Global Warming Express bound for Economic Oblivion City in order to “tackle climate change”.

Astonishingly, given the present global financial situation, Gordon Brown (still hanging on as PM by the skin of his teeth) and his likely successor, Ed Milliband, have actually increased their emissions reduction target from 60% to a mind-boggling 80% by 2050.

“In tough economic times, some people will ask whether we should retreat from our climate change objectives,” he said.

“In our view, it would be quite wrong to row back.

“And those who say we should misunderstand the relationship between the economic and the environmental tasks we face.”

Read it here.

The Moonbat Herald, clueless on climate as previously reported, will print anything, as long as it’s scaremongering, alarmist and sells a few more of its tawdry papers. Coming just a day or so after Watts Up With That reported that arctic sea ice was nearly 29% greater in extent than this time last year, some twit at the SMH howls:

Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record levels, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts, and reindeer herds appear to be declining, researchers have claimed.

Hey, let’s threaten the reindeer, get the kids onside (“no reindeer, no Santa” etc etc) and we can indoctrinate another huge swathe of the population – great! It states that the Arctic has been long expected to be among the first areas to show impacts from “global warming” – but warming stopped in 2001, so…

Read it here.

Kevin Rudd plans to carry on with his crazy ETS irrespective of anything that may be going on elsewhere. Not that I can think of anything right now that would get in its way… no, wait, hang on, something about a global financial crisis or something?

“What I would say to leaders around the world and the communtiy here in Australia is that the problem of climate change and global warming doesn’t disappear because of the global financial crisis,” he told Sky News.

The ABC illustrates the story with a picture of a chimney belching smoke, about which Tom Nelson rightly asks:

But is that blackish stuff actually carbon dioxide?

Read it here.

Terry McCrann, in today’s Herald Sun, has to spell out the blindingly obvious yet again (because no-one in government seems to get it, no matter how many times it is repeated). He describes the two delusions of Wong and Garnaut: first, that, despite the global economic crisis, nothing has changed in the climate change world (it certainly has, and the climate change agenda should change to match it), and second, that Australia should “go it alone”:

That was always a bad idea when the world economy was turning over in relatively good shape and China faced an endless boom that would pour money into Australia. We could afford to give up a little of our boundless prosperity for the good of the planet and to discharge our ‘moral duty’. However pointlessly.

Now it is quite simply both madness and irresponsible. Going it alone, to achieve precisely nothing, while putting the bulldozers through an already damaged economy.

Climate sense in a seriously deranged world. Read it all here.

Crikey, this kangaroo tastes bloody awful!

More on this post of yesterday, as the silliness spreads to the rest of Australia (bit like the weeds, really):

Scientists have warned that more government funding is needed to protect Australia against a climate-driven weed invasion.

And the following quote should go down in history as one of the funniest things EVER said about climate change:

“So it means that when members of the public say to the government ‘what are you doing about climate change? – the government should be saying ‘well look we’re investing in more weed control.'”

The Day of the Triffids is upon us.

Read it here (then hit self repeatedly over head with telephone directory until senses dulled)

Cognitive Dissonance: the uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously.

The BBC (Biased Broadcasting Corporation) is an expert at this, and trumpets “EU ‘resolute’ on climate targets” in its headline today (although now they’ve now modified it to read “EU ‘holds firm’ on climate goals“), when in fact nothing, and I mean nothing, could be further from the truth.

All of this is expertly deconstructed by Professor Philip Stott on Global Warming Politics. He juxtaposes the official statements with his imagined unofficial meanings, to hilarious effect:

Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi: “We don’t think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote. Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed.”

Meaning: Pazzo! Mama Mia! There is more rubbish here than in Naples. Matto da legare! Morbo della mucca pazza has melted their brains. I’m not going to see our pasta industry go down the pan for this lot!

Enjoy – read it here.

P.S. Matto da legare is stark raving mad, and Morbo della mucca pazza is Mad Cow Disease, by the way!

The Age is really on fire this morning, with alarmist pieces literally falling over themselves. It thunders:

MORE than 700,000 Australian homes are vulnerable to rising sea levels, with up to $150 billion worth of homes, property and infrastructure at risk of seawater inundation, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.

Almost all Australians will be affected by rising sea levels, according to the Federal Government’s Department of Climate Change.

It then quotes Professor Will Steffen, director of the “Fenner School of Environment and Society” at ANU, who claims:

the science … has progressed significantly since the publication of the IPCC [report] last year.

True enough, but not in the way you think, mate. He then goes into full blown scaremonger mode:

“The concern is that a threshold may soon be passed beyond which we’ll be committed to losing most or all of the Greenland ice sheet,” said Professor Steffen. “This would lead to 6 metres of sea level rise (with enormous implications for Australia), although the time frame required to lose this amount of ice is highly uncertain, ranging from a century to a millennium or more.”

Wow, 6 metres, a figure like that will almost certainly get me some good publicity. Yes, it will, as long as we have newspapers like The Age that are dumb enough to print it.

Read it here.

“So Mr Garnaut, where’s the recipe for stewed kangaroo?”

This article in The Age is enough to make one lose one’s breakfast. Under a sycophantic photo of our deluded GG, Quentin Bryce, and Ross Garnaut, it croons:

Essential reading: Ross Garnaut discusses his book with Governor-General Quentin Bryce at the launch in Melbourne yesterday.

Essential for whom, exactly? Anyway, Garnaut then went on to spout his usual brand of alarmism and self-interest, hammering home his view that financial crises may come and go, but climate change won’t go away.

Read it here, if you dare.

Frank Devine, writing in The Australian, makes the point that human concerns are being obscured by the “evangelical fervour” of proponents of human error as the cause of climate change, and gives another example of how Hollywood is acting as a mouthpiece for environmental extremists:

For further evidence of this, see the animated movie WALL-E from the Pixar studios, which contributed Finding Nemo and The Incredibles to our enjoyment.

Technically dazzling and dramatically engrossing, WALL-E is also pernicious and propagandistic.

It portrays an Earth 700 years hence so ruined by human depredation that humans have been driven from it. They float in space in giant cruise ships, grotesquely obese, almost too sluggish to think, served by robots as they consume, consume, consume.

It’s easy to imagine the reaction of children seeing WALL-E: “Poor Earth! Bad people!”

The article concludes with a quote from former Czech president Vaclav Klaus:

Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.

Indeed so. Read it here.

A great piece by Thomas Richard, over at Climate Change Fraud, about the striking differences between the scientific investigation of HIV/AIDS, and that of climate change:

It doesn’t take much hindsight to see what would have happened if HIV research had become a politicized organism. As it stands, every time research sheds new light on HIV, scientists around the world cheer on their colleagues. When new medication becomes available based on how the virus mutates, the media showers praise on this great accomplishment.
…
Like a roiling teakettle, those invested in the current CO2 theory don’t praise, support, or congratulate their fellow colleagues. They don’t bother to review the work or check the data. The new study and its author are attacked with screeching vehemence. Oddly and often enough, the attacks are non-specific and predominantly based on the study’s ‘abstract,’ which is nothing more than a snapshot of what’s inside.

Read it here.