The brilliant Bjørn Lomborg delivers a timely analysis of the AGW alarmists’ trick of spreading bad news at the expense of good news.

This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.

Read it all.

Vested Interest Alert: Environment ministers from more than 30 countries are at a carbon-fuelled jolly in Warsaw, where they are all struggling to remember the reason for their existence in the face of the current (more urgent) financial crisis. Remember, this is only a pre-conference meeting, as the main gab-fest in Poznan in December will have delegates from no less than 190 countries, and will have a carbon footprint the size of Siberia.

“There was a very strong consensus that the current financial turmoil should not be an excuse to slow down action on climate change,” UN climate chief Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press after the talks Tuesday.

And they are starting to trot out regularly the curious argument that tackling climate change will actually help the economy – although how throwing trillions of dollars down the gurgler to tinker with a harmless trace gas can do anything other than cripple economies left, right and centre is beyond me.

“Many ministers said that addressing climate change can deliver important economic benefits that are important in the light of the current financial situation as well,” de Boer said.

Our own “Climate Penny” was there of course:

Senator Wong told ABC Radio: “The current financial crisis does not lessen the need for the nations of the world to deal with climate change.”

I don’t think you need to worry about your job at Rudd & Co… The reality is that many countries in the EU have serious concerns about the sums of money that will be required to comply with pointless emissions reduction schemes, although whether they will have the bottle to stand firm and oppose them is another matter.

Read it here.

Andrew Bolt is rightly fuming that the new GG, Ms Quentin Bryce, will launch the book version of the Garnaut report. She doesn’t appear to have been told that as the representative in Australia of the Queen, she is supposed to put herself above politics, and represent all of us, not just those who vote Labor. He continues:

Shameless. She’s actually helping to spruik a highly political document, written by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s hand-picked advisor on climate change as part of a report to government.

What next? Will she launch Labor’s next election campaign, too?

Very probably. Read it here.

It’s inevitable, I suppose, that our predominantly left-wing educationalists will try to sneak “climate change” into the school curriculum, indoctrinating our future generations with a “watermelon” agenda (green on the outside, red on the inside), and telling them what to think, rather than how to think.

SCIENCE classes will be revamped to place more emphasis on contemporary topics such as climate change, stem cell research and hybrid cars under proposed changes to the school curriculum.

Heaven help us. Read it here.

The business community is becoming increasingly concerned that the introduction of an ETS in 2010 will damage the economy, yet Rudd & Co are determined to press on with their misguided plans.

“The current financial crisis does not lessen the need for the nations of the world to deal with climate change,” Senator [Penny] Wong told ABC Radio today.

However, Woodside Chief Executive Don Voelte was slightly more blunt:

“Heck, I think it’s off the table right now,” he told ABC Radio.

“You can’t put something like that in at this time until we get this whole fiscal chaos that is going on in the world straightened out.”

Sadly, the Australian Industry Group are not exactly standing up for business interests with a lukewarm agreement to a start in 2010:

“If we start sensibly, if we start cautiously, maybe we can learn how to operate in this new environment and the risks will be reduced.”

Not exactly what business leaders would want to hear.

Read it here.

Interesting results from two surveys released today. The first, from News.com.au, informs us that:

ONE in five Australians believe it is too late to save polar bears from extinction – and experts are not much more optimistic.
…
A survey of 1122 news.com.au readers found that 20.4 per cent of people believed polar bears were doomed.

And yet on the other hand, also on News.com.au:

ALMOST half of Australians believe the signing of the Kyoto Protocol – a cornerstone of Kevin Rudd’s election campaign – was a waste of time.

But then again, in the same article, News.com.au can barely conceal its glee that:

A whopping [love the adjective – Ed] 73 per cent of respondents to a news.com.au survey, conducted by CoreData, also said the Rudd Government was not doing enough or could be doing more to combat climate change.

So, on the one hand, Kyoto was a waste of time, but on the other, the Government’s not doing enough? We can, however, deduce that there is an element of the cute/cuddle factor at work here. The polar bear has become an icon for eco-warriors everywhere, and whether numbers are in fact going up or down, the public will assuage their collective guilt by crying mea culpa. This response is further reinforced by the fact that Australians apparently are more concerned about saving koalas (cute/cuddly – 37%) than emus (ugly/lanky – 4%).

All this coverage unfortunately gives ample opportunity for Penny Wong to spout more of her standard issue claptrap. “Carbon Pollution” alert:

“Our plan to tackle climate change has three pillars: reducing carbon pollution, helping to shape a global solution, and adapting to the climate change we can’t avoid.”

Lastly, there is an interesting gender gap on the issue of whether there was enough evidence to link human activity to climate change: men – 54%, women – 85%. Any suggestions?

One thing these surveys do demonstrate is that the Australian public are thoroughly confused by the issues – not surprising since they are being fed a diet of alarmist propaganda through the media and government – many people suspect that there’s more going on than meets the eye, but they are not sure what. Let’s hope they try to find out.

Read it here and here.

OK – listen up, all you deniers and sceptics out there. I happen to know the true reason that you can’t accept that climate change is real and caused by us humans. It’s not because the IPCC is a horribly corrupted political body spewing out dodgy evidence to support pre-conceived conclusions, or that temperatures have fallen since 2001 despite a significant rise in CO2, or that there’s no tell-tale signature hot spot above the tropics, or because you might be a little suspicious when anyone tells you the “science is settled” and therefore we don’t need to discuss is anymore so off you go and play in the sand pit. No, it’s none of these things: it’s because your poor little brains cannot deal with the psychological consequences of acceptance.

So, in order to help you all out, some kindly fellow at celsias.com (no, I hadn’t heard of it either), and thanks to Tom Nelson for the link, has prepared a step-by-step guide to coming out of the sceptical closet and embracing AGW. Highlights include:

• Al Gore – the real, caring man behind that pasty slab of a face
• “Dr Pachauri, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the IPCC” (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)
• Everything you always wanted to know about hockey sticks
• Mantra: Every day and in every way, the Medieval Warm Period is getting smaller and smaller
• Kangaroo ain’t all that bad (optional session for Aussie readers)

Sign up now, before it’s too late!

Here Down Under we can’t compete with the lunacy they churn out in the UK – we’re just amateurs by comparison. Anyway, here’s some more barking mad predictions from some group called the Forum for the Future:

Climate change will force refugees to move to Antarctica by 2030, researchers have predicted. Among future scenarios are the Olympics being held in cyberspace and central Australia being abandoned, according to the think tank report.

As the world fails to act on climate change, researchers predict that global trade will collapse as oil prices break through $400 a barrel and electrical appliances will get automatically turned off when households exceed energy quotas.

Australia and Oklahoma will be abandoned because of water shortages and athletes will stay at home in the world’s first virtual Olympics, competing against each other in virtual space with billions of spectators.

All I can say is, whatever our Forum of the Future guy was on when he came up with all that, I want some too. But here’s the cop-out at the end:

He said the crystal ball survey did not seek to project what was most likely to happen, just some of the possibilities.

So in fact, it’s all just steaming BS portrayed as fact. Read it here.

Prof Garnaut is in the news again, this time reminding everyone that the current financial meltdown is no excuse for delaying Australia’s tinkering with a harmless trace gas in the atmosphere (in order to make a hopeless political gesture towards averting “climate change”):

“The financial crisis does not materially reduce the magnitude, or the urgency of the mitigation task, nor does it create a sound reason for delaying mitigation,” he said.

Thanks Prof – don’t call us…

Read it here.

A typically incisive piece in the Daily Telegraph from that entertaining columnist Piers Ackerman, in which he exposes Rudd and Swan as politicians hopelessly out of their depth in government:

Rudd tries to look grave and prime ministerial, and Swan does his best to look comfortable in meetings with international economic boffins, but both fail. They don’t look natural. They look as if they’re acting and, increasingly rapidly, the wider electorate is starting to see what too few saw before last November’s election.
…
Labor’s problem is it’s not just the economic times denting its popularity, it’s the lack of plausible leadership.

Ackerman queries why the electorate should believe Rudd & Co on the economy when they have set in motion policies that will increase unemployment and damage economic prospects, in particular the ETS:

[Rudd] and Climate Minister Penny Wong persist in their bizarre claim that not doing anything about climate change is going to cost more than doing something, even though Treasury documents quietly released on the Friday before the recent long weekend clearly show that Rudd’s emissions reduction plans will damage the GDP and create further unemployment.

And he sums up the government’s problems succinctly:

But at the heart of the Rudd Government is a great emptiness, a void between the rhetoric and the reality, the empathy and the action.
…
Eleven months on, Australians have confidence in themselves but every reason to have no confidence in the Rudd Government.

Read it here.