On three occasions since the start of this blog have I had to comment on Governor-General Quentin Bryce overstepping the bounds of her duties as representative of the Queen in Australia by getting involved in political matters, in particular climate issues (see here, here and here).

And now she’s at it again, off on a jolly to Abu Dhabi to speak at the World Future Energy Summit (a fancy title for a gathering of eco-fundamentalists discussing solar and wind power), sharing the stage with Lord Stern, Tony Blair and none other than IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. So clearly no politics there, then…?

She displays an extraordinary lack of judgement on these matters, and is showing herself to be wholly unsuitable for the role of GG of Australia.

Read it here.

A couple of bizarre headlines from the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, which seems to be reporting any old nonsense these days:

Shiny leafed crops could help reduce global warming, claims study

and

Paint cities white to tackle global warming, scientist says

I present them without comment. Make of them what you will.

Read it here and here.

Or so says the Sydney Morning Herald in its usual style of doom-and-gloom alarmism. Under the headline “Seeing Heard is believing in global warming” (which I had to read about four times before understanding it…) it wails:

The latest bulletin from Heard Island in the Southern Ocean says temperatures are up, rapid retreat of glaciers continues unabated, and a peninsula has been split by the sea to create a new island.

No possibility of all this being caused by anything else, other than global warming? No? Just wondered, because Heard Island is in fact one enormous volcano… as is its neighbour, McDonald Island, which (the article itself concedes) has doubled in size in only a few years.

From the Australian Heard Island website:

Volcanic activity has been observed at Heard Island since the mid 1980s, with fresh lava flows on the southwest flanks of the island.

I wonder what lava flows do to glaciers? Or local temperatures? And I wonder what volcanic activity does to land levels? Move them around a bit maybe?

Personally, I won’t be relying on this particular “global warming barometer”…

Read it here.

Like waiting for a bus, you wait ages for a “scientific organisation selling out to climate change alarmism” story, only for two to come along at once. Following on from my last post, here’s another scientific institution abandoning impartiality and embracing politics, the American Meteorological Society, which has awarded its highest honour to none other than bonkers warming alarmist James Hansen (thanks to Jennifer Marohasy). Hansen, as any fule kno, is in charge of the highly suspect GISS surface temperature record which only a couple of months ago was discovered copying data from one month to the next… Hansen also:

has only contempt for so-called climate change sceptics claiming they operate like tobacco scientists and he has suggested that CEOs of fossil energy companies should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

So pretty well balanced, then. As Jennifer so rightly says:

It seems we live during a period where passion is valued much more than wisdom even by scientific societies.

Read it here.

Vested Interest Alert: The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering has, unsurprisingly, announced that Australia requires a “technology revolution” in order to “tackle climate change” and that the bill for such revolution will be a cool $6 billion.

The report argues that emissions trading, which will put a price on carbon pollution from 2010, is “necessary but not sufficient” to tackle climate change.

Without massive spending on technology, Australia will not meet its promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.

Like the Royal Society in the UK, which has abandoned all trace of its historic heritage as a body for impartial, sceptical investigation of science, and made clear that “the debate is over” on climate change, here we have another science related organisation swallowing the alarmist agenda (and cashing in as well).

As I have said before, science goes out of the window when you follow the money… Both the Royal Society and the ATSE have become political, not scientific, organisations. How many more of the world’s prestigious scientific bodies will sell out for a quick buck in the climate change economy?

Read it here.

This should be one to watch in the months ahead. You will recall the protest at the third runway earlier this week, and the purchase of land by celebs (and Greenpeace) in order to thwart its development. The UK Government has given the go-ahead for the new development citing the fact that it will create 65,000 jobs and will add GBP 7 billion to the economy every year.

In a bizarre turn of events, however, the Conservatives, usually the party of economic good sense, have opposed the development, vowing to scrap the plan if they win the next election.

Conservative transport spokeswoman Theresa Villiers said: “Be in no doubt, this is a bleak day for our environment. Labour’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow would inflict devastating damage on the environment.”

We sure live in strange times – when Labour governments are more concerned about the economy and Conservatives more about the environment…

Read it here.

Despite temperatures climbing into the mid-40s yesterday in Australia, records weren’t broken despite the fact that we’ve had 70 years of “global warming” since they were set in 1939 …

David Evans, a former adviser to the Australian Greenhouse Office, the precursor to the Department of Climate Change, said that although events such as those of January 1939 were too localised to draw implications on global warming, the 70 years since these maximums were reached was enough to “make you sceptical”.

“The debate has changed,” he said. He predicted that by 2010, the only people who would believe in global warming would be “those who have a financial interest in it, the politically correct and those who believe in big government. Everyone else will think it’s a load of rubbish.”

But there’s always an alarmist on hand to redress the balance:

National Climate Centre head David Jones said the fact the maximum temperatures were set so long ago in no way disproved global warming. He said 1939 was a freak once-in-a-century event.

I wonder if he’d be saying the same if the records had been broken yesterday. Would he be saying that that too was a freak once-in-a-century event? Or do you think he may just possibly link it somehow with “global warming”? Answers on a postcard.

Read it here.

The liberal press are up in arms about Barnaby Joyce’s comments about climate change this morning, alleging that he made comparisons with Nazi Germany. The Canberra Times misleadingly states that he “drew parallels with the Holocaust”, and goes on gleefully to report, under the headline “Joyce slammed over eco-Nazi blast”:

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke called on Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull to get Senator Joyce to retract his comments.

“Surely, even Malcolm Turnbull would draw the line at the comparisons that Barnaby Joyce made today,” he told reporters in Sydney.

“I would hope that even Malcolm Turnbull would say that comparisons with Nazi Germany … are out of line and should be publicly refuted and that’s something Malcolm should do today.”

Joyce was making the valid point that it is the AGW alarmists themselves who first made use of the offensive word “denier” in a cheap attempt to put AGW sceptics in the same boat as Holocaust deniers, and Joyce’s comments about “goosestepping” and “eco-totalitarianism” are tame by comparison. But again, the press have succeeded in turning reality upside down, dancing to the tune of political correctness, branding the attacker the victim and vice versa.

The whole thing proves the point that in the area of climate change scepticism, it is easier to attack the messenger than the message.

Read it here.

Out of all the major parties, only the Nationals have had the guts to stand up to Krudd & Co’s pointless ETS, opposing it outright, and are going to vote against it in the Senate. The Liberals, on the other hand, blatantly chasing popularity, will support it. Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate Leader, is rapidly becoming a bit of a hero in this blog for saying all the right things:

“The view across the National Party is that the reasons put forward to justify an emissions trading scheme are just a load of rubbish,” Senator Joyce told The Australian, in the strongest reservations to be expressed by a senior Coalition figure about an ETS.

“Malcolm Turnbull will probably come on board with the ETS but that doesn’t mean the National Party will support it.”

Senator Joyce was derisive of the Rudd Government’s 5 per cent reduction target for emissions. “Australia accounts for 1.5per cent of emissions worldwide, so 5 per cent of that is three-fifths of five-eighths of nothing,” he said.

“It’s nothing but blatantly ridiculous tokenism.”
…
Senator Joyce said he was disturbed at how climate change sceptics were being treated. “This has become a form of religious fanaticism and these environmental goose-steppers are pretty scary. You’re branded a denier. The last time that word was in vogue, it related to the Holocaust.”

He said it was meaningless that most climate experts believed global warming was induced by human activity. “History is replete with examples of experts getting it wrong,” he said. “Look at Y2K, look at what the doomsayers predicted about population explosions, food shortages, fuel running out, communism taking over the world. None of it happened.”

Right on the money. On the other hand, the Liberals, afraid of being branded “deniers” by Rudd, are swallowing the alarmism.

“We should be giving the planet the benefit of the doubt by changing the way we live,” [Chrisopher Pyne] said.

The benefit of the doubt? That’s probably one of the most ridiculous justifications for a crucial policy decision in the history of Australian politics! Such is the madness of climate change.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Of course, the Sydney Moonbat Herald can’t let the opportunity to smear a sceptic pass, so runs an article under the headline:

Joyce slams “Nazi environmentalists”

Nice.