It would be fantastic to get some openly sceptical members into the Australian parliament, and now there is a party to go with it, The Climate Sceptics (www.climatesceptics.com.au) (thanks to CO2 Sceptics):

Dear fellow Australians

As President of the world`s first up front political party representing climate sceptics I am asking like minded friends and contacts across Australia to do two things to help us.

1) Pass this email onto your contacts and
2) Check our web site http://www.climatesceptics.com.au and consider becoming a member.

We want to get the news of our existence to every climate sceptic in the country and we need your help to do that.

Very best of luck to them!

Thousands of species of plants, despite having survived hundreds of other climate minima, optima and goodness knows what else over the last few million years, are suddenly going to disappear thanks to our capitalist SUVs spouting “carbon pollution” (© Penny Wong) into the atmosphere:

“We were struck by the conservatism of plants – how rarely they were able to adapt and flourish outside of their ancestral environments,” said Dr Weston, of the Botanic Gardens Trust.

This made it likely that many species would have trouble surviving if their current habitats shrank as a result of climate change, he said. [Climate is always changing … if you can’t adapt, you won’t survive – that’s evolution – Ed]

Those least likely to go extinct were plants with short life cycles and that spread easily – both characteristics of weeds.

“Weeds will be the beneficiaries of climate change,” Dr Weston said.

Check out Invasion of the Killer Weeds (© ACM)

Read it here.

We knew the alarmism would get worse, but really – who comes up with this stuff? Is there some kind of “alarmism generator” buried in Microsoft Word somewhere that churns out paragraph after paragraph of climate BS?

Without urgent action [of course] to reduce global greenhouse emissions, the landscapes of south-eastern Australia will become drier and hotter and more prone to catastrophic fires. Systems such as the Murray-Darling will continue to slowly degrade, and agricultural production will begin to collapse. Untold damage will afflict the psyche of all Australians as the sunburnt country is scorched. [Yeah, my psyche’s really afflicted… by all this BS – Ed]

The year 2009 has just begun and both ends of the continent are experiencing dramatic climate extremes. Current global climate trends are exceeding the worst-case scenarios of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). The projected precipitation changes from the IPCC and CSIRO show a consistent decrease in rainfall in southern Australian during recent winters. Droughts are getting hotter and persisting longer, further reducing run-off into our river systems. The Government’s current policy response to climate change needs to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Enough! I’ll tell you anything! Just stop it, please!

Read it here.

Despite the whole two-errors-in-four-words “carbon pollution reduction scheme” being subjected to a parliamentary enquiry to consider its effectiveness (see here), Penny Wong is clearly pretty sure of the outcome of that enquiry as she continues to march the country headlong into economic oblivion for the sake of a pointless political gesture:

The federal government has released details of how it expects high-polluting industries to meet new requirements under its carbon pollution reduction scheme.

A guidance paper, released on Wednesday, outlines the assessment process for those in emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) industries and provides guidance on how they are required to meet targets.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the process would assist the government’s decision on which activities would be eligible to receive EITE assistance.

Sorry, but why is the government wasting yet more taxpayers’ money on the ETS if the enquiry hasn’t even reported yet? Or maybe, the reality is that the government doesn’t give a flying carbon-credit about what the enquiry will say? That’s more like it.

Read it here.

Yes, the World Bank, that centre for excellence in climate research, has weighed in on the debate, claiming in a report that Andean glaciers will disappear in 20 years thanks to “global warming” (which hasn’t happened for the best part of a decade…):

According to the report, in the last 35 years Peru’s glaciers have shrunk by 22 percent, leading to a 12 percent loss in the amount of fresh water reaching the coast — home to most of the country’s citizens. [But I guess the report also considered in equal depth the multitude of other factors that could lead to such shrinking, such as deforestation, particulate pollution etc… no? It didn’t? There’s a surprise – Ed]

“It is highly probable that the earth’s surface will undergo an unprecedented temperature increase of nearly two degrees centigrade (four Fahrenheit) by 2050 and up to four degrees (eight Fahrenheit) by the end of the century,” said Pablo Fajnzylber, a senior World Bank economist.

Sounds worryingly like an economist spouting IPCC-speak.

Read it here.

In his usual eloquent fashion, Andrew sums up the climate hysteria surrounding the bushfires in the Melbourne Herald Sun:

Global warming, right?

Wrong.

First, Melbourne did in fact have a hotter day before, four years before the Bureau of Meteorology started officially recording temperatures.

As the Argus newspaper reported at the time, the temperature on February 6, 1851, soared to 47.2C, helping to superheat the fires that then roared across 10 times more land than was burned last week.

AND despite claims that global warming is now heating this land like never before, Victoria’s highest recorded temperature is still the 50.7C measured in Mildura 103 years ago.

South Australia’s is also 50.7C, recorded 49 years ago. NSW’s is the 50C of 70 years ago. Queensland’s is the 49.5C of 37 years ago. Not much recent warming obvious there.

That’s the problem with this cherrypicking of one day of weather in one place. It proves nothing except the desperation of the preachers who try to fool you.

Read it here.

I have been promised a response from the ABC about what they meant when they said the poll had been “hijacked” (see original story here). I will post about it if and when received.

On another matter, a few sites have claimed that Gore Lied and ACM faked the image of the poll result. One example of the accusation can be found here. Later posts however concede that the poll was indeed genuine. More to follow.

[Post edited by ACM]

It was only a matter of time before our own Aussie James Hansen, Tim Flannery, put pen to paper to blame the bush fires on “global warming”, and he goes to town in the Sydney Morning Herald today:

Climate modelling suggests the decline of southern Australia’s winter rainfall is caused by a build-up of greenhouse gas, much of it from coal burning. Victoria has the most polluting coal power plant on earth, and another plant was threatened by the fire.
…
Australia is in shock at the loss of so many lives. But inevitably we will look for lessons. The first, I fear, is that we must anticipate more such terrible blazes, for the world’s addiction to burning fossil fuels goes on unabated. And there is now no doubt that emissions pollution is laying the conditions necessary for more such fires.

When he ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described climate change as the greatest threat facing humanity. Shaken, and clearly having seen things none of us should see, he has now witnessed proof of his words. We can only hope Australia’s climate policy, which is weak, is now significantly strengthened.

Rudd has said the arsonists suspected of lighting some fires are guilty of mass murder, and the police are pursuing the malefactors. But there’s an old saying among Australian firefighters: “Whoever owns the fuel owns the fire”.

Let’s hope Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible event, and change their polluting ways before it’s too late.

Flannery disingenuously links increasing levels of CO2 to changes in climate, without the intervening step of increasing temperature. Maybe that’s because there has been no global warming since 2001, despite rising CO2 levels. And even if temperatures were rising, there is still no confirmed link to CO2 levels (despite $50bn in research), and there are many other possible causes the IPCC won’t tell you about, like er… the sun?

And, by the way, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is plant food, without which no life on earth would exist. But hey, Flannery’s only a professor, a mammalogist and palaeontologist, so how could he be expected to know that?

Climate nonsense.

Read it here.

This guy is getting way too much coverage. ACM has already blogged this yesterday (see Sunday Alarmism), but not to be outdone The Sydney Moonbat Herald parrots the whole damn thing (without any thought), and, under the doom-laden headline “‘Feedback’ could amplify climate change peril”, goes into full-speed carbon-fuelled alarmism:

New studies have warned of triggers in the natural environment, including a greenhouse-gas timebomb in Siberia and Canada, that could viciously amplify global warming.

Thawing subarctic tundra could unleash billions of tonnes of gases that have been safely stored in frosty soil, while oceans and forests are becoming less able to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to papers presented this weekend.

These phenomena mean more heat-trapping gases will enter the atmosphere, which in turn will stoke global warming, thrusting the machinery of climate change into higher gear.

Hilarious – “thrusting the machinery of climate change” – you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried! And at the bottom of it all is our friend Chris Field.

Research presented on Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago suggested the frozen soil of the tundra stored far more greenhouse gas that previously thought.
…
Scientist Sergei Zimov has studied climate change in Russia’s Arctic for almost 30 years. He believes that as organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

Funny, ain’t it? It’s never less that previously though – always more.

“Melting permafrost is poised to be a strong foot on the accelerator pedal of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” said Chris Field, a professor at Stanford and a top scientist on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.

Top scientist? Newsbusters puts it like this:

Chris Field is not a “top climate scientist.” In fact, he isn’t even a climate scientist at all. Just a wee bit of googling on the part of [Reuters reporter Julie] Steenhuysen would have revealed that Chris Field is a professor of biological sciences whose shtick is pushing something called “global ecology.” Field has no more expertise in predicting future climate patterns than, say, a proctologist performing brain surgery.

Now that’s an image I’m going to have trouble erasing from my imagination…

Read it here.

Surely not a climate realist article in The Age? No way. After that vaguely encouraging headline, the rest of the article is typical alarmism. Every mention of cooling is always refuted by a scary mention of warming:

[Global climate research data] shows that even a cool year for the noughties was a hot one by historical standards. Average temperatures across the world last year were 0.325 degrees warmer than the average between 1961 and 1990, which meteorologists use as a benchmark period.

Last year was 0.69 degrees hotter than the average temperatures around the world in the 75 years from 1850 to 1924, before global temperatures really began to rise. [As you’d expect since the globe is recovering from the Little Ice Age … whoops, three dirty little words – Ed]

Temperatures in Australia are rising even faster. The Bureau of Meteorology reports that the average temperature last year across the continent was 0.41 degrees hotter than in the benchmark period. It was the coolest year since 2001, yet our 14th hottest year in 99 years of monitoring. [99 years is like a a blink of an eye in climate terms – Ed]

Just to give you an idea of the balanced nature of The Age’s reporting, the article uses the word “warmer” just once, “cool”, “cooling” or “coolest” four times, and the words “hot”, “hotter” and “hottest” no less than 12 times! And this is supposed to be an article about the coolest year since 2000!

You really have to laugh, or else you’d go mad.

Read it here.