[ACM blog owner falls off chair in shock at reading this article]. The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Government’s emissions trading scheme has been put on hold and might not be introduced on schedule in 2010:

A parliamentary committee has been asked to inquire into the effectiveness of emissions trading as a means to reduce carbon pollution. [I can answer that: zero – Ed]

The inquiry committee will report “in the second half of 2009”.

Legislation for the Government’s already-announced carbon reduction scheme was expected about July.

However, this inquiry might put it off for another 12 months, depending on its outcome.

Emissions trading is the core mechanism of the proposed scheme, and it would increase costs to business and households.

“Maybe the Government has decided there is no appetite for the cost of an emissions trading scheme when the economy is in trouble,” a Liberal source said.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Read it here.

UPDATE: The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Plans for emissions trading appear to be up in the air after the federal government called a fresh inquiry into the scheme. The surprise move has sparked speculation the government could delay, overhaul or ditch its main plan to tackle climate change.

Labor has promised to start emissions trading next year and has finished an intensive process to design the scheme.

Now it’s back to the drawing board.

Treasurer Wayne Swan has asked a parliamentary committee to investigate whether emissions trading is the best option for Australia after all. [It isn’t – Ed]

All we can hope is that they don’t come up with something worse.

But Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said the government was having second thoughts.

“You can see the government is getting ready to abandon the emissions trading scheme,” Mr Turnbull told parliament.

“What’s going to happen if the house economics committee concludes that the emissions trading scheme is not an appropriate response, and it’s already been legislated for?”

The opposition’s spokesman on emissions trading, Andrew Robb, said the government appeared to be backing off on the emissions trading scheme.

“It seems to be they’re running around like headless chooks on this,” Mr Robb said.

Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had experienced an epiphany and realised emissions trading would force people out of work.

Read it here.

A couple of articles that actually address the real problem, rather than the knee-jerk, Pavlov’s Dog response of the environmentalists: “climate change.” And guess who is at the root of the problem, none other than the greenies themselves, for opposing hazard reduction burns.

From The Australian today:

THE green movement was yesterday blamed for the severity of the Victorian fires that cost so many lives and ruined so much property.

David Packham, a former supervising meteorologist for fire weather nationwide at the Bureau of Meteorology, said environmentalists’ politically successful campaign to stop controlled vegetation burning off allowed the Black Saturday fires to rage uncontrollably. “The green movement is directly responsible for the severity of these fires through their opposition to prescribed burning,” Mr Packham said.

“Elements of the movement are behaving like eco-terrorists waging jihad against prescribed burning and fuel management. They believe fundamentally that if we keep all fire out of Australia’s forests, the trees will grow, the canopies will close up, the ground will become moist and there will be no fires. This is absolute and total nonsense.“

Read it here.

UPDATED: And Miranda Devine in The Sydney Morning Herald makes the same point:

Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of “prescribed burning”. Also known as “hazard reduction”, it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.
…
Teary politicians might pepper their talking points with opportunistic intimations of “climate change” and “unprecedented” weather, but they are only diverting the blame. With yes-minister fudging and craven inclusion of green lobbyists in decision-making, they have greatly exacerbated this tragedy.

Read it here.

The ABC are being rather coy about explaining quite what “hijacked” meant (see here for the original story). I have sent two emails and called the News Radio office, and I am still waiting for an explanation…

Why the reticence, I wonder? I’ll keep you posted.

The media is full of enviro-fundamentalists all to eager to blame the deaths in Victoria on our evil use of fossil fuels, but The Australian, in an editorial today, is measured:

To put climate change at the centre of any argument about the fires is an affront to the tens of thousands of Australians who are suffering. Climate change activists warn we have brought drought, and thus fire, on ourselves by using too much fossil fuel. But even if this is so, acknowledging the problem would not have stopped these fires. If there are any Australians responsible this catastrophe, it is the arsonists who appear to have lit some of them.

The article also exposes the usual hysterical bias at the ABC, especially Tony Jones, who has graced these pages many times (see here, here, and here):

Not that Tony Jones, host of ABC TV’s Lateline, would necessarily agree. On Monday night, he interviewed climate scientists about the fires. Certainly he asked whether they were part of a long-term cycle, but much of what he said was less interview than interrogation. “And do you feel, do you believe that it is beyond doubt that what we’re seeing in Victoria, these horrific fire storms, are directly related to climate change and global warming?”, Jones said in a statement cursorily couched as a question. In contrast, the scientists spoke in measured tones, one saying evidence on the impact of climate change was not all in, another pointing out that while people living in areas exposed to fire were part of the problem, many died because they left it too late to evacuate. The scientists were sensible. The debate we need is how we can stop another catastrophe of this kind, rather than how many windmills can meet a fraction of our power needs.

Read it here.

A voice of sanity amongst the ever more shrill cries of “It’s climate change”, Frank Campbell puts the record straight:

But contrary to current hyperbole, Black Saturday was not the worst fire day ever. Ash Wednesday’s wind speeds ranged from 70 to 120 km/h. A savage south-west front led to most of the deaths and property loss, whereas Saturday had a modest wind change.

Nor was the area burned in the latest fires exceptional. About 300,000 hectares is the likely total, compared with 1.5 million on Black Friday 1939, several million on Black Thursday 1851, 260,000 on Red Tuesday 1898 and 230,000 on Ash Wednesday. Note that the days of the week have mostly been used up already. Every 10 or 20 years there is a bushfire disaster. This isn’t going to change.

Read it here (in The Age of all places – how long before they pull it down? – Ed)

From the Carbon Sense Coalition:

The Carbon Sense Coalition today accused coal companies, power companies and governments of gross negligence for wasting resources from shareholders, electricity consumers and taxpayers on quixotic dreams to capture and bury carbon dioxide from power stations.

The Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, Mr Viv Forbes, said that there were five main objections to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS):

• Firstly, there are no possible climate benefits because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not control climate and the tiny effect of man’s emissions is wholly beneficial. There has been no open scientific enquiry into the justification for demonising carbon dioxide, and a large and growing scientific opposition to the whole global warming hysteria.
• Secondly, there is no public health justification for CCS because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a colourless, non-toxic gas and in fact a valuable plant food. A warm climate with abundant carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be beneficial for all life.
• Thirdly, CCS can never be “economic” because there are huge costs and zero benefits.
• Fourthly, CCS will divert a vast amount of community savings into stupid investments which will be abandoned in a more enlightened future time.
• And finally, neither taxpayers nor shareholders have seen a full cost benefit analysis of the CCS proposals by independent experts. They have no idea of the guaranteed huge cost and the illusory benefits.

Read it here.

Writing in the UK Times:

Fire is an essential element in the life cycle of Australian forests. Season by season sclerophyll or “hard-leaved” woodlands build up huge amounts of detritus, shed leaves, bark and twiggery, which must burn if there is to be new growth. Many Australian species, including most of the eucalypts, need fire if they are to complete their reproductive cycle. Seeds encased in woody receptacles need their capsules to be split by fire before they can be released to germinate.
…
The cause of these disasters is not global warming; still less is it arson. It is the failure to recognise that fire is an intrinsic feature of eucalypt bushland. It cannot be prevented but it can and should be managed. Unless there is a fundamental change of policy across all levels of government in Australia, there will be more and worse fires and more deaths.

Read it here. (h/t Andrew Bolt)

Of course it is, you denier you…

“We observed a large increase in fire-weather risk from about the year 2000. So part of this increase in risk has begun and has been observed,” said Kevin Hennessey, who was attending the 9th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography in Melbourne yesterday.

“The extreme dryness over the last 12 years may be due to natural variability but it may also be partly due to an increase in greenhouse gases; it’s too early to tell.”

It’s not too early for the Herald though, who have had their minds made up and their eyes closed to any contrary evidence for years… Apologies for stating the obvious (yet again), but there has been no global warming since 2001:

(Image from www.drroyspencer.com)

A lead author with the United Nations scientific body, Kevin Trenberth, also attending the conference, said the drying of southern Australia was consistent with global warming. “One of the things with global warming is that you have this increase in greenhouse gases and they provide a blanketing effect so there is more heat available. The heat has to go somewhere. Some of the heat goes into evaporation, into the drying of the land. Where it’s not raining, things dry out quicker, droughts set in a little quicker and become more intense.”

But alternatively:

“A warmer atmosphere contains larger amounts of moisture which boosts the intensity of heavy downpours,” said Dr Brian Soden, at the University of Miami.

Changes in heavy rainfall seem to keep pace with atmospheric moisture which rises by around 7 per cent for each ºC of warming. Based on computer models, this could mean an increase in the intensity of heavy rainfall of around 10 per cent by 2050.

However, the observed increase in extreme downpours appears to be larger than the increases predicted by current computer simulations, suggesting that predicted changes in rainfall due to global warming may be underestimated, either because of flawed measurements or because computer models lack some key understanding, for instance of the action of aerosol particles in the atmosphere. (source)

Gee, the science is really settled, ain’t it?

Read it here.

UPDATE 2: ABC have responded stating that the poll was “hijacked” (how would that be possible?), but without giving any further details. I have asked for clarification and will post it here if received.

UPDATED: The ABC web site has moved on to a new poll and has mysteriously “removed” the results from the list of past polls. Surely not more censorship? I have sent an e-mail to News Radio to find out why it was removed. I will let you know the result…

Now you see it… now you, er, don’t…

Thanks to Gore Lied. I’m sure the ABC will issue a correction, but as it stands, here is the poll result:

90% think global warming is a myth – wow! Go the deniers!

Read it here.

UPDATE: As of Sunday 8 Feb, it’s now 94.3%!!

Any chance to push the scaremongering alarmist agenda, no matter how insensitive, is gleefully accepted by the Moonbat Herald, just as it was yesterday by Bob Brown.

Research by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO has found that bushfire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later and become more intense in coming decades.

A climate study of south-east Australia by the agencies in 2007 found the number of days with “very high” or “extreme” fire danger ratings would increase significantly. The worst changes were predicted for northern NSW.

By 2020, days of extreme fire danger are forecast to increase by 5 to 25 per cent if climate change is low and by 15 to 65 per cent if it is high.

An author of the report, Kevin Hennessy from the CSIRO, told the Herald yesterday: “There does seem to be a human element to bushfire risk. In terms of human contribution it is clear that most of the global warming since about 1950 is likely due to increases in greenhouse gases [No it isn’t – Ed]. Higher temperatures clearly increase the risk of bushfires.”

And then quotes yet more of Brown (which we can all do without reading again).

Oh, yes, and 108 people lost their lives as well…

Read it here.