Melanie Phillips writes an excellent column for the UK Spectator magazine, and her latest two are both great reads.

• “That Famous Consensus“
• “America – What have you done?” (OT, but who cares!)

Enjoy!

No gutter is too low for Bob Brown. Whilst families are grieving for their loved ones who have perished in bush fires in Victoria, the callous Greens senator is using the tragedy to score cheap political points.

Senator Brown said the “dreadful inferno” was a terrible reminder of what climate change could mean for Australians.

“Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25 per cent, 50 per cent more,” he told Sky News.

“It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change.”

Disgusting.

Read it here.

It must be all that warming going on down there… As Global Warming Hoax points out:

So where is the news media on this? Antarctica sea ice extent is up 34% over 1979, imagine if this was a decrease in ice rather than an increase. If this keeps up the penguins will be able to walk to Brazil!

Read it here. (Thanks to Tom Nelson)

You can’t have it both ways. If you believe that anthropogenic CO2 is causing dangerous climate change, it is crazy then to spurn nuclear power as an alternative to coal. However, that is what most Western governments are doing, including Australia’s.

But now Sweden, one of the foremost opponents of nuclear power, has conceded that nuclear power must play a role if there is to be a “low-carbon” economy.

In a drive to increase energy security and combat global warming, ministers said they would present a bill next month that would allow the building of nuclear reactors on existing sites and introduce a new carbon tax as part of a program to cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020.

The decision is significant because Sweden was at the forefront of anti-nuclear sentiment after the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979. It voted in a referendum a year later to phase out its plants.

The Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said he did not feel bound by the referendum because it did not specify how nuclear power should be replaced. But the Government must still convince Parliament before it becomes law.

Australia should be doing the same.

Read it here.

The alarmism is getting even more desperate.

Geophysicists at the University of Toronto looked at the possible effects on the earth if sea levels rise because of a collapse of the west Antarctic ice shelf.

The Toronto researchers say the melting of the ice sheet will actually cause the earth’s rotation to shift dramatically – about 500 metres from its current position if the entire ice sheet melts – and that would result in much higher sea levels in some areas than previously expected.

The researchers say the melting would change the balance of the globe in much the same way that tsunamis move huge amounts of water from one area to another.

Is there anything that “global warming” can’t achieve?

Read it here.

University of London researchers calculated in the Southern Medical Journal that in Britain, at least, a big warming over the next 50 years “would increase heat-related deaths in Britain by about 2000 but reduce cold-related deaths by about 20,000”.

So let’s agree on the evidence: cold is the real killer, and airconditioning saves us in summer, just as central heating can save the frail in winter.

So how mad are our governments?

The Rudd Government will next year impose an emissions trading scheme that will “save” the planet by making power for your heaters and coolers more expensive. Victoria is even trialling a smart-meter so it can cut power use on hot days by making your electricity so expensive that you’d have to pay $170 a day to run ducted airconditioning.

And all this to “save” a planet from a warming that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Barking madness.

Read it here.

As always, a great read.

Weird one this. The Courier Mail breaks the shocking news that Ross Garnaut imported $18,000 worth of Italian paper for the printing of his tedious report (see here).

The odd thing is, however, that the story broke on 18 October 2008… in the Courier Mail (see here) and ACM posted about it here.

Who cares? It’s a thoroughly embarrassing story for Wong and Garnaut, so as far as I’m concerned they can print it every four months for ever if they want to!

UPDATE: The Australian has fallen for it as well! See here.

It will do no such thing, of course, but it makes the Government feel like they’re doing something. You will recall that Krudd & Co announced it will fund insulation for 2 million homes, reducing carbon [shurely “dioxide” – Ed] emissions by 49 million tonnes. The Australia Institute sees straight through the paper thin flannel:

The Australia Institute’s executive director Richard Denniss says the Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme will just reallocate those emissions.

“The way the Emissions Trading Scheme is designed, every kilogram of emissions saved by a household frees up an extra permit for a big polluter,” he said.

“So while it’s true this scheme will help reduce households’ use of energy, it won’t reduce Australia’s emissions at all.

“What they do is take those permits freed up by what the individuals have done and sell those permits to the aluminium industry or the steel industry or anyone else who wants them.

“So effectively the carbon pollution reduction scheme is really just a carbon pollution reallocation scheme.”

Read it here.

Of course it’s climate change, you denier you. The Age subtly links the Australian drought to “global warming”:

While drought in Australia has traditionally been linked to El Nino events in the Pacific Ocean, researchers from the universities of NSW and Tasmania and the CSIRO have found that it is the Indian Ocean’s cycle of warming and cooling that is to blame.

The water cycles of the Indian Ocean, which is experiencing unprecedented warming 2000 kilometres away, dictates the strength of the moisture-bearing winds that travel to Australia.

Business as usual at The Age.

Read it here.