As Lenore Taylor points out in The Australian, Krudd & Co really can’t be bothered with the ETS any more:

The best argument the scheme’s chief saleswoman, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, could put when she released draft legislation last week was that it was better than nothing.

If you compare it with the way the Government argues for things it really wants to get through, such as its stimulus plan, the defence of its major policy on climate change is largely devoid of passion. It would be a strange tactic for a government still vehemently determined to get its scheme through. It is entirely consistent with a government with far bigger problems, that wants to be able to say it has tried to meet its election promise and then blame the failure on someone else, while suffering none of the potential short-term political consequences of success.

All of which raises the following awkward question: if this is supposedly the greatest challenge to humanity since the dawn of time (as we keep being told), why does it have such a low priority?

Read it here.

Weather isn’t climate (as we all know) but the number of stories about extreme cold in the Northern hemisphere this last few months has been staggering (see here for a recent example). And now it appears the Southern hemisphere may be about to follow suit:

Parts of southeastern Australia are having their coldest nights since spring, colder than it’s been this early in the year since 2005 for some.

Temperatures are plummeting five to 10 degrees below average across parts of inland Victoria, the ACT and western, southern and central NSW due to clear skies and dry winds. Bega on the NSW South Coast dipped to 5.6 degrees early this morning, the coldest it’s been this early in the year in 15 years.

Do you think I should send this to Fairfax? What do you think they would make of it? The answer of course is nothing, because as it sayeth in the Holy Gospel according to Gore, extreme heat shalt be called global warming, but extreme cold shalt be called “just weather”.

Read it here.

An excellent article in the Courier Mail skewers the whole “Australia should go it alone” myth:

For everyone else, you need to put together one basic reality and one utterly undeniable fact.

That our emission reductions can make absolutely no difference to the climate outcome. Either for the world, for Australia, or in relation to bushfires and floods.

One of the great deceptions from the climate believers is to imply the reverse. That if you turn off the lights, you will save us from bushfires. We produce just 1.5 per cent of total emissions. We cut to zero tomorrow and it makes not the slightest difference to the climate. And again to stress, not just the global climate but our own little piece of it.

We can’t create a low carbon dioxide bubble over this continent. Our climate is in the hands of the US and China principally, and then India and Europe after that.

Read it all.

The plants have clearly been talking back to Prince Charles this time, as he compares humanity to the behaviour of frogs in boiling water…

British tabloid The Sun reports the heir to the throne made his comments in the Amazon while on a tour of South America to raise awareness of climate change.

“The trouble is it’s the old boiled frog syndrome,” he said. “You can’t tell if you are in the water that it is gradually heating up. You just get used to the heat and you don’t notice until suddenly it reaches boiling point and it’s too late to do anything about it.”

Boiled frog syndrome refers to the idea that if you put a frog into boiling water it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, it will be boiled alive. It isn’t true – when the water gets hot the frog will jump out, but it does make a nice metaphor.

So where is all this heat, your Royal Highness? Have a look at the global temperature record, and try again:

Read it here.

With every day that passes, the ETS slips through Penny Wong’s clutches. Nick Xenophon has called on the government to accept the inevitable, that the ETS won’t get through the senate.

“It should be pretty clear to the Government now that in its current form this legislation won’t pass the Senate,” Senator Xenophon said this morning.

The Government hoped to have its emissions trading legislation passed by the end of June ahead of a start date of July 1, 2010.

But [Opposition leader Malcolm] Turnbull said the Prime Minister was proceeding at a “reckless” pace.

“He’s on an ideological crusade which is to have an emissions trading scheme,” he told ABC Radio this morning. “He doesn’t seem to care what’s in it as long as he can tick that box. That’s not good enough.”

Despite the fact that the Opposition don’t have a decent alternative, this has to be good news for Australia.

Read it here.

The alarmism in the Fairfax press, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times, is getting so bad that I am considering whether to even blog stories from these papers in future. The bias is so ridiculous that it’s beyond parody, and it’s almost not worth commenting any more. What do you think?

New poll has started – let me know what you think.

Simon, ACM

This gets more ludicrous by the day! The Age, or as it’s known “Pravda on the Yarra”, is wailing about how tough the life of a climate scientist is. My heart bleeds – no, really, it does.

“Science is exciting when you make such findings,” said Konrad Steffen, who heads the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado.

“But if you stop and look at the implications of what is coming down the road for humanity, it is rather scary. I have kids in college — what do they have to look forward to in 50 years?”

And that’s not the worst of it, said top researchers gathered here last week for a climate change conference which heard, among other bits of bad news, that global sea levels are set to rise at least twice as fast over the next century as previously thought, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk.

What haunts scientists most, many said, is the feeling that — despite an overwhelming consensus on the science — they are not able to convey to a wider public just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe.

The Age just isn’t a serious newspaper anymore – it’s like Green Left Weekly gone posh. I am seriously considering expunging all future references to it from the pages of ACM. I feel a poll coming on.

Read it here (for probably the last time).

QOTD comes from the UK Meteorological Office’s Vicky Pope (see here), commenting on a plan to increase the reflectivity of clouds artificially:

“Anything that alters the climate in a different way from reducing carbon has inherent dangers because we don’t understand the climate well enough.”

But, conveniently, they seem to understand the climate well enough to make apocalyptic projections about the future of humanity unless we dramatically cut carbon [dioxide] emissions… The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Read it here.

As the only decent sceptic in the sea of moonbattish journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald, Miranda Devine must have a hard job getting anything published, but amazingly she has an article about the International Conference on Climate change, held last week in New York. Of course, the mainstream media were all working themselves up into a lather about the hysterical alarmism being spread about in Copenhagen, and nary a mention of the ICCC, so well done to Miranda for redressing the balance…

How can the courageous independent scientists in New York compete for attention with climate hysteria coming from such world leaders as Prince Charles, who in Rio de Janeiro this week claimed: “We have less than 100 months to alter our behaviour before we risk catastrophic climate change.”

Australia’s future head of state is on a 10-day eco-tour to South America, aimed at boosting his popularity. He will travel in a luxury private Airbus, delivering a carbon footprint estimated at more than 300 tonnes.

It just shows that what counts with climate hysterics is not the greenness of the planet but the brownie points they gain.

Read it all.

UPDATE: Link fixed – apologies.

The right decision, but for (partly) the wrong reasons: (a) it will cost jobs [valid reason], (b) is won’t help the environment [invalid reason]:

In his keynote address to the Liberal council, [Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull] says the Opposition will use the Senate inquiry process to work on improving the design of a climate change policy. [It doesn’t need improving, it needs dropping – Ed]

“Labor’s ETS will cost jobs and fail the environment,” he said.

“It fails to recognise Australia’s greatest and most beneficial opportunities for emissions abatement.

“We will oppose it in its present form and on its current timetable because we have a better and a greener way. Better for jobs, the economy and the environment.”

Mr Turnbull said that he is also firmly against the Government’s proposed start date of 2010.

“The real issue is getting the design right,” he said.

As any fule kno, Australia contributes 1.5% of global emissions, so even if it reduces its emissions to zero overnight, it will make not one skerrick of difference to global emissions, and absolutely no difference to the climate (assuming that CO2 drives temperature – which is far from proven). At least it looks like we won’t have the economy crushing pointlessness of Rudd & Wong’s ETS, but let’s hope we don’t get something worse…

Read it here.