Wow, really? Gosh, never would have worked that out… [er, see here, or here – Ed]

Simon Harrison, a climate change law expert with Australian firm Herbert Geer, says the complex, lucrative scheme is open to rorts.

”The price of carbon fluctuates wildly, which presents a plethora of opportunities to rort the system,” Mr Harrison said.

”Secondly, profits from sales of credits will be reliant upon baselines.

”If a project produces fewer emissions upon completion than its pre-established baseline, the difference can be sold for substantial profit, providing project owners an incentive to exaggerate the baseline to receive more credits than they would otherwise be entitled to.”

He said the Australian Federal Police (AFP) did not have the resources to police the legislation once it starts on July 1, 2011.

Can’t you just wait to see the mess we will be in when all this kicks off?

Read it here.

Kevin Rudd has shown himself not to be the sharpest chisel in the toolbox, and to prove it he seems to be doing most of his communication via Twitter. For those of you who are interested, Kev’s twittering [sorry, “tweets” – Ed] can be found at http://twitter.com/kevinruddPM, but if you can’t wait, here are a few thoughts from the mind of our great leader (these are not made up, in case you wondered):

• Blues played hard. Tough game. Congrats to NSW for last night and to Qld for the series. Fantastic atmosphere at Suncorp. KRudd. [Translation – Sport. Man of the people.]
• Good chat w Obama on climate change. Together w other leaders launched Carbon Capture & Storage Institute. Much to do b4 Copenhagen. KRudd [Translation – I am a very important person.]
• Great to be home. Test draw painful! Got update mid flight. Family well. Dog happy. Cat grumpy. Situation normal. Now back to work. KRudd [Translation – Family man.]
• Starting my blog tomorrow on Climate Change. Like to hear your ideas on practical action. KRudd [Translation – I’m a guy who will take action on climate change, because I don’t understand anything except what the IPCC and Penny Wong tell me]

I mean, really, who would possibly want to read such vacuous and inane comments from their Prime Minister? Then there’s the blog, of course, which parrots, almost verbatim the usual cracked record nonsense and misrepresentations we hear every day from Penny Wong:

Australia is determined to be on the front foot in global efforts to tackle climate change [Why? – Ed]. We know that our nation is more exposed to the impact of climate change than perhaps any other developed economy. Without strong global and national action, climate change will permanently damage our natural environment and hit our jobs and our economy hard. The Great Barrier Reef – one of Australia’s most iconic natural wonders which generates jobs for around 60,000 people and more than $4.9 billion in tourism revenue – is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

The next step for Australia is to take strong action at home through Parliament passing the [two errors in four words] Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in August. This scheme will for the first time put a limit on Australia’s [two errors in two words] carbon pollution. By taking action at home in Australia, we can give businesses certainty and give momentum to the international negotiations that are so crucial for our national interest.

ACM’s advice is to avoid both at all costs.

(I’ll give you a clue, the answer’s “no”.) Why not, we ask? As any fule kno, Al loves a good debate about global warming [surely “climate change” – Ed] so why his reluctance to demonstrate easily to the misguided Steve Fielding that the debate’s over and the science is settled? Should have been easy, right? Apparently not…

Climate change sceptic [why not just “Senator”? – Ed] Steve Fielding says he is still searching for answers after receiving the brush-off from environmental crusader Al Gore.

Senator Fielding, who holds a crucial vote in the emissions trading debate, had been trying to pin down the former US vice-president to explain one of his key climate change concerns.

But Mr Gore only managed to find time for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd during his flying visit to Australia this week.

Having offered to meet him at any time and fly to wherever he was, Senator Fielding said it was ridiculous the 2007 Nobel Prize winner didn’t have five minutes to spare.

“He was aware of how important my vote was … but obviously he felt more comfortable running to someone – our prime minister – who actually supports and believes in what’s he doing,” he told Fairfax Radio Network on Friday.

Don’t waste your breath next time Senator – the High Priest Gore will only preach to the converted.

Read it here.

Don’t forget that these models are the same ones on which governments around the world are basing their misguided policies on “climate change”. And now it appears that there are serious problems with the way in which they model the effect of CO2. A study has found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth’s ancient past, known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM:

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

During the PETM, for reasons that are still unknown, the amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere rose rapidly. For this reason, the PETM, which has been identified in hundreds of sediment core samples worldwide, is probably the best ancient climate analogue for present-day Earth.
…
The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”

Hang on – how many of you have spotted the obvious problem with all this? Yes, that’s right. The science is settled – debate’s over. Move along. Nothing to see here…

Read it here (h/t Watts Up With That)

Thanks to Climate Depot:

The recent global cooling has now been happening for so long that the cooling is even admitted by the pro-AGW-propaganda web site which calls itself RealClimate.org.

Here they say:

Excerpt: “We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”

So, even RealClimate (i.e. the Alamo of discredited so-called climate scientists) now admits the fact that the Earth is experiencing global cooling and suggests that global warming will not resume “until roughly 2020.” And they are trying to provide excuses for the cooling.

In other words, these global warming propagandists have recognized that their natural climate change denial of the last decade is not sustainable anymore. So, they have abandoned any pretence that global warming exists at the moment, and they are presenting their excuses for why the globe is cooling together with their assertions of when global warming will resume (presumably they will claim with a vengeance).

Simply, nobody can now plausibly deny that the globe is cooling while the emissions and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide both continue to increase.

Read it here.

Bjørn Lomborg writes yet another excellent article in The Australian today, exposing the anti-democratic ways in which climate alarmists wish to push their own agenda, and the pointlessness of emissions reductions schemes:

The Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman goes further. After the narrow passage of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill in the US House of Representatives, Krugman said that there was no justification for a vote against it. He called virtually all of the members who voted against it “climate deniers” who were committing “treason against the planet”.

Krugman said that the “irresponsibility and immorality” of the representatives’ democratic viewpoints were “unforgivable” and a “betrayal”. He thus accused almost half of the democratically elected members of the house, from both parties, of treason for holding the views that they do, thereby essentially negating democracy.

Less well-known pundits make similar points, suggesting that people with “incorrect” views on global warming should face Nuremberg-style trials or be tried for crimes against humanity. There is clearly a trend. The climate threat is so great — and democracies are doing so little about it — that people conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem, and that perhaps people ought not be allowed to express heterodox opinions on such an important topic.

And then nails the key point squarely:

Even if every Kyoto-obligated country passed its own, duplicate Waxman-Markey bills — which is implausible and would incur significantly higher costs — the global reduction would amount to just 0.22C by the end of this century. The reduction in global temperature would not be measurable in 100 years, yet the cost would be significant and payable now.

Is it really treason against the planet to express some scepticism about whether this is the right way forward? Is it treason to question throwing huge sums of money at a policy that will do virtually no good in 100 years? Is it unreasonable to point out that the inevitable creation of trade barriers that will ensue from Waxman-Markey could eventually cost the world 10 times more than the damage climate change could ever have wrought?

Read it here.

Steve Fielding certainly isn’t convinced by the woolly thinking of Rudd & Wong on climate change, and is now encouraging other senators to do their own research:

In a letter to senators yesterday, Senator Fielding — who has recently emerged as parliament’s most vocal climate change sceptic — said carbon emissions had “skyrocketed” over the past 15 years, but temperatures had remained steady.

Senator Fielding said Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and Australia’s chief scientist had failed to explain why this was the case.

He said it ran counter to assumptions underpinning the carbon pollution reduction scheme that carbon emissions were the leading cause of global warming.

“Therefore, I ask you to think carefully before voting on the CPRS legislation, a multi-billion-dollar tax that could cripple our economy with little benefit to environment,” he wrote.

He has also asked Al Gore for a meeting to discuss the science. All I can say to that is he’ll be waiting an awful long time. Gore doesn’t “do” science, or debates for that matter. Just propaganda.

Read it here.

Al Gore is spreading his own special brand of lies and alarmism around Australia at the moment, and the sooner he clears off the better. Check out the blatant untruths in the following, and note that none of those who jump down the throats of sceptics has anything to say about this lot:

“The planet now has a fever,” Mr Gore warned today’s breakfast gathering [Odd comment, given that “global warming” stopped in 2001 – Ed].

“We have to act [Because I want my money – Ed].”

“It’s difficult to ignore the fact that cyclones are getting stronger , that the fires are getting bigger , that the sea level is rising [yeah, at the same rate, if not slower, than it has for thousands of years – Ed], that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home [because their islands are sinking, you idiot – Ed]” he said.

Excuse the gratutious ad hom there, but this man talks nothing but unadulterated CRAP.

Two words: GO HOME.

Read it here.

The excellent Mark Steyn takes apart the latest barking mad announcement from Bonnie Prince Charlie:

It takes a prince, heir to the thrones of Britain and Canada and Australia, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, and a bunch of other places, to tell it like it is: You pampered consumerists are ruining the joint. In the old days, we didn’t have these kinds of problems. But then Mr. and Mrs. Peasant start remodeling the hovel, adding a rec room and indoor plumbing, replacing the emaciated old nag with a Honda Civic and driving to the mall in it, and next thing you know, instead of just having an extra yard of mead every Boxing Day at the local tavern and adding a couple more pustules to the escutcheon with the local trollop, they begin taking vacations in Florida. When it was just medieval dukes swanking about like that, the planet worked fine: That was “sustainable” consumerism. But now the masses want in. And, once you do that, there goes the global neighborhood.

By contrast, as an example of an exemplary environmentalist, the prince hailed his forebear, King Henry VIII. True, he had a lot of wives, but he did dramatically reduce Anne Boleyn’s carbon footprint.

Brilliant stuff.

Read it all.

“The Kids” are the new climate warriors. Funny how when a sceptic with serious credentials publishes a book, the alarmists are all over it like a rash. But when a bunch of kids and pollies get together to whine about climate, nobody bats an eyelid, before we even start on the whole indoctrination aspect of this. And the Fairytale-facts media goes into full slaver mode:

THEY are the new generation of climate warriors. They are smart, politically savvy, idealistic, apparently indefatigable and very young. They have more technology in their mobiles and laptops than NASA had when it sent men to the moon, and they are “beginning to use them for tools, not toys”, as one campaigner said.

For the next three days they will be at Power Shift, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition’s first major summit.

About 1500 Australians aged 16 to 26 are descending on the University of Western Sydney to learn about organising and to hear speeches from Tim Flannery, senators Nick Xenophon and Christine Milne, the NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, and via video link from Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations panel on climate change, and the former US vice-president Al Gore, who is training an older generation of climate change campaigners in Melbourne this weekend.

Here’s an extract from the web site:

Conference attendees will learn the best practices of climate organising, including campaign and event planning, recruitment, media liaison, public speaking, lobbying, leadership development, coalition-building, campaign strategy and community and campus organising. (source)

What’s the very important thing missing from all this? Any discussion of the actual science of climate change. In fact, “science” just one tiny session out of nearly 60, but there are the following sessions (I’m not making these up):

• Graphic design and climate change
• Media training
• Gender and climate change [useful one that – Ed]
• Climate change & Hip Hop workshop [seriously]

This workshop will ask participants to explore an issue around climate change using hip hop. The hip hop debate combines traditional debating with the MC Battle and is an interesting and challenging platform for exploring different sides of an issue. The young ‘Eco Ninjas’ crew from Alstonville High School will be performing their hip hop debate piece at Powershift and will also be assisting with facilitating the workshop. (source)

They’re not interested in boring old stuff like science, of course – hey, the debate’s over, you denier you. What they are interested in is something quite different, as this session indicates:

Civil disobedience – It’s Role in the Movement
Non violent direct action has played a crucial role in creating social change throughout history. This session will reflect on the history and discuss the future of non-violent direct action in the climate movement.

In other words, non-democratic means to force “social change”. This conference has little if anything to do with averting climate change, just imposing “social change” through the back door of environmentalism. It stinks.

Read it here (“Sick Bag Required” Alert – you have been warned…!)