Don’t forget, you heard it here first. Today’s QOTD comes from Queensland vet Mark Perissinotto:

“It’s also important not to overfeed your pet because it causes flatulence.

“Giving them the right amount not only saves you from nasty smells but saves the planet by avoiding the release of dangerous greenhouse gases.“

What would be more effective, Mark, would be to keep your own CO2 emissions to a minimum (i.e. try talking to the media a bit less).

Read it here.

Don’t give us any ideas… In a fit of petulence, Malcolm Turnbull appears to have lost all grip on reality and is laying down a challenge to his backbenchers – back me or I quit. The trouble is, he may live to regret it, since the result is far from a foregone conclusion.

Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has threatened to resign if his Liberal Party colleagues refuse to endorse his stance on emissions trading.

Mr Turnbull wants to negotiate with the government on a carbon trading scheme, but has been publicly criticised by some backbenchers who want to delay until after global climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.

Faced with repeated internal dissent, Mr Turnbull on Thursday gave his strongest indication that he was willing to put his leadership on the line.

“I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am,” he told reporters in Adelaide on Thursday.

Earlier on ABC Radio Mr Turnbull said: “To be a party with nothing to say … no ideas, is not the party I am prepared to lead”.

You have got it so, so wrong. Why should the only alternative to meekly agreeing to the ETS be “a party of no ideas”? Straw man I’m afraid. The alternative is to say firmly: wait until after Copenhagen. It’s very simple. And what’s all this nonsense about “effective action on climate change”? Everybody knows (apart from you, apparently), that the ETS will do nothing whatsoever for the climate. How can we spell this out any more clearly? And then there is this almost unbelievable statement from an Opposition leader:

“The Labor Party is showing real discipline on this issue and a number of my colleagues are not and they should learn from that,” Mr Turnbull said.

“If we want to be a government, we should have the discipline of government.”

Wrong again, I’m afraid. The Labor party are not showing discipline at all. They are playing politics with the ETS – it would be no skin off their noses to wait until after Copenhagen, but they are pushing ahead simply because they can – why are you the only person in the country who is unable to see this? I’m beginning to think you really are a closet Laborite, with a deeply worrying enviro-moonbat streak into the bargain. Time for a new leader, I’m afraid.

It’s Malcolm’s Climate Madness.

Read it here.

Anyone want to guess how many mainstream media outlets will report this? My guess: zero.

But the fact is that the infamous Hockey Stick (made famous in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, Al Gore’s fictional movie An Inconvenient Truth, not to mention literally thousands of alarmist publications) has been the foundation of virtually all alarmist climatology, demonstrating that the 20th century warming was unusually large and rapid, and that no other period in the last thousand years had been warmer.

But now that entire foundation has crumbled, with the revelation that the authors had selectively used tree-ring data in order to ensure that their temperature reconstruction showed unusual 20th century warming (see my earlier post on this here).

This is HUGE. Not only does it undermine a significant part of the alarmists’ cause, it shows the lengths that apparently reputable climate scientists will go to in order to fit data to their pre-conceived agendas.

Blogger Bishop Hill has prepared an excellent summary of the whole sorry tale, including gory details of how the scientists in question continually refused to provide their data for independent analysis, until eventually forced to by the Royal Society (which is ironic, given their own alarmist stance on climate change).

I highly recommend it – read it here.

Writing in The Australian, Alan Wood lays bare the sham that is Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong’s insistence that the ETS be passed into law before Copenhagen. Are you reading this Malcolm Turnbull?

The looming failure at Copenhagen is a powerful argument against Australia rushing to pass the Rudd government’s flawed emissions trading scheme, which isn’t even proposed to start operating until 2011. For Australia, with an economic structure heavily dependent on cheap, carbon-based energy, to move ahead of the rest of the world is foolish.

Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong see things differently. In their view, getting the legislation through the Senate in November is essential for Australia’s negotiating position at Copenhagen. According to Wong the eyes of the world are on us, waiting to see if the government succeeds.

Nonsense, of course, as Rudd gave away in an interview with CNN in New York. Asked whether the US negotiating position had been weakened by the Obama administration’s inability to get emissions trading legislation through the US Senate, Rudd replied that his own legislation had been recently blocked by Australia’s Senate.

He continued: “That doesn’t impede me from being active in these negotiations and my observation of President Obama is that it doesn’t impede him either.” So much for the importance of passing legislation before Copenhagen and, in any case, the UN knows what Australia’s position is on targets and emissions trading.
…
The government’s attempts to create a sense of urgency and set a timetable that demands its legislation be passed in November are a stunt. The issue is whether Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has the courage to do what he says is the only sensible course of action, to wait until after we know the outcome in Copenhagen.

However, having said this, Turnbull, who is in a complete funk over the possibility of a double-dissolution election on the issue, left the door open to negotiate with the government to pass its legislation, with amendments, in November. A clear majority of his back bench and probably at least half his front bench don’t agree with this policy.

Both former Labor prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating and former Liberal deputy leader and treasurer Peter Costello have warned a double dissolution is not without risks for Rudd because the electorate likes governments to run their full term.

Rudd has said more than once he doesn’t want a double dissolution and also believes governments should run their full term.

Turnbull should take him at his word and have the guts to stand by what he says he believes is the right policy, and is indeed the sensible policy: wait until after Copenhagen.

Read it here.

The gloves are off, it appears, as the insults fly backwards and forwards between Malcolm Turnbull and his backbenchers.

REBEL Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey has slammed Malcolm Turnbull for talking “rubbish” on climate change, warning the party can’t get into “bed” with Labor on an emissions trading scheme.

Declaring he would stare down the climate change sceptics within his party, Mr Turnbull said today “the answer is yes” on the question of cutting a deal to amend Labor’s emissions trading scheme ahead of a shadow cabinet meeting in Adelaide.

The Liberal leader has also flatly rejected the claims of some Coalition MPs that the joint partyroom had never signed off on a carbon trading plan, suggesting they must have “dozed off or stepped out of the room”.

But his remarks have already angered some of his flock, with Mr Tuckey telling The Australian Online that Mr Turnbull was “virtually saying to the party room: `stick it up your nose’.”

“Malcolm says the party room agreed to it. Well it didn’t. That’s rubbish,” Mr Tuckey said.

“It’s the way he does business, it’s entrapment. There’s never been a position put to our party room beyond that we should delay our decision until after Copenhagen.

“You can’t go to an election opposing an emissions trading scheme if you have been in bed with the government on trying to make it better.”

But despite the clear rejection of his approach, Turnbull isn’t giving up:

In a clear sign that he intends crashing through internal resistance, the Opposition Leader said those arguing there be no negotiation with Labor over its emissions trading scheme were advocating abandoning their constituencies.

”Farmers, people working in the manufacturing industry, people working in the coal industry, people working in gas, in aluminium. We would be abandoning them all, every one of them we would be leaving behind to make some political point,” he said.

”I am not going to walk away from thousands of Australians’ jobs. I am not going to sit back and just let Kevin Rudd have his scheme go through on whatever terms he likes.”
…
Mr Turnbull said those ”who say the Coalition should not engage with the Government at all really are speaking for nobody but themselves”.

Malcolm Turnbull is making no sense whatsoever in this. Then he admits that it is bad legislation, but that we should negotiate to make it slightly less bad, instead of what he should be doing – i.e. voting it down. He claims that by opposing the ETS, MPs are abandoning their constituents, tacitly admitting that by voting it down, it will be enacted anyway after a double-dissolution election in which the Opposition already concede defeat.

If Rudd then calls a double-dissolution election, I say bring it on – only in an election campaign can sufficient money be spent informing and educating the public about this pointless and damaging piece of legislation. An election fought on climate change would be a very interesting prospect.

Read it here and here.

Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, the ultimate alarmist propaganda poster, has, we hope, finally been laid to rest. The stick was a central part of the IPCC’s third assessment report, but was strangely dropped in the fourth. However, our own government still continues to use a version of it in order to mislead the unsuspecting public:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

 

It seems that senior coalition figures are trying to run an argument that “the ETS was policy in 2007, so it should be policy now”. This ignores the fact that a lot has changed in two years:

OPPOSITION emissions trading spokesman Ian Macfarlane has been forced to distribute the Coalition’s 2007 election policy supporting an emissions trading scheme to his own back bench, after several MPs suggested an ETS had never been party policy or had been “slipped” past them.

Strong internal opposition is mounting to Malcolm Turnbull’s strategy – endorsed by shadow cabinet – of negotiating amendments to the government’s ETS next month.

Many senior Coalition members expressed astonishment that some backbenchers appeared intent on “rolling” their already-struggling leader on an issue, when all possible alternative leaders, including Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott, agreed with Mr Turnbull’s political strategy.

Backbench dissenters such as Cory Bernardi and Wilson Tuckey seemed to be intent upon “driving the car at high speed into a brick wall in order to test the airbags”, one senior Liberal said. Others said the campaign was aimed at forcing shadow cabinet to demand such extensive amendments that the government could never agree to them, achieving the ETS’s demise by default.

Read it here.

Australian Climate Madness is 1 year old! Nearly 900 posts later and we have a loyal readership. A huge thank you to all the people who have linked to my posts and included ACM in their blog rolls, but I must single out the following, who have really helped get ACM known in the sceptic community:

• Tom Nelson – the eponymous distiller of all things climate on the web
• Marc Morano at Climate Depot
• Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That?
• Klockarman at Al Gore Lied
• Paul at The Daily Bayonet

And of course a big thank you to you, the readers.

Australia is still heading down a path to economic oblivion with the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS). By all accounts, however, as soon as anyone begins to understand it, they realise what a disaster it is.

I have posted here an ACM Summary which is a high-level bullet point list of climate issues for those interested in hearing an alternative side to the debate. Many will reject it out of hand, but it may stir sufficient doubts in the open-minded for them to begin researching climate themselves, rather than relying on the alarmism fed to them by the government and media.

So I have a small plug to make to my Australian readers: please send a link to the ACM Summary to your friends and/or colleagues, and hopefully, if we can raise sufficient awareness, we can avoid sacrificing our economy for a pointless environmental gesture.

Once again, thanks for your support and… stay sceptical!

Welcome to the Australian Climate Madness Summary. We hope the points set out below may give you some food for thought concerning climate change.

ACM Climate Change Summary

1. Introduction

For hundreds of years, scientific advancement has proceeded on the following basis: first, a theory is proposed to explain a particular natural phenomenon; secondly, that theory is used to make predictions about what may happen in the future; thirdly, the empirical observations are compared with those predictions; finally, if the observations match the predictions, it can be concluded that the theory accurately models the natural phenomenon. However, if they do not, or if a result is obtained at some point in the future that does not fit the theory, then the theory must be modified, new predictions made and new comparisons made with observations. This process will often go through many iterations.

However, when we come to the debate on climate change, the media and the government (and indeed many scientists) will say “the debate is over” or “the science is settled” and “we need to move on from the science and tackle with the problem.”

But is this really the case? Is the science really settled? If that were in fact the case and the evidence was so compelling, why is it that climate scientists need to “massage” data? Why is it that scientists who promote the alarmist agenda refuse to debate the issues? Why won’t Al Gore, responsible for the most popular climate change film An Inconvenient Truth, debate the claims raised in the film? [We know why, of course: many of them were just plain wrong.] Why are those who question the “consensus” often ostracised by their peers in the scientific community, silenced or even threatened? These are important questions to which answers should be sought.

Presently in Australia, the mainstream media and the Rudd government have closed their minds to any dissent from the “consensus” on climate change, namely that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming. The Rudd government will not entertain any debate on the science, preferring to simply rely on the pronouncements of the politically driven Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC – part of the UN), and insisting on enacting the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), a name intentionally chosen to mislead the public (it is the colourless, harmless gas carbon dioxide that is to be reduced, not elemental carbon in the form of soot, and it is not pollution). Similarly, the majority of the mainstream media has already made up its mind and only publishes articles which advance the agenda of dangerous global warming (see here for a textbook example of media bias).

All we seek to do is give readers the opportunity and the tools to find out more for themselves. If, after doing such research, readers are still convinced that AGW is real and dangerous, then at least they have been exposed to both sides of the story.

2. Key points on the science

• The earth’s climate is always changing – it has for 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so – to speak of climate change as if it is something “new” is misleading.
• There is nothing particularly special about the climate we live in at the moment – it is very benign compared to some of the alternatives – but to attempt to stop the clock and “freeze” the present state is misguided.
• That the earth is currently in a long-term warming phase is not in dispute. It has been since the end of the last Ice Age, and in particular since the end of the Little Ice Age a couple of hundred years ago. It is therefore not surprising, nor alarming, that temperatures today are higher than they were a century ago.
• However, the cause of that warming is where the dispute arises.
• There is no historical link (on geological time scales) between the harmless gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature. Levels of CO2 have been far higher (thousands of parts per million compared to a few hundred at present) in the past without the planet entering “runaway global warming” or passing “tipping points” from which it could not recover – the fact that we are here today is evidence enough of that.
• Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth showed a large graph of temperature and CO2 fitting together very closely, except that it was at such a small scale that it was not possible to determine that rises in CO2 actually lag behind rises in temperature (and vice versa) by about 800-1000 years. The long term warming and cooling of oceans releases and absorbs huge quantities of CO2.
• On shorter time-scales, temperatures rose in the early part of the 20th century with little or no man-made emissions of CO2.
• They also fell in the period 1950-1970 when CO2 emissions were rising rapidly in the post-war economic boom.
• The link between future global warming and CO2 is based predominantly on computer climate models.
• None of the computer models predicted the pause in warming (and even slight cooling) we have seen since 2001, despite rising emissions, so we must assume those models are flawed.
• There must be other factors at work, such as solar variations, cosmic ray variations, cloud cover, ocean currents etc, which have a far more significant effect on the climate than anthropogenic CO2 (which in any event is only a tiny part of the global CO2 budget)
• Every day, new peer-reviewed scientific studies change our understanding of the climate – to say the “science is settled” is pure hubris.
• The livelihood of many (most?) climate scientists depends on perpetuating the existence of the climate crisis, and there is presently a worrying lack of impartiality in this discipline.
• Studies are written with a pre-conceived agenda in mind, and the peer-review has, to an extent, been corrupted – in other words, alarmist papers are being reviewed by similarly alarmist reviewers.
• The story of the Michael Mann hockey stick is a prime example of how scientists with an agenda can manipulate data in order to produce the desired (alarmist) result – see here to read more about this particular example.
• The media and the government have already closed their minds to the subject – you will rarely read anything that contradicts the so-called consensus in the mainstream media.
• Hence the importance of the blogosphere and independent sources of information on climate.

3. Key points on the economics

• The IPCC attributes the current warming almost entirely to man-made CO2.
• This is obviously in the UN’s interest, since CO2 emissions can easily be regulated, unlike any other causes of climate change.
• This allows the UN to “blame” developed economies for the current warming, and force them to accept reductions in emissions in order to tackle climate change.
• Western government policy is based on the results of computer models which we have already seen are flawed.
• Schemes such as the Australian CPRS, otherwise known as the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will achieve nothing in terms of altering the climate – Australia produces less than 1.5% of global emissions. Even if we reduced those to zero overnight (a 100% reduction), it would make no difference to the climate (even if we assume that CO2 is the primary driver of temperature). So Kevin Rudd’s 5 – 15% will achieve less than nothing.
• The ETS will do enormous damage to our economy and the standards of living of everyone in
  society, but especially poorer families who will be burdened with higher electricity, gas and food prices – whilst doing nothing for the climate.

4. Key points on the politics

• There seems to be, amongst Western societies generally, a desire to “do something” in order to assuage our collective guilt for 200 years of economic progress (although why we should feel guilty about this is a mystery, since that economic progress has lifted billions of people out of a miserable life of poverty).
• For some reason we are embarrassed about our standards of living, and believe that we must engage in a quasi-religious penitence for the sins we have committed against the planet (see here for an excellent comparison between climate change hysteria and religion).
• History shows us that environmental causes have often been used to advance political agenda.
• The present climate “crisis” unfortunately provides such an opportunity for:

• more global governance and regulation by the UN;
• a redistribution of wealth on a global scale from richer to poorer nations;
• widespread increases in taxation at the expense of economic growth and prosperity;
• a scaling back of Western economic progress; and ultimately,
• a dismantling of capitalist systems (anti-globalisation)

• This is evidenced by the allegiances of environmental (“green”) and/or climate change activists, many of whom align themselves with socialist ideals (witness the composition of demonstrators at climate change protests – primarily from the political left).
• In Australia, the Rudd government is determined to push through the ETS before even seeing what other countries will commit to at Copenhagen. This may leave Australia in the position of having binding emissions reduction targets when much of the rest of the world has none. The inevitable result of this will be the export of local jobs and industry overseas.
• ACM believes that the ETS is a pointless political gesture for a country that produces less than 1.5% of global emissions, since it will have no effect on the climate whatsoever, but if we have to have it, we should at least make that decision with the knowledge of what other countries will commit to.

5. Conclusion

ACM is fully supportive of reducing pollution – and by that we mean proper pollution, particulates and toxins, and not CO2, which is a harmless gas and essential for all plant life on earth – from our environment. ACM is also fully supportive of conserving limited natural resources. However, the cost/benefit analysis based on these goals simply does not add up.

If you consider all the above points and dismiss them, then that is your prerogative. However, ACM’s view is that unless or until it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that the present warming is solely or primarily caused by man-made CO2 emissions, policies to reduce those emissions are pointless, and should be strongly resisted. Such policies will send millions of people back into poverty.

ACM exists to communicate an alternative viewpoint to the one-sided presentation of climate change issues provided by the Australian government and mainstream media.

Things keep getting worse for Malcolm Turnbull. In a crushing blow for his authority, a survey in The Australian has revealed that two-thirds of Liberal backbenchers disagree with his policy on the ETS:

Over the past four days, The Australian contacted all 59 Liberal Party backbenchers in the House of Representatives and the Senate, asking: Do you think the opposition should negotiate amendments to the ETS with the government ahead of the Copenhagen conference?

Only 12 MPs said they supported Mr Turnbull’s decision to negotiate, while 41 wanted the opposition to either not negotiate at all or to do so only on the guarantee that the legislation would not be passed ahead of the Copenhagen conference in December. Six MPs were either unwilling to disclose their position or unavailable.

Senior opposition frontbenchers have claimed for weeks that it is only a vocal minority of the Liberal partyroom that is critical of the negotiating position Mr Turnbull and his shadow minister Ian Macfarlane have adopted, and most media reports have reinforced this position.

But The Australian‘s survey proves that the so-called maverick Liberal parliamentarians Wilson Tuckey and Cory Bernardi are reflecting the views of an overwhelming majority of their colleagues when they publicly criticise the shadow cabinet for endorsing Mr Turnbull to negotiate with the government over the ETS.
…
Perhaps most concerning for Mr Turnbull is that when the results of the survey are broken down, the discontent with his decision to negotiate amendments is not only coming from one section of the party.

Three times as many House of Representatives MPs do not want to negotiate at all (21-7) and when the data are broken down to include only marginal-seat MPs, 11 out of 15 MPs don’t want to negotiate.

ACM’s view is that the ETS is bad law, and should not be passed, amended or not. It is now clear that Malcolm Turnbull clearly does not represent the majority view of his party on the ETS.

Read it here.