Poor old Ross Garnaut. He just cannot believe that anyone could possibly not agree with his position on climate and as usual, resorts to the typical ad hominem. It’s all so predictable:

Australia’s top climate change expert [Er, I don’t think so, he’s an economist – Ed] has likened global warming sceptics in rural areas to sharks.

Ross Garnaut’s comments come as a Newspoll shows the Rudd government losing support in regional Australia, with the Nationals benefiting from opposition to an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Without mentioning the Nationals by name, Prof Garnaut said climate change sceptics in rural areas were exploiting the ignorant.

‘That’s a sad thing,’ he told ABC television on Monday night from Beijing. ‘There, you have climate sharks preying on the vulnerability of people who aren’t in a position to be well informed themselves.’

I sincerely hope you are not suggesting that rural people are somehow less capable of understanding the issues than the urban liberal intelligentsia like you, because that really would be patronising and offensive.

Asked who the climate sharks were, Prof Garnaut said it was anyone who played on the human instinct to deny bad news.

And now the inevitable D-word Alert:

‘It’s the sort of denial we see going on with a lot of tragic circumstances, but you never make a problem easier to handle by pretending it doesn’t exist,’ he said.

Unbelievable climate nonsense from a man in an ivory tower.

Read it here.

I thought they’d only just finished… Anyway, this is the last gasp before Copenhagen (at least we’ll all get a break from climate hysteria for a while, with a bit of luck):

UN negotiations for a global climate treaty have resumed in Bangkok amid fears that delegates will fail to agree on a draft text ahead of December’s crucial showdown in Copenhagen.

The talks are the latest session in nearly two years of haggling – known as the “Bali Road Map” – that have fallen far short of an agreement to tackle climate change beyond 2010.

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said on the eve of the meetings that there was intense pressure on the 2,500 participants gathered in the Thai capital. [2500 participants? Carbon footprint must be the size of Al Gore’s house – Ed]

“We’re arriving here in Bangkok with about, I think, a 280-page negotiating text which is basically impossible to work with,” de Boer told AFP in Bangkok.

“We’ve got 16 days of negotiating time left before Copenhagen so things are getting tight and we need to get to a result.”

The suspense is killing me!

Read it here.

But because it’s a low temperature record, it’s obviously just weather, and therefore reduced to a tiny story in the dingiest part of the ABC website, whereas if it had been a high temperature record it would have been climate change [oops, I mean global warming] and plastered all over the front page of every newspaper and website in Australia.

Canberra had its coldest September day in 40 years yesterday. The temperature hovered around 6 degrees for most of the day, peaking at 8.1 degrees at 5:00 pm AEST.

Forecaster Paul Corello from the Bureau of Meteorology says it was unusual weather. “We’ve got a low pressure system sitting off east of Tasmania, a high over South Australia – those two systems dragged up a lot of cold air from over the polar regions and that cold air ended up over the south-east states,” he said.

Mr Corello says there was even light snow falls as low as 700 metres on the mountains surrounding Canberra. There was also heavy snow falls on the New South Wales Snowy Mountain ski fields.

Neil Thew from Perisher Ski Resort says it is a remarkable way to finish the ski season which officially ends this week. “We’ve had 30 centimetres of the lightest and driest snow received this season,” he said.

“We’ve had snow down to 600 metres which is remarkable for this time of year.”

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Read it here.

It’s All Happening Faster Than We Thought Alert, as the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre cranks up the hysteria with yet another study showing how it’s all tracking faster than the IPCC predicted [how does that happen, when the planet has cooled for the last eight years, which wasn’t predicted by the IPCC? – Ed]:

Global temperatures may be 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the mid-2050s if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue, a new study says.

The study, by Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre, echoed a United Nations report last week which found climate changes were outpacing worst-case scenarios forecast in 2007 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Our results are showing similar patterns [to the IPCC] but also show the possibility that more extreme changes can happen,” said Debbie Hemming, the co-author of the research which was published at the start of a climate change conference at Oxford University.

Read it here.

This is the triumphant headline in The Age today, which goes on:

THREE-QUARTERS of Australians believe that the price of fossil fuels should be increased to deal with climate change and 92 per cent believe a legally binding global climate deal is urgent and should be made at the conference to be held in Copenhagen in December.

Gosh, that’s pretty convincing… or it would be if it bore any relation to the truth. The survey was carried out by the Danish [think Copenhagen] Board of Technology. The Age gives little away about the survey:

The project, Worldwide Views on Global Warming, had demographically representative groups of citizens deliberating in 38 countries, sending strong messages to their political leaders on the issue of climate change action.

But literally ten seconds digging on their web site (http://www.wwviews.org) would have revealed to the journalist, Kelsey Munro (if he had bothered to look), that the whole exercise is nothing more than a carefully orchestrated propaganda machine for the Copenhagen talks, “educating” participants to give the answers they want:

How did a WWViews meeting take place? 

The national and regional WWViews meetings took place during one full day and involved roughly100 citizens. The citizens were informed thoroughly about the issues in ways that are locally appropriate -information videos, expert speakers, teaching sessions or video recorded interviews. The participants were put into smaller groups of 6-8 people with a moderator connected to each group.

The moderator guided the discussions at the table through four consecutive sessions of debating and voting on different issues related to climate change. Towards the end of the meeting, each group of citizens formulated one recommendation for negotiators at the COP15. These recommendations were gathered and put to a general vote that determined the priority of the recommendations produced and the prominence, which they are given in the following communication to politicians.

How will the WWViews achieve impact on climate policy?

Together the partners of the WWViews Alliance have a truly awesome network of friends and colleagues reaching across the political globe. All parts of this network are now busy disseminating the results of WWViews to reach maximum impact on the COP15 negotiations and the debate surrounding it.

To illustrate, a few highlights are appropriate:

• Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister of Climate and Energy, is not only a formal Ambassador for WWViews; she is also the host of the U.N. COP15 negotiations. While no formal promises can be made, the Minister is ideally positioned to help bring the results of WWViews to the attention of the COP15 participants.

• Each National Partner in WWViews has the responsibility to try to bring their respective national deliberation’s results to the attention of their own nation’s COP15 delegates and political decision makers.

• The WWViews secretariat plans to organize public exhibits about WWViews and its results in Copenhagen during the COP15 deliberation. COP15 delegates will see those exhibits. The exhibits will also prompt local media coverage in Copenhagen and Denmark, which may in turn directly or indirectly come to the attention of COP15 delegates. 

• The WWViews secretariat has organized a global media strategy publicized the WWViews process and results. Among other things, the WWViews deliberations were held worldwide during a single 36-hour period, and publicized immediately via the World Wide Web, building excitement, drama and media interest throughout the day. All of this media attention brings the project results to the attention of ordinary people, interest groups and political decision makers worldwide. Those people and institutions may, in turn, bring the results to the attention of national decision makers and COP15 delegates.

Do you think any of this included anything not part of the IPCC-based “consensus of alarmism”? Here are a couple of the questions. Now here’s a tricky one: what do you think happened between questions 1 and 2?

Yes, that’s right – they would have been brainwashed with an undiluted diet of pure climate alarmism, to scare them into thinking that AGW is real and dangerous and that we should act now. Do you think there was any presentation of the alternative science? You know, the thousands of peer reviewed papers that challenge the CO2-based hysteria? Er, I don’t think so. I have emailed the organisers requesting copies of the materials used – I don’t expect a response.

And the list of links tells us all we need to know:

COP15
The Cop15 takes place in Copenhagen in Dec 7 – Dec 18, 2009. This is the official homepage for the event: http://www.cop15.dk/en

COP14
The Cop14 took place in Poznan in Poland in December 2008. The debate and results made at this conference is the stepping stone for the COP15.
http://www.cop14.gov.pl/index.php?lang=EN

IPCC
The homepage of The Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is a UN organisation – the IPCC conducts the COP meetings and negotiations. The IPCC has also done extensive research in climate change.
http://www.ipcc.ch/

UNFCCC
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the predecessor to the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC secretariat supports all institutions involved in the climate change process, particularly the COP, the subsidiary bodies, and their Bureau.
http://unfccc.int/2860.php

UNEP
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) works to facilitate the transition to low-carbon societies, to support climate proofing efforts, to improve understanding of climate change science, and to raise public awareness of this global challenge. UNEP has also been involved in creating the IPCC and UNFCCC.
http://www.unep.org/

People’s Climate Action
PCA is funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry and was founded in November 2008 to prepare for COP15. The People’s Climate Action is an umbrella organisation of more than 40 large and small Non Governmental Organisations and individual projects related to the COP15.
http://www.peoplesclimateaction.dk/uk/

350.org
350.org is a campaign founded by U.S. author and amabassador for this project, Bill McKibben. The purpose of this campaign is to highlight the efforts of existing organizations and knit these many efforts together for a powerful global, scientific, and specific call to action.
http://www.350.org/

C-40
C40 is a group of the world’s largest cities committed to tackling climate change, based on the thought that cities have a central role to play in tackling climate change, particularly as cities bear a disproportional responsibility for causing it.
http://www.c40cities.org/

This is not an impartial survey, or anything approaching an impartial survey. It is a partisan, biased exercise in brainwashing in order to obtain misleading results to achieve a particular political outcome. Shame on The Age for uncritically publishing such obvious nonsense.

Read it here.

The rural communities are the only ones that really understand the effect of the ETS, and it is showing in recent polls. Green policies and environmentalism are fine when you live in the city, working in air conditioned offices, insulated from the harsh realities of those policies’ effects.

An opinion poll shows public support for Labor has fallen in regional areas as well as in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s home state of Queensland.

The latest Newspoll figures, published in today’s Australian, show an increase in support for the Coalition from voters outside capital cities.

In regional areas, the Coalition now leads Labor 44 per cent to 39 per cent in primary figures and 51 per cent to 49 per cent in two party preferred terms.

The figures can be at least partly attributed to a boost in support for the Nationals, who are leading a strong anti-emissions trading campaign in regional areas.

The Coalition’s primary vote in Queensland was higher by four percentage points to 42 per cent, only one point behind Labor.

Read it here (this page has disappeared from the ABC web site for some reason, so this is the Google cache)

UPDATE: Barnaby Joyce sums up the effect of the ETS very succinctly:

“People just didn’t understand it, and now that they do get it they just hate it,” he told ABC Radio today. (source)

That’s the spirit. At least Julie Bishop had the guts to say “bring it on”, but Ian Macfarlane, the new climate change spokesman, has thrown in the towel before the fight has even begun, effectively committing the opposition to agree to an ETS becoming law prior to Copenhagen:

THE Coalition would lose an early election sparked by an outright rejection of Labor’s emissions trading scheme and precipitate a “disaster”, according to the opposition’s new spokesman on climate change.

Warning that the threat of a double-dissolution election was so great the Liberals and Nationals must now work to amend the Rudd government’s legislation, Ian Macfarlane said yesterday his goal was to craft amendments that would bring the Nationals back inside the tent. [Any amendments that would please the Nationals would certainly be rejected by Labor – Ed]

While deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop was still talking tough about the Coalition’s readiness to fight an early poll, Mr Macfarlane said yesterday the reality was “we will lose”.

“The risk we take is that if we just oppose it outright, the double dissolution that precipitates and the likelihood (is) we would lose that election,” the acting climate change spokesman told the Nine Network.

“That means that the flawed legislation we have now will be the flawed legislation that goes to the joint parliamentary sitting. If that is the case, that will be a disaster. Far better for the Coalition to put up a practical set of amendments that will save jobs in Australia, and so I’ll be taking a proposal to the joint partyroom on that basis.”

Except the government is unlikely even to consider your amendments… I mean, why should they? They know they will win a double dissolution election (you’ve just told them), so they can be as tough as they like in negotiations, and at any time they can just walk away.

Read it here.

In an opinion piece today, The Australian correctly raises all sorts of tricky questions about the ETS which are simply not being answered:

THE emissions trading scheme, as Kevin Rudd says, is not “political slap and tickle”. It is serious legislation that could potentially have a greater impact on productivity, capital flows and jobs than the GST, which was subjected to intense scrutiny and almost cost the Howard government office 11 years ago. We’ve seen plenty of hot air, but the ETS has received little more than “slap and tickle” coverage from supposedly serious sections of the media, including some in the Canberra gallery. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s confected October 20 deadline for the opposition to propose legislative amendments led news bulletins this week, even though that was the Coalition timetable anyway. It would have been more helpful to examine the government’s failure to unveil the regulations that will largely determine the impact of the scheme.
…
But what about the government ministers, well known to many in the media, whose scepticism about the ETS and climate change privately rivals that of Mr Tuckey and Barnaby Joyce?
…
But what about jobs?
…
But what about the expectations of business?
…
Then there is the science. The public has not been well-served by scientists’ contradictory findings on such basic points as whether the world is warming or cooling. Figures predicting sea level rises fluctuate widely. Some have turned scientific method on its head, no longer proceeding through a process of conjectures and refutations, but rather conjectures and affirmation, crossing the line between inquiry and activism. The science has been politicised.

After all that, it’s hard to see how anyone could possibly support the ETS. But The Australian somehow manages it, on the flimsiest of pretexts:

What is not disputed is that Australia’s contribution to global emissions is barely 1 per cent and falling. The Weekend Australian supports the government’s scheme not because it will achieve much environmentally – it is too small for that – but because, like the scheme John Howard took to the last election, it is cautious and market-driven. Public opinion polls show most Australians feel better that something is being done.

Feel better? This is an almost unbelievably cowardly justification for supporting the worst single piece of legislation since Federation. The Australian is the only news source that is vaguely critical of the ETS, yet even it shies away from the inevitable shrill cries of “denier” that would be hurled its way if it came out and spoke the truth, namely that the ETS is bad law and should not be enacted.

Read it here.

Given that a binding global deal to slash CO2 emissions will send millions of people back into poverty, and at the same time make no difference whatsoever to the climate (which will change whether we want it to or not), let’s hope they’re right:

European leaders voiced growing doubts on whether the world will meet a December deadline for a new climate deal as a summit here looked set to take up global warming in generalities.

Twenty leaders who represent 90 percent of the global economy were holding two days of talks in the eastern US city of Pittsburgh, itself billed as a model of transition from decaying steel town to a green technology hub.

The summit opened two days after a high-powered climate meet at the United Nations, where Japan and China offered new pledges on how to save the world from rising temperatures predicted to threaten entire species if unchecked.

But with just a little more than two months before a conference in Copenhagen — designated two years ago as the venue to seal the successor to the landmark Kyoto Protocol — pessimism was growing.

“When it comes to the negotiations, they are in fact slowing down; they are not going in the right direction,” said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, the current head of the European Union.

“We are very worried that we need to speed up the negotiations,” he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also sounded a sour note.

“There has been progress, in particular from the Chinese side, from the Japanese side now, and the UN meeting with (UN Secretary General) Ban Ki-moon,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin before heading to Pittsburgh.

“But I have to say that when I consider what still has to be achieved before Copenhagen, we cannot be happy,” she said.

Read it here.

Two Indoctrination Alerts in one day? This is becoming a bit of a habit:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called on university students in the US to devote their time and talents to tackling climate change.

In the US for the third G20 meeting, Rudd took the opportunity to speak to students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh about climate change.

He told the students that human use of technology had created global warming and it was humans inventing and adapting new technologies, that would lead to reduced emissions.

The spin just gets worse and worse.

Read it here.