Ian Plimer said it first, but the similarities between the scaremongering of today, and those associated with Y2K (and the ozone layer) are too hard to ignore:

REMEMBER Y2K? This was the new millennium bug that we were told threatened to throw the world’s computer systems into chaos as we entered the year 2000.

Aircraft could fall from the sky and businesses crash in a global digital catastrophe, we were warned. Panic set in and billions of dollars were spent across the world to head off this impending armageddon.

In this mad rush there was no room for sceptics. The evidence of the looming danger was overwhelming and undeniable, regardless of the fact that it sounded like something out of a science-fiction movie. Action had to be taken and no price was too high.

Well, the tsunami turned out to be nothing more than a ripple in a pond, if that.

Does all this have a familiar ring to it? Of course. It is the same type of argument that is being foisted on us by the Rudd government over global warming and its threat to the future of civilisation as we know it.

Read it here.

UPDATED: Actually, Chris Abood claims first prize for this, see here (thanks for the link, Chris)

Crazy story of the day, reprinted, where else, in The Age:

PROMINENT French chefs have warned that the country’s wines will lose their complexity and the best produce will come from Scotland if the effects of climate change are not tackled.

A group of chefs, sommeliers and chateaux has issued a call to action, urging the country to secure ambitious targets to limit global warming.

So in 50 years time, the Scots can drink fine home-produced cabernet sauvignon with their haggis and fried Mars bars.

Read it here… on second thoughts, don’t bother.

Only took a matter of hours:

The federal government has rejected predictions grocery prices will rise by up to seven per cent under its planned emissions trading scheme.

“Those figures are wrong,” junior climate change minister Greg Combet told Fairfax Radio Network on Monday.

Phew, that’s OK then.

Read it here.

Worryingly, the public appears to have been successfully brainwashed by the Rudd government into believing that the ETS will effect a painless transition to a utopian green economy which will at a stroke save the Barrier Reef from certain destruction, and save the planet from “dangerous climate change”. The reality, of course, is that they haven’t the slightest clue about the ETS, or its effects on their way of life or standard of living:

The latest opinion poll shows the Federal Government has strong public support for another attempt at getting its emissions trading scheme through Parliament.

The Nielsen poll published in Fairfax newspapers shows 55 per cent of people want the Government to reintroduce its rejected emissions trading scheme to Parliament in three months’ time.

Only 29 per cent want the Government to wait to see what other countries will do.

Yet I wonder what proportion of the public really understand what the ETS is about? Are they really aware of the spiralling electricity prices that will result, or even this:

Grocery prices are expected to rise by 7 per cent under the federal government’s emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Large retailers have warned the government that the proposed scheme would add between 4 and 7 per cent to shopping bills, the Australian newspaper reports.

The warnings have prompted calls for the government to come up with a compensation package to help low and middle-income families.

The government says it plans to compensate households for increased energy prices when the ETS is expected to be introduced in 2011.

But it is yet to announce how it will cover the rise in grocery prices.

I wonder if the results would have been different if they knew about that?

Read it here and here.

Labor has backed down and split off the Renewable Energy Target bill from the ETS. The RET is still crazy, however, as there is not a chance in hell that 20% of the nation’s energy will come from renewable sources by 2020, but that’s another story:

THE federal government’s decision to detach its renewable energy target (RET) assistance package from its emissions trading scheme is a victory for common sense, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong confirmed today that the government would separate the RET section from the rest of its carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) so it could be voted on separately.

The move comes after the coalition and all cross-bench senators voted against Labor’s 11 climate change bills in the Senate on Thursday.

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull said today he was pleased that the government had backed down from holding renewable energy “hostage” to the passage of the emissions trading scheme.

He said the coalition would now happily sit down with Senator Wong this week and negotiate constructively to ensure the RET section passed parliament.

“We’ll certainly negotiate with her in good faith in the course of this week with the view of getting the renewable target legislation passed,” Mr Turnbull told reporters in Sydney.

Read it here.

This may be a tactic on the part of Yvo de Boer to scare governments into more action to “tackle climate change” in advance of Copenhagen, or it might be really what he thinks (unlikely). Either way, it shows how idiotic Rudd’s desperate push for the ETS to be legislated this year really is…

“If we continue at this rate we are not going to make it,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said at the end of a five-day negotiating session in Bonn.

“Momentum for a strong result is building at the highest political level,” he said, referring to individual pledges by rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

“But that action is not ambitious enough, and it is only half of the solution. The negotiations need to move forward much faster,” he said in a webcast press conference.

Some 2,400 delegates from about 180 nations, riven by major differences, made scant headway toward hammering out a draft treaty, negotiators said.

On Friday, a document of 200 pages — little more than a “laundry list” of national positions, according to one negotiator — still contained “about 2,500 brackets in the text, each indicating an area of disagreement,” de Boer said.

“This shows how much ground there is still to be covered.”

Sharp divisions remain over how deeply wealthy economies should slash their carbon emissions by 2020, and whether commitments by developing nations should be binding.

Read it here.

Kevin Rudd is once again using the most important piece of legislation since GST to play politics and force the Opposition to pass the ETS:

KEVIN Rudd is calling Malcolm Turnbull’s bluff on climate change, with a surprise agreement to key Opposition demands surrounding his Emissions Trading Scheme.

The move is an attempt to embarrass the Coalition into passing in full the Government’s climate legislation, which is blocked in the Senate.

The Government will announce the move today, then unleash senior ministers to begin wedging Mr Turnbull on the issue, claiming the Opposition is now duty-bound to pass the legislation in full.

Mr Rudd will agree to an Opposition demand that he split the legislation package into two separate Bills – one that forces energy-intensive industries to meet renewable energy targets and the other that will set the ETS into action.
…
Mr Rudd will now argue that today’s concession meets Opposition demands and Mr Turnbull should, in return, agree to pass the ETS unamended.

Unamended? Are you serious? Let’s hope Malcolm Turnbull has the guts to stand up to this cheap political stunt.

Read it here.

And I don’t mean the sceptics, I mean the alarmists, or as we should now call them, the “natural climate cycle deniers” – those who are so blinkered by the whole AGW message, and have their feet so firmly in the never-ending funding trough, that they refuse, despite clear evidence to the contrary, to acknowledge natural variation may explain at least part of the current warming. One of those is Wong-bot climate adviser, Will Steffen, quoted in a breathless article in The Alarmists’ Journal, sorry, The Canberra Times:

Remarkably, [Senator Steve] Fielding is still arguing about the science of climate change as experts shake their heads in disbelief at the senator’s ignorance and eagerness to embrace views based on according to the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute director, Professor Will Steffen ”flawed logic, misleading and inaccurate statements, and confused and inconsistent analyses”.

Why is it remarkable, given there are 30,000 odd scientists worldwide who dispute the theory of AGW? Note that the quote above doesn’t address Fielding’s points, just a list of smears.

The alarmists are the deniers now.

Read it here (if you can stand it).

Let’s see how this holds up in November, if the ETS is voted down again:

“I have not the slightest intention of going to an early poll,” he told Melbourne radio 3AW this morning.

What, you mean, you’re going to abandon the habit of a lifetime and not try to score cheap political points out of all this? Given past experience, I find that very hard to believe.

Read it here.

Bravo Nick Minchin, leader of the Opposition in the Senate, for pointing out so clearly the fraud that is the two-errors-in-four-words “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” on Tuesday (h/t Andrew Bolt):

Not only is the timing of this legislative initiative to be condemned, so too should the very name given to this package of legislation be condemned by this parliament… For no more than base political purposes, the government has called its emissions trading scheme a ‘carbon pollution reduction scheme’. This is of course the perpetuation of a cruel hoax on the Australian people, childishly simplistic and misleading. The scheme proposed does not deal with carbon. It purports to deal with something quite separate—carbon dioxide emissions—and the scheme does not deal with pollution.

Whatever the climatic role of human induced emissions of CO2, CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant. CO2 is, as we know, a clear, odourless, colourless gas vital to life on earth… Indeed the Rudd government knows it too. Its own environment department’s website has a link to the official Australian National Pollutant Inventory, which lists 93 pollutants. Surprise, surprise, carbon dioxide is not listed among them….

It is also typical of this deceitful and spin-driven government to so cynically misrepresent the nature of carbon dioxide. Of course this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming… The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century…

Australia contributes a little over one per cent of the planet’s CO2 emissions. If we were to completely shut down the Australian economy tomorrow, Australia’s
CO2 emissions would be fully replaced by China within nine months. It is indisputably the case that nothing Australia does on its own can have any impact whatsoever on the earth’s climate. The deceit perpetrated by climate change fanatics that an Australian ETS will save the Barrier Reef is utterly contemptible…

The cruel joke is that all those thousands of jobs to be destroyed by Labor’s CPRS will be in vain, because this scheme will make absolutely no difference to the global climate.

See here for Senate Hansard.