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…!)

The Wall Street Journal expertly pulls apart the climate change hubris at the G8 in an excellent opinion piece. Not only have the G8 moved away from setting emissions targets in favour of setting nebulous climate targets (2˚C temperature rise above pre-industrial levels), but there are so many caveats and exclusions that the end result is basically the square root of sweet FA.

When King Canute of lore wanted to teach his citizens a lesson, he set his throne by the seashore and commanded the tides to roll out. Canute’s spirit was back in business this week at the G-8 summit in Italy, where the assembled leaders declared that the world’s temperature shall not rise: “We recognize the scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees [Celsius],” or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, said the summit declaration.

So let it be written, so let it be done.

As for how they will achieve this climate-defying feat, well, the leaders were somewhat less definitive: “we will work . . . to identify a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050.”

Translation: Since the heads of the world’s leading economies couldn’t agree on an actual policy on climate change, they opted instead to command the clouds, the seas and all of the Earth to cool. Or maybe they were finally admitting that this whole climate business is getting too expensive, so let’s just throw out a goal that everyone knows is beyond the reach of kings, much less democratic leaders.

Read it all here.

Picked up by a stray microphone at L’Aquila, Rudd’s unguarded comment to Danish Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen:

Right now I don’t think we are on track to get an agreement at Copenhagen.

Read it here.

I heard this in the middle of the night on ABC News Radio, and I should have written it down, because guess what, it isn’t anywhere to be found in the mainstream media. All the stories are talking about how IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri was “cautiously optimistic” about progress at L’Aquila.

But this is the quote nobody wants you to read, which I found as a transcript on a Chinese web site. In it Pachauri refers to the lack of a baseline against which to measure the 80% cut by 2050:

“It’s pretty ridiculous if you ask me, I mean I’m surprised I didn’t see the fallacy that they were introducing in this pledge by not defining the baseline at least. How can you say you will achieve a cut of ‘x’ amount if you don’t even define what the baseline is, what the benchmark is?”

If anyone can find a reliable source of this quote, please let me know. You can listen to an MP3 of the quote here.

As always, a great read!

Always the last refuge of someone who hasn’t a clue what they are talking about, speaking in long complicated words which actually mean nothing is Rudd’s speciality.

While addressing German press and Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Rudd said it was unlikely any progress [on climate change] would emerge from the Major Economies Forum “by way of detailed programmatic specificity”.

The line had German translators scrambling for a meaning.

It also has this particular native English speaker scrambling for a meaning as well…

When asked about the Prime Minister’s choice of words today, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said Mr Rudd would be better to use clear, plain English.

Mr Turnbull admitted he personally had “no idea what (programmatic specificity) means”.

“As I understand it, I heard part of his speech was not only incomprehensible in English, but so incomprehensible the German translators were unable to translate,” Mr Turnbull said.

Read it here.

… and by wrecking western economies with pointless emissions reduction schemes, somehow overcome nature and stop temperatures rising more than 2 degrees C.

The aim, agreed at a G8 summit in the central Italian town of L’Aquila, is to cut overall world emissions by 50 per cent in order to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius, a declaration said.

But the world’s largest emitters, including China and India, have backtracked, and are refusing to cut emissions by 50% by 2050.

Major polluting nations meeting at a G8 summit in Italy have dropped a pledge to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a European Union official said.

“There is indeed a very strong commitment to identify the global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050, but there is no 50 per cent” mentioned in a draft declaration, the official said on condition of anonymity.

All of which means that anything the developed world does will be even more pointless that we first thought.

Read it here and here.

ACM’s favourite journo, from the “it’s all happening faster than we expected” department, all based on flaky models, of course:

Climate change is occurring faster than predicted across the Snowy Mountains, but little research is being funded by governments and universities to track its impact, scientists say.

CSIRO climate modelling predicts an 8 per cent decline in rain and snowfall across the mountains by 2020, with an average temperature rise of up to 1 degree.

Under this ”worst-case” trend, temperature would rise by 2.6 degrees by 2050, with a 97 per cent loss of snow cover lasting at least two months.

But studies of snow records by NSW parks scientist Ken Green show average snow depths in some areas are already tracking at, or close to, levels predicted for 2020.

”We’ve arrived roughly a decade before we were supposed to get there,” he said.

Yawn. Read it here.

But don’t expect anything important to be decided – these are just talks about talks, after all. Still, it’s a nice jolly to Italy in the Northern hemisphere summer, where Rudd can pretend that he’s important, rubbing shoulders with leaders of the other 16 countries in the Major Economies Forum. It doesn’t change the fact that the whole thing is a pointless waste of effort, and spews more CO2 into the air than any agreement will probably ever save:

The MEF leaders will consider signing an agreement to stop global temperatures rising by more than two degrees Celsius, a level many scientists consider potentially disastrous for the environment.

The MEF, which includes emerging economies of China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil as well as the powerful G8 members, will also be asked to back the “aspirational” goal of halving emissions by 2050.

But after holding talks in Berlin yesterday, Mr Rudd and Ms Merkel said while they hoped the MEF would make progress towards a global goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it would be up to leaders at the United Nations climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December to sign off on a new pact to limit global emissions.

Mr Rudd said it was “highly unlikely” the MEF would come up with a detailed plan to slash emissions by a certain time.

“That is what Copenhagen is about,” he said.

So what exactly is all this about? Answers on a postcard… no don’t bother.

Read it here.