Just don't tell me the debate's over…
It's a tough life on the UN AGW bandwagon
Great choice, then all the delegates can complain about the heat due to “global warming”! Perhaps they’ll also turn the aircon off a la James Hansen…
I long for the day when a climate summit is held in winter, somewhere cold and bleak, like Aberdeen – perhaps they’d appreciate the extra warmth a bit more.
We're all gonna die
That’s not the article title any more, but it is the title in the URL (see image here). Let’s scare people by saying they will die if we don’t “tackle climate change”… with a pointless carbon tax that will reduce global temperatures by seven ten thousandths of a degree.
The ABC, or Groupthink Central it it should be known, shamelessly and uncritically regurgitates an AAP/AFP article plugging a biased and one-sided report from the Climate Commission on the effects of climate change and health:
A new report is warning more Australians face dying in heatwaves and catching infectious diseases as a result of climate change.
A Climate Commission report out today, titled The Critical Decade, says climate change-related injury, disease and deaths will continue to grow in decades to come unless sustained action is taken.
The Climate Commission report says climbing temperatures will lead to more natural disasters and changing rainfall patterns, which will have an impact on people’s health as much as on the environment.
It includes a worst-case scenario where deaths from hotter temperatures in Queensland and the Northern Territory could multiply tenfold by 2100.
Alarmist tactic number 94, throw in a worst-case scenario and lo and behold, the news agency pick up on it! Brilliant.
Report co-author Professor Lesley Hughes says even a small rise in temperature can be detrimental to people’s health.
“A small rise in average temperature actually means a fairly large rise in the number of days, for example, over 35 degrees [Celsius] every year,” he said.
“So as average temperatures go up, the number of extremely hot days go up in a disproportionate way. So what we’re concerned about with climate change, amongst other impacts, is the impact on heat waves.” (source)
I seem to recall reading that the Little Ice age was pretty shit for humanity as well. Marc at ABC News Watch has more:
Despite his expertise, surprisingly no work by [Paul] Reiter was cited in the climate commission’s report on Climate change and health. The commission has presented only one side of a complex argument.The lies of omission are the greatest lies of all. The commission’s report is another example of cargo cult science in action. It is clear that the commission has no intention of fulfilling its charter to Explain the science of climate change and the impacts on Australia. It is purely a political body. I have no doubt the ABC in its coverage of this report will once again fail in their duty to ask the hard questions.
And indeed they have. They regurgitate a press release from an alarmist news agency.
The UN and extreme weather
Doesn’t matter how many times this kind of nonsense is debunked (even by warmist scientists, and played down even by the IPCC just a few days ago), the UN apparatchiks, with their rusted-on political agenda of climate socialism, just cannot let it go, especially when the delegates at Durban are desperate to ratchet up the alarmism:
The world is getting hotter, with 2011 one of the warmest years on record, and increasing temperatures are expected to amplify floods, droughts and other extreme weather patterns around the planet, said a U.N. report released on Tuesday.
The World Meteorological Organization, part of the United Nations, said the warmest 13 years of average global temperatures have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. [Carefully omitting the fact that records only go back about 150 years. Big freaking deal. – Ed]
That has contributed to extreme weather conditions that increase the intensity of droughts and heavy precipitation across the world, it said.
“Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities,” WMO Deputy Secretary-General Jerry Lengoasa told reporters in Durban. (source)
Yawn, yawn, yawn. No-one’s listening any more – not even the media. Same old spin, same old propaganda, same old BS. The party is truly over, folks, best start getting used to it.
Opening my RSS feed reader this evening I was sprayed by a fetid stream of climate hysteria from the once reputable UK broadsheet:
Climate porn
All this on the day when Canada dumps Kyoto. Yep, the world is certainly rushing ahead, eh Julia and Greg?
No links. If you’re that desperate, you can find them yourself!
Nightmare vegetable
I do not intend to waste much time over the next two weeks commenting on the inevitable nonsense that will emanate from the latest round of pointless climate talks. All the usual celebs will no doubt show up (having arrived by private jet, and then been transferred to their luxury hotels by fossil-fuel powered limousines): Angelina, Leonardo, Bono, Branson etc etc., and all the climate rent seekers will be salivating at the prospect of yet more funding diverted from solving real global problems to doing little for an imaginary one.
Durban is even more of an irrelevance than Copenhagen or Cancun. At Copenhagen, there were genuinely high expectations of a global deal – and look what happened: abject failure. Cancun was a face-saving operation with a worthless “pledge” to keep global temperature rises under 2 degrees – as if you can simply turn a knob on the earth’s climate and it will obediently respond!
And now Durban. Expectations here are so low they are negative. Failure again is a certainty. Nobody is focussed on climate change anymore – the world is suddenly faced with REAL problems. Financial crises that threaten jobs and livelihoods, and the engine of wealth creation that keeps our societies operating.
Add to that the 5000-plus emails from Climategate 2.0, which show, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “the Cause” is kept afloat by a close knit cabal of fanatical warmists, who, in conjunction with compliant mainstream media organisations (including the ABC), will do anything to ensure that dissent is suppressed and uncertainties ignored. “Out of context” they cried in 2009. Not any more! Perhaps Mr FOIA, who has tantalisingly provided a locked archive of 220,000 further emails, may be persuaded to reveal the password if they complain about “context” much more.
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful Christmas present?
UPDATE: The Australian groupthink machine (otherwise known as the ABC) desperately tries to find an alarmist story to keep Durban relevant and “the Cause” alive despite all the collapsing wreckage of climate hysteria strewn around them.
Huhne-atic
The UK is further along the road to climate madness than Australia, but where the UK now stands provides a possible vision for the future in Australia, if the Labor/Green policies are allowed to continue unhindered. Both the UK and Australia have the same characters in this vulgar melodrama, just a different cast.
In the UK, the long-suffering public has to deal with that eco-lunatic Chris Huhne, Mr Windmill, who is systematically strangling the UK’s fossil fuel energy production capacity, without having seriously considered what can replace it. In Australia we have Bob Brown, a blinkered environmental extremist, completely disconnected from the real world.
Today we have two articles from the UK Telegraph which demonstrate the ever widening gap between the rarified atmosphere of government and the harsh reality outside. Firstly, we have Huhne on the forthcoming Durban conference, sincerely believing that it will achieve something significant:
If we have learnt anything from the financial crisis, it is that clear rules implemented properly can prevent the toxic build-up of risk. A recent survey of large global firms found that 83 per cent of business leaders think a multilateral agreement is needed to tackle climate change. Businesses want certainty; only the politics lags behind.
A commitment to a new agreement will provide that certainty – and Kyoto provides the basis of the rules we need to manage a destabilising climate. Durban must not be the end of Kyoto, but a chance to build on what it began.
We recognise that it will take time to negotiate this.
So we also want immediate action. Current voluntary pledges to reduce emissions are not yet enough; in Durban, we should agree that we must close the gap, building momentum towards a major review of ambition.
We must build the system we use to measure and verify emissions cuts. We must do more on long-term financial support for developing countries and agree how the new Green Fund will operate. And we must continue to reduce emissions from deforestation.
Above all, we must show leadership. Next year I will continue to press for a more ambitious EU emissions target: a 30 per cent reduction by 2020. That will help us raise our sights globally.
Milton Friedman once said: “Our basic function is to keep good ideas alive until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That is a good description of the task that awaits in Durban. (source)
To quote The Thick of It, Huhne is “disconnected to the point of autism”. When the rest of the world is backing away (apart from Australia, of course), the UK is heading for even deeper emissions cuts! And his quoting of Friedman shows that this entire facade is pure politics. Skating over the fact that this isn’t keeping a good idea alive, but a bad idea struggling for breath and surviving only thanks to a ventilator, Huhne is on a political crusade which will not be sidetracked by trivial matters like another GFC. Pity the poor Brits.
A third article in the Telegraph here, explains how Huhne will give such long-term financial support to developing countries: GBP 1 billion of British taxpayers’ money will be sent to Africa to help them “tackle climate change.” Given the parlous state of the UK economy, you’d have to conclude that their priorities are a little out of kilter… Check out the comments on that one.
At least they have an antidote in Christopher Booker, one of the few commentators who fully understand the desperate situation the UK is heading towards. His near-weekly dose of climate sanity is always essential reading, but particularly so today:
To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.
On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.
It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph’s exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip over the folly of our Government’s infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our nuclear expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU’s “emissions trading scheme” has wasted $287 billion (£186billion) over six years – paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing “carbon emissions”. There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly £300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.
…
All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.
It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.
We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory – even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell. And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.
Again and again we see them trying to defend the indefensible, giving vent to wild personal abuse of the enemies of what they call their “cause”, and stopping at nothing to keep their critics’ evidence out of IPCC reports and scientific journals, and prevent dissenting views from getting media atention.
This is no longer science worthy of the name. As I wrote when the first Climategate emails appeared in 2009, the global warming scare is far and away the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. When we then contemplate the insanity of the measures the politicians have imposed on us in consequence, we know we are looking at a collective flight from reality which has no precedent in the history of the world. (source)
Australia is actually better placed than the UK to retreat from the madness. At least we have a political party that opposes pointless carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes. All the major parties in the UK support the kind of nonsense Huhne is proposing, although there are signs of retreat there as well.
The big question, however, is this: Will sanity prevail before it’s too late?
The only way is down…
As if the European financial crisis wasn’t bad enough. Not only is GFC Mark II just around the corner, courtesy of a US debt of over $15 trillion, the sound financial management of Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, etc etc, but also, thanks to Julia Gillard’s pointless carbon tax (AU$23 per tonne, rising each year thereafter), Australia’s competitiveness at a very difficult time will be severely compromised in the global economy, as European carbon prices enter free fall:
European Union carbon permits and U.N.-backed credits collapsed to record lows on Thursday, extending this week’s sharp price slide as fears of a slowing economy sapped demand in the markets that are heavily supplied with emissions units.
It was also a signal that market participants are losing confidence in the flagging EU carbon market, the world’s biggest cap-trade scheme, traders and analysts said.
This latest crash could not have come at a worse time. In just a few days a U.N. climate summit in South Africa will resume work on a new globally binding pact to cut emissions.
Investors are already nervous about the future of carbon markets, given the uncertainty around when a new climate pact will emerge and what trading mechanisms will operate under it.
“Confidence is at an absolute minimum. It’s the macro-economic picture and the whole sentiment is not too good,” said a carbon trader at a financial institution.
Front-year carbon permits called EU Allowances (EUAs) closed 6.6 percent lower at 7.91 euros ($10.54) a tonne, after touching an all-time low of 7.80 euros earlier.
“There’s room to go down to 7 euros,” said Matteo Mazzoni, carbon analyst at Nomisma Energia in Italy, adding that 7.70 euros could be the next support level.
Some 11,000 power generators and industrial plants from 30 European countries take part in the region’s emissions trading scheme. It covers around half of the bloc’s carbon emissions.
Benchmark U.N.-issued carbon credits, which come from accredited emission reduction projects in developing countries, closed down almost 8 percent at 5.43 euros, after hitting a new record low of 5.30 euros.
FREEFALL
Carbon prices have shed more than half their value since June, as the euro zone’s worsening debt crisis choked demand for emissions permits.
The EU carbon market is also oversupplied with hundreds of millions of permits, and some analysts don’t expect demand to outpace supply until 2020.
“The oversupply seems to be overwhelming,” the trader said. (source)
Demand won’t outpace supply until 2020 – meaning that if the carbon tax survives that long (highly unlikely), Australians will suffer at least three years of a fixed carbon price far greater than that in the EU, and then a market-based trading scheme which will have a price floor of $15 from day one.
Hello? Julia and Greg? Are you receiving any of this? This Labor government sure know how to screw a country. Their own.
Double standards...?
More journalistic double standards in our balanced media. Fairfax loves to defend Julian Assange, darling of the Left, for the release of the Wikileaks material, but is far more reticent about defending those who were responsible for the release of the Climategate emails.
Sunday Age editorial, 12 December 2010
Julian Assange and the public’s right to know
…
WikiLeaks, acting with newspapers around the world including The Age and The Sunday Age, is publishing information that makes governments uncomfortable. This action affirms the role of the media, which have a duty to expose the secret machinations of those who wield power. In the US, the chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman, has suggested that because it published some of the leaked information The New York Times might be subject to criminal investigation. This would breach the First Amendment protecting freedom of the press.
So leaks of intelligence that may damage national security is fine, because it is the duty of a journalist to “expose the secret machinations of those who wield power.”
The IPCC and climate scientists around the world also wield power. Lots of it. National governments are on the verge of turning their economies upside down on the basis of the IPCC’s dire predictions for the climate if emissions are not drastically reduced. How would The Age respond to exposing the “secret machinations” of the IPCC? Very differently, of course.
When Climategate 2.0 broke this week, The Age was more interested in the opinion of Phil Jones, one of the alleged “victims” of the leak, rather than staunchly supporting the release of the emails themselves:
The Age, 24 November 2011
Climatologist speaks out after new leak
The British climatologist ensnared in a major new email leak has taken his case to the public, arguing that he and his colleagues’ comments have again been taken out of context.
The University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones was one of the major players in the controversy that erupted two years ago over the publication of emails which caught prominent scientists stonewalling critics and attacking them in sometimes vitriolic terms.
The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of how world temperatures have varied over time [not any more – Ed], and Jones came under particular scrutiny following the 2009 disclosures – even receiving death threats over allegations that he was a leading a conspiracy to hype the dangers of climate change.
Jones and his colleagues have since been vindicated by a series of independent investigations, but the university’s reputation has been dented by criticism that it refused to share data with sceptics.
Jones said that his “heart did sink a bit” when he heard about the most recent leak, which apparently consists of old messages held back the first time around. (source)
A quick Google search of “Wikileaks” at “site:theage.com.au” produces 15,400 results. A similar search of “Climategate” produces just 330, barely 2% of the coverage given to Wikileaks. Fairfax also invariably refers to the release of the Climategate emails as a “hacking”, in order to taint it with illegality or criminal behaviour. Naturally, Fairfax also avoids giving prominence to the story because it challenges one of their preset agendas, that of the reality of dangerous man-made climate change.
So instead of robustly defending the release of the emails as a “journalistic duty”, Fairfax pens a teary piece about the “victims”, including rehashing the non-story of the “death threats” in order to garner sympathy for the scientists whose confidences have been betrayed. Such a stark contrast.
Climate sensitivity distribution. 3 C is the upper limit (click to enlarge)
Some break this is turning out to be! Climate stories are breaking every day, and they deserve some coverage here. Two articles in The Australian today are of particular interest.
Firstly, the publication of a paper in Science that questions the high-end climate sensitivity probabilities put forward by the IPCC. Remember, climate sensitivity is the KEY question. If the climate isn’t sensitive to CO2, then “man-made global warming” is a non-problem. It’s the fact that the climate models project that there is a real possibility of significant climate sensitivity, leading to substantial and dangerous warming, which is enough, the IPCC would argue, to justify drastic emissions cuts based on the precautionary principle. The problem is that it may not be true:
DRAMATIC forecasts of global warming resulting from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been exaggerated, according to a peer-reviewed study by a team of international researchers.
In the study, published today in the leading journal Science, the researchers found that while rising levels of CO2 would cause climate change, the most severe predictions – some of which were adopted by the UN’s peak climate body in its seminal 2007 report – had been significantly overstated.
The authors used a novel approach based on modelling the effects of reduced CO2 levels on climate, which they compared with proxy-records of conditions during the last glaciation, to infer the effects of doubling CO2 levels.
They concluded that current worst-case scenarios for global warming were exaggerated.
“Now these very large changes (predicted for the coming decades) can be ruled out, and we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem,” the study’s lead author, Andreas Schmittner, an associate professor at Oregon State University, said.
…
Professor Schmittner said taking his results literally, the IPCC’s average or “expected” value of a 3C average temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 ought to be regarded as an upper limit. (source)
Wait for the warmists to start the smear campaign on that poor guy. And at the same time, more explosive Climategate emails show the extent to which uncertainty was minimised within the climate science community in order to avoid any possible damage to “The Cause”.
In one 2009 email exchange between British government advisers and climate scientists, including Professor Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia who was a key figure in the first Climategate saga, one adviser writes: “I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” The exchange concerns a project called Weather Generator that forecasts heatwaves and extreme rainfall events across Britain.
In a 2003 email to colleagues, the UEA’s Irene Lorenzoni writes: “I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and governmental opinion.” (source)
Details have also emerged at the close relationship between those scientists and the BBC, confirming suspicions that the UK’s national broadcaster is acting as an environmental activist mouthpiece for climate alarmism:
Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats. (source)
“The objective impartial (ho ho) BBC”. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Ah, pity the poor Brits paying their TV licences for this kind of disgraceful bias. Little reason to doubt that the ABC is in a similar position – you only need to look at their output on climate matters to see that.
I thought I’d repost this image from Climategate 1.0, as it shows what the consensus boys (or, as we should now call them, “the cause”) get up to in their spare time. The filename is “marooned.jpg”. If their climate modelling is anywhere near as awful as their Photoshop skills, it would explain a lot…
Disappointed there's no sequel in CG 2.0
Who can name them all?
Australian Climate Madness 
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