Nepali cabinet to "meet on Everest"

2 November, 2009 by

Only a few days ago we had the Maldives cabinet all pissing in the sea to highlight the “dangers of climate change”, and now we have the Nepali government, heading up Everest to do the same (the air’s pretty thin up there, maybe they’ll all pass out…). And, as always, uncritically reported by our own moonbat media, The Sydney Morning Herald:

The Cabinet will meet at the Everest base camp later this month, just ahead of an international climate change conference next month in Copenhagen, Denmark, Forest and Soil Conservation Minister Deepak Bohara said.

Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and other Cabinet members will fly by plane to the 5,300 metre camp [and the carbon footprint of that is, exactly? – Ed], the starting point for mountaineers attempting to climb the world’s highest mountain.

Bohara said the meeting is an attempt to highlight the problem of melting glaciers in the Himalayas.

Glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, creating lakes whose walls could burst and flood villages below. Melting ice and snow also make the routes for mountaineers less stable and more difficult to follow. [And that’s caused by climate change, of course. Couldn’t be anything else, oh no – Ed].

Barking climate madness.

Read it here.

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Malcolm Turnbull grilled by Alan Jones

2 November, 2009 by

A great interview with Malcolm Turnbull on 2GB. Alan Jones gives him hell, as he should, and brands him “Rudd-lite”.

Brilliant stuff.

Listen here. (via Andrew Bolt)

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Aussies not worried by climate change

2 November, 2009 by

Despite all the hype, all the spin, all the (dare I say it?) lies from the warmists, the media and the government, the Australian public are thankfully not falling for it.

A new international survey has found Australians no longer care about climate change as much as they do about domestic issues and the financial crisis.

The survey looks at attitudes towards climate change in 12 different countries and found concern in Australia dropped in the past year by 14 per cent – the largest drop among the developed nations surveyed.

But the Climate Group CEO, Steve Howard, still claims (bizarrely) that the public is clamouring for a deal at Copenhagen:

“Around the world, four out of five people want to see a good global deal in Copenhagen,” he said. [What? 4.5 billion people? Do me a favour, pal – Ed]

“Are people a little bit less concerned than this than 12 months ago or two years ago? Yes they are, but we’ve just had a global financial crisis and I think we’ve seen a reordering of people’s priorities.”

In other words, the public is realising that the climate crisis is little more than a smoke and mirrors exercise in apocalyptic alarmism and stealth taxation, just like it is in the US and around the world.

Read it here.

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Enjoy the warmth while it lasts

2 November, 2009 by

Lawrence Solomon writes in the Financial Post:

Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time. Our planet is usually in a deep freeze. The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000 years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between.

We are in-betweeners, and just barely — we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so after the end of the last ice age. But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age.

Our luck is even better than that. Those 10,000-year warm spells aren’t all cosy-warm. They include brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age that started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren’t around during its fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable — even the Inuit fled. While the cold spells within the 10,000 year warm spells aren’t as brutal as a Little Ice Age, they can nevertheless make us huddle in gloom, such as the period in history from about 400 AD to 900 AD, which we know as the Dark Ages. We’ve lucked out twice, escaping the cold spells within the warm spells, making us inbetweeners within the inbetween periods. How good is that?

Read it here. (h/t Climate Change Fraud)

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CSIRO bid to gag ETS attack

2 November, 2009 by

The CSIRO is supposed to be the nation’s top scientific body, but it is up to its neck in the grubby politics of climate change by attempting to silence a critic of the government’s oh-so-wonderful ETS:

THE nation’s peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government’s climate change policies.

The paper, by the CSIRO’s Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed.

The paper was accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed.

But Dr Spash told the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics conference that the CSIRO had since June tried to block its publication.

In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is “far removed” from the reality of permit markets. “While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases),” he says. “Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters.

Read it here.

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Rudd: Australia will contribute to climate change fund

2 November, 2009 by

Yesterday it was global socialism in the EU, today in Australia, as Kevin Rudd confirms that Australia will contribute to a fund to help developing countries to help “tackle climate change”. Where do those dollars come from? Your pocket. Did you vote for that?

Mr Rudd also conceded a tough road lay ahead for negotiators at Copenhagen after German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote off the chances of next month’s talks agreeing to a comprehensive successor to the Kyoto treaty. EU leaders agreed at the weekend to call for a global fund to total €100 billion ($161bn) by 2020 to pay developing countries to combat climate change, but failed to agree on how much money it was prepared to put into it.

Mr Rudd said yesterday Australia would play a role in helping to fund the project.

“Look, I have worked very closely with Chancellor Merkel in recent months on both climate change and a whole range of global financial challenges, and she is a strong and active contributor to trying to forge consensus for Copenhagen,” he said. “Negotiations are really tough, that is absolutely right, and I’ve been completely up front about that, and they’ll continue to be tough.”

On the subject of the fund, Mr Rudd said: “Australia, once a global agreement is shaped, would always be prepared to put forward its fair share. At this stage there’s no global agreement as to what long-term financing arrangements should underpin a deal at Copenhagen for emerging and developing economies.

And then of course there is the pious plea to the Opposition to pass the ETS:

“And I would appeal to all fair-minded Liberals, all fair-minded conservatives, that this is a national interest question which literally should transcend politics for the next 20, 30 and 50 years.”

Literally.

Read it here.

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Environmentalism and fear

2 November, 2009 by

You will recall the disgraceful UK government ad, using a bedtime story to scare a little girl about the dangers of “climate change” (see here). Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Australian, analyses the motivation behind such actions:

Not surprisingly, the ad has caused a storm. Nearly 400 people have complained to Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority. Some are disturbed by the ad’s scientific illiteracy (how one gets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s relatively sober reports about changing weather patterns to a cartoon dog drowning in a flooded city is anybody’s guess). Others have slammed the government for knowingly and deliberately – and with taxypayers’ money – scaring kids.

Yet the ad is only an extreme version of what has become mainstream environmentalist policy in recent years: terrifying children.

The environmentalist ethos, whether it is spouted by official bodies or radical, dreadlock-sporting campaigners, presents itself as caring and considerate, yet it is shot through with the politics of fear.

In place of grown-up, adult debate about the future, environmentalists continually use scaremongering – conjuring up horrid, squalid future scenarios based more on their fantastic imaginations than scientific fact – to try to force people to lower their horizons and change their behaviour.

And this green politics of fear is starting to have a detrimental effect on children.

As popular culture bombards kids with messages about a fiery, bunny-hostile future, and as many schools in Britain and elsewhere rebrand themselves as “eco schools”, devoted to reducing children’s carbon footprints as much as expanding their minds, so children are becoming paralysed by fear.

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change.

“It’s making me and my friends go mad,” said a 12-year-old girl.

In the environmentalists’ desperation to get their message across, we are bringing up a generation of children scared out of their wits.

Read it here.

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Slaughter buffalo, eat your dog… all to save the planet

1 November, 2009 by

45 minutes at gas mark 7.

45 minutes at gas mark 7.

The lunatic fringe is in full voice at the moment, advocating all kinds of idiotic schemes to “save the planet from climate change”. Last week it was a pair of New Zealand “scientists” who had calculated that your pet dog has a larger carbon footprint than a Toyota Landcruiser. Their book is charmingly entitled “Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living“, and was all unquestioningly reported by the global media, including our own Fairfax:

The couple from Wellington’s Victoria University measured the carbon emissions of popular pets, taking into consideration what and how much the animal eats and the land needed to create that food.

The shock verdict was that owners of large dogs are as much in the dog box on environmental sustainability as owners of the oft-criticised four-wheel drive.

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable,” Brenda Vale said. (source)

Then today we read of another wackademic proposing that 150,000 feral buffalo be culled in order to reduce emissions:

Charles Darwin University’s Professor Stephen Garnett says an individual buffalo emits the equivalent of about a tonne of carbon dioxide each year.

He says feral animals release around 4 per cent of the Northern Territory’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Professor Garnett says outstation communities should be paid to cull feral buffaloes to fight climate change.

“There’s many places where you can’t run a buffalo ranching operation,” he said.

“There’s potential for reducing those numbers as a greenhouse gas mitigation measure.

“Each adult buffalo produces the equivalent of about a tonne of carbon dioxide each year and they live quite a long time. So that is a reasonable amount of carbon dioxide they are producing.” (source)

Where will this all end? Clearly the 6 billion humans belching and farting 24/7 must have a pretty big carbon footprint as well. When are we going to start culling them? We’ll leave the last word to Robert Vale:

Robert Vale told New Scientist magazine that we need to consider pet sharing: think the theatre cat or the temple dog.

And if you must have your own you should enjoy it for both its companionship and its flesh.

He recommends hens, which partly compensate for their eco-footprint by providing eggs, as well as pigs, or even rabbits, “provided you eat them”.

Fido and chips all round, then…

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Strong Aussie dollar hits ETS bottom line

1 November, 2009 by

But you can guarantee that the Treasury modelling will massage the figures to make it look like everything is rosy in the ETS garden:

THE resurgent Australian dollar and strong commodity markets have slashed by more than $10 billion the expected revenue from the emissions trading scheme over the next decade, dramatically reducing the government’s scope to accept Malcolm Turnbull’s amendments.

Ten-year costings for the ETS, expected to be released with the government’s mid-year economic forecasts next week, are likely to show that instead of the $11bn surplus estimated by independent forecasters by 2020, the ETS could run at a loss in many of those years and require top-up funding from the budget.

A large or ongoing deficit would contradict government promises that the scheme will over time pay for itself, and jeopardise promised compensation to businesses and households from revenue raised from selling emissions permits.

And the good news is that this may prevent the Government from being able to negotiate with the Opposition, forcing them to vote it down:

The forecast estimates will dramatically lessen the chances of a deal in ETS negotiations between the government and the opposition, ahead of the second Senate vote late next month when the laws could become a double-dissolution trigger.

The Coalition could reject Kevin Rudd’s proposed carbon emissions trading scheme next month even if the Prime Minister accepts all of Malcolm Turnbull’s proposed amendments.

Senate leader Nick Minchin said yesterday there was no guarantee the Coalition partyroom would accept any agreed proposals, sparking government claims the opposition was acting in bad faith in negotiating with it over amendments.

Read it here.

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Global socialism begins in Europe

1 November, 2009 by

The European Union has agreed to begin a vast transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor by agreeing to throw over US$150 billion every year by 2020 at developing countries to “tackle climate change”:

European Union leaders on Friday reached a deal on how to help developing nations tackle climate change, but without putting a figure to Europe’s contribution, officials said.

“We have an agreement,” said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, at the end of a two-day European summit in Brussels.

“The EU now has a strong negotiating position and the countdown to Copenhagen now has started,” he added, referring to international climate talks in Denmark in December.

…

“We can now look the rest of the world in the eyes and say we Europeans have done our job,” said EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso at the summit-closing press conference.

“It was essential that the European Union kept its leadership role and we have done that,” he added.

But there is plenty of smoke and mirrors in this announcement, as the leaders are strangely reluctant to actually publish their individual contributions to this huge bill. And Barroso put the inevitable caveat on the agreement, something that Rudd & Co seem unable to grasp in their rush to implement an ETS:

He cautioned that the EU “offers are not a blank cheque… we are ready to act if our partners are ready to deliver.”

Read it here.

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