From The Australian:

LIBERAL backbencher Julian McGauran has become the latest coalition MP to defy Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, saying he will not support an emissions trading scheme under any circumstance.

On a day when Mr Turnbull argued unity was vital for the Liberals on the issue of climate change, Senator McGauran joined a growing chorus of unhappy Liberals.

He confirmed he would cross the floor and vote against an emissions trading scheme, with or without amendments.

“I will not be supporting the bill under any circumstances, and I’ve made that clear to my leader,” he told ABC Television.

“And I think there’ll be more than just one senator doing it.”

He was the latest Liberal to publicly defy Mr Turnbull, joining party colleagues Wilson Tuckey, Mitch Fifield, Cory Bernardi and Mathias Cormann.

Senator McGauran also sent a word of warning to his leader, urging him to listen to dissenters.

“Any leader that blindly disregards the greater majority of the party room invites trouble, so this is all in Malcolm’s hands,” he said.

Indeed it is.

Read it here.

A summary of headlines today:

• ‘Back me or sack me’ haunts Turnbull
• Costello gone, Turnbull may not be far behind
• Turnbull’s grip slipping
• Look who’s stalking
• Turnbull in political killing zone
• Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership under seige

And the real tragedy is that by making this a leadership issues, Turnbull has turned all the focus of the media onto himself, and not where it should be, scrutinising the effects of the government’s disastrous ETS.

From the Climate Sceptics Party:

Not Evil Just Wrong – World Premiere

I would like to invite you to the participate in the World Premiere of the documentary entitled Not Evil Just Wrong – The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, to be held on Sunday, 18th October 2009.

Just as Australia is debating whether to rush into emissions trading scheme before Copenhagen, the launch of this movie comes at an important time and goes a long way towards exposing the environmental movement and challenging the assertions of Al Gore, the IPCC, the Minister for Climate Change, our Prime Minister and others.

You can view the trailer here:
http://www.noteviljustwrong.com

We encourage every Australian who believes in accurate science to attend a screening of this movie – the more people attending the premiere will mean the greater our voice will be heard!

Melbourne Cinematic World Premiere

There will be a Melbourne cinematic screening at the Sun Theatre, a boutique cinema in Melbourne, at 7pm on Sunday 18th October – all are welcome!

The evening will be a great chance to meet like-minded people and there will certainly be the opportunity to have a coffee and a good chat before and after the movie.

Not Evil Just Wrong – the True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria
7pm, Sunday 18th October at the Sun Theatre
8 Ballarat St, Yarraville, Melbourne
Tickets: $15 (or $10 for Climate Sceptics members)

To book tickets:
Please send an email to noteviljustwrong@climatesceptics.com.au stating the number of tickets required at $15 and the number of tickets at $10.

To pay for tickets by credit card:
– go to www.climatesceptics.com.au
– click the “Donate” button
– enter the Purpose “Not Evil Just Wrong Melbourne – x people” (e.g. x = 2 for two attendees)
– enter the cost of the tickets in Donation Amount (e.g. $15 + $10 = $25)
– please use the paypal facility to complete the payment
Your tickets will be mailed out to you on the next business day.

To pay for tickets by cash:
Please send an email to noteviljustwrong@climatesceptics.com.au to arrange a time to meet one of our organizers in Melbourne CBD during business hours on any day Monday to Friday.

Host Your Own Screening

Would you like to host your own for-free screening of this movie ? You can purchase the dvd and show the movie in your home, church, community hall or local club. Please see the web site http://noteviljustwrong.com for details.

If you are planning to host your own screening in Australia, please email us at noteviljustwrong@climatesceptics.com.au so that we can make a list of all the screenings around the country.

We look forward to seeing as many people as possible being a part of the World Premiere for this movie 🙂

Please forward this far and wide, to your friends, family, colleagues and email lists.

For further information, please email us at noteviljustwrong@climatesceptics.com.au or call us on 08 8725 9561.

Wayne Swann has weighed in to the debate now, and is basically ordering the Opposition not to look too carefully at the ETS, not to debate it for too long, nothing to see here, move along.

“Given that this legislation has been before the Parliament for well over six months it’s about time the Liberal Party demonstrated their bona fides and made a commitment not to use procedural tricks and filibusters in the Senate to frustrate discussion of this very important legislation,” he said.

“Malcolm Turnbull and the shadow cabinet must rule out using their numbers to block a vote on the [ETS] in the Senate – they must do that today.”

Yeah, like we were born yesterday… Fortunately, the Opposition are having none of it:

Speaking ahead of today’s shadow cabinet meeting, deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop has told Radio National the Opposition will not be rushed through debate on the bills in the Senate.

“If this is the greatest challenge of our generation, it should be subject to one of the greatest debates of our generation,” she said.

“I believe we should allow the Senate to do its work thoroughly. The Australian people can only benefit from extensive debate, rather than the suppression of debate.”

Read it here.

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Costello explains the fallacy of the government’s position on the ETS vote:

If the big countries (including developing countries) don’t agree to reduce emissions, then nothing Australia does will have the slightest impact on global emissions. The only thing affected will be Australian jobs (which will go overseas) and prices (which will go up).

And that’s why it’s plain silly to say Australia must finalise the design of its scheme before the forthcoming negotiations in Copenhagen. The shape of our scheme will not affect what happens at Copenhagen. What happens at Copenhagen will determine the shape of our scheme. Let’s get a sense of perspective here. The cock crows because the sun rises. The sun does not rise because the cock crows.

Read it here.

Thanks to Andrew Bolt, who returns from his sabbatical to write in the Herald Sun. As would be expected, not a single mainstream media outlet chose to run the story of the final debunking of the famous (infamous) hockey stick – I wonder why?

THIS mad global warming scare could at last be over. And all thanks to just 10 trees in Siberia.

Unreported in any newspaper here – and how typical that is – is a startling challenge to the central claim underpinning this greatest scare of our lifetime.
…
McIntyre found that Briffa could have used 34 more tree ring cores from Yamal that he’d actually referred to in other papers, and which had been collected by his colleague Schweingruber himself.

McIntyre then checked what difference that bigger sample of tree rings would have made, had Briffa added them to his sample of just 10. Answer: the bigger sample showed no warming at all over the past century, with temperatures today lower than in medieval times. The past 12 years don’t include 11 of the hottest in history.

Briffa, who is ill, has not said why he did not include Schweingruber’s trees but denies “cherry-picking” samples.

It’s too early to say if his hockey stick is now broken, but not too early to say that the global warming theory is unproved.

Rather the reverse. The big scare now is not that we’re heating the world to hell, but that so few journalists and scientists refuse to see the growing evidence that we’re not.

Read it here.

As talk of a possible filibuster emerges in order to sink the ETS, Penny Wong ignores the blatant hypocrisy of her government’s position in trying to push through the ETS before Copenhagen, and cries foul on the Opposition for playing tricks:

The Opposition’s Leader in the Senate, Nick Minchin, is now warning the Government that it might not get a vote this year.

“The Government knows it’s taking a risk in bringing such significant legislation back into the Parliament in November and that’s on the Government’s head,” Senator Minchin said.

“We believe it’s arrogant and cynical of the Government even to be using the last two weeks of sitting of this year’s Parliament to seek to debate its emissions trading scheme. We don’t think it should be debated until February.

“We’re not saying we’re going in there to delay debate, but our responsibility as legislators in the Senate is to vigorously subject this legislation to significant cross examination.“

Delaying a vote in the Senate until next year would appease many disgruntled Liberal Party members who do not want any action until after the climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December, and it will frustrate the Government.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says it is too important an issue to play “tricky procedural games with“.

“Mr Turnbull has said to the Government he wants to negotiate in good faith. Well, there are too many members of the Liberal Party who appear to be scheming to prevent this from happening,” Senator Wong said.

“It’s time the Liberal Party stopped doing anything they can to avoid action on climate change and are prepared to actually have the discussion and the debate with the Government in the Parliament.”

“Negotiate in good faith”, in the mind of the Wong-bot’s central processing unit, means agreeing with everything I say.

Read it here.

It’s a full alarmist rant, as you would expect. Of course, our national broadcaster has already made up its mind on climate change and that we have to turn the clock back to the Dark Ages in order to “tackle global warming”, so I really shouldn’t be surprised, but the bias is still breathtaking, even to me! Quotes from crackpots like James Hansen and David Karoly are strewn about with gay abandon, as are alarmist factoids that are treated as gospel. Here are a just a few examples:

A younger, passionate scientist argued that such niceties were not observed by climate change deniers and corporate opponents of greenhouse gas mitigation who regularly launched sweeping statements with no facts at all. Those campaigns were holding back vital, stronger political measures, he said. Wasn’t it time scientists spoke out more?

Many of them have. NASA scientist James Hansen is probably the best known. He’s even been arrested during an anti-coal mining protest. Less than a year ago I interviewed some of the world’s other leading climate scientists who live in Australia. Even then they were willing to describe how the pace of global warming had left them gobsmacked: “… many, many scientists now … are frantically, hysterically worried,” said Professor Ann Henderson-Sellers, the former head of the UN’s World Climate Research Program, now at Macquarie University.
…
From melting polar caps to acidifying oceans to increased frequency of drought, floods and bushfires, climate scientists have worked harder than ever this year to bridge the communication gap between what they know, what the rest of us think and what the politicians are doing. There are so many science updates lately that I’ve decided to provide a summary of some of the most significant in this blog each week.

Here’s one recent example from The New Scientist:

“BY 2055, climate change is likely to have warmed the world by a dangerous 4 deg C unless we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the way we do now. This is the startling conclusion of a study by the UK Met Office, unveiled at a conference in Oxford.

…
I’m contacting many of Australia’s most prominent [alarmist] climate scientists to hear directly how they’re feeling about their research, public advocacy and the likelihood of political success at Copenhagen in December. Already one of the most common themes in some early replies is the yawning gap between the science and proposed political responses. I’ll bring you their comments in greater detail next week.

It’s almost too funny for parody. I for one won’t be reading, and I strongly suggest you don’t either. This is the tragedy. As the planet cools, the hysteria gets worse, and the ABC is peddling it for all its worth to an unsuspecting public.

Read it here (if you really must).

It’s so obvious, why can’t the politicians and the public see it?

In short we have a prime minister who wants to destroy the most basic foundation of a modern civilised society – cheap and available power. And then ‘ finish the job’ some time in the future by destroying our export industries.

Along the way, Rudd’s typically bureaucratic ‘clever’ alternative to closing our power stations, is to ‘allow us’ to pay billions of dollars to foreigners to let us keep them open.

I have to stress this, because the utter stupidity of what is proposed is so breathtaking, that the average person wouldn’t believe it.

We would get nothing, repeat nothing for the billions of dollars potentially shipped overseas. Except the ‘right’ to keep emitting CO2. To keep our power stations open.

That any government would only be dragged kicking and screaming by global force, to reluctantly accept such a direct and massive assault on not just the prosperity of every Australian but the very basis of what makes this country work, would be bad enough.

But to have a government and a prime minister actually proposing such an attack on the country is beyond rational or even irrational belief.

Then there are no superlatives to capture the government actually demanding that proposal become implementation before anyone in the rest of the world has signed on.

Read it here.

Acres of ETS coverage this morning, as the media dissects the events of last week. But more and more critics of Malcolm Turnbull’s approach are coming out of the woodwork, the latest being Mitch Fifield, who has like so many others, called for the delaying of the vote until after Copenhagen – which, let’s be honest, is pure common sense, except in the minds of Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong and, er, Malcolm Turnbull it seems:

MALCOLM Turnbull is facing a rebellion from the Liberal Party’s West Australian branch, which is demanding he drop his plan to negotiate with the Rudd government on an emissions trading scheme before the UN summit on climate change to be held in Copenhagen in December.

The looming revolt in Western Australia this Saturday comes as divisions on the ETS spread to the Coalition front bench and the Liberal leader remained locked in a desperate battle with the Queensland branch of the Liberal National Party to save the career of promising frontbencher Peter Dutton.

The first item on the agenda at Saturday’s West Australian Liberal Party state conference demands a rethink on the ETS, urging Mr Turnbull to “delay any negotiation with the federal Labor government on the design or introduction of any emissions trading scheme until after the climate change conference in Copenhagen”. The motion from the state party’s influential rural policy committee, which appears to have wide support among the West Australian Liberals, further declares: “We also ask that any future decision to introduce an ETS be in line with the actions taken by Australia’s major trading partners.” The motion follows shadow parliamentary secretary Mitch Fifield’s call that any vote be deferred until after the Copenhagen conference. (source)

And Turnbull’s decision to put his leadership on the line has also come in for a caning:

LAST week Malcolm Turnbull had one of his brain snaps that so many Liberals feared he would have.

He put his leadership “on the line” over an emissions trading scheme, accused some colleagues of being climate change deniers and called others “anonymous smartarses“.

It was a public expression of frustration and a determination to assert his authority and impose his leadership through force of personality.

His bold endeavour – to simply tell the Liberals they couldn’t have him as leader without his ETS policy – was also based on the belief that because there was no leadership alternative he would prevail.

He may be right but his strategy may be careering out of control because now the Liberal Party is snapping back. The Nationals have been snapping for some time and it’s showing in the latest Newspoll surveys. (source)

And the Newspoll results are indeed pretty bleak:

LIBERAL Party support has slumped back to the level it was at early in Brendan Nelson’s embattled leadership, as Malcolm Turnbull loses economic credibility with the public and fights his own back bench over an emissions trading scheme.

The slump in party support – which would wipe out the Coalition at an election if it does not improve – will increase tensions between the Liberals and Nationals as the Opposition Leader tries to impose his authority on the Liberal National Party in Queensland, rebellious Liberal MPs and Nationals threatening to split the Coalition. (source)

But we would do well to remember what the ETS will mean. Already, the government is setting up a “super bureacracy” to administer compliance with the laws, despite the ETS not even having passed into law yet. It will be a civil servant’s dream:

At the heart of this is the Australian Climate Change Regulatory Authority, which will be supported by a new division created within the Department of Climate Change.

Informed sources say that about 100 staff and officials will initially be involved in this operation, but this is likely to blow out dramatically when the full implications of what will effectively amount to a federal consumption tax on carbon emissions become clear.

This new regulatory agency will have sweeping powers to enforce the government’s climate change regime. It will also issue and auction emissions permits and collect the revenue from these. The bill to provide for this agency went up to a Senate committee inquiry earlier this year but it received little attention as the focus was largely on the scope of the CPRS proposals. (source)

Oh joy.