There is not a natural disaster on earth that cannot now be linked to “climate change”, in the alarmists desperation to keep the bandwagon rolling, as temperatures fall and more people begin to question the consensus on global warming. So it’s little surprise that the recent disaster in Samoa is being blamed on climate change:

AN 8.3 earthquake struck Samoa and set off tsunami warnings in the South Pacific. The people of the South Pacific islands have been more fortunate than the people of Indonesia, but these types of earthquakes and equally dangerous volcanoes are likely to increase in frequency worldwide, and the reason is climate change. Scientists are reporting that these events are unrelated, which very well may be true; however, as you will read below, there is a common denominator to the tectonic instability that is being witnessed. How can this be? As a sphere, the Earth “reflects” vibration internally, so that an earthquake in the South Pacific is picked up by seismologists across the world; say, in Alaska. The Indonesian quake resonated so strongly that it set off quakes in Alaska. (Samoa also had a 7.9 earthquake in March.)

Now, add this to the equation. In Greenland, and to a lesser extent, Antarctica, ice sheets and glaciers are melting and, more importantly, sliding in rapid bursts. [Are they? Show me the evidence, please – Ed] The result: each “slide” of these multi-tonne glaciers sets off an “ice quake” that registers an average of 3 to 5 on the Richter scale. This (may) sound minor, but these are occurring multiple times a year. This means that the Earth is being jolted repeatedly by these ice quakes, destabilising faults lines, which has many, many consequences.

The rest of the article reads like a catalogue of the alarmists worst exaggerations, and pay close attention to the author’s expressions of compassion for the victims… there aren’t any. But who cares about them, just as long as we can plug our agenda. At least most of the comments point out that this is BS. Unfortunately, however, this kind of nonsense will only get more frequent as the alarmist gravy train comes off the rails.

Read it here (if you must).

Malcolm Turnbull’s threat to quit has provoked all sorts of hostile reaction, as was to be expected:

Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce told The Australian Online today the bottom line was that Mr Turnbull  “is not the leader of my party”.

And rebel Liberal MP Mr [Wilson] Tuckey has fired back on calls he fall into line, warning Mr Turnbull that the last leader who staked his leadership on climate change, Brendan Nelson, ended up losing it.

Mr Turnbull warned rebel Liberal MPs, including Mr Tuckey and Cory Bernardi, today that those who continue to talk publicly were “undermining the electoral prospects of their colleagues, particularly in marginal seats”.

Suggesting he might quit if he cannot reach consensus in the partyroom, he warned he cannot lead a Liberal Party that is determined to “do nothing” about climate change.

“I understand the right of Malcolm as leader of the Liberal Party to guide it as he thinks is right but Malcolm is not leader of my party,” Senator Joyce said.

“The leader of my party is Warren Truss and the Nationals have been consistent and we do not believe an emissions trading scheme is a good idea. It’s a massive tax that will have no effect.”

Mr Tuckey said the Coalition could not save Australian jobs by amending the Rudd Government’s ETS as, at the best, such protection was on borrowed time.

“If the leader wants to threaten the party room with, “Follow me, I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and we’ve all got to follow”, that’s a matter for him,” he told The Australian Online.

“Let the Australian people decide. We knock it back, we put up a credible alternative and it’s a referendum on an emissions trading scheme.

“But if it goes to a double dissolution election, big business ought to get off its backside and tell people what it’s all about and not lobby us to get a special deal for them.”

A referendum on the ETS – now that would be fun! Interesting times.

Read it here.

Don’t forget, you heard it here first. Today’s QOTD comes from Queensland vet Mark Perissinotto:

“It’s also important not to overfeed your pet because it causes flatulence.

“Giving them the right amount not only saves you from nasty smells but saves the planet by avoiding the release of dangerous greenhouse gases.“

What would be more effective, Mark, would be to keep your own CO2 emissions to a minimum (i.e. try talking to the media a bit less).

Read it here.

Don’t give us any ideas… In a fit of petulence, Malcolm Turnbull appears to have lost all grip on reality and is laying down a challenge to his backbenchers – back me or I quit. The trouble is, he may live to regret it, since the result is far from a foregone conclusion.

Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has threatened to resign if his Liberal Party colleagues refuse to endorse his stance on emissions trading.

Mr Turnbull wants to negotiate with the government on a carbon trading scheme, but has been publicly criticised by some backbenchers who want to delay until after global climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.

Faced with repeated internal dissent, Mr Turnbull on Thursday gave his strongest indication that he was willing to put his leadership on the line.

“I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am,” he told reporters in Adelaide on Thursday.

Earlier on ABC Radio Mr Turnbull said: “To be a party with nothing to say … no ideas, is not the party I am prepared to lead”.

You have got it so, so wrong. Why should the only alternative to meekly agreeing to the ETS be “a party of no ideas”? Straw man I’m afraid. The alternative is to say firmly: wait until after Copenhagen. It’s very simple. And what’s all this nonsense about “effective action on climate change”? Everybody knows (apart from you, apparently), that the ETS will do nothing whatsoever for the climate. How can we spell this out any more clearly? And then there is this almost unbelievable statement from an Opposition leader:

“The Labor Party is showing real discipline on this issue and a number of my colleagues are not and they should learn from that,” Mr Turnbull said.

“If we want to be a government, we should have the discipline of government.”

Wrong again, I’m afraid. The Labor party are not showing discipline at all. They are playing politics with the ETS – it would be no skin off their noses to wait until after Copenhagen, but they are pushing ahead simply because they can – why are you the only person in the country who is unable to see this? I’m beginning to think you really are a closet Laborite, with a deeply worrying enviro-moonbat streak into the bargain. Time for a new leader, I’m afraid.

It’s Malcolm’s Climate Madness.

Read it here.

Anyone want to guess how many mainstream media outlets will report this? My guess: zero.

But the fact is that the infamous Hockey Stick (made famous in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, Al Gore’s fictional movie An Inconvenient Truth, not to mention literally thousands of alarmist publications) has been the foundation of virtually all alarmist climatology, demonstrating that the 20th century warming was unusually large and rapid, and that no other period in the last thousand years had been warmer.

But now that entire foundation has crumbled, with the revelation that the authors had selectively used tree-ring data in order to ensure that their temperature reconstruction showed unusual 20th century warming (see my earlier post on this here).

This is HUGE. Not only does it undermine a significant part of the alarmists’ cause, it shows the lengths that apparently reputable climate scientists will go to in order to fit data to their pre-conceived agendas.

Blogger Bishop Hill has prepared an excellent summary of the whole sorry tale, including gory details of how the scientists in question continually refused to provide their data for independent analysis, until eventually forced to by the Royal Society (which is ironic, given their own alarmist stance on climate change).

I highly recommend it – read it here.

Writing in The Australian, Alan Wood lays bare the sham that is Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong’s insistence that the ETS be passed into law before Copenhagen. Are you reading this Malcolm Turnbull?

The looming failure at Copenhagen is a powerful argument against Australia rushing to pass the Rudd government’s flawed emissions trading scheme, which isn’t even proposed to start operating until 2011. For Australia, with an economic structure heavily dependent on cheap, carbon-based energy, to move ahead of the rest of the world is foolish.

Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong see things differently. In their view, getting the legislation through the Senate in November is essential for Australia’s negotiating position at Copenhagen. According to Wong the eyes of the world are on us, waiting to see if the government succeeds.

Nonsense, of course, as Rudd gave away in an interview with CNN in New York. Asked whether the US negotiating position had been weakened by the Obama administration’s inability to get emissions trading legislation through the US Senate, Rudd replied that his own legislation had been recently blocked by Australia’s Senate.

He continued: “That doesn’t impede me from being active in these negotiations and my observation of President Obama is that it doesn’t impede him either.” So much for the importance of passing legislation before Copenhagen and, in any case, the UN knows what Australia’s position is on targets and emissions trading.
…
The government’s attempts to create a sense of urgency and set a timetable that demands its legislation be passed in November are a stunt. The issue is whether Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has the courage to do what he says is the only sensible course of action, to wait until after we know the outcome in Copenhagen.

However, having said this, Turnbull, who is in a complete funk over the possibility of a double-dissolution election on the issue, left the door open to negotiate with the government to pass its legislation, with amendments, in November. A clear majority of his back bench and probably at least half his front bench don’t agree with this policy.

Both former Labor prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating and former Liberal deputy leader and treasurer Peter Costello have warned a double dissolution is not without risks for Rudd because the electorate likes governments to run their full term.

Rudd has said more than once he doesn’t want a double dissolution and also believes governments should run their full term.

Turnbull should take him at his word and have the guts to stand by what he says he believes is the right policy, and is indeed the sensible policy: wait until after Copenhagen.

Read it here.

The gloves are off, it appears, as the insults fly backwards and forwards between Malcolm Turnbull and his backbenchers.

REBEL Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey has slammed Malcolm Turnbull for talking “rubbish” on climate change, warning the party can’t get into “bed” with Labor on an emissions trading scheme.

Declaring he would stare down the climate change sceptics within his party, Mr Turnbull said today “the answer is yes” on the question of cutting a deal to amend Labor’s emissions trading scheme ahead of a shadow cabinet meeting in Adelaide.

The Liberal leader has also flatly rejected the claims of some Coalition MPs that the joint partyroom had never signed off on a carbon trading plan, suggesting they must have “dozed off or stepped out of the room”.

But his remarks have already angered some of his flock, with Mr Tuckey telling The Australian Online that Mr Turnbull was “virtually saying to the party room: `stick it up your nose’.”

“Malcolm says the party room agreed to it. Well it didn’t. That’s rubbish,” Mr Tuckey said.

“It’s the way he does business, it’s entrapment. There’s never been a position put to our party room beyond that we should delay our decision until after Copenhagen.

“You can’t go to an election opposing an emissions trading scheme if you have been in bed with the government on trying to make it better.”

But despite the clear rejection of his approach, Turnbull isn’t giving up:

In a clear sign that he intends crashing through internal resistance, the Opposition Leader said those arguing there be no negotiation with Labor over its emissions trading scheme were advocating abandoning their constituencies.

”Farmers, people working in the manufacturing industry, people working in the coal industry, people working in gas, in aluminium. We would be abandoning them all, every one of them we would be leaving behind to make some political point,” he said.

”I am not going to walk away from thousands of Australians’ jobs. I am not going to sit back and just let Kevin Rudd have his scheme go through on whatever terms he likes.”
…
Mr Turnbull said those ”who say the Coalition should not engage with the Government at all really are speaking for nobody but themselves”.

Malcolm Turnbull is making no sense whatsoever in this. Then he admits that it is bad legislation, but that we should negotiate to make it slightly less bad, instead of what he should be doing – i.e. voting it down. He claims that by opposing the ETS, MPs are abandoning their constituents, tacitly admitting that by voting it down, it will be enacted anyway after a double-dissolution election in which the Opposition already concede defeat.

If Rudd then calls a double-dissolution election, I say bring it on – only in an election campaign can sufficient money be spent informing and educating the public about this pointless and damaging piece of legislation. An election fought on climate change would be a very interesting prospect.

Read it here and here.

Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, the ultimate alarmist propaganda poster, has, we hope, finally been laid to rest. The stick was a central part of the IPCC’s third assessment report, but was strangely dropped in the fourth. However, our own government still continues to use a version of it in order to mislead the unsuspecting public:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

 

It seems that senior coalition figures are trying to run an argument that “the ETS was policy in 2007, so it should be policy now”. This ignores the fact that a lot has changed in two years:

OPPOSITION emissions trading spokesman Ian Macfarlane has been forced to distribute the Coalition’s 2007 election policy supporting an emissions trading scheme to his own back bench, after several MPs suggested an ETS had never been party policy or had been “slipped” past them.

Strong internal opposition is mounting to Malcolm Turnbull’s strategy – endorsed by shadow cabinet – of negotiating amendments to the government’s ETS next month.

Many senior Coalition members expressed astonishment that some backbenchers appeared intent on “rolling” their already-struggling leader on an issue, when all possible alternative leaders, including Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott, agreed with Mr Turnbull’s political strategy.

Backbench dissenters such as Cory Bernardi and Wilson Tuckey seemed to be intent upon “driving the car at high speed into a brick wall in order to test the airbags”, one senior Liberal said. Others said the campaign was aimed at forcing shadow cabinet to demand such extensive amendments that the government could never agree to them, achieving the ETS’s demise by default.

Read it here.

Australian Climate Madness is 1 year old! Nearly 900 posts later and we have a loyal readership. A huge thank you to all the people who have linked to my posts and included ACM in their blog rolls, but I must single out the following, who have really helped get ACM known in the sceptic community:

• Tom Nelson – the eponymous distiller of all things climate on the web
• Marc Morano at Climate Depot
• Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That?
• Klockarman at Al Gore Lied
• Paul at The Daily Bayonet

And of course a big thank you to you, the readers.

Australia is still heading down a path to economic oblivion with the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS). By all accounts, however, as soon as anyone begins to understand it, they realise what a disaster it is.

I have posted here an ACM Summary which is a high-level bullet point list of climate issues for those interested in hearing an alternative side to the debate. Many will reject it out of hand, but it may stir sufficient doubts in the open-minded for them to begin researching climate themselves, rather than relying on the alarmism fed to them by the government and media.

So I have a small plug to make to my Australian readers: please send a link to the ACM Summary to your friends and/or colleagues, and hopefully, if we can raise sufficient awareness, we can avoid sacrificing our economy for a pointless environmental gesture.

Once again, thanks for your support and… stay sceptical!