The outgoing member for Bradfield, Brendan Nelson, former Opposition leader, has used his farewell speech to warn the Coalition against voting for an ETS:

Debate is raging within the Coalition over whether it should consider voting for an amended emissions trading scheme by the end of the year.

Dr Nelson has told Parliament it should not vote for the scheme until next year.

“An emissions trading scheme in a country responsible for 1.4 per cent of global emissions – before knowing what the three major emitters will do – defies not only logic, it also violates Australia’s best interests,” he said.

Right on the money.

Read it here.

It looks like Arctic sea ice extent has bottomed out for 2009, and it’s about half a million square kilometres up on 2008, which itself was about half a million square kilometres up on 2007. But don’t wait up to read about it in the mainstream media, because it doesn’t fit the alarmist agenda too well:

Read it at Watts Up With That.

UPDATE: And of course, right on cue, the ABC publishes a story about precisely the opposite:

The Northeast Passage, which for the most part follows Russia’s Arctic coastline, had seemed impenetrable to international commercial shipping.

Yet with rising temperatures melting the ice cover at a record rate, an opportunity literally opened for the ships this summer.

There’s no other word for it, I’m afraid: lies.

Read it here.

More desperation from the alarmists at Oxfam, this time tugging at emotional heartstrings by roping in “children” to ram their misinformation home:

AT least 4.5 million children could die if wealthy nations fail to provide more funds to help impoverished countries combat global warming [surely “climate change”? – Ed], development charity Oxfam has warned.

The organisation said in a report it was concerned that industrialised nations would take money out of existing funds dedicated to economic development in order to help poor countries battle climate change.

World leaders will meet in Denmark in December to negotiate a new climate pact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions [fat chance – Ed] blamed for global warming.

I don’t need to tell you what I think of this.

Read it here.

Why would that be, I wonder? Maybe the alarmists think they’d lose, perhaps? I guess that’s the only possible conclusion we can draw seeing they won’t be there to defend themselves. Thanks to The Unbearable Nakedness of Climate Change:

I am not at all surprised that George Monbiot (and by inference, Gavin Schmidt) have lost their public (virtual) debate against Ian Plimer even before having a public (real) debate. That’s because:

• I have been following Monbiot’s antics for quite some time, and have never been struck by the power of his at-times-downright-silly arguments
• Likewise concerning Schmidt, a known debate (sore) loser
• Skeptic vs. Climatechanger debates are few and far between, and not for the lack of willing skeptical debaters (one suspects, it’s because skeptics invariably win, just like against homeopathy practitioners, UFO believers, creationist/ID proponents, chemtrails counter-conspirators, etc etc)
• Plimer is no debate spring chicken, once described as having a “street-fighting style“

Why has Plimer won the debate? Because the end result is that Monbiot has refused to publicly debate with him. And in any sport, failure to show up automatically makes you a loser.

Funny, ain’t it? The science is so settled that alarmists won’t debate it. That’s not science, that’s religion.

Read it here. Also check out this post.

ACM has relocated to www.australianclimatemadness.com. If you go to the original blogspot address, you will be automatically be redirected.

Because it’s all our fault, you see. Nothing to do with the sun, or clouds or orbital eccentricity or cosmic rays. Our use of evil, capitalist SUVs and 4x4s has damaged the climate for poor developing countries (like China and India) so we’d better cough up, or else:

THE cost of climate change in the developing world will be up to $US470 billion ($547 billion) each year by 2030, and wealthy countries such as Australia should help pay to fix it, the World Bank says.

Calling climate change ”a deeply unfair issue”, the World Development Report 2010 finds that rich countries are responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. But it concludes that poorer countries in South Asia and Africa are expected to bear the brunt of the impact through drought, sea level rise and extreme weather [evidence, please? – Ed] which could permanently cut up to 5 per cent a year from their annual consumption and slash their food production.

The report’s co-director, Rosina Bierbaum, said yesterday that while the costs of coping with climate change were huge, ”we can’t afford not to address it. But it absolutely will not be cheap and it will not be easy.”

It’s all too convenient to blame climate change on CO2, because then we can punish Western economies for it and extract huge sums of money in a kind of global wealth redistribution. So much harder to do all this if it’s just natural climate variation caused by [insert extremely long list of possible causes here].

Read it here.

A few crumbs of comfort in this. Malcolm Turnbull has been forced to clarify his position on the ETS in order to stave off a rebellion from backbenchers (although the Australian headline somehow spins this as a victory for Turnbull…):

The federal Opposition leader today sought to reassure “trenchant” coalition critics of the Government’s emissions trading scheme he will not act unilaterally over the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

The CPRS legislation was defeated in the Senate earlier this year and is not due to be debated again until November, but the issue dominated a heated Coalition party room meeting today, with both National and Liberal MPs opposing an emissions trading scheme.

Former opposition leader Brendan Nelson told his colleagues in a valedictory speech public opinion was moving against the government on climate change.

Dr Nelson warned them against acting like “intellectual lemmings” on the issue [Great phrase! Suits the Kruddites perfectly – Ed].

Mr Turnbull and his climate change spokesman Andrew Robb were forced to restate the current Coalition position on the legislation.

The meeting confirmed Coalition opposition to voting on the CPRS ahead of the December Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change and before the final fate of emissions trading legislation currently before the US Congress is known.

The best result would be for the Coalition to come out wholly against the ETS (like the Nationals), a pointless and harmful political gesture which will make no difference to the climate of Australia or the planet. But that won’t happen, sadly.

Read it here.

Suddenly in the news again, being the first anniversary of the release of Garnaut’s report, but still spouting the same old nonsense. For some reason, in his mind, legislating CO2 reductions before everyone else decides what to do puts us in a stronger position than if we wait and see. Go figure. And the fawning media hangs on his every word:

“With the 2020 target on the table, if the rest of the world is prepared to accomodate strong mitigation [the key word there being “if”, and we don’t know yet – Ed], I think our interests would be served by passing ETS,” he said.

“Australia has a bit of a credibility problem; Australian signed Kyoto and then didn’t ratify it, and we’re the highest per capita emitter amongst developed countries. [Except Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain etc etc… Or are they not “developed” enough? – Ed]“

Read it here.

Businesses are starting to work out the harsh reality of the ETS, and the effect it will have on the Australian economy. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) has written to both political parties requesting amendments to give more compensation to energy intensive industries. But right on cue, Ross Garnaut emerges from his cave to make some distasteful remarks about the subject:

The demands came as the government’s climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, warned yesterday against more industry compensation under the “arbitrary” carbon reduction system devised by the government – against his advice – saying it had led to “ugly money politics” and unnecessary budgetary costs.

Professor Garnaut said demands for more compensation for electricity generators to make up for lost asset value because of the carbon price was an “abominable” policy idea.

Bad news for the Opposition as well:

The BCA has rejected the centrepiece of the Opposition Leader’s proposed “greener, cheaper, smarter” hybrid emissions trading scheme – the Frontier Economics’ proposal for a different treatment of the electricity industry – saying it does not solve industry’s problems.

“We sat down with Frontier Economics, but quite frankly you still end up with the same problems,” BCA president Greig Gailey said.

Opposition emissions trading spokesman Andrew Robb is consulting with industry before finalising amendments to be put to the deeply divided opposition partyroom, but the BCA’s rejection of the Frontier model undercuts the Coalition’s assertion that its proposal presents a cheaper alternative for households and businesses.

And the inevitable response from the government:

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said she would consider the BCA’s proposals, but welcomed the fact that “business wants us to get moving, so investors have certainty”.

Consider them, and then ignore them. That’s the government way.

Read it here.

From The Science is Settled Department. The IPCC and all the AGW alarmists discount the effect of the sun on climate change because, they argue, the variation in solar output is too small to have any effect on the climate (and therefore it must be evil CO2, because, er… we can’t think of anything else it could be):

A new study in Science demonstrates how two previously known mechanisms acting together amplify the Sun’s impact in an unsuspected way. Not surprisingly, the new discovery is getting a cool reception from the CO2 climate change clique.

Scientists have long suspected that changes in solar output may have triggered the Little Ice Age that gripped Europe several centuries ago, as well as droughts that brought down Chinese dynasties. Now, in a report in the August 28 issue of the journal Science entitled “Amplifying the Pacific Climate System Response to a Small 11-Year Solar Cycle Forcing,” Gerald A. Meehl et al. have demonstrated a possible mechanism that could explain how seemingly small changes in solar output can have a big impact on Earth’s climate. The researchers claim that two different parts of the atmosphere act in concert to amplify the effects of even minuscule solar fluctuations.
…
As I have previously reported, scientific evidence from NASA points to changes in the type of solar radiation arriving at the top of Earth’s atmosphere as a possible trigger for other powerful climate regulating mechanisms. Scientists have discovered, that while total solar irradiance changes by only 0.1 percent, the change in the intensity of ultraviolet light varies by much larger amounts. According to Judith Lean, a solar physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., its possible that long-term patterns—operating over hundreds or thousands of years—could cause even more pronounced swings in solar irradiance (see “Scientists Discover The Sun Does Affect Earth’s Climate”). The discovery of the solar heat amplifying effect provides the causal link between historical changes in solar activity and climate change.

Previously, the direct impact of increased irradiance on global avarage temperature has been estimated at around 0.25°C last century—a three fold amplifying effect would raise that to 0.75°C. This leaves practically no warming effect for CO2 to account for and renders the whole anthropogenic global warming argument moot. In other words, if the atmospheric solar amplifier theory is correct anthropogenic global warming is wrong, a useless theory describing a nonexistent phenomenon. It seems like poetic justice that a modeling experiment may point the way to discrediting global warming once and for all.

Read it here.