Continuing its welcome focus on climate realists (as opposed to the hysterical alarmism of other media organisations I could mention, eg the ABC and Fairytale Facts), The Australian publishes an article by climate data analyst and member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition, John McLean, in which the politicisation of the climate debate is laid bare:

The IPCC has now delivered four scientific assessment reports, each accompanied by an increasingly urgent call to action regarding climate change driven by greenhouse gases. National governments, which are signatories to the UNFCCC, have almost without exception bought into the alarm, modulating it only to accord better with their own political philosophies. This, combined with the allocation research funding according to policy relevance, means governments now attempt to predetermine the findings of scientific research.
…
Vested interests now dominate climate science. Whether climatologists, their employers and other people believe the government-approved line has become irrelevant, because they all wish to retain an income stream and whatever reputations they’ve established. These people advise governments, which subsequently set policy and research funding regardless of any contradiction with observational data.

Read it here.

An embarrassing backflip by Labor, and had it happened to the Coalition, KO’B would have savaged them mercilessly. But not so our Penny, as Australian Conservative reports:

He handled Wong with kid gloves, allowing her to duck and weave with hardly a blow landed. It is exceedingly rare for O’Brien to allow one of his interruptions to be batted away but Wong got away with it.

O’Brien posed a tough question at the start: wasn’t this an embarrassing u-turn? he asked. Wong was allowed to avoid a yes or no answer, and instead was allowed to spin her way out of it. O’Brien also passed up a chance to push a very obvious point.

Wong argued that moves to tackle climate change would have to be delayed and watered down because of problems with the accuracy of economic forecasts.

With even global warming scaremongers like David Karoly accepting that the world has cooled in the last 12 years, could it be a fact that global warming computer modelling is similarly flawed?

Read it here.

The Australian continues its support for Ian Plimer, offering him an opportunity to respond to the myriad uninformed and ad hominem attacks his book has received, mainly from people who haven’t read it.

Well-known catastrophists criticised the book before they actually received a review copy. Critics, who have everything to gain by frightening us witless with politicised science, have now shown their true colours. No critic has argued science with me. I have just enjoyed a fortnight of being thrashed with a feather.

Despite having four review copies, ABC’s Lateline photocopied parts of chapters and sent them to an expert on gravity, a biologist and one who produces computer models. These critics did not read the book in its entirety. The compere of Lateline claimed that he had read the book yet his questions showed the opposite. When uncritical journalists have no science training, then it is little wonder doomsday scenarios can seduce them.

In The Age (Insight, May 2), David Karoly claims that my book “does not support the answers with sources”. Considering that the book has 2311 footnotes as sources, Karoly clearly had not read the book. Maybe Karoly just read up to page 21, which showed that his published selective use of data showed warming but, when the complete set of data was used, no such warming was seen.

Robert Manne (The Weekend Australian, Inquirer, April 25-26) claims to be a great democrat yet demonises dissent on a matter of science. He is not a scientist. The gains made in the Enlightenment, the scientific method, history and integrated interdisciplinary science are all ignored in an ideological push to remodel the economy.

Read it all!

Breaking news:

The Federal Government is today expected to announce that it is delaying the introduction of its emissions trading scheme by a year.

The ABC understands that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is about to announce that the scheme will be delayed until 2011, while the range of proposed cuts will be increased to 5 to 25 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020.

The ABC also understands that the scheme will be changed to ensure that efforts made by households to reduce emissions will be factored in.

More comment to follow later. Read it here.

If you’re visiting the Australian Museum in Sydney, I would advise you to steer clear of their latest climate change exhibition, entitled “Climate Change: Our Future, Our Choice” – even the title is misleading. We have no choice in it – climate changes, that’s what climate does – and a glance at the kind of message the exhibition sends confirms my worst fears:

Developed by climate change experts and scientists [any sceptics among them, I wonder? I very much doubt it – Ed], in conjunction with Perth-based science centre Scitech, this exhibition gives you the rare chance to uncover the truth and consider how the decisions you make today will impact the future. Join us in thinking about the type of world you want for yourself and generations to come – and discover how you can personally make it a reality!

In other words, we need to do something to “save the planet”… and if that’s not enough, here are some of the things you can do:

• Melt the ice caps and see which parts of Sydney flood first.

• Dance to the beat on a special dance floor and see how much green energy you can generate.

• Discover what makes up the carbon footprint of a simple hamburger and encounter a 36,000 litre cube showing exactly how much greenhouse gas they are responsible for each day.

Stop, stop – enough. Another supposedly impartial organisation sells out to the politics of climate alarmism, and thousands of our children will be indoctrinated as a result.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt comments on the sorry tale here.

Remember “Think climate, think change” – probably one of the most vacuous and inane slogans of our time? You may recall that Krudd & Co were planning to spend $14 million of your tax dollars spruiking the whole climate change/ETS nonsense (see here). Now it appears they have given up on it, having spent “only” $8.8 million.

THE Federal Government has quietly scrapped a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz to promote its controversial emissions trading scheme amid widespread criticism that its plan is too complex and will do little to tackle global warming.

Documents given to The Sunday Age reveal a taxpayer-funded climate change call centre was also canned, after receiving an average of just 16 calls a day at a cost of $52 each. [It really is the greatest challenge to humanity since the dawn of time! – Ed]

The Government’s campaign — “Think Climate, Think Change” — has already cost millions of dollars, with ads run on television and in magazines.

But documents from the Department of Climate Change show that a second phase of the campaign, which was to explain how emissions trading would work, has been dumped and “no further advertising is being planned”.

Still spinning furiously, as only Krudd and Co know how, the government defends its decision:

The department said ads were cancelled because they had “already achieved substantial market coverage and penetration, and the campaign objectives of raising awareness of the impacts of climate change … were unlikely to be enhanced by further advertising at that time“.

Read it here.

Funny, but I didn’t notice The Age going to such extremes to pick apart the science in An Inconvenient Truth, which is the climate science colander of our times: full of holes. But it shouldn’t surprise us. The Fairfax editors made up their minds years ago on climate change, and now have their brains firmly locked down to anything that dissents.

Amusingly, The Age also resents the fact that Ian Plimer has received “uncritical publicity”, which is utter nonsense given every journo in the country has been trying to smack him down – think the ABC’s Tony Jones, for example. If you want a real example of uncritical publicity, try Al Gore and AIT.

As usual, The Age focuses on one small fact, and ignores everything else, namely that temperatures have dropped since 1998. Take out the 1998 El Niño, and The Age triumphantly announces that:

the line turns upward. Global warming before your eyes.

The fact is that since about 2001, temperatures have declined. But also, since the earth is slowly recovering from the Little Ice Age, you would expect there to be “global warming” on a century scale. The argument is over whether it is human-induced.

Then, having “won” the argument on that, The Age launches into the usual warmist tactic of the ad hominem attack, describing Plimer as:

rambling and hard to pin down… his conversation is a grab-bag of arguments against human-induced climate change drawn from science and popular debate [nice touch – Ed]. It veers here and there…

The Age lines up some rent-a-quote warmists (e.g. David Karoly) to rubbish the claims in his book, backing the IPCC and telling some real porkies in the process. Matthew England from the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre defends the IPCC:

“That is an absolute no-brainer. He shouldn’t be getting away with saying the IPCC ignores the past, it’s absolutely untrue,” he says. “The IPCC includes all relevant information from geology, geophysics, solar processes, oceanography, glaciology, right through to paleoclimate. Every area he claims he is bringing in for the first time is already there.”

So why did the IPCC models fail to predict the cooling since 2001? Maybe it’s because the effects of the sun are played down to almost nothing, and hardly figure in IPCC models, and neither does cloud cover. And also think Michael Mann and hockey sticks – erasing the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in order to advance a political agenda – one of the worst examples of scientific dishonesty in history. (And, of course, if you conceded that climate change was natural and there was nothing we could do about it except adapt, you’d be out of a job.)

As a final flourish, the article quotes David Easterling of the US National Climatic Data Centre at length, but in the last few lines concedes:

Easterling hasn’t read Plimer’s book, but his analysis published last weekend also challenges Heaven + Earth.

It’s getting harder and harder for The Age to defend it’s blinkered, warmist agenda against the cool facts.

Read it here.

As always, a great read! (And a new look too!)

How pathetic can you get? The proper response, of course, is “Get of your knees and clear out of here. The ETS is a crock of sh*t, and you know it.” Let’s hope that’s what the Opposition will tell him.

Mr Rudd tried to keep the ETS alive during a news conference in Hobart on Thursday following a meeting of the Council of Australian Governments.

“I’d appeal to all politicians in the Australian Parliament, in the upper house; this is serious stuff for the nation in the 21st century,” he told reporters. [No it isn’t, it’s bad law based on bad science. It needs to be chucked in the dumpster – Ed]

“Our job is to try and punch this through … we’re going to give it a damn good go.”

Jolly good, old chap, you punch away, for all the good it will do you.

Read it here.

But we all knew that anyway. It will damage the economy and do nothing for the climate (even if CO2 drives climate, which it almost certainly doesn’t). Maybe Krudd & Co should tax the sun instead to encourage it to reduce its output of harmful radiation (heat and light)!

The analysis, prepared by David Pearce from the Centre for International Economics, warns that the Government has failed to adequately assess the level of environmental benefits the CPRS will achieve for its cost, its ability to deal with uncertainty and whether it explicitly accounts for international developments.

Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change Greg Combet effectively conceded yesterday that the Government will have to deal with the Coalition to pass the CPRS.

He said the Greens had “made themselves irrelevant” with demands that amounted to “lunacy”.

Mr Robb said the CIE report “clearly establishes that the design of the Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme needs to be reconsidered and compared empirically with alternatives.

“For the Government to have ignored the impact of the global financial crisis beggars belief,” he said.

“The costs over the next 20 years of lost competitiveness and lost jobs must be established, along with the likely impact, or not, on CO2 emissions.”

But the Opposition have still got it wrong at the core. They should not be questioning just the effect of the ETS on the economy, they should be questioning the whole purpose of the ETS at all. The science on climate change is not settled, despite what Rudd, Wong, Combet, Gore and Obama say, and there is no evidence, either from recent past or geological times, that CO2 is a driver of temperature. Tinkering with a harmless trace gas will do nothing, and the Opposition should have the guts to say that. Spend money on adaptation, not control.

Read it here.