The plants have clearly been talking back to Prince Charles this time, as he compares humanity to the behaviour of frogs in boiling water…

British tabloid The Sun reports the heir to the throne made his comments in the Amazon while on a tour of South America to raise awareness of climate change.

“The trouble is it’s the old boiled frog syndrome,” he said. “You can’t tell if you are in the water that it is gradually heating up. You just get used to the heat and you don’t notice until suddenly it reaches boiling point and it’s too late to do anything about it.”

Boiled frog syndrome refers to the idea that if you put a frog into boiling water it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, it will be boiled alive. It isn’t true – when the water gets hot the frog will jump out, but it does make a nice metaphor.

So where is all this heat, your Royal Highness? Have a look at the global temperature record, and try again:

Read it here.

With every day that passes, the ETS slips through Penny Wong’s clutches. Nick Xenophon has called on the government to accept the inevitable, that the ETS won’t get through the senate.

“It should be pretty clear to the Government now that in its current form this legislation won’t pass the Senate,” Senator Xenophon said this morning.

The Government hoped to have its emissions trading legislation passed by the end of June ahead of a start date of July 1, 2010.

But [Opposition leader Malcolm] Turnbull said the Prime Minister was proceeding at a “reckless” pace.

“He’s on an ideological crusade which is to have an emissions trading scheme,” he told ABC Radio this morning. “He doesn’t seem to care what’s in it as long as he can tick that box. That’s not good enough.”

Despite the fact that the Opposition don’t have a decent alternative, this has to be good news for Australia.

Read it here.

The alarmism in the Fairfax press, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times, is getting so bad that I am considering whether to even blog stories from these papers in future. The bias is so ridiculous that it’s beyond parody, and it’s almost not worth commenting any more. What do you think?

New poll has started – let me know what you think.

Simon, ACM

This gets more ludicrous by the day! The Age, or as it’s known “Pravda on the Yarra”, is wailing about how tough the life of a climate scientist is. My heart bleeds – no, really, it does.

“Science is exciting when you make such findings,” said Konrad Steffen, who heads the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado.

“But if you stop and look at the implications of what is coming down the road for humanity, it is rather scary. I have kids in college — what do they have to look forward to in 50 years?”

And that’s not the worst of it, said top researchers gathered here last week for a climate change conference which heard, among other bits of bad news, that global sea levels are set to rise at least twice as fast over the next century as previously thought, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk.

What haunts scientists most, many said, is the feeling that — despite an overwhelming consensus on the science — they are not able to convey to a wider public just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe.

The Age just isn’t a serious newspaper anymore – it’s like Green Left Weekly gone posh. I am seriously considering expunging all future references to it from the pages of ACM. I feel a poll coming on.

Read it here (for probably the last time).

QOTD comes from the UK Meteorological Office’s Vicky Pope (see here), commenting on a plan to increase the reflectivity of clouds artificially:

“Anything that alters the climate in a different way from reducing carbon has inherent dangers because we don’t understand the climate well enough.”

But, conveniently, they seem to understand the climate well enough to make apocalyptic projections about the future of humanity unless we dramatically cut carbon [dioxide] emissions… The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Read it here.

As the only decent sceptic in the sea of moonbattish journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald, Miranda Devine must have a hard job getting anything published, but amazingly she has an article about the International Conference on Climate change, held last week in New York. Of course, the mainstream media were all working themselves up into a lather about the hysterical alarmism being spread about in Copenhagen, and nary a mention of the ICCC, so well done to Miranda for redressing the balance…

How can the courageous independent scientists in New York compete for attention with climate hysteria coming from such world leaders as Prince Charles, who in Rio de Janeiro this week claimed: “We have less than 100 months to alter our behaviour before we risk catastrophic climate change.”

Australia’s future head of state is on a 10-day eco-tour to South America, aimed at boosting his popularity. He will travel in a luxury private Airbus, delivering a carbon footprint estimated at more than 300 tonnes.

It just shows that what counts with climate hysterics is not the greenness of the planet but the brownie points they gain.

Read it all.

UPDATE: Link fixed – apologies.

The right decision, but for (partly) the wrong reasons: (a) it will cost jobs [valid reason], (b) is won’t help the environment [invalid reason]:

In his keynote address to the Liberal council, [Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull] says the Opposition will use the Senate inquiry process to work on improving the design of a climate change policy. [It doesn’t need improving, it needs dropping – Ed]

“Labor’s ETS will cost jobs and fail the environment,” he said.

“It fails to recognise Australia’s greatest and most beneficial opportunities for emissions abatement.

“We will oppose it in its present form and on its current timetable because we have a better and a greener way. Better for jobs, the economy and the environment.”

Mr Turnbull said that he is also firmly against the Government’s proposed start date of 2010.

“The real issue is getting the design right,” he said.

As any fule kno, Australia contributes 1.5% of global emissions, so even if it reduces its emissions to zero overnight, it will make not one skerrick of difference to global emissions, and absolutely no difference to the climate (assuming that CO2 drives temperature – which is far from proven). At least it looks like we won’t have the economy crushing pointlessness of Rudd & Wong’s ETS, but let’s hope we don’t get something worse…

Read it here.

Climate sense in a sea of alarmism and propaganda. Eventually, people will have to start taking notice, but at this stage only The Australian carries this story, and you certainly won’t see it in The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald:

“Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis [of man-made global warming] has been substituted for truth,” writes Shunichi Akasofu, founding director of the University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre.

Dr Kusano, Dr Akasofu and Tokyo Institute of Technology geology professor Shigenori Maruyama are highly critical of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s acceptance that hazardous global warming results mainly from man-made gas emissions.

On the scientific evidence so far, according to Dr Kusano, the IPCC assertion that atmospheric temperatures are likely to increase continuously and steadily “should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis“.

Dr Maruyama said yesterday there was widespread scepticism among his colleagues about the IPCC’s fourth and latest assessment report that most of the observed global temperature increase since the mid-20th century “is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.

When this question was raised at a Japan Geoscience Union symposium last year, he said, “the result showed 90 per cent of the participants do not believe the IPCC report“.

Read it all.

Or not. Certainly not in the case of Lateline presenter Tony Jones, a full-blown card-carrying climate alarmist (see see here, here, and here) and Kruddite who gives Penny Wong a really rough ride about the ETS, as The Australian reports:

The first question Jones asked, as well as the following four, concerned how many renewable energy jobs the ETS would create. Not how many jobs the ETS will cost as export industries lose business to companies based in countries where they do not pay to pollute. Not the overall economic impact of a scheme that miners say will lead to workers being sacked. Jones is interested in jobs in the future, not people in the present. The future is green, so why worry now about unemployed workers who are blue?

Read it here.

Writing in the UK Spectator, Melanie Phillips exposes the hysteria that has surrounded the gathering of alarmists in Copenhagen:

The atmosphere is cooling, the ice is expanding, the seas are not rising — even though carbon emissions are increasing. The evidence is now crystal clear to anyone with an unwashed brain that man-made global warming theory is sheer unadulterated bunkum. So how do the warmers react to the ever more embarrassing evidence that they have hitched their reputations to the biggest anti-scientific scam in history? By ratcheting up the hysteria to fever pitch and shrieking that their predictions about the impending irreversible environmental apocalypse have grievously underestimated the catastrophe which is going to be far, far worse.
…
The BBC, whose Today programme yesterday devoted its prime 0810 slot to unchallenged ‘melting ice/rising seas/we are all doomed’ propaganda, has not even mentioned the New York conference [the International Conference on Climate Change – see here]. And as far as I can see, of the British papers only the Guardian attended it – not to report the proceedings, but to sneer. Thus Suzanne Goldenberg wrote:

It would be easy to dismiss this gathering as a pity party for people on the fringes of modern thought

which of course she proceeded to do. The attendees were

almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age

and worse still, other than the academics,

they are affiliated with rightwing thinktanks.

Well, say no more.

Indeed.

Read it here. (via Tom Nelson)