Despite the whole two-errors-in-four-words “carbon pollution reduction scheme” being subjected to a parliamentary enquiry to consider its effectiveness (see here), Penny Wong is clearly pretty sure of the outcome of that enquiry as she continues to march the country headlong into economic oblivion for the sake of a pointless political gesture:

The federal government has released details of how it expects high-polluting industries to meet new requirements under its carbon pollution reduction scheme.

A guidance paper, released on Wednesday, outlines the assessment process for those in emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) industries and provides guidance on how they are required to meet targets.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the process would assist the government’s decision on which activities would be eligible to receive EITE assistance.

Sorry, but why is the government wasting yet more taxpayers’ money on the ETS if the enquiry hasn’t even reported yet? Or maybe, the reality is that the government doesn’t give a flying carbon-credit about what the enquiry will say? That’s more like it.

Read it here.

Yes, the World Bank, that centre for excellence in climate research, has weighed in on the debate, claiming in a report that Andean glaciers will disappear in 20 years thanks to “global warming” (which hasn’t happened for the best part of a decade…):

According to the report, in the last 35 years Peru’s glaciers have shrunk by 22 percent, leading to a 12 percent loss in the amount of fresh water reaching the coast — home to most of the country’s citizens. [But I guess the report also considered in equal depth the multitude of other factors that could lead to such shrinking, such as deforestation, particulate pollution etc… no? It didn’t? There’s a surprise – Ed]

“It is highly probable that the earth’s surface will undergo an unprecedented temperature increase of nearly two degrees centigrade (four Fahrenheit) by 2050 and up to four degrees (eight Fahrenheit) by the end of the century,” said Pablo Fajnzylber, a senior World Bank economist.

Sounds worryingly like an economist spouting IPCC-speak.

Read it here.

In his usual eloquent fashion, Andrew sums up the climate hysteria surrounding the bushfires in the Melbourne Herald Sun:

Global warming, right?

Wrong.

First, Melbourne did in fact have a hotter day before, four years before the Bureau of Meteorology started officially recording temperatures.

As the Argus newspaper reported at the time, the temperature on February 6, 1851, soared to 47.2C, helping to superheat the fires that then roared across 10 times more land than was burned last week.

AND despite claims that global warming is now heating this land like never before, Victoria’s highest recorded temperature is still the 50.7C measured in Mildura 103 years ago.

South Australia’s is also 50.7C, recorded 49 years ago. NSW’s is the 50C of 70 years ago. Queensland’s is the 49.5C of 37 years ago. Not much recent warming obvious there.

That’s the problem with this cherrypicking of one day of weather in one place. It proves nothing except the desperation of the preachers who try to fool you.

Read it here.

I have been promised a response from the ABC about what they meant when they said the poll had been “hijacked” (see original story here). I will post about it if and when received.

On another matter, a few sites have claimed that Gore Lied and ACM faked the image of the poll result. One example of the accusation can be found here. Later posts however concede that the poll was indeed genuine. More to follow.

[Post edited by ACM]

It was only a matter of time before our own Aussie James Hansen, Tim Flannery, put pen to paper to blame the bush fires on “global warming”, and he goes to town in the Sydney Morning Herald today:

Climate modelling suggests the decline of southern Australia’s winter rainfall is caused by a build-up of greenhouse gas, much of it from coal burning. Victoria has the most polluting coal power plant on earth, and another plant was threatened by the fire.
…
Australia is in shock at the loss of so many lives. But inevitably we will look for lessons. The first, I fear, is that we must anticipate more such terrible blazes, for the world’s addiction to burning fossil fuels goes on unabated. And there is now no doubt that emissions pollution is laying the conditions necessary for more such fires.

When he ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described climate change as the greatest threat facing humanity. Shaken, and clearly having seen things none of us should see, he has now witnessed proof of his words. We can only hope Australia’s climate policy, which is weak, is now significantly strengthened.

Rudd has said the arsonists suspected of lighting some fires are guilty of mass murder, and the police are pursuing the malefactors. But there’s an old saying among Australian firefighters: “Whoever owns the fuel owns the fire”.

Let’s hope Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible event, and change their polluting ways before it’s too late.

Flannery disingenuously links increasing levels of CO2 to changes in climate, without the intervening step of increasing temperature. Maybe that’s because there has been no global warming since 2001, despite rising CO2 levels. And even if temperatures were rising, there is still no confirmed link to CO2 levels (despite $50bn in research), and there are many other possible causes the IPCC won’t tell you about, like er… the sun?

And, by the way, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is plant food, without which no life on earth would exist. But hey, Flannery’s only a professor, a mammalogist and palaeontologist, so how could he be expected to know that?

Climate nonsense.

Read it here.

This guy is getting way too much coverage. ACM has already blogged this yesterday (see Sunday Alarmism), but not to be outdone The Sydney Moonbat Herald parrots the whole damn thing (without any thought), and, under the doom-laden headline “‘Feedback’ could amplify climate change peril”, goes into full-speed carbon-fuelled alarmism:

New studies have warned of triggers in the natural environment, including a greenhouse-gas timebomb in Siberia and Canada, that could viciously amplify global warming.

Thawing subarctic tundra could unleash billions of tonnes of gases that have been safely stored in frosty soil, while oceans and forests are becoming less able to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to papers presented this weekend.

These phenomena mean more heat-trapping gases will enter the atmosphere, which in turn will stoke global warming, thrusting the machinery of climate change into higher gear.

Hilarious – “thrusting the machinery of climate change” – you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried! And at the bottom of it all is our friend Chris Field.

Research presented on Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago suggested the frozen soil of the tundra stored far more greenhouse gas that previously thought.
…
Scientist Sergei Zimov has studied climate change in Russia’s Arctic for almost 30 years. He believes that as organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

Funny, ain’t it? It’s never less that previously though – always more.

“Melting permafrost is poised to be a strong foot on the accelerator pedal of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” said Chris Field, a professor at Stanford and a top scientist on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.

Top scientist? Newsbusters puts it like this:

Chris Field is not a “top climate scientist.” In fact, he isn’t even a climate scientist at all. Just a wee bit of googling on the part of [Reuters reporter Julie] Steenhuysen would have revealed that Chris Field is a professor of biological sciences whose shtick is pushing something called “global ecology.” Field has no more expertise in predicting future climate patterns than, say, a proctologist performing brain surgery.

Now that’s an image I’m going to have trouble erasing from my imagination…

Read it here.

Surely not a climate realist article in The Age? No way. After that vaguely encouraging headline, the rest of the article is typical alarmism. Every mention of cooling is always refuted by a scary mention of warming:

[Global climate research data] shows that even a cool year for the noughties was a hot one by historical standards. Average temperatures across the world last year were 0.325 degrees warmer than the average between 1961 and 1990, which meteorologists use as a benchmark period.

Last year was 0.69 degrees hotter than the average temperatures around the world in the 75 years from 1850 to 1924, before global temperatures really began to rise. [As you’d expect since the globe is recovering from the Little Ice Age … whoops, three dirty little words – Ed]

Temperatures in Australia are rising even faster. The Bureau of Meteorology reports that the average temperature last year across the continent was 0.41 degrees hotter than in the benchmark period. It was the coolest year since 2001, yet our 14th hottest year in 99 years of monitoring. [99 years is like a a blink of an eye in climate terms – Ed]

Just to give you an idea of the balanced nature of The Age’s reporting, the article uses the word “warmer” just once, “cool”, “cooling” or “coolest” four times, and the words “hot”, “hotter” and “hottest” no less than 12 times! And this is supposed to be an article about the coolest year since 2000!

You really have to laugh, or else you’d go mad.

Read it here.

Having insisted that in order to “save the planet” from “catastrophic climate change” we all throw away our evil capitalist incandescent bulbs/globes and replace them with CFLs (compact fluorescent lights), the UN is now wringing its hands about all the mercury floating around, much of which comes from the “improper” disposal of … CFLs.

And by the way, don’t ask me what “proper” disposal is, since Governments haven’t bothered to think of that, despite passing laws banning incandescents. In Australia, each council has its own rules, very few have specialised CFL disposal arrangements (and those that do will charge you for it), and the general advice is chuck ’em in the garbage… forward thinking by Krudd & Co as always (see here).

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on Sunday urged environment ministers meeting this week in Nairobi to adopt a strategy to curb the use of the highly toxic metal mercury.

“The world’s environment ministers meeting in Nairobi, Kenya this week can take a landmark decision to lift a global health threat from the lives of hundreds of millions of people,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.

Not only that, here at ACM we detest the light from CFLs, which take an age to warm up, are hopelessly dull, and often flicker annoyingly. Long live the filament bulb.

And The Age can’t help throwing in a “climate change” message, just for good luck:

As climate change melts the Arctic, mercury trapped in the ice and sediments is being re-released back into the oceans and into the food chain, UNEP said.

Read it here.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, that austere body founded in 1847 by railway pioneer George Stephenson, and whose other famous presidents included Robert Stephenson, Joseph Whitworth and Robert Napier, has sold out to climate alarmism, reports the UK Financial Times.

Tim Fox, head of environment and climate change at the IMechE, said: “Yes, we need to mitigate [greenhouse gas emissions], but the evidence shows this isn’t working alone.”
…
The IMechE identified sea level rises, and an increase in droughts, floods and storms as the main worries arising from global warming. Various measures can be put in place to counteract these effects, ranging from seawalls in some areas to abandoning tracts of land to the sea, and designing transport networks to be more resilient.

Another previously impartial scientific organisation bites the dust.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Piers Corbyn slams the report, calling it “alarmist, self-serving nonsense”. See here.

A crop of alarmist reports in The Age, The Herald Sun and The Sydney Morning Herald today, just to brighten up your Sunday morning. Starting with The Herald Sun which runs the clichéd old headline “Climate change could be even worse than predicted, expert warns” – yawn.

Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years. [Funny how higher temperatures in previous eras never did this – Ed]

That could raise temperatures even more and create “a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century“. [Ditto]

“We don’t want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot,” said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental earth system science at Stanford University.
…
Mr Field is co-chair of the group charged with assessing the impacts of climate change on social, economic and natural systems for the IPCC’s fifth assessment due in 2014. [Great! Another report we won’t have to bother reading – Ed]

No such critical threshold has ever been demonstrated to exist. And Professor Field doesn’t seem to know much about English, either:

“Tropical forests are essentially inflammable,” Mr Field said. “You couldn’t get a fire to burn there if you tried.”

I think you mean “non-flammable”, but hey, it’s an easy mistake, even for a professor…

Moving on to The Moonbat Herald, under the headline “It will only get worse as climate changes”:

Research by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO has found that bushfire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later and become more intense in coming decades.
…
An author of the report, Kevin Hennessy from the CSIRO, told the Herald yesterday: “There does seem to be a human element to bushfire risk. In terms of human contribution it is clear that most of the global warming since about 1950 is likely due to increases in greenhouse gases. Higher temperatures clearly increase the risk of bushfires.”

“Clear” that something is “likely”? Don’t forget, there has been no global warming since 2001, and more warming in the first half of the 20th century than in the second.

Professor Mark Adams, dean of the faculty of agriculture at the University of Sydney, said higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased the risk of bushfires and added to the likelihood that their intensity would also increase.

Simple as that – it’s all too easy. The article then quotes Bob Brown, which I won’t repeat here, as it is likely to put readers off their breakfasts… The Age next, in an editorial:

We have long known that the Victorian bush is prone to fire, but the latest event raises the question about what can be done to prevent deaths in an era of drought and climate change.

Every era is an era of climate change – climate changes, that’s what it does. Get used to it and adapt.

There is speculation that the conditions of Black Saturday will occur more frequently in the future — that we have had a taste of what climate change will bring — which means that we need a tough reassessment of how to live safely and responsibly in Victoria.

And finally, a “pick a loved icon and put a gun to its head” item:

Penguins nesting off Argentina’s coast are starving because changing ocean patterns have forced their mates to swim 40 kilometres further than they did a decade ago to find food, researchers said on Thursday.
…
Overfishing, pollution and climate change have contributed to the loss of fish stocks near the Punta Tombo animal preserve about 1600 kilometres south of Buenos Aires, Boersma said.

I’d guess (overfishing + pollution) = 99%, climate change = 1%, but it’s just a guess…

Read it here, here, here and here.