You can’t have it both ways. If you believe that anthropogenic CO2 is causing dangerous climate change, it is crazy then to spurn nuclear power as an alternative to coal. However, that is what most Western governments are doing, including Australia’s.

But now Sweden, one of the foremost opponents of nuclear power, has conceded that nuclear power must play a role if there is to be a “low-carbon” economy.

In a drive to increase energy security and combat global warming, ministers said they would present a bill next month that would allow the building of nuclear reactors on existing sites and introduce a new carbon tax as part of a program to cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020.

The decision is significant because Sweden was at the forefront of anti-nuclear sentiment after the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979. It voted in a referendum a year later to phase out its plants.

The Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said he did not feel bound by the referendum because it did not specify how nuclear power should be replaced. But the Government must still convince Parliament before it becomes law.

Australia should be doing the same.

Read it here.

The alarmism is getting even more desperate.

Geophysicists at the University of Toronto looked at the possible effects on the earth if sea levels rise because of a collapse of the west Antarctic ice shelf.

The Toronto researchers say the melting of the ice sheet will actually cause the earth’s rotation to shift dramatically – about 500 metres from its current position if the entire ice sheet melts – and that would result in much higher sea levels in some areas than previously expected.

The researchers say the melting would change the balance of the globe in much the same way that tsunamis move huge amounts of water from one area to another.

Is there anything that “global warming” can’t achieve?

Read it here.

University of London researchers calculated in the Southern Medical Journal that in Britain, at least, a big warming over the next 50 years “would increase heat-related deaths in Britain by about 2000 but reduce cold-related deaths by about 20,000”.

So let’s agree on the evidence: cold is the real killer, and airconditioning saves us in summer, just as central heating can save the frail in winter.

So how mad are our governments?

The Rudd Government will next year impose an emissions trading scheme that will “save” the planet by making power for your heaters and coolers more expensive. Victoria is even trialling a smart-meter so it can cut power use on hot days by making your electricity so expensive that you’d have to pay $170 a day to run ducted airconditioning.

And all this to “save” a planet from a warming that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Barking madness.

Read it here.

As always, a great read.

Weird one this. The Courier Mail breaks the shocking news that Ross Garnaut imported $18,000 worth of Italian paper for the printing of his tedious report (see here).

The odd thing is, however, that the story broke on 18 October 2008… in the Courier Mail (see here) and ACM posted about it here.

Who cares? It’s a thoroughly embarrassing story for Wong and Garnaut, so as far as I’m concerned they can print it every four months for ever if they want to!

UPDATE: The Australian has fallen for it as well! See here.

It will do no such thing, of course, but it makes the Government feel like they’re doing something. You will recall that Krudd & Co announced it will fund insulation for 2 million homes, reducing carbon [shurely “dioxide” – Ed] emissions by 49 million tonnes. The Australia Institute sees straight through the paper thin flannel:

The Australia Institute’s executive director Richard Denniss says the Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme will just reallocate those emissions.

“The way the Emissions Trading Scheme is designed, every kilogram of emissions saved by a household frees up an extra permit for a big polluter,” he said.

“So while it’s true this scheme will help reduce households’ use of energy, it won’t reduce Australia’s emissions at all.

“What they do is take those permits freed up by what the individuals have done and sell those permits to the aluminium industry or the steel industry or anyone else who wants them.

“So effectively the carbon pollution reduction scheme is really just a carbon pollution reallocation scheme.”

Read it here.

Of course it’s climate change, you denier you. The Age subtly links the Australian drought to “global warming”:

While drought in Australia has traditionally been linked to El Nino events in the Pacific Ocean, researchers from the universities of NSW and Tasmania and the CSIRO have found that it is the Indian Ocean’s cycle of warming and cooling that is to blame.

The water cycles of the Indian Ocean, which is experiencing unprecedented warming 2000 kilometres away, dictates the strength of the moisture-bearing winds that travel to Australia.

Business as usual at The Age.

Read it here.

ACM’s favourite journalist, Rosslyn Beeby, tugs at the heartstrings, as “climate change” is set to wipe out another cute creature:

Nemo the clownfish will lose the ability to smell the way home, as climate change makes the world’s oceans more acidic, new research says.

A team of scientists from Australia, Russia and Norway have discovered that as seawater becomes more acidic, baby clownfish the stars of the Disney cartoon Finding Nemo lose the scent cues that guide them home from the open ocean to the coastal reefs where they were born.

”This is a disturbing finding, with potentially devastating consequences for marine life. It could lead to a decline in coastal reef species,” James Cook University marine biologist Philip Munday said.

In fact, the article uses the name “Nemo” no less than 5 times (including in the headline), just to ram home the point. And, of course, it’s all our fault:

“At least 30 per cent of the human-generated carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the past 200 years has been absorbed by the oceans,” the paper says.

This has caused the ocean to acidify at a rate about 100 times faster than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

Read it here.

The Sydney Morning Herald (or as it now should properly be known, “Green Left Weekly In Drag”) fawns over Greens Senator Bob Brown (you know, the one who thinks CO2 emissions should be reduced to zero by 2050):

More than 1 million people voted for the Greens in the 2007 election and Brown scored more than 17 per cent of the Senate vote in Tasmania, where he has lived since 1972.

Before that, he grew up in rural NSW, a shy, dreamy child from a politically conservative family of police officers. He studied medicine at Sydney University and worked as a GP in Sydney, Canberra and London all the while battling bouts of depression as he came to terms with his homosexuality.

When he moved to Tasmania, he immediately felt at home among its wild landscape and old-growth forests. But it was a rafting trip down the Franklin River in Tasmania’s south-west wilderness in 1976 – and the subsequent seven-year anti-dams campaign – that was the making of Bob Brown.

And gives him a platform for the usual Green alarmism that we’re all familiar with:

“The world is in a pre-catastrophe situation with climate change and the destruction of a variety of life on the planet. In those circumstances, my work becomes all the more important. I’ve never been happier or more content,” he says.

Bizarre juxtaposition of ideas there…

Read it here.

In the big game of climate change there are no losers, just one big cash-guzzling winner. As inevitable as night follows day, scientists have claimed that the worst winter snow in London for thirty years is consistent with climate change. The UK’s Telegraph newspaper reports this under the faintly amusing headline:

Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists

Yep, that’s right. Heatwaves mean global warming, snow means global warming, staying the same means global warming, [insert your own phrase here] means global warming (shurely “climate change?? – Ed). Isn’t it hilarious how none of these events ever means nothing at all (“it’s just weather”) or even possibly global cooling? Nope, it’s all the big AGW at work.

Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming,” said Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford.

“If it wasn’t for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common.

Oh right, so if it weren’t for global warming this would happen more often? OK, got it. Brilliant.

Climate Madness.

Read it here.