Thanks to Theo Spark

ACM was delighted to have its piece “If Michael Mann had been a corporate accountant … he would have been in jail by now” featured on the excellent “Junk Science” web site on 26 January (see here for the archive).

If you haven’t checked it out already, JS is essential reading – highly recommended.

Fairfax has gone from being a reasonable, if slightly Left-wing, media organisation to resembling something more like “Green Left Weekly”, if this editorial in the Canberra Times is anything to go by. Another “D” Word Alert (they just can’t help themselves…):

Under the leadership of John Howard, the Liberal and National parties were mostly staunch, even proud, climate-change deniers, happy to ignore the increasingly urgent warnings by the International Panel on Climate Change [shurely “Intergovernmental”? – Ed] and sit on their hands while governments elsewhere in the OECD (with the notable exception of the US) began to take active steps to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Coalition’s excuses (that the link between global warming and human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide had not been satisfactorily established, that Australia’s share of greenhouse gas emissions was small in any event and that efforts to rein in these emissions were pointless unless all large polluters, including those in the developing world, agreed to undertake remedial action) perfectly matched its conservative ideology and its fear that action would cost jobs. But this stance became increasingly untenable towards the latter part of its term in office.

All copper-bottomed Gore-bull. Those aren’t “excuses”, but well-founded reasons for caution, which Rudd & Co dismiss out of hand (“Hey, the science is settled, right?”). In fact, such a position has become far less untenable, with the almost daily growing evidence that climate change is a natural, cyclical phenomenon, that CO2 has little to do with it, and that emissions trading schemes are pointless political gestures which will set Western economies back decades whilst at the same time achieving nothing.

And the editorial writers are clearly so up to speed with climate change issues that they cannot even get the name of the IPCC correct!

“The alarmists are the new deniers.” © ACM

Read it here.

Another $10 million of Australian taxpayer dollars that could be far better spent on schools and hospitals is heading down the gurgler in pointless research into the “enormous health risks” of changing weather patterns, reports The Canberra Times:

Senator [Penny] Wong said Australians faced a range of risks, including higher rates of infectious diseases, an increase in bushfire-related injuries, and more heat-related death and illness. ”By 2020, the number of heat-related deaths in our capital cities is projected to double to 2300 a year, we are likely to see more food-safety related illness and dengue fever is likely to spread southwards,” she said.

”We need to better understand the diversity of these health risks, who will be most vulnerable, and the action governments, individuals and communities can take to reduce the risks.”

Read it here.

Just six days into his presidency, “Barry” is already making bizarre decisions based on flakey science and a complete misunderstanding of the issues of “climate change”. And just for luck, there’s another “D” Word Alert. As reported in The Age today:

“We will make it clear to the world that America is ready to lead,” Obama said, in an apparent swipe at former president George W. Bush’s reluctance to take control of international efforts to combat climate change.

“To protect our climate and our collective security, we must call together a truly global coalition,” the president said, just six days after his inauguration, in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

Obama signed memoranda designed to prod the struggling US auto industry to design new fuel-efficient vehicles to lessen US dependence on energy sources which he said bankroll dictators, and to spur the US economy.

“The days of Washington dragging its heels are over,” Obama said.

“My administration will not deny facts — we will be guided by them,” Obama said, in an apparent dig at Bush aides accused of subverting science for ideological reasons.

So will Obama not “deny” the fact that the earth is cooling, despite increasing CO2 emissions? Or “deny” the fact that the debate isn’t over? Or “deny” the fact that climate models cannot accurately predict the future?

The logic of this announcement is crazy – the US government is already spending billions of taxpayer dollars propping up the struggling car manufacturers in the US, and yet in the name of “climate change”, Obama kicks them again hard while they’re down…

It’s a taste of what’s to come.

Read it here.

So reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

Global warming may create “dead zones” in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia, according to a study published on Sunday.

Its authors say deep cuts in the world’s carbon emissions are needed to brake a trend capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas. [No surprise there – Ed]
…
“Even if after a hundred years, if you stopped all carbon emissions, the ocean would still need hundreds of more years to cool. These low-oxygen areas would continue to expand and they would peak around 2,000 years from now. The ocean would then slowly recover as it cools.”
…
Lead scientist Gary Shaffer of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen said it was unclear, in the grim light of this study, whether future generations could look to the oceans as a major reserve of food.

The Herald then takes the opportunity to recycle all the usual tired old global warming BS, just in case you’d forgotten it since the last time they recycled it all (probably about a week ago…)

Even ignoring the fact that the earth is entering a cooling phase, where are the all the “dead zones” from previous warmings, such as the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods that should still be hanging around? Why haven’t they been identified? Maybe it’s because the whole study is based on yet another incomplete and inaccurate “computer model”, which professes to simulate climate change over the next 100,000 years…

Read it here.

… he would have been in jail by now.

MBH99 [the “hockey stick” paper] is like a bad audit finding. When you find that Bear Stearns or Enron or Citicorp or whoever has fabricated some nonexistent asset on its books, you don’t give it a slap on the wrist and tell it to cross the line out. You unleash the forensic guys. You don’t find just one cockroach in a kitchen. And you don’t tell the health inspector, “sorry, we’ll kill it.”

MBH99 is not an ancient, irrelevant result. It is the single most publicized piece of research in the history of IPCC climatology. It singlehandedly put Mann in Scientific American’s list of America’s 100 top young scientists. And it really is not a stretch to compare it to an ape jaw glued to a human skull. The thing reeks. It is data laundering of the worst kind.

The Case for Global Warming Skepticism

Also check out Mencius Moldbug’s blog.

Malcolm Turnbull is set to try to trump the Government’s “carbon pollution reduction scheme” by introducing a policy of alternative energy, forestry and carbon sequestration, The Australian reports.

Mr Turnbull’s first major policy announcement since he ousted Brendan Nelson from the Liberal Party leadership in September will come in a speech today to a Young Liberals convention in Canberra.

“The Rudd Government, in its haste to implement its poorly designed ETS, has neglected all alternative paths to a low-carbon economy,” says a copy of Mr Turnbull’s speech.

“We need imagination, we need passion, we need courage and, above all, we need real leadership.

“We cannot afford to blunder on with Mr Rudd’s miserable, bureaucratic approach.”

Mr Turnbull’s plans, for which he will not provide costings, represent a clear attempt to counter Labor attacks on the Coalition’s refusal to commit its support to the planned ETS, which has dominated Mr Rudd’s agenda for the past year.

Apart from the fact that many of the technologies the policy requires are unproven (and uncosted), Malcolm Turnbull and the Opposition are heading off in completely the wrong direction. Instead of standing firm against the ETS and the IPCC non-science that is behind it, they are attempting to outflank Krudd & Co by adopting even more Greenie policies than the Government, and in the process shifting themselves dangerously to the Left.

As predicted, Turnbull and the Opposition are so cowed by the possibility of Rudd calling them “climate change deniers” that they have sold out their principles to the environmentalist cause.

Contrast this nonsense with the words of Tony Abbott, also in The Australian, where he rightly says:

the party should resist the urge to take populist stances on issues, instead of fighting for what is right.

How ironic – the Opposition policy on climate change outlined above has nothing to do with what is right, and everything to do with populism.

Mr Abbott says those who see unions as “just another sectional interest” and who “heed climate change science rather than green religion” are more important than ever since the defeat of the Howard government.

This is a very disappointing day for climate change policy in Australia. We are now in a position where only one (small) party, the Nationals, has the guts to oppose Rudd’s pointless ETS (and despite Turnbull officially reserving his position on it, we know full well he won’t oppose it outright).

Read it here and here.

From Antony Watts, regarding the Antarctica warming story:

There were some of the pronouncements made in the media, particularly to the Associated Press by Dr. Michael Mann, that marry that paper with “global warming”, even though no such claim was made in the press release about the scientific paper itself.

I agree with Ross Hays [meteorologist who has worked extensively in Antarctica]. In my opinion, this press release and subsequent media interviews were done for media attention. The timing is suspicious, with the upcoming Al Gore’s address to congress, he can now say: “We’ve now learned Antarctica is warming”. A Google News search shows about 530 articles on the UW press release in various media.

If this is true, it is a cheap trick from a bunch of “scientists” with no integrity.

Read his full analysis here.

Thanks to Jennifer Marohasy.

In a piece on ABC radio’s AM programme yesterday on the Antarctic warming story (see here), the paper’s author, Eric Steig, was interviewed, followed by our old friend and über-alarmist, Barry Brook. Then they interviewed William Kininmonth, who pointed out that there was no evidence of reduction in the cycle of Antarctic sea ice and that it was only around the coastal margins that temperatures exceeded zero degrees celsius during daytime for about one month of the year – the West Antarctic ice sheet has been in place for millions of years and likely to remain so.

However, this part of the interview has been censored from the online transcript and the podcasts (both of the segment itself and the whole programme). This kind of censorship of sceptical views, if it took place, is unacceptable, and in breach of the ABC’s charter.

UPDATE: The ABC have belatedly posted the audio of the interview with William Kininmonth on the AM website (with no transcript) and citing the lame excuse that it was only in the Radio National version and wasn’t included in the main programme “for space reasons” – how very convenient. As Jennifer says in her comment: “Not good enough.”