The liberal press are up in arms about Barnaby Joyce’s comments about climate change this morning, alleging that he made comparisons with Nazi Germany. The Canberra Times misleadingly states that he “drew parallels with the Holocaust”, and goes on gleefully to report, under the headline “Joyce slammed over eco-Nazi blast”:

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke called on Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull to get Senator Joyce to retract his comments.

“Surely, even Malcolm Turnbull would draw the line at the comparisons that Barnaby Joyce made today,” he told reporters in Sydney.

“I would hope that even Malcolm Turnbull would say that comparisons with Nazi Germany … are out of line and should be publicly refuted and that’s something Malcolm should do today.”

Joyce was making the valid point that it is the AGW alarmists themselves who first made use of the offensive word “denier” in a cheap attempt to put AGW sceptics in the same boat as Holocaust deniers, and Joyce’s comments about “goosestepping” and “eco-totalitarianism” are tame by comparison. But again, the press have succeeded in turning reality upside down, dancing to the tune of political correctness, branding the attacker the victim and vice versa.

The whole thing proves the point that in the area of climate change scepticism, it is easier to attack the messenger than the message.

Read it here.

Out of all the major parties, only the Nationals have had the guts to stand up to Krudd & Co’s pointless ETS, opposing it outright, and are going to vote against it in the Senate. The Liberals, on the other hand, blatantly chasing popularity, will support it. Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate Leader, is rapidly becoming a bit of a hero in this blog for saying all the right things:

“The view across the National Party is that the reasons put forward to justify an emissions trading scheme are just a load of rubbish,” Senator Joyce told The Australian, in the strongest reservations to be expressed by a senior Coalition figure about an ETS.

“Malcolm Turnbull will probably come on board with the ETS but that doesn’t mean the National Party will support it.”

Senator Joyce was derisive of the Rudd Government’s 5 per cent reduction target for emissions. “Australia accounts for 1.5per cent of emissions worldwide, so 5 per cent of that is three-fifths of five-eighths of nothing,” he said.

“It’s nothing but blatantly ridiculous tokenism.”
…
Senator Joyce said he was disturbed at how climate change sceptics were being treated. “This has become a form of religious fanaticism and these environmental goose-steppers are pretty scary. You’re branded a denier. The last time that word was in vogue, it related to the Holocaust.”

He said it was meaningless that most climate experts believed global warming was induced by human activity. “History is replete with examples of experts getting it wrong,” he said. “Look at Y2K, look at what the doomsayers predicted about population explosions, food shortages, fuel running out, communism taking over the world. None of it happened.”

Right on the money. On the other hand, the Liberals, afraid of being branded “deniers” by Rudd, are swallowing the alarmism.

“We should be giving the planet the benefit of the doubt by changing the way we live,” [Chrisopher Pyne] said.

The benefit of the doubt? That’s probably one of the most ridiculous justifications for a crucial policy decision in the history of Australian politics! Such is the madness of climate change.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Of course, the Sydney Moonbat Herald can’t let the opportunity to smear a sceptic pass, so runs an article under the headline:

Joyce slams “Nazi environmentalists”

Nice.

More barking madness from celebs who seem to know so much about the earth’s climate. Not Australian, but it’s from my homeland, so that’s OK…

In order to thwart plans for a third runway at Heathrow, a rag-tag bunch of enviro-celebs have purchased a football field-sized chunk of land and are going to divide it up and sell it to people concerned about “climate change”. And of course, where there are shiny celebs in the foreground, there’s always the dog-on-a-string brigade in the background:

“We’ve bought a piece of land slap bang in the middle of the proposed third runway site at Heathrow,” Greenpeace said in a statement on its website.

“The government plans to go ahead with airport expansion across the country even though this means we’ll have no hope of meeting our climate emission targets.”
…
Actor [shurely “actress”? No, hang on, this is The Age after all – Ed] Emma Thompson said it was “laughably hypocritical” of the government to expand Heathrow while at the same time say it was committed to reversing climate change.

“I don’t understand how any government remotely serious about committing to reversing climate change can even consider these ridiculous plans,” she said.

“We’ll stop this from happening even if we have to move in and plant vegetables.”

Personally, I’d love to see Emma Thompson planting vegetables in a small allotment in the sleepy hamlet of Sipson, just north of Heathrow – if she does it for long enough, there’ll be a gift shop and tea room. But there’s bad (good?) news. If the runway gets the go-ahead, the land will be compulsorily purchased anyway, making the whole gesture utterly pointless. Here’s the full list of shame:

• Emma Thompson (to be expected)
• Alister McGowan, impressionist (ditto)
• Zac Goldsmith, Conservative Party green adviser (should know better)
• Dr Simon Lewis, climate scientist (no surprise there)
• John Sauven, Greenpeace (next)
• Susan Kramer, Liberal Democrat MP (ho hum)
• John McDonnell, Left wing Labour MP (yawn)

Read it here and here (and everywhere, for that matter).

Christopher Pyne is the Opposition education spokesman, and he has disappointingly revealed himself to have been taken in by the alarmism of the Rudd government in an article in the Sydney Institute Quarterly. Mr Pyne believes that the Liberals should position themselves as the party “most committed to tackling climate change”, a pointless aspiration which takes the Liberals in completely the wrong direction.

Here are some of the things he had to say:

• “There is a demonstrable need to address the release of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere.”
• “The view that the activity of the human race has added to changes to the climate and the warming of the Earth, is not a view with which one will get any argument from younger generations and which is increasingly accepted by all generations.”
• By leading on solutions to the issue of climate change, the new generation of Liberals can demonstrate that they believe progress is in the interests of the party and the country [from the Sydney Morning Herald report on the same article]

So the fact that a bunch of brainwashed teenagers think that AGW is real is enough to convince you, is it? On the contrary, as education spokesman, Mr Pyne should be campaigning to ensure that children are not brainwashed in schools by repeated uncritical showings of An Inconvenient Truth…

As I have said before, the Opposition should have the courage to reject Krudd & Co style alarmism, and look dispassionately at the evidence for AGW, which is shrinking rapidly by the day. But I haven’t got any money on it…

Read it here.

… that we can’t even predict a tide properly, let alone determine the climate 100 years in the future. Headline on ABC website this morning:

Biggest king tide in 18 years hits east coast

And, of course, CSIRO can’t help playing the “climate change joker”:

The CSIRO’s Dr Kathleen McInnes says climate change could make things much worse.

“In 50 years’ time, when we get that much global sea level rise occurring anyway, this is the sort of thing we might be experiencing every two weeks,” she said.

Then in The Age this afternoon:

Sydney’s king tides ‘just a ripple’

Sydneysiders and tourists descended on Sydney Harbour to witness the natural spectacle of a king tide, but were greeted by nothing more than the normal serene waters lapping gently onto harbour foreshores.

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW had predicted sea levels on Monday would peak up to two metres above normal, with Sydney’s highest tide due at Middle Head at 9.50am (AEDT).

Read it here and here.

The double-standards in reporting issues relating to the climate is hilarious, especially in the alarmist press like Fairfax: any bad news is immediately linked to “global warming”, whereas any good news is spun so that it’s not really good news at all! Heads I win, tails you lose.

The “good news” in this case is that out of three models of glacier retreat in Greenland, the one that most closely fits the data has little to do with “global warming”. However, here is how the Moonbat Herald spins it, having grudgingly conceded that the third model fits best (but whilst at the same time noting that even this third model is still related to “global warming” – phew). Count how many times the good news is caveated. And for good measure there is an “Everything’s Actually Happening Faster Than We Thought” Alert:

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted in 2007 that sea levels could creep up by 18 to 59 centimetres (7.2 to 23.2 inches) by 2100 due to thermal expansion driven by global warming.

Such an increase would be enough to wipe out several small island nations and seriously disrupt mega-deltas home in Asia and Africa.

But [the] IPCC failed to take into account recent studies on the observed and potential impact of the melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, prompting the Nobel-winning body to later remove the upward bracket from its end-of-century forecast. [No mention of the myriad other factors the IPCC “failed to take into account”, but which don’t advance the “consensus” like, er, the sun?]

A new consensus [Science has nothing to do with consensus] has formed among experts that levels could rise by a metre or more by 2100, according to Mark Serreze of the National Now and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorodo.

“What has puzzled us is that the changes are even faster than we would have though possible,” he said in a recent interview. [When has a global warming alarmist EVER said that something is happening more slowly than predicted…?]

Vieli cautioned that his findings, published in Nature Geoscience, are narrowly focused on one glacier, and that sea levels could still rise higher than the IPCC’s original projections. [That’s right, the data from one glacier ALWAYS shows less than what’s really happening – never the other way round… How do they manage to choose the wrong glacier every time?]

Other Greenland glaciers behave differently, and the dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet are still poorly understood [Hang on, surely the science is settled, right?], he noted.

Nor should the new study “be taken out of context to suggest that climate change is not a serious threat — it is,” he added. [Perish the thought]

The ice sitting atop Greenland could lift oceans by seven metres, though even the gloomiest of climate change projections do not include such a scenario. [But the Sydney Morning Herald article does, of course!]

Read it here.

UPDATE: The story actually originated from AFP (thanks to Climate Change Fraud), and the other media still gleefully parrot the alarmism…

… which it paid for in the first place. But in the world of “climate change”, anything goes, and no expense is spared in order to keep the rickety old bandwagon rolling.

In yet another appalling example of the waste of taxpayers’ money on climate change, The Australian has revealed that, having given $2.3 million of your tax dollars to Ross Garnaut to prepare his tedious tome, the Government has now handed over the rights, for free, to the Cambridge University Press to sell it worldwide on a commercial basis, with precisely zero profits being returned to the Government. Which means, in a ludicrous turn of events, that the Government’s Department of Climate Change had to buy its own copies, at a cost of more than $65,000 (paid for again by yet more of your tax dollars). Quite rightly, the Opposition is furious:

“It is outrageous that the Government has given away for nothing an expensive, taxpayer-funded report to a private company, which in turn is selling it with no return for taxpayers,” Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield said.

“Australian taxpayers forked out their hard-earned money for the Garnaut report to be produced and yet they will not receive a single cent from its sale.

“If the report is to be sold, there should be a return for taxpayers.”

It is unusual for a major international publishing house to become involved in the printing of a government report and then sell it on a commercial basis.

It’s two embarrassments in three days for the Government’s crazy climate change policies, with the admission on Wednesday that it’s advertising campaign for “Think Climate. Think Change” had cost nearly $14 million. Australian Climate Madness indeed.

Read it here.

Nearly a fortnight has passed since the last Age scare story, but here’s the first of the New Year, claiming that “half the planet may be hit by a food crisis by 2100” as a result of, what else, climate change.

According to researchers, there is a 90 percent probability that by 2100 the minimum temperatures in the tropics and sub-tropical regions will be higher than the maximums [sic] so far recorded in those areas.

The affect on crop-growing in those regions would be dire, according to the projections based on direct observations and data culled from 23 computer models on the planet’s evolving climate patterns.

Minima greater than the maxima? That would require a temperature rise of 5 – 10 degrees… far greater than even the most crazy projections of the IPCC. And those would be the same computer models that failed to predict nearly a decade of cooling, right?

“We are taking the worst of what we’ve seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation,” added Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment.

At least one thing is right in that quote – adaptation. Climate has changed for ever, and will always change, whether humanity exists on the planet or not. It’s about time we started to understand this.

Read it here.

China puts its economy before nebulous half-baked climate nonsense. Why is Australia not doing the same?

This story puts the final nail in the Government’s argument for an early introduction of an ETS. Krudd & Co have been selling us the story (at huge expense – $14m at the last count) that China will participate in a “global agreement” to reduce emissions to be signed in Copenhagen, which is why Australia should be out in front, leading the way with its two-errors-in-four-words “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.

Well, I think you can just about forget that, Kevin and Penny, as news comes in that China will be increasing it’s coal production by 30% in just six years to meet its ever-growing energy demands.

China is dependent on coal for about 70 per cent of its energy and because of its thundering growth the country has become one of the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases alongside the United States.

Beijing has said that coal, the cheapest and most plentiful source of fuel in China, will remain its major energy source, despite the impact global warming, which is blamed on greenhouse gases, has already had on the country.

The Government should be scrapping this false deadline of 2010 for the ETS immediately, as there is no hope of China being part of any global deal, and consequently no chance of global emissions being reduced significantly. All of which means that Australia’s 1.5% contribution to global emissions is less than a fart in a (global warming induced) hurricane.

James Hansen just laid the planet’s demise at Australia’s feet for continuing to export coal – I wonder what he’ll have to say about this?

Read it here.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Macquarie Dictionary has added the phrase “climate porn” to its database, which is ironic because the greatest purveyor of said climate porn is … The Sydney Morning Herald.

Read it here.