That’s $14m of your taxpayer dollars down the drain, spruiking a pointless political gesture that will do nothing for “climate change”, even if CO2 was involved… The Opposition, rightly, are horrified:

“This is an outrageous waste of taxpayers’ money to run a very extensive campaign that offered no detail or explanation of what the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will look like nor what impact it will have on the everyday lives of Australians,” Senator [Mitch] Fifield said today.

“Even readers of FHM, Cosmopolitan and Women’s Day couldn’t escape these advertisements.”

An outspoken critic of Howard government advertising campaigns when she was in opposition, Senator [Penny] Wong had attacked the previous government for failing to reveal the true cost of taxpayer-funded advertising campaigns.

“Yet in an act of gross hypocrisy, Senator Wong is responsible for placing her Government’s climate change PR campaign in just about every newspaper and magazine and on every television and radio in Australia,” Senator Fifield said.

“There is a legitimate role for government advertising when it explains the impacts of major and complex policy changes to the Australian public.

“But the ‘Think Climate. Think Change’ campaign is nothing more than a slick PR exercise for the Rudd Government. Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for something clearly designed as a booster for Labor’s poll numbers.”

Couldn’t have put it better. Read it here.

The Sydney Morning Herald is in full scaremongering swing this morning with a front page article forecasting more conflicts as a result of “climate change” (surely “global warming”… Ed), and quoting that ever reliable source of balanced comment, James Hansen. Here’s a handy summary of the weasel words in the article:

• “May”: 4
• “Could”: 3
• “Risk”: 3

and here’s the scary spin from the Herald:

RISING sea levels could lead to failed states across the Pacific and require extra naval deployments to deal with increases in illegal migration and fishing, a Defence Force analysis says.

“Environmental stress” has increased the risk of conflicts over resources and food and may demand greater involvement by the military in stabilisation, reconstruction and disaster relief, the analysis, prepared by Defence’s strategic policy division, says.

It warns there is a risk of a serious global conflict over the Arctic as melting icecaps allow easier access to undersea oil and gas deposits.

Those would be the melting ice caps that have exactly the same extent of ice they had back in 1979, right? But when you actually read the report it’s even more vague:

“From a defence planning perspective, we don’t know how quickly these changes will occur, exactly what their impact will be, or how states and societies will react“

i.e., we know precisely Jack shit, but we’ll make lots of scary predictions anyway. Then the Herald wheels out Hansen:

Dr Hanson, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said Australia was making “honest efforts” to tackle climate change but failing.

Carbon trading schemes such as that proposed by the Federal Government would slow the rate of greenhouse emissions too slowly, Dr Hanson said.

“This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat,” he said. “It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity.”

Read it here.

We all knew he was a warming-fruitcake, but this confirms our worst fears. Here are a few quotes from a letter by Hansen and his wife to Michelle and Barack Obama (why both, unless to tug at emotional heartstrings?):

[Schmaltz Alert] We write to you as fellow parents concerned about the Earth that will be inherited by our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born.
…
[Horse Shit Alert] Urgency now dictates a personal appeal. Scientists at the forefront of climate research have seen a stream of new data in the past few years with startling implications for humanity and all life on Earth.

“New data”, showing the earth cooling, perhaps? “Startling implications” for alarmists like Hansen (and their nice revenue stream)?

[More Horse Shit Alert] An urgent geophysical fact has become clear. Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.

Creation with a capital “C”? What, like in Genesis? Oh, please. “The planet of stable climate” – when has the climate ever been stable? Civilisation has been through far worse than the gentle warming that is currently occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age (oops, those are three dirty words to Hansen, of course), but hey, who cares about the facts when GISS funding is at stake?

I warned you the alarmists would get desperate. I was right.

Read it here and here.

UPDATE: Global sea ice back to 1979 levels, the year measurements began. Does that appear in your stream of “new data”, James? [Thanks to Skeptics Global Warming]

Of course it does, you denier you. Records are being broken all over the northern hemisphere for excessive cold, and the Sydney Moonbat Herald remains resolutely silent. Then one hot day in Sydney, and it goes into alarmist overdrive. Under the idiotic headline “If you think it’s hot now, wait until next year” the SMH writes:

NSW was bracing for a heatwave today as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology published its annual report showing last year to be one of the hottest on record and predicting more scorching temperatures this summer.

One of the hottest on record? Actually the 14th hottest, since, er, 1850. It was the coolest year since 2001… And by the way, what do surface temperature measurements show? Urbanisation, not climate. Look at the satellite records if you want the true global temperature trend.

“This is entirely consistent with climate change projections,” Dr David Jones [of the National Climate Centre] said.

So what about the record cold? Is that “entirely consistent with climate change projections” then? Climate nonsense.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Mercifully, an antidote in The Australian: “The Warmaholics’ Fantasy“

I have just come across this excellent skeptic blog from a fellow Aussie – I recommend it highly. Check out the handy, pocket sized “Skeptics Handbook” which will floor an AGW alarmist at ten paces…

Visit it here.

Thanks to Tom Nelson. The first reaction of any alarmist when faced with a skeptic is to question his or her qualifications to comment on the matter. That, however, doesn’t seem to happen in reverse. Anyone, anywhere, can say what the hell they like unchallenged, especially if they’re a luvvie or a politician.

In this case, our own Cate Blanchett (climate qualifications unknown, but I’m guessing pretty much zero) fawns nauseatingly over Al Gore (climate qualifications definitely zero) and the whole despicable Climate Project, whose sole purpose, let us remind ourselves, is to disseminate the lies and deception contained within An Inconvenient Truth. She should stick to acting. Under the headline “Climate Change Warriors”, she spouts:

“In 2006 the inspirational Al Gore came out to ignite the Climate Project (TCP), which is generously supported by the ACF [Australian Conservation Foundation, which “runs” the Climate Project in Australia], where citizens from all walks of life in Australia are indoctrinated and empowered with the information [and a version of the slide show featured in Gore’s documentary film] An Inconvenient Truth to go out into their communities and spread the word.

“He trained 70 people then [in Sydney]. My husband and I went. We went as citizens and we went as concerned parents. We wanted to do something with our anxiety and to turn our anxiety into action. We were so inspired by the passion of the people doing the training, who were obviously inspired by Al Gore himself. It was the individuals [attending] who were then asking pertinent and specific questions about climate change and had the passion to go back and communicate to their communities.

The rest of the article is full of comments from more celebs, all hopelessly deluded by the contents of AIT and the Climate Project, most of which was debunked years ago. But Cate did get one thing right: “indoctrinated” is certainly the word for it, namely to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view. Who cares about the real science, when we can indoctrinate an unsuspecting public with outright lies to mislead them into subscribing to our quasi-political agenda.

Dumb and dumber.

Read it here.

UPDATE: With excellent timing Watts Up With That points us to an excellent article by Harold Ambler in (of all places) the Huffington Post which thoroughly debunks everything that Gore and AIT stand for. Read it all, Cate.

UPDATE 2: Gore Lied has a hilarious video to go with it!

I think we should start using the term “denier” to apply to those alarmists who refuse to acknowledge that the world is cooling, and has been since at least 2001. It’s the IPCC who are in denial – denying the clear facts in order to push a pre-conceived agenda. And so it is with most of the mainstream media.

The Australian cannot grasp the fact that spending trillions of dollars tinkering with a harmless trace gas is a complete waste of time, continuing to spread doom, such as the following:

As the chart at right covering the past 10 years shows [not shown], that makes [2008] the third year in a row of falls. Draw a trend line between 1998 and last year and it slopes downwards.

So at least global warming has halted, hasn’t it? That is one way of looking at it. Evidence that the earth is cooling certainly has put a new bounce in the step of climate change sceptics.

However, the news does not look so good if we take the longer-term view. The official records going back to 1850 … show a long-term rising trend. It is not huge – of the order of 0.8C – and it is not without fluctuations but it is unmistakable. It also coincides with increasing carbon dioxide emissions, which we know will continue growing for some time yet, even if the world manages to reach an agreement in Copenhagen this year on future reductions. On this longer view, 2008 is the 10th hottest year of the last 158.

This last paragraph is utter nonsense. Records of 150 years are almost meaningless in climate terms. Temperatures have been rising slowly since the end of the Little Ice Age (which the IPCC deny ever occurred), and so a rise of 0.8C is completely normal, and temperatures were far higher in the Medieval Warm Period (which the IPCC also deny ever occurred). And CO2 emissions didn’t even get going until the mid 20th century, so how does this show a “correlation with CO2”?

The article then goes on to quote warming-freak James Hansen, rubbishes a petition of 31,000 scientists who question the “consensus” because it came from an institute:

based in a small rural town and styles itself as a non-profit research institute with six “faculty members” working in protein biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and ageing. It also promotes home schooling as an alternative to “socialism in education”.

(what has that got to do with anything? No major institution would dare question the consensus for fear of losing funding, so the fact that it’s a small organisation doesn’t surprise me in the least) and further complains that the signatories don’t have the right qualifications (like the IPCC, of course, but no-one ever mention that), and tries to use the hackneyed “insurance” analogy to persuade us that action is need urgently.

It’s the alarmists that are the true deniers.

Read it here.

… so resorts to petulant ad hominems instead. Always the last chance saloon for someone unable to counter the substantive arguments of “skeptics”, Rosslyn Beeby attempts the impossible: portraying alarmists as reasonable chaps, always open for debate and discussion (like Al Gore, I suppose, who refuses to debate AGW with anyone who might ask a half-intelligent question, which of course rules out most journalists), and skeptics as the hysterics of the piece.

She spends the first few paragraphs cherry picking a few examples of realists’ frustration boiling over with all the endless nonsense they have to deal with from the alarmists on a daily basis, branding the “name calling” of the skeptics as “grotesque”, and praising Barack Obama’s new science adviser, John Holdren, whose opinions are clear on:

…the climate-change skeptics who infest talk shows, Internet blogs, letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and cocktail-party conversations.’’ Climate change scepticism is not just “regrettable’’ but dangerous.

“It has delayed – and continues to delay – the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge,’’ he writes on Climate Shift blog.

Spot the hypocrisy there? It’s OK for an arch-alarmist to write on a blog, but a skeptic? Dear me no. Shut them up. Stifle debate. Science is settled, right? By the way, I don’t seen any arguments against the skeptics’ substantive points relating to issues of climate change, however… maybe they come later in the article? (No, they don’t – Ed)

Holdren is a warming fruitcake à la Hansen who, along with doom-monger Paul Ehrlich, spectacularly and embarrassingly lost a very public bet back in the 80s about the prices of metals ten years later (they were wrong on all counts), and whose critique of Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist was described as:

“strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.” (source)

See a pattern emerging here? Let’s just remind ourselves of Michael T Eckhart’s email to Dr Marlo Lewis, so that we can fully appreciate what reasonable, good natured and balanced chaps these alarmists are:

Marlo –
You are so full of cr*p.

You have been proven wrong. The entire world has proven you wrong. You are the last guy on Earth to get it. Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.

Mike

Michael T. Eckhart

President
American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)

How’s that for articulate and well-mannered, Rosslyn? Truly, this is the silly season.

Read it here (stiff drink advisory)

Thanks to Skeptics Global Warming: An article to “warm” the soul, from Christopher Booker in the UK’s Daily Telegraph:

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph. The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.

Read it all.