Well, anything goes when we’re talking about “saving the planet”. In a barking mad opinion piece, Melissa Fyfe sucks up to the new “people power” (i.e. breaking the law) in order to achieve aims that cannot be achieved through the proper democratic process. As we have seen already, the courts in the UK are quite prepared to turn a blind eye to criminal offences where “climate change” is concerned – coal-fired power stations are fair game.

In the wake of Rudd’s decision, some in the environment movement are talking about a return to people power. They are talking not just about individual action but national campaigns of “direct action”: protests, civil disobedience, making life hard for coal-fired power stations. They are talking about moving out of the boardroom and back to front-line action. They know that they will be risking jail.

I wouldn’t bet on it.

A similar shift is happening globally. As the Crikey website mentioned recently, a man managed to walk into a British coal and oil-fired power station and shut down a whole turbine. “No new coal” was on the note he left.

This glorifying of criminal action is incredible for a supposedly serious newspaper. All I hope is that the courts, at least in Australia, treat such “civil disobedience” as what it is: criminal action that requires suitable punishment. That everyone should be equal before the law is a fundamental tenet of Western democracy, and to lose it for the sake of nebulous “climate change” claims would be a disaster.

But in the end, however, we discover the whole rant is built on thin air, as the sources of her climate (mis-)information are revealed: James “Let’s massage our data retrospectively” Hansen and Al “High Priest of Global Warming, who, by the way, won’t debate the issues with anyone” Gore. She has swallowed the alarmist agenda whole – well, this is The Age after all.

Read it here if you can bear it.

2008 is shaping up to be the coolest year since 2001, and yet the media can always dig up an alarmist who can spin it into bad news, to keep the AGW bandwagon of doom rolling (and of course, the cash flooding in). The alarmist in question is Prof Barry Brook, whose amusing title is “Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change” at Adelaide University, which the Adelaide Advertiser (probably the worst newspaper in Australia) reports without question, under the doom-laden headline:

“Year of extremes sparks climate woes“

The article uses the phrase “on record” no less than seven times, without bothering to point out that “on record” means as a maximum in the last 150 years (many stations being far more recent), which, in geological terms is a gnat’s whisker, and almost totally irrelevant. Self-Interest Alert:

University of Adelaide climate change professor Barry Brook labelled 2008 as “more climatically damaging” in SA, causing incredible stress to plant and animal life.

Professor Brook said 2008 was a year of extremes. “We had that heatwave, of course, in March and yet we had a cool winter,” he said.

“The fact that we had that heatwave makes 2008 more climatically damaging than the past 50 years or more.”

Professor Brook said temperature extremes were going to become more common but annual average temperature records would not clearly portray these extremes and the severe effects of climate change.

So no matter what the temperature records show, the effects of “climate change” would always be hidden, right? And if that’s not enough, don’t forget that even though it’s cooler now, warming is still going on…

National Climate Centre senior climatologist Dr Andrew Watkins said 2008 was still warmer than previous La Nina years, in a sign climate change had caused warmer-than-normal temperatures.

A La Nina event relates to cooler-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

“Even though this year should have been a relatively cool year, it was warmer than all but two years since the beginning of this century,” Dr Watkins said.

Which is exactly what you would expect, since temperatures have been climbing gently since the Little Ice Age (which no-one ever mentions, of course).

Read it here.

Thank you to all of you who have visited this blog over the past few months – I hope you have enjoyed your visits. I’m taking a short break now and will be back posting in the New Year.

Have an enjoyable and peaceful Christmas and best wishes for 2009.

P.S. I couldn’t let the year end without a great alarmist/Scrooge story from the ABC:

Festive feasts ‘contributing to climate change’

Read it and weep.

Can’t keep up with the number of stories about records for extreme cold currently being set all over the globe. And yes, I know that weather isn’t climate, but there is a hell of a lot of anectdotal evidence showing that temperatures are heading down. Here’s an example, from ABC radio this morning:

While most Australians can only dream of a white Christmas this week, Canadians are set to experience their whitest in almost 40 years.

The entire country is covered in snow for the first time since 1971.

Alberta is the only province that has no weather warning current and as many as 100,000 people in Atlantic Canada are without power as snow and freezing temperatures wreak havoc.

The prairie provinces are in a deep freeze, with temperatures dipping to under minus 30 degrees Celsius, and even British Columbia is suffering with unusually cold weather.

Eastern Canada is still digging out from back-to-back weekend snowstorms that dumped 50 centimetres of snow and disrupted air travel during the busiest time of the year.

Forecasters say there is more snow coming on Christmas Eve.

Source.

No longer is there any doubt in the minds of the Canberra Times (=Fairfax =SMH =The Age =enviro-hippies) journos who write environmental stories. In a typically batty piece about ensuring your Christmas lights are powered by green electricity (seriously), it throws in the following:

The average household emits around 14 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, half of which is from electricity generation. This contributes to climate change and global warming.

No “possibly” or “may” or “some believe that”, you notice. It does, period. Debate’s over, science is settled. Nothing to see here.

Source.

More climate sense from Prof. Carter in The Australian who exposes the ETS for what it is, a pointless, but harmful, political gesture:

The Rudd Government is poised to introduce a CO2 taxation bill on doubly spurious grounds. It presumes, first, that dangerous warming caused by human emissions is occurring, or will shortly occur. And, second, that cuts to emissions will prevent significant amounts of future warming.

There is, therefore, now a dramatic disjunction between scientific reality and the stranglehold that global warming alarmism has on planned Australian climate policy.

Today’s public views about climate change are based upon 20 years of promulgation of dangerous global warming by what has become a hugely powerful coalition of self-interested groups and agencies.

Read it here.

(Thanks to Andrew Bolt). Clearly the ABC would never allow this kind of thing on their “proper” site (as it doesn’t fit with their alarmist editorial agenda), so it’s relegated to the Unleashed section, where they stick all the rantings of freaks and weirdos (like climate realists):

After several prominent public claims by skeptics in 2008 that there is no evidence left for AGW, alarmist scientists offered only two points.

First, laboratory tests prove that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. But that observation tells us nothing about how much the global temperature changes if extra carbon enters the real, complicated atmosphere. Every emitted carbon atom raises the global temperature, but the missing hotspot shows that the effect is negligible.

Second, computer models. Computer models are just huge concatenations of calculations that, individually, could have been performed on a handheld calculator. They are theory, not evidence.

Governments have spent over $50 billion on climate research since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence for AGW.

The most amusing part of this article, however, since it is on the ABC website, is the comments section, chock-a-block full of ad hominem attacks from the Loony Lefties who cannot believe that anyone could possibly question the consensus on AGW. Here’s an example:

This bilge is lies, distortions and misrepresentations from beginning to end. Evans peddled this rubbish at ‘The Fundament’, the Die Sturmer of local denialism recently. He is an associate of the loony, far, far Right Lavoisier Group, well established as established up by Rightwing ideologues. All Evans’ points have been rebutted over and over again, and his trump-card, the alleged ‘absence’ of a tropical tropospheric ‘hot-spot’ has been rebutted by a paper published recently in the International Journal of Climatology (I know. It’s not as distinguished a source as ‘The Fundament’ or the ‘Proceedings of The Lavoisier Society’) by Ben Santer and 17 other real scientists.
…
Both anthropogenic climate change and Peak Oil are being caused by runaway, cancerous, economic growth, which our market fundamentalist capitalist state religion demands must continue forever, and hang the consequences for the billions who will suffer as a consequence.

And by the way, Santer refused to release the data for the “rebuttal” he claims to Steve McIntyre – I wonder why? Maybe Santer thought it would get the same treatment from McIntyre as Mann’s hockey stick!

Read it here.

This is what we can expect as global temperatures level off and fall, ever increasing hysteria from the warmists desperately trying to stop the wheels falling off their cash-cow bandwagon. The Brisbane Times (from the Fairfax – Age, SMH – stable) excels itself in scaremongering claptrap in an editorial piece entitled “Economy won’t matter if earth dies“:

The science of climate change now tells us that if global temperatures are allowed to rise by 3 degrees — which is compatible with widespread adoption by developed countries of the Rudd Government 2020 emission targets — irreversible changes will be set in place that will drive the global temperature increase to 6 degrees above the pre-industrial level.

If this is allowed to happen, it will have catastrophic consequences for the environment and human civilisation.

Even managing to contain global warming to 2 degrees would involve risks for the planet that would be unacceptable to most individuals if the same odds of death applied to air travel or engineering projects.

Already the consequences of global warming are apparent. Extreme weather events are becoming commonplace. The lower Murray and the Great Barrier Reef are crippled almost beyond repair.

If the Rudd formula is applied generally, science tells us the consequences of global warming above 3 degrees include in Australia the deaths of the Great Barrier Reef, the Murray-Darling-Goulburn Basin and Kakadu National Park.

Internationally, the costs include loss of Arctic summer sea ice. Without ice to reflect the sun, the temperature rise will cause the irreversible loss of the Greenland and Himalayan ice sheets, which would translate into an eventual seven-metre rise in sea levels. Under threat are the 200 million people living on flood plains; 22 of the 50 largest cities, which are at risk from tidal surges; and the billion people in an ark from Pakistan to China whose lives depend on the six great rivers of Asia to keep flowing during the dry season.

Just count up how many misrepresentation and outright falsehoods there are in those few paragraphs. The trouble is that most people reading it will treat it as gospel. Disgraceful journalism, Kenneth Davidson.

Read it here.

… thanks to the indoctrination of their eco-fundamentalist science teachers, the ABC, and newspapers like The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. From a letter to The Age:

MR RUDD, I am 17. Although my opinion will be politically insignificant for another year, it is my generation who will suffer the consequences of inadequate climate change action. After your election, I was one of many excited at the prospect of change. Now I feel extreme disappointment. What happened to taking climate change seriously; to listening to science; to climate change being the greatest challenge of the generation?

I understand how such a politically cunning response would blunt Opposition attacks. But we don’t need clever political manoeuvres or more excuses, summits or reports. We know the facts. A carbon reduction of 25-40 per cent by 2020 is necessary to keep global temperatures within 2 to 2.4 degrees of pre-industrial levels. A mere 5 to 15 per cent means destroying the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu and catastrophe for the Murray-Darling Basin, thus threatening 700,000 jobs.

Global warming may be the greatest challenge of your generation but it is the greatest threat to mine. Don’t go down with John Howard as one of the men who stood by and watched it happen.

Robert Moseley, Upper Ferntree Gully

Read it here.

A great piece from Andrew, who exposes the hysterical predictions made by alarmists for what they are – nonsensical hype.

GLOBAL warming preachers have had a shocking 2008. So many of their predictions this year went splat.

Here’s their problem: they’ve been scaring us for so long that it’s now possible to check if things are turning out as hot as they warned.

And good news! I bring you Christmas cheer – the top 10 warming predictions to hit the wall this year.

Read, so you can end 2008 with optimism, knowing this Christmas won’t be the last for you, the planet or even the polar bears.

Read it here.