Thanks to Tom Nelson. You may recall that Robyn Williams is the ABC journo who has stated on previous occasions that “the debate is over” (and on whom I have previously commented – see here) and is frothing at the mouth because all us deluded sceptics are not swayed by the power of his arguments. Ad hominem Alert:

I draw two conclusions. The first is that the handful of ‘climate sceptics’ are politically driven and exploit the same trademark clutch of factoids and phrases. They ignore published, peer-reviewed scientific papers containing evidence that shatters their case, vanishingly small as it is.

The noise they make is out of all proportion to their puny numbers, and they protest furiously that all they are doing is trying to save us from unnecessary paralysing angst – rather than inconvenient truth.

The other characteristic of these people is that they lack nuance. After all, everything in science is debatable.

“These people”?! Everything in science is debatable? Except climate change, clearly! What a joke. I lost count of how many ad hominem attacks the article contains. This guy should be sacked from the ABC.

Read it here.

UPDATE: Once again, Andrew Bolt does a great demolition job on Williams here.

Australia is steaming ahead with an economy-crippling ETS, so other countries are now looking to us for tips as to the best way to cripple theirs too, including the US:

Edgard Kagan, the economic counsellor at the US Embassy in Canberra, says US officials are awaiting with interest the Federal Government’s carbon reduction scheme white paper, which is due in just under a fortnight.

“There’s a great deal of interest within the parts of the US Government that deal with climate change issues in what Australia’s doing, because there are tremendous similarities between the US and Australian economies, both in geographic scale and structure of the economy,” he said.

Both countries also have moonbatty watermelon leaders (green on outside, red on inside). And more “tremendous similarities” will follow, as the economies of both countries disappear down the gurgler.

Read it here.

Only kidding of course. But the Australian attempts to put all sceptics in their place by reporting a lecture given by Marvin Geller of Stony Brook University in New York State. Under the patronising headline:

Professor sheds light for climate change sceptics

(as if we sceptics are Neanderthals grovelling around in the fog of ignorance), Geller spouts the usual alarmist stuff. But the good professor’s logic is full of holes, as whilst he states that a very small change in solar radiation cannot possibly affect climate, he then goes on to state that a very small change in CO2 obviously does. He then compares the effect of this harmless trace gas to cyanide… oh dear.

And it’s really all downhill from there: 11 of last 12 years warmest on record (only since 1850 of course), insulting our intelligence by explaining the difference between “weather” and “climate” in terms that would patronise a 12-year-old.

“Many components of the climate system … are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century.“

Read it here.

Quoth Andrew Bolt. But this time it’s not the koala, but the white possum, which the Courier Mail thunders has been made extinct by “global warming” (shurely “climate change” – Ed):

“If it has died out it will be devastating,” Ms [Sheridan] Morris said.

“It is a big one, and a big one to bang the drum over.

“It is equally as shocking as losing an iconic marine species like a whale or the dugong.”

It’s a big IF of course, and doesn’t tie in with the fact that global temperatures are much the same as they were 30 years ago…

Read it here.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt skewers the whole thing very nicely here.

Just as Rudd and Wong are starting to realise that drastic cuts in emissions might (surprise, surprise) harm an already weakened economy, the greenie hoards write a bleating letter to the Prime Minister urging him to cut emissions by 40% by 2020 “for the planet’s sake”, reports The Age. As if the planet would even notice a 0.6% reduction in global CO₂ emissions …

“We urge you to stand up to the pressure from the big polluters and adopt a strong emissions reduction target that will keep alive the possibility of a strong international agreement,” the letter says.

“A five to 15 per cent target would represent a profound failure.”

The letter warned the latest science showed climate change was happening faster than previously thought, and deep emission cuts were needed to ward off a greenhouse catastrophe.

Wrong on all counts (but especially wrong on the last).

Read it here.

I think Poznan may well turn into a bit of a competition to see who can come up with the most outrageous scare story. IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri is the reigning champion, and you’ll have to be pretty good to oust him from the top spot.

HALF of humanity could face water shortages by 2050 if the world lets the financial crisis distract it from fighting global warming, a key UN climate change summit of more than 185 countries has been told.
…
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri told an opening meeting that many people had still not woken up to the risks of climate change if the world failed to act.

He cited projections that the number of people living in river valleys and facing water stress could quadruple from more than 1.1 billion in 1995 to more than 4.3 billion by 2050, that a third of species could face extinction, that the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets could melt, triggering massive sea-level rises.

It’s all so last year. But what’s happened to Donald Tusk, Polish Prime Minister? In October, he was standing firm against the EU emissions nonsense (see here), but now appears to be a card-carrying IPCC disciple:

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told summit delegates the economic downturn was no excuse not to tackle climate change.

Is this the same Donald Tusk who said the following, in respect of Poland’s dependence on coal?

“We don’t say to the French that they have to close down their nuclear power industry and build windmills, and nobody can tell us the equivalent.”

Who knows. I think they must put something in the water. More of the same tomorrow, no doubt.

Read it here.

I don’t know if I can face another 12 days of scaremongering from Poznan. The Age lives up to its alarmist reputation with a cool-headed and dispassionate account of the first day’s proceedings:

War, hunger, poverty and sickness will stalk humanity if the world fails to tackle climate change, a 12-day UN conference on global warming heard.

A volley of grim warnings sounded out at the start of the marathon talks, a step to a new worldwide treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and help countries exposed to the wrath of an altered climate.
…
“Further expansion in the same style will generate global threats of really great intensity – huge droughts and floods, cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, pandemics of tropical disease, dramatic decline of biodiversity, increasing ocean levels,” said [Polish environment minister Maciej] Nowicki.

All of which overblown claims have little basis in reality, but which are good at grabbing headlines in moonbat papers all over the world, like The Age. And then this absolute gem:

Nowicki’s warning was underscored by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides neutral scientific opinion on global warming and its impacts.

“Neutral scientific opinion” my foot. Propagating religious dogma with a ferocity approximating the Medieval Catholic Church, perhaps…

Read it here.

The alarmist in chief is back on form in an interview for AFP, reported in the Brisbane Times, which clearly has no idea about Hansen’s well-known record for being a global warming fruitcake and massaging the GISS temperature record to fit his own agenda:

A half-dozen climate experts told AFP, ahead of international climate talks starting on Monday, that current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, would unleash devastating droughts, floods and huge increases in human misery by century’s end.

But the new studies, they say, indicate that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that would be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further.
…
“The most recent IPCC report was prior to … the measurements of increasing mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica, which are disintegrating much faster than IPCC estimates,” said climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Unlike the Arctic ice cap, which floats on water, the world’s two major ice sheets – up to 3km thick – sit on land.

Runaway sea level rises, Hansen said, would put huge coastal cities and agricultural deltas in Bangladesh, Egypt and southern China under water, and create hundreds of millions of refugees.

Were Greenland’s entire ice block to melt, it would lift the world’s sea levels by almost seven metres, while western Antarctica’s ice sheet holds enough water to add six metres.

Yawn. Next.

Read it here.

… published within 5 minutes of each other.

From the Melbourne Herald Sun at 5.08 am:

Climate change fight could create jobs

From the Newcastle Herald at 5.13 am:

Emission scheme casts shadow on jobs

It’s all so confusing…

Read it here and here.

“For ever” is a very long time in geological terms, yet the climate pseudo-scientists bandy it about as if it meant nothing. The moonbattish Canberra Times quotes Professor David Archer of Chicago University, who goes into full scaremonger mode:

”The climatic impacts of releasing fossil-fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilisation so far”.
…
In a paper to be published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, he says, ”The ocean is getting fed up with absorbing our CO2.” Surface waters which used to sop up the gas quite fast, are getting saturated with it turning acid in the process and, so, decreasing their uptake. They need to be replaced with fresh water from deep down, but this circulation ”takes centuries or a millennium”.

Global warming is expected to slow this down: the hotter the surface layer becomes, the longer the replenishment takes.

The paper says research shows this renewing process will not be enough to remove the vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Much will have to wait hundreds of thousands of years before being removed by another, much slower, process: the natural weathering of rocks, which incorporates the gas into other substances.

Two points:

• That would be the global warming that hasn’t happened since 2001, right?
• If the science is so settled, why is this all such a surprise?

Read it here.