An amusing article in the Daily Telegraph for your enjoyment this morning.

At that moment Dave’s son came up with the perfect slogan for the 2012 US election: Global Warming for President!

The boy’s a genius. How could global warming possibly lose?

Global warmings got 100 per cent name recognition, awesome fund-raising powers and the ability to kill anyone who opposes him. Global warming, should he choose to run, has a total lock on the White House. If he doesn’t flood it first, of course, or fill it with sad polar bears.

Read it here.

The Australian has an article from the Wall Street Journal which doesn’t rate very highly the chances of any of Barack Obama’s empty promises on climate change actually making it onto the US statute book:

“Funding has stalled,” says Ezra Green, chief executive of Clear Skies Solar. The New York company recently cancelled plans to build a one-megawatt solar plant in California’s Mojave Desert, unable to get financing even though a California utility agreed to buy all the output.

“We’ve cancelled the solar-panel order,” Mr Green says.

Hobbled by the financial crisis, power companies across the US are slashing capital budgets and cancelling projects for clean electricity. Financing for new nuclear power plants appears shaky. And some energy companies are even having trouble satisfying their short-term needs for cash.

Forging a new energy future by creating vast amounts of wind, solar and, possibly, nuclear energy is one of Mr Obama’s highest priorities. But enacting that policy depends to a large degree on the ability of energy companies and utilities to finance the massive new investments that would be needed. With many of those companies cutting spending, a lot of those investments are being pared back or eliminated.
…
Many utility-sector executives and analysts now expect Congress to water down any climate-change legislation out of fear that it would push up electricity prices for consumers.

Strange, because aren’t we always hearing that the transition to a green economy would be utterly painless and wouldn’t cost a cent?

Read it here.

Denial Alert Number 2: After Obama’s ignorant comments on “global warming” earlier in the week, there’s more barking nonsense emanating from the US. Once again, some moonbat senator thinks that the green revolution will cost nothing, will have no detrimental effect on an economy already weakened by a global financial crisis, and will be a panacea for the ills of the world:

“The time to start is now,” said Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, vowing to step up to Obama’s challenge to combat climate change and create millions of “green jobs” in the reeling US economy.

Yep, we have to “do something” and it has to be NOW!! And again, she uses the “D” word to brush off the thousands of scientists who believe that CO2 emissions have little to do with “climate change”:

“Instead of denial we will have resolve, instead of procrastination, we will have action. Instead of listening to the voice of the stagnant status quo, our committee hears the voice of our president-elect,” Boxer said.

“We are facing a sea change,” Boxer said, arguing that Obama’s election and the big gains in congressional elections for Democrats would transform the attitude of the United States to global warming, the world’s biggest polluter.

That’s the “global warming” which, er, stopped nearly a decade ago, right? Madness indeed.

Read it here.

Tenuous Link to Climate Change Alert: Here we have a typical non-story about the rare, but not unheard of, storms in Queensland this week, which some climatologist has hijacked to try to make a link with “climate change”. This story is so full of contradictions I had to read it about five times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. It reads like a “good news, bad news” joke. First the good news:

University of Southern Queensland professor of climate and water resources Roger Stone and Queensland weather bureau spokesman Gavin Holcombe said that while November in southeast Queensland had generally been a dry month over the past decade, big storms such as the last two were not unusual.

OK, not unusual. However, here’s the bad news:

“But this sort of violent weather activity is consistent with climate change predictions. We’re coming off a long drought in southeast Queensland, and that has been an extreme weather event. Now we’re getting these storms, and they’re also extreme weather events.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that there is no proven link between warming and more extreme weather… But then after getting us all excited, it’s all a damp squib, and there’s good news again:

He cautioned against reading too much into the storms, saying that a series of events by themselves did not “prove” climate change one way or the other.

But under what headline does the usually sensible Australian run this story?

Wild weather in Queensland ‘a sign of climate change’

This is just one of hundreds of examples of appalling journalism about climate change in the mainstream media – articles written by journos who have no understanding of science and are incapable of separating fact from fiction. No wonder the general public don’t have a clue what is really going on.

Read it here.

As usual, a great read.

If it was April 1, then this story would be a corker. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t April 1, and it’s genuine. From the UK’s moonbat Guardian (reprinted in The Age):

Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, appealed to British users of the class A drug [cocaine] to consider the impact on the environment. He said that while the green agenda would not persuade addicts to give up, the middle-class social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment might not take the drug if they knew its impact.
…
Santos said many middle-class Britons who used cocaine were unaware of its environmental impact. “For somebody who drives a hybrid, who recycles, who is worried about global warming – to tell him that that night of partying will destroy 4m square of rainforest might lead him to make another decision.”

Only the liberal coke-snorting intelligentsia that read The Grauniad and The Age would be more influenced by the effect cocaine use has on the environment than by more traditional reasons to avoid it, such as, you know, it’s illegal…

Read the Guardian article here. (Thanks to Tom Nelson)

As well it might, given the economic situation, and the fact that “global warming” hasn’t happened for nearly a decade and people are beginning to smell a large Gore-shaped rat. A recent survey of Asia-Pacific government leaders shows that “global warming” doesn’t even appear on the list of top priorities this year.

“We’ve been swamped by bad economic news and you don’t have to look at our survey results alone to see that the interest and focus on climate change has dissipated somewhat,” said Yuen Pau Woo, co-author of the report.

“You see the same shift in focus in the public away from climate change questions to questions of economic survival and growth,” said Woo, president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Yet again, this is simply a statement of the only too obvious.

Read it here.

On the one hand, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner says we can only rely on financial modelling for 6 – 12 months, yet on the other, when it relates to climate change and his precious ETS, Kevin Rudd is happy to rely on such modelling for nearly 50 years. As Andrew Bolt comments:

No wonder smarter economists are alarmed:

THE global financial crisis showed how foolish the Rudd Government would be to base its climate change response on economic forecasts for the coming century, academic and Reserve Bank board director Warwick McKibbin said yesterday….

While partly involved in the modelling, Professor McKibbin said he was not responsible for the scenarios and believed it was “stretching the imagination” to believe you could forecast 100 years in advance and use that process to determine targets….

Professor McKibbin said the Kyoto experience showed how even most environmentally-friendly countries, such as New Zealand and Canada, could commit to rigid, long-term targets only to find themselves disadvantaged when their economies or external conditions changed. He declared there would never be a uniform global carbon scheme and urged the Rudd Government to take the time necessary to develop a workable national scheme.

Read it here.

Denial Alert: Obama is demonstrating himself to be as clueless on climate as we would expect, using the “D” word in a video message to a climate change conference.

“And once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.

“Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.”

And Tom Nelson has picked up some outright lies from the Obaminator in the same address:

“The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Obama has clearly swallowed whole the alarmism and bad science of Gore and the IPCC. Fortunately, however, there is no guarantee that Congress will pass any legislation on the subject.

Climate change is a paper tiger, and a gift for guys like Obama: it allows them to appear decisive and firm by talking tough and “doing something” about an issue that isn’t really an issue at all, and diverts attention from the far more real and difficult problems they face, which they don’t have the first idea how to deal with.

Read it here.

This, according to some SMH journo, is news, apparently. Every week the Moonbat Herald wheels in some D-list celeb to prattle on about how “green” they are. Today, it’s Merrick Watts, host of a breakfast show on Nova FM. He admits to having been trained (along with is conjoined twin, Tim “Rosso” Ross, who laughably has an abbreviated name longer than his actual name…) by the Gore-meister himself as part of his despicable Climate Project. Merrick oddly appears to be proud of this fact.

Q You are renowned for being a clown. Is there anything you don’t find funny when it comes to the state of the planet?

A Yes. Inaction. Particularly by people who should know better: politicians and the heads of big businesses. Also, there are still people who attempt to argue climate change hasn’t begun.

Er, we don’t argue the climate doesn’t change, because it does, and has done for millions of years without any help from us, but we do argue very strongly about the cause. He admits to driving a V8 car, but then ties himself in knots trying to explain it away:

I am aware that my car is a V8 but it doesn’t do as many kilometres as the average vehicle and runs on the cleanest fuel available, so is well below the national carbon output average. The next car I purchase will be more efficient. I am interested in seeing developments using hydrogen.

I believe you, mate, thousands wouldn’t.

Read it here (if you can bear it)