Gore tries desperately to bask in some of the reflected glory of Obama’s presidential victory, by somehow claiming “the internet” could help save the planet, much as it helped elect Obama (no, I don’t get it either). Anyway, the Sydney Morning Herald, willing as ever to print a non-story such as this, reports:

The one-time presidential contender turned environmental champion told Web 2.0 Summit goers in San Francisco Friday that technology has provided tools to save the planet while creating jobs and stimulating the crippled economy.

“The young people who have been inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign and the movement that powered Barack Obama’s campaign want a purpose,” Gore said.

I guess that purpose would be transferring large sums of money to Gore’s pointless climate corporations?

“One of the reasons we were all thrilled Tuesday night is it was pretty obvious this was a collectively intelligent decision.“

The Internet’s critical role in Democrat Obama’s victory in the presidential race against Republican John McCain was a “great blow for victory” in addressing a “democracy crisis” stifling action against climate change, Gore said.

The only person stifling anything is Gore himself, who refuses to debate with anyone who might ask a difficult question about climate change.

Read it here.

Forget about science, economics, or even morality (see here). Now we have God to answer to if we don’t “tackle climate change”. This is according to an American evangelical leader, Reverend Richard Cizik, whom our own deluded Prime Minister has agreed to meet, in an amazing display of naivety. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

The Reverend Richard Cizik arrived in Australia yesterday on a seven-day tour to spread God’s word about saving the planet.

Mr Cizik said there was a strong biblical mandate for humans “to watch over and care for” earth’s bounty and creatures. ” Australia and the United States have been major blockers to action on climate change and our new governments have a special responsibility in creating a new kind of leadership,” he said.

Note the absence of criticism of China and India, of course… We knew that AGW alarmists would scrape the barrel for excuses to keep their slowly sinking agenda afloat, but enlisting the help of the bible shows real desperation. Kevin Rudd (and Malcolm Turnbull) should treat this nonsense with the contempt it deserves.

Read it here.

Last month, when the IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri was in Sydney for the Metropolis Conference, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of science by the moonbats at the University of NSW, and he gave a presentation which included a graph showing temperatures climbing sharply in the last decade. Michael Duffy, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, was understandably shocked by this:

As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]“.

Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.

So it’s disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri’s presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.

Later that night, on ABC TV’s Lateline program, Pachauri claimed that those who disagree with his own views on global warming are “flat-earthers” who deny “the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence”. But what evidence could be more important than the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged only a few hours earlier?

Quoting Richard Lindzen, he also correctly identifies the reasons for why alarmism is so popular in science.

Central to this is the importance of government funding to science. Much of that funding since World War II has occurred because scientists build up public fears (examples include fear of the USSR’s superiority in weapons or space travel, of health problems, of environmental degradation) and offer themselves as the solution to those fears.

And he concludes:

Rajenda Pachauri’s recent Sydney lecture suggests that in this relatively new field, inconvenient truths to the contrary are not welcome.

Personally, I find it incredible that anybody still believes a word the IPCC says. We always knew that it was a politically-motivated body whose sole aim was to find evidence to back up a conclusion already reached. Instead of acting like proper scientific investigators and saying, “well, the fact is that global temperatures are pretty steady or even declining, so let’s use this opportunity to find out why so that we can better understand the mechanics of the climate,” they lie and mislead in order to keep their preconceived ideas afloat.

The IPCC has abandoned all pretence of impartiality and has become just another in the long line of alarmist organisations desperate to keep the AGW bandwagon rolling in order to achieve political objectives. As Michael Duffy says, shocking.

UPDATE: New post with details of the presentation

Read the SMH article here.

Remember, Iran and the US have not had any diplomatic relations for nearly 30 years. What does this say about what we should expect from an Obama presidency?

Ahmadinejad Congratulates Obama – Sydney Morning Herald

With friends like Ahmadinejad, who needs enemies?

These protests seem to be gathering pace (as we knew they would – see here). Two “protesters” (Greenpeace activists, probably) have chained themselves to a conveyor belt carrying coal to Tarong power station north-west of Brisbane.

Protest spokeswoman Clare Towler said the pair, supported by 10 others and representing a coalition of concerned Brisbane residents, had stopped production at the power station in protest at the Rudd Government’s failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“Australia’s greenhouse pollution is rapidly increasing, and our addiction to coal-fired power is the main cause,” Ms Towler said.

“We are taking peaceful direct action because we refuse to stand by while our Government sacrifices the Great Barrier Reef and a safe future for our children.”

As has been stated on many, many occasions in this Blog, reducing Australia’s CO2 output to zero will make not one iota of difference to local or global climate, or to the Barrier Reef, or (cue emotional tug at heartstrings) whether our children have a safe future or not. But you can’t expect these protesters to understand that.

Read it here.

The Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation will broadcast anything sensational and scaremongering, and here’s yet another example:

A climate change expert says the New South Wales far south coast can expect to feel the full effects of rising sea levels as global warming takes hold.

Dr John Church, a scientist for the Centre for Climate Research, was the keynote speaker at a three-day coastal management conference at Wollongong this week.

Dr Church says sea level rises were markedly higher last century than in the previous 100 years and he expects that by the year 2100, the levels will be at the higher end of current climate change model.

Global warming? Sorry to labour the point, but are you referring to the global warming that has clearly taken hold in the last decade, and which everyone else has somehow missed? And as for sea level rises, they have been remarkably constant at about a millimetre or two a year since the end of the last Ice Age, so how on earth can you state with such authority that they will be at the higher end of climate change models?

Read it here.

“In Parramatta, we’re working hard to get the community motivated about the importance of sustainability and recognise that being energy efficient is a key factor in reducing our own carbon emissions and our impact on the earth’s climate system,” [Lord Mayor Tony Issa] said.

1500 tonnes in a year – sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Except when you realise that the same amount is generated by a medium sized power station in about an hour and a half…

Read it here.

In an article entitled When recression knocks, forget about saving the globe, Alan Wood exposes the gaping cracks in the Treasury’s modelling for the ETS, and criticises the governments “press on at all costs approach”:

Whatever the difficulties of forecasting the short-term behaviour of the Australian economy, they pale beside the task of forecasting the economic impacts of the Government’s climate-change policies and the future path and consequences of global warming.

Which raises a very important question: Should the Rudd Government be pushing ahead with the early introduction of an emissions trading scheme to limit carbon emissions in the middle of global and possibly local recession?

When asked about this on Wednesday, Swan not only reaffirmed the Government’s intention to introduce the scheme in 2010, as has Rudd. He added the extraordinary claim that “It’s all about strengthening our economy.” If the Treasurer is relying on his department’s modelling of the economic costs of cutting carbon emissions for this claim, then he is like the pig that built its house of straw. For a start, the modelling tells us nothing about the short-term costs of adjustment.

And its suggestion that the longer-term economic costs will be as low as 0.1 per cent of gross domestic product a year defies common sense and depends on impossibly optimistic assumptions about the progress of global agreement on carbon reductions and improbably optimistic ones on the emergence and costs of newtechnologies.

The most sensible approach is to defer introduction of any scheme until the recession has passed and we know the outcome of international negotiations on a post-Kyoto scheme. Action is pointless without commitments to carbon-reduction targets by China, India and the US.

Read it here.

Ian Plimer, professor of mining geology and Adelaide University, has criticised the government’s plans for an ETS during a speech at a Sydney Mining Club lunch, saying:

If you thought Y2K was a scam, you wait for this one.

And he correctly points out that scientific research generally follows government policy:

“Scientists play politics the same as everyone else,” he said in his speech, entitled Human induced climate change – a load of hot air.”

“I think we’ve got people playing games in politics.”

“If you want the research funding and if you want the money then … follow the money, follow the pocket of paradise, but it could actually send us broke.”

Read it here.

As always, a great read.