Stephen Matchett in The Wry Side discusses the demise of global warming hysteria now that the public actually have something serious to worry about – the economy.

Then the boom went bust and all of a sudden global warming was off the agenda. People became more interested in the state of their superannuation than greenhouse gases. And as for the damage done by economic growth, instead of worrying that there was too much of it the big issue became whether there would not be enough.

Instead of people promising pollsters that they would be willing to make using electricity a Christmas treat to save the planet, it’s unemployment, not the environment, that is now top of the polling pops.

This is all terribly unfair to people who invested decades of intellectual capital in warning us about global warming, but that’s the caprice of the market for you.

Read it all here.

Pots and kettles spring to mind here, as, without any hint of irony, Wayne Swan takes a swipe at Warwick McKibbin of the RBA, who yesterday criticised the Treasury’s ETS modelling (see here):

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan has dismissed the advice of a leading climate change economist to delay its proposed emissions trading scheme until international negotiations are completed.
…
“He must have a crystal ball if he knows the outcome of the international negotiations,” Mr Swan said.

Is that the same crystal ball the Treasury used to come up with its predictions last week? If so, I think it’s got a crack in it…

Read it here.

… and told “don’t do it again.” Equality before the law, except where climate change is concerned. If you claim that your actions are justified by the need to save the planet, it appears that the judiciary will look the other way. In this case, even though they were ordered to pay over $23,000 in restitution and fined a pretty paltry $500, no convictions were recorded. Why not? If they had caused the same damage to a public library for example, they wouldn’t have been given such lenient treatment. I suppose coal-fired power stations are fair game?

Magistrate Haydn Stjernqvist said the activists had put a heavy emphasis on the need to act on climate change in their peaceful protest.

Why on earth did the magistrate feel the need to say this? Did he allow their cause to affect his judgment? It is only a matter of time until this becomes the norm, given Al Gore’s recent call to arms to the younger generation to engage in civil disobedience (see here) and the UK court’s insane decision to acquit the Kingsnorth Six (see here).

The latest advert for the Toyota Prius claims that by driving one for 10 years or 100,000km, you can save 7.5 tonnes of CO2 as compared to a regular petrol-engined car.

Let’s put that into perspective. If you drove a Prius for, say, 70,000 years, you would save the same amount of CO2 that a large coal-fired power station generates in a day.

Moral of the story: don’t fool yourself into thinking that driving a butt-ugly hybrid car is anything but a feel-good gesture.

There seems to be no end to the mushrooming growth of businesses making a quick buck from climate change hysteria. As reported here, revenues from such businesses worldwide is now $300 billion. An example of one in the news today is the “Carbon Reduction Institute”. Even its name has an error in it – carbon is not carbon dioxide, but hey, who cares about the details? It also has the amusing URL “noco2.com.au” – and although it technically refers to making businesses carbon neutral, it is ambiguous enough for many to think it refers to CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore, for the first time (drum roll please), a URL wins today’s “ACM Idiotic Comment of the Day” gong!

[CRI Managing Director] Mr [Rob] Cawthorne explained how the Federal Government’s proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme would affect their businesses.

He said everyone was involved “no matter what the personal standing on climate change was”.

“If we don’t curb climate change it will make the economic crisis now seem like a pittance,” he said.

And by the way, our business can relieve yours of substantial sums of money that could be far better spent on something else (anything else for that matter) for providing pointless “climate change consultancy services”, heavily relying on the principle that there’s one born every minute.

Read it here.

Clearly the RBA doesn’t think much of the Treasury’s economic models either, which will probably turn out to be about as reliable as the IPCC’s climate models (which spectacularly failed to predict nearly a decade of global cooling).

Warwick McKibbin, who sits on the RBA board and is a climate change economist, said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should not act before Australia knows what commitments other countries will make to reducing carbon output.
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“There is no way that at Copenhagen there can be a firm commitment on abatement because the US administration, whoever it is, won’t have the people in place to negotiate a rules-based system,” Professor McKibbin told the West Australian newspaper.

“What they will negotiate in Copenhagen is a set of principles – if you’re lucky – and hopefully they’ll separate mitigation or cutting emissions from investment in new technologies and forestry and land use actions.”

Read it here.

For anyone who is still deluded into thinking that there will be a utopian global deal on emissions in Copenhagen next year, and that the rest of the world will “follow Australia’s lead” in crippling their economies with pointless emissions trading schemes, the following from the Canada Free Press (thanks to Climate Change Fraud) should put you straight:

China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol— which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom note to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP—about $300 billion per year—to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.
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China, India, Brazil, and Mexico had already demanded—in July— that the developed countries cut their own emissions by 80–95 percent by 2050. Very unlikely. The EU has loudly boasted of trying to set an 80-percent cut in its emissions, but that now looks impossible. Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are part of a “blocking force” saying says they can’t afford to give up coal and oil during a financial crisis.

Even Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, who helped to develop the Kyoto protocol, has abandoned attempts to reduce emissions and is building more brown coal power stations. A global deal is so unlikely to happen that it makes Rudd, Wong & Co’s “plough on at all costs and the world will follow” position on the introduction of an ETS even more untenable than it was …

Read it here.

Terry McCrann, in The Australian, comments that two recent examples of economic modelling by the Treasury, on the financial meltdown and the impact of an ETS respectively, demonstrate how that department’s tenuous grip on reality has finally evaporated.

On Sunday, October 12, Treasury signed off on Kevin Rudd’s unlimited bank deposit guarantee.

On Thursday, the Treasury modelling on his emissions trading scheme was released. These events bookend the shredding of Treasury’s credibility over 18 days in October.

The first was inexcusable, creating a mess for markets and investors. The second was disgraceful, a statistical fraud on the Australian people. Apart from the sheer waste of time and resources — and balloons of carbon dioxide released.

And, rightly, he is particularly scathing about the ETS modelling:

It purported to show that we could have our low carbon economic cake and still get to eat more and more of it. That sharply reducing emissions would hardly dent our growth path out to 2050.

That broadly, instead of the economy growing at 1.4 per cent per person per year in real terms, it would grow between 1.2 and 1.3 per cent instead.

If an adult of reasonable intelligence and basic economic understanding can’t see immediately that this is sheer, utter rubbish, we really do have a problem at the centre of economic advice in this country.

And he concludes:

Treasury was one of the last bastions of reason. It has now signed on as official “statistician” in Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong’s First Church of Climate Apocalypse.

Read it here.

Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation gave the first Boyer Lecture at the Opera House yesterday. He made some comments about climate change, which the mainstream media picked up and spun in such a way as to indicate that he was a closet greenie, but that isn’t the whole story. This is the text:

Climate change is another area where Australia needs to lead. I’m not sold on the more apocalyptic visions of climate change.

Unlike too many policiticans…

But I believe the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt. I believe there will be great rewards for those Australians who discover new ways of reducing emissions or cleaning the environment. [He then briefly discusses his own companies’ emissions reduction programs.] Our emphasis should be on practical solutions. It is to take the lead in developing real alternatives to solve the problem by offering clean, cheap energy to meet the growing demand.

I don’t agree that the “benefit of the doubt” argument, but as much as the next person, I am in favour of reducing pollution and cleaning the environment – who wouldn’t be? Practical solutions means adaptation. But his next comments are the most pertinent (completely overlooked by the Herald and The Age, of course):

We cannot address climate change merely with emotion. The ultimate solution is not to punish the economy by imposing standards that the rest of the world will never meet.

This, unfortunately, is precisely what Rudd, Wong & Co intend to do. And finally:

It is to take the lead in developing real alternatives to solve the problem by offering clean, cheap energy to meet the growing demand.

Read it here.

Apologies for yet another Age story, but they just don’t give up!

Atmospheric concentrations of methane, “a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide”, have risen for the first time in eight years, prompting concern about the pace of climate change.
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CSIRO senior climate scientist Paul Fraser said the data was in line with predictions that rapid melting of Arctic ice would create natural wetlands, one of the most common methane emitters. “This is not good news for global warming,” he said.

That would be the “global warming” that has run amok since 2001? And, as any fule kno, the Arctic ice recovery is over 30% faster than last year…

Tom Nelson sums up the response we should all adopt:

Would it be prudent to run for the hills every time methane rises by 10 parts per billion (with a “b)?

Read it here.