In a move likely to cause a big stir in Coalition circles, the National Party has dumped its support for an ETS until the rest of the world implements one. The Nationals are now the only party to have the courage to stand up against Rudd & Co’s ridiculous “carbon pollution reduction scheme”, given that the Liberals only plan to delay its introduction by a couple of years. Senator Ron Boswell said:

“We should not go down this track that is going to hit rural Australia and primary industry the hardest when it’s picked up in 2014. We should draw the line in the sand for this party and say that we will only go this far.”

Well said. Let’s start the timer, and see how long it takes for Rudd, Wong or one of their cronies to squeal “deniers” or “sceptics”. My bet is less than 24 hours.

Read it here.

Thanks to Tom Nelson. The Head of the IPCC has clearly been inhaling too much CO2 recently, when he comments:

“In the last year and a half, there has been a massive explosion of awareness; however, the media has not reported enough about the emergency and depth of action,” said Pachauri, who has led the United Nations panel since 2002.

What planet does Pachauri live on? Doesn’t he ever read the papers or listen to the radio or watch TV? Is he so insulated from the real world in his IPCC bubble that he hasn’t seen the thousands upon thousands of scare stories and alarmism every week in the media?

Pachauri suggested that major news agencies now rely too much on high-level science reports or large climate-related events for their stories, rather than examples of climate change’s ongoing effects. “We need to go beyond the cyclical coverage of climate change and emphasize the day-to-day relevance,” he said.

Heaven forbid that news agencies actually read the science reports (media coverage shows that they do nothing of the sort anyway – they just take the sound bite that will sell most papers/attract most listeners or viewers, irrespective of its scientific merit). I’m afraid this guy is well on the way to becoming categorised as an environmental whacko.

Read it here.

Thanks to Climate Change Skeptic.

There has been a lot of publicity about a recent alarmist WWF report:

WWF’s report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is accelerating far beyond the IPCC’s forecasts.

As an example it says the first tipping point may have already been reached in the Arctic where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years – something that hasn’t occurred for 1m years. This could result in rapid and abrupt climate change rather than the gradual changes forecast by the IPCC.

Climate Change Skeptic takes a cool look at these scaremongering claims, and finds that they are pure fiction:

Whatever the case, there are a lot of good reasons to believe we are not seeing an “acceleration” in global warming. And a lot of very, very good reasons to believe we are not reaching a “tipping point.” Tipping point implies that we have entered a regime where the climate is dominated by runaway positive feedback.

Read it here.

From Climate Change Fraud.

This will give the environmentalists something to cogitate on over their breakfasts. It has been disclosed that one of the biggest sources of the new evil trace gas, Nitrogen Trifluoride, is the production of that icon of “clean enegy”, the solar panel. So the reduction of CO2 emissions by using renewable energy sources such as solar will actually increase the concentration of a gas that is 17,000 times more potent in its greenhouse effect. Oh, the irony!

Read it here.

This time it is Nitrogen Trifluoride, which is apparently 17,000 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2 – which makes CO2 look a bit, well, innocuous, maybe? Fortunately, there isn’t much of it in the atmosphere at the moment, 5,400 tons.

“Isn’t much” turns out to be the understatement of the year, because given the mass of the atmosphere is 5×10¹⁵ tons, 5400 tons works out to be 0.0000000001% of the total, and at the current growth rate it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to reach even one hundredth of one percent, by which time technology will have found ways to reduce its use. However, scientists are already gearing up to make NF3 the next evil trace gas:

Michael Prather, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California at Irvine, noted nitrogen trifluoride is being used more commonly and predicted that more would be found in the atmosphere.

“It is now shown to be an important greenhouse gas,” Mr Prather… said in a statement. “Now we need to get hard numbers on how much is flowing through the system, from production to disposal.”

Read it here.

Andrew Bolt comments on Tony Jones’ world-renowned impartiality in last night’s Lateline on ABC, which interviewed three climate scientists and a UN official.

Showing his famed concern for balance, host Tony Jones presents a range of views from this:

PROF. ANN HENDERSON-SELLERS, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY: A lot of people like myself, and I believe many, many scientists now, who are frantically, hysterically worried.

To this:

PROF. DAVID KAROLY, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: The only way that I could see the climate system in 50 years time or 100 years time being cooler than at present is if the earth got hit by an asteroid and basically human civilisation was destroyed.

I think that covers the subject.

UPDATE

I’m unfair to Jones. He did cover the views of the thousands of sceptical scientists:

TONY JONES: Do you think they are flat-earthers, or akin to flat-earthers, people who believe the earth is flat?

RAJENDRA PACHUARI: …We still have a flat earth society in existence in the world somewhere or the other. So they clearly are looking at the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, and denying it. So in that sense they are flat-earthers.

What could be fairer?

Read it here.

The Head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, spoke at the World Metropolis Conference in Sydney, where his message was entirely as to be expected, namely “it’s not too late to save the planet, but emissions reductions must be even greater than previously thought”. He sprinkled his address with plenty of scaremongering and alarmism:

If you look at parts of Africa, by 2020 there will be 75 million to 250 million people living under water stress on account of climate change,” he said yesterday. “Are we going to ignore the welfare and, I would say, even the peace and stability of societies that are so vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and say ‘No, we can’t do it’?”
…
“There are a section of scientists and some analysts that are actually now saying that 450 [ppm] is a bit too high and what we should be targeting is 350.”
…
Dr Pachauri warned the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was already contributing to sea-level rise. If the world’s big ice sheets kept melting, “you are talking about well over a metre of sea-level rise and that, to my mind, is going to be disastrous for hundreds of millions of people.“

He, too, is guilty of sickening Schadenfreude at the current economic crisis, setting up the hackneyed straw man of “unregulated capitalism”, and then knocking it down, exposing the true agenda of the IPCC as a deeply political, anti-capitalist, anti-development front for the UN’s environmental extremists:

“I think unbridled capitalism without any regulation, without some control, is something people are not going to accept now.”

Where has there ever been capitalism without regulation? A truly idiotic comment which completely ignores the fact that capitalism as an economic model has raised living standards and wealth for billions of people throughough the globe, and to a far greater degree than any other such model (think Communism, for example, flourishing the world over, no, hang on…).

Read it here.

As usual, a great read!

Thanks to Tom Nelson.

Lucy Greg from Fruit Growers Tasmania says apple and cherry crops in the Derwent and Huon Valleys appear hardest hit.

The owner of a Coal River Valley vineyard says they’ve lost the entire crop in the Derwent Valley.

Ms Gregg has told the ABC’s Country Hour that while the severe frost has affected apple and cherries, frost protection measures have worked.
…
Ross had what’s believed to be an October record with the temperature dropping to minus 5.6.

Read it here.

The details of the questions asked in the Climate Institute poll are now online. Here they are in full:

Given the turmoil in the financial markets, how much do you agree with the following statements?

A. Government should delay action on climate change
B. It’s even more important to take action on climate change and create new green jobs and industries

Comment: adding the words in bold clearly prejudices respondents to answer B, because creating new green jobs and industries is obviously something that any reasonable person would consider a beneficial thing. However, it has nothing to do with the question.

Which of the following political parties do you think is better at handling climate change?

• ALP
• Coalition
• Both the same
• Don’t know

Comment: This seems reasonable, and probably elicits a fairly representative response.

How concerned are you about the following potential effects from climate change?

• Rising sea levels & coastal erosion
• Loss of the great barrier reef
• Less water for cities
• Damage to agriculture
• More frequent and intense bushfires
• More frequent and intense drought

Comment: Unsurprisingly, at least 78% of respondents said, yes, they were concerned about those things. But let’s face it, what reasonable person wouldn’t be concerned about things like the loss of the barrier reef? But the key point is that the question presupposes that climate change will cause those things, which is by no means the case. The question simply elicits an emotional response, which has nothing to do with people’s beliefs regarding climate change.

Read it here (PDF)