On Friday I posted a link to a typically scaremongering Herald article about record temperatures in the Arctic. For any of you who wish to see a well argued rebuttal of this nonsense, check out the following on Watts Up With That:

Ice Reality Check: Arctic Ice Now 31.3% Over Last Year, plus Scientists Counter Latest Arctic ‘Record’ Warmth Claims as ‘Pseudoscience’

Token Gesture Alert: Krudd and Co have been handing out grants of $8000 to householders to install solar panels on their roofs. And the scheme has swallowed the $150m budget for three years in less than half that time.

Solar power is inefficient and expensive to install, and the kind of systems available for private homes produce pitifully little power – on average about 1kW, which is less than half of what is required to boil a kettle – and only that for a few hours in the middle of the day, if it’s not cloudy. You can run the lights or the fridge, but not both. But nobody in government cares about the reality of this, because it makes us feel like we’re saving the planet.

Read it here.

Pity the poor residents of the Australian Capital Territory who, it looks likely, will have managed to put the Greens in the position of holding the balance of power in the state parliament after today’s election. They’re going to wake up tomorrow morning with an almighty election day hangover, as the thought of wielding such power goes to Bob Brown’s head:

“In the middle of the financial crisis it obviously shows that people are looking at the Greens and they like what they see,” he said.

Yeah, right. The Greens are clearly the party of choice when it comes to sound economic management… Far more likely, it’s just former Labor voters who don’t want another Labor government, but can’t bring themselves to vote Liberal.

“The Greens will see how the election finally pans out and be talking about issues like the commitment of the big parties to make Canberra a solar city,” he said.

“Solar City”? Sounds like something out of Flash Gordon. Enter Ming the Merciless stage left…

Read it here.

Compassion personified…

I can’t resist this, from the same ABC news item discussed in the previous post. An economist at AMP Capital, Dr Shane Oliver, has come up with this frankly offensive plan for the new economy:

• Economy goes into recession;
• Millions made unemployed;
• Governments spend trillions tinkering with harmless trace gas;
• All those unemployed can go and work in new climate-friendly industries.

I’m really not making this up. This guy genuinely believes that we should take advantage of all the poor workers made unemployed by the economic downturn and switch them into climate-friendly jobs, without demonstrating an ounce of compassion for what unemployment really means for millions around the globe:

“Introducing an emissions scheme at a time when those resources are still unemployed … makes sense because those resources can then be reabsorbed into the cleaner parts of the economy,” he said.

Can these guys sink any further in their desperate attempts to justify “tackling climate change”?

Read it here.

Arse-over-Apex Logic Alert: We’ve had a few posts over the last few days commenting on the new angle the alarmists are taking, namely that by “tackling climate change” it will somehow help the economy (in particular here, where I comment on what I believe was the first outing of this inverted logic, thanks to Mr A Gore – who else?).

Personally, I fail to see how pouring gazillions of dollars into a pointless “carbon pollution reduction scheme” (that will achieve, let us be clear about this, precisely nothing) can possibly help the economy, whether in a time of growth or recession. Notwithstanding this, Garnaut is now using this argument ad nauseam in order to maintain focus on climate issues when the majority of the population have got more pressing matters on their minds.

Speaking on ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra programme (reported on the ABC web site, and illustrated again with a hackneyed photo of a belching chimney stack) :

“Any large reform involving structural change, involving low emissions technologies and low emissions forms of transport and so on, requires investment,” he said.

“That is easier to manage as you recover from a downturn. It’s perhaps counter-intuitive but that’s the reality.“

Counter intuitive? You can say that again. Will someone please put an end to this madness.

Read it here.

Thanks to Gore Lied. James Delingpole, writing in the UK Spectator magazine, describes the increasingly wide gulf between the media and public opinion on the matter of climate change, and how governments (ours included) plough on regardless in an ever more desperate attempt to regulate every part of our lives.

Pick up a newspaper, pretty much any paper left or right — though there are honourable exceptions, notably the space the Sunday Telegraph gives to the heroic Christopher Booker — and the story peddled on climate change is virtually identical: look at all those drowning polar bears/melting ice-caps/ ‘unprecedented’ natural disasters. We’re all doomed. It’s all our fault. Something needs to be done NOW!

Rarely if ever are these stories challenged, because it’s not in the interests of the in-house specialist — the environment correspondent — to do so. Scare stories sell newspapers (oh, to be an economics editor now!) and the last thing any journalist wants to do in these dark, difficult times is talk himself out of a job.

But he ends on a positive note:

But the tide of history is against this Green Terror and so, increasingly, are the people. We’ve had enough of its ghastly wind turbines, its fascistic recycling inspectors and its swingeing eco-taxes. We want lightbulbs you can see by, not horrid flickery yellow ones; we want weekly rubbish collections; we want countryside unblighted by vast Teletubby windmills. And we want Al Gore’s head on a plate.

Read it here.

One rule for the governing elite, and one for the poor general public, that’s the situation under Rudd’s government. Whilst most of us are being told to tighten our belts and get used to paying more for our electricity and gas under Rudd & Wong’s barking ETS, Ross Garnaut has been spending taxpayers’ money like water.

Anyone with half a brain would have thought that Australian paper would be perfectly adequate for printing copies of Garnaut’s tedious tome. But no, Aussie paper just ain’t good enough, so Penny Wong’s department specially imported $18,000 worth of Italian paper, adding even more to the Garnaut Report’s already huge carbon footprint:

When asked how many “carbon miles” were used to bring the paper into Australia, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said it had not been calculated or offset.

Tasmanian Liberal Party Senator Eric Abetz asked some awkward questions about how much money the Environment department was throwing at Garnaut. The answers are interesting:

• Italian paper: $18k
• Travel and accommodation expenses: $14k
• Staffing resources: $200k
• Printing costs for Garnaut report: $70k
• Mobile phone (35% of total): $1.5k

Furthermore:

A Question on Notice by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Nick Minchin of the Liberal Party, revealed that about 64 staff have been employed to disseminate the Government’s spin.

The Government is finding it needs that many spin doctors to sell the lie of “global warming”…

Read it here.

Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd seem to have a lot in common, such as:

• they are both good ol’ fashioned socialists, who believe in big government, taxing high and spending big,
• they will both be out on their ears at their respective next elections, and
• they have both bought one-way tickets on the Global Warming Express bound for Economic Oblivion City in order to “tackle climate change”.

Astonishingly, given the present global financial situation, Gordon Brown (still hanging on as PM by the skin of his teeth) and his likely successor, Ed Milliband, have actually increased their emissions reduction target from 60% to a mind-boggling 80% by 2050.

“In tough economic times, some people will ask whether we should retreat from our climate change objectives,” he said.

“In our view, it would be quite wrong to row back.

“And those who say we should misunderstand the relationship between the economic and the environmental tasks we face.”

Read it here.

The Moonbat Herald, clueless on climate as previously reported, will print anything, as long as it’s scaremongering, alarmist and sells a few more of its tawdry papers. Coming just a day or so after Watts Up With That reported that arctic sea ice was nearly 29% greater in extent than this time last year, some twit at the SMH howls:

Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record levels, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts, and reindeer herds appear to be declining, researchers have claimed.

Hey, let’s threaten the reindeer, get the kids onside (“no reindeer, no Santa” etc etc) and we can indoctrinate another huge swathe of the population – great! It states that the Arctic has been long expected to be among the first areas to show impacts from “global warming” – but warming stopped in 2001, so…

Read it here.

Kevin Rudd plans to carry on with his crazy ETS irrespective of anything that may be going on elsewhere. Not that I can think of anything right now that would get in its way… no, wait, hang on, something about a global financial crisis or something?

“What I would say to leaders around the world and the communtiy here in Australia is that the problem of climate change and global warming doesn’t disappear because of the global financial crisis,” he told Sky News.

The ABC illustrates the story with a picture of a chimney belching smoke, about which Tom Nelson rightly asks:

But is that blackish stuff actually carbon dioxide?

Read it here.