Both Italy and Poland, host nation for the climate change conference taking place in Poznan in December, are realising the economic and political costs of entering into emissions reductions schemes which, as has been said many times before, will achieve nothing. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was adamant:

“I have announced my intention to exercise my veto,” the Italian leader Wednesday told a press conference on the sidelines of the summit.

“Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed,” he said.

And Polish leaders were equally determined:

The foreign minister of Poland, heavily dependent on coal-fired power, said his country would resist attempts to railroad the targets through.

“This is a very intricate game and Poland is ready to introduce a veto if there will be attempts to force us to achieve an agreement on the climate package,” Radoslaw Sikorski told reporters.

Read it here.

Another example of news being ignored when it’s convenient to do so:

Remember all those dire warnings in the media of an ice-free North Pole this (northern) summer? Remember the British eco-explorer, Lewis Gordon Pugh, announcing he’d paddle to the Pole to draw attention to the frightening lack of ice?

But….

Has anyone in the main-stream media since told you that Pugh had to call off his plan, still 600 miles from the North Pole, when his kayak ran into too much ice?

Anyone in the media since told you there was in fact 9 per cent more ice at the Arctic this summer than there was last?

And is anyone in the media telling you that the refreeze at the Arctic this autumn is remarkably fast and widespread?

No-one’s telling us any of this, because it doesn’t fit in with the media’s alarmist agenda. Well done for keeping your readers informed of the other side of the story.

Read it here.

Professor Bob Carter will be speaking at Blacktown Workers Club on Friday 17 October 2008, at 1pm and 7pm – for free! This is a great opportunity to hear a well-known climate sceptic outline his arguments, and demolish some of the alarmists’ arguments.

Source.

Although we don’t call it “global warming” now, we call it “climate change”, which covers every possible eventuality. A journalist at the Northern Argus couldn’t resist the temptation to blame “climate change” for increased frosts in the Clare Valley, which are causing problems for winemakers.

And if anyone has had their doubts about climate change, [grapegrower] Martin Smith said the effects had been noticeable in the Polish Hill River region.

“We’d never seen frosts in more than 100 years here, and now we have had two years of frost, in 2005 and 2007, with dry years in between.”

That’s the wonderful thing about climate change – it’s so versatile! Read it here.

Publishers of the book version of Garnaut’s report, 680 pages of hot air, have had to purchase carbon credits in order to offset the damage its publication has caused to the environment. It would have been so much easier not to bother in the first place.

Read it here.

And why should they? They have more important things to worry about, like running their business in a time of economic crisis…

Read it here.

Hardly surprising, this is the ABC (Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation) after all. But concerning none the less, given the fact that this is a national broadcaster which informs a large proportion of the Australian population. Robyn Williams, presenter of a number of popular science programmes, was speaking to engineers at Gladstone’s Rydges Hotel, reported the “Gladstone Observer”:

He said his role as a journalist was to report the science that supported the theory behind global warming.

Strange, no word about reporting science that doesn’t…

Since that time [40 years ago] the science had been growing to a stage now where the debate is over.

He said the very best of science now claims climate change as fact.

I think we all know climate change is fact – it has been fact since the beginning of time – it’s the link to human activity we’re all arguing about. Anyway, for someone claiming to be a science journalist, he clearly has no understanding of what scientific investigation is about. Maybe he should go into politics. Read it here.

The brilliant Bjørn Lomborg delivers a timely analysis of the AGW alarmists’ trick of spreading bad news at the expense of good news.

This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.

Read it all.

Vested Interest Alert: Environment ministers from more than 30 countries are at a carbon-fuelled jolly in Warsaw, where they are all struggling to remember the reason for their existence in the face of the current (more urgent) financial crisis. Remember, this is only a pre-conference meeting, as the main gab-fest in Poznan in December will have delegates from no less than 190 countries, and will have a carbon footprint the size of Siberia.

“There was a very strong consensus that the current financial turmoil should not be an excuse to slow down action on climate change,” UN climate chief Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press after the talks Tuesday.

And they are starting to trot out regularly the curious argument that tackling climate change will actually help the economy – although how throwing trillions of dollars down the gurgler to tinker with a harmless trace gas can do anything other than cripple economies left, right and centre is beyond me.

“Many ministers said that addressing climate change can deliver important economic benefits that are important in the light of the current financial situation as well,” de Boer said.

Our own “Climate Penny” was there of course:

Senator Wong told ABC Radio: “The current financial crisis does not lessen the need for the nations of the world to deal with climate change.”

I don’t think you need to worry about your job at Rudd & Co… The reality is that many countries in the EU have serious concerns about the sums of money that will be required to comply with pointless emissions reduction schemes, although whether they will have the bottle to stand firm and oppose them is another matter.

Read it here.

Andrew Bolt is rightly fuming that the new GG, Ms Quentin Bryce, will launch the book version of the Garnaut report. She doesn’t appear to have been told that as the representative in Australia of the Queen, she is supposed to put herself above politics, and represent all of us, not just those who vote Labor. He continues:

Shameless. She’s actually helping to spruik a highly political document, written by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s hand-picked advisor on climate change as part of a report to government.

What next? Will she launch Labor’s next election campaign, too?

Very probably. Read it here.