The ACSC has its official launch today, and has a PDF press release on its website here.

Members of the ACSC, like many scientists in Australia and overseas, encourage people to discuss, question and debate key climate change issues and, in particular ask: where is the evidence for dangerous human- caused global warming?

“We do not believe that past and current climates are sufficiently well understood, nor even the best computer models adequate, to enable accurate predictions of future climate. There is a need to exchange scientific ideas and to encourage proper political and social debate on this intriguing subject,” said Dr John Nicol, Chairman of the ACSC.

Let’s wish them the best of luck with their mission.

You’d expect little else, of course. Bob Brown has told a rally in Canberra the Government cannot sideline its response to climate change because of the financial crisis.

“I would say to Kevin Rudd, listen to the people of Australia,” he said.

“I think you’ll find more ecological wisdom in our average primary school than you’ll find round your Cabinet table.”

If by “ecological wisdom” you mean indoctrination by repeated showings of AIT and brainwashing about “carbon pollution”, then sadly, you are probably right.

Read it here.

As noted in previous posts, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has suggested, given the current financial crisis, that introduction of an ETS should be delayed. It was therefore only a matter of time before someone at Rudd & Co got bored of trying to think up cogent arguments against this suggestion, and launched the personal attacks. First in the ring is Wayne Swan (who else?), drearily predictable as always in labelling Turnbull a “sceptic”. Speaking on ABC TV:

Mr Swan accused Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull of turning into a climate change sceptic.

“He used to behave like he believed in doing something about climate change,” he said.

“We are serious about it. We have a measured approach to dealing with it. But we are committed to dealing with it for the long-term economic and environmental health of the country.”

Swan is as clueless as Rudd and Wong on climate change, and clearly doesn’t understand that cutting our emissions to zero would make not an iota of difference to the environmental health of this country, while at the same time sending our economy back to the Dark Ages.

Read it here.

The great thing about being a politician is that you can tell people how they should run their lives in this post-climate change world, safe in the knowledge that it will have no effect whatsoever on your own life. John Brumby has already revealed himself as pretty clueless when it comes to matters climate, and he doesn’t exactly come out of this covered in glory. Glaring Hypocrisy Alert, as the Victorian Premier spends big and leaves a carbon footprint the size of the MCG during a trip to the US:

PREMIER John Brumby and his entourage kept a limousine waiting while they dined on a “high-level business dinner” 600m from their hotel on a recent overseas trip.

Mr Brumby and his team spent more than $17,600 on chauffeur-driven sedans, vans and sports utility vehicles on their nine-day US tour that cost taxpayers $78,905.

The extravagant spending was part of a whirlwind Brumby Government US expedition that cost taxpayers almost $9000 a day.

Wow – seventeen and a half big ones on SUVs – the enemy of the environment – I hope there isn’t anything to do with climate change in this story, or it could be really embarrassing…

[A spokesman] said Mr Brumby held talks on climate change and biotechnology with Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger…

Ouch. No comment required. Read it here.

The Australian has a piece by James Halliday, producer of the Australian Wine Companion, in which he talks a great deal of sense about the effect of the drought on the Murray-Darling basin and its causes.

Again and again we hear — from Kevin Rudd, Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong and Murray-Darling Basin Commission chief executive Wendy Craik — that this is due to climate change. As a headline grab and as an opportunity to castigate those who dare to suggest the Murray-Darling’s woes are due to drought and a century of profligate water extraction, it reinforces widespread popular belief.

And he correctly identifies the central flaw of the whole “carbon pollution reduction scheme”:

But let us suppose for a moment that rising CO2 emissions are the direct cause of the Murray-Darling’s plight. Australia could close down all mining and manufacturing industry overnight, throw away the keys to all the cars in the country, work only while sunlight and solar power were available and plunge itself into Third World poverty, all without making a blind bit of difference to global warming and the Murray-Darling.

He also suggests, again correctly, that adaptation is the key. I think I’ll open a nice bottle of Barossa Shiraz on that note…!

Read it here.

The SMH devotes acres of copy today (with a multimedia photo gallery) to the plight of people in Bhola, Bangladesh, whose island home is disappearing beneath them, blaming it all on sea level rises caused by “global warming”.

The earth is disappearing from under the feet of millions of impoverished Bangladeshis.

Nasir Ahmed is terrified of the full moon. In the dead of night three weeks ago it induced an unprecedented tidal surge that inundated his coastal village on the island of Bhola, in southern Bangladesh, leaving him, his wife Nasima, and their six children without shelter.

Skating over the fact that a tidal effect has nothing to do with climate change, this is all disingenuous, as it ignores the numerous other factors that are at work, not least the fact that sea levels have been rising steadily for many thousands of years (since the last Ice Age), but curiously less in the second half of the 20th century than the first, when CO2 emissions were much greater. However, this is the Herald we’re talking about…

Again, skating over the fact that “global warming” stopped in 2001, it drops in the usual chestnut about increased storm activity, which is widely regarded as a red herring:

If that wasn’t enough, Bhola is cyclone-prone and likely to experience more frequent and extreme storms as sea temperatures rise because of global warming.

…

The global warming threat was underscored last year when Bangladesh was hammered by a series of devastating weather events. Two unusually severe floods were followed immediately by cyclone Sidr, a category five storm that killed more than 3300 people and left about two million homeless.

The remainder of the article quotes the IPCC and Greenpeace, so we can all see where we’re headed here. The reality is that Bangladesh, and particular the Ganges Delta where Bhola is located, is an area where substantial erosion (and corresponding deposition) have always taken place, and some research indicates that Bangladesh’s total land area is in fact increasing.

Sea levels are rising, and have done so for centuries, and to blame all of this on whatever tiny anthropogenic effect there may be on top of this overall rise, is just pure alarmism.

Read it here.

The article yesterday about the Archbishop of Melbourne weighing in on climate change has been followed up by an article in the UK Church Times (thanks to Skeptics Global Warming):

“There are ways to reduce emissions, and Churches can contribute to solutions by proposing changes in lifestyle and behaviour patterns. We must look to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions by around 95 per cent.”

In its final communiqué, the assembly said that acting against climate change was “a sign that Christ the Word of God comes into the world to give life and not death, and our appointed task is to preach this good news to all creation. The roots of human destruction of the environment are to be found not just in actions, but in our most deep-seated attitudes.”

I suppose it’s only a small step from Archbishop Gore of the Church of Global Warming preaching the word of AIT, to the Church of England preaching that it is part of God’s work that we should fight “climate change”. Read it here.

Watts Up With That? has an article about a new Australian website, “Kids against Anthropogenic Global Warming“, started by a 14 year old who has clearly had enough of the indoctrination that is so common in schools today (thanks in part to the widespread showing, uncritically, of AIT). Well done for having the courage of your convictions!

Come on in, the water’s lovely…

A photo gallery to tug at the heart strings –

• polar bears – drowning due to climate change
• frogs – dying all over the world “due to climate change”
• ice shelves cracking – “due to the effects of global warming” [note change of terminology there…]
• flooding islands – rising sea levels “due to climate change”
• dried up lakes – soaring demand “and climate change”
• penguins in Brazil – due to “climate change”

And to finish off, a photo of a belching chimney with the caption:

Big part of the problem … smoke billows from the brown coal Hazelwood Power Station in Latrobe Valley, 150km east of Melbourne.

And not a single shred of evidence to show that any of these photos are linked directly or otherwise to “climate change”. But hey, who cares about the truth? Just as long as we can scare enough people into thinking that “climate change” is something we can control by tinkering with a harmless trace gas, then that’s OK. Alarmist journalism at its worst. Rant over.

See it here, if you can stand it.

The Federal Government must take immediate steps to salvage Australia’s economy, including dropping the 2010 starting date for the carbon emissions trading scheme, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says.

“We are proposing three actions the government can take immediately which will strengthen the Australian economy in the face of this economic crisis and add confidence to Australian householders and Australian business.”

One of those steps would be to announce a delay to the start of an emissions trading scheme in Australia.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised the scheme would be introduced by 2010, but Mr Turnbull is urging Mr Rudd to admit this was “nothing more than an election year flourish”.

“An emissions trading scheme in 2010 would mean the design of the scheme would have to be finalised before we know what the rest of the world is going to do at Copenhagen – which is the big climate change conference in December next year – and indeed before we know what the new US president will do,” Mr Turnbull said.

“Industry has come back to the PM and said 2010 is too soon, it’s too rushed. We have to be part of a global solution.”

I suppose we can’t hope for everything at once, and the Opposition still broadly agrees with the Government that man-made CO2 emissions are causing climate change and we need an ETS, but as a first step, a delay for further evaluation sounds eminently sensible to me. Read it here.