Looks like Garnaut is throwing his weight around in a planning dispute relating to his private home in Melbourne.

Objectors told The Australian they believed Professor Garnaut had used his status to try to influence the local council’s decision to build the second house and renovate the heritage-listed house already on the block.

…

Yarra City Council had originally approved Professor Garnaut’s development, despite its failure to meet all relevant residential code requirements.

One of the objectors, Joe Esposito, who owns the property next door, said yesterday the original application to Yarra City Council by Professor Garnaut “was tantamount to subdivision by stealth”.

For someone who has not stopped gassing about his report for the last few weeks, on this issue Professor Garnaut was strangely “unavailable for comment”.

Read it here.

It seems the alarmists are now resorting to scare tactics about our diet. After all the “positive” publicity surrounding Ross Garnaut’s suggestion that we all eat kangaroo (see previous posts), CSIRO have weighed in with their own report which goes one step further, threatening the Australian public with the demise of another local favourite – seafood.

The report says projected ocean warming of 2-3 degrees by 2070 could render salmon farming unviable, leaving open the possibility of salmon farmers having to shift their operations offshore to deeper, cooler waters.

And the retreat of mangrove forests and seagrass beds could leave commercially farmed banana prawns, mud crabs and barramundi without their habitats, the study found.

Penny Wong, always ready for a cheap soundbite, chimes in:

“The report finds climate change is likely to affect not only the fishing industry but also the regional and coastal communities the industry supports,” Senator Wong said.

“It finds climate change impacts will vary by region and that many impacts are expected to be negative, with some data suggesting that effects may have already occurred.”

But at the very end of the article, after most people would have given up reading, it is admitted by the report’s author that:

“It was not certain all of the changes documented in the report were attributable to climate change.”

Oh well, I suppose if it had been at the start it would have ruined a good story…

Read it here.

Professor Penny Sackett has recently been appointed the Australian Government’s Chief Scientist. Here’s a great opportunity for someone with a genuine scientific approach and significant influence in Government to cut through the usual AGW hysteria and take a dispassionate look at the science, not just the propaganda.

Professor Sackett, previously head of astrophysics and astronomy at the Australian National University in Canberra, will take over the job as the nation’s chief scientist next month.

She said examining what impact Professor Ross Garnaut’s proposed cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would have on climate change would be the first thing she would review.

…

“I believe that the people of Australia, if they have the choices that confront them clearly articulated in an open atmosphere of dialogue and if that is underpinned with scientific evidence, then I believe that Australians will make the choice that is the best for them and for their children.” [my emphasis]

Here’s hoping…

Read it here and here.

If you need any more evidence that CO2 is not driving temperature…

Climate Realist: Global CO2 Emissions Rise to Record Levels, but Global Cooling Since 2002

In a great article in The Age today, David Purchase makes two fundamental points which are right on the money: (1) that there is no rational debate on GW – it is now a religion, and any criticism of the dogma is heresy; and (2) that all good science is based on scepticism.

Dare to challenge the “inconvenient truth”, that global warming, leading to climate change, is man-made, and heaven help you. In ages gone by, it seems you either died of the black plague, were drowned as a witch or burned as a heretic. Life choices were thus somewhat limited.

He quotes Ian Plimer, professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, who recently said:

Science is married to evidence, scepticism and dissent. Noise, political pressure or numbers of converts does not validate a scientific concept.

When the president of the Royal Society says the science on human-induced global warming is settled, one is reminded of a previous president who said it was impossible for heavier-than-air machines to fly!

This is a key point – good science is, and always has been, based on scepticism and challenge. If the AGW case is strong enough, it will survive those challenges on its merits, if not, it will fail.

It is time we returned open, reasoned debate, genuine inquiry and a genuine sharing of ideas to this discussion.

Religion or not, I say “Amen” to that!

Read it here.

The lemon is the one on the left…

I know this is old news but I just can’t resist it. A torch, powered by solar, wind, “hand-crank” (thought that was something else…), and lemons is making its way across Australia in support of a halving of Australia’s greenhouse emissions by 2020. I’m not making this up, honest.

“The torch is a challenge to our representatives at all levels to halve Australia’s greenhouse emissions in a decade.”

Yep, nothing like setting realistic targets – and that is nothing like a realistic target.

Read it here.

Tim Wilson in The Australian explains that bipartisan support for an ETS in the United States, one of the main justifications given by Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong for Australia entering into an ETS, is no guarantee of it ever being passed into law (witness the $700 bn bailout for the US economic crisis).

Members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years and are highly accountable to their electorates. Their allegiance is to their electorate first and their party second. And US voters are very sensitive to the government voting for legislation that will simply take money from their back pockets.

Indeed, and Australians should be similarly wary.

And that leads to the second myth: Australia needs to develop an ETS to participate in the forthcoming international trading scheme. But there will not be a comprehensive international trading scheme. Establishing one requires every major emitting country to participate.

India and China are very unlikely to do so.

If we keep heading down this path, the myths will become clear, and it won’t take long before Australians start to ask why we are harming our economy while achieving virtually no reduction in emissions.

It is an answer Rudd and Wong should think long and hard about.

Read the rest here.

Economic growth, which really means better standards of living, better education, better healthcare, better services, is a “cancer”, according to a new senator who is clearly “green” in more ways than one. Inevitably, he blames all the country’s ills on our reliance on fossil fuels:

He said future historians would come to this period as the “beginning of the oil endgame”. “The age in which Australia sleepwalked along behind a tiny handful of powerful nations armed with nuclear weapons into a disastrous occupation of Iraq, with the singular objective of cornering the world’s shrinking reserves of cheap oil. China’s behaviour in Burma and Sudan, and Russian aggression in Georgia, flow from this same terrible imperative,” Senator Ludlam said during his speech two weeks ago.

I think he should have stuck to graphic design.

Read it here.

(…before we get found out, that is)

The UK Met Office, for whom I used to have great respect, is now spouting alarmist propaganda on a daily basis, and the Guardian newspaper is happy to report it (and our very own Herald is happy to repeat it).

THE world will have to take drastic action within two years to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution if it is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a new British study warns.

Sorry to be pedantic, but CO2 is not pollution…

A leading adviser at the Met Office, Vicky Pope, warned that failure by governments to agree to “large and early” cuts or to meet those targets “could have significant consequences”.

Read it here.

A great read!