Abbott: Rudd's Copenhagen entourage an "unfair expense"

12 December, 2009 by

Rudd wants to rule the world

Rudd wants to rule the world

But surely Statesman Rudd requires all of those 114 delegates (including a personal photographer) in order to appear sufficiently like a future UN secretary general for the unofficial job interview he’s attending? Oh, you guys all think he’s going for climate talks? Ha, ha – good one.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott says the size of the Australian delegation to the UN climate conference in Copenhagen is an unfair expense on tax payers.

The Opposition says Kevin Rudd will be taking 114 people to the conference – a larger contingent than that of Britain or India.

World leaders will be joining the conference next week to try and negotiate a global climate agreement.

Mr Abbott says the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should be focussing on Australia.

“I think it’s in a sense admirable that Kevin Rudd is prepared to risk jet lag for our country,” he said.

“But the people who he’s really got to persuade about his whopping great big emissions tax are here in Australia, not in Copenhagen.”

Rudd cares little for domestic politics at the moment – his focus is the world stage.

Read it here.

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Copenhagen: Armed response to Climategate question

12 December, 2009 by

Climate science is all about open debate, right? Wrong.

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BBC: Clive James on climate change

12 December, 2009 by

Climate sense

Climate sense

Our most famous expat writes on climate change in the BBC magazine:

Over the last 10 years we have heard a lot about how civilisation would be in trouble if it didn’t soon do something drastic about global warming. But this impressive message tended to sound less impressive as time went on. It wasn’t just that the globe uncooperatively declined to get warmer during the last 10 years.

It was that the language of alarm wore out its welcome as it became ever more assertive about what had not yet happened.

The brief, unarguably still hot period, when the world had somehow refused to grow any hotter was soon explained, although it seemed strange that it had not been predicted.

The world, when it resumed warming again would heat up by so many degrees, or so many more degrees than that, and within 10, 20, 25 years – within a single Hermie – there would be the corpses of fried polar bears floating past your penthouse window.

According to the media, scientists were agreed, the science was settled, science said, that all this would happen. The media promoted this settled science, and the politicians went along with the media. The whole deal had the UN seal of approval.

The coming catastrophe that had to be averted wasn’t exactly like knowing when the asteroid would arrive so you could send Bruce Willis, but unless we did something, irreversible damage, if not certain doom, was only a Hermie or two away.

Today, after recent events at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, that supposedly settled science is still the story, but the story is in question. Suddenly there are voices to pronounce that the reputation of science will lie in ruins for the next 50 years.

Read it here. (h/t Climate Realists)

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Tony Abbott: Why I had to take a stand on the ETS tax

12 December, 2009 by

Writing in The Australian:

As things stand, there will almost certainly be a climate change election. It won’t just be about climate change, but that will be the totemic issue. The government will say that lifting the price of carbon is necessary to help the environment. That might be the case one day, but certainly not now. The challenge is to find ways to improve the environment without a great big new tax.

When Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace in the dark days of 1940 to accept the king’s commission, he felt that his whole life had been but a preparation for this moment, or so he recounts in his memoirs. This is not wartime Britain. And I am certainly not Churchill. Still, I feel well equipped to take on the leadership of the party in what are testing times for the conservative side of politics.

Read it here.

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Government pushes ahead with ETS plans, despite Senate defeat

12 December, 2009 by

Too important?

Too important?

Looks like the government thinks climate change is too important for democracy, as it continues to make arrangements for the ETS despite it being defeated in the Senate, and despite it almost certainly being defeated again in February:

The federal government is pushing ahead with its planned emissions trading scheme by moving to engage experts to run complex auctions of millions of carbon emissions permits each year, despite legislation for the ETS being defeated in the Senate last week for the second time.

The Department of Climate Change called on Friday for tenders from companies wanting to design, operate and manage the auctions, Fairfax newspapers say.

The department also said it will issue a separate tender request early next year for settlement services for the hundreds of financial transactions expected to be generated by the auctions under the scheme.

The auctions cannot start unless the legislation for the scheme passes the Senate, which seems unlikely after the Coalition dumped its support for emissions trading policy under its new leader, Tony Abbott.

Not quite sure the legality of spending taxpayer money without the authority of parliament, and not sure how the successful tenderers will react when in February, the ETS is defeated again, and they’re told that their contracts have just been torn up.

Read it here.

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Copenhagen Day 5 – Rudd's document irks Chinese

12 December, 2009 by

Day 5

Day 5

It’s not going very well, and part of the reason for that is Kevin Rudd’s desire to be seen as an international statesman, at the forefront of negotiations. But unfortunately his meddling is annoying the Chinese, whose participation is essential if any deal is to come out of Copenhagen:

CHINA has accused the developed world of retreating from its undertakings to cut greenhouse gas emissions, rejected a proposal at the Copenhagen conference to reduce financial help to China and described the draft deal Kevin Rudd worked on as creating “a lot of problems”.

The Chinese have accused the developed world of abandoning the Kyoto Protocol and pressuring the developing nations to cut emissions without proper compensation for the “luxury emissions” the West has put out for the past century.

The so-called “commitment circle” draft document worked out between Denmark, Australia and other nations was said to be from a small and isolated group and designed to lift the political standing of individuals. [Who could they possibly mean? – Ed]

…

The Chinese position is providing no room to raise its carbon emissions target and to accept any binding agreement. It is demanding new technology regardless of patents, and rejects the view that it should be labelled a developed nation. The draft proposal, which involved the Danish leader and Mr Rudd as a “friend of the chair of the conference”, “was not the overwhelming view of developed countries and was also a personal view not representing the view of his country“, Mr Zhang said.

“The so-called draft has been widely criticised by the developing camp through the group of 77, which truly demonstrates this draft was made by a very small number of countries in isolation, and there are a lot of problems to be addressed,” he said. (source)

Keep up the good work, Kevin – you’re doing everyone a favour. If you want to read the draft, you can find it here.

And China is digging in, pushing its right to economic development:

China has become the “key” to success at Copenhagen, on the developing side, but the world’s most populous nation is fighting back against proposals, in part developed by the Australian Prime Minister, which would redefine China’s status as a developing nation, oblige it to meet tougher targets and cut its access to the billions in aid from the developed world to fight climate change. The proposals also effectively weaken the binding agreements under the Kyoto Protocol.China, in a co-ordinated effort, has decided to put responsibility for emissions cuts back on Europe and the US and to declare its targets of 40 to 45 per cent reductions as “the upper limit”, or the maximum achievable.

Using the backlash from the developing world at Copenhagen, China is marshalling its argument that the West created the greenhouse gas problem and built its wealth upon coal-fired industry. Now, says China, it has 150 million in poverty, millions in regions who suffer harsh winter conditions and their right to develop and simple comfort and sustenance cannot be denied. (source)

Meanwhile, the EU has begun the global socialism at the core of the Copenhagen summit:

European Union nations have agreed to give 7.2 billion euros to help developing nations tackle climate change, the Swedish EU presidency announced Friday.

“The EU total is equal to 2.4 billion euros per year,” over the next three years, with voluntary pledges coming in from all 27 EU member states, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said after a two-day EU summit in Brussels.

The ‘fast start’ money is Europe’s contribution to helping the developing world to adapt to global warming over the next three years and to encourage the ongoing UN climate change conference in Copenhagen to do more. (source)

Just a drop in the ocean compared to what they’re hoping for…

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Rudd-maths: 114 – 14 = "50 or 60"

11 December, 2009 by

Bottom of the class

Bottom of the class

Kind of like Rudd-speak, Rudd-maths is maths in another universe. Rudd-maths is fine with the mainstream media – they just wave it through. If it had been from a Liberal, however, they would have been all over it like a rash. This all relates to Australia sending a frankly ridiculous delegation of 114 (one hundred and fourteen) to Copenhagen, including 7 media advisers and a “personal photographer,” compared to just 70-odd for the UK. Nice work if you can get it.

But in The Australian, Kevin Rudd tries to blame the huge number on the states:

A provisional list published in The Australian today contains the names and details of 114 Australian representatives, compared with just 71 for the United Kingdom.

Mr Rudd did not dispute the reported number, saying officials from the state and territory governments were part of Australia’s delegation.

He claimed the Australian delegation was larger than the British contingent because the UK did not have state governments.

“We extend an invitation to (officials at the state level) and they come,” Mr Rudd told Fairfax Radio today.

But the provisional list contains details of only 14 representatives of state government, plus one delegate from the Australian Local Government Association.

The Prime Minister said the “core Australian government delegation” was “probably in the order of about 50 or 60”.

So there’s a huge hole in the maths there, Kev, in case you haven’t noticed. Take away the state representatives and you have 100. So where on earth do you get “50 or 60”? But hey, the mainstream media don’t bother about such trivia – except when it’s the Liberals, naturally.

Read it here.

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Climategate in the UK House of Lords

11 December, 2009 by

Palace of Westminster

Palace of Westminster

H/t: Watts Up With That. From a speech in the House of Lords by the rather ironically named Lord Turnbull – notable because it questions the science. Many politicians believe that public opinion dictates that the science be left alone, and arguments made purely on economic grounds. ACM believes this is wrong, and that the whole scientific basis of AGW should be thoroughly reviewed.

There is the issue of the science, which I had previously taken as given; but many people’s faith is being tested. We are often told that the science is settled. I suppose that is what the Inquisition said to Galileo. If so, why are we spending millions of pounds on research? The science is far from settled. There are major controversies not just about the contribution of CO2, on which most of the debate is focused, but about the influence of other factors such as water vapour, or clouds-the most powerful greenhouse gas-ocean currents and the sun, together with feedback effects which can be negative as well as positive.

Worse still, there are even controversies about the basic data on temperature. The series going back one, 10 or 100,000 years are, in the genuine sense of the word, synthetic. They are not direct observations but are melded together from proxies such as ice cores, ocean sediments and tree rings.

Given the extent to which the outcome is affected by the statistical techniques and the weightings applied by individual researchers, it is essential that the work is done as transparently as possible, with the greatest scope for challenge. That is why the disclosure of documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit is so disturbing. Instead of an open debate, a picture is emerging of selective use of data, efforts to silence critics, and particularly a refusal to share data and methodologies.

It is essential that these allegations are independently and rigorously investigated. Naturally, I welcome the appointment of my old colleague, Sir Muir Russell, to lead this investigation; a civil servant with a physics degree is a rare beast indeed. He needs to establish what the documents really mean and recommend changes in governance and transparency which will restore confidence in the integrity of the data. This is not just an academic feud in the English department from a Malcolm Bradbury novel. The CRU is a major contributor to the IPCC process. The Government should not see this as a purely university matter. They are the funders of much of this research and their climate change policies are based on it.

We need to purge the debate of the unpleasant religiosity that surrounds it, of scientists acting like NGO activists, of propaganda based on fear, for example, the quite disgraceful government advertisement which tried to frighten young children – the final image being the family dog being drowned-and of claims about having “10 days to save the world”. Crude insults from the Prime Minister do not help.

Well said indeed.

Read the whole speech here.

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Europe's ETS: fraudsters pocket €5bn

11 December, 2009 by

carboncredit

Fake

ACM has posted before about scammers and the potential for defrauding carbon markets (see here for example), but there is no better argument against an ETS than this article in the UK Telegraph:

Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90% of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn) mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency.

The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalise heavy emitters of carbon dioxide.

Rob Wainwright, the director of serious crime squad, said large-scale organised criminal activity had “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.

…

Suspicions about an unprecedented level of carbon crime over the last 18 months have led investigators to believe criminals are using “missing trader” techniques to buy up carbon credits elsewhere in Europe where there is a cheaper rate of VAT [GST – Ed].

Then they sell on the credits in the UK, charging the domestic rate, and pocket the difference. This has been commonplace among trading of very mobile commodities across European borders, such as phones, computer chips and cigarettes.

Ninety percent?? Unbelievable.

Read it here.

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The Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Round-up

11 December, 2009 by

Skewering the clueless

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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