The Skeptical Science Escalator … of Alarmism

16 September, 2013 by

Escalating hysteria

Escalating hysteria – click to watch

No visit to the Skeptical Science website is complete without having one of their smug “escalator” graphics shoved down your throat.

Not content with the temperature escalator, which paints anyone who questions their zealous devotion to “The Cause” as a simpleton, they have now come up with the sea ice escalator, along similar lines.

So finally, ladies and gentlemen, we present the Australian Climate Madness version of [drum roll, please], The Escalator!!!

CLICK HERE to watch animation (opens in new window).

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Celebrate! Climate Commission to be abolished!

11 September, 2013 by

The Climate Commission

The Climate Commission

The hopelessly politicised Climate Commission, the function of which was apparently to spin government propaganda as “science”, is to be abolished, along with a raft of other pointless climate organisations.

Here’s how ACM reported some of the worst Climate Commission excesses:

Time for Tim Flannery and Will Steffen to pack their bags and ship out. The party’s over, as The Australian reports:

PUBLIC servants are drawing up plans to collapse 33 climate change schemes run by seven departments and eight agencies into just three bodies run by two departments under a substantial rewrite of the administration of carbon abatement schemes under the Coalition.

Coalition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt briefed public servants on the dramatic restructure of the federal climate change bureaucracy before the election was called and yesterday confirmed the Coalition was committed to proceeding with the plan.

Under the simplification, the Department of the Environment and the Department of Resources and Energy will run all of the climate change programs under the Coalition’s direct-action program.

The move is forecast to save the government tens of millions of dollars. The Coalition budgeted for savings of $7 million this financial year rising to $13m in each of the next three years for a saving of $45m across the budget period.

The changes will see all carbon abatement schemes run by three bodies: the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which will be overseen by the Department of Resources and Energy; and the Clean Energy Regulator and Low Carbon Australia, which will be run by the Department of the Environment.

The Climate Change Authority, which sets emissions caps, the Climate Commission, which has conducted research into climate change, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which funds renewable technologies, are all slated to be abolished under the plans. (source)

At last, the Green madness is being unwound. Australians should breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

Filed Under: Aussie Politics, Climate Tagged With: , ,

Climate at the heart of Abbott’s election victory

9 September, 2013 by

So claims Tom Switzer, in an article at WSJ Online:

For two years, the global warming debate had been conducted in a heretic-hunting and illiberal environment. It was deemed blasphemy for anyone to dare question not only the climate science but the policy consensus to decarbonize the economy. Mr. Rudd even claimed that climate change was the “great moral challenge” of our time and even denounced critics of cap and trade as “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.” The hapless Liberals led by Mr. Turnbull—an Oz version of Mitt Romney—were in the deepest political valley.

Mr. Abbott, then widely written off as a remnant of the Howard era, decided to challenge the media-political zeitgeist. Cap and trade, he argued, merely amounted to economic pain for no environmental gain, especially for a nation that accounted for only 1.4% of greenhouse gas emissions. He contested the Liberal party leadership, winning by a single vote.

Like Margaret Thatcher‘s victory in the U.K. Conservative party leadership ballot and Ronald Reagan’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1980, this delighted the left. They considered him too divisive and—gasp!—conservative to be electable. According to one distinguished intellectual, under Mr. Abbott’s leadership the Liberals would become “a down-market protest party of angry old men and the outer suburbs.”

Then along came the failed 2009 Copenhagen summit, which exposed the Rudd agenda as a sham. When the rest of the world refused to endorse the climate enthusiasts’ fanciful notions for slashing carbon emissions, Mr. Rudd imploded. Mr. Abbott seized the moment and highlighted the higher energy costs created by Labor’s emissions trading scheme.

Almost overnight, Mr. Rudd’s stratospheric poll figures cratered. Facing a changing (political) climate, he ditched the emissions trading scheme, his government’s key-note legislation.

Rudd’s popularity slipped and he was knifed by his own party soon afterwards. In the election of 2010, as climate alarmism’s downward spiral was well underway, Julia Gillard shackled her fortunes to the Greens, environmental extremists who demanded urgent action on climate as part of the deal to support Labor. Gillard was forced to break her pre-election promise on the introduction of a carbon [dioxide] tax, and from that moment, trust in her and Labor was gone.

Once again languishing in the polls, Labor, in a fit of desperation, reinstated Kevin Rudd, forgetting all the leadership dysfunction and chaos of his first stint, and believing him to be the Messianic figure that would transform Labor’s fortunes. Wrong. The veneer of “new Kevin” chipped and cracked within days to reveal the same “old Kevin” underneath. Voters (and his own party) had had enough.

Thus, Tony Abbott became Prime Minister of this great country.

From the archives: How Australian Climate Madness reported on Abbott’s victory in the leadership election, 1 December 2009:

Abbott claims the leadership

Abbott claims the leadership

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Abbott on the verge

7 September, 2013 by

Out in the gutter with all the other trash…

Out in the gutter with all the other trash…

The Coalition, led by Tony Abbott, is on the verge of regaining power after the worst six years of government in Australia’s Federal history.

The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-again experiment proved to be the most untrustworthy, incompetent and arrogant administration one could conceivably imagine. Broken promises, failed policies, epic waste, smear, lies and corruption lay strewn in its wake. Labor’s shabby deal with the Greens in 2010 was bought with a promise of urgent action on climate change, which gave Australia the most pointless emissions tax on the planet.

Producing barely 1.5% of global emissions, Australia has always been a bit-part in the fairytale theatrics of global climate action, and Labor’s tax was supposed to reduce that tiny figure by a paltry 5%, all at a cost of billions of dollars to the Australian economy. And what effect would it have on the climate? Nothing. Well, as close to nothing as one could get, something like a twenty-thousandth of a degree Celsius.

But that didn’t matter, because the Greens are ideologically blind to harsh decisions and realities, putting their fluffy, feel-good pet causes above the quality of life of ordinary Australians. Labor tied itself to this party of nut-jobs and extremists, and with luck, by the end of today, they will have paid the ultimate price for having done so.

I look forward to seeing the end of the carbon [dioxide] tax, the ETS, the abolition of the Climate Commission and with it, the disappearance of Tim Flannery, Will Steffen, and all the other climate rent-seekers suckling on the public teat for the past six years.

But no matter how much you may agree or disagree with Labor’s policies, it has been the style of government that has shamed Labor most. Their currency has been utter incompetence, personal smear and abuse. Gillard’s misogyny rant went viral – surprise, surprise, given what a hot-bed of Lefties social media has become – and Abbott was portrayed as an unreconstructed bully and a thug. The approach failed miserably, as people have realised that it is not Abbott but Kevin Rudd that has the sociopathic tendencies.

Also, the Left’s ever-present totalitarian instincts, always bubbling away just under the surface, were almost given free rein when the truly frightening Finkelstein report was released, which advocated a government-appointed watchdog to “regulate” news media (i.e. muzzle any criticism of the government and shackle the Murdoch “hate media”). Whither free speech in our so-called democracy? Thankfully, it never made it, but boy, was it close.

Their standards in public life have also been reprehensible, with the Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper affairs sullying the reputation of the Australian parliament. The recent ICAC investigations have demonstrated the level of corruption and back-scratching that went on within New South Wales Labor when it was in power. Cannot imagine that Federal Labor is much different.

If all the polls are even vaguely correct, the delinquent adolescents who have been playing at running our country for the last six years will be punished severely, and the adults will once again form the government of Australia.

Filed Under: Aussie Politics, Climate Tagged With:

Pyrocumulus in Sydney

24 August, 2013 by

Pyrocumulus over Hornsby

Pyrocumulus over Hornsby (click to enlarge)

Driving up the Pacific Highway north out of Sydney this morning, I was intrigued to see a pyrocumulus forming above a hazard reduction burn near Hornsby.

During the Southern hemisphere winter, the rural fire services carry out controlled burns to reduce the fuel supply for the forthcoming bushfire season.

The remainder of the sky was clear, with only a few upper altitude stratiform clouds, but there was a distinct cumuliform top to the column of smoke rising from the fire. The updraft generated by the fire is sufficient to cause a rising column of air, and the conditions were such that adiabatic expansion allowed the air to cool below the dew point. The cloud had dissipated within ten minutes.

Very nice! Link to location map.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Lewandowsky and UWA – Freedom of Information Documents

9 August, 2013 by

More Lew paper

More Lew paper

I am providing a download link to all the UWA FOI documents relating to Stephan Lewandowsky and the “Moon Landing denier” paper. If you haven’t followed this closely, you can check out the whole story here.

The FOIs were in two stages, the first focussed on the emails sent to “sceptic” blogs, and the second was more general in scope. The ZIP file contains two folders with the various documents from each.

Download HERE (.zip file, 95.7 MB).

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

The 97% Consensus

22 June, 2013 by

The climate Consensus isn’t that 97% of climate scientists or papers worship at the altar of the warmist religion, as Cook ‘n’ Lew would have you believe, kind of like the old Whiskas advert (“8 out of 10 owners, that expressed a preference [that proviso added by the lawyers, clearly], said their cats preferred it”), but is in fact…

… that 97% of climate models are wrong. In fact, it’s nearly 100%. Epic fail.

That's the only consensus there is…

That’s the only consensus there is…

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Climate Commission’s latest report slammed as ‘environmental activism’

19 June, 2013 by

The Climate Commissioners on their days off...

The Climate Commissioners on their days off…

Tell us something we don’t already know. The Climate Commission has got nothing whatsoever to do with impartial, free-thinking scientific enquiry. It’s sole purpose is to regurgitate government climate policy, couched in pseudo-science and alarmism.

Monday’s “Critical Decade” report, which claimed that there is a one-in-two chance that there will be no humans left on the planet by 2100, has been rightly exposed as extremist environmental propaganda:

THE mining industry has lashed out at the latest Climate Commission report, labelling it taxpayer-funded environmental activism that would devastate the Queensland economy.

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke said the report, which called for an end to most coal mining, crossed the line from scientific analysis into environmental campaigning.

The report warns that unchecked climate change would hit hard at Queensland’s biggest industries: mining, cattle and potentially tourism, through impacts on the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics.

Climate Commissioner Will Steffen said an orderly transition had to be made from most fossil fuel use such as coal if the climate was to be stabilised this century.

Mr Hooke said extreme green groups had promoted an end to the coal industry in a secret campaign called Stopping the Coal Export Boom.

The document outlined a plan to eliminate the industry and he wanted to know why a taxpayer-funded agency with a charter that demanded scientific rigour was following the same approach.

Professor Steffen hit back, saying there were no conspiracies [Conspiracy? Quick, where’s Loon-dowsky when you need him? – Ed], he had not heard of the campaign and his organisation had no contact of any sort with conservationists.

“If he’d cared to read the report [Sarcasm, lowest form of wit – Ed], he would find pages of [alarmist] scientific references in it [and none that challenged the consensus],’’ Professor Steffen said. “(The report) is based on the [fudged and fiddled] science and consistent with what the International Energy Agency says, what the Grantham Institute says and what (economist) Lord Stern says.

“It’s well understood in investment and science communities [both of which are making shed-loads of cash from the climate scare].’’

The stopping coal document, which is sponsored by Greenpeace, Coalswarm and the Graeme Wood Foundation [remember to boycott Wotif.com] and is available on the internet, says its strategy is to disrupt and delay key projects while eroding support for coal mining.

Mr Hooke said there would be severe economic consequences if coal mining ended but no tangible environmental dividend.

“Eliminating the Australian coal industry would reduce Australia’s GDP by between $29 billion and $36 billion per year,’’ he said. “It would reduce Australian jobs by almost 200,000 and reduce income to the Commonwealth by $6 billion.’’ (source)

But that’s OK, because the activists’ quasi-religious duty to ‘save the planet’ trumps everything, including common sense, apparently.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Climate Commission’s emotive alarmist blackmail

17 June, 2013 by

You just need to take a close look at this image to see all that’s wrong with the government funded propaganda mouthpiece the Climate Commission. It has been annotated with some ACM comments:

Propaganda, alarmism and blackmail

Propaganda, alarmism and blackmail

Planet’s been here for four and a half billion years, yet this microscopic blink of ten years is critical, right chaps?

Read the whole sorry thing here – and see if you can find any reference to the divergence between models and reality. Most of it is just a cut-and-paste job from IPCC AR4. This is where your tax dollars are going. Aren’t you glad?

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

UK: Tim Yeo steps down amid corruption claims

11 June, 2013 by

source: Cartoons by Josh

source: Cartoons by Josh

Conflict of Interest Alert as Tim Yeo, who is alleged to have £1,000,000 (AU$1.65m) in Green interests, and who chairs the UK parliament’s Energy and Climate Select Committee, was caught in a Sunday Times sting, offering to lobby government figures in exchange for payment (allegedly).

The Telegraph reports:

The Conservative MP who scrutinises energy policy has been filmed boasting that he can be paid to introduce businessman to members of the Government.

Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, also said he had coached John Smith, managing director of GB Railfreight, before the executive gave evidence to the committee last month. Yeo is a paid director and shareholder of Eurotunnel — the firm’s parent company.

Mr Yeo was filmed by undercover reporters working for The Sunday Times saying: “I told him [Mr Smith] in advance what to say. Ha-ha.”

When asked if he would be interested in a £7,000-a-day consultancy contract with a solar company, the MP said: “If you want to meet the right people, I can facilitate all those introductions and I use the knowledge I get from what is quite an active network of connections.”

The reporters queried if this included Government figures. Mr Yeo replied “Yes”.

The House of Commons’ code of conduct forbids MPs from acting as paid advocates, including by lobbying ministers. (source)

For those with their snouts in the trough (allegedly), the green economy is a nice little earner.

See also James Delingpole here, and plenty on Guido here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,
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