Wong has been called the High Priestess before, and punishment for heresy the obvious next step, as Liberal Senator David Bushby pointed out:

“There is no doubt that she approaches such heretical behaviour as if she was the high priestess of the religion,” he told the Senate on Tuesday night.

“If she was allowed to, I suspect she would like to burn at the stake all who dare question the truth of the science behind climate change.”

Senator Bushby said extreme weather events such as hurricanes, droughts and bushfires were occurring less severely than in the past.

“I have no choice but to refuse to believe what I am told is true, and to declare myself a sceptic when it comes to the issue of mankind’s impact on the climate.”

Excellent – another one joins the party! However, on a much more distasteful note, that pitiful excuse for a Premier, Nathan Rees, has opened his not inconsiderably sized mouth and placed a size 11 boot in it, by comparing climate sceptics to “Nazi appeasers” – how charming – the alarmists can use that one when they’re not branding us “Holocaust deniers”:

In a speech about good policy based on good science [Ha, Rees wouldn’t know good policy or good science if they came and smacked him in the head], Mr Rees said it was important not to ignore the messages scientists were giving about the environment.

‘‘The threat of climate change is catastrophic [it certainly is if you’re a pea-brained pollie who believes every word the IPCC says]. In fact, the current wave of climate change scepticism smacks of 1930s-style appeasement: ‘Hide under the blankets and it will go away’. But it won’t go away.”

The election in NSW just can’t come soon enough.

Read it here and here.

The RET isn’t just a feel-good gesture that the Opposition should wave through, it will achieve what all climate related legislation achieves: nothing in terms of climate, everything in terms of increased costs for consumers:

HURRAH, the Rudd government and Turnbull opposition have agreed to pass the Renewable Energy Target, an initiative unjustified in economic terms that makes emission reduction costs three times more expensive than the price of permits under cap and trade and resurrects government planning that Australia spent half a century trying to escape.

This is an initiative driven totally by politics. In a new world of climate change tokenism it means Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are heroes. Government support to create new renewable industries otherwise untenable has become the test of being “serious” about climate change.

Perhaps it is time to be grateful for small mercies since in the scale of climate change policy atrocities this is modest. But it illuminates a greater truth: a fundamental change in policy values produced by global warming and a new hypocrisy about solutions running from renewables to nuclear power.

And the Nationals (and some Liberals) aren’t going to let it pass without a fight:

MALCOLM Turnbull will be forced to seek Coalition partyroom approval before signing a deal over the government’s renewable energy target, after several backbenchers expressed concerns yesterday he was not driving a hard enough bargain.

In a sign of how hard the Opposition Leader will have to fight to get backing for any kind of climate change legislation, Nationals senators Ron Boswell, Barnaby Joyce and Fiona Nash said the opposition should insist on all of its proposed amendments before allowing the bills through the Senate.
…
The Nationals were backed by Liberal senators Cory Bernardi, Mathias Cormann and backbenchers Bronwyn Bishop and Wilson Tuckey, with many arguing that opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt should drive a harder bargain in the talks he is holding with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.

Read it here and here.

Right title but for the wrong reason.

The film is a wake-up call with an elegiac tone — not quite hectoring but pressing. It goes well beyond the arguments about science that Al Gore tried to straighten out in An lnconvenient Truth. This is about human nature, greed and personal responsibility. It aims to scare and galvanise — and it’s pretty good at both.

Al Gore “straightened out” the science? I guess that’s right in a way – he flattened the temperature record for the last 1000 years to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age – in fact, given his enormous bulk, he probably sat on it.

You have been warned. Read it here.

Terry McCrann sets out the plain common sense, which for some reason appears to elude almost everyone in Canberra:

REMINISCENCES of Woodstock are all the rage this month – in many cases proving the accuracy of the dictum about remembering the 1960s.

Perhaps this is why we seem to be literally living through a never-ending episode of the 1960s science fiction TV show The Outer Limits – where aliens take control of people’s minds, from the prime minister down.

How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable? Where we have Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong and previously rational people like Lindsey Tanner and Craig Emerson marching in lockstep, as if down one of those dodgy 1960s mainstreet USA film-sets, chanting: “emissions must be reduced, emissions must be reduced”.
…
That – literal or figurative – mind possession also demonstrates the pointlessness of posing the obvious question: why?

There is of course, no answer. Rational discourse is completely impossible – given the absolute commitment by Rudd and Turnbull et al to doing something so utterly pointless.

Australia reduces its emissions of carbon dioxide by 100 per cent and the – purportedly beneficial – consequences, are zero. We reduce by the suggested 20 per cent and the answer remains exactly the same – 20 per cent of zero is still zero.

Read it here.

Ian Plimer said it first, but the similarities between the scaremongering of today, and those associated with Y2K (and the ozone layer) are too hard to ignore:

REMEMBER Y2K? This was the new millennium bug that we were told threatened to throw the world’s computer systems into chaos as we entered the year 2000.

Aircraft could fall from the sky and businesses crash in a global digital catastrophe, we were warned. Panic set in and billions of dollars were spent across the world to head off this impending armageddon.

In this mad rush there was no room for sceptics. The evidence of the looming danger was overwhelming and undeniable, regardless of the fact that it sounded like something out of a science-fiction movie. Action had to be taken and no price was too high.

Well, the tsunami turned out to be nothing more than a ripple in a pond, if that.

Does all this have a familiar ring to it? Of course. It is the same type of argument that is being foisted on us by the Rudd government over global warming and its threat to the future of civilisation as we know it.

Read it here.

UPDATED: Actually, Chris Abood claims first prize for this, see here (thanks for the link, Chris)

Crazy story of the day, reprinted, where else, in The Age:

PROMINENT French chefs have warned that the country’s wines will lose their complexity and the best produce will come from Scotland if the effects of climate change are not tackled.

A group of chefs, sommeliers and chateaux has issued a call to action, urging the country to secure ambitious targets to limit global warming.

So in 50 years time, the Scots can drink fine home-produced cabernet sauvignon with their haggis and fried Mars bars.

Read it here… on second thoughts, don’t bother.

Only took a matter of hours:

The federal government has rejected predictions grocery prices will rise by up to seven per cent under its planned emissions trading scheme.

“Those figures are wrong,” junior climate change minister Greg Combet told Fairfax Radio Network on Monday.

Phew, that’s OK then.

Read it here.

Worryingly, the public appears to have been successfully brainwashed by the Rudd government into believing that the ETS will effect a painless transition to a utopian green economy which will at a stroke save the Barrier Reef from certain destruction, and save the planet from “dangerous climate change”. The reality, of course, is that they haven’t the slightest clue about the ETS, or its effects on their way of life or standard of living:

The latest opinion poll shows the Federal Government has strong public support for another attempt at getting its emissions trading scheme through Parliament.

The Nielsen poll published in Fairfax newspapers shows 55 per cent of people want the Government to reintroduce its rejected emissions trading scheme to Parliament in three months’ time.

Only 29 per cent want the Government to wait to see what other countries will do.

Yet I wonder what proportion of the public really understand what the ETS is about? Are they really aware of the spiralling electricity prices that will result, or even this:

Grocery prices are expected to rise by 7 per cent under the federal government’s emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Large retailers have warned the government that the proposed scheme would add between 4 and 7 per cent to shopping bills, the Australian newspaper reports.

The warnings have prompted calls for the government to come up with a compensation package to help low and middle-income families.

The government says it plans to compensate households for increased energy prices when the ETS is expected to be introduced in 2011.

But it is yet to announce how it will cover the rise in grocery prices.

I wonder if the results would have been different if they knew about that?

Read it here and here.

Labor has backed down and split off the Renewable Energy Target bill from the ETS. The RET is still crazy, however, as there is not a chance in hell that 20% of the nation’s energy will come from renewable sources by 2020, but that’s another story:

THE federal government’s decision to detach its renewable energy target (RET) assistance package from its emissions trading scheme is a victory for common sense, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong confirmed today that the government would separate the RET section from the rest of its carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) so it could be voted on separately.

The move comes after the coalition and all cross-bench senators voted against Labor’s 11 climate change bills in the Senate on Thursday.

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull said today he was pleased that the government had backed down from holding renewable energy “hostage” to the passage of the emissions trading scheme.

He said the coalition would now happily sit down with Senator Wong this week and negotiate constructively to ensure the RET section passed parliament.

“We’ll certainly negotiate with her in good faith in the course of this week with the view of getting the renewable target legislation passed,” Mr Turnbull told reporters in Sydney.

Read it here.

This may be a tactic on the part of Yvo de Boer to scare governments into more action to “tackle climate change” in advance of Copenhagen, or it might be really what he thinks (unlikely). Either way, it shows how idiotic Rudd’s desperate push for the ETS to be legislated this year really is…

“If we continue at this rate we are not going to make it,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said at the end of a five-day negotiating session in Bonn.

“Momentum for a strong result is building at the highest political level,” he said, referring to individual pledges by rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

“But that action is not ambitious enough, and it is only half of the solution. The negotiations need to move forward much faster,” he said in a webcast press conference.

Some 2,400 delegates from about 180 nations, riven by major differences, made scant headway toward hammering out a draft treaty, negotiators said.

On Friday, a document of 200 pages — little more than a “laundry list” of national positions, according to one negotiator — still contained “about 2,500 brackets in the text, each indicating an area of disagreement,” de Boer said.

“This shows how much ground there is still to be covered.”

Sharp divisions remain over how deeply wealthy economies should slash their carbon emissions by 2020, and whether commitments by developing nations should be binding.

Read it here.