They just don’t get it. Someone who actually takes their time to investigate the whole “global warming” issue, and realises that there’s something fishy about it, and the government just can’t cope with it. Greg Combet goes postal and smears Fielding:

Addressing the Sydney Chamber of Commerce on emissions trading, he started proceedings with a critique of Senator Fielding’s inability to understand “clear facts and compelling rationale”.

“The government accepts the consensus scientific view that human activity is responsible for observed climate change,” Mr Combet said in his written speech.

“However, in the face of this consensus view, Senator Fielding and others are still publicly promoting sceptical arguments, more often than not using populist, non-peer reviewed science.” [Er Greg, don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that do not agree with the consensus, but conveniently, the government and the alarmist media choose to ignore them completely – Ed]

Mr Combet, who is the minister charged with assisting Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, wasn’t done there.

He went on to suggest Senator Fielding had wasted the time of Australia’s chief scientist Penny Sackett. [It’s the other way round, of course. Fielding should not have even wasted a second of his time trying to winkle answers out of the warming apologists in the government – Ed]

“It is clear that some people are not looking to understand clear facts and compelling rationale to assist in the formulation of good public policy – even when their questions are addressed by climate change experts and Australia’s chief scientist,” Mr Combet said. [They weren’t!! – Ed]

“Instead they are looking for more reasons to justify delaying action.”

Maybe all this would be slightly less objectionable if Wong and Sackett had actually bothered to answer Senator Fielding’s three basic questions on the science behind the ETS, which, oddly, they failed to do.

Read it here.

It will be interesting to see how the magistrate deals with these clowns. I wonder if they will be treated like any normal person, or whether, because they will bleat about “saving the planet”, they will be let off with a slap on the wrist…

Greenpeace activists say they are happy with yesterday’s protest at a north Queensland coal terminal, despite failing to interrupt activity at the port. [Easily pleased, clearly – Ed]

The protesters had planned to block ships from docking at the Bowen terminal but none were scheduled to berth. [Oops, bad luck! – Ed]

Instead, three protesters chained themselves to a crane – three men from Papua New Guinea and Sydney and one woman from San Francisco have been charged over the incident and are due to face the Bowen Magistrates Court next week.

Read it here.

More unsightly protests from Greenpeace, who think that the “climate crisis” allows them to break the law:

SIX Greenpeace activists have climbed the Abbot Point coal terminal in north Queensland to protest Australia’s inaction over climate change.

Abbot Point, 25km north of Bowen, is Australia’s most northerly coal port, operated by Xstrata Coal subsidiary, Abbot Point Bulk Coal.

Greenpeace said the protest was timed to coincide with this week’s Pacific Islands Forum where a regional approach to climate change will be discussed.

Let us hope that when this bunch get to court, the judge will treat them for what they are – criminals. And coincidentally on the same day, we have another bunch of greenies calling for “civil disobedience” in the name of saving the planet:

Organisers of a rally in the Latrobe Valley, calling for civil disobedience, have defended the event.

Environment groups have posted news of a major rally, at the Hazelwood power station next month, on the internet.

Friends of the Earth spokeswoman Louise Morris says organisers have spoken to police about the event.

Or is the usual democratic process too trivial when we are supposed to be tackling climate change? It’s a very slippery slope…

Read it here.

Penny Wong is heaping blame on to the Opposition for the alleged future loss of national treasures such as the Sydney Opera House and the Great Barrier Reef. Yet no-one appears to have picked up the very obvious point that even if the Opposition supported the ETS fully, and it was implemented fully, and CO2 was the primary driver of temperature on earth, it would make no difference whatsoever to the fate of those treasures.

“It is now up to one politician to determine whether Australia’s carbon emissions will continue to rise or whether we will start to reduce emissions for the first time ever,” Senator Wong said.

“In 10 days from now, he must decide whether he wants to finish what he claims to have started.”
…
What Mr Turnbull called design principles were nothing but a “string of wilted fig leaves”, Senator Wong said, adding there was no reference to reality.

“It is simply an attempt by Mr Turnbull to look to the public as though he is engaged, while at the same time telling his party room he is holding the line.”

It was “a disappointing low” for or someone who once led the way on emissions trading.

Wong is a fine one to talk about having “no reference to reality”, given that she continues to refuse to answer Steve Fielding’s three basic questions on the science (or lack of it) behind the push for an ETS, which have now been answered by astrophysicist Professor Willie Soon and climatologist Professor David R. Legates:

The brief answers to Senator Fielding’s questions are –

1. Yes, temperatures did fall after 1998 while carbon dioxide rose;
2. Yes, late 20th century warming was indeed not unusual in either its rate of change or magnitude; and
3. Yes, all IPCC models did project warming through a ten year period when instead cooling occurred.

…
Taken together, the correct answers to Senator Fielding’s questions indicate that the hypothesis of dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions is invalid. It follows that costly emissions trading legislation is at best pointless. Doubtless this is why it has been so hard to elicit clear statements on the matter from Minister Wong and her supporters. (h/t Andrew Bolt)

Read it here.

P.S. I actually laughed out loud when I read this headline on ABC:

Govt seizes on ANU climate change report

The Federal Government says a study backs its warning World Heritage-listed sites including the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and the Sydney Opera House are threatened by climate change. (source)

The study was, er, commissioned by the government itself from the ANU, and the head of the climate change department there is none other than Will Steffen… Wong’s alarmist advisor, who for some reason couldn’t answer the three questions set out above.

Yesterday it was the climate scientists’ turn to scare the public into believing that CO2 will cause the apocalypse, and today it’s the Federal government, in a report to be released about the effect of “climate change” on World Heritage sites. The report has been prepared by ANU, so you can bet that it will have Wong adviser Will Steffen’s fingerprints all over it.

None of this is surprising, however, because the government inevitably will ramp up its efforts, in advance of the Senate vote on 13 August, to mislead the unsuspecting public into thinking that the ETS will actually make some discernible difference to the climate, and therefore to the fate of Australia’s World Heritage sites. I have news for you: it won’t.

I hope you are sitting down for this, because it’s a veritable smorgasbord of all the worst scaremongering you will ever hear from the Aussie alarmists:

THE Royal Exhibition Building, the Sydney Opera House and the Great Barrier Reef could be wiped off the map if runaway climate change is left unchecked, a new Federal Government report claims. [This runaway climate change must have escaped me, because personally, I haven’t noticed, and neither have the satellites measuring global temperature – Ed]

The Department of Climate Change’s damning insight into the future of our most treasured heritage sites forecasts rising sea levels, drought and extreme weather as factors that could see buildings and natural landmarks devastated.

The preliminary assessment of Australia’s World Heritage sites predicts:

• The Royal Carlton Gardens could wither and the Exhibition Building could crumble with faster deterioration from higher temperatures.
• The Sydney Opera House could be battered by storm surges and rising sea levels and could be infested by pests because of habitat change.
• The Great Barrier Reef faces coral bleaching and a halt in growth from higher ocean acid levels, as well as rising mortality rates for seabirds, turtles and other species.
• Kakadu National Park could see an outbreak of diseases such as malaria because of increased temperatures, plus erosion from cyclones and extreme weather.

I could go on to dissect all this, but really, I can’t be bothered. It’s Sunday. I will post a link to the report when it is online.

Just a final word, remember that the government still does not acknowledge the existence of the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age and is still using the “Hockey Stick” from the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, shown to be a fraud years ago, as demonstrated by this graph in the Climate Change Department’s web site:

Read it here.

Are we all ready for our morning dose of Fairfax alarmism? The warm-mongers are getting desperate. The planet continues to ignore the predictions of flaky climate models, and has cooled since 2001, and the warmenistas are starting to worry that they’ll be out of a job if this whole “global warming” scam [surely “climate change” scam – Ed] is revealed to be nothing more than natural climate variations which humanity can do nothing about except adapt.

So what do they do? Resort to even more desperate misrepresentations, which, let’s face it, are bordering on outright lies. Let’s pick them apart.

• The global average temperature has increased by about 0.8 degrees since 1850, with most of the increase occurring since 1950. The warming varies among decades because of natural fluctuations but the overall trend has been inexorably upward.

Yes, the trend has been “inexorably upward” because the climate is recovering from the Little Ice Age, which most alarmists try very hard to ignore. It’s like saying the temperature trend from winter to spring is “inexorably upward” which would surprise nobody. Most of the 20th century warming occurred before 1950, when carbon emissions were negligible, and they conveniently forget to mention the whole “new Ice Age” scare in the 1970s, when emissions were rising faster than ever.

• Warming is evident in other indicators, such as rising sea levels and reduced sea-ice and snow cover.

Again, sea levels have been rising at an almost constant rate for several thousand years, and there has been no discernible change in that rate of increase, except, if anything, a possible slowing down in the last few years. Arctic sea ice may have reduced recently, but Antarctic sea ice has increased hugely and is at the same levels as thirty years ago – why did they forget to mention that?

• Of these, the most important measure is the extra heat in the oceans, which is steadily rising.

There has been no increase in ocean heat since 2003 (see here).

The article then moves on to other “conclusions”:

The second conclusion is that the dominant cause of the warming since about 1950 is the increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases released by human activities, of which carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important.

This critical conclusion is based on several independent lines of evidence, including basic physics, studies of climate changes in both in the geological past and in the industrial era, and finally – but far from solely [yeah, right – Ed] – from the predictions of climate models. Together, these provide an overwhelming case that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations cause warming, and that CO2 is the largest contributor to the current warming trend.

No explanations why they conclude this, you will note. Just accept what we say, peasants, and don’t ask difficult questions. They also avoid the tricky subject of why the planet has cooled since 2001 with ever increasing CO2 emissions.

The third conclusion is that warming will increase in future, if emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases maintain their present paths. “Business as usual” scenarios for future emissions lead to likely global temperature increases of up to six degrees above present temperatures by 2100.

Where do they get this figure from? The same flaky models, despite them being only used as an afterthought, apparently. And then, just to ram home their desperation further, the usual “it’s all happening faster than we thought”:

New findings suggest that the situation is, if anything, more serious than the assessment of just a few years ago.

The heightened concern among climate scientists arises from a growing realisation that climate change can be accelerated beyond current predictions by reinforcing “climate feedbacks”, which contribute to climate change and are accelerated as it occurs, thus causing climate change to feed on itself. When these feedbacks are sufficiently strong they become “climate tipping points” which can flip the climate into a new state with essentially no way to recover.

And this is the trump card the alarmists love to play – the “tipping point”. The planet has been warmer in the past, and, strangely, there were no climate tipping points then. But the whole idea of a “point of no return” is such a useful tactic for the alarmists to scare the unwitting public that they aren’t going to drop it in a hurry. In their view, the climate is balanced precariously on a knife edge, and the slightest prod, whether from man or natural causes, will send it spiralling into oblivion. This is despite no evidence of this ever happening in the past (and please don’t quote the planet Venus at me, there are so many differences that it isn’t the slightest bit analogous to Earth).

And no mention, you will notice, of the possibility of any negative feedbacks, such as increased cloud cover or precipitation, which may transport energy away from the planet or reduce incoming solar radiation, to push the climate towards its original starting point. Feedbacks, in the alarmists’ minds, are always positive.

That’s enough. I can’t stand any more. Here’s the last paragraph, the usual call to immediate action, no matter what the cost:

All of these concerns are firmly grounded in science. They have led the great majority of climate scientists to conclude (paraphrasing the summary of the Copenhagen conference) that rapid, sustained and effective emissions reductions are required to avoid ‘‘dangerous climate change’’, regardless of how it is defined.

Here’s the rogues’ gallery of authors, so you can keep an eye out for them in future:

• Michael Raupach and John Church, CSIRO
• David Griggs, Amanda Lynch and Neville Nicholls, Monash University
• Nathan Bindoff, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre
• Matthew England and Andy Pitman, University of NSW
• Ann Henderson-Sellers and Lesley Hughes, Macquarie University
• Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, University of Queensland
• Roger Jones, Victoria University
• David Karoly, University of Melbourne [über-alarmist extraordinaire]
• Tony McMichael and Will Steffen [Penny Wong’s climate advisor], Australian National University.

Read it here, but you have been warned.

It’s like banging your head against a very large, very solid brick wall listening to Penny Wong. Nothing, repeat nothing, ever gets through. So we’ve hardly had a chance to draw breath after UN climate change bigwig Yvo de Boer said that we don’t need to legislate the ETS before Copenhagen, and guess what Penny does? That’s right, completely ignores it and ploughs on regardless, as she makes clear in this transcript from ABC’s The World Today. Sabra Lane doesn’t do a bad job of trying to get Ms Wong’s icy façade to crack, but it’s just no use:

SABRA LANE: Penny Wong, the head of the United Nations’ climate change agency Yvo de Boer says it doesn’t matter if Australia doesn’t have an emissions trading scheme in place by the time of the Copenhagen talks in December.

That blows a pretty big hole in your argument, doesn’t it?

PENNY WONG: Well look what Yvo went on to say was that these are matters of domestic policy and domestic issues. What the Government is saying to the Australian people is this – that we want Australia, Australian businesses to know how we will meet the targets we sign up to in Copenhagen. We think that is the responsible thing to do and that is what passing the legislation will provide.

SABRA LANE: But he was specifically asked if it mattered and he said quite honestly, no.

PENNY WONG: The Government’s view is and it’s a very logical position is that a failure to legislate does weaken our negotiating position.

We have to look at the national interest. We think it is in the national interest to ensure that we have a way of meeting the targets we sign up to and when I as Minister and in Copenhagen, I want Australians to know how we can meet the targets that we will be committing to.

I am utterly sick and tired of listening to the same old nonsense from this arrogant, self-satisfied, self-opinionated, out of touch government.

Read it here.

Back in January, ACM made the comment that those who deny that the planet is cooling will be the new “deniers” in 2009 (see here). Dr Roy Spencer has picked up on that same theme in a new article, branding them “natural climate cycle deniers”:

The natural climate cycle deniers have tried their best to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from climate data records by constructing the uncritically acclaimed and infamous “hockey stick” of global temperature variations (or non-variations) over the last one- to two-thousand years.
…
And when the natural cycle deniers demand changes in energy policy, most of them never imagine that they might personally be inconvenienced by those policies. Like Al Gore, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Leonardo DiCaprio, they scornfully look down upon the rest of humanity for using up the natural resources that they want for themselves.

And the few who freely choose to live such a life then want to deny others the freedom to choose, by either regulating or legislating everyone else’s behavior to conform to their own behavior.

The natural climate cycle deniers’ supposedly impartial science is funded by government research dollars that would mostly dry up if the fears of manmade global warming were to evaporate. With contempt they point at the few million dollars that Exxon-Mobil spent years ago to support a few scientists who maintained a healthy skepticism about the science, while the scientific establishment continues to spent tens of billions of your tax dollars.

Read it all!

Kevin Rudd’s excuses for trying to force through the ETS legislation before Copenhagen are in tatters. Now even the moonbattish UN has stated that there is no urgency for the scheme to be in place before the climate summit:

It won’t matter if Australia doesn’t have its emissions trading scheme finalised by December’s Copenhagen climate change talks, the head of the UN’s climate change agency says.

Other nations will only care that the federal government has made a commitment to reduce emissions targets ahead of the summit, Yvo de Boer says.
…
“I think everybody is very happy with what Australia is doing,” he told ABC radio.

But when asked whether it mattered if Australia arrived at Copenhagen in December with a scheme in place, he replied: “Quite honestly no.”

So there you have it, from the horse’s mouth: a commitment is all that’s required. Kevin Rudd’s blinkered urge to see the ETS enshrined in legislation before December is exposed as nothing but political posturing. Enough is enough, Mr Rudd. Delay the ETS until after Copenhagen. End of story.

Read it here.

UPDATE: See Penny Wong’s knee-jerk response here [Can you guess what it is? – Ed]

A welcome return for the Weekly Roundup – always a great read!