NSW experiences "coldest winter in 12 years"

31 August, 2010 by

Brass monkeys

From the Weather Isn’t Climate Department. There are thousands of blog posts elsewhere in which you can read about the review of the IPCC that came out today [summary: it needs fundamental reform – surprise, surprise], so here’s a local story from New South Wales, Australia:

NSW shivered through its coldest winter in 12 years, while daytime temperatures in August hit their lowest since 1990.

NSW experienced average daytime temperatures of 15.9C, making it the coldest winter since 1998 and the 16th nippiest winter on record.

Climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), Shannon Symons says widespread rainfall also resulted in the wettest winter since 2005. [Which is odd, because the BoM are always predicting that global warming, er, climate change will cause massive droughts…]

“Northern inland regions received above, to very much above average rainfall and that was mainly in July and August, and that’s pretty much the case (across) NSW as well,” Ms Symons told AAP today.

Inland rainfall was attributed to a La Nina event, which creates cooler than average sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

“When we have La Nina events we, not always, but usually see enhanced rainfall across eastern Australia,” Ms Symons said.

Then we have the inevitable caveat:

Ms Symons said in the coming months, temperatures should rise as NSW settles into spring. [Well, of course they will. Duh…]

She said the La Nina event should dissipate by summer, but while it continues, there are chances of above average rainfall in inland NSW and warmer nights. (source)

In other words, it’s only a temporary cooling, and global warming will really take off again very soon, just you wait and see. But hang on, Watts Up With That is reporting that La Niña is actually deepening still further. Spoils the story a bit.

(h/t Climate Realists)

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Achim Steiner

30 August, 2010 by

Fully duped by the alarmists

The executive director of the UN Environment Programme shows he is about as f-witted as they come. As for the actual idiotic comment of the day, you can take your pick from this lot (all gleefully reported by the ever-impartial ABC):

Achim Steiner also said extreme weather in 2010, such as floods in Pakistan or Russia’s heatwave, were a “stark warning” of the need to act to slow global warming, as outlined by the UN panel.

He said he would be surprised if the review, spurred by mistakes in a 2007 report such as an exaggeration of the thaw of Himalayan glaciers, called for any radical overhaul of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [No, of course not. Business as usual.]

The InterAcademy Council, comprising science academies around the world, is due to hand its review and recommendations for the future of the IPCC to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York.

Mr Steiner, head of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program (UNEP), said the report follows others in 2010 that have backed the core findings by the IPCC that it is at least 90 per cent certain that mankind is driving global warming. [shurely “climate change”?]

“Hopefully the release will be a moment where the public can reflect and say that all these reviews have not pointed to any fundamental flaw in the work,” Mr Steiner said.

Nah, course not mate. There’s the carpet over there – just sweep it all underneath.

Read it here.

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Electricity prices "set to soar"

30 August, 2010 by

Freaking useless, and expensive

Thanks to feel-good Green policies, such as the renewable energy targets, which mean that electricity will have to be generated by useless wind turbines rather than plain-old efficient coal. Power bills are already creeping up, and it will only get worse, good people of Australia:

THE chief executive of one of the country’s biggest energy retailers has warned that power prices are set to increase dramatically.

Origin Energy boss Grant King said that complying with the mandatory renewable energy target (RET) and network spending would put upward pressure on energy prices.

“That’s not of our making, or anybody other than policymakers,” Mr King told The Australian.

“That’s just the inevitable and logical consequences of the policies” that governments are implementing.

His comments follow both federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson and his opposition counterpart Ian Macfarlane warning in separate interviews with this newspaper that power prices were likely to double in the next five to seven years.

Mr King said that estimate was “possibly conservative” and added that many consumers of utilities faced “a real come to Jesus moment” as suppliers were forced to re-price energy, water and other essential services.

The RET seeks to ensure that 20 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption by 2020 is derived from renewable sources.

Wind farms would cost between $100 and $125 per megawatt hour, compared with $30 to $40 per MWh for coal.

Moreover, the intermittent nature of wind means that it would need to be backed up with big-ticket investment in gas turbine power plants.

Mr King said he suspected that policymakers “didn’t truly know the cost” of policies that had been introduced.

Really? You don’t say.

Read it here.

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Nature mag: extreme cold is global warming

29 August, 2010 by

Just loving this global warming

Because as we all know, everything and anything is now blamed on global warming, er, climate change. Extreme heat, of course, more rain, less rain, extreme cold, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, you name it. In fact, I’d like to ask one of these authors what weather phenomenon they could identify that wouldn’t indicate climate change. Probably none. It’s the climate change lottery where every alarmist is a winner!

The numerous recent examples of unusual cold in the southern hemisphere have all but gone unreported in the mainstream media, but the journal Nature, which has already made up its mind on climate change (it’s all our fault), realises it can’t ignore it any more and … blames the recent extreme cold in South America on “climate change”:

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history. [Funny, I thought it was just weather…]

“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”

And then the inevitable:

With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.

It’s getting rather tedious now, don’t you think?

Read it here. (h/t Climate Depot, WUWT, Bishop Hill, etc etc)

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Climate madness in Canberra

27 August, 2010 by

Home for the climatologically insane...

The Australian Capital Territory’s loony Labor government tries to outdo the world:

The ACT Government has announced it will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 – the most ambitious climate target in the country [and most of the sane world].

Australia’s national target is to cut emissions by between five and 25 per cent by 2020. [with the emphasis on “five”, if you’re lucky]

ACT environment minister Simon Corbell tabled the new target in a Bill in the Legislative Assembly [pictured] today.

“Governments have a responsibility to act on this issue, and the ACT Labor Government is leading Australia on reducing our carbon footprint,” Mr Corbell said in a statement.

The ACT has also pledged to have its emissions peak by 2013, decline by 80 per cent by 2050, and for the ACT to be carbon neutral by 2060.

And now back to the real world…

Read it here.

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Obama throws AGW court case under a bus

27 August, 2010 by

Legal analysis

But, but, but, Obama’s a friend to the environment – he’d never do something like this! Unfortunately, that’s exactly what his administration has done, urging the Supreme Court to throw out a ruling that would allow big emitters to be sued under the law of public nuisance. As the New York Times reports:

In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation’s largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The defendants — American Electric Power Co. Inc., Duke Energy Corp., Southern Co. and Xcel Energy Inc. — filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court earlier this month, asking the court to reject the argument that greenhouse gas emissions can be addressed through “public nuisance” lawsuits (Greenwire, Aug. 4).

In a brief (pdf) filed yesterday on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal agreed with the defendants, saying that U.S. EPA’s newly finalized regulations on greenhouse gases have displaced that type of common-law claim.

Katyal urged the court to vacate the decision and remand the case to the 2nd Circuit for further proceedings, this time taking into account the administration’s push to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The environmentalists are speechless (almost):

Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general’s office on June 24, it seemed they had “a lot of friends in the room,” he said.

“We feel stabbed in the back,” Pawa said. “This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?”

Top attorneys at environmental advocacy groups are buzzing about the brief, sources say. Some feel betrayed by a White House that has generally been more amenable to environmental regulation than its predecessor.

“This reads as if it were cut and pasted from the Bush administration’s briefing in Massachusetts,” said David Bookbinder, who served as the Sierra Club’s chief climate counsel until his resignation in May.

Don’t worry, the EPA has still classified CO2 as a pollutant, so there’s still a chance of fully-blown climate madness in the US.

Read it here.

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Election 2010: New poll is the only answer

26 August, 2010 by

Rather busy at present so only a short post, but I have been watching, with increasing dismay, three obscure independent MPs turn into pocket despots as the balance of power goes to their heads in double quick time. Ludicrous demand follows quickly after equally ludicrous demand, each of which make little or no sense. The future of Australian government shouldn’t be in the hands of these three mavericks. Unlike Julia, who appears happy to give them whatever they want in order to cling on to power, Tony Abbott is right not to pander to their nonsensical rantings. If that means Labor ends up in government with a rickety coalition, so be it. It won’t last a year, and in that time, Tony can have an absolute field day.

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James "Titanic" Cameron runs scared from climate debate

25 August, 2010 by

Cameron

And then to make matters worse, refers to sceptics as “swine” as a parting shot. Nice.

Hollywood director James Cameron challenged three high profile global warming skeptics to a public debate at a global warming and energy conference. But Cameron backed out of the debate at the last minute after environmentalists “came out of the woodwork” to warn him not to engage in a debate with skeptics because it was not in his best interest.

Cameron challenged Andrew Breitbart, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano and filmmaker Ann McElhinney of ‘Not Evil Just Wrong.‘ The debate was already in the program for the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit. The website program described the agreed to debate as “AREDAY Climate Change Debate: Reality or Fiction?”

After setting up the public global warming debate, Cameron and his negotiator then changed formats multiple times and initially said it would be open to the media and then said he would only participate if it was private with no recording devices. The skeptics agreed to all the changes. According to AREDAY organizers, activist Joseph Romm of Climate Progress urged Cameron not to go ahead with the debate as well.

Cameron’s cancellation of the agreed to debate did not happen until one debate participant (Morano) was already in mid-air, flying from DC to Aspen on Saturday August 21 to attend the debate. (source)

Also check out Ann McElhinney’s account here.

If you don’t turn up, you lose.

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Al Gore: Australia's the way to go!

24 August, 2010 by

Full of climate misinformation

Not sure if Al is being serious here, but a recent blog post from Al “Three F-ing Huge Monitors” Gore [what’s the carbon footprint of that little set up? No, wait – “do what I say, not what I do”, isn’t it?] seems to indicate that he thinks Australia’s climate protests are something to be imitated, and pins the credit on his misleading “Climate Project” slide show:

Around the world, when politicians fail to act to solve the climate crisis, people are taking action:

“Tens of thousands of protesters – and a few skeptics – have taken to the streets across Australia to urge the major political parties to take action on climate change.”

“Both Labor and the coalition have failed to take decisive action to cut Australia’s pollution levels in the run-up to the federal election, Walk Against Warming rallies in Australia’s capital cities heard on Sunday.”

It is my hope we see activism like this here in the United States. A special thanks goes out to those I trained in Australia to give my slide show. They played a major role in the events:

“In Sydney, Al Gore’s Climate Project presenter, Nell Schofield, attracted huge cheers when she said Australia’s lack of political action on climate change was “not only embarrassing, it is morally reprehensible”. (source)

Unfortunately for Al, the protests were a dismal failure, with numbers down yet again, as ACM reported:

MORE than 40,000 turned up in 2006, but just 10,000 people participated in the Walk Against Warming, an annual march through the city to protest against government inaction on climate change. (source)

Let’s hope the rest of the world takes Australia’s lead, just as Al wants.

(h/t Climate Change Fraud)

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Election 2010: Labor's implosion

23 August, 2010 by

Labor headquarters this afternoon

Didn’t take long for the recriminations and back-stabbing to begin. In fact, it began on election night thanks to Maxine McKew. A great advert for Julia’s plea to the independents for “stable government”, ain’t it? Andrew Bolt does the round-up:

It’s getting ugly in Labor, as scores get settled.

Defeated MP Maxine McKew on Labor’s faction chiefs and strategists:

Well, you cannot have a Labor leader removed within two months of an election for it not to have significant ramifications, so clearly that was a factor…

We kept the nation working – that’s an extraordinary achievement. But that was not the central message of our campaign – it should have been built more around jobs.

Former NSW Premier Morris Iemma on Labor campaign director Karl Bitar:

As the campaign director, Karl Bitar ought to have by now fallen on his sword and he just doesn’t have the principle to do it.

Karl Bitar on Iemma:

Iemma’s attacks on me have nothing 2 do with the fed campaign and all about his attempts to privatise electricity in NSW in 2008.

Iemma on Labor power broker and frontbencher Mark Arbib and others of the NSW Right:

They have debased the political process in NSW, they have taken their disease and infected the federal Labor Party.

There’s LOTS more. Read it here (it’s worth it). And if you haven’t seen it already, check out Wayne Swan getting whacked live on Channel 9 – priceless!

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