Rudd loses it on 7.30 Report

13 May, 2010 by

Grim faced

As the Herald Sun puts it, channelling the spirit of Mark Latham. Well, what else can the poor chap do? He’s claimed climate change is the greatest moral challenge since the dawn of time, but then drops the ETS like a hot rock when it looks like the public don’t like it. Not content with that, he then pretends that climate change is still at the forefront of Labor policy. What a joke!

THE PM has been accused of petulance and likened to Mark Latham after a fiery outburst during a television interview last night.

Some of his political opponents compared the prime minister’s performance on ABC Television’s 7.30 Report with former failed Labor leader Mark Latham.

“He’s starting to lose it,” opposition frontbencher Andrew Robb said.

The night before, a visibly angry Mr Rudd dismissed a suggestion he had shown political cowardice on climate change by deferring his carbon pollution reduction scheme until at least 2013.

“(Climate Change Minister) Penny Wong and I sat up for three days and three nights [so what? – Ed] with 20 leaders from around the world to try and frame a global agreement,” he said.

…

Mr Rudd’s deputy Julia Gillard defended her boss saying he was passionate about climate change action.

“You’re seeing the prime minister articulate the policy but also the passion and enthusiasm to deal with this question of climate change in that interview.”

Opposition frontbencher Christopher Pyne dismissed that description of the interview, saying Mr Rudd was “just petulant”.

His colleague Greg Hunt went further: “He is making wildly erratic decisions and morphing into Mark Latham, but without the conviction.

“It appears that under the slightest pressure the prime minister is looking increasingly out of control.“

Read it (and watch an extract) here.

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US to legislate carbon cuts

13 May, 2010 by

Still desperately trying to wreck their economy for no environmental benefit, the Yanks are launching another cap-n-trade bill:

US senators on Wednesday unveiled a long-awaited plan on climate change, proposing to cut emissions 17 per cent by 2020 off 2005 levels through regulation of power, industry and transportation.

“We can finally tell the world that America is ready to take back our role as the world’s clean energy leader,” said Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts and close ally of President Barack Obama.

After months of fine-tuning, Kerry and independent Senator Joe Lieberman proposed a bill that would put the onus on heavy industry and power plants to cut carbon emissions, which scientists blame for global warming.

Read it here. And to understand just how pointless it all is:

The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small—0.043°C (0.077°F) by 2050 and 0.111°C (0.200°F) by 2100. In other words, by century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction. (source)

In other words, barely measurable with a thermometer.

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UN: The fount of all hysteria

11 May, 2010 by

Hysteria Co., Inc

If it’s not climate it will be something else. The UN is watching its plan for world government through climate alarmism disappear in smoke, as the public realise that there are more important things to worry about, like erupting volcanoes and Greek financial crises and Islamic terrorism. So it’s now looking elsewhere for some other “cause” via which to regulate, tax and control the globe. This time it’s the extinction of species. As you read this report, just notice how often they have simply taken the climate alarmists’ dictionary, and applied it to extinctions:

  • “Business as usual no longer an option”
  • World needs a “new vision”
  • “Sustainable future”
  • “Tipping points”
  • “Irreversible” damage to the planet unless we “act now”

As the Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reports:

KEY natural processes that sustain human life, such as crop production and clean water, face a high risk of ”rapid degradation and collapse” because of the record rate of extinction of animal and plant species.

That is the key finding of a major United Nations report, the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook.

The executive-secretary of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said: ”The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be up to 1000 times higher than the historical background rate.

”Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.”

The Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed a ”new vision for biological diversity for a healthy planet and a sustainable future for humankind”.

The outlook finds extinction rates of plant and animal species will continue and potentially accelerate far above the natural rate across this century. Threatened species are on average moving closer to extinction due to the impact of humans and climate change. Coral and amphibians are under the most stress.

The report states that if the rate of species extinction hits crucial ”tipping points,” not yet identified, there is a high risk that natural systems that help crops grow and keep water clean could be damaged irreversibly. (source)

Just replace the word “extinction” with “climate change” and we’ve heard it all before. So the next logical steps will be:

  • develop computer models that predict that species extinctions will rapidly get out of hand (just ask Michael Mann for his cast offs)
  • tweak those models to demonstrate that extinctions are directly related to something easily regulated, such as land use
  • ensure that the models play down all other factors, especially those that are natural in origin
  • organise regular conferences to decide that the world needs to “urgently tackle extinctions”
  • describe extinctions as “the greatest moral challenge of our time”
  • require countries to sign a treaty promising not to expand land use, unless they pay a new “land tax”
  • companies can trade permits to build on undeveloped land in a Land Trading Scheme
  • in no time at all, fraudsters will account for 90% of all trading on the Land Permit exchanges

and we’re back to square one.

Think I’m kidding? Just you wait!

UPDATE: And of course the Greens can’t wait to jump on any passing bandwagon. Cue Bob Brown:

Humanity is sealing its own fate by rapidly destroying the planet’s ecological diversity, the Australian Greens have warned.

“It’s not going to change while we have governments who don’t care and governments who are making things worse,” [Brown] told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

“It is a prescription for our own fate if we don’t stop to consider the value, of least to ourselves, of wildlife and biodiversity.” (source)

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SMH: Temperatures to rise "12 degrees by 2300"

11 May, 2010 by

Throw some more snags on the barbie, mate

Another day, another desperate plea from the warmist camp. Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to the alarmism of the Sydney Morning Herald? Every day, its readers are barraged with acres of doom and gloom from some hysterical climate research, its authors desperate to get a headline and keep the funding going – and the Moonbat duly obliges. The headline screams “Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction“:

HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn.

New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies.

The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions [of course – Ed], average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300. [Let’s skate over the idiocy of measuring temperature rises in percentages, which only an ignorant non-scientific writer would ever do – Ed]

”Much of the climate change debate has been about whether the world will succeed in keeping global warming to the relatively safe level of only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100,” said Professor Tony McMichael, from the Australian National University, in an accompanying paper published in the journal.

”But climate change will not stop in 2100 [Duh – Ed] and, under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more.”

Professor McMichael said that if this were to happen, then current worries about sea level rises, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties would ”pale into insignificance” compared to the global impacts.

Not content with this, the article goes yet further:

There was also a real possibility that much of the existing climate modelling had underestimated the rate of global temperature rise, they said.

Dr [Keith] Dear [also of ANU] said scientific authorities on the issue, such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had struck a cautious tone in forecasting future temperature rise and its impact.

Please stop, my sides are about to split… Ridicule is the only response that this kind of rubbish deserves. Every single word of this is based on flaky and inadequate computer models, which are hopelessly incomplete, and which are skewed to exaggerate the effect of CO2 and suppress the effects of everything else. They must think we were born yesterday…

Read it here.

P.S. As the warmists are all over sceptics’ qualifications like a rash, I think it only fair just to point out that both authors are not climate scientists, but specialise in epidemiology and population health. Just sayin’. (see here)

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Desperation as alarmists sense the battle is lost

10 May, 2010 by

The fate of a sceptic in Kruddistan

The more desperate the quotes, the more tragic the arguments, the more it reveals that the alarmists realise that not only is the planet not complying with their incomplete and worthless climate models, but also that the penny [Wong? – Ed] has dropped in the public mind. The public realises now that the IPCC is a politicised advocacy group, spinning the science to fit an agenda conceived back in the 1980s to regulate CO2. Witness the outpouring of vitriol on Tony Abbott for daring to suggest that school pupils be sceptical (see here for original story). Heaven forbid. In Kruddistan we don’t want any of that, they should just uncritically believe whatever Chairman Rudd and the Wongbot say.

So it is with a wry smile that I read this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.  It shows utter desperation in the face of a lost cause, even down to the headline, “Climate scientists cross with Abbott for taking Christ’s name in vain“, which once again tries (and fails) to portray Abbott as some religious nutcase:

TONY ABBOTT is under pressure to justify telling students it was considerably warmer when Jesus was alive after leading scientists said his claim was wrong.

He urged year 5 and 6 pupils at an Adelaide school to be sceptical about the human contribution to climate change, saying it was an open question.

In a question-and-answer session on Friday, the Opposition Leader said it was warmer “at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth” than now.

Leading scientists said there was no evidence to suggest it was hotter 2000 years ago.

The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, said true scepticism was fine, but required looking at published data with an open mind. “To make these glib statements to school students, I think, is wrong. It’s not encouraging them to be sceptical, it’s encouraging them to accept unsubstantiated information.” Tas van Ommen, who as principal research scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division collects climate data from ice cores, said any definitive statement about temperatures 2000 years ago was “completely unfounded”.

He cited the 2007 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found the available data from climate records was too sparse to make clear statements beyond about 1000 years ago. Dr van Ommen said the confidence that global warming was linked to greenhouse gas emissions was based on multiple lines of evidence.

Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. As soon as you quote the IPCC, it’s time to switch off. And then they wheel out Fairfax’s alarmist in chief:

David Karoly, a Melbourne University federation fellow and climate panel lead author, said Mr Abbott’s statement appeared to be based on Heaven + Earth, a 2009 book by the geologist and climate change contrarian Ian Plimer. It has been embraced by sceptics, but criticised by scientists working in the fields it covers. [Ah yes, of course, Plimer isn’t “working in the fields it covers”, right? – Ed]

Professor Karoly said: “It seems strange to me that the leader of a political party would be seeking to disagree with Australia’s chief scientist, the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and Australia’s support of the work of the IPCC. He obviously knows better.” (source)

Probably right. The public have an innate common sense which Sackett (raving alarmist), the Bureau, CSIRO (all on the climate gravy train) and the IPCC (ditto) all lack. They can smell a rat – and it’s a dead, rotting, carcass of a rat with a stench that could strip paint. One letter writer in The Australian gets it right:

CLIMATE Change Minister Penny Wong says she was disappointed in Opposition Leader Tony Abbott for encouraging climate change scepticism in the classroom, which she claimed was “irresponsible”, (“Climate change natural”, 8-9/5).

Since when was scepticism in science a bad thing? Mr Abbott was quite right to point out it is an open question as to why the climate changes, and what role man plays in that change.

Surely we want our children to grow up with open and questioning minds and not to accept unthinkingly any proposition put to them in the classroom.

The irony in all this is that Mr Abbott is presented as something of a hardliner, as being inflexible. But it now appears the boot is on the other foot. It is Senator Wong who is the dour, inflexible one as she constantly refuses to accept there is a valid scientific position on climate change apart from her own doomsday alarmist scenario.

It is irresponsible not to present the full range of scientific views on climate change to young, inquiring minds — indeed the general public, and individuals should be allowed to make up their own minds, without fear of being labelled or ostracised.

Alan Barron, Grovedale, Vic (source)

Keep it coming, SMH. Just more evidence that climate hysteria, like Rudd, is on the skids.

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UK: Cameron agrees to "low-carbon economy" for Lib Dem deal

9 May, 2010 by

Cameron and Clegg

Cameron and Clegg

The UK Conservatives are still stuck in the past on climate change, and desperate as they are to form a government, they are abandoning yet more of their principles by giving in to a Liberal Democrat demand for a “low-carbon economy” as part of any deal with the Conservatives. James Delingpole sums it up under the headline “Cameron’s first stupid mistake”:

I hate to tell you this but committing Britain to a low-carbon economy is not like committing yourself to keeping all phone boxes painted red or promising Britain will never join a currency it was never going to join in a million years anyway.

A low carbon economy is virtually the same thing as NO economy.

It means:

1. Committing your country – at the enormous expense of at least £18 billion a year – to combatting an entirely imaginary problem called CO2, which is plant food, and which makes no serious contribution to [Anthropogenic] Global Warming.

2. Losing 2.2 real jobs for every “Green job” you subsidise with taxpayers’ money.

3. Crippling industry with higher fuel costs and greater tax and regulation at the very moment in the economic cycle when what it needs is cheap, reliable energy, a slashing of red tape and lower taxation.

4. Squandering still more money on “alternative energy” sources, all of which are enormously expensive, none of which work.

If Cameron tries to push this sort of legislation through, our only hope is that he will be torn apart by the Furies within his party, many of whom are as AGW-sceptical as they are Euro-sceptical.

We can count ourselves lucky that at least here in Australia we have one party that is as sceptical as it’s possible to be in the current politically correct climate change environment.

Read it here.

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Observation shows climate sensitivity low

8 May, 2010 by

Roy Spencer

Note that this result is obtained from actual observations of the climate system not flaky computer models. Roy Spencer explains:

Arguably the single most important scientific issue – and unresolved question – in the global warming debate is climate sensitivity. Will increasing carbon dioxide cause warming that is so small that it can be safely ignored (low climate sensitivity)? Or will it cause a global warming Armageddon (high climate sensitivity)?

The answer depends upon the net radiative feedback: the rate at which the Earth loses extra radiant energy with warming. Climate sensitivity is mostly determined by changes in clouds and water vapor in response to the small, direct warming influence from (for instance) increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.

…

A net feedback of 6 operating on the warming caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 late in this century would correspond to only about 0.5 deg. C of warming. This is well below the 3.0 deg. C best estimate of the IPCC, and even below the lower limit of 1.5 deg. C of warming that the IPCC claims to be 90% certain of.

How Does this Compare to the IPCC Climate Models?

In comparison, we find that none of the 17 IPCC climate models (those that have sufficient data to do the same calculations) exhibit this level of negative feedback when similar statistics are computed from output of either their 20th Century simulations, or their increasing-CO2 simulations. Those model-based values range from around 2 to a little over 4.

These results suggest that the sensitivity of the real climate system is less than that exhibited by ANY of the IPCC climate models. This will end up being a serious problem for global warming predictions. You see, while modelers claim that the models do a reasonably good job of reproducing the average behavior of the climate system, it isn’t the average behavior we are interested in. It is how the average behavior will CHANGE.

And the above results show that not one of the IPCC climate models behaves like the real climate system does when it comes to feedbacks during interannual climate variations…and feedbacks are what determine how serious manmade global warming will be.

Read it here. (h/t WUWT)

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Penny Wong

8 May, 2010 by

Close those minds

Tony Abbott dares to suggest that school students should be open-minded and sceptical in their thinking on climate change and earns this rebuke from Penny Wong:

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said it was “irresponsible and disappointing” for the Liberal leader to encourage climate-change scepticism in the classroom. (source)

Because in your mind Penny, unless you are a true believer and switch off any critical thought you’re a heretic that should be burned at the stake, right? Let’s bring up a generation of children who can’t think for themselves and believe whatever the government tells them.

And I notice that Wong doesn’t complain about the alarmist climate indoctrination many students receive from their teachers every day? Strangely silent on that one.

P.S. Notice how The Australian spins the headline (“Abbott evokes Jesus…”) to make Abbott out to be some religious fruitcake as well, when in fact he was simply referring to the Roman warm period…

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Yet another whinging letter from climate scientists

7 May, 2010 by

Still an embarrassment

Climate scientists can sense they’re being found out. You can always tell, because they start writing bleating letters to journals banging their fists and saying “It’s not fair” like toddlers who don’t get their own way. And yes, another one appears today in the pages of Science. You can read the full text at the Guardian (of course) here. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet. [and our wallets – Ed]

And our own chief scientist Penny Sackett can’t support it quickly enough. Sackett is a regular on these pages (see here and here) for her extreme views on climate change, and she still hasn’t learnt that being a scientist is all about free-thinking and impartial enquiry, not eco-Marxist environmental advocacy:

AUSTRALIA’S chief scientists Professor Penny Sackett has backed a group of eminent international scientists calling for urgent action on climate change.

Professor Sackett said governments everywhere needed to show more leadership on climate change action.

“Even if each one of us on the face of the earth stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, not another ounce into the atmosphere, the temperature would still rise,” she told ABC radio today.

“I would say that every delay makes it harder for ourselves in the future. I’d like us to also think about how much more difficult it makes it for the next generation.”

In their open letter published in the journal Science, the group of 250 scientists called for rationale [sic] debate and not to have discussion deflected by extreme views. (source)

Rational debate? Don’t make me laugh. And “extreme views” in this context means anything that challenges the pseudoscience of An Inconvenient Truth, I guess. And then there is the inevitable victim status plea for the sympathy vote. The letter reads:

“We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.”

You have to laugh, don’t you. So let’s get this straight: destroying emails is innuendo perhaps? Fudging data is innuendo maybe? If these guys were accountants or lawyers they would understand this concept better – because they would be in prison.

Just more evidence that the consensus scientists can see their cash cow being sent to market, and they are doing everything to keep their precious funds flowing in. Sorry guys, the public (who are far more intelligent than you have ever given them credit for) are not falling for it any more.

UPDATE: And a timely Galaxy opinion poll demonstrates that exact point:

Two out of three Australians are not convinced climate change is man-made, and even those who do believe it is aren’t prepared to pay much to fix it, a new poll shows.

A Galaxy Poll, commissioned by the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, found 35 per cent of respondents blamed humans for global warming.

Fully 26 per cent believed it was just part of a natural cycle, while 38 per cent remained uncertain. [Total 64% – Ed]

Thirty-five per cent said they would not be prepared to pay anything to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming.

Of those who believed climate change to be man-made, 27 per cent said they would be prepared to pay only $100 or less a year in increased tax and utility costs. (source)

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Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

7 May, 2010 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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