Australian Climate Madness

What an extraordinary headline: “Combet won’t guarantee Fielding’s access to scientists.” Why, you ask? Because “the science is in,” you evil denier you. Regular readers will know that I abhor ad hominems, but really, Combet is an utter dipstick. And these guys run the country – heaven help us all.

“We don’t discuss these things through the media, with all due respect. We’ll sit down with Senator Fielding and go through the issues,” he told The World Today.

Mr Combet says the Government remains determined to get the legislation passed despite Senator Fielding’s doubts. [Yawn, yawn, yawn, and yawn again. How many more times do we have to listen to Rudd, Wong and now Combet banging on about how this pointless ETS “is going through whatever happens”? Please spare me – Ed]

“One thing that we are determined about, that shouldn’t be underestimated, is to get this carbon pollution reduction scheme [two errors in four words again – Ed] through because we do accept the science,” he said.

“The science is in on this issue from the Government’s standpoint. Global warming is a reality.”

Guess which scientist they will put forward to “answer” Steve Fielding’s questions? None other than the über-alarmist Chief Scientist Penny Sackett, who chimes into the debate with a classic quote:

“What we’re seeing now is an unprecedented change and its primary cause is due to greenhouse gas emissions.”

We are really in cloud cuckoo land when the Chief Scientist approaches a scientific issue with such a closed-brain attitude and spouts misleading comments such as this. She is unworthy to call herself a scientist of any sort. Do I really have to put this graph up again…? I think I do. Please tell me where the unprecedented change is, when global temperatures are just 0.04˚C (four one hundredths of a degree) above the average from 1979-1998:

I sincerely hope that the public are slowly beginning to see how utterly untenable the government’s attitude to this legislation, and now towards Steve Fielding, is becoming. The more they try to force it through, the harder it will become…

Read it here.

UPDATE: Penny Sackett claims:

“the reason global warming is tracking along the upper prediction of the IPCC is because the greenhouse gases that humans emit have not been abated at all”.

Kinda like this:

Is it too much to call Sackett’s statement an outright lie? Link to audio here (MP3). (h/t Tom Nelson)

So threatened are the warmists by dissent. No-one is allowed to hold a contrary view, under fear of ridicule or punishment, and anyone that does is obviously deranged and needs to be “re-educated”. Maybe the next step will be the introduction of the “Climate Police”, like the Stasi, snooping around and bugging people’s homes to listen out for any dissenting views, and carting those responsible off to special facilities where they will be brainwashed into believing the true Word. It’s worse than East Germany before the Wall came down.

FAMILY First senator Steve Fielding has been offered a briefing from top scientists in a bid to change his view that climate change may not be caused by human activity.

Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong made the offer yesterday after Senator Fielding returned from a conference in the United States, saying he was not satisfied with the science behind the widely held view that global warming was a result of an increase in carbon dioxide levels caused by human activity.
…
“The Government’s approach to climate change is guided by the consensus science and we are able to provide a briefing on this to Senator Fielding,” Senator Wong said. “We are happy to facilitate a meeting between Senator Fielding and Australian Government scientists if requested.”

Read it here.

P.S. The moonbat papers are also falling over themselves to discredit Fielding, and those from whom he sought advice. Forgive me if I can’t be bothered to blog them – it’s just too depressing. All the usual stuff is trotted out, and you can read it here and here.

An excellent article on Steve Fielding’s trip to the US:

Astonishingly (for a politician) he stands out from the crowd for simply saying the obvious. He wants to “hear from both sides of the debate.”

A simple statement like this should not be remarkable—but it’s so rare. Steve Fielding assumed the mainstream thinking was right, but is now doing what anyone who hasn’t looked at the debate in detail ought to be doing. Some research. It’s a rare occasion when you can see the good side of democracy and free speech in action. He paid for himself to fly to the far side of the world to attend Heartland’s 3rd conference on Climate Change to hear from scientists who are not convinced carbon has a large role to play in our climate.

Read it here.

As you would expect, the threat of Steve Fielding challenging the received wisdom of the IPCC and Gore is too great for climate scientists in Australia, safely on the climate change funding gravy train, and heavily invested in the “consensus”. So out with the usual scaremongering and distraction:

• “We understand that there was probably some warming earlier last century, due to changes of emissions from the sun, but no evidence that the recent warming is due to that.” (Graeme Pearman) [Evidence please? None to be seen – Ed]
• “It’s absolutely rubbish.” (Pearman again) [There’s reasoned argument for you – Ed]
• “[He] seeks to get his information from a group of climate change deniers, an organisation that’s receiving sufficient funding from the fossil fuel industry.” (Yawn and yawn again: David “Asteroid hitting earth only solution to GW” Karoly) [Ad hominem – Ed]
• “He seeks to accept their scientific misinformation more than he accepts peer-reviewed scientific publications.” (Karoly again) [Oops, and another. By the way, there are plenty of peer-reviewed publications which disagree with the consensus – Ed]
• “We really don’t have time to wait – we have to get on with it. That doesn’t really mean that we’re absolutely sure about everything that is projected in climate change,” he said. (Karoly again, and yawn again – methinks the lady doth protest too much)

That last comment sums it up again – we really don’t know if the science is right or wrong, but we’re going ahead anyway, because (as always) we must act now!!

Read it here.

UPDATE: To Graeme Pearman, I suggest you read this: “NASA Study acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming“

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive. At the conference I attended on Tuesday hosted by the Heartland Institute, I heard views that challenged the Rudd government’s set of “facts”. Views that could not be dismissed as mere conspiracy theories, but that were derived using proper scientific analysis. The idea that climate change is a result of the variation in solar activity and not related to the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere is not something I can remember ever being discussed in the media. The question of whether global warming is a new phenomenon or something that is just part of the naturally occurring 1500-year climate cycle was never raised in any of the discussions I have had with the Rudd government. Has the government considered these questions, or has it just accepted the one scientific explanation for climate change at face value?

These are the sorts of questions that I believe need to be answered before any emissions trading scheme can be properly considered.

Well said.

Read it here.

A little Queen’s Birthday alarmism from The Age, to get your day off to a good start.

CLIMATE change is causing heatwave records to be smashed in ways that would have been considered fantasy just a few years ago, a leading climate scientist has warned [It’s still fantasy: Fairfax fantasy, that is – Ed].

Monash University’s Neville Nicholls [lead author of the Summary for Policymakers for IPCC WG1 assessment – so that says it all – Ed] said the increase in the number and severity of extremely hot summer days in Victoria was unprecedented, making it impossible to estimate accurately the impact it would have on people’s health. The State Government recently estimated 374 Victorians may have died because of extreme heat in the final week of January.
…
“Climate change is happening now and will happen all through the rest of our lifetimes,” he told a State Government conference on adapting to climate change. [Unbelievably misleading comment from a “professor” of climate. Climate change has happened since the dawn of time and will continue happening until the sun swells up and swallows the earth whole in about 4.5 billion years – Ed]

As usual, the article refers to “records” four times, without ever pointing out that official “records” only go back to 1851, and in that year, even though the planet was emerging from the Little Ice Age, the temperature in Melbourne reached 47.2. And as for everything being faster, badder, bigger than our worst fears:

Read it here.

Batten down the hatches, get out your thermal underwear and dust off the snow chains for the car. Al Gore is visiting Australia next week, and will no doubt bring the infamous “Gore Effect” with him. The Goracle will be here to launch a new organisation, Safe Climate Australia, founded by “concerned scientists and business and community leaders.” The article, in The Sunday Age, says that one of the group’s founding members, Ian Dunlop, said that “Safe Climate Australia was not a new advocacy group, rather an apolitical organisation that wanted to produce a practical plan.”

“The problem is that the scientific debate and the political debate are like two ships passing in the night, there’s no connection between them,” Mr Dunlop said.

So true, so very true. But unfortunately not in the way you mean.

Read it here.

A letter in the Australian Magazine wins today’s ICOTD gong:

There isn’t a lot of certainty in our world, but one thing even more certain than the sun coming up tomorrow is that we have come close to destroying our own planet. Thank God, Buddha, or whoever, for a gutsy woman like Penny Wong, who stands tall among the leaders of this country.

Peter Hollis
Brisbane

Not entirely surprising, given the poor fellow’s probably been fed on a diet of undiluted alarmism, thanks to the work of Fairytale-fax’s Brisbane Times. He should maybe learn about the history of the planet over the past 4 billion years to realise that the time we’re living in is nothing special, and is in fact remarkably benign compared to some of the climate upheavals of the past, rather than thinking a gentle warming is “destroying our planet”. Tragic.

Namely, all the questions that our so-called “leaders” should be asking – in particular, Rudd, Wong and Combet, all of whom are blinded by the glittering Nobel Prize glow emanating from the IPCC. From the same Age article:

Senator Fielding said he wants the science “cleared up” before he decides how to vote. [That’s not possible, but at least he may realise there is sufficient doubt about the causes of climate change that regulating a harmless trace gas and taxing our economy out of existence is madness – Ed] He supports a Coalition push to delay [the] vote until after an international climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

He said he was open-minded on climate science, but “there seemed to be merit” in claims that global warming had stopped and solar activity had a greater influence on temperature.

A majority of climate scientists say the long-term warming trend due to greenhouse emissions is clear: that six of the warmest years since industrialisation were between 1998 and 2006 [Yep, that old chestnut again – we are, sorry, were, in a period of warming after the Little Ice Age so it is natural that later years are warmer [duh], and it was warmer still in the Medieval and Roman warm periods, and “since industrialisation” is a blink of an eye in geological terms – Ed].

“I now need the science to be resolved,” Senator Fielding said. “I would be derelict in my duties and I think I’d be letting down the Australian people if I didn’t properly research the issues and relied on one side of the debate.”

Bravo.

Read it here.

This quote, from The Age, perfectly sums up the Obama administration’s attitude to climate change, and that of all main governments, including our own. It relates to Steve Fielding’s trip to the US to attend a climate realist conference. Senator Fielding emailed graphs to Obama officials showing that the planet had not warmed for nearly a decade, and asked them why he should not believe them:

Senator Fielding said he found that Dr [Joseph] Aldy [Obama’s special assistant on energy and environment] and other Obama Administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

The talks focused on the Democrats’ Waxman-Markey climate bill, expected to go before Congress in August.

This demonstrates perfectly what we have always suspected, namely that those in government don’t care whether they are right or wrong on the science. They aren’t going to pass up the opportunity like this to tax people out of existence on the pretext of “saving the planet”, and exert even more control over people’s lives.

Climate madness.

Read it here.