Nobody's listening to ya, Al!

If you, like me and 99.9999999% of the population of the planet, missed the 24-hour Goreathon of climate spin either by good fortune or by design, Josh provides a useful summary over at Bishop Hill. By all accounts it was the usual hysteria and misrepresentation, so much so that even the Greenies switched off.

To paraphrase Steve Fleming in The Thick of It, Al Gore is moving from the man people love to hate, to the man people just hate. From Simon Cowell to Piers Morgan.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: Piers Corbyn draws our attention to a post on Climate Realists which is worth a read.

Witness for the prosecution…

I guess this would be a Friday Funny if it weren’t for real. The battiness of the environmental movement really knows no bounds. “Experts” meeting in Queensland are apparently calling for the introduction of “wild law” which will hand legal rights to plants and animals and various other parts of the ecosystem:

Australia’s rivers, forests, ocean waters, flora and fauna should have their own legal rights, according to environmental experts meeting in Brisbane today.

Lawyers, academics and researchers from across the world will gather at Griffith University to discuss this emerging global legal movement, known as “wild law”.

The movement calls for laws to not just protect species and properly manage environments, but to actually hand legal power over to flora and fauna.

Conference organiser Michelle Maloney, the convener of the new Australian Wild Law Alliance, said the movement’s successes in South America had come about because indigenous groups were strongly represented in senior leadership positions within governments.

“At this point in time, all western legal structures and governance systems are based on a belief that humans can do whatever they wish and that most things out there in the world are simply for our use,” she said. (source)

Speaking as a lawyer, I look forward to seeing how one is supposed to take legal instructions from an ocean, or a forest, or an endangered species of fish, perhaps. Maybe we’ll see polar bears in solicitors’ office waiting rooms, flicking through back copies of National Geographic to see if they can spot any members of their family in the photos.

And surely if we grant such rights to plants and animals, then they must bear the same responsibilities as their human counterparts, including the duty to provide first hand evidence of the wrongs done to them in open court. “Call Fluffy to the witness box, please” will be the cry echoing through courtrooms across the land. And I can’t see cross-examination going that well, to be honest.

And don’t expect to get paid in a hurry either, except perhaps in dead fish.

Lunacy.

UPDATE: It is also worthy of note that the environmental movement seeks in so many ways to take civilisation back to the Medieval period, so it should come as no surprise that it is now returning us to the age of animal trials (except this time with the parties reversed).

Cut out 'n' keep!

Fed up with the spin? Confused by the lies? You need ACM’s handy cut-out-n-keep glossary.

Here are a selection of Labor’s climate buzzwords and phrases translated into English for the rest of us:

• Carbon: carbon dioxide
• Pollution: environmentally beneficial
• 500 biggest polluters: 500 most productive industries
• A carbon tax will help tackle climate change: I failed Kindergarten science
• Green jobs: unemployment
• There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead: Bob Brown leads the government
• Greens: Marxists
• Hottest decade on record: hottest decade in the last 3 hundred-millionths of the planet’s lifespan
• Unprecedented: I have the memory of a goldfish
• Wind power: an oxymoron
• The science is settled: shut up
• The debate is over: shut up
• Bob Brown: a watermelon
• Consensus: don’t mention the science
• Climate change is a moral issue: don’t mention the science
• Green economy: the Stone Age
• We must invest in clean technologies: I own shares in the companies that manufacture them
• The Central Coast is most at risk from rising sea levels: Tanya Plibersek has lost her marbles
• China is taking action on climate: Greece is a paragon of economic integrity
• We must respect the science (© M Turnbull): we must respect the science that fits our ideology
• 80% cuts in emissions by 2050: the lunatics have taken over the asylum
• Deniers: the Government

Fenbeagle is a truly wonderful political cartoonist from the UK, who has been exposing the lunacy of climate policies and wind power (and particularly those of Energy and Climate Change secretary Chris Huhne) in a series of unique and highly amusing cartoons. Today he has turned his attention to Australia:

Gillard v Bolt

Fen also grabs a quote from ACM (blush):

Fame at last!

See the whole thing here, and add Fenbeagle to your bookmarks.

Now a sceptic

In a shock about turn, Julia Gillard has taken a leaf out of Tony Abbott’s book and described the consensus on dangerous AGW as “absolute crap.” Speaking this morning she said she had experienced a “Damascene conversion” and was now a fully-fledged climate sceptic:

“I woke up this morning and realised that all the scares were just that. I spent a number of hours reading Australian Climate Madness and realised that the science wasn’t settled, and the debate wasn’t over.

The physics however is clear: a doubling of CO2 can only produce about a 1 degree rise in temperature. Anything beyond that is just the product of flaky computer models advocated by scientists desperate to secure more funding. Our policy for climate mitigation by way of a carbon tax and ETS was just plain wrong, and merely wealth distribution by the back door.

Nothing we do in Australia will make the slightest difference to climate locally or globally. Those policies will be abandoned as of today, to ensure the continuing standard of living of all Australians.

All of our nonsensical climate committees will be disbanded, and Tim Flannery will be permanently exiled to Christmas Island.”

And she also had words of warning for the Greens:

“The Greens aren’t a serious political party – they are an extremist environmental activist group that deserves no place in modern government. I cannot believe that I allowed myself to be duped by the likes of Brown and Milne for so long.

I would like to apologise to the Australian people for my blindness and stupidity. I intend to call an election immediately to enable the Australian people to elect a proper majority government.”

Check the date. Oh well, I guess we can dream…

So true...

Thanks to WUWT.