An Honest Climate Debate

It’s about making cash, not cutting gas

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun, November 5, 2009

Even greens say emissions trading is more about hot money than hot air:

The world’s carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another “sub-prime” style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today.

In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose…

The carbon market, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126bn in 2008 and is predicted to mushroom to $3.1tn by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off.

However, FoE fears that the area has been hijacked by speculators on the financial markets.

But surely Kevin Rudd’s scheme will be better. Right?

Seeing through hoax of the century

By Janet Albrechtsen
The Australian, November 4, 2009

INCREASINGLY, the road to Copenhagen resembles a suburban street on Halloween with the number of climate change freak shows and stunts reaching a nadir in recent weeks. Nicholas Stern says we should turn vegetarian in order to combat climate change. If you must eat meat, eat kangaroos, says Ross Garnaut, because marsupials emit negligible amounts of methane. And that champagne you drank on Melbourne Cup day? Scientists scolded us with a report that a 750ml bottle of bubbly could produce 100 million bubbles, releasing five litres of carbon dioxide.

Yet far from rallying people to the cause of immediate action on climate change, every new cri de coeur may be turning people away. Could it be that those derided as the great unwashed are beginning to ask more questions than their smart political leaders or the bastions of intellectual curiosity in the media?

Late last month, activists gathered at Sydney Opera House to listen to Sydney mayor Clover Moore announce that “the time for talk is past”.

“Already we know that this building, our Opera House, for decades a symbol of optimism and the human spirit, is under threat from global warming,” she says.

The Opera House under threat? That would be from rising sea levels, right? Just like the small island nation of Maldives where, last month, the president conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to remind the world that his country would be rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. Kitted out in full scuba-diving outfits, Mohamed Nasheed and his ministers sat at a table underwater off the coast of the capital of Male.

As planned, the president’s stunt made headlines across the globe. Send us money – and lots of it – is his message. The media love stunts. They are so easy to report.

Sadly, the media is not inquisitive enough to report those who question the circus acts of climate change. A week after the Maldives underwater show, Nils-Axel Morner – a leading world authority on sea levels – wrote an open letter to the president telling him that his stunt was “not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments”.

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Lawrence Solomon: Canadian concern over climate change plummeting

by Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post, November 2,2009

According to a new Climate Confidence Monitor survey released today, support for action on climate change is plummeting in Canada. Just 26% of Canadians consider global warming among their chief concerns, down from 34% in 2008.

Concern in the U.S. is even lower – just 18% , down from 26% in 2008. The UK’s level of concern is the lowest of all, a mere 15%, down from 26% in 2008.

Worldwide, the drop in concern over climate change has also dropped by 8 percentage points, from 42% to 34%.

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A climate of fast money

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun, October 30, 2009

PSST. Want a surefire way to get a grant – maybe $300,000, or even more – for your university research?

Then gather around, my dear professors, and say these magic words.

Climate change.

You scoff? You say it’s too crazy to work, given that your expertise is actually in Bible studies, Aboriginal history, ceramics or sorghum?

More fool you. Just check the 1136 grants of the Australian Research Council that were approved this week by Science Minister Senator Kim Carr.

That’s $392 million Carr has splashed out in this year’s funding round for university research into everything from history and anthropology to physics and genetic engineering.

Yet with so much to choose from, an astonishing 10 per cent of that entire budget for ARC Discovery and Linkage grants went on projects submitted by academics who’d squeezed in some reference to “climate change”, no matter how preposterous.

Ten per cent! Oh, those cunning academics. Those wind-sniffers.

How well they understand the far-Left Kim “Il” Carr’s fierce need to have all scientists sing the Rudd Government’s hymn of global warming doom. How closely they heeded his decision to make climate change research this year a “priority”.

Still, I must laugh at the inventiveness some showed to scramble on to this greatest of gravy trains.

My favourite? It’s the proposal from two Australian Catholic University academics to study “Crisis management in late antiquity: the evidence of Episcopal letters”.

Their plan is to read the letters of the bishops of the early Christian church to see how they dealt back then with massacres, turmoil, poverty, disasters and … yes, “climate change”. This, the academics added innocently, would help us form “appropriate responses to environmental and social crises” today.

Ker-ching! That’s $262,000 for you, dear priests of this new taxpayer-funded Church of Global Warming.

But some academics were as artless as they were brazen. Take the ones from Wollongong who plan to ask Australians what they know about their food, and then claimed “this research may also enable citizens to deal with the changes caused by climate change”.

You laugh, but it worked. They got $160,000.

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The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up

By JEFFREY BALL
The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2009

Many Scientists Say Temperature Drop From Recent Record Highs Is a Blip, While a Few See a Trend; Inexact Climate Models

Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is “unequivocal” and is “very likely” caused by man.

Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth’s temperature was beginning to drop.

That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don’t believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.

The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn’t mean that people aren’t heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn’t predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.

“There is a lot of room for improvement” in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again — a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. “You need to know what you can believe and can’t believe from the models.”

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Beware the UN’s Copenhagen plot

By Janet Albrechtsen
The Australian, October 28, 2009

SHAME on us all: on us in the media and on our politicians. Despite thousands of news reports, interviews, analyses, critiques and commentaries from journalists, what has the inquiring, intellectually sceptical media told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty? And despite countless speeches, addresses, interviews, doorstops, moralising sermons from government ministers, pleas from Canberra for an outcome at Copenhagen, opposition criticism of government policy, what have our elected representatives told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty?

With just over 40 days until more than 15,000 officials, advisers, diplomats, activists and journalists from more than 190 countries attend the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, we know nothing. Nothing about a climate change treaty that the Rudd government is keen to sign and one that will bind this country for years to come.

Of course, there is no final treaty as yet. That is what they are hoping to finalise in Copenhagen. But there are 181 pages that make up the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change dated September 15, 2009: a rough draft of what could be signed in Copenhagen. And yet, not one member of the media or political class has bothered to inform us about its contents as an important clue to what may happen in Copenhagen. The shame of that state of affairs started to trickle in last week.

Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty.

Even after Monckton’s speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don’t need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true.

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