Apoplectic apocalyptic greenies threw shoes at an effigy of Kevin Rudd, broke into a woodchip mill in Tasmania and threatened to move to Europe as part of an orchestrated dummy spit against the Prime Minister’s emissions scheme announced this week.

The tantrums from Australia’s screeching environmental banshees have barely abated since the Government revealed its plan to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions from between 5 and 15 per cent by 2020, an amount deemed too small by green groups.

“It’s a decision to see the Great Barrier Reef die before our very eyes,” said Greens Senator Christine Milne.

Rudd must be rubbing his hands with glee as the more crazed greenies give him the appearance of being a safe pair of hands on climate change - doing just enough to placate green-aware citizens but not enough to wreck the economy.

But his scheme is a more radical proposal than any other country has adopted.

Professor Bob Carter, a James Cook University geologist, described it yesterday as “the worst single piece of legislation to be tabled in the Parliament since Federation”.

“It is a non-solution to a non-problem,” he said. “If ever there were a bill that justifies a conscience vote, then this must be it, for it wittingly intends to reduce the living standards of all Australians.”

The Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, who is about to take up the EU presidency, described the European climate deal as “a silly luxury” this week, so what does that make Australia’s deal?

Read more here.

Someone please tell me it’s about to end. That it’s O-V-A-H in New England. That’s it’s D-U-N in Rio Linda. That it’s fini in France and finito in Italy.

I’ve experienced a build-up of evidence that undermines climate change alarmism, and I’m at the tipping point. My head has formed a canopy of truth-trapping that can only contain so much before my circuits overheat, blood pressure elevates, and my faith in broad-based common sense melts away. So please: polish it off in Poznan—wishful thinking, you might think, but signs point to the beginning of that end. Read on.

As global warming pathologists insist that increasing carbon dioxide drives planetary meltdown, scientists who actually watch the climate trends—as well as all the forces that affect it - see something different. They observe unchanging (if not declining) temperatures over the last dozen years despite increased global CO2 emissions during the same time period. They see Antarctic ice swells despite a greater media emphasis on Arctic ice loss. They see a current warming bias across temperature monitoring stations; a cooling pattern since 1997; and a valid theory that solar cycles affect climate change more than any other phenomena.

That’s just a start to what I will finish momentarily, but the point is this: that the politicos who push for CO2 emission reductions, and grant-seeking activist researchers, should be put out to pastures where they can examine cow flatulence (and a more effective greenhouse gas—methane) up close and personal. Meanwhile let the rest of us who enjoy our variable climate move on to more important issues like malnourished children, genocide, and modern-day slavery.

Really, you alarmists: you waste our time and resources de-beefing your baloney. You lie about hockey stick graphs—repeatedly (PDF). You deceive about “points of no return.” You manipulate data and promote “tailored climate information.” You claim there is agreement among scientists that supports your alarmist beliefs when in fact there is no such consensus. You attribute weather-driven disasters to anthropogenic global warming. You talk all benefits and no costs when you tout the wonders of “green jobs.” You’ve created a whole new industry sector for yourselves with this garbage. And now you’ve corrupted companies who want to skim off their portion. Please, you’re killing us with this crap.

Why are so many of you are a bunch of abortion promoting, population control socialists who hate the idea that free markets, capitalism, and access to cheap energy resources do more to enhance health and prosperity than your treasured government-mandated programs? Why do so many of your multimillion-dollar foundations have programs that support environmentalism excess and species protection while at the same time they promote human extermination? I suggest you visit places like Burma and North Korea, make your pitch about the horrid pollution that their economy-suffocating practices produce, and then come back and see us when you’ve got those bad boys straightened out. Then we’ll know you’re sincere about your priorities.

That anyone takes you seriously about CO2 emitting a stronger global warming “signal” than other contributing factors is amazing, but then again, we are talking about the environoia promoters in the media who love to stir up the sheeple, aren’t we? Well, they had a good run of peril pushing for several years, but now the truth (and economic factors) appear to be turning public thought:

There is both growing public reluctance to make personal sacrifices and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the major international efforts now underway to battle climate change, according to findings of a poll of 12,000 citizens in 11 countries. Less than half of those surveyed, or 47 per cent, said they were prepared to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions, down from 58 per cent last year. Read more of this excellent post with many links here.

The Australian tells journalists to get off the warming wagon:

THE word, according to Deborah Cameron, ABC radio’s morning host in Sydney, is that “there could be an ice-free Arctic in 2010”. Precisely whose word, and on what evidence, is unclear. So is the basis of SBS reporter Karen Middleton’s question to Kevin Rudd at the National Press Club in Canberra on Monday about environmental analysts’ claims that “the Barrier Reef and the Murray-Darling river system could well be gone by 2020”. Gone where?

Andrew Bolt

Much of the print and online coverage of the Government’s emissions trading scheme echoed the same sentiments, as opposed to facts.

This has not been the fourth estate’s finest hour. It has exposed much of the mainstream media as naive, prone to hyberbole on environmental issues, ideologically blinkered and lacking logic and analysis skills. Many of the culprits would pride themselves on being sophisticated sceptics in other areas of life, yet without question preach the scorched-earth gospel and hang on the prophecies of Greens leader Bob Brown. Fewer than one in 10 Australians vote Greens, yet that party’s claims have become accepted wisdom for many journalists.

UPDATE: Scientists damn AP for scaremongering, and Professor David Deming sets the record straight: “The mean global temperature, at least as measured by satellite, is now the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years sea level has stopped rising. Hurricane and cyclone activity in the northern hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980.” Deming said the (AP) article is further evidence of the media’s decision to talk about global warming as fact, despite what he says is a lack of evidence. “Reporters, as I understand reporters, are supposed to report facts,” Deming said. Read more and see increasingly favorable comments here. The tide is turning.

Here’s how it happens, as the scientists explain it: Mosquitoes make their way on to planes in tropical regions, and at the end of a flight can escape into the increasingly warmer climates of developed countries, where they now have a better chance of surviving and proliferating. “The real problem with malaria is that it is not rare,” said study author Dr. James H. Diaz, program director of environmental and occupational health at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. “It’s the most common cause of infections in the world. It kills over 12 million people per year, and they’re probably 300 to 500 million cases in the world every year. And the malaria-endemic areas of the world are themselves growing as the world warms.”

“And we also know that an infected patient can get on a plane and get anywhere in 24 hours,” added Diaz. “And an infected mosquito can get on a plane, as well. And in a warming world where mosquitoes live longer, have more breeding areas, and longer egg-laying seasons, this is a way the disease can be reintroduced into areas where it is now uncommon, such as the U.S.” Diaz and his colleagues presented their findings Monday at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting, in New Orleans.

See story here.

Lord Monckton fact-checked the story:  The official figures are that malaria kills 850,000 a year, not 12 million. Of course, only 50,000 a year were killed before DDT was banned. Even though the ban has been lifted by the WHO, the international Left won’t allow it to be used. So they blame the current incidence and prevalence of malaria on “global warming”. That is nonsense, because the malaria mosquito can survive in temperatures up to -25 Celsius, except that in the short breeding season it needs +15 for a brief time. That’s why the largest 20th-century outbreak was in Siberia, infecting 13 million and killing 600,000, 30,000 of whom were in Arkhangelsk on the Arctic circle. There is no statistically-significant correlation between global surface temperatures and the incidence or prevalence of malaria. And, in any event, the world has been cooling for seven years, when the IPCC had predicted warming. End of scare.

Icecap note: The environmentalists bear the responsibility for the malaria related death of many tens of millions of people (mostly small third world children) worldwide when they banned DDT because of the possible effect on songbirds - never proven. How many millions more will die because they are preventing the third world from modernizing because of their equally fictitious global warming hype?

THE on-again, off-again relationship between the progressives and the proletariat has hit a rough patch, this time over saving the planet. The moral middle class has barely forgiven the outer-suburban battlers for propping up John Howard’s conservative regime for more than a decade. Now, in what seems to be another infuriating act of false consciousness, the McMansion-dwelling classes appear reluctant to embrace the deep-green agenda on climate change.

The rift widened this week when Paul Howes, the Australian Workers Union national secretary, argued persuasively in The Australian against emission restrictions that would drive trade-exposed, energy-intensive industries overseas. “My members and their wives, husbands and children are getting pretty tired of being told their jobs are dirty and polluting, particularly by bankers relentlessly pocketing their money and frittering away superannuation,” he wrote.

For the tertiary-educated greens, it felt like a knife in the back. Didn’t the bourgeoisie stand shoulder to shoulder with the workers to defeat Mr Howard’s extreme workplace laws? And this is how they are rewarded! Class treachery of the highest order.

It is easy being green in the leafy inner city, where public transport is available, the tofu co-op is around the corner and the local cafe serves a decent fair-trade soy cappuccino. It is much harder in the outer suburbs, where two cars are a necessity, not a choice. Much of what passes for green commentary is a thinly disguised attack on the suburbs and the people who choose to live there. Flat-screen televisions, V8 utes and lawns that must be mown and watered are evidence of their environmental depravity.

Every now and then a proxy-war breaks out, the latest being a proposal to bring V8 Supercar racing to Sydney’s Olympic Park at Homebush, a suburb that lies on the geographical fault-line between environmentally conscious inner-western enclaves and the western suburbs. The arguments about trees, noise and air pollution will be familiar to Melburnians who followed the debate about Formula One Grand Prix racing at Albert Park and the environmental subtext is the same: shouldn’t Lewis Hamilton drive a Prius?

Kevin Rudd is acutely aware of the mood in the suburbs, where voters would take a dim view of any government that pushed deep-green policies at the expense of jobs or prosperity. We confidently predict, therefore, that the emissions targets the Government will announce on Monday will not be deep enough to mollify the tree-hugging Left. Once again, the green movement has positioned itself at the extremity of debate, a long way from the pragmatic centre ground defined by popular sentiment and occupied by both major parties. But that, we suspect, is where the moral minority feels at home, recycling the bathwater and looking smugly down their noses at the rest of us. See post here.

Be skeptical about global warming and you’re branded with a scarlet “D” for “Denier.” Say global warming is a crock, and you are shunned at parties. I’m an environmentalist, like most in Maine, but I’m not an environmental zealot. Because I’m also an economist and a professional business analyst. From these perches, I can see policies that purport to fix global warming - like cap and trade taxes, and legislation that enacts them, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative or the federal Climate Security Act - as pernicious and corrupting ideas in the arena of business and politics.

They’re elegant con jobs, which turn junk science into major dollars for developers. People like former governor Angus King and energy expert Matt Simmons are smart. They see the global warming rainbow coming and are placing their pots at the end of it. Simmons’ Ocean Energy Institute recently announced plans for an offshore wind farm in the Gulf of Maine estimated to produce an average of 1,650 megawatts of electricity for about 26 cents/kwh. King is a principle in Independence Wind, which wants to build turbines in Roxbury, and sits on the state’s Ocean Energy Task Force, which first met this week. Nonprofits like the Natural Resources Council of Maine see the rainbow too, but want to decide which pots get the gold. This has begun already.

Recently, Dylan Voorhees of the NRCM was quoted as saying, “It’s a significant pot of money (and) a variety of interests have opinions how to spend that money,” about Maine’s $750,000 share of RGGI money. A hearing on it was held in Augusta on Dec. 3. Money raised from cap and trade should be spent wisely.

But not just for wind power, an unreliable and hugely expensive source of electricity. For the $25 billion proposed for turbines in the gulf, a gas-fired electricity plant could produce 35,000 megawatts for 10 cents/kwh; a nuclear plant could produce 5,280 megawatts for about 10 cents/kwh, according to Carroll Lee, the former chief executive of Bangor Hydro.

Profit to wind energy proponents from money raised by cap and trade will cost the public through higher utility bills and costs for consumer goods, not to mention higher taxes, fees and bureaucratic expenses to pay for supervising this corruption. The whole campaign for “cap and trade” of carbon dioxide emissions - like RGGI or the Climate Security Bill - is based on the faulty scientific theory that carbon dioxide is the most potent greenhouse gas. It isn’t. (The real answer is water vapor - clouds.)

The environmental lobby misdirects attention to carbon dioxide, and by failing to explain the real factors involved in global warming, the media and political leaders are also negligent. It’s that simple. All the talk about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is irrelevant against the context of macro-environmental effects over which humans have no control. These include solar activity and ocean currents, as stated in a report from the Heartland Institute titled: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.”

The earth has gone through warming and cooling cycles for the last five million years. So we are witnessing the biggest con job in the history of mankind: guilt and fear politics are transforming dubious science into big dollars to further the interests of environmental zealots and entrepreneurs, while lower-cost, higher-yield energy alternatives are ignored for methods that stand to raise utility rates, increase consumer costs and reap significant profit. It all boils down to one question. Why should we pay so much, trying to stop a natural event? Read more here.

OGUNQUIT - One of the hottest environmental topics in the world - global warming - was the subject of a seminar offered Dec. 6 by the Ogunquit Conservation Commission.

Nationally known lecturer and Ogunquit resident Tom Wysmuller presented “The colder side of global warming,” a two-hour slide show, to about three dozen people.

Wysmuller has been lecturing on the topic since the early 1990s. His presentation was based on research work done on the polar ice cap by Maurice Ewing and William Donn. Their work and ice cores taken by scientists in Russia at the Vostok ice station have measured changes in the temperature and carbon dioxide levels over the past 400,000 years, Wysmuller said. “The cores show carbon dioxide and temperature levels increase periodically,” he said. “There have been four distinct ice ages and warming phases in that time.”

Wysmuller argues that the current spike in temperature and carbon dioxide levels are approaching levels that existed just prior to the most recent ice age. What that means, he said, is that we are nearing a period when temperatures will actually start to decrease and weather patterns dramatically change.

“As there is more open water in the Arctic, it absorbs more light and warmth,” he said. “There’s been a great loss of multi-year ice. The Arctic will be open soon.”

Rather than temperatures continuing to increase as a result of that, however, Wysmuller says they will start to decline. That will happen because the open water will generate an abundance of “ocean effect” snow, similar to the lake effect snow that hits the upstate New York area. “(The Arctic) will have massive amounts of ocean effect snow,” Wysmuller said. “The accumulated snowfall increases reflecting light, so temperatures will cool.”

Wysmuller said the temperature increases of today are distinct from carbon dioxide levels. “Carbon dioxide is increasing but not dragging the temperatures up,” he said. “If we controlled pollution now, we still wouldn’t stop the ice cap from melting. The carbon management issue is a separate and equally important issue. The largest contributor to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the warming oceans.”

Wysmuller presentation was part of the commission’s ongoing campaign to make Ogunquit the state’s first green town, under Gov. John Baldacci’s Carbon Challenge program.

Read more here

The United Nations is huddling in Poznan, Poland, this week to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, but the real news is that part of the global “consensus” on climate change seems to be unraveling. To wit, the myth of “green jobs.” In Brussels last week, some 11,000 metal workers clogged the EU quarter to protest global-warming policies. They worry that their industry could be harmed and their jobs forced overseas; some of them carried coffins as props. Most of the marching workers were from Germany, where auto makers are also still fuming over new emissions standards. Audi and BMW and other carbon-using industries have argued both for shallower emissions cuts and a longer phase-in period.

Meanwhile, Poland is threatening to veto a new EU climate-change accord unless restrictions on its coal use are eased. And Italy’s government complains that new green policies could cost its industry up to 20 billion lira a year over the next decade. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared at Poznan by video, asserting that green measures “will also revive our economies.” But not everyone is buying it. As Stefania Prestigiacomo, Italy’s environment minister, has noted, “Some people claim environmental measures are a way to relaunch industry, but we have to be realistic. Resources are limited, and they will be even more so because of the economic crisis.”

This is certainly a new tune for the Europeans, who have lectured Americans for more than a decade to sign Kyoto because the planet is in peril. Their happy talk of a painless 20% reduction in emissions by 2020 has been mugged by reality. Carbon emission regulations come at a high price in lost jobs and lost competitiveness.

No wonder, then, that the Europeans are delighted over the pledges by the incoming Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress to adopt similar legislation to tax U.S. industries. The EU members may differ on their own limits. But they all agree that the U.S. should “show leadership” by committing to meet the same target they’re setting for themselves—reducing emissions by 20% to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020. Never mind that most European countries aren’t close to meeting their Kyoto goals, and in all likelihood will fall short of any new targets. The point is to impose those same burdens on the Yanks.

China and India, two of the globe’s biggest carbon emitters, have even called Mr. Obama’s goals for combating climate change “inadequate” and have advised the U.S. to speed up its time table for carbon reductions. And why not? They would be first in line to gobble up the jobs and production lines that the U.S. would lose if energy costs rise sharply in America.

We hope the incoming Obama economics team is paying attention to the worker and industry backlash in Europe. Mr. Obama is still embracing the line from Greenpeace and the Environmental Defense Fund that cap and trade can generate five million “green jobs.” If you throw enough tax subsidies at something, you’re bound to get some new jobs. But if the money for those subsidies comes from higher energy taxes—and a cap and trade regime would amount to as much $1.2 trillion of new taxes—millions of jobs in carbon-using industry are also going to be lost. The Europeans once believed the “green jobs” myth too. Now, as blue-collar workers take to the streets, they have learned that climate-change legislation means green unemployment. Read more here.