“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”
Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles
August 24, 2010
When delving into the Climategate material I found PDF files of promotional pamphlets prepared by a communications agency intended to help UK government departments influence public debate.
Read more...August 23, 2010
Careful analysis of the sea level situation indicates that the risk of extensive flooding of low lying areas in Australia is remote and that State governments and councils are behaving irresponsibly.
Read more...August 19, 2010
Miranda Devine: “John Gay’s wife was spat at in the supermarket and the Tasmanian media sat on the fence as a good man’s reputation was destroyed.”
Read more...August 18, 2010
Michael Borgas, president, CSIRO Staff Association: “And in Australia, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and many other science agencies have been attacked and threatened in Senate estimates by politicians and in the right-wing media such as Quadrant and The Australian.”
Read more...August 15, 2010
Despite an overwhelming abundance of evidence clearly indicating that most Western nations are on an unsustainable path to a major economic crisis, the prevailing climate of denial is astounding.
Read more...August 12, 2010
Whatever happens at the election or afterwards, the Australian version of an emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, is unlikely to see the light of day.
Read more...August 8, 2010
Stimulated by the announcement of Labor’s “new” climate policy by Prime Minister Gillard, Australian voters were once more subjected to a parade of self-anointed, global-warming-is-dangerous public figures whose innocence of knowledge of the science of climate change is exceeded only by their sense of moral superiority.
Read more...August 6, 2010
Who would get appointed to Julia Gillard citizens’ assembly set-up to look at climate change? Would we see many appointees who are sceptical that global warming is taking place at all? No. Would we see many who admit warming is taking place, but that man is not responsible? No.
Read more...August 1, 2010
Bob Carter’s essay is a challenge to both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to ensure that all voices are heard in a true debate over the science of climate change before decisions are taken which, if they are wrong, will destroy generations of Australian lives.
Read more...August 1, 2010
Tony Abbott, says Ms Gillard must drop the Citizen’s Assembly and take real action. But there is nothing in his $3.2 billion ‘Direct Action Plan for Climate Change and the Environment’ that will seriously address the issue.
Read more...July 28, 2010
The power is back on. There is talk about extending the nationwide brownouts to two days, making it a Gaia Weekend rather than a single day. It would cut carbon emissions from the nation’s coal fired power stations by twenty eight percent.
Read more...July 26, 2010
On Counterpoint listen to Australian scientist John Abbot recount the case of David Holland and his attempts to get climate data from the British Met Office.
Read more...July 23, 2010
The Greens object to all power stations except for windmills and solar installations. If these ambitions were to be realised Australians would be forced to live as their 19th century forebears lived.
Read more...July 20, 2010
You might think that these people are deranged but there were 1,400 of them, tertiary educated to a person, clapping and cheering enthusiastically. It’s a sobering thought that these people financed from the public purse and dedicated to destroying the Victorian coal and gas based electricity generation industry are comparable in number to those in gainful employ in that industry.
Read more...July 20, 2010
Cardinal Pell: “A politician referred my February article on global warming to the Bureau of Meteorology for comment. In a roundabout way they conceded the truth of most of my factual statements, but ducked the issue of Roman warming and claimed that ‘all available hemispheric to global scale analyses’ suggest recent decades have been warmer than in the Middle Ages. This is misleading.”
Read more...July 18, 2010
A suggestion was made during the Monckton Tour that a movie be made, aimed specifically at young people, to give them the real facts.
Read more...July 15, 2010
Clive Crook: “The case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no. His record is swooned over. Verdict: case dismissed, with apologies that Mann has been put to such trouble.”
Read more...July 9, 2010
The author of a new book on climate scepticism, Mark Lawson, is a senior journalist who writes on environmental matters for the Australian Financial Review. Remarkable.
Read more...July 8, 2010
Anthony Watts runs the world’s most popular science blog with three million hits per month. One of the reasons for its popularity is that it possibly the most cheerful science blog, which in turn is a reflection on the owner.
Read more...July 7, 2010
Crikey has published an article by Andrew Macintosh, associate director of the ANU Centre for Climate Law and Policy, criticising Tim Flannery. Macintosh disputes seven claims Flannery made in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece.
Read more...July 7, 2010
Anthony Watts claims that in November 2009 an Australian contributor to his blog was the first to dub the breaking CRU scandal “ClimateGate”.
Read more...July 6, 2010
This week Professor Bob Carter was interviewed about his new book on ABC radio.
Read more...June 30, 2010
"Noble Cause Corruption is a belief that what you're doing is so much more important than what anyone else is doing because your cause is noble, you're saving the planet, and because you're saving the planet, you are doing it for the good of mankind."
Read more...June 30, 2010
John Black: “The Greens are the richest group of voters in Australian politics. The poorest of course are the National Party voters.”
Read more...June 26, 2010
The University of Western Australia is presenting a closed mind discussion of climate change with a university psychologist explaining the “perils” of climate scepticism.
Read more...June 25, 2010
Gillard’s speech suggests a “softening” in the Rudd approach and could conceivably provide the basis for an independent public inquiry into the science or at the least into the temperature measurement series.
Read more...June 20, 2010
Anthony Watts: “I find that while I’m doing my tour in Australia, CSIRO organized a meeting that is designed to combat the sort of inconvenient discussions I’m having. Fortunately, I’ve been given the whole slide show.”
Read more...June 18, 2010
The Victorian Government sponsors a seminar for public servants on how to deal with “climate denialism”. The presenter is a CSIRO scientist.
Read more...June 17, 2010
Anthony Watts on the attempted hijacking of his Brisbane lecture by an Australian academic.
Read more...June 15, 2010
What is distressing about the renewables approach is that the expansion of the scheme from a few percent of demand to near 20% occurred without serious consideration of the consequences and with bi-partisan support.
Read more...June 15, 2010
Some people think that the global warming scam is finished and that there is no further threat to our jobs, our economy and our energy supplies. Unfortunately there is no reason to relax. Public opinion has changed but the politicians have not.
Read more...June 13, 2010
An historic occasion. Anthony Watts’ Australian lecture tour has begun.
Read more...June 9, 2010
Fair Farming Group: "In the absence of sound science the case has not been made for the economic costs to agriculture and industry associated with an ETS."
Read more...June 9, 2010
There’s no fear of government funds being used to propagate a one-sided message, because JoNova is discussing the science (with no government funding, no industry sponsorship, and no university support). So that’s what they call, “balance”.
Read more...June 8, 2010
If, at the next election, Rudd wins, and the Greens control the senate, what we get then will be far worse than the ETS we fought before. They will have carte blanche to run the chainsaws through the intricate branches of business, careers, and livelihoods.
Read more...June 8, 2010
Tim Flannery: “It is my job as curator not to program any climate change skeptics.”
Read more...June 2, 2010
The Wheeler Centre’s “Festival of Intolerance” rolls on with the announcement of even more speakers - but not a sceptic in sight.
Read more...June 1, 2010
The CSIRO might be forgiven for not having a corporate memory more than 60 years long, but why did they and the Bureau of Meteorology only use 50 years of data to produce a graph [of record hot day maximums] when they had more than 100 years of data they could have used?
Read more...June 1, 2010
It is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that NIWA’s political urge to prove a warming trend overcame its professional urge to apply objective scientific principles in constructing a sound and defensible temperature series.
Read more...May 31, 2010
A second curious, and even dodgier, thing happened after Quirk's Quadrant report. CSIRO “updated” its main graph to include the more recent methane data. No admission was made and the graph's scale made it all but invisible and did not show the plateauing.
Read more...May 29, 2010
The Deakin Lectures reflect the continuing fight back by the many politicians and governments, bureaucrats and academics who have locked themselves into the belief that the earth faces a dangerous period of warming unless governments act to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. In effect the Wheeler Centre has been established with taxpayers’ funds as a centre to promote left wing views.
Read more...May 27, 2010
Apparently, the final draft “State of the Climate” report was not reviewed by CSIRO or BOM scientists themselves, and when it is questioned others are blamed for the errors it contains and the confused dating of information.
Read more...May 26, 2010
The methane data were plotted by a non-CSIRO designer in a manner that resulted in about a 20 year lag at the end of the record, presumably to separate them visually from the carbon dioxide record. This should have been explained in State of Climate - unfortunately it was not, and this has lead to Quirk’s misinterpretation of the data.
Read more...May 23, 2010
It is surprising that the Australian media exhibited no interest in a major international conference at which copious evidence was provided that global warming is no longer a threat (if ever it was), and that global cooling may well be underway. Robyn Williams, Tony Jones and the Kerry O’Brien team, where were you?
Read more...May 23, 2010
Sometime after my essay was posted online a funny thing happened on the CSIRO website. There was a change to page 5 of their “State of the Climate” report. This has the appearance of a response.
Read more...May 19, 2010
The CSIRO paper “State of the Climate” is as much a commentary on the state of the climate scientists who put the document together. The CSIRO has waded into a large government funded trough and is not inclined to publish anything that gets between it and the trough.
Read more...May 15, 2010
New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and the Climate Ministers are attempting to save face rather than confess that they have been running their policies on the basis of bogus data for many years.
Read more...May 12, 2010
I have become aware of the controversy over your comments at an Adelaide school last week, including the public response by [a] scientist with an alarmist global warming bent.
Read more...May 11, 2010
It appears the differences in views regarding the reality and origin of global warming are of a quantitative nature rather than qualitative nature.
Read more...May 11, 2010
It’s time for the propaganda of half truths to stop. It’s time for universities to be called to order and shamed for their pathetic standards of logic and reason.
Read more...May 10, 2010
Climate: The Counter-Consensus by Bob Carter is due for publication in the UK in May, and release in Australia in June.
Read more...May 10, 2010
Two new videos of Bob Carter and Barry Brill on the messy NZ ETS, and other things.
Read more...May 9, 2010
Wheeler Centre Director Chrissy Sharp: “If we talk about how bad tobacco is, we don’t ask for someone to come in and represent the tobacco companies. I do think we’re seeing that in climate change.”
Read more...May 6, 2010
Letter to Catalyst: “A program on science has a particular duty to ensure that misstatements about the scientific facts made on programs, or included on web sites, are corrected. Your program on the Antarctic has already led a prominent journalist to erroneously accept the presentation in your program.”
Read more...April 30, 2010
Quadrant Online's climate debate between Andrew Glikson and Joanne Nova. Join the discussion.
Read more...April 29, 2010
Andrew Glikson: "As in other fields of science and technology, credibility lies with the respective experienced authorities and is protected, as much as humanly possible, by the peer review system."
Read more...April 29, 2010
Joanne Nova: "Andrew Glikson backs his arguments with weak evidence and logical errors. Instead of empirical evidence, often he quotes authoritative reports written by glorified committees."
Read more...April 28, 2010
Eli Kintisch has a breath-taking new concept for all of us to contemplate and worry about — “clean air might actually intensify global warming”.
Read more...April 27, 2010
Of the 30 “best people addressing the climate problem now”, the Alfred Deakin lecturers all appear to be warmists, and include John Brumby and Malcolm Turnbull. Scientists with any knowledge of the global warming debate are in short supply and there are no sceptics.
Read more...April 27, 2010
Those fightingback are trying desperately to dismiss the growing revelations that not only is the science used by the so-called consensus highly (and increasingly) uncertain but so too are the temperatures used as statistical backing for that science.
Read more...April 19, 2010
The widening gulf between scientific observations around the globe and public perceptions of the nature and origin of climate change is threatening to lead the world away from evidence-based policies despite projections by the world’s major climate research bodies.
Read more...April 19, 2010
A trawl through the Lateline archive netted more than 20 one-on-one interviews in the same period with experts on the true-believer side of the debate. It is a scandalous scorecard: believers 20+, heretics 1.
Read more...April 19, 2010
The central problem with “attribution” of the cause for the warming is that dozens of major forces are working on our climate, and none of them leave a business card.
Read more...April 12, 2010
About once in a decade a ship runs aground somewhere on the Great Barrier Reef. Although this has never resulted in other than trivial damage to the reef, a three ring media circus always unfolds.
Read more...April 5, 2010
It was left to SBS to show some sense of occasion by broadcasting in the 7.30 prime time slot a documentary entitled Turin Shroud — The New Evidence. And the great drama in this, as with global warming, all got down to that most pesky of substances - carbon.
Read more...March 30, 2010
The State of Climate report can only be described as offering a grossly inadequate assessment of both past trends and possible future trends in climate. The many inadequacies offer the Coalition an opportunity to demand an independent inquiry into the science being used to back the dangerous warming thesis.
Read more...March 29, 2010
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has grown into a 45 million dollar a year bureaucracy charged with “managing” the reef. This it does by remote control from air conditioned offices where it oversees the application of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems.
Read more...March 29, 2010
After Avatar, normal activist extremism, Lenten sacrifices of carbon pollution and special intentions (prayers) for environmental activists a prayer to the IPCC.
Read more...March 29, 2010
Few stories in science come bigger than deliberate censorship, and especially so when it concerns material that is relevant to the dangerous global warming debate. We present a brief outline of how we were censored by leading AGW scientists.
Read more...March 24, 2010
A new Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority report, published in PNAS, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, makes questionable claims of remarkably rapid, large, widespread and diverse environmental and economic benefits from the expanded protected areas introduced on the Great Barrier Reef in 2004.
Read more...March 23, 2010
“A rose may stop smelling like a rose. This is the concern of environmentalists as flowers are losing their scent due to climate change and air pollution. And their fragrance may be lost forever.”
Read more...March 22, 2010
Apart from the “science is settled” spin, which is code for “don’t question us”, the other side of the debate has been the “Outrageous-Claims Department”. This is where the dedicated followers of climate let pass for science any outrageous claim made by any of their front-line “experts”.
Read more...March 22, 2010
The controversy continues. But with the imprimatur of Phil Jones to the key fact that recent warming is not unusual, the debate will never be the same.
Read more...March 22, 2010
Rule number one: Don’t believe anything you read or hear in the news about ice. Count on it to be a tart up of a pre-tarted position.
Read more...March 18, 2010
Margaret Simons: ‘When the Carter and Hendrickx pieces were rejected, Quadrant magazine gleefully published them together with the predictable rhetoric of ABC censorship and "iron curtains".’
Read more...March 17, 2010
Marc Hendrickx: “Why did the ABC not report on the obvious and easily located links between ClimateWorks Australia and the Australian Labor Party?”
Read more...March 15, 2010
Matt Ridley: “As a long-time champion of science, I find the reaction of the scientific establishment more shocking than anything. The reaction was not even a shrug: it was shut-eyed denial.”
Read more...March 15, 2010
Without being rude or discourteous, Professor Tim’s lecture would have to have been the worst presented, most head-bangingly-boring and uninformative address that this writer can remember.
Read more...March 15, 2010
The Climategate affair and its ongoing revelations have exposed a deep systemic corruption at the heart of climate science. Unfortunately this corruption is not restricted to climate science but is endemic across the environmental sciences which have become more of an ideology and a scam than they are a science.
Read more...March 15, 2010
There are numerous myths surrounding those who are wrongly labeled “deniers”. Most of them can be distilled into six basic accusations.
Read more...March 13, 2010
John Quiggin: “Looking over the evidence that is now available, I think there is enough to point to Steven McIntyre as the person, along with the actual hacker or leaker, who bears primary moral responsibility for the crime.”
Read more...March 8, 2010
The best response came from Dr James Hansen who quietly said that more people had been killed by ice flying off wind turbine blades than from nuclear accidents.
Read more...March 5, 2010
“The $175 million green loans scheme was "hijacked" by opportunists, overseas call centres and companies that specialised in making homes environmentally friendly, leading to a raft of dubious assessments.”
Read more...March 4, 2010
The role of the scientist in this debate, is as it has been: to continue to diligently report the facts, test the theories, to be honest, to be skeptical, to avoid hyperbole, to properly outline the errors and uncertainties, to avoid activism.
Read more...March 4, 2010
The ABC has again banned climate sceptics from taking part in public debate. This time the victim of censorship by The Drum is Marc Hendrickx.
Read more...March 3, 2010
Hansenist climate alarmism has also damaged the standing of many leading science journals and science organizations, which have replaced their formerly careful editorial and organizational balance with environmental alarmism and naked global warming advocacy.
Read more...March 3, 2010
After inviting professor Bob Carter to contribute to an online debate The Drum has backed down and rejected his essay - a criticism of visiting climate alarmist James Hansen.
Read more...February 28, 2010
UPDATE: A story that changed completely when the ABC's The Drum rejected essays it had commissioned.
Read more...February 28, 2010
Putting the climate debate into perspective. The release of carbon dioxide will not cause dangerous global warming. An ETS would impose a severe cost penalty for agriculture and for the economy overall is not required.
Read more...February 22, 2010
Kevin Rudd has called climate change the greatest moral challenge of our time, and he has made no apology for that. Tony Abbott is more succinct, he calls it “crap”.
Read more...February 22, 2010
Lord Monckton interviewed by Tom Minchin: “The IPCC should be disbanded. It is corrupt from top to bottom, its pseudo-science has been exposed for the scam it is.”
Read more...February 21, 2010
The Age: “Australia green groups have called a strategy meeting to devise ways to hit back at the climate sceptics movement, amid fears they are losing the PR war.”
Read more...February 15, 2010
The weight of evidence is such that modellers are frantically revising their strategies. They are asking for an international climate computing centre and $5 billion (for 2000 times more computing power) to solve this new problem in climate forecasting.
Read more...February 14, 2010
“This is how debate should be, and just to read even Lambert’s admittedly partisan account is to see how much faster we are likely to arrive at truths, or at least save ourselves from error, if we promote debate and insist it be held in good faith.”
Read more...February 14, 2010
Most sceptics find appalling the Orwellian Animal Farm structure that represents the way global warming theorists and the IPCC have actively gone about promoting their theory.
Read more...February 11, 2010
John Quiggin: ‘All the same elements were there – supposedly disinterested citizen researchers who were in fact paid rightwing operatives, misuse of accountability procedures, and exceptional gullibility on the part of the “sceptical” mass audience.’
Read more...February 10, 2010
Watching the UK Guardian catch up with the blog world is a lot of fun. Here’s a new treat.
Read more...February 10, 2010
Mike Carlton on climate sceptics: “These people are not merely deluded. They are downright dangerous.”
Read more...February 8, 2010
Jon Faine, ABC Melbourne radio announcer, had Lord Christopher Monckton on his show to debate Rupert Posner. This is what happened.
Read more...February 3, 2010
Monckton's time was cut short by the insistence of The Age newspaper environmental writer on a one on one interview. The article that followed in The Age on Tuesday said next to nothing about the arguments raised and the tone of the article could best be described as “atmospheric”!
Read more...February 2, 2010
Lord Monckton lectured yesterday in packed to the rafters venues in Melbourne. The photos tell the story.
Read more...February 2, 2010
Guardian headlines:“Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws. Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures.”
Read more...January 31, 2010
A major new analysis by two Australian scientists shows that the temperature data published by the IPCC and other organisations has been manipulated to give the appearance of a warming trend - but not one that has actually occurred. This analysis has major international implications in regard to the policies to be adopted by countries on emissions reductions.
Read more...January 31, 2010
The man who managed to get the climate industry to where it is today is a mild mannered character by the name of Maurice Strong. The whole climate change business, and it is a business, started with Mr Strong.
Read more...January 29, 2010
“Lord Christopher Monckton, imperious and articulate, won yesterday's climate change debate in straight sets.”
Read more...January 28, 2010
The Australian Climate Science Coalition reports that on the first day of his Australian tour Lord Monckton spoke to 1400 people at two Sydney functions.
Read more...January 27, 2010
Only published in the US last week the very first book on the Climategate scandal is now available in Australia on Amazon’s Kindle.
Read more...January 24, 2010
The Australian has performed best in giving space to sceptics and dissenters but has stuck to the save the planet line in its editorials, some say because Rupert Murdoch said so publicly. Yet in a personal communication with Murdoch he indicated his scepticism to me.
Read more...January 24, 2010
A doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is always claimed to be where we are heading. Lord Kelvin, in 1895, calculated that so much coal was being burnt that all the free oxygen in the atmosphere would be gone in some three hundred years. This calculation caused some distress at the time.
Read more...January 24, 2010
The scientists, and the politicians and media types, who have totally embraced the dogma of human-induced climate change, have gambled heavily with their reputations. They have nowhere to run.
Read more...January 24, 2010
It is a great tragedy that the vital debate about environmental issues should have been so effectively hijacked by the radical left and ideologues channeling the latest version of the irrationalism and totalitarianism that deformed the 20th century.
Read more...January 22, 2010
“The Climategate files opened up what was happening behind the scenes, and it turned out there was no paranoid fantasy: they really were out to get you.”
Read more...January 20, 2010
Sinclair Davidson reveals that both the Rudd government’s White Paper into the CPRS and the Garnaut Report used the false Himalayan glacier story.
Read more...January 19, 2010
Lawyer Val Majkus has written to Australian MPs asking for a royal commission into man-made climate change claims and protesting that information on a government website "is misleading and deceptive and displays a lack of due diligence by the Government in the wake of Climategate."
Read more...January 19, 2010
It’s out. The first book on the Climategate scandal: “For those who have heard that the emails were taken out of context - we provide that context and show it is worse when context is provided.”
Read more...January 17, 2010
Tony Abbott’s initiative promises not only to produce practical benefits for the environment, but also provides an opportunity to reassert the conservative heritage of environmental thought, while challenging the hegemony of the left-green statist ideology.
Read more...January 10, 2010
Even assuming that ecological viability itself were in issue, it is still entirely unjustified and unjustifiable to jump to a conclusion that government is able to centrally plan the ecology and the economy, by bureaucratic command-and-control.
Read more...January 8, 2010
Lord Christopher Monckton will present a luncheon lecture in Melbourne on February 1: “Apocalypse? NO! ‘Global Warming’ is not a Global Crisis”.
Read more...January 6, 2010
The environment minister should stick to saving whales and doing what he does best - gyrating wildly across a stage whilst making bold political statements that he will never be held accountable for.
Read more...January 5, 2010
Dennis Boothby rocks away the climate blues.
Read more...January 5, 2010
Largely ignored in the local Australian media was an extraordinary story published in London’s Daily Telegraph two weeks ago which accused the Chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, ‘of making a fortune from his links with “carbon trading” companies.’
Read more...January 4, 2010
On the last day of Copenhagen my Minister said to me “The Departmental Secretary is out of his tree”.
Read more...January 4, 2010
New tariffs are now prohibited by the WTO, and both the CAP and VAT are unpopular with voters. Enter “Climate Change” - and an indirect tariff via a carbon tax, an ETS.
Read more...December 26, 2009
The opinion of economists on the science is superfluous to their role and simply gets in the way of informed debate.
Read more...December 24, 2009
“The ABC [state controlled media] acknowledges that polar bears are not necessarily driven towards cannibalism because of climate change; this claim should have been attributed to conservationists.”
Read more...December 21, 2009
In so far as bias can be detected in press coverage of global warming it operates in favour of the alarmist message, which is, of course, no surprise to those familiar with the ways of the media.
Read more...December 21, 2009
In Sydney, Greenpeace (who are apparently completely above the law) once again assaulted the Opera House to unfurl a banner demanding a ‘climate treaty now’, as if such a predictable and platitudinous stunt contributed anything meaningful.
Read more...December 21, 2009
A central issue for the debate was whether to limit temperature rises to 1.5 or 2 degrees centigrade. The former apparently insured the survival of the Pacific island states while the latter would do them and some of Bangladesh irreparable damage.
Read more...December 21, 2009
Peter Spencer is demanding the Australian government pay fair compensation to him and all Australian property-holders whose property rights were taken without compensation pursuant to the Kyoto Protocol.
Read more...December 21, 2009
Pity the politician in 2010. Climate change policies pose an unknown, but potentially strong, temptation to cross party lines.
Read more...December 19, 2009
Obama’s short speech to the conference plenary was probably the most insulting and patronising speech delivered by a US President in a long time.
Read more...December 18, 2009
It’s hard to stand between developing country governments and a pot of gold especially when the obligations that come with it will fall onto their successors.
Read more...December 17, 2009
Government indifference to serious emissions reduction is driven by political greed because they don’t want to be exposed to the voter policy backlash from actually cutting emissions.
Read more...December 16, 2009
NGOs don’t actually like being called NGOs. They prefer being referred to as “civil society”.
Read more...December 15, 2009
Rumours around the conference are that a group of NGOs will try and storm the conference centre to try and get access to political leaders.
Read more...December 14, 2009
The Climategate files have demonstrated the scientific malfeasance of an influential and internationally well networked segment of the climate research community.
Read more...December 14, 2009
As the Copenhagen conference unfolds it is possible to detect the outlines of the grim future dystopia that will emerge if the stealthy and remorseless proponents of global eco-fascism are allowed to remake our world in their image.
Read more...December 14, 2009
Leaked emails and computer code reveal manipulation of data to serve political ends, attempted perversion of the peer review process, collusion, destruction of data and worse.
Read more...December 14, 2009
Gold, Silver and Bronze medals are falling out of the sky in the first week of the Climate Games in Copenhagen.
Read more...December 14, 2009
Considering the religious fervour that many climate evangelists bring to the issue Sunday is, appropriately, an official day of rest.
Read more...December 14, 2009
I attended the Copenhagen Climate Challenge Conference. It was about the science of climate. Speakers were scientists, lawyers and environmentalists.
Read more...December 13, 2009
What was surprising was that the topic of the leaked emails and documents that has prompted ‘Climategate’ didn’t come up in the questions and answers section.
Read more...December 12, 2009
To make themselves feel important most delegates at international negotiating conferences always talk in acronyms, but at Copenhagen they’re in overdrive.
Read more...December 11, 2009
Like the debate about climate change in Australia, symbolism over substance is triumphing in Copenhagen and the pledge to make the conference carbon neutral is looking decidedly hard to deliver.
Read more...December 10, 2009
The Australian government alone has more than one hundred registered delegates.
Read more...December 10, 2009
The credibility of this segment of so-called news was zero to any intelligent person; even, I would hope, to those wedded to the conventional wisdom of man-made global warming.
Read more...December 9, 2009
Is any one actually in favour of pollution? Are people really organized and paid to encourage more pollution? Does this make any sense at all?
Read more...December 9, 2009
The best entertainment was at a side-event with a speaker who dared decry the NGO group think that prevails over the conference.
Read more...December 8, 2009
Anyone sceptical of the UN system or the science of climate change never made it into the opening ceremony under the gaze of the world’s media. Instead their voices were sent to the other end of the conference centre out of sight, and out of mind.
Read more...December 7, 2009
Suppose a conventional wisdom is substantially astray from the truth (the way the world really is) and its impact is adverse. Never mind how it started, the important question is when and under what circumstances will it go away.
Read more...December 7, 2009
A milestone in this mess can be said to be when John Houghton of the IPCC said it was the IPCC’s job to “orchestrate” the views of science. Everything that has happened flows as an inevitable consequence of that.
Read more...December 7, 2009
Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
Read more...December 2, 2009
What should we make of the near-unanimity of opinion among a cohort of scientists in such a complex and dynamic field?
Read more...November 30, 2009
As the Climategate emails show, the warmers captured the whole system – all the journals, all their editors and the journals’ boards.
Read more...November 30, 2009
A selection of videos about climate change and Climategate. Bring your own popcorn.
Read more...November 30, 2009
Wikileaks justified the publication of Sarah Palin's stolen emails as in the public interest. There was no outcry from the Left condemning the theft of the emails or questioning the possibly unethical publishing of personal material.
Read more...November 30, 2009
Yesterday I visited John L. Daly’s tiny office where he lived on the outskirts of Launceston. It is about the size of two telephone boxes.
Read more...November 30, 2009
In order to distract the people from massive government debt and invasion, the Prime Minister had the public servants construct a carbon horse.
Read more...November 30, 2009
Last Wednesday the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition released a document showing that New Zealand’s average temperature had not risen by as much as its National Institute for Water and Atmosphere claims.
Read more...November 30, 2009
That the utter disregard for truth exhibited in the CRU emails can be either invisible or insignificant to AGW defenders is indicative of the vast chasm between their faith and the open rational empirical world of real science.
Read more...November 24, 2009
Science is supposedly open with data, methods, conclusions and hypotheses all made available to other scientists so that they might confirm the processing and then apply further tests to the hypotheses. The CRU emails reveal the antithesis of this.
Read more...November 23, 2009
Recent statements from leading politicians concentrate on suppressing debate and ridiculing sceptics of dangerous global warming. Yet anyone who studies the evidence will realize that the science is most uncertain. Objective, unimpassioned debate is desperately needed.
Read more...November 23, 2009
Clive Hamilton has now compared climate change skeptics to Holocaust deniers, and predicted that the effects of climate change would be a hundred or even two hundred times worse than the Nazi Holocaust.
Read more...November 23, 2009
“A key concern is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which advises governments around the world - has used the Murray Darling Basin and incorrect science as an example of CO2 induced climate change.”
Read more...November 23, 2009
Threats to the environment and the climate change “crisis” are hypothetical arguments presided over by people who have never built, grown, manufactured or produced anything and whose practical ability is challenged by changing a light bulb.
Read more...November 15, 2009
No-one in those days, or up until recently, would have thought there might come a day when the debt of war would be replaced by the debt of climate ‘warming’, for which reparations were demanded.
Read more...November 15, 2009
Initially, George Monbiot agreed to debate Ian Plimer, but someone reasoned that it was a high-risk venture - a debate between a froth and bubble, blog-obsessed journalist and a leading academic with impeccable credentials in earth sciences.
Read more...November 15, 2009
Do we have the politicians with the courage required to put the brakes on this increasingly menacing process, or will the future of Australia be sacrificed on the altar of the eco-apocalypse?
Read more...November 12, 2009
I will debate Kevin Rudd on the science of climate change anywhere, anytime. I am very confident that he will be too cowardly to accept the challenge, far easier to resort to invective.
Read more...November 12, 2009
Ian Plimer and George Monbiot were to meet in London to debate climate change on 12 November. Monbiot chickened out. Here are two emails they exchanged.
Read more...November 10, 2009
The Prime Minister’s speech to the Lowy Institute appears to have been drafted by one of Australia’s many climate change bloggers. It certainly marks a new low in the standard of political debate.
Read more...November 9, 2009
The CIA goes as far as to suggest that the new global patterns considered likely to last at least 40 years and possibly centuries, could cause political and economic upheaval “beyond comprehension”.
Read more...November 9, 2009
The National President of the CFMEU, a union covering 13,000 coal miners, recently described the term “green jobs” as “dopey”.
Read more...November 9, 2009
Because the Greens portray themselves as “progressive” in their political ideology and programme, questions about the “natural fit” between radical environmentalism and fascism have not been frequently asked.
Read more...November 9, 2009
The description of the impact of the CPRS with its ETS has been an artful exercise in misleading and deceptive presentation. It is another GST dressed up as a tax on carbon dioxide.
Read more...November 3, 2009
The famous COP 15 or Copenhagen Treaty, which few politicians seem to have read, is here.
Read more...November 2, 2009
It is a measure of the corruption of science amidst the moral panic of global warming that Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ has now been elevated to the status of a scientific theory.
Read more...November 2, 2009
Will the Copenhagen Treaty be debated and voted on by the Australian Parliament? - or will it be simply be another one of those international treaties simply signed by the Prime Minister. Another one of our “international obligations”!
Read more...October 27, 2009
Quadrant Online has received a passionate plea for tolerance - emailed from a gum tree somewhere in Higgins.
Read more...October 26, 2009
A cunning plan to bring water to Lake Eyre, rain to south east Australia and prosperity to the Murray Darling Basin.
Read more...October 26, 2009
Though no scientist doubts that humans influence climate at local level - causing both warmings and coolings - no definitive evidence has yet been discovered that a human influence is measurable, let alone dangerous, at global level.
Read more...October 19, 2009
The Left should call a halt to their ongoing war on DDT and thereby on science; the collateral damage – mostly third-world children, pregnant women and the old, claimed by malaria – is unacceptable.
Read more...October 19, 2009
All Australian politicians have now for some years lived in terror of a global-warming-brainwashed electorate, and of the strong Green intimidation that continues to be exercised against all voters.
Read more...October 12, 2009
Why should the people of the world, whose lives will be utterly transformed by the draconian actions proposed by the global warming fanatics, meekly accept their fate?
Read more...October 12, 2009
The film is not so much about the science of climate change as it is about explaining the sociology and politics of what is now perhaps the world’s greatest-ever scare campaign.
Read more...October 5, 2009
The advocates for what turned out to be markedly opposing views were Des Moore, the former Deputy Secretary of the Federal Treasury and Harry Clarke, Professor of Economics at La Trobe University.
Read more...October 5, 2009
Rachel Carson’s magnum opus Silent Spring made her famous and a darling of the left. In making her case against DDT Carson constructs not a sturdy cornerstone of scientific truth but rather an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.
Read more...October 2, 2009
A proper hazard reduction and adaptation policy to deal with known future climatic threats is a very different matter to the political question implicit in today’s headlines.
Read more...September 27, 2009
On October 18 our documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, will premiere in homes and campuses across Australia and around the world.
Read more...September 27, 2009
By what authority does the ABC allow ecoevangelists to grandstand their relentless and extreme views at public expense – effectively providing their organisations with continuous free advertising at the taxpayers’ expense?
September 21, 2009
As the temperature trend for ten years now has been one of cooling, since the unusually warm El Nino year of 1998, this requires a precautionary response to cooling rather than warming.
Read more...September 14, 2009
The atmosphere is not for turnin’
Temperatures rise and people are burnin’
too much fuel but they ain’t learnin’
the earth’s on edge of over turning’
And we are just its overburden.
September 9, 2009
More and more questions are being asked about the scientific foundations of the ETS by highly qualified scientists and others. Yet these doubts are simply being disregarded. This is a high risk path with no apparent ability to back-down if the entire edifice is built on sand.
Read more...September 7, 2009
My assessment is not based primarily on scientific analysis but on many years in Treasury and outside of analysing proposals for government intervention to solve perceived “crises”. Much analysis of the present proposal requires little more than common sense.
Read more...August 31, 2009
To pass this Bill, or any incarnation of it ahead of the Copenhagen talks, is sheer folly. To do so, when Labor’s scheme is not even scheduled to commence until 2011, would suggest that politics and politicians have taken leave of their senses.
Read more...August 24, 2009
It is claimed that there is a scientific consensus about human-induced climate change. Consensus is a process of politics not science. There is certainly no scientific consensus about human-induced climate change and the loudest voice does not win scientific discussions. Science is married to evidence, no matter how uncomfortable.
Read more...August 24, 2009
In my view what is important about The Climate Caper is that it is an insider’s account of how Australia’s scientific institutions were suborned into being accomplices to a religious crusade and, how, in accepting the bribes that were offered, they have seriously compromised their integrity.
Read more...August 24, 2009
The terrible conclusion to be drawn from all this is that while we are exporting expensive energy to Japan, China, India and our other customers we will set about destroying a competitive advantage of cheap power while literally tilting at windmills!
Read more...August 24, 2009
I asked David Karoly why he had not replied to my invitation to attend a lecture by a US scientist who described the kind of science he presented as a “scam”. K said he was on leave, to which I responded “you could have replied”.
Read more...August 24, 2009
The astonishing bipartisanship on an environmental issue that threatens Australia’s ability to compete internationally has quickly inspired a startling proposal on “how to save” Malcolm Turnbull by “doing a Whitlam”.
Read more...August 17, 2009
Following the lead of the British Government with the example of the Tate Modern in the old Battersea Power Station, will we see governments create a string of art galleries and museums in the Latrobe and Hunter Valleys or will some sanity return to the essential provision of electricity?
Read more...August 17, 2009
Reports that climate change is causing some kind of far fetched change in something or other are now a daily occurrence in a news media which has abandoned any vestige of due diligence in reporting stories which appear to support the dogma of global warming.
Read more...August 17, 2009
I was asked at a conference in New York last March where public opinion has to be before we can turn government away from climate change. My answer was 70 per cent, and I believe that's the objective.
Read more...August 12, 2009
There are many silent skeptics. If the ALP or the Coalition offered their members a silent ballot, they might be shocked at how few privately believe the dogma.
Read more...August 11, 2009
Even when alarmist evidence is conclusively discredited (e.g. the hockey stick graph), the climate alarmists continue to use it, and to dismiss all conflicting evidence no matter how sound or voluminous it may be. When their own claims fail, they revise the evidence, not their hypothesis.
Read more...August 10, 2009
The IPCC projection of the “very likely” average temperature increase to 2100 has a range of uncertainty that is so wide (50-60 per cent) as to make it meaningless for policy decision-making.
Read more...August 8, 2009
Comfortably clad, fed and housed, and egged on to view themselves as original sinners, our chattering classes and their media flag-wavers have proved astonishingly susceptible to ecoevangelistic propaganda about dangerous human-caused climate change.
Read more...August 8, 2009
Air and ocean temperatures have been dropping for the last few years, contradicting the climate model predictions made in 2001 of soaring temperatures. Yet the world won’t listen, and seems determined to commit economic stupicide. How did it come to this?
Read more...August 8, 2009
There is no direct, real world evidence for dangerous human-caused warming at all, and that despite the efforts of thousands of scientists and organisations since 1990, and the expenditure of approaching $100 billion, looking for precisely such evidence. Instead, the global warming scare is built entirely around unvalidated computer climate models that are known to be wrong.
Read more...August 8, 2009
Wind and solar are fantasies in the Green mind. Where they have been seriously tried, as in Spain, the costs have been prodigious and the impacts on employment calamitous.
Read more...August 8, 2009
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (the Australian ETS) cannot have any beneficial effects on climate, but it and its associated policies will certainly increase farm costs, decrease farm employment and reduce food production.
Read more...August 8, 2009
The government’s intention to introduce an emissions trading system in Australia rests upon their belief that human carbon-dioxide emissions are a cause of dangerous global warming. That belief is incorrect.
Read more...August 8, 2009
Australia’s emissions reductions can have no significant impact on global emissions or global climate. Therefore, the incremental benefits to Australia of the Government’s policy are zero.
Read more...August 8, 2009
I’m against cap-and-trade and Australia enacting its own such Bill for all of the above reasons, and because I think some people in favour of it are hypocrites. If global warming is such a big risk that it demands action, then it demands a carbon tax and nuclear power.
Read more...August 8, 2009
By 2020, the need for emissions reduction policies will be clearer, and presumably we will have access to all the technological advances that Treasury claim will be forthcoming by that time. Preparing for action should it be needed, but meanwhile deferring the introduction of a tax that will wreak massive economic damage, could be an ideal solution for Australia to adopt.
Read more...August 8, 2009
There is a serious risk that we will end end up with the worst outcomes possible because of the frailties of computer modelling: carbon dioxide will prove to have little impact on climate but implementation of the Rudd government’s cap and trade legislation will seriously raise energy costs and expand unemployment.
Read more...August 8, 2009
An emissions trading system, unlike a straight carbon tax, has merit for governments. For it makes it harder for industry and consumers to see the costs that are being imposed upon them.
Read more...August 8, 2009
It has quickly become apparent that green jobs will require massive government subsidies to sustain them. They do not create additional value and so cannot become self-sustaining. The biggest question, of course, is to what extent will green jobs crowd out existing jobs? In short what is the opportunity cost of a green job?
Read more...August 8, 2009
Ross Garnaut, a key advisor to the government on climate change, suggested in his final report on climate change that the end of the beef industry would be a good thing for the Australian environment and that a switch from beef cattle to kangaroo would have multiple environmental benefits additional to reducing emissions.
Read more...August 8, 2009
The government’s emissions trading legislation is to be considered again by the Senate on 13 August. The vote that Senators deliver then, and again later should the bill be defeated and resubmitted, is the biggest decision that they will make in their political careers. For the passage or not of this bill will determine the fate of the Australian economy, and the standard of living of average Australians, for decades to come.
Read more...August 8, 2009
If you are going to set up a new cult, which is what the emissions trading bill is all about, you really have to get in quickly and corner all of the best descriptive and emotive words; seize the moral high ground; then get out and kick hell out of any doubters.
Read more...August 8, 2009
There are formidable measurement, verification and enforcement issues that stand in the way of any internationally-agreed scheme of binding emissions reduction targets. In the meantime, Australia should not commit itself to the large costs and inefficiencies of an emissions trading scheme of the kind that is currently before the Parliament.
Read more...August 8, 2009
By asking three succinct questions regarding climate change, and exposing the Minister’s inability to answer them, Fielding’s actions have given many politicians within all parties cause for pause.
Read more...August 3, 2009
The brief answers to Senator Fielding’s questions are: (1) Yes, temperatures did fall after 1998 while carbon dioxide rose; (2) Yes, late 20th century warming was indeed not unusual in either its rate of change or magnitude; and (3) Yes, all IPCC models did project warming through a ten year period when instead cooling occurred.
Read more...July 26, 2009
The need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.
Read more...July 20, 2009
Lord Christopher Monckton: “Dr. Paltridge’s little book will be regarded as one of the few, rare, precious beacons of enlightenment that prevented humanity from wandering through carelessness, ignorance and absent-mindedness into a new Dark Age.”
Read more...July 13, 2009
Given that Australia still has an emissions trading bill on the Senate table, is it not of public interest to know that climate science Minister Penny Wong is acting on the basis of flawed, if not incompetent, science advice?
Read more...June 29, 2009
Assessment of Minister Wong’s "Written Reply to Senator Fielding’s Three Questions on Climate Change" by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and William Kininmonth.
Read more...June 29, 2009
The timing and framing of this first survey of environmental views and behaviour is not inconsistent with the apparently increasing tendency of the public service to serve the interests of the government rather than the wider national interest.
Read more...June 22, 2009
Surveys have obvious implications in terms of the all-important US policy position on global warming. Unfortunately, our major political parties seem way behind the ball game in gauging both community attitudes and the fundamental flaws in the science used in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Read more...June 11, 2009
The greatest Australian special interest of all lies with the average voter upon whom Prime Minister Rudd and Climate Minister Wong plan to impose their unnecessary, ineffectual and swingeingly costly carbon dioxide tax. Are you listening out there, True Blue?
Read more...June 10, 2009
Have you ordered your copies yet, Bob Brown and Christine Milne?
Read more...June 9, 2009
This is scarcely a scientific secret, so how come that Ross Garnaut doesn’t seem to know about it?
Read more...June 8, 2009
“In my judgment, the proposed cap-and-trade system would be a costly policy that would penalize Americans with little effect on global warming. The proposal to give away most of the permits only makes a bad idea worse”. Are you listening, Kevin Rudd?
Read more...
May 31, 2009
As the world has been getting cooling since 1998 the global warming alarmists have to scare us with other things. A favourite is rising sea level, allegedly caused by rapid melting of the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland.
Read more...May 25, 2009
In the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby, it is a “courageous act” to tax pipelines with such an extraordinary formula. It is more than courageous, it is really stupid.
Read more...April 30, 2009
The Invitation to the Brisbane “launches” of Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth carries a remarkable statement about two Federal Senators.
Read more...April 13, 2009
Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science.
Read more...April 6, 2009
At Easter, my book on climate change comes out. I destroy every single argument that has ever been raised about human-induced climate change.
Read more...April 2, 2009
A reader replies to William York. Copy of letter supplied to Quadrant Online courtesy Patrick McCauley.
Read more...
April 1, 2009
“William York” is a well known contributor to OnlineOpinion. His friend Tom recently received a letter from him.
Read more...March 30, 2009
Joanne Nova’s lively The Skeptics Handbook has been published in the US with an astonishing 150,000 copies print run which will be distributed to thousands of politicians, scientists, journalists and teachers. A further 10,000 copies are being published for Australia and New Zealand.
Read more...March 23, 2009
Vaclav Klaus: “The book I wrote two years ago Blue Planet in Green Shackles comes to very similar conclusions but I have to say that if I’d had a chance to read Professor Plimer’s book, my book would have been better.”
Read more...March 23, 2009
The International Conference on Climate Change was held in New York from March 8 to 10, 2009. While the international media ignored the conference Quadrant Online carried exclusive reports by Bob Carter.
Read more...March 8, 2009
Travellers from around the world are today converging on the Mariott Marquis in Times Square, where the Heartland Institute is hosting its second Manhatten conference on climate change.
Read more...March 1, 2009
Thank God for Carbon, a new publication by Ray Evans, explores the demonising of carbon by climate change extremists – including the Rudd government.
Read more...February 24, 2009
Australia needs adaptive policies to deal with real climate change in place of the government's expensive, inefficient and ineffective plans to “prevent” an entirely hypothetical global warming. Why is it so difficult for our major political parties to discern this obvious truth?
Read more...February 10, 2009
“It has been a difficult lesson for me to accept that despite the severe damage to our forests and even a fatal fire in our nation's capital, the political decision has been to do nothing that will change the extreme threat to which our forests and rural lands are exposed.”
Read more...February 10, 2009
David Packham in 2002: “For almost three decades State and Commonwealth governments have been warned of the potential of a 1939 repeat fire disaster. Those warnings by fire managers and fire researchers have been ignored, discounted or discredited."
Read more...February 2, 2009
Senator Cory Bernardi: "... challenging popular opinion demands courage … And in no sphere is this more apparent than the new religion of climate change where all questions challenging the orthodoxy are treated as heresy and those that dare to raise them are heretics or, worse still, ‘deniers’."
Read more...January 28, 2009
Ian Plimer: A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature.
Read more...September 4, 2008
The extent of anthropogenic global warming caused by carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is a controversial and politicised issue and there certainly is no scientific consensus.
Read more...September 3, 2008
Carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table. It is unique among the elements in the vast number and variety of compounds it can form.
Read more...September 2, 2008
Many reasons have been put forward for John Howard’s failure to win the 2007 election—negative reaction to WorkChoices, his refusal to abdicate in favour of Peter Costello, even a sense that he had just been in power too long—but there was another issue which suffused the Opposition campaign and which played a major part in persuading voters: climate change, in particular the recent drought.
Read more...September 1, 2008
Sometime after the Soviet Army had crushed the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968, our great cold-war warrior, Frank Kopfelmacher, was described by his opponents in condescending and patronising tones as a “threat expert”.
Read more...