the Australian

The Australian Government has set up a Coasts and Climate Change Council to plan how to adapt to increases in sea levels and cyclone intensity that global warming will most likely bring. Since its about adaption to climate change and planning for the future, in a rational world even on opponent of mitigation like The Australian would be on board, but they are not. The Australian is certain that scientists are wrong about sea level rise and they have an impeccable authority: Bondi veteran Lee Boman has swum at the beach for more than 30 years and was adamant he had seen "no change" to the…
Janet Albrechtsen (writing in The Australian, of course) is asked a question by her teenage daughters: 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. You can read a transcript of Monckton's claims here. Monckton reckons that the environmentalists "are about to impose a communist world government on the world". (As opposed to…
Malcolm Colless, writing in The Australian declares that human-caused global warming is a beat-up, just like human-caused ozone depletion. I swear I'm not making this up. Look: Remember, it was not so long ago that we were confronted with the unnerving prospect of being fried like eggs on a hotplate as a result of a widening hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere. The hole is apparently still there, although it has stopped expanding and has, in fact, started shrinking. Coincidentally, it is now playing second fiddle to global warming in the climate change debate. Apparently Colless is…
Today was the day of the Big Push in the Australian's war on science. They published two news stories that distorted scientists' views on Antarctic ice, a long piece promoting "silenced" Ian Plimer's denialist book, an absurdly over the top piece from Christopher Pearson about how Plimer's book is the turning point that leads to global warming being recognized as a mass delusion as well as an editorial touting Plimer's views. The debunking of this rubbish is outsourced to Harry Clarke.
The collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has prompted the Australian to launch yet another attack on scientists -- it seems they are "tabloid media ambulance-chasing" and the ice shelf collapse was entirely natural. every natural phenomenon, such as the ice shelf split this week, is interpreted as a disaster and all who do not agree are denounced as an enemy of the planet. And so it is easier for people in public life to acquiesce rather than address the evidence - as Mr Garrett's Lateline performance proves. The result is the intellectual equivalent of tabloid media ambulance-chasing. We are at…
Today's Australian has a piece by Bob Carter predicting global cooling Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why? Well, look at this graph from my previous post. When you want to talk about climate trends, you need to use at a bare minimum ten years and not cherry pick your starting point. Carter continues: There are two…
Ian Musgrave has written the post I was going to write on Jon Jenkins' article in the Australian, so I just want to emphasize that fitting a degree six (yes, degree six) to temperature data does not produce a meaningful trend line in any way shape or form. Go read. Note that if the editors at the Australian had bothered to read their own paper just three days earlier they would have known that the Jenkins' claims about the Oregon petition and global cooling were rubbish. News Limited blogger Grame Redfearn also pointed out the enormous holes in Jenkins' arguments and talked to Australia's…