Gillard — the Australian Prime Minister — got the timing perfectly wrong.

Within two weeks of the Carbon Tax finally becoming Law, it’s becoming hard not to notice that the whole Global Scam is fragmenting. This Carbon ship is on fire,  the lifeboats are leaving, the rats are jumping, and the Australian team just turned up with the family jewels. Their policies are “take no prisoners” and “bring no life jackets”. Their exit plan is to have No Exit.

Sergey Abramov (ship, 1960) ...By Leksey

It’s hard to imagine how the timing could have been more quintessentially insane, or their  “Leadership of Clean Energy” more poignantly inane.

After subterranean lakes of Shale Gas were discovered two months ago under Lancashire in the UK , even half-tinted-Green governments started stepping backwards from diabolical renewables deals. Nearly everyone popped up and said No No No to Kyoto. “Let’s be frank” said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, “At best we could only get the EU, Norway and maybe two or three more countries to sign up for a second Kyoto period.” The Bloomberg article about the collapse of the Kyoto agreement discusses 14 nations and two continents, but Australia wasn’t  one of them. So much for setting examples for the world.

Meanwhile, renewables are so openly on the nose that even  the Duke of Edinburgh not only said windfarms are absolutely useless, but he got away with it. Windfarms are unpopular in Spain, the UK (here and here), Vermont, Scotland, New Zealand, and even the-iconic-home of-windmills the Netherlands. Solyandra sank like a concrete block. Google are pulling out of renewables, then on top all that, the IPCC shocked everyone by admitting they don’t know if the weather will get warmer or cooler for the next thirty years.

And that was just last week.

This week, FOIA popped up and released another 5,000 emails of self-serving scientists behaving badly (and another 200,000 encrypted ones, no password yet, just in case). Ross McKitrick put out a carefully cutting report on how the IPCC needs to be reformed or abandoned. Then another report pops out by Schmittner and co, saying that actually, the worst case scenario is just 1.7 – 2.6 degrees not 4 ,5, 6, or 11 degrees. 

The EU is teetering on financial collapse, and panic selling sees the price of carbon is hitting record lows (€ 7.040 in the EU, and in New Zealand just $9US). The carbon price has dropped by half since June.  There is an oversupply of carbon credits and trading houses are asking how low the price can go? UBS is suggesting a price of €3 (A$4). Australians will pay a fixed price of $15 per ton, set by people who keep telling us that a free market is the “best solution”. (If only they knew what a free market was.)

The word carbon is so unpopular that even the Carbon Market and Investors Association changed its name — they think “Climate Market” has a better ring to it (oh boy, do we have news for them).

Poetically, record snow is falling in the Northern Hemisphere (eg in Canada and Russia).

How times are changing

Headlines in The Australian newspaper rather put a fine point on it. The three stories below were all just on Friday; the top story about exaggerating the forecasts was on the front page. For the fans of man-made Global warming who say The Australian is biased in favour of skeptics, I say just wait until The Australian starts reporting the other side of the story for real (they look they might be working up to it). We haven’t seen anything yet. Fans of catastrophic warming prophecies will soon yearn for the days when The Australian only printed the occasional politically-skeptic article among their reprints of unquestioned government propaganda.

(The Australian, like the rest of the media world, never publishes anything that seriously questions the official science — they’ll print graphs of bond yields, but not graphs of heroic air-temperature predictions that failed, Argo ocean temperature data, or, gasp, the missing hotspot. Why do we get photo’s of X-factor stars, but we can’t spare the space to show photos of corrupt surface thermometers sitting in hot air next to air conditioner outlets?)

Climate forecasts ‘exaggerated’: Science journal

They concluded that current worst-case scenarios for global warming were exaggerated.

“Now these very large changes (predicted for the coming decades) can be ruled out, and we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem,” the study’s lead author, Andreas Schmittner, an associate professor at Oregon State University, said.

The study found high-sensitivity models led to a “runaway effect” under which the Earth would have been covered in ice during the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, when CO2 levels were much lower.

“Clearly that didn’t happen, and that’s why we are pretty confident that these high climate sensitivities can be ruled out,” he said.

Professor Schmittner said taking his results literally, the IPCC’s average or “expected” value of a 3C average temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 ought to be regarded as an upper limit.

Scientists’ quest for influence in emails

LEAKED emails show climate scientists responding to “huge” political interest in linking extreme weather with climate change, contrary to a later UN report that found evidence of such connections is unlikely to clearly emerge for decades.

Politics muddies the debate

The latest emails demolish any lingering doubts that those at the heart of climate research have been focused as much on social advocacy and political spin as scientific finding.

 Image: Via Wikimedia