Climate change sinks embattled troglodytes

Poor Tim Blair. Poor Miranda. Increasingly they look like flat earthists geocentrists* in a post-Galileo world.

See the report Hot, parched and sinking – apocalypse Sydney in today’s Herald, but even more importantly go to Climate change in Australia: “Climate Change in Australia was developed by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology in partnership with the Australian Greenhouse Office through the Australian Climate Change Science Program.”

Climate change

Lovely irony, ABC! Running Bolivian Meltdown tonight on Foreign Correspondent and The Great Global Warming Swindle on Thursday… And do visit that link where you will learn from Sir John Houghton, a top meteorologist and former Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, why that “controversial” exercise is wrong on just about every scientific point it makes.

Meanwhile, in Bolivia, as we are seeing tonight:

Climate change — beyond John, Tim, Miranda — and even Al…

… and yet not Left as some might conceive it.

I am still processing a heap of new stuff that is coming my way, but not from the Americans. All I can confidently say is that it is worth looking into. There are names here that in my ignorance I had never even heard of, and yet at least one of these is a name that John Howard must surely have heard of — and what a gloriously British name it is! Sir Crispin Tickell. “Coldstream Guards, diplomat, Ambassador to Mexico and the United Nations during the 1991 Gulf War. Sir Crispin was warden of Green College, Oxford between 1990 and 1997, when he made George Monbiot a fellow. Tickell wrote Margaret Thatcher’s speech on global climate change…”

Miranda asks a question or two on climate change

Yes, that banner is a link.

Why shouldn’t we be told humans produce a small fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere each year, compared with volcanoes, bacteria, animals, rotting vegetation and the oceans?

That is in Miranda’s damp squib defence of “The Great Global Warming Swindle, a science-backed [sic] rebuttal of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.” I’ll let notoriously non-Marxist Christian Sir John Houghton, a top meteorologist and former Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, reply. You can download his PDF Global Warming, Climate Change and Sustainability: Challenge to Scientists, Policy-makers and Christians (3.9 mb).

5. Volcanic eruptions emit more carbon dioxide than fossil fuel burning – NOT TRUE. In fact, none of the large volcanic eruptions over the last 50 years feature in the detailed record of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Next question. Miranda?

Climate change — too important for conventional politics

What do you think? Kevin Rudd rightly says of today’s National Climate Change Summit organised by the Labor Party:

Climate change does not simply threaten the Australian environment – it also threatens Australian jobs and Australia’s long term economic prosperity. Invitations have been extended to the Prime Minister and his Ministers, and State Premiers and Chief Ministers.

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges that Australia and the world will face in the 21st Century. To face this challenge we must come together as a country, a region and a planet to take real practical action on climate change.

Participants include:

Climate change and our “practical” government

The past 24 hours and more have seen whole forests felled in the production of stories about climate change, with much on the electronic media as well. Perhaps the most sensible person I saw/heard was Dr Tony Haymet, former Chief of Marine and Atmospheric Science at CSIRO, now director of the prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of Marine Sciences at the University of California on last night’s 7.30 Report:

KERRY O’BRIEN: As a close observer of how the science and the politics are finally coming together on climate change, how optimistic are you that the politicians now, that governments, are going to come up with a satisfactory end game?

TONY HAYMET: I’m very optimistic at the moment. I’m very encouraged by what’s happened in the last 18 months in Australia, in the United States, particularly in Europe. Recently we’ve been trying to think through, what is the climate end game? I think most observers would say it’s got to be the biggest emitter, the United States, and the fastest-growing emitter, China, coming together and making a compact that they can feel both comfortable with. I think we feel that if that happened then Europe and India would easily be accommodated into that framework. I think that then invites the question, what’s Australia’s role? We’re two per cent of the problem, we’re two per cent of the innovation system. I think there’s a chance that Australia could be the honest broker in that dialogue. I think both the US and China have great respect for Australia’s leaders and I hope that we can play a positive role there.