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The Greens are at it already. Cyclone Yasi has not even reached the coast, and Christine Milne Australian Senator for the Greens is claiming it is a “tragedy of climate change”.
There have been 207 cyclones since 1858 along the East Coast of Australia since 1858. Were they all caused by Climate Change?
There are an average of 4.7 cyclones per year that affect Queensland. Cyclone Yasi is number 3. Seems well within the average so far.
And what about all those cyclones that were so disastrous more than 100 years ago? Were they caused by Climate Change as well?
On the 4 March 1899 a cyclone hit Bathurst Bay, north of Cooktown causing 307 deaths. On 5th March 1887 a cyclone causing a tidal surge struck Burketown wiping out nearly all the town. The 1918 Mackay cyclone which had 1411mm of rain in 3 days, and a storm surge of 2.36 metres. Cyclone Willis damaging Cairns in 1927.
There have been so many cyclones in Queensland over the last 150 years, yet it seems only Cyclone Yasi was caused by Climate Change.
 Cyclones that have passed near Cairns since 1906
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has dropped several schemes that are a response to Climate Change, to save money for the Queensland Flood reconstruction. Its good riddance to most of these schemes. However the Labor/Green alliance has promised the upcoming carbon tax will be used to fight climate change, by making every Australian pay more tax.
Canceled or reduced schemes:
Cash for Clunkers – canceled.
Green Car Innovation Scheme – a scheme to subsidise overseas companies to build cars that nobody wants.
Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships – reduced
Solar Flagships – another scheme to subsidise the most expensive form of power production – dramatically reduced
Green Start Program – not proceeding with round 2
Solar Homes and Communities plan – another wasteful subsidy for expensive power production – phased out
Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute – reduced funding for another body wasting taxpayer money.
Unfortunately the Australian Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has not been cut, and costs us $300+ million per year to pay federal public servants to do nothing but produce propaganda.
President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address makes no mention of Climate Change. No mention of a Cap and Trade scheme, or a Carbon Tax. No mention of Global Warming.
So the leader of the richest and most powerful nation in the world makes no commitment on Climate Change. Meanwhile on the other side of the planet, the Australian Federal Government run by a Labor/Green alliance will soon be implementing a Carbon Tax, to penalise our citizens, to force them to pay for more energy.
How much of the worlds CO2 does Australia emit – 1.28%
How much of the worlds CO2 does the USA emit – 19.91%
Australia produces 6% of the CO2 produced by the USA, yet we are going to suffer a carbon tax. Our people, our businesses, our farmers, will all find it harder to complete against the USA, because we will soon be paying a Carbon Tax, while no person, business or farmer will pay a Carbon Tax in the USA.
And how much impact on the worlds production of CO2 will the implementation of a Carbon Tax in Australia cause?
Zilch.
China and the USA will emit the extra CO2 we save within a few months.
Greens Senator Bob Brown says that the floods in Brisbane were caused by burning coal. He said in Hobart on Sunday 16th January 2011 “It’s the single biggest cause – burning coal – for climate change and it must take its major share of responsibility for the weather events we are seeing unfolding now”
Well, the Greens have a member in the House of Representatives, and in six months they will have the balance of power in the Australian Senate. Why don’t they show the courage of their convictions. Why don’t they put up a private members bill to Ban the Mining and Export of Coal in Australia.
Greens Senator Bob Brown said further ” There’s very little doubt that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible for the hottest oceans we’ve ever seen off Australia, which in turn the scientists are saying very clearly is responsible for the quite extraordinary and harrowing floods that we’ve seen. ”
So Greens Senator Bob Brown, Ban Coal Mining. If it is such terrible stuff, then ban its use in Australia, and don’t allow those people overseas to use Australian Coal either. Lets sack the 137,000 people employed in the coal industry and shift them over to those imaginary Green Jobs . As an added benefit we will then know that Australia will never again have any more floods (or droughts).
The Greens (the party) and other Climate alarmists will tell you that investment in renewables will result in tens of thousands of new “Green Jobs”. What they don’t tell you is that most of these “Green Jobs” are in China.
News of another Solar panel manufacturer moving to China from the USA. Australia has no Solar Panel manufacturers (or wind turbine factories). We have a government subsidised solar panel installation industry, that could not survive with out those government subsidies.
So we make our “old economy” industries uncompetitive by wacking a carbon tax on them, and the “new economy” jobs are in China.
Sounds a great future.
 New economy jobs in China
There are already people claiming that the Brisbane Floods are the result of Climate Change. Australian Climate change committee member Professor Will Steffen has stated that there was no direct link between climate change and the Queensland floods. However he says that “As the climate warms, there is more water vapour in the atmosphere,” and “This means that there is a probability that there will more intense rainfall events around the world.” As well Professor Neville Nicholls, an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at Monash University “You’d have to be a brave person to say it [climate change] is not having some sort of effect”.
So how do these scientist explain that the worst floods in Brisbane’s history occurred in 1893. Brisbane has the longest complete record for floods. The Brisbane Flood of 2011 is nowhere near as high as the the floods of the 1890s or the 1840′s. So how did we manage to have more rain in the 1840s and 1890s when there was no Global Warming, and no Climate Change? When CO2 levels were much lower than they are today?
UPDATE:
Neal Ashkanasy, a water resources engineer, says that he believes that the Wivenhoe Dam “kept 1.5m off the top of the 2011 flood”. That would make the flood about 6 metres, still well below the 1893 flood event. He also says “When John Oxley discovered Brisbane 180 years ago, the local Aboriginal people were very agitated about flooding, and they showed him high-water marks that would have been 12m.”.
A 12 metre flood approximately 200 years ago. 200 years of CO2 and we can only make 6 metres now. Yet somehow the flood of January 2011 was caused by coal-mining and climate change, yet a flood double the size 200 years ago was caused by…..?
Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering Stewart Franks talks on Radio National Counterpoint program on why it is impossible to link Climate Change with floods, and how poor climate models are – its here.
 Brisbane Flood 1893
The Climate Change religion is struggling in its battle to convince the public about the so called dangers of CO2. There is a decreasing trend in coverage in the media of climate change issues. Less and less of the Australian public believe in man made climate change, and even less think we should do something about it. So what to do? Climate Change needs an advertising makeover. Lets call Carbon Dioxide “Pollution”.
They “have found that ’pollution’ resonates much stronger than ‘climate change’ with the public”. So its easy. Don’t get complicated by trying to argue your case. Make it confusing by calling a coal-fired power station a source of pollution. That way the public will think that the coal-fired power station is polluting the world with some nasty substance, rather than just emitting the stuff everyone of us breathes out, ever minute of every day – carbon dioxide.
Lets not mention that other than humans, every animal and plant also emits this “pollution”.
The Bureau of Meteorology has announced that 2010 was the 3rd wettest year on record (since 1900) . As well it was Australia’s coolest year since 2001. It was not too many years ago (2007) that the Bureau of Meteorology was telling us that Global Warming meant “climate projections that foreshadow general drying across southern Australia”.
It was also not long ago that the adherents to the Climate Change religion were predicting “long-term climate change” in Australia. Tim Flannery said in 2005 “ongoing drought could leave Sydney’s dams dry in just two years”. Sydney’s dams are now at their highest levels for six years.
South Australian Premier Mike Rann said in 2006 that we were in a 1 in a 1000 year drought, and after spending $1.83 billion dollars on a desal plant, Mike Rann is now looking to moth-ball the desal plant because Adelaide dams are full, and Adelaide’s rainfall in 2010 was 50 mm above average.
So does Climate Change cause more droughts or more rain?
December 2010 was in the United Kingdom the coldest December since 1890. The average temperature (1961-1990) in the UK in December is 4.7C, while this December was an average of -0.8C, 5C lower than average. There were ten nights when the temperature dropped below -18C somewhere in the UK.
So the usual suspects who are first to trott out any hot weather as a sign of Global warming, now are rushing to print with complicated theories to show why this record cold weather in the northern hemisphere is also Global Waming. It doesn’t matter what the weather is. Hot, Cold, Wet, Dry, Drought or Flood, its all climate change to the climate change religion.
1500BC, or maybe 5100BC? The CO2 levels 7000 years ago were a lot less than today. The point is that the temperature has been changing on earth for millions of years, and the real question is, is the current temperature increase within normal bounds or an outlier? This is the crux of the Climate Change debate. Take Greenland ice core data. These estimate the temperature based on the isotopes of oxygen found in the tiny bubbles of air trapped in the ice. Its a proxy, an estimate for past temperatures. If the ice core data is right then the warming of the part 100 years is just part of the normal climatic movement. We had the Medieval Warm period, followed by the Little Ice Age, that now we are warming up to get back to temperatures that have occurred in the past.
All the discussion in the media with temperature graphs and comparisons focuses on the last 60-100 years. If it was as warm, or even just close to as warm 2000 years ago during the Roman Warm Period with no increased CO2 levels, then how did that happen? If the British were harvesting grapes in the Medieval Warm period, with no extra CO2 levels, then how did the temperature increase then? If 2010 is the hottest year in the last hundred years, or the last ten years, does it really matter if it was even warmer 2000 years ago?
 Greenland Ice Core temperature
The predictions from ten years ago about UK winters from The Independent – March 2001:
“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.”
The situation ten years later. Ten more years of Global Warming. Ten more years of CO2 injected into the atmosphere. Ten years closer to catastrophic climate change . From the same newspaper The Independent December 2 2010:
“Britain was warned to brace for further heavy snow, travel chaos, closed schools and widespread disruption as forecasters said sub-zero temperatures would continue across most of the country.”
 Snow in the UK December 2010
Julian Assange, it seems has been claiming for a while that it was he and Wikileaks that released the Climategate emails. He made claims on May 17th 2010 on Phillip Adam’s show Late Night Live on ABC Radio National where he said “we were responsible for the climategate emails, um although it appears that our sort of right wing sympathisers in the United States have forgotten all that..”. Julian Assange sounds almost apologetic on this video, but still claims that Wikileaks “released” the files.
However many people disagree. No one has ever admitted to releasing the files. In fact some have even suggested it was an inside job. Julian Assange timelines don’t seem to agree. Steve McIntyre on Climateaudit.org says that people were downloading the files from the Russian server two days before the Climategate emails were every mentioned on Wikileaks. Steve McIntyre has the timeline here.
I am not sure what Julian Assange is trying to do. I think people have assumed that he is saying he leaked the Climategate emails to bolster his recent popularity. However he has been making this claim for many months, even when he was nowhere near as famous as he is now. He used the word “responsible” with Phillip Adams, which is a lot more that just saying he put files that were already in the public domain up on Wikileaks.
 Julian Assange
Solar activity drops again with the sun without sunspots for the first time in 70 days.
 SOHO image December 20 2010 with no sunspots We are just part-way into Solar Cycle 24, which has been much lower than predicted. The Dalton Minimum was a period of low sunspot activity from 1790 to 1830. At the same time temperatures dropped worldwide. There was no decrease in CO2 levels at the time, so how do the Climate Change computer models explain this drop in temperature? The computer models cannot, because sunspot numbers are not meant to have any affect on the temperature of the earth.
The weakness of Solar Cycle 24 is starting to be similar to Solar Cycle 5, which was the start of the Dalton Minimum. If you look at the sunspot numbers graph below you can see the last time the sunspot numbers were low was in the 1970′s. In the 1970′s Australia was cooler, and as just as one example, it was the last time Lake Eyre filled completely, allowing boats to sail all over the lake.
 Sunspot numbers
Australian Labor/Green Alliance Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Greg Combet said yesterday “Our reliance on coal-fired power generation has made us prosperous.” However Greg Combet obviously does not want this prosperity to continue, as he wants to tax coal fired power stations out of existence.
Greg Combet says “Around 80 per cent of our electricity is generated by coal.“, and we have benefited from “cheap electricity generated from coal”. However not anymore, as Greg Combet wants to close down those coal-fired power stations, that work perfectly well providing electricity all over Australia, and build new power stations that will generate electricity at a considerably higher cost than coal.
Is there anything wrong with these coal-fired power stations? Are we running out of coal?
The answer to both questions is No.
Yet while we dismantle these coal-fired power stations giving us cheap electricity, Greg Combet is happy for us to export our coal around the world. He says “The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future”.
So we are happy to export our coal to China, where they will burn it to produce cheap electricity to benefit their industries. While Australian industry with expensive power will have to compete against those overseas competitors with cheap power .
The coal exported will put the same CO2 into the atmosphere, whether it was burnt in Australia to produce cheap electricity, or burnt in China to produce cheap electricity.
 Port Augusta power station burning brown coal from Leigh Creek
The poster boy of the Climate Change religion is the pacific Island of Tuvalu. To quote UN Climate official Christiana Figueres speaking at the Cancun 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference who said: “Tuvalu, The Maldives, Kiribati, Vanuatu are looking for ways of evacuating their entire populations because of salt water intrusion and sea level rise; their fate is a wake-up call to all of us.”
Sounds bad. However what do the facts say about the sea level rise on Tuvalu?.
It is very hard to measure sea level rise, because you have to discount for the land possibly sinking, as well as atmospheric and storm influences. Flinders University National Tidal centre has been measuring Pacific Island sea levels for some years, and you can read their report here. Paraphrasing from their report, they have only limited data for Tuvalu, but that limited data shows a 4.7 mm rise per year for Tuvalu. However when you gather longer term trends over the whole Pacific that trend drops down to only 1.3 mm of sea rise per year.
1.3 mm per year. Over 100 years if the trend continues, and who knows if it will, the total rise in sea level at Tuvalu will be 13 cms. I am sure Tuvalu will cope.
 Tuvalu Tide Gauge anomalies - from Flinders Univerity National Tidal Centre  Tuvalu Tide Gauge from Flinders University National Tidal Centre
The Climate Change alarmists are getting frustrated with the Australian population, and its growing climate change skepticism. If individuals or countries do not toe the Climate Change Religion line, then its time to use force.
That failed Greens candidate in the Higgins by-election Clive Hamilton, says its time for “the suspension of democratic processes”, and Dan Cass says if a country will not bring its carbon emissions down to zero then we need to “enforce climate security through trade sanctions or ultimately force itself”.
Its the Climate Change Religion. Show your support for the orthodox view, or we will force you to think the way we want you to think. Heretics must be purged.
The Spanish Inquisition would approve.
 The Seal of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Spain - the spanish inquisition
The Chairman of the Productivity Commission chairman Gary Banks has warned against subsidising alternative energy sources. He says “most of the programs in question serve more as industry assistance than environmental assistance”.
He says that a carbon tax will have significant implications for productivity.
We are already paying for the subsidies for Solar Panels and Wind Power with higher electricity prices. The poorer people in Australian society are now paying for the trendy subsidised solar panels installations of the wealthy, and the expensive green dreams of inner city Sydney and Melbourne, of wind generators everywhere.
The threatened carbon tax proposed by the Labor/Green alliance will only further increase those electricity costs of Australian consumers. As well they will increase the power costs of Australian industry, that competes against overseas companies with cheaper power costs.
 The most expensive form of power generation available
The latest survey from Essential Media shows that the majority of Australians do not believe that Climate Change is caused by mankind.
More interestingly a bare majority of Labor voters (53%) believe that “Climate change is happening and is caused by human activity”. This will be interesting when Prime Minister Julia Gillard brings in a Carbon Tax that 47% of her supporters do not believe in. And the trend is going the wrong way for Julia Gillard and the Labor/Green alliance. One year ago 53% of people though Global warming was man-made, and a year later its only 45%.
Liberal opposition leader Tony Abbott should stick with his climate skeptic line, where only 32% of Liberal Voters believe in man-made Climate Change. Tony Abbott will gain climate skeptics from Labor Party supporters.
David Marr on insiders just last Sunday stated that the majority of Australians wanted action on Climate Change. How can that be? When the majority of Australians do not even believe that Climate Change is caused by humans?
The Australian commentariat keeps trying to tell the Australian people what they should believe, and the Australian public just thinks for itself.
Update:
Just a few hours later the Australian comes out with Newspoll, and another Climate Change survey result. But what strange questions. They ask “Do you personally believe or not that climate change is occurring?”. Its been warming since the Little Ice age, so what does that question mean?. Then of the people that answer yes, they ask is it “Entirely” or “Partly” cause by human activity. 70% of people answer “partly”. Only 24% say “Entirely”, and that has dropped from 32% a year ago, so the true Climate Change believers are still trending down.
So what does “Partly” mean?. You might believe, as many people do, that there is some slight warming, and that warming has been going on for hundreds of years.As well you might believe that CO2 has some very small effect on that warming. In that example, according to Newspoll, you are a Climate Change believer, when really you are no such thing.
The more telling survey result is do you support a carbon tax “that would help slow global warming”. In this result only 47% are in favour, which is very close to the Essential Media poll result above that have 45% believing in human caused climate change. So around 30% of the “Partly” believe that humans influence climate change, but do not believe its enough to warrant doing anything about it. Its all trending the wrong way for Julia Gillards Labor/Green alliance.
South Australian Premier Mike Rann tweets “Announcing that SA wants to set the toughest emission limits anywhere in Australia for electricity production.” and “The C02 emission limits we are proposing would effectively prevent the construction of new coal fired power stations in SA.”
That guarantees South Australians will be paying more for their electricity. South Australians who are on average the poorest people on the mainland of Australia. Coal fired power stations are the cheapest way to produce electricity. Australia has at least two hundred years of coal supplies to produce reliable base-load power. However Mike Rann wants the South Australian poor to pay more for electricity. He wants South Australian industry to pay more for its power, so it is harder to complete against Chinese industry that happily uses coal to produce electricity.
This hurts South Australians for what benefit?
So Mike Rann can feel virtuous?
 Premier Mike Rann
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