As nations gather in Copenhagen next Monday to debate global climate change policy that will affect the daily lives of all Americans, the basic science behind the initiative is being questioned — by the scientists, themselves.
Terrorist Willie Brigitte will be freed from jail having served less than half his sentence for conspiring to blow up our only nuclear reactor and power grid
Abbott's focus on battlers, jobs
LIBERAL leader to portray PM as a big spender whose climate change policies will destroy jobs.
South Australia 'heading for crisis'
DEMAND for workers will outstrip supply from 2012, when one-third of South Australia's workforce reaches retirement age, new research reveals.
Afghan Surge Over 6 Months
Obama will announce he is sending 30,000 U.S. troops to be deployed over six months, and plans to discuss endgame for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan
Is 'Imperfect' Bill Dems' Perfect Solution?
As Senate digs in for weeks of health care debate, some push to settle for 'imperfect' bill in order to get it passed
Nathan Rees on borrowed time as Premier
STATE Labor Party bosses are believed to have privately withdrawn support for Premier Nathan Rees, the final sign that his days may be numbered.
Cop Killer Shot Dead
Seattle police kill career criminal Maurice Clemmons, who gunned down four officers in a coffee shop
Mum smothers baby while breastfeeding
A BABY girl has died after her mum fell asleep as she breastfed her on a flight across the Atlantic.
Parents hire private eyes to spy on kids
PARENTS are hiring detectives to spy on their kids, concerned they're into sex and drugs.
What had us reaching for the keyboard
SWINE flu, stimulus package, Lady Gaga and croquembouche among our most Googled terms.
Comedian caught in dumb and dumber plot
THIEVES tried to steal $575k from Ricky Gervais by using a photo from The Office on a passport.
Greedy Westpac spoils Christmas
OUTRAGED home buyers branded Westpac the Christmas scrooge after the bank almost doubled yesterday's official interest rate rise.
Fears grow over killer bug
STUDENTS infected with a potentially deadly virus are victims of a more virulent strain of it - and doctors fear more cases.
Woman's DUI reading stuns police
A YOUNG woman has stunned police by recording a blood alcohol content of 0.385 - one of the highest levels ever recorded, at 19 times over the limit.
=== Journalists Corner ===
From troop levels to our timetable for victory, Obama maps out his strategy for success!
Fox News has Live Coverage of the President's Address!
=== Comments ===
Man of the people who could be Rudd’s worst nightmare
Piers Akerman
NEW Opposition Leader Tony Abbott offers Australian voters their first real political choice since the 2007 election. - It is good to see a conservative getting a go. The Liberal party does not have defined factions like the ALP, but I trust someone with the same kind of scruples as Mr Howard or Mr Greiner. Already The Age is getting upset and calling him a liar for correctly calling the interest rate hike for what it is .. Rudd's fault. - ed.
===
Afghanistan and Iran Causing President Obama Major Problems
By Bill O'Reilly
As you may know, President Obama will address the nation Tuesday night, telling the world he will send more troops to Afghanistan but also that he'll demand the Karzai government stop the massive corruption going on over there.
I mean, we simply cannot have American service people dying so Afghan war lords can sell heroin.
Tuesday night at West Point, the president will try to sell the world that the Afghan war is an international cause, but that's a joke. A few nations are fighting, but very few.
Once again, the USA is carrying the heavy load against the Taliban terrorists and their Al Qaeda pals.
The weakness of the world is also what's driving the Iranian mullahs. As predicted, Iran is defying the United Nations, saying it will not cooperate with inspectors trying to inhibit the mullahs from building nuclear weapons. After years of BS, the U.N. has finally voted to censure Iran, greatly amusing the mullahs who could not care less.
So President Obama is looking at a bad situation in Afghanistan and a worse scenario in Iran as he again tries to rally the world to help out.
In its lead editorial Monday, The Wall Street Journal says: "Until the president, his advisers and the Europeans realize that only punitive sanctions or military strikes will force [Iran] to reconsider its nuclear ambitions, an emboldened Islamic republic will continue to march confidently toward a bomb, over Barack Obama's best intentions."
The very liberal New York Times has also editorialized: "There is no military solution here. But Iran's repressive leaders cannot be allowed to threaten the rest of the world with a nuclear weapon."
The Times believes international pressure and sanctions will stop the mullahs. I do not believe that. Only a naval blockade that drastically limits Iran from importing goods might bring the Iranians around.
President Obama is positioning himself as a negotiator, and that's fine up to a point. The worst thing the USA could do is to start yet another fight without exhausting all other options.
But as Stratfor reports, the Iranian mullahs, Putin and others believe the president is weak and therefore will continue to defy him until something changes.
Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a huge toll on America, especially on the military and their families. We are not in a position of strength right now.
What a mess.
===
STICK TO GOLF
Tim Blair
Visit a doctor, cop a lecture:
Doctors should give patients advice on climate change, a leading body of medical experts has claimed … their controversial plan would see GPs and nurses give out advice to their patients on how to lower their carbon footprint.
===
ALL GOOD
Tim Blair
The Abbott era begins:
Tony Abbott will steer the Liberal Party back to its conservative roots with a 2010 election campaign portraying Kevin Rudd as a Whitlamesque big spender whose climate change policies will smash Australian jobs.As well, Abbott promises sharper policies on border protection and industrial relations. Also good: Abbott is “a hate figure among several constituencies: feminists, aggressive secularists, climate change believers and many middle-ground progressives.”
The new Opposition Leader’s first act after ousting Malcolm Turnbull in a partyroom vote yesterday was to scrap his party’s support for Labor’s carbon emissions trading scheme, which he dismissed as “a great big tax”.
And Mr Abbott immediately moved to repair the Liberals’ shattered relations with the Nationals, embracing their contempt for the ETS after months of Mr Turnbull dismissing their views as irrelevant.
===
BEGIN THE INCERNCRATION
Tim Blair
Could Malcolm Turnbull be the first political victim of Warmergate? Possibly; those CRU emails wouldn’t have helped him. But nor would the 400,000 or so emails and calls estimated to have arrived at Coalition offices over the past two months.
Turnbull went into full-tilt greenist mode after consulting British conservative leader David Cameron in late September, so it’s only right that carbon-minded BritCons are now facing the lash of reason themselves. The mob awaits:
Two of the main protagonists over in Australia are employees of Murdoch – an Andrew Bolt and Tim BLair - they are whiping up a virtual lynch mob baying for the incerncration of AGW advocates -All advocates will be incerncrated. This is my pledge.
UPDATE. Mark Steyn on Turnbull: “Signing on to the climate hooey in effect deprived the Australian people of any choice on the most pressing issue of the day.”
UPDATE II. Other causes of Turnbull’s ousting:
A middle ear virus called labrynthitis and an informal vote cost Malcolm Turnbull his leadership yesterday.I caution against linking middle ear viruses and informal votes to global warming.
===
CAT ON A COP
Tim Blair
A rare sighting of the Texan Law Tabby:
===
ROAD TO DA MADNESS
Tim Blair
Scroll down for calming beach views! Jules Crittenden explores Charles Johnson’s crazy hatred.
===
THIS HAS ALL BEEN EXPLAINED
Tim Blair
NYT paranoia pod Paul Krugman clears up that trifling Warmergate matter:
It’s not – read – this has all been explained. What he meant is they want to put a start on it. We have an end to it, we don’t have a start on it. There’s a lot of loose use of language when you’re just talking among each other. And what (inaudible) really meant, deleting would be meant that, you know, we don’t know when this thing started, because we don’t have very good data back then. There weren’t any weather stations. And that’s what the context was.Click for video. Warning: crazy eyes.
===
RIGHT THE FIRST TIME
Tim Blair
SMH crylady Marian Wilkinson:
At the recent United Nations climate summit in New York, Barack Obama told his fellow leaders that ‘’the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent and it is growing’’. The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, calls the threat ‘’catastrophic’’, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, believes addressing it is ‘’crucial for the future of mankind’’.I’m annoyed too, Marian. He shouldn’t have backpedalled at all.
Just months ago Tony Abbott described the same threat as ‘’absolute crap’’.
Yesterday the new Liberal leader backpedalled just a little by saying his words were ‘’hyberbole’’ for debate.
===
CRICKET IS DESTROYING THE PLANET
Tim Blair
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sets a fine example for his Copenhagen-bound carbonite clan:
So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.Meanwhile, climate crawlers are changing schedules:
An administration official says some world leaders may change their schedules so they can attend an upcoming climate conference the same day as President Barack Obama.Kevin Rudd may have another chance to meet his mortal enemy, the so-called most popular politician on earth:
===
The game suddenly changes
Andrew Bolt
I sense Paul Kelly is softening, having just seen how electrifying an opposition to a great green tax can be - and how the public mood is shifting.
Kelly on May 16:
The Liberals need to retreat from their madness in threatening to block the carbon emission scheme bills, a manifest act of political suicide. This will become the decisive test of Turnbull’s leadership...To this goal, the Liberals should sanction, if necessary, the Nationals voting against the carbon scheme bills with the Liberals voting for the bills… The Liberal Party needs to remember that you can win elections by “giving prime ministers their dreams”.Kelly today:
Yet Abbott’s election, like that of any new leader, offers an opportunity. It cleans the slate. It means the public listens anew. It guarantees the Coalition base will be ignited in an unpredictable populist crusade with Abbott and Barnaby Joyce terrifying the nation about Rudd as a big spending, big taxing Whitlamite, reckless in his pursuit of climate change orthodoxies…But let’s just address what will become a political meme. Spot who is truly running a scare campaign, and one informed by a great lie:
Abbott’s success depends on changing the politics of climate change and the momentum is shifting in his direction, though Abbott’s is still a minority position… Abbott is ... a danger to Rudd because he disbelieves the orthodoxy that action now on an emissions trading scheme is an election winner. Abbott will force Rudd to make the case all over again.
Kevin Rudd:
The Government took a plan to tackle climate change to the last election, to tackle the risks climate change poses to our planet, and especially to the health, lifestyle and livelihoods of our children…Tony Abbott:
Temperatures in Australia rising by around five degrees by the end of the century.... A fall in irrigated agricultural production in the Murray Darling Basin of over 90 per cent by 2100… Storm surges and rising sea levels – putting at risk over 700,000 homes and businesses around our coastlines… Our Gross National Product dropping by nearly two and a half per cent through the course of this century from the devastation climate change would wreak on our infrastructure alone.
This is a $120-billion tax on the Australian public and that is just for starters. We have heard from the Independent Pricing Regulator in NSW just yesterday that this ETS would add 30 per cent to the people of NSW’s power bills… I am not frightened of an election on this issue, because as far as many, many millions of Australians are concerned, what the Rudd Government’s ETS looks like is a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicised hand outs by a giant bureaucracy.Let’s face it: any politician who claims that the world will end in a fireball if you don’t vote for them can’t complain about the scare tactics of their opponents.
UPDATE
In his typically and attractively elegant prose, former Treasurer Peter Costello explains exactly why Turnbull was a disaster - and why his Senators could not ignore the grassroots fury at having their party hijacked by the Left:
The Liberal supporters who work in the branches and hand out the cards on election day will compromise on policy if they think it will lead to government and the chance to implement bigger political objectives. But they do not see it as much of a trade to betray their policy beliefs in a losing cause.
The grass roots of the Liberal Party are emphatically opposed to the Rudd Government legislation on emissions trading… They do not believe it is the job of Liberal MPs to get Labor’s legislation through the Senate… It should not surprise that senators are particularly sensitive on this issue. Senators are selected by the party’s activists and are therefore especially sensitive to the views of the party membership…
Turnbull promised to promote unity. But it is hard to think of any step he took to implement it. It is hard to think of any time when the party has been so deeply riven…
The disunity is a consequence of how the (warming) issue has been managed and broadened out to concerns about the management of the party in general. I have never seen a Liberal leader attack senior colleagues in the way Turnbull did at the weekend. Turnbull’s attacks have been sharper and inflicted more damage on his colleagues than Kevin Rudd ever did.
Now the Turnbull experiment is over… The party must lock in behind (Abbott) and move on. And to do that, the past year is best buried and forgotten along with the madness of the Hewson and the Latham eras.
===
Being green gives you a licence to lie
Andrew Bolt
If the evidence of man-made warming is so clear, why all the wild exaggerations and falsehoods?
Take the latest column of environment writer Fred Pearce in the Guardian (I’ve bolded the false claims and unsupported hype):
Australia is the hottest and driest continent on Earth. Parts have been embroiled in record drought for the past decade, leaving reservoirs empty and agriculture decimated…
Aussie scientists were among the first to warn about global warming. Back in 1988, they printed off posters showing the fin-shaped roof of the Sydney Opera House poking out of a blue sea…
Either the world adopts tough emissions cuts – in which case demand for Australian coal will shrink and the country will face painful economic reforms to cut its soaring domestic emissions. Or the world fails to come up with tough emissions cuts – in which case, say its scientists, there is a real risk of the entire nation becoming uninhabitable.
===
At last a fight over this mad tax
Andrew Bolt
PURE fluke, of course. But the Liberals have voted to stand up at last and fight.
From his very first press conference as the new Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott showed how lucky the Liberals were to somehow pick him in a voting accident.
Abbott, using plain sentences we’d never heard from Malcolm Turnbull, said the Liberals would no longer agree to pass the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme. Not now, at least - and almost surely not ever.
Instead, Abbott took this scheme that Turnbull so disastrously backed, and showed how to use it as a weapon not against the divided Liberals - but against the reckless government that had dreamt it up.
You know this ETS, which 80 per cent of voters polled by Galaxy last week said they don’t understand?
They’ll sure understand it now that Abbott is there to explain it to them.
Tell me if Turnbull ever described Kevin Rudd’s scheme to force us off carbon-based power as well as Abbott did yesterday: “This is a $120 billion tax on the Australian public and that is just for starters.
“We have heard from the Independent Pricing Regulator in NSW just yesterday that this ETS would add 30 per cent to the people of NSW’s power bills ...
“What the Rudd Government’s ETS looks like is a great big tax, o create a great big slush fund o provide politicised handouts by a giant bureaucracy.”
And every word true.
===
The Age of Seeming
Andrew Bolt
THE AIDS ribbons were the first red flag of this Age of Seeming - this great explosion of public sanctimony.
For a long while, no celebrity dared turn up at a big do without wearing that loop of red ribbon to show they cared.
Was a single AIDS patient actually saved by this flaunting of compassion?
Don’t be silly. These ribbons were for advertising the wearer’s good heart, not the sufferer’s weeping sores.
It was weird the way they suddenly vanished. Do edicts on the cause-du-jour get published in Vanity Fair, so the fashionable don’t risk turning up to an event caring about the wrong thing?
How mortifying if Cate Blanchett was the only one in a room of red AIDS ribbons to be wearing the brown ribbon of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
But if red ribbons vanished, this new virus of “consciousness raising” stayed, mutating into ever more offensively reproachful forms.
Only last week, I watched Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the now deposed opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, boast they’d taken the following oath, which they urged all other men to swear, too:
===
Hand it to hustling Gore
Andrew Bolt
What a gravy train is pulling into Copenhagen:
“Have you ever shaken hands with an American vice president? If not, now is your chance. Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference,” notes the Danish tourism commission, which is helping Mr. Gore promote “Our Choice,” his newest book about global warming in all its alarming modalities.Price? 5,999 Danish kroners or $1300.
===
Climategate: two investigated as new coverup exposed
Andrew Bolt
Here is the lastest news on the scandal that the ABC’s Jon Faine said was too helpful to “conspiracy theorists” to even report:
Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.Pennsylvania State University is investigating another of the Climategate scientists - Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann.
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
Here, now, is the latest example of how the Climategate conspiracy suppressed evidence that their data was flawed and faked - which in this case meant temperature rises were exaggerated by not allowing properly for the fact that concreted cities are naturally warmer. Mathametician Douglas Keenan:
Some of the emails leaked in Climategate discuss my work. Following is a comment on that, and on something more important.If you think the IPCC processes are too strict to be corrupted by such disgraceful practices, let Madhav Khandekar show how a mere typo had the IPCC predicting a melting away of glaciers in 30 years, rather than 350:
In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The emails show that Tom Wigley — one of the most oft-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate — thought my paper was valid. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to convince the journal editor not to publish my paper.
After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release.
But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque.
The report apparently concluded that there was no fraud. The leaked files contain the defense used against my allegation, a defense obviously and strongly contradicted by the documentary record. It is no surprise then that the university still refuses to release the report. (More details on all of this — including source documents — are on my site.)
My paper demonstrates that by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC.
Predictably, the IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily [to Indian research denying warming was melting Himalayan glaciers] citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate ( of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate. ...The scale of this scandal grows greater and more bizarre by the day.
First, where did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from?
According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996...). estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!
===
Rudd’s great green tax is verrückt
Andrew Bolt
I’m glad to see how much my German has improved since I was as Adelaide University:
Bolt argumentiert: ”Ich finde es verrückt, dass wir diese CO2-Steuer einführen, die es in keinem anderen Land gibt, die für das Klima nutzlos ist und das, obwohl führende Klimawissenschaftler inzwischen sagen, dass sich die Erde gar nicht erwärmt, sondern in Wahrheit abkühlt.”How inspiring, to see Abbott’s win yesterday being reported around the world as a victory for global warming sceptics, and perhaps another reason for other political leaders to take heed. Another “but he’s naked” moment in this Emperor’s New Tax story.
===
Climategate: Keep spreading the news
Andrew Bolt
Finally, the Climategate scientists produces a real hockeystick.
Meanwhile, Google hits on ”Climategate” now top 13 million, as the outlets such as The Age and the ABC continue to run dead on the greatest scandal in modern science.
===
ETS ASSUMES ROOM TEMPERATURE
Tim Blair
The Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme has been defeated in the Senate. Hilariously, Labor is now trying to frame opposition to the ETS as a scare campaign; this would be the same mob that insists our children, grandchildren, coastlines, cities, wildlife, health and economy are all at risk from climate change.
===
Rudd’s great tax on everything is defeated
Andrew Bolt
How close was that bullet? A mad new tax is voted down, thanks only to Tony Abbott’s one-vote win over Malcolm Turnbull yesterday:
KEVIN Rudd has lost his bid to deliver an emissions trading scheme in Australia before talks in Copenhagen but won an early election trigger after the Senate formally rejected the laws again today.So which two Liberal Senators voted against reason, against the party’s clear decision and against the national interest?
Just two Liberal senators broke ranks with a clear mandate among Coalition MPs to delay an ETS and voted with Labor on an emissions trading scheme
Queensland Liberal Senator Sue Boyce said she could not in good conscience abandon the amendments agreed to by Labor and the Coalition to improve the scheme.... Earlier, Liberal senator Judith Troeth said her experiences in the bush and in farming had convinced her climate change was real.Troeth can’t even cite in her denial of global cooling anything more that anecdotes about “her experiences in the bush and in farming”.
Good heavens.
Poor Rudd, though. It’s a blow to his hopes of using Copenhagen to lobby for support for his bid to become the UN secretary general.
===
Howard made them lousy artists
Andrew Bolt
Playwright Louis Nowra checks 20 Australian films to see if they could really be as bad as people say:
Nowra writes that Australian films suffer a “monotonous bleakness” and are “so dispiriting that they make Leonard Cohen seem positively cheery” ...So far, so much sense. But then Nowra tries to explain this near-uniform grimness - this death of beauty - and either indulges in parody ... or lapses into astonishing stupidty:
”The consensus was that Australian films were boring, grim and unsatisfying. After watching over 20 films, I had to agree.”...
Nowra asked himself why films including Last Ride, Lucky Country, Balibo, Beautiful Kate, Van Diemen’s Land and The Combination “suffer from a surfeit of glumness"…If Nowra’s theory has any weight, next year’s Australian films will be all-dancing, all-singing festivals of joy unconfined. Can’t wait.
He believes this year’s films are a legacy of the John Howard era. They were developed and financed in the last years of his government and all “express a sense of national impotence”.
“Howard never gave you the sense of enthusiasm and idealism and these films are the last cultural residue of the era… The film and literary people and intellectuals of Australia didn’t know how to deal with Howard so they came out with this bleakness, as if there was nothing they could do any more...”
UPDATE
This is all Howard’s fault - script, acting, moaning music and above all that overpowering gloom:
And, of course, this must all be Howard’s doing, too - script, acting, thumping music and above all the overpowering ... gloom?
===
Combet’s angry eyes
Andrew Bolt
Psst. A tip to Labor. I get it that your message is to make sceptics seem like wild-eyed ideologues:
We ultimately sat down with the Opposition, negotiated in good faith, made significant concessions, reached an agreement that was endorsed by the shadow cabinet and the Coalition party room, only to have a bunch of extremists, conspiracy theorists and climate change sceptics undo their own party, pull down their own leader and install Mr Abbott, of course who’s quite an ideologue on many fronts.But I think that message is better delivered by a Minister who isn’t a former far-Left union extremist whose own eyes are so disconcertingly intense:
===
Don’t mention the Climategate war
Andrew Bolt
A great effort at gatekeeping…
Warmist Tony Jones interviews fellow alarmist Lord Stern on Lateline for nearly 10 minutes without asking him a single question about Climategate, even though their main subject is the silliness of sceptics like Tony Abbott to doubt “the science”.
But if ABC presenters won’t bring up Climategate, Lord Stern discovers the angry public sure will:
EMMA ALBERICI: But Lord Nicholas Stern’s press conference was hijacked by questions about the underlying science of his assumptions after hackers broke into the computer systems of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit last month.Hijacked? Alberici, another ABC employer, seems upset that the public is doing what should have been done by her colleagues, and asking questions about climate science that badly need answers.
Meanwhile Marian Wilkinson, whose ABC documentary last year predicted a possible loss of all Arctic ice by 2012, complains about Abbott’s rise:
There is no argument that Abbott’s leadership marks the triumphant return of the climate sceptics to the top of the federal Liberal Party.Wilkinson missed the obvious analogy: Abbott’s rise marks a return of sceptics that’s as crushing to warmists as the return of Arctic ice.
===
Obama orders a fight-retreat in Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama will now have more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan - 200,000 - than did that warmonger Bush:
US President Barack Obama has ordered 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan ....Obama is ordering exactly the kind of surge he opposed in Iraq, when it was ordered by George Bush.
Still, good, yes, that Obama (belatedly) shows such determination to fight. But that show of strength is immediately undercut in Obama’s next breath:
After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.Good grief. Setting such timetables was one sign of weakness that Bush had the courage to resist.
===
Running scared
Andrew Bolt
It’s astonishing how fast the climate is changing - the intellectual and political climate, that is.
Julia Gillard, Penny Wong and Greg Combet are holding a joint press conference to announce that the Government has backed down. There will be no immediate double dissolution election on their great green tax on everything.
What they actually said was that they will introduce into Parliament in February the emissions trading scheme bill - as just amended - to the Parliament next February to give the Liberals “one more chance” to change their minds. (They won’t.)
That means they are not calling a double dissolution election until next February at the very earliest, and probably could not for a while even then while the arguments are again fought out. Indeed:
Ms Gillard said the Government did not intend to call an early poll, even though Labor now has a trigger for a double-dissolution election.Another clue: Gillard did not wait for Rudd’s return to make this messy call. Or rather, Rudd did not want to say all this himself.
And how did the journalists react? With questions about hollow threats and political theatre.
Abbott should be very pleased with the immediate impact he’s had, and the unmistakable signs of having called a Government bluff. Moreover, his success so far has shown how baseless were Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey’s arguments that the Liberals had no option but to back this great tax or face decimation in a double-dissolution election.
===
SERIOUS JOURNALIST AT WORK
Tim Blair
Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes is deep in conversation with a fake Twitter site.
===
HIJACKED BY QUESTIONS
Tim Blair
The ABC reports:
Nicholas Stern, whose 2006 climate review was like a call to action around the world, has told an audience in London that those who deny that the globe is warming and that human beings are responsible for it are muddled and confused.Are they as muddled and confused as Stern himself? In the absence of any critical questions from timid journalists, who decline to challenge even his most ridiculous comments, Stern now finds himself confronted by “hijackers”:
Lord Nicholas Stern’s press conference was hijacked by questions about the underlying science of his assumptions after hackers broke into the computer systems of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit last month.How inconvenient for him.
===
RAPID IS RELATIVE
Tim Blair
The widespread claim:
Most people following the climate change debate are aware that many sources claim that the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing “rapidly” – in fact, that they may disappear by 2035, a mere 25 years from now.The misread report upon which that claim is based:
The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates – its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350.
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