Proponents of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis are cornered. They made a political choice to prove rather than disprove the hypothesis, as the scientific method requires. It failed, as IPCC projections (range of predictions?) indicate, but instead of abandoning or modifying the hypothesis, as normal science requires, they’ve reverted to tactics they think worked in the first place.

One of these was a return of the “consensus argument” in a survey by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) that said “98% of all scientists believe in global warming”. It was a contrived result that wasn’t really a consensus. It didn’t matter to proponents because the headline was the objective. They know the rejoinder is not news and rarely gets reported, especially in the mainstream media. As Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson said “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”

Proponents can’t make new scientific claims because the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing global warming was offset when temperatures declined and CO2 levels continued to rise. Their strategy apparently involves claiming earlier evidence was correct as confirmed by new studies. These are then trumpeted by familiar names and outlets, such as Justin Gillis or Seth Borenstein of the New York Times. Here’s Borenstein’s July 23, 2009 email to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) gang. He wrote, “Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It’s Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Watchya think?” A journalist talking to scientists is legitimate, but like the leaked emails, tone and subjective comments are telling. “Again” means there is previous communication. Others have commented on Borenstein being “too damn cozy with the people he covers.”

Initially the Antarctic ice core was presented as 420,000 years of evidence that an increase in CO2 caused a temperature increase. Within a few years the opposite relationship was proved; temperature increased first. All other records showed the same relationship, but most continued with the assumption, in their models and elsewhere, that CO2 causes temperature increase. In April, 2012 Harvard professor Jeremy Shakun and colleagues claimed a re-examination showed the original claim for the ice core was correct. The New York Times dutifully reported the story with the desired headline, “Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link.” It didn’t take long for Eschenbach and Easterbrook among others to expose the flaws, but those weren’t reported in the New York Times.

The “hockey stick” appeared in the 2001 IPCC Report as major evidence that human CO2 caused current warming that exceeded the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). There were two problems with the claim. The MWP occurred as hundreds of papers affirm and the data selection and statistical analysis used was flawed.Two independent committees reached the conclusion that “the original hockey stick was created by a biased methodology.”

Apparently, rather than try to challenge the MWP evidence directly, some of the authors of the Antarctic ice core story incorporated it into a wider claim. The warmer than today MWP was a challenge, but equally problematic was the Holocene Optimum. This period spanned some 11,000 years from the end of the last ice advance of the Pleistocene and was mostly warmer than today reflected in rapid ice melt and sea level rise.

Shakun is now co-author in a paper by Marcotte et al., titled, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”, whichclaims current temperatures are warmer than the MWP, but also warmer than the Holocene Optimum. A New York Times headline says,“Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 years.” It was undoubtedly, exactly the headline they sought. You won’t see a story reporting expert Don Easterbrook’s analysis of their study that concludes, “In the past 10,000 years, at least six other warm periods of magnitude equal to the MWP occurred; nine other warm periods that were 0.5°C warmer than the MWP occurred; two warm periods that were 1°C warmer than the MWP occurred; and three warm periods that were 1.5°C warmer than the MWP occurred. All of these periods warmer than the MWP clearly contradict the Marcott et al. conclusions.”

“This paper appears to be a text book example of creating a Hockey Stick by using a low resolution time series for the handle and a high resolution time series for the blade…”

The headline about the original article grabbed the spotlight, but the public and politicians are not paying much attention anymore. They are inured, saturated and increasingly indifferent to the daily ‘sensationalist’ headlines.

Evidence of the new PR campaign was reappearance of phrases used prior to the leaked emails. They were designed to limit experts to a discreet few “active climatologists.” The emails detail how they controlled the peer-review process to delimit who was “active.” The term appears in the AGU survey discussed earlier. It was often interchanged with “working climatologists.” The problem is “working climatologists” created the leaked emails, bypassed the peer review process and produced the unsuccessful IPCC projections (predictions). These climatologists are now playing the victim card. Mann and others claim they’re victims of an attack funded by “big oil”. As he said in 2010,

“We literally have the most powerful industry that ever existed on earth using much of their resources to smear the science and confuse the public about the adverse effects to our world of fossil fuel burning. History will look back most unkindly on industry-funded individuals and groups who sought to intentionally mislead the public about the reality and threat of human-caused climate change.”

He resurrected the claim in his 2012 book, but Joanne Nova exposed the truth.

“The money and vested interests on the pro-scare side is vastly larger, more influential, and more powerful than that on the skeptical side,” “Despite this highly asymmetrical arrangement, the skeptics are winning simply because they’re more convincing—they have the evidence,” “The other team avoid debate, try to shut down discussion (only their experts count), they imply the audience is too stupid to judge for themselves, and then call everyone who disagrees rude names. The dumb punters are figuring them out.”

Dumb punter awareness means AGW proponents are losing the political battle. Governments still wear the cloak of green, but most of them quietly reduce funding as they watch green economies and alternate energies fail. Most know political climate science is over, but a few continue to defend the indefensible. The only likely residual will be carbon taxes and carbon regulations for a political agenda, almost exclusively in the US.

Odd how quiet the MSM and CAGW brigade (or should that be cadre?) go when the weather turns cold and wintery! Very chilly here in the SE of England, folks trapped in cars overnight due to snow and ice but it ranks well below other more ‘correct’ news items.

The battle that should be fought, but generally isn’t by skeptics, is the one the Muller is fighting with BEST. Whatever else you think about him and his tactics, he is directly attacking the legitimacy of the pro-AGW side, calling to account those people who have been caught using illegitimate scientific techniques.

The other side threatens to marginalize and exclude voices on the skeptical side. They need to be fought against on exactly those terms. Nature got away with its farcical gyrations over MBH98 and the subsequent corrigendum forced by MM. They shouldn’t have.

The silence was deafening in the 1930s Germany and in the 1930s China. Maybe the scale of impingement on human life of today’s political agenda are less but the intent of coercion is just the same. In my opinion this has not been about science but about justification of control.

“Governments still wear the cloak of green, but most of them quietly reduce funding as they watch green economies and alternate energies fail. Most know political climate science is over, but a few continue to defend the indefensible. The only likely residual will be carbon taxes and carbon regulations for a political agenda, almost exclusively in the US.”

In a nod to Chairman Mao, I suggest we refer to this period of mass hysteria as the Green Leap Forward. It will be the job of historians to tally the body count.

“The only likely residual will be carbon taxes and carbon regulations for a political agenda, almost exclusively in the US.”

Well, except for Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and others, where there already is some sort of a carbon tax.

Get your stuff correct, esp. when you can look in up so easily using Google.

Anyone listen to the LIES on NBC Nightly News last night that “temperatures are 10 degrees higher in the Antarctic” than 15 years ago? This, in the face of the record extent of Antarctic sea ice, the rapid buildup of the continental icecap and three years in a row of record cold temperatures in the interior of Antarctica (down to -140 F)? Recalls the LIES about temperatures at Byrd Station broadcast by the BBC, which it subsequently had to retract after the people at Byrd Station called the BBC out on them.

What can we, as rational obsevers, do to stop this madness? It is indeed like the 1930s all over again, as Mr. Bixler says here. Environmental extremism is the Nazism of our time, and global warming is its poster child, and today’s news media are the Voelkischer Beobachter of our day,.

I have come to the conclusion that the mass media, as the producers of a consumer product, should be subject to the same truth-in-packaging regulations as are applied to other products that can do harm – such as cigarettes. Mass media disinformation can do every bit as much harm as cigarettes. The mass media should be required by law (as a condition of their broadcasting and publishing licenses) to present opposing views along with their lies, and disclose their biases. There is no free speech or press freedom issue here: they would be free to continue lying, so long as they also present the truth. And we’re not talking about the corner soapbox orator, or the citizen writing to his congressman, or even the person attending a city council meeting – we’re talking about big, greedy coirporations and “reporters” (translate “propagandists”) pulling down big bucks to spread lies and fear. We’re talking about people and agencies with powers of propaganda and censorship every bit as great as those of a totalitarian dictatorship.

When Climategate broke and the information became available on line, my husband (who is a software engineer) analyzed the code the University was using to create their models- the code was garbage. The models are therefore meaningless, generated with code that is worthless, so in my mind, “the debate” ends right there.

Thank you TIM. I shall copy this article and send it to all my “dumb punter” friends who have not yet figured it out. It saves me the effort of collating all the information and is in any event far more succinct than any effort I could have made. Nothing annoys me more than the one sided presentation from the majority of the media and this exposes it very well.

…The only likely residual will be carbon taxes and carbon regulations for a political agenda, almost exclusively in the US….

Um… a bit of US-centrism here, surely? Europe, and the UK in particular, are well ahead of the US in the Carbon Taxing stakes. The UK is about to close down its entire generating capability because of them…

Fortunately for us, the Director of the Climate Institute can enlight Yahoo with statements like these: “And what about all the dying pine trees on the mountains from
British Columbia to Colorado–mainly because the pine bark beetle is not
being sufficiently killed off by very cold winter temperatures? And
increasing loss of mountain glaciers in area (with sea level starting to
rise)? Mike”
Let’s spread his Word.
LOL

I fear the frowardness is yet to come. The Great Leap Forward was relatively well-behaved compared to what came after: crazed young zealots waving Red Books, chanting slogans, and violently assisting civilizational suicide. It could happen again with Green Books.

Skeptics are winning because despite the assistance of the MSM, the Armageddon that has been promised by the alarmist has not come to pass. That of course is due to the fact that the real science is on the side of the skeptics. But the “dumb punters” do not know that. They only know that life goes on, the same as before.

I have been looking through the nuclear web sites the last couple of weeks. Since global warming is advantages to their cause, they are proposing it as a solution. Bill Gates says we should pass a carbon tax to pay for research. As long as the CO2 scare is convenient to whatever cause, it will not go away.

The EU is still completely stuck on Kyoto till 2020. It’s the law, governments HAVE to comply whether they like it or not. Thou shall go green if it ruins you or not. Tnx to rabid green EU commissioner for the environment Connie Hedegaard who is best known for quadrupling energyprices in Denmark and very proud of that

Get ready to knock Australia off the ranks of those countries who have a carbon tax after next September. Labor is headed to a catastrophic defeat thanks in large part to their support of it.

And perhaps not so surprisingly, the countries that retain carbon taxes will not see any significant reduction in the use of carbon based fuels, since the alternatives simply do not work. All those taxes will do, in the end, is increase the misery of the working poor, those who can least afford a regressive tax covering something they have to use to live.

fredb writes “So what’s the purpose of this blog entry? It’s merely a restating of arguments said many times before. Lets see some new science in support of the position, and not more opinion.”

Abysmal comment. You think it’s easy to encapsulate those cogent arguments in a few crystal clear paragraphs?Let’s see you try it. You also seem to think that skeptics were born that way, and that our numbers always remain the same. New people come around all the time, looking for answers. I was one of them not long ago.

pokerguy, you are exactly right. A friend of mine, a very good science reporter for a newspaper, was a convinced warmist five years ago. He has come around to the other side completely since the exposure of the computer code foulup at East Anglia.

“Any real scientific basis for the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming has by this stage been thoroughly shredded. What we’ve got coming at us in the future are; Snailbats, HALsays, Scarems, LewPapers and DickPols, because that’s all they’ve got left to use. Enjoy yourself sorting them into the appropriate categories as they come along.”

“Terry Bixler says:
March 12, 2013 at 9:10 am
The silence was deafening in the 1930s Germany and in the 1930s China. Maybe the scale of impingement on human life of today’s political agenda are less but the intent of coercion is just the same. In my opinion this has not been about science but about justification of control.”

You are exactly spot on correct. The truth is not in them. It is not a time to be a spectator; these thieves have overtly displayed their intentions.

fredb’s comment looks like generic green boilerplate since there is no actual cogent content to the comment. That boilerplate comment could be ‘plugged in’ to most any blog posting it’s sooooo generic.

I liked the article. Nice wrap up of recent events in my mind. I like the comment about the new ice core study that still shows C02 rise occurs after temperature rise. It’s amazing that a study that proves C02 is not the ‘earths thermostat’ gets gung-ho treatment by the NY times as if it proves the opposite.

fredb says:
March 12, 2013 at 9:33 am
So what’s the purpose of this blog entry? It’s merely a restating of arguments said many times before. Lets see some new science in support of the position, and not more opinion.

.
And it doesn’t help them that it is snowing again in the UK today, which is not exactly usual for March. The harder they shriek, the more Mother Nature pours snow on them. And the more they claim that Global Warming caused more snow (the BBC, yet again), the more the public think they are nuts.

That was the Greenpeace situation in ’91, but it changed again in 2000 when it absorbed the enviro-activist group Ozone Action while making its founder, John Passacantando, the new executive director of Greenpeace USA ( http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/080700-01.htm ). Consider how one alumnus of Ozone Action is Greenpeace’s Kert Davies, prominently seen in the just-released anti-skeptic movie “Greedy Lying Bastards”, and another is Kalee Kreider, Al Gore’s spokesperson from 2006 until July of last year. Add to that how Ozone Action battled Dr S Fred Singer in the early ’90s over CFCs, and how I describe Ozone Action as the epicenter of the smear against skeptic climate scientists ( http://tinyurl.com/cjn9tv6 ), and you see how the IPCC / Al Gore side’s only fallback position in defending AGW is exactly the ever-more desperate rearguard action we see.

Here in South Africa they also began with this tax, just to make (more) money, I am sure. I wonder why nobody takes them to court?

We can’t afford to. We are using up all our money heating up our homes. Global Warming is very cold. Still it’s not as bad here in the UK as it is in Northern France. They have had four foot of snow over night and it’s still snowing. The high speed train link from the UK to France has been suspended for at least 2 days.

Dumb punter awareness means AGW proponents are losing the political battle. Governments still wear the cloak of green, but most of them quietly reduce funding as they watch green economies and alternate energies fail.

Tim: could you provide some specific examples? My impression is the public trough is still pretty much wide open for the Green piglets to feed. What actual cash payouts have been curtailed? Maybe the public is losing interest, but the Green groups are still very well represented in the back halls of government.

trafamadore says:
March 12, 2013 at 9:34 am
In NZ an ETS was introduced some years ago. The original scheme was planned to eventually include agriculture (the infamous fart tax) about now however the Government decided to scrap the fart tax. This revelation has received remarkably little adverse media attention. Notworthy is that the tradable carbon credits were worth about $20 per tonne several years ago however fallen to about $2 per tonne. It’s a failed system and likely will be scrapped in its entirety sometime soon.

“98% of all scientists believe in global warming”. Sure it has since the last ice age and it still seems to be warming in fits and starts except for the past few years. I believe the records clearly indicate that. What I don’t like is the alarmist co-opting the language to indicate that this means anthropogenic global warming, a disaster and we just need to do something about it and those who don’t believe in this are just flat earthers and dupes. It’s time we took the language back and were more precise.

Kelvin Vaughan says: March 12, 2013 at
They have had four foot of snow over night and it’s still snowing. The high speed train link from the UK to France has been suspended for at least 2 days.
__________________________________________

Yes, it has been quite bad across Germany and France. It is amazing how much cold and snow a warmer climate brings. /sarc.

Get ready to knock Australia off the ranks of those countries who have a carbon tax after next September. Labor is headed to a catastrophic defeat thanks in large part to their support of it.

wws, I’ll make you a friendly wager: no matter how big a defeat Labor suffers in Australia, the carbon tax will not be repealed. Once in power, people’s priorities quickly change to staying in power, and having money to spend on important interest groups is a necessary asset toward that end. Your opposition party will use the carbon tax issue if they think it will get them votes, but once in power they’ll use the tax receipts to buy the votes to keep them there. Meanwhile, they’ll be mainstream media rock stars for “evolving” their positions on Global Warming.

I hope for the sake of Australia that I’m wrong of course, but I’ll still make the wager.

Hey Bob –
Does the “98 percent of all scientists” include the 31,000 who signed the Petition Project statement?
Let’s see the alarmists show us a list of 1,519,000 scientists who support AGW (extrapolated from the 31,000 by simple arithmetic).

Russell Cook (@questionAGW) says:
March 12, 2013 at 11:13 am
The Greenpeace quote Dr Ball has – “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true”

And the usual green flag wavers (Algoreus, Billgateus, et. al.), go about their lives not in setting the example or doing their waving part to sacrifice, but to feel good that they are part of something on the surface that is so publicly noble. Their argument ends when they are the ones put on the spot to wear sheep skins, sandals from the same, eat what they forage, and live only by the light of day and stars of night. In their arrogance, they are as ignorant as the foolish life they live.

All are hypocrites: A person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs. Also a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, especially one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.

New Zealand is in the grip of one of the worst droughts in a decade, but should we be getting used to it?

One of New Zealand’s foremost climate scientists, Jim Salinger, says the current drought is historic and could spell the end of farming as we know it.

Salinger will joining us in the newsroom for a live chat on the issue, to answer all your questions about the drought, what future Summers could bring, and how practices may have to change.

A lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, he has calculated that the amount of rain needed for grass growth in this drought is the highest since records began.

We’ll be getting the discussion under way at midday, so leave your question below in the comment box.

This is in todays online ‘Stuff’ news, why the hell are they interviewing this proven fraud?The NZ National institute of weather and atmospheric research actually fired him!!

Failed EU auction sends CO2 prices to six-week lowLONDON, March 12 (Reuters Point Carbon) – EU carbon allowances fell to a near six-week low of 3.71 euros on Tuesday as the market baulked in response to the cancellation of an EU auction of permits, traders said…http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2217628
desperation on the cusp of madness:

EU Commission wants carbon cuts, more renewables in 2030 goals
BRUSSELS, March 12 (Reuters) – The European Union needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent and increase the share of renewable energy to 30 percent by 2030, the executive European Commission said in a draft paper on new climate and energy policyhttp://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.2217048?&ref=searchlist

Climate hysteria and the recent hysteria over the dreaded “sequestration” both have the same etiology. The cause is insolvency in our governments and greed among special financial interests. These governments need to borrow and spend to keep the game going, and they need to also create a new inflatable currency in the form of carbon taxes and credits that can be manipulated at the will of governments and special interests to create false wealth which can be used to pay debt. By “false wealth” I mean wealth that is created out of thin air, not backed by anything of real value. Carbon credits are just like our dollars in this respect. The net result, of all of this is basically the theft and redistribution of real wealth from the creators – all of us – through inflation and taxing.

Most people fail to see that this is what is happening. Fear is used to manipulate us for this purpose.

Funny, Alarmists are quick to decry any of what they regard as politicization of any paper they don’t like. Yet here is a flagrant attempt to exaggerate, distort, and politicize a dubious study which DOES NOT SAY what the Congressman claims it does:

Earlier in the day, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said on the floor that a new study from Harvard University and Oregon State University shows that the Earth is hotter now than it has been in the last 11,300 years. He said the use of engines and turbines over the last 100 years has caused more warming than in the last 100 centuries combined.

“The findings are sobering, a wake-up call, and should be a wake-up call for the members of this institution,” DeFazio said.

Thanks, Tim, for a well put together article. It’s nice to see it summed up like that and I agree it is all but over. The climb back up might be long and slow, but it’s on the way.

In answer to those who believe the carbon tax of Australia will persist, I believe it will go. Taxes do get repealed, although it might not feel like it (we tend to remember the taxes we have, not the taxes that go and are no longer a problem). Reaching back in time, we no longer have a window tax or a hearth tax, for instance, although let’s not give them any ideas.

Taxes the world over need to be cut back to ensure economic recovery, and that will happen. I’ve lived in several countries through the years, and without fail each has had governments that waste money and raise taxes followed by governments that take care of business and work to recover the economy by lowering or removing taxes.

Despite the wooliheadedness of some politicians, most do have a sense for political survival. They know full well the tide has turned, they know what the people want, they know the “science” of CAGW has failed, and they know the MSM is running out of puff to keep up the sham. They (the politicians) are already pulling back.

Kyoto expired. The extension was/is illegal and countries can safely ignore it. Quite frankly, that’s all they need to do in any case. If (I know, it’s a big ‘if’) the countries inflicted by the UN got together they could decide to ignore all UN directives, and that would be the end of the UN.

Some of these countries are growing a backbone and are beginning to cut funding to the Eco-whackos. Subsidies to Green-madness are being cut everywhere you look, world-wide. So everything Tim has said is right – this nonsense is at last on the way out, although the diehards will continue to push forward as though all is exactly as they want it to be.

Should make for great watching. I’ve got the popcorn ready. I shall even enjoy a champagne. Several. :)

” You won’t see a story reporting expert Don Easterbrook’s analysis of their study that concludes, “In the past 10,000 years, at least six other warm periods of magnitude equal to the MWP occurred; nine other warm periods that were 0.5°C warmer than the MWP occurred; two warm periods that were 1°C warmer than the MWP occurred; and three warm periods that were 1.5°C warmer than the MWP occurred. All of these periods warmer than the MWP clearly contradict the Marcott et al. conclusions.””

Noelene
The possibly new Australian government may repeal the tax but something else will increase to make up the shortfall, I doubt that the tax will go.

The NZ drought is supposedly so historic that it is the worst for 50 years, ahhhhhh the short memory of people. Here we go again with the weather cycles. Last year was one of the wettest.

In the meantime parts of Europe have “historic” snowfalls, I can remember snow in those parts in Europe at that time of the year and I am not that historic.

As far as the references to China and chairman Mao etc are concerned. According to Mao in his “red book” rape was not possible. A woman with her skirt up can always run faster then a guy with his pants down. The reason I mention this is that the AGW movement with their pants down can never hope to keep up with the speed of the observational results disproving every model and hypothesis.

Jim Salinger was the host of an online news debate over NZ drought conditions today. Imagine my surprise when he had no time to answer my question, posed only 5 minutes into his hour, which asked how accurate his climate model predictions were after 15+ years of no warming given they all predicted worse…

The most important point made in this article, almost parenthetically, is “They made a political choice to prove rather than disprove the hypothesis, as the scientific method requires.”

In a single sentence, Dr Ball has explained how the worlds most prestigious scientists can all be wrong without invoking the dreaded “C” word. When you tell a believer that by looking to “prove” the man made warming hypothesis, they have by necessity, ignored evidence that falsified (or even failed to make falsifiable predictions), most people will understand precisely what’s gone wrong. It is a moment when scales should fall from eyes.

Shakun is now co-author in a paper by Marcotte et al., titled, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”,

A second assessment by David Middleton determined,

“This paper appears to be a text book example of creating a Hockey Stick by using a low resolution time series for the handle and a high resolution time series for the blade…”
===

The forth author is Alan Mix. so , without wishing to strip Mann of being the father deceptive mixing of incompatible datasets to create a false impression with Mike’s Nature Trick ™ , I would suggest that this bout of deception be called the Shakun-Mix method.

Reading your comments from the Don Easterbrook post, you cannot see why Don is allowed to change both the scale and the offset of the ice-core data to match the instrumental record. This is, however, standard for temperature proxies. After all, the Greenland temperature is not the global temperature from the instrumental record so you cannot expect the ice-core proxies to give the same values.. If we were dealing with stomata widths, deuterium ratios or whatever, we would expect to do the same thing. (in fact for some we would have to invert the graph as well, e.g. the Tijander sedimentation proxies.)

““The only likely residual will be carbon taxes and carbon regulations for a political agenda, almost exclusively in the US.”

Well, except for Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and others, where there already is some sort of a carbon tax.

Get your stuff correct, esp. when you can look in up so easily using Google.”

The EU does not have a carbon tax. We have FIT tariffs in some countries paid for by a fee on electricity which is explicitly NOT called a tax and does NOT go through the governments coffers. It would if it were a tax.

And we have a carbon credit ETS scheme. Which is, again, NOT a tax, but a carbon trading scheme.

Get your stuff correct, esp. when you can look it up so easily using Google.

“One of New Zealand’s foremost climate scientists, Jim Salinger, says the current drought is historic and could spell the end of farming as we know it.”

… why the hell are they interviewing this proven fraud? The NZ National institute of weather and atmospheric research actually fired him!!

While I have very little respect for Jim Salinger I would like to point out that as far as I know he has not been convicted of the serious crime of fraud. The reason given for his dismissal from NIWA was I believe disobeying instructions not to talk to the media. If there are other reasons why NIWA was unhappy with him those have not been made public.

The laws of libel still apply on the internet. Words like “fraud” are particularly dangerous to throw around casually because they carry a very specific legal meaning. A court is likely to regard the use of such a word as a serious matter since it refers to a serious crime. If you apply that word to someone who has not actually been convicted of that crime a court will almost certainly construe it as libel.

A very good post and I am in general agreement with the thrust of Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 argument. However I’ll take his wager as well – as an Aussie punter.
The current Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, went to the last federal election with a pledge that ” there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.” There was a big swing against Labor in that election resulting in a “hung” parliament. Gillard was only able to hold on to office by forming a coalition with the Greens. The price? A carbon tax.
Governments, federal or state, that only get serve two terms are a rarity in Australia. Everyone expects this government to be one with spades. The Liberals have explictly linked their credibility to removing this tax.
Single term governments are a very rare species but not impossible.

… the “consensus argument” in a survey by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) that said “98% of all scientists believe in global warming”.

The 1st Amendment allows for “freedom of religion”, so everybody is allowed to believe what they want, but the SCOTUS has declared that there is a separation of Church and State, so these beliefs have no place in the operation of the US government.