Inconvenient Truths...the NZ perspective...

...I have commented before that pragmatic southern hemisphere policies on climate change are likely to lead the world. I wouldn't have made that prediction 6 or 7 months ago, when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's ETS was the only political option on the table for Australia. However, a lot has happened since then; most of those happenings ending in 'gate'. Exceptions to that terminology though are Copenhagen and Tony Abbott. Both have exploded into the debate and changed it forever.

Here in NZ, conscious of our size we like to think that internationally we "punch above our weight". And certainly with a look at the statistics of sport and child abuse we do a lot of punching. With regard to saving the planet though, our ex-PM Helen Clarke, now pulling levers at the UN, was a dutiful and obedient party liner, eager to destroy our economy if she could . Her successor, John Key has played a more cautious pragmatic line, leaving comment largely up to his Environment Minister Nick Smith. And Smith's most recent pronouncement was "I've had calls...to abandon or defer the ETS. That's not what the Government's going to do. It's a very important first step."Smith is also quoted as saying NZ would do its fair share (to cut emissions) but that "it would not be a world leader".The two sentiments seem very difficult to reconcile. In Australia, Kevin Rudd is now seen as "being alone and exposed" over his failure to maintain support for the ETS. If an Australian election dumps Rudd in favour of Tony Abbott, and the USA so-called 'cap and trade' bill fails, as seems likely, NZ and Europe will be the world's only champions of an ETS. Where I wonder would that leave Nick Smith ? Is he reading this, do you think ? Is anyone even asking ?

...The Business Council of Australia no longer considers the introduction of an ETS as providing business certainty and has put a caveat on support for an Australian scheme that cannot be met.
Given the fiasco of Copenhagen, the BCA has urged the government to change its scheme "in line with other international responses". Further, it has demanded the unconditional target of cutting greenhouse gases by 5 per cent by 2020, the same target as the Coalition's, not be lifted "before we have clear and credible commitments, and actions, from both developed and developing countries that are verifiable and monitored".
That's impossible for nations such as China and India to meet: the BCA may as well have urged an ETS be set up on the moon before Australia lifts its target...more here...

Lights! camera ! action !

...when the climate alarmists start to get skewered by the PC MSM (read TV) we will really know that we have traction... A note to Kiwi's re this post. John in this spoof is the voice of John Clarke, a.k.a. our old mate Fred Dagg. This script is a voice over to a 2 year old interview featuring John Clarke as the then Aussie PM; John Howard. Artistic license has substituted John Howard for Rudd's Environment Minister Penny Wong...

Kerry: Tonight, we’re joined by Senator Penny Wong.
Brian: Senator Wong, thanks for joining us – and may I add how lovely you look tonight.
John: Why, thank you Brian.
Brian: You’ve been pretty quiet lately, Senator.
John: Plenty to be quiet about Brian.
Brian: Such as?
John: Climategate, Copenhagen, conflict of interest, Glaciergate. Blizzards in the northern hemisphere. Anything to do with Climate Change, actually. It’s all gone to custard.
Brian: So it’s been a tough few months, then?
John: Been a mongrel, Brian, yes. First Climategate made us all look like a bunch of crooks. Then Copenhagen made us look like a bunch of stupid crooks. And…
Brian: And ???
John: Subsequent events have confirmed the earlier conclusions Brian. The UN head of climate change turns out to be a railway engineer who’s now on the gravy train, and it seems our peer reviewed glacier data is obtained over the phone from a gentleman in the Punjab.
Brian: Who is…?
John: A certified idiot Brian. And as of late, a highly respected and very well credentialed traveler on the gravy train as well.
Brian: Where the wheels are looking wobbly to the point of parting from the vehicle?
John: Cheers for that Brian. Can we change the subject please?
Brian: OK. So, err, Senator, any plans for the future?
John: Not much.
Brian: How about the ETS legislation in February?
John: Not much point really, is there Brian? Blind Freddy can see it’s a crock of it. A total waste of taxpayer’s resources and government’s time. Government exists to maintain and expand the social and economic well-being of its population – not to legislate natural events. No responsible government would even contemplate such a thing.
Brian: Then what will you do instead?
John: After disbanding the Department for Climate Change?
Brian: Dismantle your own department?
John: Of course. It’s about as useful as tits on a bull right now Brian. Yep. Disband the department, resign from parliament and then I think I’ll renovate the en-suite and put in a home entertainment room.
Brian: (Gobsmacked) What!?
John: Home entertainment room Brian. A lot of houses have them these days.
Brian: (Spluttering) Resign?
John: Sorry, should have mentioned it earlier. The Labor Party will be resigning on Monday. We’ll probably be the first government in history to resign in protest at their own incompetence. Brian: (Still gobsmacked.) The Labor Party?
John: Only the feds Brian. Though I hear the New South Wales guys reckon it could be a good idea as well. Kevin might stick around to run a garage sale and hand over the keys. The best thing we can do for the country Brian.
Brian: You can’t be serious!
John: (Laughing) ‘Course not Brian. When do you want to start the interview?

When the establishment's media darlings show some courage and lampoon their traditional liberal political allies and the laughing starts, it's all over...H/T Jo Nova...

...and breaking news...Abbott unveils coalition climate policy...here... and Kevin Rudd warns his troops...there is "no guarantee" Labor will win the next election in the wake of a shock Newspoll finding that the Coalition has overtaken Labor on the primary vote.
The Prime Minister said today the reality was that Mr Abbott would be prime minister if two or three people in 100 changed their vote at the next election...more here..

But southward (Poms and Yanks) look, the land is bright...

...students of international affairs who like to speculate about power shifts and the end of empires tend to focus on economic and ideological issues and their reflections are often written in hindsight as a post mortem. As a proud Kiwi Pom, I have posted before that this part of the world will rise to a become a major player on the world scene. We (that is Australia and NZ) are blessed by our geography and by the fact that we were colonised by a benevolent power whose institutions we have gratefully accepted and exploited.

Now, with the benefit of distance from our so called mother country we can see for ourselves the trail ahead clearly, and if we are clever enough we can avoid the pitfalls and minefields that continue to paralyse and degrade other nations. As an example see today's posting from Cranmer : Nick Clegg (Leader of the UK opposition Liberal Democrats) : Faith schools must teach that homosexuality is 'normal and harmless'...

However, our good mates over the ditch in Australia are likely to be the first western nation who will choose their next Prime Minister (above) on the basis of his attitude towards climate change. In this respect Australia will lead the world, and the level of intense debate will have international repercussions. Writing this morning in the WSJ, Tom Switzer observes...

...When I say the climate is changing, I do not mean, as many people do, that man-made global warming is destroying Planet Earth. I mean that the politics of climate change is changing rapidly all over the globe. Al Gore's moment has come and gone.
In the United States, Democrats, nervously facing midterm elections, are calling on President Obama to jettison the cap-and-trade bills before the Senate. In Canada, the emissions-trading scheme—another term for cap-and-trade—is stalled in legislative limbo. In Britain, Tories are coming out against David Cameron's green stance. In the European Union, cap-and-trade has been the victim of fraudulent traders and the carbon price has more than halved to $18.50 per ton. In France, the Constitutional Council has blocked President Nicolas Sarkozy's tax on carbon emissions that was set to take effect in the New Year.
In Copenhagen, meanwhile, the United Nations' climate-change summit went up in smoke. And in Mexico City later this year hopes for any verifiable, enforceable and legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gases—and to bring in developing nations such as China and India that were, insanely, omitted from the Kyoto protocol in 1997—are a chimera... Nowhere is the changing climate more evident than in Australia...The center-right Liberal-led opposition, moreover, is now led by Tony Abbott, a culture warrior who has described man-made global warming in language unfit to print in a family newspaper and cap-and-trade as "a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicized handouts, run by a giant bureaucracy."Australia's debate has entered a new phase, one that goes beyond the religious fervor and feel-good gestures that had held sway all too often...more here...

Cometh the hour, cometh Tony Abbott...

...Australia will "almost certainly" vote next year on the issue of AGW and the huge tax increases that will go with it. Readers of this blog know that AGW is a grand plan to redistribute Western wealth to developing nations, and is a direct reaction to the success and strength of capitalism, and the fruit of capitalism, globalisation. The reactionary green/left anti-capitalist revolt is attempting to cement in place world government via the UN. The clash between the two forces will come to a head next year when Australians will vote in 2010 in a general election that will scrutinise every aspect of the science fraud and international conspiracy behind AGW. The eyes and ears of the world will focus on the debate, and in particular on Tony Abbott who made it happen... From the man himself, writing in The Australian...

...As things stand, there will almost certainly be a climate change election. It won't just be about climate change, but that will be the totemic issue. The government will say that lifting the price of carbon is necessary to help the environment. That might be the case one day, but certainly not now. The challenge is to find ways to improve the environment without a great big new tax.

When Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace in the dark days of 1940 to accept the king's commission, he felt that his whole life had been but a preparation for this moment, or so he recounts in his memoirs. This is not wartime Britain. And I am certainly not Churchill. Still, I feel well equipped to take on the leadership of the party in what are testing times for the conservative side of politics...more here.. and here... and here...

...AND on the eleventh and twelth days of Christmas, my true love sent to me, twelve thousand warmists meeting, eleven guns a smoking,ten computer programmes, nine researchers dancing, eight grants for milking, seven bears a swimming, six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs, three hockey sticks,two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

"Their shoulders held the sky suspended...

...they stood and earth's foundations stay..." A.E.Houseman wrote about an army of forgotten mercenaries. Although his sentiments are a little melodramatic, they are applicable and could also apply to 2 individuals who are changing our world as we watch. One is the anonymous northern hemisphere whistleblower who leaked the CRU information and data to us, the second is Australian Opposition leader Tony Abbott, whose ascendancy to political leadership over the climate change issue is being watched and debated worldwide. As Andrew Bolt observes in the Melbourne Herald Sun, Tony Abbott has...

... bought the Liberals time - the only thing left that could heal their bloody division over global warming.The Liberals can be healed if they see global warming not as a moral question, but a scientific and economic problem. And events will prove decisive in settling a difference of opinion on those. FIRST, if the world keeps failing to warm, the warming theory itself will crumble. Indeed, it's crumbling already. Rudd's belief that man is heating the world is based almost entirely on the reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But thousands of emails uncovered in this month's Climategate scandal show that the scientists most responsible for those reports did not just doctor data, destroy awkward evidence, and censor sceptical scientists. They also show some of them privately admitting that the world seems not to be heating as they (and Rudd) predicted.
"Where the heck is global warming?" raged Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, to another Climategate scientist: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
But time won't just settle this argument about whether the world is actually warming.
By next year the UN's Copenhagen summit will be well over and we'll also know then how serious other countries really are about cutting their emissions, too.
If the world's biggest emitters - such as China, the United States and India - keep refusing to agree to their own legally enforceable cuts in emissions, then tiny Australia going it alone will seem even more suicidally mad.
Of course, it cuts both ways. If the world resumes warming with a vengeance, and if the world's big emitters do indeed set real targets, then many sceptics will be forced to shut up.
So time will tell, and time will heal. Time is thus what the Liberals need most, along with a leader who would meanwhile rather die fighting than live crawling. With Abbott, the Liberals finally have both a cause to fight, and time to heal...more here...

...I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Mick Jagger was right. Time really is on our side...meanwhile Phil Jones has his collar felt...

...and, H/T Theo... Anyone need a new watch ? Buy a Rolex...

Nurse Myra and Tony Abbott...

...Mr Abbott (right) the new Australian opposition leader and next Prime Minister is, according to this morning's NZ Herald...an outspoken, two fisted conservative. M.A. (Oxon.) Rhodes scholar, ex boxer...

...obviously then a man to be reckoned with...“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously...when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”...and "As opposition leader I am not frightened of an election, and I am not frightened of an election on this (climate change) issue...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 handouts, run by a giant bureaucracy..."

Abbott's ascendancy is another major blow for the left, (what a week !) particularly the extreme statists. The 2010 election will be a de facto referendum on climate change, this from the Australian...

...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...more here...

...and while in public Abbott hedges his bets over AGW, (as does John Key ), the Australian electorate is generally as cynical over Al Gore's climatastrophe as their Kiwi cousins...Abbott said he believed climate change was real and humans did make a contribution, but that the extent of that contribution and the measures needed were in dispute, as were the merits of an ETS. "We will have a strong and effective climate change policy, but one thing we are not going to do is damage Australia's export industries, put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage against the world, and we are not going to have the conceit of thinking we can save the world on our own."

And Nurse Myra ? Well, she reminds me of someone I knew well many years ago at St. Vincent's Hospital in Darlinghust. Our paths crossed recently in cyberspace when I stumbled upon her enthralling and edgy blog; Gimcrack Hospital. Nurse also knows a fair bit more than I do about Mr Abbott's past. (An ex paramour maybe ?) as her comment to yesterday's posting showed. Pay her a visit and say hello...

...and quote of the day..."Leute wie Sie standen auf den Mauer-Wachtürmen der roten Sozialisten, Sie überwachten die Wachtürme der braunen Sozialisten. Und, ..., Leute Ihres Schlages werden auf den Wachtürmen der grünen Sozialisten stehen und deren Umerziehungslagern zu klimatologisch korrekten Staatsbürgern."("People like you stood in the guard towers of the red socialists' wall, they stood in the brown[shirt] socialists' guard towers. And people of your stripe will stand in the guard towers of the green socialists and their re-education camps for climatologically correct citizens.")
- Commenter Frank39, who appears to have lived in East Germany, responding on a post on Climategate from the German "Science Skeptical" blog...H/T Samizdata...