We are told the US invasion of Iraq was all about oil. Or was it? In fact, the oil wars began almost as soon as oil became the common mode of fuel. This enlightenment comes from a book by Paul Roberts, ‘The End of Oil’. The British switched their navy quickly from coal to oil, […]

Today in Ipswich three Greenpeace activists were fined $500 each and ordered to pay damages between them for $23,000 worth of damage to a smoke stack at Swanbank Power Station. They had scaled the stack and painted the words “Go Solar” on it in July as a protest against the greenhouse gases being emitted by […]

In The sad demise of ‘On Line Opinion’ Clive Hamilton writes: “What readers were not told is that Harris is a paid lobbyist for energy companies, that he has tried to change his Wikipedia entry to conceal the fact that he is or has been employed by the PR company High Park Group, and that […]

According to the WWF Australians are consuming four times as much per capita as we should. “So Australians are among the biggest consumers of the world’s resources. “The sustainable average round the world is probably about two hectares per person. So we’re using about four times more resources than we should be.” But when you […]

The climate science is slowly blowing more and more holes in the IPCC anthropogenic warming case, but just as with any other bubble, the bulls are at their most vigorous just as their case starts to collapse. The result? You won’t hear references to the collapse around the water cooler, anymore than people were telling […]

I just came across Joanne Nova and her The Skeptics Handbook. Joanne appears to be eminently qualified as a scientist, and a science communicator, having even occassionally stood-in for Dr Karl on ABC radio. She can’t be dismissed as some sort of an outsider, and unlike many of the skeptics she’s not a superannuated professor, […]

Climate skeptics are frequently incredibly bad at arguing their case. I’ve been following the greenhouse issue since I was a kid back in the 60s, so I should have heard all of the persuasive arguments by now. But I read a very persuasive one today that I had never seen before. If the skeptics were […]

The only way General Circulation Models can produce catastrophic CO2-induced warming is to introduce positive forcings from other agents, such as water vapour. Without these forcings temperature increases are relatively benign. What most don’t understand is that the values attributed to these forcings are largely imaginary. I’ve just come across two pieces of information which […]

It’s semi-official. Global warming is taking a back seat to the economy. The Lowy Institute has just released the results of their 2008 pollwhich finds, amongst other things: Australians see protecting their jobs and strengthening the economy as more important foreign policy goals than tackling climate change according to the 2008 Lowy Institute Poll, to […]

Is there a link between the demise of Lehman Brothers and global warming? Jennifer Marohasy certainly seems to think so, but she doesn’t say why. There is a spate of theories from her commenters. I think that there is a link, but it’s not specific to Lehman Brothers, but rather systemic, and it has to […]