Seriously, mofos, if you read only one blog post this year make it this one by Trevor. I literally have tears rolling down my cheeks.

Steve Fielding’s wife has written an article for The Punch.

In the article, Steve (via Susan) trots out all of the lines he’s being spewing into the media recently about looking at both sides of the story, the science not being settled, and pretty graphs presenting arbitrarily-selected data proving something or other (Tobias covers this in more detail over at Pure Poison.) But the most brilliant moment of deluded madness is this:

I briefly met Mr Gore at a breakfast in Melbourne attended by more than a thousand people. He was aware of the important role Family First plays in the senate and was keen to catch up.

After a series of phone calls I was met with a stonewall of resistance. I offered to meet Mr Gore at any place at any time but had no luck. Here we had the former Vice President of the United States, a self proclaimed climate change preacher running away from me over a few simple questions.

Don’t you know who I am? I am the leader of a Party of one that on the basis of 50,000 votes is holding the Upper House of Australia’s Parliament to ransom in a futile effort to get myself re-elected in 2010.

Steve’s just pissed off that he paid for dry cleaning for nothing.

On the back of this story, I’d like to confess to heinous war crimes:

• I have committed genocide using weapons of mass destruction
• I have bombed entire populations resident on my land with chemical weapons, out of pure racism
• I have launched military action against a colony on the false premise that they posed a danger to me
• I have employed torture devices that have maimed and killed countless innocent creatures, just ’cause

I submit myself to PETA and humbly ask for leniency.

Great article about what Tim Lambert calls “The Australian’s War on Science” in the SMH:

Less well documented so far has been the industry’s influence on the media. Take the powerful News Corporation, which publishes two-thirds of our remaining newspapers. Despite a spectacular about-face on climate change in 2007 by News Corp’s chairman Rupert Murdoch, no media group can match the Murdoch press for consistently fomenting global warming scepticism and arguing against climate change mitigation measures.

News Corp’s tabloid provocateurs Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt rail against greenies every other day but don’t have the attention to detail to influence national debate on climate change science, emissions trading and reduction targets, and international negotiations on global warming.

The Australian – Rupert’s baby and local flagship – does. But nothing you read on climate change in The Australian can be taken at face value. Its coverage of the issue is effectively sponsored by the resources industry.

Read it.

I love single-issue political parties. They pop up now and again, seemingly with no mission other than to give bloggers fresh fodder, only to attract a couple of hundred members, some media attention for a couple of days, and then disappear off the mainstream political radar. This month’s single-issue party is a doozy; I just know we’re going to have a lot of fun with The Climate Sceptics.

And all power to them. There is a growing number of people out there who are sceptical about climate change or about the role that humans play in it, and a growing number of outright deniers. If the Climate Sceptics Party wants to have a crack at representing those people, then who are we point, laugh and ridicule?

So let’s say you are sceptical about climate change and you are looking to support a political party that will oppose legislation you see as unnecessary and destructive. You stumble across the Climate Sceptics and you like what you see.

The boxing kangaroo means they’re dinky-di Aussie, mate.

But, being a thinking person, you see some contradictions and dodgy assertions. Firstly, you’re a little taken aback to see this graphic.

You know, being a thinking person, that a slick diagram proving that the sun is rooly, rooly big doesn’t conclusively prove shit when it comes to climate change.

And you know, being a thinking person, that our society works best when people take personal responsibility for personal actions, considering how they affect themselves, other people, and shared surroundings, so you’re disappointed to see this hand-washing, guilt-absolving statement.

You wonder to yourself, being a thinking person, if this political party exists to drive better national policy or just clear people’s consciences. You begin to doubt, as a thinking person, the Climate Sceptics, and your doubt only strengthens after reading the About Us page, where you find these statements about the organisation’s philosophy.

• We support family values
• We support a return to basic values, good manners and respect for human values within our society.

And your worst fears are confirmed. The Climate Sceptics are not just a single-issue party that exists to drive better legislation on your behalf, they’re also a conservative movement committed to reinforcing those tired concepts of “family” and “basic” values, like discrimination against homosexuals and restriction of personal freedoms in the name of personal freedom. The Climate Sceptics, far from existing to battle it out on environmental issues, exist only to fight the culture wars.

GrodsCorp’s favourite über-freak, Prodos, has a long history (scroll to point five) of being hostile towards those who hold opposing views, despite his oft-repeated claim of being “objective” and “constructive”. For somebody who is so apparently committed to rational debate, our Prodos can only tolerate his own way of thinking. For once I am in complete agreement with Dr (sic) John ‘TingTong’ Ray who said of Prodos: “[his] ego has run away with him. He thinks that his own approach is the only defensible one.”

The latest self-aggrandising project to spew forth from Prodos’ ego is the objective and constructive Are You A Moron? project, which requires you to answer “yes” if you believe in any of the following:

• Global warming
• Scientific consensus
• That the debate is over
• Renewable energy
• Taxing carbon
• Green jobs
• the idea CO2 is a pollutant

As is the way with all of Prodos’ projects (Privatize The ABC, Celebrate Capitalism, Thinker To Thinker, I Love Prodos etc.) he seems to be more interested in the pithy slogans, domain names and merchandise than he does in the issue. This particular project boasts at least four domain names (areyouamoron.com, greenpoppycock.com, carbondioxideisnotapollutant.com and greensliepeopledie.com) — conservative estimates put the total number of domain names owned by Prodos at over 9000 — a blog with links to stuff other people wrote, and a massive range of stupid merchandise like this:

Someone needs to proof read Prodos’ slogans for grammar before he prints them

Now all he needs is a matching song, perhaps along the lines of this one he wrote about Teh Moooooooslems.

What happens when you really, really, badly want a graph to show something and you blow your load too early?

THE editor-in-chief of GrodsCorp, Scott, has won the Latte Award for Media Excellence for leading the blog’s balanced coverage of politics and current affairs. The award is presented each year by the Australian Coffee Roasters and Brewers’ Association.

For the first time, the judging panel presented the award to an editor rather than a reporter or columnist. ACRBA chief executive Ernest Pickleheim said that over the past 12 months GrodsCorp’s “in-depth and balanced coverage of a range of social and political issues affecting Australians all has been of a consistently high standard”.

Writers at GrodsCorp including John Surname, Bridgit Gread, Ant Rogenous, Bron and Jason, were judged to have “significantly contributed to this very high standard of journalism”.

(More information here and here.)

Everyone loves trying to summarise important speeches as Wordles, hoping the at-a-glance nature of the resulting graphic might give some insight into the speech’s themes. So I plugged Malcolm Turnbull’s press conference from this afternoon, announcing his intention to vote against the government’s emissions trading scheme, into Wordle to better understand it.

However, pretty as it may be, the Wordle didn’t really help me understand the thrust of Turnbull’s speech. So I went looking through the text for easy-to-understand metaphors and I found one.

We don’t want to get into a sort of Betamax/VHS debate here, you know where Kevin Rudd says I’ve got the best scheme and the rest of the world say, ‘yeah that’s very interesting Kevin, it’s very interesting but we’re not interested in adopting it because it’s from our point of view not practical’.

So I set this out graphically, for ease of translation.

Here’s Kevin Rudd’s technically-superior, yet unpopular ETS scheme:

And here’s the massively popular, yet inferior scheme favoured by the rest of the world:

And here’s the format offered by Malcolm Turnbull in the place of the government’s proposed scheme:

Laserdisc: experience the future of technology NOW

Gasp in horror as Michelle Bachmann completely denies Co2 is harmful in any way, before recycling the “trace gas” meme.

Click here for a neat little summary as to why she is wrong.

(Thanks to GrodsReader Andrew.)

It might be lazy blogging, but I don’t think I can make my point about Earth Hour any better than I did last year.

Somebody call Teh Press! Carbon’s role in AGW has been clarified by the Citizens Electoral Council (who?), and we need more carbon!

Nature craves more carbon dioxide

Government policies to force drastic cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, out of fear of CO2 as a “pollutant”, are insane… The global average atmospheric CO2 concentration is currently a tiny 387 ppm (parts per million)—just a trace gas—and trees and plants are craving for more, yet fools are threatening to decimate our economy, in order to reduce this life-giving gas.

If this is true it will cause a total realignment of thinking across the world and a total change in behaviour; it’s revolutionary stuff. What sort of evidence is behind this theory?

Commercial greenhouse operators are advised to add enough CO2 to maintain about 1,000 ppm around their plants… The dinosaurs survived just fine when CO2 concentrations exceeded 2,000 ppm… Exhaled human breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000 ppm…

Oh, dear. Is it even worth wasting the kilojoule or two of energy required to type a critique of those arguments?

Just when you thought that the award Australia’s stupidest political party had been taken by Family First, along comes a party so ludicrous all you can do is laugh.

Presenting – the Climate Skeptics, noble crusaders against alarmism of all kinds (emphasis below mine).

Anthropogenic or man-made Global Warming (AGW) alarmism is the biggest con, fraud, hoax, swindle, deception and mass hysteria in the history of modern civilization, because climate changes naturally.

As discussed previously, the words “con” etc suggest that scientists are deliberately hoaxing the folks – presumably to introduce communism, I’m sure. A great start.

They are a party firmly rooted in common sense:

In their marvellous “child abuse” page, they liken teaching children about science to sending them off in the Children’s Crusade.

The Climate Sceptics object in the strongest possible terms to the kind of child abuse being inflicted on children by AGW alarmism in school classrooms. It is not science. It is religio-political indoctrination. It is a drive to sweep up children in one of the most fanatical movements the world has ever seen.

The Children’s Crusade of 1212 C.E. was one of the most shameful events in the history of the Christian West. After four Crusades had failed to wrest the Holy Lands from the Mohammedan powers, many thousands of children were swept up by the mass hysteria and religious enthusiasm of the day to do what the armies of Christendom had failed to do – repossess the Holy Lands.

Oh boy! A crusade!

Their climate change page is as sparse, selective and unscientific as you’d expect, and contains every meme and rambling, incorrect quote that has already been dispelled at actual scientific sites.

Their ABC page is hysterical:

The Climate Sceptics will have the following Policy for ABC programming about AGW:
POLICY

1. The IPCC will not be treated as an indisputable authority about AGW
2. Statements and predictions about AGW from IPCC, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO will be subject to critical analysis and not accepted at face value.
3. Equal time will be given to sceptic scientists and spokespersons in response to announcements and media releases in support of AGW.
4. Sensationalist and alarmist language should not be used in the reporting of AGW predictions and statements of alleged consequences of AGW.
5. The ABC will undertake a measured and thorough analysis and presentation of what AGW is and the alleged evidence to support it.

I suppose Catalyst will be presented by Andrew Bolt?  Will the news be running non-alarmist items about global warming child abuse?

I don’t like to use the word hypocrite (okay, I do!) but it is hypocritical to complain about “alarmism” from one quarter (and “alarmism” in itself is not an argument against global warming) while calling for the censorship of the ABC and accusing schools of “child abuse” for teaching real science and not hamstrung political ideology.

More on this party when my housemate isn’t pining for the PC.

Flawless deductive reasoning as witnessed in the comments at Andrew Bolt’s blog*.

People are carbon lifeforms,
greens hate carbon,
greens hate people.
– cohenite of newcastle

With thanks to Craig who read this awesomeness and alerted me via an aborted Skype phone conversation that went just like this one.

* I accidentally typed “clog” instead of “blog” here. Freudian?

A firefighter joins the crowing:

Consider the devastation in Victoria. Research by the CSIRO, Climate Institute and the Bushfire Council found that a “low global warming scenario” will see catastrophic fire events happen in parts of regional Victoria every five to seven years by 2020, and every three to four years by 2050, with up to 50 per cent more extreme danger fire days. However, under a “high global warming scenario”, catastrophic events are predicted to occur every year in Mildura, and firefighters have been warned to expect up to a 230 per cent increase in extreme danger fire days in Bendigo. And in Canberra, the site of devastating fires in 2003, we are being asked to prepare for a massive increase of up to 221 per cent in extreme fire days by 2050, with catastrophic events predicted as often as every eight years.

So now even the firefighters are pleased about the bushfires. Because that is what you mean by crowing, isn’t it Bolt? We’re pleased that people have died, right? We’re using the dead to push our socialist agenda?

Just keep digging that hole.