Jennifer Marohasy

 
The proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street failed to pass the US Congress last night.   Across the world disappointed investors are now fleeing stock markets as the global economy teeters on ruin.
 
With the likely arrival of more austere times it is unlikely national governments will have a lot of time or interest in [...]

A branch of the Victorian Liberal Party has been attacked for holding a climate science forum in Melbourne that will hear only one, unfashionable point of view: the skeptics.  For more information on this, and other environment-related events, visit the community page at this blog. 

Well known climate change skeptic, Bill Kininmonth, will be speaking at a community forum on Wednesday , October 1,  at 8pm at the Marwal Centre, 9 Marwal Ave, North Balwyn.  The organisers, the Kew Branch of the Liberal Party, are offering tea and biscuits afterwards.

The forum received some publicity in yesterday’s The Age newspaper.

Dear Colleague,
The greatest gathering of global and domestic carbon market practitioners and businesses ever assembled in Australia – 100 speakers and 90 exhibitors representing leading carbon market experience from Europe, Asia, North America, New Zealand & Australia – will be on hand at Australia’s first international carbon market expo & conference on the Gold Coast [...]

 
The risk of a climate crisis, like the risks associated with sub-prime mortgage securitisation, are calculated using complex computer models and both are too complex for the average punter to understand.  
 
As Graham Young wrote last week in a blog post entitled ‘Sub-prime and climate change’, these models were created by clever people with PhDs [...]

At a hastily convened Landcare meeting yesterday, around 100 landholders affected by the proposed Tarong Coal mine on the Haystack Plain called on the Queensland government to protect iconic farmlands from mining development.
 
Landcare Project Officer Nevin Olm said: “It is good enough for the government to protect the iconic Daintree and other natural areas, why [...]

The BBC is being investigated by television watchdogs after a leading climate change sceptic claimed his views were deliberately misrepresented.  Lord Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, says he was made to look like a ‘potty peer’ on a TV programme that ‘was a one-sided polemic for the new religion of global warming’.  Read [...]

A new report by a research consortium called the Global Carbon Project has confirmed that China leapfrogged the United States in 2006 as the world’s biggest carbon emitter and India is heading for third place.  The report also claims global greenhouse gas levels are “scaling record peaks”. Read more here.

“A pervasive myth has taken hold in the public consciousness: That there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent.”
 
At least that is according to Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck writing in the proceedings of the 20th Conference on Climate Variability [...]

I begin as a trickle, of melting snowflakes,
High in the mountains as Springtime awakes.
I ooze from the sedges, and springs neath the ground.
Drawn by gravity, it’s downward I’m bound.
I’m one of the elements of antiquity,
The basis of life, I begin clear and free.
It’s water I am, the compound H two O.
They say I am scarce, [...]