Herald Sun

That’s it for me until late January. It’s family time now, and time, too, for gardening, reading, cooking and a bit of tennis.

Thank you so very much for your wonderful support this year, or for just your interest. With a week of December still to go, we’ve smashed all our previous records with 2.4 million page impressions from 850,000 unique browsers.

I’m very grateful. Have a marvellous Christmas. Make some children very happy.

UPDATE

Thank you so very much to all who have sent cards or comments on this blog wishing me and my family the best for Christmas. I return those wishes in full to you. Merry Christmas, and may the new year be wonderful.

UPDATE 2

Reader Fay of Perth sends this last gift of 2009, apres the Copenhagen farce and the toppling of Malcolm Turnbull: a defining moment of Australian (non)-journalism from representatives of the media collective. Heed their like and you’d never understand how we got to where we are now. And you wouldn’t end the year with a smile as broad as mine.

Ministers gathering to discuss poverty and greenhouse gases create lots of both:

Sweden recently hosted the European Development Days, a five-day summit meeting of EU ministers discussing poverty and climate change. Attendees thumbed their noses at both the poor and the environment, Sweden stuck with a 3.5 million kronor ($480,000) bill for limousine services.

How mad are these people? North America and Europe are freezing under record snows, but the warmists at the toys-chain Build-a-Bear are telling children Christmas may be cancelled this year because global warming has melted Santa’s home:

Girl Elf: Santa, it’s gone!

Papa Elf: It’s gone, It’s gone!

Santa: What’s gone?

Girl Elf: Tell ‘em, Dad!

Papa Elf: The North Peak.

Santa: A mountain? A mountain’s gone? How is that possible?

Ella the polar bear: Santa, sir, that’s why I’m here. That’s why we’re here. The ice is melting!

Santa: Yes, my dear, we know, the climate is changing. There’s bound to be a little melting.

Ella: It’s worse than that, Santa, a lot worse! At the rate it’s melting, the North Pole will be gone by Christmas!”

Santa: My, my…all of this gone by next Christmas? I don’t think so.

Ella: No sir, not next Christmas, this Christmas! The day after tomorrow!

Once again, it’s the bullying and me-me-me badgering that betrays the appeal of global warming to the inner totalitarian. Ask me all about it, having had a warmist MC at our local carols by candlelight hector me from the stage.

For any children worried that Santa’s home really has melted, here’s the latest satellite picture of all the ice (in purple):

(Via Big Government.)

MOST people will date the death of the great global warming scare not from the Copenhagen fiasco - boring! - but from Avatar.

It won’t be the world’s most expensive warmist conference but the world’s most expensive movie that will stick in most memories as the precise point at which the green faith started to shrivel from sheer stupidity.

Avatar, in fact, is the warmist dream filmed in 3D. Staring through your glasses at James Cameron’s spectacular $400 million creation, you can finally see where this global warming cult was going.

And you can see, too, everything that will now slowly pull it back to earth.

December 2009. Note it down. The beginning of the end, even as Avatar becomes possibly the biggest-grossing film in history.

Cameron, whose last colossal hit was Titanic, has created a virtual new planet called Pandora, on which humans 150 years from now have formed a small settlement.

They are there to mine a mineral so rare that it’s called Unobtainium (groan), of which the greatest deposit sits right under the great sacred tree of the planet’s dominant species, humanoid blue aliens called Na’vi.

If Tim Flannery, Al Gore and all the other Copenhagen delegates could at least agree to design a new kind of people, they’d wind up with something much like these 3m-tall gracelings.

The Na’vi live in trees, at one with nature. They worship Mother Earth and, like Gaians today, talk meaningfully of “a network of energy that flows through all living things”. They drink water that’s pooled in giant leaves, and chant around a tree that whispers of their ancestors.

They are also unusually non-sexist for a forest tribe, with the women just as free as men to hunt and choose their spouse. Naturally, like the most fashionable of Hollywood stars, they are also neo-Buddhist reincarnationists, who believe “all energy is borrowed and some day you have to give it back”.

And, of course, the Na’vi reject all technology that’s more advanced than a bow and arrow, for “the wealth of the world is all around us”.

Sent to talk dollars and sense into these blue New Agers and move them out of the way of the bulldozers is a former Marine, Jake Sully (played by Australian Sam Worthington), who drives the body of a Na’vi avatar to better gain their trust.

(WARNING: Spoiler alert! Don’t read on if you plan to see the movie.)

Continue reading 'Column - Avatar, the answer to a Copenhager’s dream'

THERE is something to marvel at in the rise, fall and rise again of Susan Boyle - and something to learn from it, too.

What’s to marvel at is just what’s made this 48-year-old Scottish spinster the heroine of the most-watched YouTube clip of the year.

More than 120 million times have people clicked to watch Boyle stomp on to the stage of Britain’s Got Talent in her housewife’s frock, to guffaws and sneers from an audience amazed that such an unkempt frump would even presume to be a singer.

And 120 million times have people been awed, often to tears, to see Boyle put the microphone to her mouth and sing so miraculously sweetly that the mockers were stilled to stunned silence.

What was transformed in that instant was not just a vision of plainness into a sound of beauty. Boyle’s very life was instantly transformed, too.

The unemployed church volunteer and self-announced virgin was overnight an international celebrity, in demand by every newspaper, and music entrepreneurs fought for her signature.

But when she lost the final of Britain’s Got Talent to some dance group we’ve never heard of since, Boyle collapsed, and was rushed to a London clinic to slowly recover in seclusion from what was described as exhaustion.

Many were only too keen then to put Boyle and all such dreamers back in their station. Author Nicci French, for instance, tut-tutted the mob that had told this ugly duckling she was a swan.

But Boyle just needed time and space. Now she’s back with a debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, topping the charts in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

For many the moral will be as simple as the titles of the tracks of her album suggest: I Dreamed a Dream, Daydream Believer, Who I Was Born to Be and Proud. It’s of dreams coming true, plus some battler’s I’ll-show-’em, which is why it will sell better at Kmart than Readings.

Continue reading 'Column - Susan Boyle’s gift'

John Humphreys is in disconnect mode. He first correctly notes the defining characteristic of the new green moralists in this Age of Seeming:

It is an indication of the sorry state of community groups that when faced with a problem, they spend millions of dollars whinging and asking other people to do something. This is especially true when it comes to climate campaigners. While this group of young ideologues revel in their self-appointed moral superiority, they have so far achieved very little.

But, not realising that such no-sweat, pass-the-buck, bully-others posturing is precisely the appeal of the authoritarian green faith, Humphreys then recommends the disciples actually do something - that they actually change from seeming to being:

Instead of whinging and waiting for politicians to become benevolent, people who are worried about anthropogenic global warming can take immediate action…

Effective action requires money… One option for funds would be workplace giving, where workers could allow 0.5 per cent (or more) to be deducted from their income and go directly to the community fund as a voluntary donation. Even if only one-third of Australians agreed to give the minimum, they would easily raise more than $1 billion. It is easy to imagine entire workplaces getting together and jointly agreeing to join the scheme.

Easy to imagine, John? Then why hasn’t it happened already?

In fact, as the debate over the emissions trading scheme shows, the closer the pain, the more the doubt that this green faith is worth it.

Incidentally, I’m sorry to see the Centre for Independent Studies giving the global warming scare such credence.

Green groups will have to get used to the idea that the capitalist US isn’t their greatest enemy at all. In fact, the real spoiler in Copenhagen was the world’s biggest emitter:

Copenhagen, however, has demonstrated - to Western eyes - a less agreeable side to Chinese assertiveness.

Across the developed world, China’s brazen stonewalling of attempts to reach a legally binding treaty on climate change was greeted by a stunned, angry and almost visceral response. Australian officials, led by Kevin Rudd, were understood to be irate; US President Barack Obama - who claims his greatest strength is his cool temper - was reportedly stood up by Wen Jiabao and barged in on a meeting the Chinese Premier was holding with other leaders.

The British Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, showed even less restraint, accusing China of ‘’hijacking’’ the summit.

Welcome to the Chinese century.

Mind you, it was always perfectly clear and understandable that China would insist on giving people and progress the benefit of the doubt, knowing that cutting growth to “save” the planet was not just unfair to the poor but political suicide for the Communist regime. The only astonishing thing is that what China did came as such a shock to Rudd, when it was so obvious even to me that in February last year I wrote this:

Folks, get over this white man’s burden thing. China is now in charge... It’s done the maths and figured it will be better off warmer and richer than cooler and poorer.

But I suspect the green groups will keep giving China a pass. Not that they care about China’s poor, of course, but that they hate capitalism more.

Just another demonstration of how green power is built on huge government handouts, all funded by you:

AGL threatened not to invest in alternative energy forms until the Government addressed a collapse in the price of certificates designed to encourage investment.

The threat highlights the risks hanging over $30 billion of expected investment needed to reach a target of obtaining 20 per cent of power from renewable sources by 2020.

The managing director of AGL, Michael Fraser, said the Government’s approach was a fraud that threatened the industry’s ability to meet the target.

To encourage investment, energy companies receive renewable energy certificates in return for building green power stations. But the value of these certificates has almost halved, from near $60 to about $30 since the Government began issuing them to consumers who install solar hot water systems and other products that do not generate power.

These green carpetbaggers plan to be on the government teat for the rest of your life, and will always be wanting yet more of your cash.

Here we go again:

THIRTY young Afghan asylum-seekers have been transported to Melbourne for processing because of chronic overcrowding in the detention centre on Christmas Island.

Imre Salusinszky discovers the unexpurgated version of the letter from six-year-old Gracie from which Kevin Rudd quoted in Copenhagen.

Who said the science was settled?

Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

”My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming....”

In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.

Australian angle: Lu received his PhD in Physics from the University of Newcastle.

(Thanks to reader Thumbnail.)

UPDATE

If Lu is right, the US can expect more winters like this one, with more than half the country now covered in snow:

UPDATE 2

Another reminder that warming would be good, since it’s cold that is the bigger killer:

Winter freeze kills 79 in Poland

The Rasmussen poll is echoed by the Quinnipiac poll:

American voters also disapprove 51 - 44 percent of President Obama’s handling of the economy and disapprove 56 - 37 percent of the way he is creating jobs.

In fact, Obama is losing even the Doonesbury demographic.

Roger Kimball says one picture tells the story:

(Via Instapundit.)

I thought Al Gore and Gordon Brown were trying to lead us up the garden path in Copenhagen, but this metaphor will do even better.

Tim Blair presents sobering evidence that when a Marxist decides to parade his learning, he tends to parade something very different indeed. Oddly enough, in this case the effect is more comic than Guy Rundle achieves when he’s actually trying to be funny.