As you can see it features a lovely little banner and a picture of me which, I’m being told repeatedly, looks like it was taken by a police officer shortly before  charges were laid.

Anyway, the blog is called Planet Oz and it has a little homepage and RSS feed all of its own in the maelstrom of information that is The Guardian’s web-beast. There are already a couple of posts for you to chew over.

One – “How climate scientists are being framed” – looked at how some climate science mangling columnists and conservative opinistamakerpeople are trying in their writings to get us to associate climate scientists with things like sick children and totalitarian regimes. I sneaked onto the site’s front page with that one.

Another post – “Great Barrier Reef is at risk even if it doesn’t make Unesco’s danger list” – reviewed some of the recent research on the future of the reef. I argued that even if the United Nations does put it on its World Heritage “danger list” as it is threatening to do, the evidence suggests the reef is still facing a pretty dire future.

I’ll be hoping to cover a whole bunch of issues on the blog related to climate change, climate science denial, the environment, energy, sustainability and other such stuff. I’m still freelance so I’ll keep contributing to DeSmogBlog and hopefully I can keep writing for places like Green Lifestyle magazine and ABC Environment.

Planet Oz is part of a network of environment blogs which The Guardian has created in the mould of its science blog network project. In the same way that the science bloggers can write about “what they want, when they want” – within the boundaries of The Guardian’s own Editorial Guidelines – the environment bloggers should be given the same freedom once we’ve got our heads around the content management system and how not to fill our posts with garbled html code and pictures that don’t fit the screen.

Despite some confusion, Planet Oz and the blog network is separate from the approaching launch of Guardian Australia (hopefully though the very nice people at Guardian Australia will feature the posts).

The venture was actually announced back in December 2012 and I’m told about 800 people applied to be environment bloggers. Before the launch, some of the prospective bloggers had a little try out. I wrote about Australia’s love of exporting fossil fuels.

There are some cracking blogs already launched as part of the network and I’m kinda chuffed to be in their company. There’s Nafeez Ahmed’s Earth Insight, Jenni Duggan’s China’s Choice, John Abrahan and Dana Nuccitelli’s Climate Consensus – the 97%, Kavitha Rao’s Terra India, Canadian journalist Martin Lukacs’ True North, Emma Bryce’s World On A Plate and Africa Wild by Paula Kahumba. I think there are one or two more still to launch (I’ll add them here when I get them). UPDATE: Just launched, Alexander White’s Southern Crossroads, also from Australia.

Please go off and check them all out and share the posts if you like them. Even if you don’t like them, share them anyway and keep the comment threads healthy.

In reality, the headline should have read something like this “One solar physicist in Russia who is a member of a climate science denial organisation says we’re heading for global cooling but all the other people we spoke to say he’s dead wrong”.

Not as catchy though, eh?

The story “Emissions debate heats up while experts warn of a coming ice age” was written by the newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd and there are some very curious aspects to it.

Lloyd’s only “expert” warning of global cooling is Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov, a Russian solar physicist who has been claiming for at least four years that we’re heading for an ice age and we should all rug up. Abdussamatov says that climate change is all down to solar cycles and that the sun is in a quiet phase that will plunge us all into a deep freeze. Skeptical Science explains why this climate myth – one of the most popular – is wrong.

Lloyd tells readers that he is quoting Abdussamatov via an interview given to Principia Scientific International (Lloyd doesn’t say who they are, but I’ll have more about them in a moment). Here are Lloyd’s quotes

“Mars has global warming – but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians,” Abdussamatov said. “These parallel global warmings – observed simultaneously on Mars and on the Earth – can only be a consequence of the effect of the same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance.”

Here’s the real news. The quotes which Lloyd uses from Abdussamatov are actually more than five years old and come originally from this interview given to the National Post in Canada in January 2007.

Lloyd quotes Abdussamatov as “the head of space research at the Russian Academy of Sciences Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg, and director of the Russian segment of the International Space Station”.

This wasn’t accurate either. Principia Scientific International has already issued a correction saying that in fact “Dr Abdussamatov is actually head of space research of the Sun Sector at the Polkovo Observatory and head of the Selenometria project on the Russian segment of the International Space Station.”

Not quite so impressive as being the head of space research or the head of the Russian bit of the International Space Station.

Lloyd then goes on to provide some “balance” on his story leaving the reader with the impression that genuine experts actually are discussing the possibility of a coming ice-age, when they’re not. All they’re doing is responding to crank theories.

Lloyd quotes Frank Hill, a scientist at the US National Solar Observatory in Arizona. Lloyd writes that the quotes from Hill are from “last June”. This is also wrong. The quotes Hill gave were from June 2011 (here they are).

Irrespective of this, Lloyd quotes Hill like this

“We are predicting the behaviour of the solar cycle,” he said. “In my opinion, it is a huge leap from that to an abrupt global cooling, since the connections between solar activity and climate are still very poorly understood.

“My understanding is that current calculations suggest only a 0.3 degree C decrease from a Maunder-like minimum, too small for an ice age.”

Lloyd left out the beginning of Hill’s original quote, perhaps because it was so unequivocal. “We are NOT predicting a mini-ice age,” Hill pointed out, just in case anyone was wondering.

Hill’s understanding on the impact of a low point in the solar cycle reflects a paper published in 2010 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which found that if solar activity did drop to low levels, this would only take 0.3C off any global warming which we will have experienced by the end of the century. Several reports are now saying global average temperatures could be 4C higher or more by the end of the century.

Lloyd also gets a quote from Peter Stott of the UK’s Met Office.

“It is misleading to the public that other theories, such as that most of the warming is caused by solar changes, carry equal weight,” he says.

Except Lloyd probably didn’t get the quote from Peter Stott. Instead, it appears he took it without attribution from this article in April from the UK website Carbon Brief. The article explains just why the claims that we’re heading for a “mini ice-age” are misleading tosh.

Remember the headline at the top of Lloyd’s story? The one about how “experts warn of a coming ice-age”? Even though the first “expert” Lloyd cites does claim this, the other people quoted in Lloyd’s story say exactly the opposite. I should point out that Lloyd would likely not have written the headline.

Now back to our Russian physicist and the source of Lloyd’s story – the article on Principia Scientific International.  Graham Lloyd doesn’t say anything about who this group is, so allow me. PSI promotes some of the most widely debunked theories on climate change that exist on the internet (behind, possibly, magnetism) and it’s chief executive John O’Sullivan does not even accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet.

Terri Jackson, who is credited with writing the story about Abdussamatov, has also written a pamphlet in which he claims that the greenhouse effect is bogus and that carbon dioxide “cools the earth”.

Principia recently got into a row with climate science denial pin-up boy Lord Christopher Monckton. Monckton does at least accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which was seen as a step too far for Principia.

When you are sourcing information from an organisation too fringe even for Lord Monckton that promotes positions which only the dark corners of the internet could sustain, then you know you are in trouble.

James Delingpole

I IMAGINE only a small percentage of people reading this have had any journalism training, but don’t let that stop you from pondering the following ethical question.

If you read a newspaper story that included a direct quote from someone – let’s say, for instance, UK climate scientist Dr David Viner – would it be acceptable to put quotation marks on the headline of that story and claim it was a quote from Dr Viner? You can have a minute to think about it.

It might help you to know that the headline was not written by the reporter who interviewed Dr Viner and wrote the story, and certainly not by Dr Viner himself. In short, a third person – a sub-editor – wrote the headline.

You don’t need a minute? Of course not: it would be unprofessional, unethical and factually wrong to pass off a sub-editor’s made-up words as Dr Viner’s.

The Australian newspaper has just published a column from UK-based climate science mangler and anti-wind farm activist James Delingpole that tries to argue that Australia’s recent unprecedented heatwave and hottest month on record wasn’t all that hot and that global warming “alarmists” should be answering to a court with the power to issue a death sentence (no, I don’t exaggerate, but we’ll get to that at the end).

In the story, Delingpole says that Dr Viner had “famously declared” in 2000 that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”.

But here’s the thing. Dr Viner never did utter those words. He was indeed quoted in a story in the UK’s The Independent newspaper which carried the headline “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”. But the headline was a gross over-statement: the first paragraph makes the  far more modest claim that a trend to warmer winters meant that  “snow is starting to disappear from our lives”.

The reporter, Charles Onians, quoted Dr Viner as saying that within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. Note the absence of quote marks on the time frame being within a few years – they were Onians’s words, just as the headline was the sub-editor’s.

So Dr Viner’s actual prediction was that at some point in the future snow could become “a very rare and exciting event”. As well, the story paraphrases him as adding an important qualifier – that heavy snow will return occasionally and catch people unprepared. But Delingpole leaves this bit out.

Delingpole then uses the non-quote that Dr Viner didn’t say as a launchpad to ridicule him. “Viner has since become a legend in his own lunchtime, frequently quoted on the internet, sometimes having his name joshingly used as a synonym for snow. This isn’t because he got his prediction right, of course. It’s because, like Flannery, he got it so spectacularly, hilariously, hopelessly wrong.”

Hopelessly wrong, Mr Delingpole? What, like hopelessly attributing a quote to someone who never said it?

Delingpole is of course “reporting” from an unseasonably cold and recently snowbound United Kingdom, which the BBC reports has just experienced its second coldest March since records began.

Scientists are now reporting a link between the loss of sea ice in the Arctic – driven by human-caused climate change – and cold snaps in the northern hemisphere like the one experienced by the UK. A recent scientific paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explained the link.

Delingpole also says in the column that Australia’s recent record-breaking summer heatwave wasn’t that hot. “The thermometers were higher when the First Fleet arrived in the Sydney summer of 1790-91,” writes Delingpole, presumably having travelled back in time to check that the First Fleet thermometer was positioned within something resembling a Stevenson screen to ensure sunlight or incorrect air flow didn’t corrupt the reading.

It’s possible that Delingpole based his statement from this guest blog post by Australian MP Craig Kelly on Watts Up With That, where Kelly wrote that on December 27th 1790 one of these First Fleet thermometers near Observatory Hill in Sydney recorded a temperature of 42.8C.

It’s a shame that Delingpole didn’t check this figure. Four days after Kelly wrote that story, Sydney recorded its hottest day ever with 45.8C at Observatory Hill on 18 January – a full three degrees hotter than Kelly’s favoured First Fleet thermometer. Even The Australian reported it.

But in any case, Australia’s recent record breaking heatwave wasn’t a heatwave confined to one temperature reading in one place. As a Bureau of Meteorology special climate statement pointed out, “maximum temperatures over the period 1–18 January have been 6 °C or more above normal over a wide area of interior central and southern Australia and 45 °C has been reached at least once during the event over 46.9 per cent of Australia.”

You might think that The Australian would be wary about using Delingpole, after a recent Australian Press Council upheld a complaint about one of his previous contributions to Australia’s only national newspaper.

In that story in May last year, Delingpole quoted an un-named sheep farmer as saying that the wind farm industry  was ”bloody well near a pedophile ring. They’re f . . king our families and knowingly doing so”.

The APC said this was “highly offensive” and “the level of offensiveness is so high that it outweighs the very strong public interest in freedom of speech”.

But rather than heed the blunt-toothed press council’s finding, Delingpole was given more space by The Australian to respond. He wrote: “I stand by every word of the piece – especially the bit about pedophiles. I would concede that the analogy may be somewhat offensive to the pedophile community.”

How could even Delingpole top this statement for offensiveness?  He has a prime contender at the bottom of his most recent column, where he writes: “The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer: preferably in the defendant’s dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap.”

To those not au fait with the traditions of the English courts, black caps were only worn by judges when handing out death sentences.

By continuing to publish such low-grade and offensive polemics, in my view the only things hanging limp from the gallows are The Australian‘s credibility on climate change and its professional standards.

Resources and Energy Minister Gary Gray on ABC’s Lateline

AUSTRALIA has a new energy and resources minister in the form of Gary Gray, who was elected to the Federal Parliament in 2007 after six years as an adviser and corporate affairs director for gas company Woodside.

This is a piece of Gary Gray’s history which is uncontested, given that it appears on his biography on his ALP home page.

But one aspect of Gray’s history which has been contested, are his views on climate change and an apparent association with a climate science denial organisation.

Just minutes after Prime Minister Julie Gillard announced Gray’s appointment, a handful of people I follow on Twitter were pointing to claims that Gray had been a founder member of the Lavoisier Group.

On Climate Spectator, Tristan Edis also reported that Gray was a founder member of the “Lavoisier Institute [sic]“.

But after looking into the Lavoisier archives and reviewing some documents sent to me by journalist Bob Burton, it’s pretty clear that Gray wasn’t even a member, never mind a founder member

The Lavoisier Group was launched in May 2000 to directly challenge any moves to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and to argue, wrongly even back then, that the science of human-caused climate change was controversial and not worth acting on.

The group was founded by then executive director of Western Mining Corporation Ray Evans and his boss at WMC, Hugh Morgan, a former board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia and, later, the president of the Business Council of Australia.

Morgan was an unlikely choice to chair a Commonwealth Business Forum round table on climate change in 2011 with Australia’s climate change minister Greg Combet in attendance. As I wrote for DeSmogBlog, having Morgan chair the meeting was a little like asking a creationist for advice on teaching science in schools.

Gary Gray did speak at the launch of the Lavoisier Group in Melbourne in May 2000. At the time Gray was billed as the former national secretary of the ALP – he had recently resigned from that position which he had held for seven years.

Perhaps a reason Gray agreed to speak was that his father-in-law Peter Walsh, a former ALP finance minister, was a Lavoisier founder member and was president of the organisation for many years. Bob Hogg, another former ALP secretary, was also down to speak at the Lavoisier launch, but there appears to be no record of him ever actually appearing.

One report of the launch in The Australian, written by Frank Devine, paraphrased Gray, saying he had told the audience that “any campaign against ratification of the Kyoto protocols based on denying greenhouse was doomed to failure”.

Before 2000, Gray had reportedly described climate change as “pop science”. Whatever Gary Gray thought about climate change back in 2000 is of little relevance to what he thinks now.

Australian Financial Review political correspondent James Massola Tweeted quotes from Gray this afternoon apparently addressing his belief, or otherwise, in human-caused climate change. Gray is reported to have said:  “When I was national secretary of the ALP I made the observation about climate change being ‘pop science’. I have said on many occasions since then,since being elected, I have said it in the parlt. and on the public record, I was wrong”.

But even if Gray has accepted the science on human-caused climate change, then any questions of his role over the coming months seem a little pointless. As Giles Parkinson in RenewEconomy described it, Gray’s is a “lame duck” appointment. In my view there are few indications yet that climate and renewables policy under a Liberal government will be anything more than tokenistic.

UPDATE: Minister Gray has been giving interviews on the ABC and Emma Alberici on Lateline and Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast both asked him if he believed in human-caused climate change.

“Yes I do. I accept the contribution that human beings have made to the changing climate of our planet,” he told Kelly, who asked why he had changed his mind. Gray answered that it was his time working “working with an oil company” (I presume he means Woodside) and seeing the firm adjust parts of its business “to understanding the impact of climate change.” He added: “It really struck me and it opened my eyes.”

In the interview on Lateline, Gray said he had been embarassed by some of the things he had said in the 90s, which included calling climate science “pop science” and that “climate science was middle class conspiracy to frighten schoolchildren”.

EMMA ALBERICI: So can I just clarify then: do you reject now the Lavoisier Group, the climate deniers, and do you accept that the globe is warming and that human activity is responsible?

GARY GRAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt about that conclusion, but equally, Emma, there is no doubt that I attended the inaugural meeting of the Lavoisier Group and I counted and still count as friends members of that organisation. I just don’t agree with them anymore.

EMMA ALBERICI: So you do agree then that it’s human activity that’s causing the globe to warm?

GARY GRAY: I think there’s an undeniable connection between human industrial activity and carbon pollution that we need to address, that we should address and also that we can address.

Mann is the scientist behind the famous “hockey stick” graph that first appeared in the journal Nature in 1998.

Mann and two other scientists Professor Raymond Bradley and Professor Malcolm Hughes had reconstructed temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere from the year 1400 to present day using data mainly from tree rings, ice cores and modern temperature readings.

The following year, the same three scientists extended their study to reconstruct 1000 years of temperatures and published this in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Each time the team plotted their data on graphs and each time the plots showed what is the now famous “hockey stick” shape with a sharp uptick in temperatures towards the end of the century.

What really got the ire of the climate science denial industry and its cheerleaders was that this second study showed that modern day temperatures were likely hotter than they had been in the so-called Mediaeval Warm Period.

This negated a key argument from sceptics – which they continue with today – that it’s been warmer in the recent past before the industrial revolution caused the westernised world to fall in love with fossil fuels.

Incidentally, it was never a very convincing argument anyway. Even if it was warmer in the past, it doesn’t challenge the multiple lines of evidence which point to burning fossil fuels and deforestation as the main cause of the rapid warming, ocean acidification and sea level rises we see now.

But anyway, enough of the climate science history lesson. Back to Michael Mann.

Soon after his work was published (it also appeared as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report) he started to come under attack. He was accused of being fraudulent and of carrying out dodgy science.

When a bunch of his emails were found among files hacked from the UK’s Climate Research Research Unit, his words like those of other scientists were cherry-picked and taken out of context in a further attempt to discredit.

In 2011, the US National Science Foundation conducted an inquiry into the many allegations against Mann and found no wrongdoing and praised him as one of the most respected scientists in his field. Several inquiries into the leaked “climategate” emails also cleared the scientists, including Mann, of wrongdoing.

Despite the exonerations, the attacks continued. For  many years, Mann – who recounts his experiences in a book “Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” – chose to defend himself in the court of public opinion but has now started to fight in the courts of law too.

In March 2011, Mann launched a defamation action against climate sceptic Dr Tim Ball, who had answered a question about whether  scientists had committed “fraud” by saying that Mann should be in a jail. The writ includes the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which published the comments on its website.

Mann is also suing over a separate story which claimed he had committed scientific fraud and compared him to a child molester (read the full complaint here).

Mann has also been pursued himself through the courts.  In a case dragged out over two years, Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccineli tried to force the release of Mann’s emails from his time at the University of Virginia. Cuccineli is regarded by some as one of the United State’s highest profile climate science deniers. The case was thrown out.

The American Tradition Institute has also pursued Mann’s University of Virginia inbox and files through court action. An investigation into the roots of the ATI found it was “largely bankrolled” by individuals or businesses with an interest in fossil fuels.

This whole affair brings us to Australia and Lord Christopher Monckton, the British hereditary peer and climate science denier currently on a country-wide tour. Lord Monckton claimed on March 1 that Mann “gave up the case” against Ball, neglecting to check with Mann or his lawyer first.

Mann’s lawyer in the case is Roger McConchie, who it turns out was busy on March 1. Doing what, I wonder? He told me via email

I conducted an examination for discovery (deposition) of Tim Ball under oath before a Court Reporter in Victoria on Friday, March 1, 2013.  I will continue that deposition of Ball in late May, 2013. Michael Mann is scheduled to be examined for discovery in Vancouver by Ball’s lawyer on May 22, 2013. I anticipate conducting discoveries of Ball’s co-defendant Frontier Centre for Public Policy in the near future.

Christopher Monckton’s statement about the litigation has no basis in reality.

Joanne Codling (JoNova) has since corrected her story.

Lord Monckton has also been making threats of his own. He has written to the University of Tasmania (UTAS) and accused scientist Dr Tony Press of “serious professional and academic misconduct and scientific fraud”. Monckton claims there is now a “rigorous” investigation taking place.

What is in fact happening, is that UTAS has received a complaint and is obliged to consider it, no matter how ungrounded it might be. A UTAS spokesperson (possibly carrying the straightest cricket bat you’ll ever see) told me: “The University is assessing the matters under Part B of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.”

You would have to be concerned if UTAS was taking seriously threats made by a man who calls for climate scientists to be “locked up”, claims President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was most likely forged and launches an extremist political party fronted by an anti-Islamist creationist pastor. Not to mention his many misrepresentations of climate science.

And it’s worth reminding ourselves just what it is that UTAS is apparently “assessing” – namely, comments Dr Tony Press made to a newspaper reporter which outlined why Monckton’s argument that global warming has stopped was misleading.

If Lord Monckton really has taken umbrage with Dr Press, why not publish his concerns in a scientific journal and subject his ideas to established peer review – something which he has never been able to do?

Instead, Lord Monckton abuses scientists and calls for them to be sacked with the potential to intimidate academics, intimidate a Vice Chancellor and tie up university resources with an unfounded complaint.

The story is based on an interview with ABC Radio, where Mr Hunt is commenting on a new report – The Angry Summer – from Australia’s Climate Commission. The report points out the role that climate change is playing in heatwaves, bushfires and floods.

The report comes just a week after the Bureau of Meteorology declared that Australia’s summer of 2012/2013 was the hottest on record. January 2013 was also Australia’s hottest month on record.

If you listen to the interview, Mr Hunt makes a point of saying that when considering global warming, we need to look at the long term trends rather than pick single events. Quite right.

To demonstrate this, he said that “we have had record cold temperatures in Russia, parts of the United States and China” over a similar period to Australia’s hottest summer on record.

Even in a warming world, you’ll still get record cold events – it’s just that the hot ones are outnumbering the cold ones. In Australia, for example, for every record cold temperature there’s three record hot ones. In the US, a 2009 study found record high temperatures were outstripping record colds by two to one.

I had a quick look at this unusually cold US winter which Greg Hunt alludes to. The government’s National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration has all the figures. Incidentally, January 2013 is the 335th consecutive month where global average temperatures have been above average.

Final rankings for the US winter are not expected to be out for a week or so yet but, so far, the chilly winter turns out not to have been that chilly after all. In fact, the period November 2012 to January 2013 ranks 109th (with a rank of 1 indicating the coldest and 118 the warmest) in a record going back 118 years.

So there you go. As Mr Hunt says, best to check with the experts.

The horse excretion in question is a report – CSIROh! – Climate of Deception or First Step to Freedom - sent to Cubby by one of Australia’s most tireless – and some might say tiresome – climate science deniers, Malcolm Roberts. But more of Ben Cubby’s response later.

Malcolm Roberts is the volunteer project manager for the Galileo Movement - a climate science denial organisation whose patron is popular Sydney radio shock-jock Alan Jones who himself thinks human-caused climate change is a “hoax” and “witchcraft”.

Roberts’ “report” appears to have been sparked by an email from ABC Brisbane radio presenter Steve Austin back in February 2010.

“For some time now I have been receiving a barrage of your unsolicited emails about climate change and your analysis of IPCC flaws,” wrote Austin, who attached a copy of a CSIRO report on climate change and suggested Roberts respond. Austin promises he’ll send that response to the CSIRO and provide any feedback he gets.

Roberts is a former coalface miner and management consultant and in a declaration of  interests writes: “For extensive work performed in the mining industry I was paid money by mining companies (including three government-owned coal mining companies)….”

He claims to have foregone more than a million dollars in earnings for his unpaid work researching climate change. Part of that involved him travelling to the US to attend the Heartland Institute’s climate skeptics conference in New York in 2008, co-sponsored by Australian free market think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs.

Well, three years pass since the exchange with Steve Austin and finally Roberts sends him the report, which he must have been hanging out for. But here’s a prediction. Whatever the CSIRO or any other reputable research institution says to Malcolm Roberts about human-caused climate change, Roberts will not accept it. Why?

Because if you scan the hundreds of pages of “appendices” attached to Robert’s report, you’ll find he regards the whole human-caused climate change thing as a conspiracy. It’s a hoax devised by international bankers and socialists hell bent on installing a New World Order. In short, the motivation for the whole science of human-caused climate change is down to a heady mix of “international bankers”, “socialists” and a desire for “global control”.

There are 19 completed appendices. One of them, Appendix 14, is 135 pages long and seeks to explain the motivation behind what Roberts habitually describes as the “climate fraud” being committed by scientists across the world, by a “fraudulent” United Nations.  ”Nature alone determines levels of CO2 in air,” he claims, ignoring the 33 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted in the last year alone from burning fossil fuels and making cement.

“The core problem is massive over-government through international bankers seeking to control,” writes Roberts. “We now know WHY they push climate fraud. They’re pushing global control.”

Roberts wraps this whole global conspiracy theory neatly into a heading for one section: “The objective is global control through global socialist governance by international bankers hiding control behind environmentalism”.

At one point, Roberts claims that “it’s likely that during John Howard’s prime ministership socialist bureaucrats pulled the strings” which leaves you wondering why these evil socialist puppet masters failed to get Howard to sign the United Nations’ Kyoto protocol?

What else have the New World Order been up to? According to Roberts, “key American Presidents and bureaucrats have spent billions of dollars on killing or injuring hundreds of millions of people and brutally forcing sterilisation and/or abortions on tens of millions of people”.

Now, the Galileo Movement says on Twitter that the report wasn’t an official Galileo Movement document. They are distancing themselves from the work of their own project manager. News Ltd commentator and climate science mangler Andrew Bolt has already pulled the pin on his “advisor” status with the Galileo Movement over what Bolt claimed was Roberts’ “anti-semitic” conspiracy theory over Jewish bankers ruling financial systems. Roberts insists he is not anti-Jewish.

There is at least one group happy to align itself with Roberts’ version of climate change science. The Mine Managers Association of Australia writes appreciatively on its website how Roberts, a “long-standing member”, has been “waging ‘war’ against politicians for allegedly misleading the public on the issue of anthropogenic global warming”. The association provides its members a link to one of Roberts’ previous reports and then describes as “nonsense” the idea that carbon dioxide might be linked to climate change.

In recent weeks, Roberts has been sending out copies of his report to every Australian member of parliament, state premiers, scientists he doesn’t like, journalists he doesn’t like, journalists he does like (Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones among them), the bosses of media organisations and the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.

Some politicians are singled out for special attention. Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Shadow Minister for Broadband and Communications Malcolm Turnbull are among those sent letters demanding they “resign from parliament immediately”.

In a letter to ABC managing director Mark Scott, Roberts says unless the ABC can give him “empirical scientific evidence and logical scientific reasoning proving that damaging warming was/is/will be caused by human CO2″ then the ABC should retract every story on human-caused climate change they’ve ever done.

Ten prominent scientists also get a copy of Roberts’ report, which includes the faintly narcissistic demand that if they fail to prove that human-caused climate change exists to his satisfaction, then “by Friday, March 1st, 2013 I will assume you do not disagree with my report.”

Some journalists, including Ben Cubby, SMH columnist Mike Carlton and ABC identities Robyn Williams, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki and Wendy Carlisle, have had “lawful noticies” demanding they “withdraw” any past claims about CO2 damaging the climate. “If you continue making such claims and fail to retract past claims you will be knowingly misleading the public and parliament,” writes Roberts, expectantly.

Roberts has started posting responses. He either hasn’t had too many, or he’s a bit slow on the upload. In any case, the only reply of any substance on the site comes in two emails from a fawning and grateful Alan Jones.

Jones describes Roberts as a “magnificent worker” and an “inspiring individual” and adds: “The hoax is more obvious today than it ever was.”

Which brings us back to Ben Cubby, one of the journalists who has been on the receiving end of reams of conspiratorial theorising from Roberts. Cubby’s response hasn’t been posted yet, but I’ll provide it here in full. In my view, it affords these conspiracy theories the contempt they deserve.

Malcolm-Ieuan,

In considering your request that I identify errors in the report you sent to me – CSIROh! Climate of Deception? Or First Step to Freedom? – I find myself confronting an unusual problem: how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?

Even by the exceedingly low standards of Australia’s climate skeptic community, your report is dire. You direct me to Appendix 13. It is littered with errors of all kinds: a mish-mash of muddled conjecture, impossible leaps of logic, fundamental misunderstandings of the scientific method, misread and misquoted research that has been poorly cited, internal contradictions, confused dates, spelling mistakes, and strangled grammar. It is, in all respects, a dud.

I am not going to comply with your demand that I ‘‘identify, specify and justify’’ all the errors in your report. There are too many. However, this should not be read as a reluctance on my part to address your complaints. You will recall that, many months ago, you asked me to provide you with some empirical evidence of human-induced climate change, and I immediately sent you a series of peer-reviewed papers that did just that.

You responded, a month later, after lengthy consultation with your science advisor Tim Ball (not ‘‘Tim Tall’’, as you call him in your report). You advanced an unpublished and frankly bizarre theory about underwater volcanoes. Apparently these hidden volcanoes conveniently rumbled to life at just the right rate to mimic both the rise and isotopic signature of human-generated atmospheric CO2. With theories like this, it is not difficult to see why even other climate skeptics have distanced themselves from your work.

Your report tries to allege that there are factual errors in my reporting. If you honestly believe this, there is a fairly simple way to deal with it: request a correction from the newspaper. Your requests will be independently considered on their merits by people other than me. It is remarkable that you allege thousands of errors, spanning a period of several years, yet have not sought to address them in this straightforward, transparent way.

You demand I declare my ‘‘personal financial interests in advocating the claim that human CO2 should be cut’’. First, I’m not advocating anything in particular, apart from fact-based reporting. Second, I have no financial interest in any industry related to emissions cuts. Nor have I worked for coal companies, as you have.

As I’ve made clear in earlier replies to your many emails, I don’t mind a civil discussion about environment reporting or climate change. But until you start to ground your opinions in fact, I will continue to regard your correspondence as amusing spam.

But before you go off and lose yourself in The Guardian’s website (it’s got electric bees and Mark Hamill for goodness sake), I thought it worth dwelling on a load of numbers about CO2 (you’ve all gone already haven’t you?).

In The Guardian piece, I’ve highlighted a new study  published in the journal Biogeosciences (yeh I know, it’s not Return of the Jedi is it, but just hang on in there) by a team of 10 researchers, eight of which are at Australia’s CSIRO.

The study is an attempt to get a better handle on the flow of greenhouse gas emissions across different industry sectors and across borders.

For me, the really interesting bit was when it looked at how much greenhouse gas Australia emits at home from burning fossil fuels compared to the fossil fuels we export for someone else to burn instead. The climate, after all, doesn’t give a monkey’s chuff who or where the fuels are burned.

The numbers in the study come out looking like this. In 1990, Australia emitted 279 Mt of CO2-e from burning fossil fuels in Australian power plants. By 2010, this had gone up to 418 Mt CO2-e.

Now to what we export. Between 1990 and 2011, Australia exported 513 Mt CO2-e a year over that period. But it’s accelerating due to the booming coal export industry. In 2010, the study shows that Australia’s exports of coal and gas would generate 884 MT of CO2-e when it was burned.

To put this number into further context, Australia still has a target to cut emissions from their levels in 2000 by 5% by 2020. According to the Treasury, this gets us down to 530 Mt by 2020. Without the target, we’d be up at something like 679 Mt CO2e.  That’s a saving of 149 Mt CO2-e – a saving scrubbed out five times over by our exports now.

And there’s much more exporting action to come.

In October 2011, I highlighted one of the first international studies to look closely at the trading of emissions between different countries. Carnegie Institute for Science’s Steven Davis, who was also one of the co-authors on this most recent Biogeosciences paper, had found that in 2004 Australia was already responsible for double its “official” carbon footprint thanks to all the coal and gas we were sending to Japan, China and other mainly Asian countries.

One issue which both these studies raise, is at what point in the chain from digging up fossil fuels to burning them, do you decide to impose the tax? As things stand the worldwide convention is that you make the burner of the fuel pay the carbon price to their nation’s government.

So what might happen if countries decided to tax all carbon emissions at the point of extraction – that is, at the gas well or the mine mouth? The result for Australia is obvious. Tax emissions at the point of combustion, and other countries get the cash. Tax at the point of extraction, and Australia recoups far more.

I guess it all comes down to where you think the responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions sits. When it comes to coal, gas and oil for energy, it’s not being pulled out of the ground for us to look at.

Lord Monckton at the launch of Rise Up Australia. Credit: ABC footage

A FEW weeks ago I wrote a story for DeSmogBlog looking at how Lord Christopher Monckton – a poster child of the climate science denialist movement – had agreed to launch a new Australian political party fronted by an anti-Islamist Creationist preacher.

The party in question is called Rise Up Australia and its messianic front man, Pastor Danny Nalliah, believes that only God can control the climate and that Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, which killed more than 170 people, were God’s punishment for Victoria’s laws allowing abortion.

Well, Lord Monckton’s deed has been done and duly covered on the ABC’s flagship news program 7.30 Report.

The rented room at the National Press Club in Canberra was chock-full of Pastor Danny’s enthusiastic, God-fearing supporters and Lord Monckton whipped their evangelism until the froth was soaking the carpet. Reporter Hayden Cooper went through Nalliah’s beliefs, including his claim that he had brought a couple of people back from the dead.

As I exlained on DeSmogBlog and also on Crikey, Pastor Nalliah actually launched the party in May 2011 (and again a couple of months later) and registered the party with the Australian Electoral Commission 12 months ago. But the launch made for good telly.

One of Lord Monckton’s longest-serving supporters is Andrew Bolt, the climate science mangling News Ltd columnist  and blogger who is, as we’re often told, the country’s most influential political commentator. He’s none too chuffed by Lord Monckton’s endorsement of Pastor Danny, and wrote on his blog:

Why on earth was Christopher Monckton endorsing the nationalist Rise Up Australia Party? Great chance for warmists to paint climate sceptics as fringe dwellers.

So rather than denouncing the extremist views of Pastor Danny Nalliah, Andrew Bolt instead is most immediately concerned that Lord Monckton’s endorsement of Rise Up Australia might be bad PR for climate sceptics.

But Andrew Bolt is an awful long way behind the climate science denial 8-Ball here, given that Lord Monckton was endorsing Pastor Danny Nalliah’s position as long ago as July 2011 when Monckton was invited to speak at Nalliah’s extremist Catch the Fire Ministries.

As an aide-mémoire, Lord Monckton’s 2011 tour of Australia was in trouble before it started, when just weeks before he had described the views of Australian government climate policy advisor Professor Ross Garnaut as “fascist”.

During a Californian conference talk (where he shared the platform with ‘intelligent design’ advocates) Lord Monckton also used a two-metre high picture of a swastika next to a quote from Professor Garnaut.

It was also the tour at which he gave a lecture in Perth at the invitation of Gina Rinehart and then addressed a pro-mining think-tank, also in Perth, where he suggested the “super rich” should be encouraged to buy into the media as a way to get more publicity for climate sceptics like Andrew Bolt.

At the time of Lord Monckton’s swastika incident, Bolt jumped to Lord Monckton’s defence and described his critics as “hypocrites” and “cowards”. Monckton apologised for the remark, which he said was “catastrophically stupid and offensive”. But after leaving the country, Lord Monckton decided that in fact his actions had been “very mild“.

Before we get back to matters present, it’s worth pointing out that Lord Monckton has been recently touring the US, sponsored by Tea Party groups, and telling audiences that President Barack Obama probably wasn’t born in America and that his Hawaiian birth certificate was most likely forged.

This fact didn’t deter Andrew Bolt from promoting Lord Monckton’s tour three times on his blog (here, here and here). Neither, presumably, did Monckton’s previous endorsement of Pastor Nalliah.  Only now, after negative publicity on a prominent ABC news show, does Bolt start to worry about climate sceptics being seen as fringe dwellers with loopy beliefs.

But extricating the climate denial movement from conspiracy theories might be a job too big even for Australia’s most-often-described-as-influential columnist. In the psychological science literature, there’s a trait described as “conspiracist ideation” – the tendency to see some dark, secretive collusion as the most likely explanation for something which challenges your views.

Recent work in this field suggests that rejection of science is often linked to a willingness to accept conspiracy theories, such as NASA faking the moon landings or plots from within the British Royal family to kill Princess Diana.

One of Lord Monckton’s tour sponsors is South Australian state MLC Ann Bressington, who gave a keynote speech in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago at the launch of the Lord Monckton Foundation where she told the audience about some secretive, insidious United Nations plot to encourage sustainable development. In conspiratorial dark tones, she told the audience: “The words Agenda 21, ladies and gentleman, were never meant to be spoken.”

So keen in fact was the United Nations to avoid the words “Agenda 21″ from ever being spoken, they hid them away on the cover of the 1992 document of the same name which is still hidden on a publicly-available United Nations web page.

When Ann Bressington isn’t warning people about non-existant secretive plots at the United Nations, she’s warning them about the “biggest health fraud of all time” – fluoride in drinking water.

The event where Bressington appeared was filmed by an organisation called Bushvision, which is led by Leon Ashby, a co-founder of the Climate Sceptics political party. A glance at Bushvision’s other contributions on YouTube reveals a slew of videos promoting climate science denial, anti-fluoridation and lots and lots of footage of evangelical Christian “healers” curing people just by touch (spinal injuries, crippled knees, pancreatic cysts, gluten intolerance, diseased gall bladder, partial blindness, terminal cancer – all healed).

This isn’t the first time that Andrew Bolt has been spooked by the beliefs held by some in his own ranks. In August last year, he chastised the climate denial group the Galileo Movement – Patron Sydney radio personality Alan Jones – for promoting anti-Semitic consipiracy theories about Jewish bankers ruling the world. For at least a year, Bolt had been on the organisation’s panel of experts even though he claimed to know little about it.

A survey of 13950 scientific research papers on climate change published between 1991 and 2012 has found that 0.17 per cent (just 24 papers) argued global warming was either false or was caused by something other than human activities.

Despite what Andrew Bolt might tell you, the reason that climate science denialists are described as being on the fringe is because that is generally where they are. Perhaps the reason they shout so loud, is to so that their voices can be heard from the outer reaches of reality.

Flooding in Bundaberg, January 2013. Credit Instagram/ABC News

“GIVE me a break,” said the premier of the Australian state of New South Wales Barry O’Farrell when asked if recent devastating floods might have something to do with climate change.

“Let’s not turn this near disaster, this episode that has damaged so many properties and other things, farm properties and other things, into some politically correct debate about climate change,” said Mr O’Farrell.

Let’s just all reach for the “pause” button for a second.

Mr O’Farrell now thinks the issue of climate change is one of “political correctness” which sits alongside debates about the appropriate language to describe homosexuals or whether Christmas trees might offend one religious group above another.

Not to degrade those important debates, but political correctness doesn’t flood thousands of people’s homes, threaten water and food supplies or machine-gun the economy leaving a scattering of billion dollar-sized bullet holes.

The flooding concentrated in Queensland has so far killed six people, devastated several towns and cities and thousands of people’s homes, in particular in Bundaberg, and sparked food supply fears after crop damage.

The disaster has come just weeks after the longest and most widespread extreme heatwave in Australia’s recorded history, causing life and livelihood-threatening bush fires. In all likelihood, January 2013 will turn out to be Australia’s hottest ever month on record. Queensland still remembers the 2011 floods which put a dent in the country’s GDP of an estimated $30 billion.

Mr O’Farrell’s fellow Liberal, Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott, was similarly dismissive of climate change when he was asked by a journalist if he thought that climate change had played any role in the recent floods. He broadened his answer to include the role of climate change in droughts and fires.