Terry McCrann: Now, should we destroy the economy? | Herald Sun

BEAUTIFUL. The release of the Garnaut report could not have been better timed. It was dead, dead, dead, before it hit the table.

The dark greens and all the climate carpetbaggers and main-chancers who have sprouted like weeds at the prospect of sharing in the 21st century theological rents will come to look back wistfully at his - original - modest emission reduction targets.

Hopefully, from their humpies beneath those disused windmills which had yet to be dismantled. Apart from the ones kept as a record of a crazy religious cult that infected the world in the early years of the 21st century.

There is no way even the Rudd Government is going to embrace a policy to destroy the economy, in the wake of this week's disaster on Wall St and the Hill - the US House of Representatives.

What, Rudd is going to get up and announce the wrecking of the economy starts now: barely 60 weeks away on January 1 2010? Before the next election?

Whether it's fair to blame the weather - Telegraph

What we are lacking these days in the reporting of severe weather events are proper historical and statistical contexts. Destructive summer floods such as those of 2007 have happened before: in 1986, in Wales and north-west England; in 1968, across the West Country and the Midlands in July and in London and the South East in September; in 1930 and 1931 in Yorkshire; and in 1912 in East Anglia.

Extreme weather is part and parcel of our climate and it is wrong to treat it as new every time it happens. Last weekend's downpours over central and southern England, which triggered 75 flood warnings, are a case in point.

Calling such events "unprecedented" provides an excuse for failure for those we pay to maintain the infrastructure. Sadly, as someone once said: "Thirty years ago, these people had the grace to look thoroughly uncomfortable when they lied to us; now, they lie with a smile on their face."
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Philip Eden is vice-president of the Royal Meteorological Society.