Report undercuts Kevin Rudd's Great Barrier Reef wipeout | The Australian

KEVIN Rudd's insistence that the Great Barrier Reef could be "destroyed beyond recognition" by global warming grates with new science suggesting it will again escape temperature-related coral bleaching.

Tony Abbott's cut-through climate plan | The Australian

TONY Abbott has promised to attack climate change with a $3.2 billion plan that does not cap carbon emissions but instead proposes direct action such as planting trees.

And while Kevin Rudd has ridiculed the direct-action plan as "a climate con job", most business groups have backed the plan, agreeing with the Opposition Leader's assertion it is "cheaper, simpler and more cost-effective" than Labor's proposed carbon emissions trading scheme.

Boreal Wildfires and Climate Change

With respect to this long-term "diminishing fire activity," as they describe it, Girardin et al. state that "the spatial extent for these long-term changes is large enough to suggest that climate is likely to have played a key role in their induction." And, interestingly, that role would appear to be one of reducing fire activity, which is just the opposite of what the world's climate alarmists contend should occur. And to emphasize that point, and provide still more evidence for it, they state that "the fact that diminishing fire activity has also been detected on lake islands on which fire suppression has never been conducted provides another argument in support of climate control."

Daily Temperature Range and Human Mortality

In discussing their findings, the four Hong Kong researchers state that "a large fluctuation in the daily temperature - even in a tropical city like Hong Kong - has a significant impact on cardiovascular mortality among the elderly population." In addition, we note that it has long been known that the DTR has declined significantly over many parts of the world as mean global temperature has risen over the past several decades (Easterling et al., 1997), which is perhaps another reason why colder temperatures are a much greater risk to human life than are warmer temperatures.

Millions of trees to sway Australian voters | The Daily Telegraph

The Opposition Leader promised to match the Government's carbon pollution reduction targets and timetables without forcing up prices for food and electricity or creating a multi-billion dollar carbon "market".

And he said he would do it for less money - $3.2 billion over four years as against the Government's $40 billion. And with it came a promise to plant 20 million trees along highways, streets and in parks.

Nashville snowstorm tests Southern stereotypes | tennessean.com | The Tennessean

Storm kills 2

Road conditions were so bad that ambulances overturned, hundreds of vehicles crashed and at least one Rutherford County salt truck went off the road.

Ed Miliband Needs To Listen

Lord Lawson, the chairman of the GWPF, said: "This is a very important area of policy, and it is worrying that the Minister notionally responsible should show such ignorance of both the science and the economics."

Dominic Lawson: So all these climate revelations were a dastardly foreign plot - Dominic Lawson, Commentators - The Independent

As it happens, we now know that disc was leaked by someone legitimately in possession of it – a whistleblower who was appalled by what he saw, and thought that the public should know. For some reason, it has not occurred to Sir David King that the UEA emails might have been accessed and then leaked by an insider shocked at what he had discovered. Remember also that they were in any case all being collated following a request under the Freedom of Information Act; perhaps this insider became aware that the now suspended head of the Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, had asked colleagues to delete certain emails, and was determined that Jones should not be allowed to get away with it.

Even if the leak were not the work of a whistleblower from inside the UEA, it is still ludicrous scaremongering on Sir David's part to declare that this must have been a concerted operation by one or more foreign intelligence services.