Aussie Vote Heard In Kyoto, Bali

The apparent defeat of Australian Liberal (i.e., Conservative) prime minister John Howard (fittingly on the right in this photo) by Labor's Kevin Rudd has its Iraq implications, but may be more significant in global warming politics.

Howard is, of course, a Bush ally on both. Rudd, looking reality in the eye like our serious Dem Prez candidates are, has not made any rash promises about pulling out of Iraq; rather, he talks only of pulling out some troops. Nancy and Harry, are you paying attention?

On global warming, though, Rudd has promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol, even though the protocol would bring massive reductions in international productivity with virtually no signficant atmospheric changes. Still, with Australia presumably joining the lemmings, Bush will find himself even more isolated when world leaders gather in Bali to discuss how to replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

Howard has overseen eleven and a half years of an unprecedented 17-year boom in the Australian economy. Much of the economy's strength can be attributed to Howard's undoing of Labor's big-government restrictions on the economy in favor of a free market approach. The results have been stunning -- so successful that the biggest economic worrys Australia faces is how to manage the boom.

Rudd has promised to follow in Howard's laissez faire footsteps -- but how can you do that while imposing mandatory limits on your economy, as Kyoto requires? Show me an economy without greenhouse gases and I'll show you a failing economy.

Before Rudd tanks the Australian economy in the name of Climate Change Fundamentalism, he might want to question the dogma of the faith a bit, as Malcolm Duncan did recently in Australia's Web Diary. Reading through the UN's IPCC report, Duncan wrote:

Let’s look at how reasonable this science is. Despite all the rhetoric, as all good science does, this document is hedged with qualifications.

First there is the assertion (p 2):

Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores (my emphasis)

Yet the explanation given includes this:

The annual carbon dioxide concentration growth-rate was larger during the last 10 years (1995-2005 average: 1.9 ppm per year) than it has been since the beginning of continuous atmospheric measurements (1960-2005 average 1.4 ppm per year) although there is year-to-year variability in growth rates

That’s right: they’ve only been doing serious continuous measurements since 1960.

A footnote says:

Climate Change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity.

Hmmm, so we’re not necessarily talking about human activity as a factor. In the rest of the report, that just gets glossed over and of course it is ignored by every Climate Change nutter activist and journalist who says anything about the issue. (hat-tip: Greenie Watch)

Duncan's piece goes on through quite a few more wiggle-words and conflicting statements, to the point one must wonder why Australians would willingly buy into the global warming hysteria and put their economic well-being at risk.

In Rudd's election, we have the set up of a perfect global warming experiment. We won't be measuring greenhouse gases; we'll be tracking an economy that was healthy as it enters the world of mandatory controls required to comply with Kyoto. Will it stay healthy? Will it fail?

Hint: Most Kyoto signatories have simply ignored the protocol's requirements, so my guess is the Australian experiment may well prove inconclusive.