Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders. On the one hand, warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases — produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests. On the other, the technological, economic and political issues that have to be resolved before a concerted worldwide effort to reduce emissions can begin have gotten no simpler, particularly in the face of a global economic slowdown.

Global talks on climate change opened in Cancún, Mexico, in late 2010 with the toughest issues unresolved, and the conference produced modest agreements. But while the measures adopted in Cancún are likely to have scant near-term impact on the warming of the planet, the international process for dealing with the issue got a significant vote of confidence.

The agreement fell well short of the broad changes scientists say are needed to avoid dangerous climate change in coming decades. But it laid the groundwork for stronger measures in the future, if nations are able to overcome the emotional arguments that have crippled climate change negotiations in recent years. The package, known as the Cancún Agreements, gives the more than 190 countries participating in the conference another year to decide whether to extend the frayed Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most wealthy nations to trim their emissions while providing assistance to developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy future.

At the heart of the international debate is a momentous tussle between rich and poor countries over who steps up first and who pays most for changed energy menus.

In the United States, on Jan. 2, 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency imposed its first regulations related to greenhouse gas emissions. The immediate effect on utilities, refiners and major manufacturers will be small, with the new rules applying only to those planning to build large new facilities or make major modifications to existing plants.  Over the next decade, however, the agency plans to regulate virtually all sources of greenhouse gases, imposing efficiency and emissions requirements on nearly every industry and every region.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html

The seriousness of the insidious problem of global warming seems to escape the mind of Tony Abbott and his cohort of well-meaning people. Either their sight and other senses are not as good as they used to be either their comprehension of things related to the planet is becoming more and more tied up to their selfish wallets. Who knows. But if we do not do something now, there is bugger of a chance we will reduced the world CO2 emissions 60 per cent by 2050... By then the world temperature average will have added another one degree, possibly 1.5 degree C.

The "earth" does not think in terms of "revenge", "Armageddon" or policies supporting this or that... The earth's surface mechanically and chemically responds to variable content of chemicals within it. We know that.

Well some people know that — other still think the earth is an excised bit of paradise that has been modified to treat us like shit because we have sinned through our ancestors Adam and Eve after they ate a forbidden fruit, under the temptation of a devil disguised as a snake... Oh my god they might be right!

From Phillip Adams

ORGANISED by the brainless bigots of shock-jockery, following the example of their American heroes in talking up the toxic Tea Party, a Canberra rally ostensibly about carbon tax was addressed by Tony Abbott and wisely boycotted by Hockey and Turnbull.

Climate change denial? There were deeper, darker purposes to the gathering. The crowd contained many members of deranged cults owing their existence to a truly evil man called Eric Butler.

Shortly before his death in 2006, aged 90, Australia’s most virulent anti-Semite complained bitterly to the Press Council about some columns I’d written to expose him and his League of Rights. I’d wanted to remind the National Party, first infiltrated by the league in its Country Party days, of what these thugs were really on about – and to prevent such foolish Liberal ministers as Alexander Downer sharing public platforms with Butler’s acolytes. Not that Downer went as far as my old friend Jim Killen who, sadly, had backed the league in the 1960s, even travelling with Butler to Europe. Let me now warn Tony Abbott, and any shock-jock who can read.

If the word “traitor” means anything Butler was a traitor, often investigated during World War II by stumble-bum security people for his pro-Axis activities. He argued that Churchill, Roosevelt and John Curtin were “covert communists”, that then ally the Soviet Union was “a Jewish slave state... controlled by international Jewish financiers in New York”. And here we see his favourite theme. The evils of the Jewish race. At the time of his complaint to the Press Council Butler was still distributing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, arguably the most malignant forgery in human history – and still very popular in the Middle East. Another book on his recommended reading list was a piece of garbage claiming that the Anne Frank diaries were fraudulent. Mind you, any book that denied the Holocaust was endorsed. According to Butler, it never happened. For full details read Butler’s The International Jew. And Tony, the League was in your cheering, jeering audience.

read more at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/a-warning-for-tony/story-e6frg7fx-1226034302796

see image at top...

Exposing the duplicity of Israel in the demolition of Palestinian homes while still pushing the barrow Israel is a "victim", does not mean that we are anti-semitic on this site... I could be Jewish... and I know many Jews who are horrified at what Israel is doing "in their name"...

JERUSALEM - Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank tripled in 2010, figures from an Israeli human rights group showed on Wednesday, with a leap in the number in the Jordan Valley.

Annual figures published by B'Tselem showed that Israel demolished 86 homes across the West Bank in 2010, compared with 28 a year earlier.

Last year's house demolitions left 472 people homeless, almost half of them children, the figures showed.

Demolitions more than doubled in the Tubas region, which straddles the northern sector of the Jordan Valley, rising to 51 from 24 in 2009 and leaving some 219 people homeless, 94 of them children, the group said.

They also rose sharply in the Nablus district, which also covers the central Jordan Valley, with 19 demolitions last year, compared with none the year before, the figures show. Some 134 people were made homeless, 51 of them children.

B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli said the group had noticed an increase in demolition activity in the Jordan Valley and in the south Hebron Hills area, which was aimed at razing Bedouin-owned structures built illegally.

"The trend now is toward demolishing temporary accommodation, usually put up by the Bedouin," she said, describing them as non-permanent structures largely in encampments, but stressed they served as homes.

"The net result is the same -- people are displaced," she said, adding it was not clear why the authorities were focusing their attention on these two particular areas.

"The ongoing policy seems to be aimed at pushing the nomadic community out of these areas and towards the population centres," she said.

A spokesman for the Israeli Civil Administration, the branch of the army responsible for all building issues in most of the West Bank, known as Area C, said he was not aware of any rise in demolition activity in the area.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/ENGLISH/?id=43911

Back to Phillip Adams:

I don’t expect shock-jocks to give a damn. But the Leader of the Opposition? He should understand the perils of a Billy Tea Party. If Abbott doesn’t, he’s a dill. If he does, and still speaks at their rallies, he’s a disgrace. It’s not only on climate change that we see two Abbotts. Which twin is the Tony?

Gus: Phillip... Tony is a disgrace and a dill, no question about it. But he is a clever dill in his exploitation of the populace's ignorance. For Tony, like for most of the idiotic shock jocks, cultivated ignorance is a virtue on the way to happiness...

see Abbott-the-Idiot at top...

Among the 3000 or so protesters who gathered outside Parliament House on March 23 to rally against the carbon tax, few believed in global warming. It was easier to find subscribers to some sort of nebulous United Nations conspiracy than it was to find a believer in the scientific consensus.

When Tony Abbott addressed the baying crowd, he stressed that Julia Gillard's broken promise about a carbon tax was the issue. ''I don't think this is about climate change. Climate change happens, mankind does make a contribution,'' he said. During the brief but awkward silence that ensued, a little old lady turned to reassure those around her: ''He has to say that.''

Abbott had entered that golden zone in which opposition leaders can find themselves. Such is the dislike of their opponent, they can say and do virtually anything and be ignored, defended or forgiven.

When confirmation came that Gillard would announce the details of the carbon price package on July 10, Abbott's immediate instinct was to stick to his scheduled plan to live with an Aboriginal community on Cape York for the week. He was happy to let his climate change spokesman, Greg Hunt, mount the initial response.

Overnight, he changed his mind, or had it changed for him. The Cape York visit was postponed for a week, then for another week, now for a third. The thinking inside the Coalition is that Abbott is on a roll, and so another week on the phoney campaign trail beckons.

...

To mount a recovery, Gillard lacks at least two ingredients Howard had - money and authority. The budget of May 2001 was a shameless exercise in using the surplus to festoon pensioners and self-funded retirees with money to salve their anger over the GST. And Howard had a majority on the floor of the House, meaning he never faced losing such votes as the constitutionally-meaningless but authority-sapping Greens-Coalition motion condemning the Malaysian solution.

But unlike Howard, Gillard - caucus permitting - has time. And Abbott's faltering last week was the first glimmer of hope for Labor for ages.