“This has been their policy for the last five years, with exactly the same annual amount put into it as Scott Morrison has promised for the future, and yet we’ve seen carbon pollution go up year upon year, projected to continue to go up all the way to 2030,” Butler said on Monday. “This is a failed policy”.

Bill Hare, a climate scientist and the director of Climate Analytics, said the emissions reduction fund was “a failed policy”, with all independent analysis showing it had not reduced emissions to the extent the government claimed.

“They certainly have not shown up in the national emissions, which continue to increase,” he said.

Hare said the amount of annual funding proposed by Morrison halved what the original policy provided under Abbott. He said the government had also taken no steps to rectify problems with the scheme, including that emitters were currently able to use the safeguard mechanism to increase their emissions.

“The bigger issue is there’s no way the Australian taxpayer can pay for the emissions reductions needed, and nor should they,” Hare said.

“The polluter-pays principle needs to be applied and that means a carbon pricing system would enable companies to make an investment in their production that would benefit taxpayers and the bottom line.”

The Australian Conservation Foundation said the emissions reduction fund had done nothing to cut carbon pollution since its introduction and it was difficult to see how continuing with the same policy would lead to a different result.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/25/scott-morrison-pl...

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. And the Liberal (CONservative) Party is expecting us to be insane enough to believe their same shit.

I believe Scummo has not a single shingle on the roof as to what "global warming" is. From the kitchen, I could hear some imbecile going on about "climate change" with Leigh Sales on the ABC, and when I went into the TV room, I recognised him... Scummo was parroting some 500,000 years of pseudo-denialist crap as if there was some science in it, but he was doing it so badly, it seemed to come from an idiot's bird brain, though forcefully delivered with a brilliance and vigour equal to the shine on his shoes. Dazzling!

Scummo and his Liberal (CONservative) idiots get their misinformation from Uncle Rupe's "The Australian" which is as unAustralian disinformation disservice outlet as all get out:

Two front page stories in The Australian exaggerate the cost of climate action policies.

Broadcast: Mon 25 Feb 2019, 9:15pm

Published: Mon 25 Feb 2019, 9:49pm (Transcripts to come, I hope).

After Scott Morrison’s announcement of his new climate change policy we know two things – the government still thinks we’re idiots, and they are still not serious about reducing emissions.

I guess we should be grateful that at least the government now realises it needs to look as if it gives a damn about reducing emissions, because for a while they couldn’t even be bothered to do that.

But stuff it. I’m done with giving out prizes for pretence. I’m done with being satisfied with something not even worthy of being called a fourth-best policy. I’m done with the lies.

Do not for one second think this is a policy designed to reduce emissions. It is a political band-aid while the actual wound to our economy from its greenhouse gas dependency is open and festering.

It is a fraud, and not even a new one.

It’s the same bulldust that the LNP has been selling the public for nigh on a decade with a different badge. Gone is the Emissions Reduction Fund; say hello to the “Climate Solutions Fund”.

This fund of $2bn over 10 years is not just a rebranding of Tony Abbot’s direct action, it is actually a diminishment of it. At $200m a year on average it is less than half the money a year that was spent on direct action – a policy that was so laughably bad that a government with any level of shame would quietly have dumped it and pretended it never happened.

Yet, here we are. Nine years after Lenore Taylor ripped apart the Liberal party’s policy of reliance on “soil magic” we have the prime minister still thinking such measures of carbon sequestration are worth pursuing and will achieve anything close to what is required.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/26/the-government-thi...

Read from top.

Wallace S. Broecker

Newberry Professor of Geology

To his colleagues, peers and admirers he is a genius and a pioneer, the Grandfather of Climate Science. And to his countless friends – most of whom also happen to be colleagues, peers and admirers – he is simply Wally.

Broecker is arguably one of the world’s greatest living geoscientists. For more than half a century, his major research interest has been the ocean’s role in climate change. He was among the pioneers in radiocarbon and isotope dating – the quintessential processes for creating maps of the Earth’s past climate fluctuations since as early as the Pleistocene period. He was also the first person ever to recognize the Ocean Conveyor Belt (which he named), arguably the most important discovery in the history of oceanography and its critical relation to climate.

Broecker’s studies regarding biogeochemical cycles of carbon and the influence of climate change on polar ice and ocean sediments have earned him decades of international attention. Among many other awards, he was granted the Vetlesen Prize in 1987, the National Medal of Science by Bill Clinton in 1996 and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2002. Most recently, he has been in the limelight for his cutting-edge work in carbon sequestration with his Earth Institute colleagues, including geophysicist Dr. Klaus Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy.

Broecker and Lackner are leaders in the war on anthropogenic climate change and both advocate drastic changes in people’s carbon emissions and the dire need for large-scale carbon sequestration. In his latest in a decades-long series of highly-acclaimed books, Fixing Climate, Broecker and science writer Robert Kunzig make a compelling case for carbon “scrubbers” to cycle carbon out of the atmosphere and back into the earth’s crust where it belongs. Speaking strictly in terms of its climate change implications, the book has an interesting message: “Burning fossil fuels is not bad, what is bad is dumping the waste into the atmosphere.”

While Broecker is an advocate of utilizing alternative fuels, he is realistic about humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels – especially in industrializing nations. He was recently featured on the BBC’s Hardtalk, where he spoke of his unlikely climate optimism in the face of rapidly industrializing nations: “I think we have an option and the option is to let them industrialize but take care of the problem by capturing and storing the CO2.” He says that “we’re going to have to learn to capture the CO2 and bury it – just like we learned to collect and put away garbage [and] sewage… We’ve taken over stewardship of the planet and with that we have the responsibility to take care of it.”

At Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory he works toward manufacturing and developing carbon sequestering devices: safe, silo-like instruments designed to neutralize fossil fuel emissions. A pioneer in the face of overwhelming skepticism, Broecker has been warning the world of climate change since the 1970s, thanks to his prescient comprehension of atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulation. His research continues today as he studies planktonic foraminifera in the world’s oceans to gain a better understanding of the triggers of abrupt climate change.

Regarding the science behind his lifelong quest to understand abrupt climate change, he writes:

The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth's climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change... Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation. We place strong emphasis on using isotopes as a means to understand physical mixing and chemical cycling in the ocean, and the climate history as recorded in marine sediments.

Wally Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He is also a scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and an Academic Committee member of the Earth Institute. An alumnus of Columbia, Broecker has been a fixture in the Columbia community for over 55 years – he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His earned his doctorate in geology in 1958 and was appointed to the Columbia faculty in 1959.

Wallace Broecker passed away on Feb 19, 2019. Read his obituary: Wallace Broecker, Prophet of Climate Change

Read more:

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2246

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

What’s the story?

Fossil fuel industry consultant Brian Fisher has released so-called “independent” modelling looking at the economic cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but his research is deeply flawed. 

Who is Brian Fisher?

Brian Fisher is the fossil fuel industry’s go-to consultant. The industry has paid for much of Fisher’s so-called ‘research’. 

Is the modelling credible?

No. Fisher’s report fails to consider the economic benefits for Australia from investing in renewable energy and new technologies as well as failing to quantify the costs of not acting to prevent climate change. 

Several of his findings are implausible. For example, his findings on electricity prices are contrary to a range of detailed Australian studies showing more renewable energy means lower wholesale electricity prices.

This is a distraction.

The Federal Government has a poor record on climate change and is running a scare campaign to distract from this. Since the Liberal National Party has been in government, pollution has gone up, electricity and gas prices have gone up and extreme weather events have worsened.

Australians are demanding action on climate change.

Australia saw the largest ever demonstrations on climate change last week. Polling around the country consistently shows Aussies want the Federal Government to protect them and the places they love by taking immediate and serious steps to address climate change.

Read more:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/brian-fisher-modelling-whats-the-story/

Read rom top.

See also:

http://theconversation.com/killing-renewables-softly-with-endless-reviews-23409

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-05/renewable-energy-target-panel-defends-conflict-interest-claims/5501372

http://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/P700%20Let%20us%20assume%20%5BWEB%5D_2.pdf

https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-chooses-climate-change-denier-to-head-renewables-review-65883/