the author makes the typical mistake of believing that adding solar panels to one's roof will lower CO2 output. The fact that your solar panels will reverse your power meter for 6 - 8 hours per day in reality makes no difference to the power output of the local coal burning power station. The belief that you are producing power means the power company produces less is misleading.

The reason we have off-peak power is because you can't turn a power station down, it keeps producing once fired up so it's reasonable for a power company to try to offset this factor by offering off-peak power at a cheaper rate when demand is low.

A true solar system is one where the user stores the solar power in lead/acid batteries and uses that power when the solar panels no longer produce power. The high cost, high pollution and high maintenance of these batteries makes these systems unattractive yet they are the only TRUE solar systems..I know, I lived with one and put up with the inherent inefficiency. To operate a house as you would with a grid connected solar system you would need to at least triple the solar output from your roof and even then, after a cloudy wet week, you may still be gasping for power.

As Greg Sheridan says in today’s Australian, the belief that any action on carbon emissions will have an effect on climate change is purely “faith based”. He further adds that the developing countries are not in any position to reduce their emissions, so it doesn’t matter what Australia does with its 1.4% of total global emissions.

Even Garnau says: “The relevant mitigation is global. The global problem cannot be solved by Australia, which is responsible for little more than 1per cent of world emissions.”

“The benefits depend overwhelmingly on what other countries are doing,” he stresses.

Perhaps the carbon debate should be combined with this month’s topic on the change in religious observance. Some people who no longer accept the fairy tales and myths of religion, but who still need something to ‘believe in’, are switching over to unproven science and the naïve belief that humans can change the climate.

If the Australian Government really wants to make a fool of itself, it will introduce all its faith-based measures in 2010, while the big emitters – developing countries - will continue on their merry way, taking the last of our industry.

There will be no improvement in the climate (the human cause belief is twaddle) but Australia will still have had its industry and standard of living driven backwards.

Copenhagen Consensus!
Whose consensus?

Massive research is clearly the way to go.Plus the necessary change in our energy-wasting consumer patterns---see the note on clothes-lines below

Meanwhile President Carter put into place a comprehensive legislative package with all kinds of tax-breaks to encourage the necessary research into renewable/sustainable energy sources, as an attempt to wean the USA off of its dependency on imported oil.

On of the first things that Ronald Reagan did was to abolish all of that---let the "market" rule being the alleged ideological reason for that decision.

It was a truly short-sighted decision for which the entire world is now paying, especially the people of Iraq in particular and the Middle East in general.

The USA may have weaned itself off of dependency on cheap imported oil if the Carter policies had stayed in place.

Meanwhile the use of outside clothes-lines is banned in many places in the USA, even in places where there is lots of sunshine---the sun-belt states. People are offended by knickers and jocks blowing in the wind. Such an offense is touted as being a threat to property values!

How much energy is used to package and ship Evian water to Australia?
To cater for the preferences of pretentious "up-market" consumers.

I read that in the case of the UK millions of dollars worth of fresh chicken products are exported to Europe every year. And that at the same time an equivalent amount of chicken products is imported from Europe.

The same goes with many products. Right now there are shiploads of the same kind of products (biscuits for instance) going to and from Australia and Europe.

All that waste of energy, especially oil.

its all built on a lie
remember the cfc's destroying the ozone layer
plus the sun[in one day releasing ,more heat energy than a year of fossil fuels [its not our co2 its about getting a new tax ,that allows the market to set how much tax gets drawn from our pocket

WE SEEN WHAT MARKET FORCES DO ,they boost up the price WE PAY EVER MORE TAX ,no further acts needed because GOVT tied us uinto the NEO [new] carbon MARKET forces.

Global warming consensus takes another battering
Paul Joseph Watson

Three top scientists have once again contradicted the claim that a “consensus” exists about man-made global warming with research that indicates CO2 emissions actually cool the atmosphere, in addition to another peer-reviewed paper that documents how the IPCC overstated CO2’s effect on temperature by as much as 2000 per cent.

Professor George Chilingar and Leonid Khilyuk of the University of Southern California, and Oleg Sorokhtin of the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have released a study that they claim completely contradicts the link between CO2 and global temperature increases.

“The writers investigated the effect of CO2 emission on the temperature of atmosphere. Computations based on the adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect show that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere results in cooling rather than warming of the Earth’s atmosphere,”

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

The full study, which appears in the Energy Sources journal, is sure to cause ire amongst climate cult adherants.

No global warming has been observed for the past 10 years

The paper also outlines evidence to confirm that Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed, a factor attributed to the Sun having been more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

The paper concludes, “CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100.”

http://www.celestinevision.com/celestine/forum/index.php

http://www.thinkfreeforums.org/index.php
http://www.newstatesman.com/contents

http://www.youtube.com/1oneundergod1
http://www.youtube.com/1under1GOD
http://thinkfreebefree.proboards105.com/index.cgi
my favourites list
revealing the vision behind the s/words
http://www.youtube.com/profile_favorites?user=oneundergod

note previously

http://www.youtube.com/profile_favorites?user=1oneundergod1
http://swedenborg.newearth.org/hh/hh00toc.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ne/newviews/heavenearth.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ne/newviews/life.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ne/newviews/facts.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ne/newviews/morelife.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ne/newviews/hereafter.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ne/newviews/morelight.html

"it doesn’t matter what Australia does with its 1.4% of total global emissions"

Nonsense, of course it matters. Australia can't solve the climate change problem by leading from behind - by telling developing countries what to do while it sits back and does nothing. We can however fix what is happening in our own backyard. Depending on how you measure it, there are a couple of hundred countries in the world, give or take. Even 1.4% (1.5% according to other sources) is far more than our fair share. A person doesn't get let off a littering charge by pointing out that they are only contributing one millionth of the total litter.

Let's not forget too that Australia has the highest per capita level in the developed world and five times more per person than China.

Simply put, none of this is really aimed at making a difference anyway. Its a whitewash, a political handshake to try and keep the masses quiet.

I'll tell you what is really going to make a difference, companies realising we all care, and basing their new strategies around that.

An example of what I'm talking about is at http://www.thegreenroad.com.au/about-the-greenroad .

There you'll find a company really doing something about vehicle emissions, and not charging the public a cent to do it.

The idea that Australia has to ‘lead’ on emissions cuts is not only arrogant but downright stupid. Rudd got a raspberry from both China and India. He will have his work cut out leading Australia; he is certainly not up to leading the world on anything.

The very thought of a country like Australia – love it though we do - leading the world, is ludicrous. It’s as laughable as the Asia/Pacific equivalent of the EU that Rudd came up with, thinking the countries actually situated in Asia would welcome the ratty brainstorm from a person who thinks he is the Great White Hope.

Nobody even knows what an acceptable measure of carbon is, so there is no way to gauge how damaging our piddling 1.4% is or is or is not.

The cracks in Rudd’s confidence are already showing with the 6 month extension after 2010 now announced. Last night on the “7.30 Report”, he was using the same words (they could not be called answers) for completely different questions, and looking shiftier all the time.

The biggest joke of all is that this character claims to be interested in cutting back on CO2 emissions while his Immigration Minister is boasting that the massive immigration of unskilled workers will be even bigger this year.

The propaganda that climate change is man-made – not natural as it has been through the ages – is very useful at the moment for politicians like Kevin Rudd to take the focus off what he is stuffing up in other areas – health, education, immigration, prices and allowing our industries to be nabbed by foreigners.

Hopefully voters will wake up to the scam well before 2010.

But, Mr. Right, you agree with Greg Sheridan... lol...

We're not leading the world. Other countries, and California, already have it in place.

It's interesting that still no-one has re-mentioned that one of the defences that China has used in the past is "if somewhere like Australia can't be bothered, why should we?"

Mr Right: "The very thought of a country like Australia" ... "leading the world, is ludicrous."

You have confused 'lead' as in 'being first' with 'lead' as in 'leadership'. We will not be first by any means, as other countries are well ahead.

Mr Right: "Nobody even knows what an acceptable measure of carbon is" ... "The propaganda that climate change is man-made" ...

Still peddling the same old rubbish in every climate thread you can find I see. Given that you are at odds with the vast majority of climate scientists, and since you clearly wouldn't know Saturn from Uranus when it comes to science, nobody with any sense should take you seriously.

Johnsamuels, I have a huge problem with tree planting schemes such as Greenfleet (your link). The latest I heard was that a tree has to be 12 years old before it starts to capture any significant carbon. And when it is really large in a hundred or so years and its timber and roots weigh 100 tonnes, only 10 of those tonnes will be captured carbon. On top of that, much of the tree planting is being done in marginal areas where growth is poor, and one company is touting plantings of mallee, because 'they re-grow when they are burnt' (and release all their stored carbon!).

I'm all for growing forests, but pretending that 17 little tubestock trees will offset a year of car emissions is, to put it politely, misleading. A $51 payment to Greenfleet may leave you feeling warm and fuzzy, but will do very little to address CO2 levels and nothing at all to change our behaviour,

What Lomborg is saying, actually makes sense to me.

Australia can pontificate to the world, all that it wants,
we can spend our time trading carbon schemes, all that
we want, but the solution is innovation and good science
and investment in these.

Somebody mentioned lead/acid batteries. This is very
old technology. Who is to say that there are not much
better and cheaper options for energy storage?

What is required is some serious money being thrown
at r&d in these areas, by both Govt and private
enterprise. New energy sources, new storage methods,
etc, all need developing and for that it needs finance.

The Australian solution, is going to involve little more
then heaps of time invested on the feelgood factor, its
not going to provide any solutions.

Everyone will trade their carbon credits, wheras the real
solution is new science and innovation, to discover things
that we don't yet know.

Candide -

This is GreenRoads though, they do it for free. Greenfleets does the planting for the Greenroads initiative, which is in turn sponsored by Sensis. Completely free for the consumer.

Also about the tree age. You've got it backwards. A tree is sequestering carbon all through its growth stage, which is obviously its youngest years. Older trees which hardly increase in size each year actually produce carbon rather than sequester it.