Nonsensical flannel from Flannery

It was only a matter of time before our own Aussie James Hansen, Tim Flannery, put pen to paper to blame the bush fires on "global warming", and he goes to town in the Sydney Morning Herald today:

Climate modelling suggests the decline of southern Australia's winter rainfall is caused by a build-up of greenhouse gas, much of it from coal burning. Victoria has the most polluting coal power plant on earth, and another plant was threatened by the fire.
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Australia is in shock at the loss of so many lives. But inevitably we will look for lessons. The first, I fear, is that we must anticipate more such terrible blazes, for the world's addiction to burning fossil fuels goes on unabated. And there is now no doubt that emissions pollution is laying the conditions necessary for more such fires.

When he ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described climate change as the greatest threat facing humanity. Shaken, and clearly having seen things none of us should see, he has now witnessed proof of his words. We can only hope Australia's climate policy, which is weak, is now significantly strengthened.

Rudd has said the arsonists suspected of lighting some fires are guilty of mass murder, and the police are pursuing the malefactors. But there's an old saying among Australian firefighters: "Whoever owns the fuel owns the fire".

Let's hope Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible event, and change their polluting ways before it's too late.

Flannery disingenuously links increasing levels of CO2 to changes in climate, without the intervening step of increasing temperature. Maybe that's because there has been no global warming since 2001, despite rising CO2 levels. And even if temperatures were rising, there is still no confirmed link to CO2 levels (despite $50bn in research), and there are many other possible causes the IPCC won't tell you about, like er... the sun?

And, by the way, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant - it is plant food, without which no life on earth would exist. But hey, Flannery's only a professor, a mammalogist and palaeontologist, so how could he be expected to know that?

Climate nonsense.

Read it here.