Climate change represents the biggest opportunity for global giant General Electric over the coming decades, the company's Australian and New Zealand chief executive Steve Sargent says.

"For us, we look at this (climate change) as the biggest business opportunity of the century," Mr Sargent told an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia lunch in Melbourne.

GE provides a range of services and products to the energy, oil and gas and water-treatment sectors, and manufactures jet engines and locomotives.

Climate change is a hot topic among business as the federal government prepares for the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2010 to curb the growth of globally warming greenhouse gases.

Several Republican members of Congress are asking constituents to send in their gas receipts, which will be presented to the vacationing Democrat leadership.

Sen. Jim Inhofe asks Oklahomans:

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They earn the award for their accomplishment in advertising without taste:

Free-speechyness: the Portage paper has refused the ad, which is their right.  I wish they had run it, Peta deserved the massive backlash and fall-out that would have resulted.  –The Daily Bayonet

We seem to be having occasional success in getting things archived. CSIRO was shamed into providing the data for their Drought Report and David Stockwell has now reported on this.

Earlier this year, we reported a form of academic check kiting by Ammann and Wahl, where they had referred to Supplementary Information for key results, but failed to provide the Supplementary Information. Flaccid peer reviewers and flaccid editors at Climatic Change either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Given that RE significance had been a major issue both in the original MM articles and in the twice rejected GRL submission by Wahl and Ammann, you’d think that someone would have spent a couple of minutes checking out whether the argument in the SI actually worked. But, hey,…

The editors of Climatic Change didn’t have any information about the SI. When I contacted Caspar Ammann for the SI, he replied early this year in the typically ‘gracious’ Team style:

why would I even bother answering your questions, isn’t that just lost time?

I just learned that I am exterminating the orangutans. Wiping them off the face of the earth.

That’s right folks, the butter substitute (Smart Balance) that I dearly love is made from palm oil and is such a great product and so healthy for humans that it is causing the conversion of jungle land to productive palm crop land.

Is that horrible or what? That land conversion is, according to the eco-freaks, going to exterminate the orangutans in 10 years.

So by 2018, these “gentle creatures” (blah blah blah), who “share so much of our DNA” (blah blah blah), are all going to die.

Once again I must choose between my lifestyle and the survival of the endangered species du jour.

So far this week, I am killing off the orangutans by eating my butter substitute, I am killing off the polar bears by driving my truck, thereby causing global warming, and I am killing off all the fish in the ocean.

Solzhenitsyn

Mind you, it took no great brains to see evil in an ideology that was trying to destroy him.

After all, this Russian war hero had been arrested on wild charges of slandering Stalin and sent to the Gulag, where millions had died.

But we should be warned. When Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago in English from 1974, warning of the horrors of the Soviet system he'd somehow survived, his revelations struck many intellectuals in the West like a clap of thunder.

What? Nice communism, meant to help people, actually slaughtered them in their millions? Who'd have thought?

Well, not them. And which of our intellectuals can see now the newest form of the same totalitarian instinct?

Al Gore says he wants to get America off oil but he's personally invested in the most cutting edge oil extraction technologies. Gore is a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, a venture capital firm. Kleiner Perkins pours investment dollars into green energy companies and not-so-green ones. An investment firm Gore chairs, Generation Investment Management (GIM), entered into a partnership with Kleiner Perkins to "provide funding and global business-building expertise to a range of businesses, both public and private, and to entrepreneurs." Gore makes money by promoting investments that bear the imprimatur of Kleiner Perkins and GIM - including those in the supposedly dirty oil business.

So Al Gore is not only in the global warming business: he's in the oil business. This isn't Gore's first oil venture either: for years he's profited from oil investments. Like any smart businessman, he hedges his bets. If the global warming business eventually peters out, he can always make millions from black gold.

For years, hyperactive environmentalists have burned votive candles to the spirit in the sky, hoping she'd levitate energy prices high enough to make alternatives to oil economically feasible. That day has come. Result: The oil has hit the fan.

With gasoline over $4 and with life as they love it in the suburbs being shut down, did people call for the windmills? Nope. A heavy majority want to drill the bejeezus out of anywhere in America we can find familiar black slop.

No one has been hit harder by this unexpected truth than Nancy Pelosi and her green brigades.

Fearful of an up-or-down vote on drilling for oil in, of all places, our own country, the Pelosi House and Harry Reid's Senate shut down Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner calls drilling the greatest issue Republicans have had in his political lifetime. A party flat on its back is ready to run on oil pumps.

One thing could quash the debate over “global warming” real quick — global cooling — and it could be on the way.

This brave, against-the-grain prognostication that the Earth’s average temperature could be actually starting to decrease comes from agricultural meteorologist Drew Lerner, who in circles of the global warming in-crowd is known as a “denier.”

Apparently this is because his opinion is based on a well-grounded theory that global warming and cooling are largely affected by factors such as solar radiation, Arctic winds, water vapor and the El Niño/La Niña phenomena, and less by the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Lerner’s opinion runs contrary to those of “alarmists” such as Al Gore — who blames man-made global warming for increased hurricane activity, rising sea levels and making him tell a fib about creating the Internet.

Acid rain caused by industrial pollution could actually help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of agriculture, say scientists.

Research led by the Open University's Dr Vincent Gauci suggests that sulphur-based acid rain from atmospheric pollution could cut the methane emissions associated with cultivating rice by almost a quarter.

Tonne for tonne, methane is more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming.

Dr Gauci's findings suggest that, ironically, the high levels of pollution associated with China's rapid industrialisation may actually be going some small way towards mitigating its soaring CO2 output.