On Sunday, Megan Evans pointed me towards a 2009 interview with Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott. It's 13 minutes long but what grabbed my attention was an answer towards the end where Abbott throws out a few climate denier myths then seamlessly transitions into arguing that a carbon tax is the best way to put a price on carbon. Yesterday morning, I uploaded the one minute answer onto YouTube:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tony-Abbott-denies-climate-change-advocates-carbon-tax-in-the-same-breath.html

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Tony has changed his opinions about global warming as many times as he has changed his budgie smugglers (for UK and US people read underpants)... His latest opinion on this subject (and many others) is never far from a new self-rebuttal of this opinion, depending on which crowd he's spruiking too...

One cannot trust this guy AT ANY TIME...

From Chris Berg...

The release of the Productivity Commission's draft report into climate adaptation at the end of last month could have been a spark that changed the debate in Australia.

That's because it implicitly suggested that adapting to climate change – regardless of whether its origin is anthropogenic, 'natural', or whatever – is now the main game.

And the PC is not alone. In the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, there was just one chapter on adaptation. The previous report in 2001 was the same: one chapter. Now, according to the outline of the 2013 report, the adaptation section will blow out to four chapters.

This new attention on adaptation makes sense. Nobody believes global emissions will be reduced to the extent the IPCC claims is urgent and necessary. Supposed deadlines for action have come and gone, over and over. By 2012, sceptics, alarmists, realists, and optimists should all agree that seriously mitigating climate change is a pipe dream.

So, given this, it was very disappointing the Productivity Commission's draft report entered the public sphere with such a quiet thud last fortnight.

The mainstream press had a few short, passionless bites. The online specialty service Climate Spectator, which usually scrutinises every aspect of climate economics and politics, simply reposted a newswire report announcing the release. No further analysis apparently needed.

The final product will be released at the end of this year. But even in draft form, it starkly illustrates how much of a philosophical shake-up moving from a mitigation focus to an adaptation focus will be.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3997798.html?WT.svl=theDrum

Meanwhile as I have mentioned many times on this site, insuring against the damage is going to be costly:

The revelation that it took James Hardie Industries 52 years from the time it knew asbestos was carcinogenic until it ceased manufacturing the product has resonance today (''Hardie Seven face moment of truth'', May 5-6). Hardie is still responsible for compensating for the effects of its negligence, despite trying to evade its responsibilities.

It is 31 years since the 1981 publication of Dr James Hansen's paper linking the burning of fossil fuels to excessive greenhouse gas emissions, extreme weather events and potentially catastrophic global warming. Yet Australia spends 11 times more subsidising the use of fossil fuels than it does in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Yesterday Suncorp announced that it would not provide new insurance for properties in Emerald and Roma that were flooded in an extreme weather event last year.

Devastating as the illness and deaths related to asbestos-generated mesothelioma are, they will be insignificant compared with centuries of destruction that will follow uncontrolled global warming.

Our politicians and business people should note that the nations doing most to effectively address global warming are those where the most reinsurance is written. They are, in order of reinsurance value: Germany, Switzerland (which has a carbon tax of $32 a tonne going to $65 in 2013), Denmark and Britain. Those reinsurers have been warning their governments of their inability to cover losses due to global warming.

Just as the costs of mesothelioma finally caught up with Hardie Industries, the cost of global warming will surely catch up with those industries causing the problem in the first place.

If the insurers won't pay, those who have lost will seek compensation from those companies causing the warming.

John Bushell Surry Hills

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/time-for-a-fair-go-but-clearing-the-slate-would-help-20120507-1y8zu.html#ixzz1uG7vidBq

As I have also mentioned before — a carbox tax is "a form of insurance" against global warming and the premiums (see Switzerland) are going to go up and up...