“The “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” meme was launched by James Hansen in his address to the US Senate in June 1988. Despite the predictions of the IPCC modelling and the mewling of the catastrophists, there has been no warming trend for the last 18 of those 26 years and the world is presently cooler than it was in 1998.
How does this blatant fraud survive?”
Put the ABC business editor, John Hewson, Ross Garnaut and a couple of other coal-phobic gabblers on the same stage and what do you get? Why, that fabled “elephant in the room” — and a jumbo-size load of alarmist droppings to mark its effect on otherwise intelligent souls
On Monday, November 17, the school of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne convened a panel devoted to the proposition that fossil fuel-infected “stranded assets” might cause the next global financial crisis. If you’re not up to speed with the latest enviro-disaster greenspeak lingo, know that a stranded asset is an investment in some or other carbon-spewing industry or portfolio, and that the true believers consider it likely that it will be rendered near-worthless when the world switches abruptly to those “sustainable” sources we keep hearing are just around the corner.
You might think that the business faculty at one of Australia’s most august tertiary institutions would begin by considering just how likely such a sudden transition might be, then progress to a reasoned and logical examination of all the associated risks and rewards associated with what participants kept calling the “carbon bubble”. You would, alas, be hopelessly wrong.
The introduction on the university’s website:
“If coal, oil and gas companies are permitted to exploit all the resources they have currently discovered, the world’s climate will warm well beyond the 2C limit governments have agreed is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
An HSBC study found that removing the ‘stranded assets’ from the balance sheets of fossil fuel companies would halve their sharemarket value. Aggregating these losses is in the realm of $2 trillion: a greater impact on global sharemarkets than the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Reports by Citibank, Standard & Poors, Bloomberg, the Bank of England, Oxford University, London School of Economics and others support the seriousness of the carbon bubble threat.
Meanwhile, the scientific evidence of climate change continues to pile up, the likelihood of a post-Kyoto global political agreement is increasing, and the divestment movement gathers momentum.