Corals turn out to just love this global warming, after all:

Scientists say warm water and calm conditions have provided perfect conditions for the start of the coral spawning season along the Great Barrier Reef this week.

But some people just can’t let their hostage go:

Northern parts of the Great Barrier Reef is likely to suffer severe coral bleaching this summer, the conservation group WWF Australia warns.

Meanwhile, Professor Bob Carter says there are four things the Rudd Government should know before it imposes on us a useless and expensive scheme to fight global warming:

First, global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate or magnitude.

Second, humans have an effect on local climate but, despite the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($70 billion) looking for it since 1990, no globally summed human effect has ever been measured…

Third, we live on a dynamic planet; change occurs in Earth’s geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans all the time and all over the world. No substantive evidence exists that modern rates of global environmental change (ice volume; sea level) lie outside historic natural bounds.

Last, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, be it in Australia or worldwide, will likely result in no measurable change in future climate… (A)t most, a few tenths of a degree of extra warming would result from a completion of doubling of CO2 since pre-industrial times.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

UPDATE

Terry McCrann hands out an award in a crowded field:

THE mindless irrationality of the global warming hysterics was perfectly captured by a comment from The Age’s economic theology editor Tim Colebatch....

On Colebatch’s ‘correcting’ calculations, Australia would cut emissions by between 34 and 41 per cent; Europe by 27 to 36 per cent.... The bigger point though, according to Colebatch, was that ...if we both achieved our lower 2020 targets, we would still emit twice as much gas per head as Europeans… 16.1 tonnes compared with 8.8 tonnes.

What went straight past The Age’s economic theology editor’s head was that our cuts would be much, much greater per head than Europe’s… They’d cut by less than 2 tonnes per head; we’d cut by six times that, 10 tonnes per head. He obviously does not understand the trauma involved, not only to the economy but the broader Australian society, of such savage reductions, in such a short period. ...

And why does Europe have such lower emissions? A big factor’s a little thing called nuclear power… So is Colebatch embracing an accelerated program to build nuclear plants in Australia? Is Rudd?

UPDATE

Reader John McLean wonders just how anyone can detect a human signal in the “warming” of the Great Barrier Reef: