No, BurnShrike, this is the thread where liberals show for the 6,723,522nd time that they can't take a joke.

Wait, weren't we supposed to be all swamp-ass by now?
... unsure of the murderous environmental timeline now.
I'm dead from swine flu
I'm dead from bird flu
I'm dead form the hole in the ozone
I'm dead from global cooling
I'm dead from global warming
earthquakes/meteors/drought/floods/fires/hyperactivity/crack/mrsa/ddt
apparently, we ARE the zombie apocalypse!

You'll never guess from the linked article who the parent corporation of the Herald Sun is. Oh, wait. You could.

wildcardjack: I'm curious if any is familiar with this legislation.

It's rather striking that the article could blather on for that many words without mentioning the content of the legislation, other than "It's a tax! Booga booga!"

They did find room for:
There has been no further melting of the Arctic ice cap since 1997.



Data courtesy of NOAA/NSIDC.

They did find room for:
The European Space Agency's Envisat satellite system for measuring sea level shows no further rise over the past seven years.



Data courtesy of NASA/JPL.

They did find room for:
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found no rise in the global ocean heat content since 2002.

Why 2002? Because if you pick any other year, or just look at the overall trend, you'd draw a very different conclusion:



Data courtesy of NOAA. Manuscript available from ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf.

From that same data source:
"We have previously reported estimates of the variability of the ocean heat content (OHC) of the world ocean [Levitus et al., 2000, 2005a]. The warming trend in OHC dominated earth's heat balance during the past fifty years [Levitus et al., 2001] and the trend has been attributed to the increase in greenhouse gases in earth's atmosphere by Levitus et al. [2001] and Barnett et al. [2001, 2005] among others."

Fair and Balanced, Australia edition!

I now return you to the same small cadre of trolls spamming the thread with irrelevant comments they pasted in from their talking point blogs.

I'm pretty sure "raining hookers" is right up there with locusts in the biblical "oh shiat" list.

More reasonable article from the BBC is here.

Basically, the 500 largest polluters in Australia will be required to pay $23 AUS (~$23 US) for each ton of carbon discharged into the environment.

Hopefully, this will help spur the Australian wind industry-- they presently only derive ~2% of their electricity from wind, whereas several countries in Europe have surpassed 10%. They're also well-poised to use PV, fission, tidal, and geothermal.

Curiously, they mine 23% of the world's uranium and don't have a single fission plant despite having tons of available space for siting and disposal.