Story from the UK Times. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Australia’s plan to be at the forefront of efforts in Copenhagen to tackle global warming has been torn to shreds after the Senate voted against carbon emission legislation.

The Government’s Bill was voted down 41 to 33 this morning at the end of a marathon debate. The defeat became inevitable yesterday when the main opposition party dumped its leader and replaced him with a climate change sceptic.

Tony Abbott, a right-wing maverick, ousted Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberal leader, by one vote in a backroom ballot. He immediately vowed to oppose the Government’s proposed carbon emissions trading scheme Bill.

[…]“The last thing we should be doing is rushing through a great big new tax just so Mr Rudd can take a trophy to Copenhagen,” Mr Abbott said minutes after taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Earlier this week, I blogged about the new opposition leader Tony Abbott.

A good summary of the week’s climate news is here at Michelle Malkin‘s blog.

New Zealand may be hiding the decline, too

And finally, Watts Up With That is reporting about a conflict between New Zealand’s official climate data and the raw climate data. (H/T MandM, Evolution News)

Excerpt:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century… But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result… Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.

[…]There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

Here we go again! If you click through, just compare the first two graphs. The first graph is the official data, the second graph is the raw data. They are completely different because of the apparently unjustified “adjustments”.