Australia is in the midst of the greatest teaching moment on global warming possibly since this entire business began. Our team of scientists getting frost bite while frozen in, even with technologies today that did not exist a century ago when Douglas Mawson made the same journey. Yet this is not the way it is being reported, although I was pleased to see that Andrew Bolt has made it onto Powerline Picks. But the deep deep scandal, that ought to be one of the most instructive moments in this long and sad saga, is going to waste. And it is worse that I could have thought.

First there was the headline on Drudge, “‘Global Warming’ Intensifies”. So I went into the story which turned out to be from The Telegraph in London. And there, right at the start of the story, was this about Australia. But it’s not about what you might have thought:

As the planet marked its fourth hottest year on record, a study published in the journal Nature found increasing levels of carbon dioxide will lead to thinner ocean clouds and reduce their cooling impact, causing temperature rises of at least 5.6F (3C) over the course of the century.

The team of scientists said the findings show some climate models have been too ‘optimistic’ and previous estimates of a minimum temperature rise of only 2.7F (1.5C) could now be discounted. The optimistic models did not properly assess the impact of water evaporation, which sometimes rises only a short distance into the atmosphere and causes updraughts that reduce cloud cover, the study found.

‘These models have been predicting a lower climate sensitivity but we believe they’re incorrect,’ Professor Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.

‘The net effect of [climate change] is you have less cloud cover.’

The study comes amid a controversy in Australia over claims by Maurice Newman, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser, who said the world had been taken “hostage to climate change madness”.

Mr Newman said the climate change establishment, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remained ‘intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money’.

‘The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,’ he wrote in The Australian. ‘Global temperatures have gone nowhere for 17 years… If the IPCC were your financial adviser, you would have sacked it long ago.’

Mr Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange, was criticised by the opposition and pilloried by scientists, who said he was expressing “flat earth” views and should be sacked.

‘His piece is a mix of common climate change myths, misinformation and ideology,’ said Professor David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald.

‘I would not choose a person who believes that the Earth is flat to advise Australian shipping or airline businesses on how to plan routes to travel around the world. It is clearly not sensible to have a person who believes that climate change science is a delusion as leader of the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council.’

Mr Abbott, who is something of a climate change sceptic, once claimed that ‘climate change is “absolute crap”,’ though he later said he accepts it is ‘real’.

Since winning a federal election last September, he has moved to scrap Labor’s tax on carbon emissions and instead proposes to address climate change by paying polluters to reduce emissions, though critics say the plan is underfunded and will not achieve its reduction targets.

The debate comes as Australia in 2013 marked its hottest year since reliable recordings began in 1910. The world’s driest continent also recorded its hottest day, hottest month, hottest winter’s day and hottest summer.

The run of warmer weather began late in 2012 and was so great that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology last year changed its official weather forecasting map to include new colours – deep purple and pink – for areas with temperatures above 50C (122F).

So let me return to Andrew Bolt one more time. This is on Professional warmist attacks amateur sceptic for being on the take:

David Karoly’s salary depends on him being a warmist. He is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Climate Change Authority.

Today he attacks sceptic Maurice Newman, the former ABC chairman and now head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, who is paid not a cent to point out – correctly – that the world has not warmed as alarmists predicted and the carbon tax wouldn’t prevent it anyway. Says Karoly of Newman:

As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Is Karoly at all aware of how stupid he looks?

Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t, but to tell the truth, he could not care less.