Disconnection between Climate Change & Reality

Terry McCrann, in his Herald Sun column*, writes, “When the wind doesn’t blow … which is nearly all the time”:

Eric Beecher’s Crikey, new media’s effort to make old media shock jocks look like voices of calm and reason, got it exactly and so deliciously right yesterday.
“There’s a bizarre disconnection between the climate change debate in Australia and reality,” was the email’s plaintive opening sentence.
Quite.  Collective warmenists like Crikey and its ‘intellectual’ peer The Age demonstrate the truth of that sentence every day—persistently, stridently and so totally unknowingly in their pompous condescending inanity.
If men are from Mars and women from Venus, generally speaking, then the Crikey people and their fellow warmenists are from a dark planet way outside our or indeed any solar system.
The first, biggest and all-encompassing disconnect from reality is their demand for a “price on carbon [sic] to tackle global warming”.  […]
Crikey & The Age & co. are the ones disconnected from reality.  […]
You want to see a disconnect from reality?  Look at the blithe belief of people like Crikey and The Age that we can close down our coal-fired plants and we’ll get the electricity from ‘something else’.[†]
Here’s another reality from which the debate has been very deliberately ‘disconnected’.
Analysis [by Tom Quirk] shows the carbon tax will have to be at least $50 a tonne, not the $20 a tonne soothingly and deceptively promoted by Combet, to begin to force a shift from coal to that ‘something else’.  Principally gas.
Try connecting that with the ‘reality’ of the higher prices you face for everything.
The reality is that there is one big difference between the carbon tax and the GST.  The carbon tax will force up the price of EVERYTHING—including health, education and fresh food excluded from the GST.
This is the reality that needs to be disconnected from the rubbish and outright lies spun by Combet, Gillard and their obliging mouthpieces at Crikey and The Age.

*  The version of the column in the Daily Telegraph is truncated; it ends with:  “Analysis by Quirk shows the carbon tax will have to be at least $50 a tonne, not the $20 a tonne promoted by Greg Combet, to begin to force a shift from coal to other sources.”  The editors of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reckon that its readers are more easily vexed, perhaps, by offensive but accurate terminology (such as “deceptively” and “rubbish” and “outright lies”) than the readers of Melbourne’s Herald Sun are.

†  See also  “A lot of hot air: Wind farms ‘working at just 21% of capacity’”, by David Derbyshire:  “Britain’s wind farms produce far less electricity than their supporters claim – and cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on, a study from a conservation charity showed yesterday.”

UPDATE—from comments:  Official report says, “Wind-farms are totally useless.”