The world according to Tony Mark I or II 0r III or IV or V...........

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Now just in case you think Oz Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has had a divine revelation on the 27th of May about global warming and climate change - remember that he tailors his opinions to his audience.

Here's Tony over the last six months:

"If you look at Roman times, grapes grew up against Hadrian's Wall - medieval times they grew crops in Greenland. In the 1700s they had ice fairs on the Thames. So the world has been significantly hotter, significantly colder than it is now. We've coped....

Well, look, if man-made CO2 was quite the villain that many of these people say it is, why hasn't there just been a steady increase starting in 1750, and moving in a linear way up the graph."
{Tony Abbott in Lateline interview on 19th November 2009}

"I mean in the end this whole thing is a question of fact, not faith, or it should be a question of fact not faith and we can discover whether the planet is warming or not by measurement. And it seems that notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man made CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world's warming has stopped. Now admittedly we are still pretty warm by recent historical standards but there doesn't appear to have been any appreciable warming since the late 1990s."

{Tony Abbott in 2GB Radio interview with Alan Jones on 9th December 2009}

"In a wide ranging speech, Mr Abbott talked about climate change, the Liberal political fortunes and Kevin Rudd. Quote - the argument on climate change is absolute crap, he said."

{Editor of Pyrenees Advocate quoting Tony Abbott in North Coast Voices post on 8th February 2010}

"OK, so the climate has changed over the eons and we know from history, at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now....And then during what they called the Dark Ages it was colder. Then there was the medieval warm period. Climate change happens all the time and it is not man that drives those climate changes back in history.....It is an open question how much the climate changes today and what role man plays."

{Tony Abbott to a school class quoted in The Australian on 8th May 2010}

"I am confident, based on the science we have, that mankind does make a difference to climate, almost certainly the impact of humans on the planet extends to climate."

{Tony Abbott in a speech to 11th National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald on 27th May 2010}