�A sweaty sense of dislocation was palpable today throughout Europe, where unusually high temperatures and a summerlong dearth of rain have damaged crops, fanned wildfires, and left residents and tourists baking, broiling and steaming as seldom before.�

It would make a great opening for a Roman Detective parody: �A sweaty sense of dislocation was palpable as Gordias Maximus, private eye, mulled over the evidence. Togas clung like wet sheets to dames passing by his portico (much to the delight of patricians, slaves and legions on the street below). Maximus had been marking time, just punching the ol� sundial -- raiding chariot chop shops and busting small-time gladiator fight fixers. That is, until his big break came on that unusually sultry March spring day...�

The �heat� in Europe is apparently so bad that male Swedish bus drivers have reportedly taken to wearing skirts (shorts are prohibited attire) and Germans � who until now had a reputation as the continent�s most diligent workers � do not have to show up for work if the temperature hits a mere 29 C.

Britain�s tabloid The Sun claims bananas are growing in Essex and the media, more generally, daily have featured pictures of packed beaches, where great white sharks have been sighted, apparently on the prowl for pasty white English flesh. You might mistake Brighton Beach for Bondi. Yeah, yeah, I hear you, not in a month of hot Sundays.

Hardy Australians � and their North American cousins � are unimpressed. Frankly, we find all the heat wave headlines a scream � so much melodramatic moaning. Twenty-nine degrees? Well, whoop-de-do. Bus companies should have enough common fashion sense to know that its patrons will find Ralph Crampton in a skirt an unattractive look, except perhaps during Sydney�s Mardi Gras. Shorts are de rigueur for down under summertime bus driving.

The high temperatures apparently got to Sir John Houghton, former head of Britain�s Met Office, the country�s weather bureau, when he claimed in a Guardian column the other day greenhouse gasses were a "weapon of mass destruction�. And Le Monde has run a hysterical cartoon (reminiscent of the most outlandish former Soviet Block propaganda) depicting global warming as an American capitalist WMD attack on Europe.

However, the current head of the Met Office, Nigel Read, has explained the heat is actually due to a rather more mundane cause: a cold front that is pilling hot air from where else but France. Nevertheless, is Europe�s sweatiness simply a transitory discomfort � an excuse for a whinge � or is this yet another sign that Greenland may soon live up to its name? Perhaps constant European ventilating on the subject is not just so much, well, hot air after all.

I am not convinced � less so by a former weatherman (well okay, weather supremo, if you wish). When does the Met ever get it right? Their forecasting blunders are infamous. The 1979 storm, which sent half the fleet in the Fastnet Yacht Race to the bottom of the sea, and the 1987 �Hurricane�, which turned Kent�s lovely Seven Oaks into a timber clearance sale area, are but two of the more egregious examples that happen to come to mind.

The Met Office can not predict what is going to happen in Greater London 24-hours in advance � unless it will be the ubiquitous �dull� � much less what the planetary weather will be in 50 or 100 years. Why should anyone take account of Sir John�s dire warnings when his former office can�t tell me whether I should take an umbrella or slip, slap, and slop? Sydney has recently recorded one of its coldest winter days. Is that a sign of another impending ice age?

But let�s presume arguendo that Sir John is on to something. Which brings me � in a roundabout way � to David Penberthy�s revelation in the Daily Telegraph last month that NSW Premier Bob Carr and his wife Helena had bought a �spectacular getaway in New Zealand's world-famous wine and wilderness country� at Mt Rosa Station and Estate Winery in the South Island�s Gibbston Valley � known locally as �Millionaire�s Row�.

A minor brouhaha erupted because Carr would obviously avoid paying the hefty stamp duty imposed by his own Labor Government, which would have amounted to about A$10,000 on the A$330,000 Kiwi property. And, deputy Opposition Leader Barry O�Farrell dubbed the property a retirement �Shangri-La�.

The premier�s minders rejected claims Bob�s new bolt hole suggests he is ready to collect his gold watch. Rather, the premier � who said he intends to stick around for another term beyond the one he�s just won � will use his Kiwi-La as a weekend getaway. The premier and Helena � with his salary and her successful printing business � are on a pretty good wicket, and it�s hard to imagine ten grand would have made a difference one way or the other between his offshore haven and purported local runners-up, Albury, Orange, Port Macquarie.

But getting away from it all won�t be as convenient as, say, programming the Millennium Train computer for a trip up the coast for fish and chips at Terrigal, a pint with the blokes at the Central Coast Leagues Club, and maybe a few tries at the pokies before calling it a night. And all those meals-ready-to-fly could get a bit tiresome � especially for a man with an eccentric nutritional regime � though Carr seems to like it up where the air is thin, jetting off to Milan, New York and Davos, as he is want to do, albeit apparently always in furtherance of the state�s economic and trade interests (naturally).

And all of those high-altitude excursions raise a troubling question. If the Mt Rosa property really is only to be Carr�s weekender � a la President George Bush�s Crawford Ranch � then isn�t it a bit taxing on the environment for the self-professed green-friendly premier to be jetting back and forth to New Zealand to relieve a little heat stress?

Carr would not expel nearly as much exhaust into the heavens traveling as he typically does on a commercial flight as Bush does on Air Force One � in Carr�s dreams maybe. Come to think of it, your typical presidential motorcade creates enough fumes to require citywide smog alerts whenever it is on the move. Freight trains are shorter and less noisy.

But the frequent flyer premier never misses an opportunity to lecture wealthier nations, such as Australia and America, on the need to reduce atmospheric emissions. And rather than set an example by weekending closer to home � instead of filling the atmosphere with jet exhaust � for Carr it seems to be a case of �do what I say, not what I do�.

According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), aviation contributes about 2% of total carbon dioxide emissions (cited as a cause of global warming) from human activities and is projected to grow to between three and five percent by 2050. And IATA warns that aviation contributes other allegedly climate changing emissions, such as water vapor and nitrogen oxides.

If you believe humans are warming up the planet, then it doesn�t take a rocket scientist to know that Carr is contributing far more than the average Penrith punter to turning Nanook of the North�s igloo into a puddle. Actually, er, it does sort of require a rocket scientist to work it out.

So I turned to the guys and gals with the pocket protectors at NASA (the ones who made that buddy movie that fooled everyone into believing two guys named Neil and Buzz walked on the moon and where they�ve been busy working out the trajectory, speed and kinetic energy of large globs of flying foam insulation). They have also been calculating the impact flying holidaymakers have on the Earth�s atmosphere.

According to NASA rocket genius Verner von V-2, a force balance equation is used to calculate fuel burned. To obtain the fuel consumption, we use the following formula:

Are your eyes glazing over yet? Just imagine what the global warming �formula� must look like. Bugger me if I know what to do with it. Forget all those calculations. According to the Boeing Aircraft Company, a 737 consumes around 2,440 kilograms of aircraft grade kerosene per hour at cruise altitude. It takes approximately six and one-half hours to fly across the Tasman. For the sake of argument, let�s say Carr makes eight pilgrimages a year (a reasonable estimate considering his investment).

That would mean the premier would be aloft for about just over 100 hours each year commuting to his South Island sanctuary (still with me?), personally burning 2,440 kilograms of hydrocarbon fuel in the upper atmosphere (assuming 100 passengers on an average flight) or about 20,000 kilos if he stays in office for another four-year term. I haven�t calculated take-off and climb out, so the figure is actually somewhat higher.

The premier�s green alter ego, Senator Bob Brown, is an even greater atmospheric emitter, commuting back and forth between Hobart and Canberra every week in order to get up the Government�s nose at each afternoon�s question time. In addition to international study tours, ad hoc trips, visits around Australia, I reckon � just spitballing here � Brown will have traveled a total of about oh say 1 million kilometres by the time his Senate term expires in 2008.

That�s roughly a trip to the moon and back. I know this because I worked it out scientifically by typing into Google �distance to the moon�, which seems to be where Brown gets most of his ideas � both from Google and the Moon, with no offence to the great search engine � but that is another matter. Who knows, perhaps before 2008, technology will allow Brown to transmit his hologram image into the Senate chamber for question time instead of polluting the planet in order to save it.

What does all this mean for the value of the Nanook family home? How much greenhouse gas will Carr emit into the stratosphere and how much will he contribute to global warming? I�m not sure, but the answer, if there is one � that is, if the problem exists and it is as serious as Carr and other doomsayers claim it is � is a lot more than most of us.

Of course Carr could offset his gaseous ways by turning his 3.8 hectare spread into a greenhouse gas sink by, for instance, burning biomass, such as manure, for heat. This is known in eco-industry industry parlance, as Integrated Manure Utilization System (IMUS). I prefer to call it the Sewerage Heating Integrated Treatment System (you can work out the acronym).

But alas, according to a report late last year in the Sydney Morning Herald, �Carr, is sitting on a dirty secret: Australia's sheep and cattle fart too much. So much, in fact, that farmers might have to swap their animals for vegetables to comply with greenhouse emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol.� Apparently, New Zealand � where it is said sheep outnumber people by more than ten to one � has the same problem. And the huge brown haze covering parts of Asia is partly attributed to dung burning. So Carr will have to grow carrots or celery or at least something that does not produce flatulence.

I don�t want to be mean-spirited. What with the summer heat, the drought, and raging bushfires, the hardworking member for Maroubra deserves a wee respite in a cooler clime � especially after a tough day performing in the Macquarie Street bear pit. But lets face it, things could get a little warm if the entire globe were to take to the skies just to get to their weekend love shack. That is, of course, if there was enough land to accommodate villas for the masses.

Which appears to be the reason Carr has bought in New Zealand: he�s locked up huge swaths of NSW in a massive National Parks land grab for Green voting preferences while preaching consolidation for urban folk. Indeed, as more and more Kiwis seek refuge in Australia from the economic policies of Helen Clark�s Labor Government, New Zealand offers Aussies with cash and travel miles plenty of nearby offshore Lebensraum.

So much glib caviling, you say? Okay, so I�m having a little fun. But Carr�s personal travel habits would appear to run counter to the entire �philosophy� of the Kyoto Protocol, which he prattles on about whenever he is given the chance. That is, the haves should curb their emissions while the have-nots be allowed to proceed unhindered in despoiling the atmosphere. Which is to say, Kyoto isn�t really about the environment at all.

More like green tinted socialism than a plan to stop weapons of weather mass destruction. If the predictions of global catastrophe are so correct, why is it three-quarters of the globe should be allowed to make the problem worse? Maybe Carr � not from the socialist wing of the ALP � really sees the truth of the matter, rationalizing his jet-setting lifestyle.

Who knows, the next time Greens preferences-minded pollies and their greenocratic flying circus jet off to some far away land to discuss the hot Earth, they might even consider including their own aviation-produced emissions, which are presently � and conveniently for them it would seem � exempted from the Kyoto Protocol.

But maybe we are missing something here. We�re not seeing the big picture � the forest for the tree-huggers, if you know what I mean. To get back to the beginning of all of this � the European heat wave: if the stories emanating out of Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London are true, it appears that global warming presents Australia with a competitive advantage, for the simple reason that Europeans can�t take the heat. When the going gets hot, Aussies get on with it, while European trade competitors become indolent crossdressers.

It has been alleged that the Europeans intend to use Kyoto as a trade weapon against non-Kyoto member countries such as Australia and the US. If this is true, I say let�s use global warming to wilt the Europeans into a better post-Kyoto deal. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, himself a Kyoto advocate, said recently in his address to the US Congress that is was time to look beyond Kyoto. Here, here.

So for the time being at least, we should not be too hard on flyboy Carr and his airborne pollie ilk, even if they are wielding weapons of mass destruction. If they are WMD, we could adopt the blackmailing tactics of North Korea: �we won�t stop our WMD program until we get the environmental and trade agreements we want.� Carr�s intrepid indulgences could therefore be seen to be serving the national interest, turning up the heat, so to speak, on those European wuses to come up with a more sensible solution to their own discomfort.

I did want to include a comment from the premier about all of this before putting this column in the can. But as it turns out, Carr had apparently jetted off to the US for a study tour during parliament�s winter recess.