Cobourg Skeptic – Climate Change and Resources

Australia has been out in front trying to get legislation passed to control Climate change.  Why Australia?  And why do the majority of Australians support this effort?  John Stanley of Sydney radio station 2UE discusses this point and says that research by the CSIRO (Government operated – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) is one reason.

But while discussing this point, he also concedes that a “majority” (but not all) of scientists say there will be climate change and more importantly,  Australia’s contribution will be miniscule.  But because they would be heavily affected, Australians should care more.  And Australia is more dependent on weather than most western countries.  Not only are the big farm exports (wool and wheat) heavily dependent on enough rain, but the big cities rely for their water supply on rainfall captured in reservoirs.  And a drought over the last 7 years has caught the popular attention.  The idea that they can “do something” is very attractive.  It’s a pity they are wrong on that one – fortunately the same reasons for popular attention has also caused Australian scientists to look closer and get their message out.  One good example is Ian Plimer.

It’s not often that one blog recommends another – but you have to look at the site by Joanne Nova, an Australian science writer and skeptic.  She is on the spot on Australia which is in the forefront of AGW skepticism.  In association with the HeartLand Institute in Chicago, she published a 16 page booklet called “The Skeptics Handbook” (download here). It is a great summary of all the arguments why any Global Warming is not man caused and does it in a way that is very entertaining and straightforward.

In fact it’s suitable to be sent to schools. So that’s exactly what Joanne and the Heartland Institute did – they sent it to 16,000 US School principals. Of course many of them see it as junk mail – if you get mail that puts forward an idea you don’t agree with (think Political mail from the “other” party), then it’s junk, right?  However, it puts the counter evidence at least as strongly as Al Gore’s film and hopefully many Principals are true professionals and will at least read it.  If you need a single, easy to read document to give to an alarmist, then this is what you need.  If this does not make a difference – then they believe with a religous fervour that has no connection to rational thinking.

According to news coming out of Australia, the Labour Government’s cap-and-trade legislation (Emission Trading Scheme (ETS))  is about to be defeated in the Senate.  In addition, the public attitude there is starting to accept that the science for Global warming is dubious.

On April 29, The Australian newspaper described the general trend – and its leading cause:

There is rising recognition that introduction of a carbon tax under the guise of “cap and trade” will be personally costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming seems to have taken a holiday….

The public is receptive to an exposé of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language.

Part of this revised understanding comes from information generated by local scientists such as Ian Plimer.  He has written a  book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, which has been received with such enthusiasm that it is now into its fifth print run (more on this earlier post ) ,  Paul Sheehan, a leading global warming ‘hysteric’ for the Sydney Morning Herald, describes Plimer as “one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists,” and his book as “brilliantly argued” and “the product of 40 years’ research and breadth of scholarship.”

Sheehan wrote in his review:

Much of what we have read about climate change, [Plimer] argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive.”…

The Earth’s climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth’s climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.

To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable-human-induced CO2-is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly.

Sheehan concludes:

“Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” This cannot be interpreted as anything but a capitulation. It cedes to the global warming rejectionists the high ground of being “evidence-based,” and it accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists.

The casting vote in the Senate is held by Senator Fielding who went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. He collected some information and then emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment.  But now, Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

Telling an Australian [like the operator of Cobourg Skeptic]  that you’re not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….

As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.

What Fielding’s questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo’s tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.

And that’s what makes Plimer so influential-not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: “The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history”-Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed-”yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma.”

Plimer is not a “skeptic,” a term which would imply that he merely has a few doubts about the global warming claims. Instead, he rejects the whole myth outright, and this seems to have emboldened and liberated a great many Australians who were already chafing under global warming conformity. As Plimer puts it:

There are a large number of punters who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in public opinion against the global warming dogma can happen on one side of the earth, it can happen on the other-especially when the US edition of Plimer’s book, scheduled for July 1, hits the stands.

His role, Plimer says, is to show “that the emperor has no clothes.” After three decades of relentless global warming propaganda, it’s about time.

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Parts of this post from an article by Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin

In Australia, Senator Steve Fielding has the deciding vote on the leftist Labour Government’s plan to impose billions of dollars of taxes on all sources of emissions.  With the opposition Liberals refusing to back the scheme this year, the Government needs not just the votes of the Greens but of the two senators representing minority parties including Fielding. Because of proportional voting, the Australian upper house (the Senate) is composed of a mix of parties and so the governing party needs to lobby them just like is done in the U.S.  Looks like he has the attention of Australia – and certainly the Government.

But Steve no longer accepts that the world is warming from carbon dioxide emissions and is homing in on one fact that has been repeatedly mentioned on this blog:

While man-made emissions and atmospheric CO2  are increasing each year, satellite measurements show the world’s temperatures have not risen above the 1998 record, and have fallen since 2002.

Andrew Bolt of the Australian Herald Sun Newspaper has “asked both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong – to their faces – to explain why the world isn’t still warming as it should if their global warming theories are right”.

And Bolt says “Neither has given me an answer. Nor have they answered similar challenges from the few sceptics in Parliament who have dared to reveal themselves – notably the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce and the Liberals’ Dennis Jensen.”

Fielding is an engineer [like me - Ed] and is now insisting he be shown the proof that the world is even still warming, and the Government must at last justify its plan’s most basic assumption.

According to Bolt, he put this very question to Joseph Aldy, President Barack Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, and is yet to get the answer he’s been promised.

Further, Fielding confesses: “Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions.”  Doesn’t he read blogs like this? There are thousands of scientists saying the same thing.  But we know the answer, once on a roll, politicians take a lot to stop.

And commenting on the treatment Fielding has received from the Australian Media,  Bolt says: “This is more like a religious war, with heretics to be burned, not reasoned with.”

Another journalist (Dennis T. Avery) , quotes Fielding as saying: “500 years ago the whole world “knew” the sun revolved around the Earth. Galileo dared challenge the prevailing dogma anyway – and was put under house arrest for the rest of his life.”

Australia is a country where lack of water has always been the major environmental concern much like cold and ice is the concern in Canada.  Australia has large areas of desert much like Canada has large areas of tundra.  So it is natural that when all the scare talk of global warming became popular in the 1980-90’s, that Australians jumped on the bandwagon.  It was not reassuring when record breaking droughts arrived in 2007-2008.  But now, Australians are becoming skeptical.  Maybe the science isn’t proved and maybe it’s not caused by man but is a natural cycle.  And maybe being a “believer” in “global warming” fulfills a need and becomes a “religion for the politically correct”!

Two books are available in Australia that make this point:

1. HEAVEN AND EARTH Global Warming: The Missing Science by Ian Plimer
2. THE CLIMATE CAPER by Garth W Paltridge

Ian Plimer’s book is summarized by:

The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2  is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times.

The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected.

A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.

When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up.

Garth W Paltridge’s is due to be published in July and has this summary:

So you think the theory of disastrous climate change has been proved! You believe that scientists are united in their efforts to force the nations of the world to reduce their carbon emissions! You imagine perhaps that scientists are far too professional to overstate their case!

Maybe we should all think again. In his book The Climate Caper, with a light touch and nicely readable manner, Professor Paltridge shows that the case for action against climate change is not nearly so certain as is presented to politicians and the public. He leads us through the massive uncertainties which are inherently part of the ‘climate modelling process’; he examines the even greater uncertainties associated with economic forecasts of climatic doom; and he discusses in detail the conscious and sub-conscious forces operating to ensure that scepticism within the scientific community is kept from the public eye.

It seems that governments are indeed becoming captive to a scientific and technological elite – an elite which is achieving its ends by manipulating fear of climate change into the world’s greatest example of a religion for the politically correct.

The publisher’s web site is here.