CARBON POLLUTION REDUCTION SCHEME DEBATE
Dr JENSEN (Tangney) (12:50 PM) —The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
Bill 2009 [No. 2] has problems on so many levels that I hardly know
where to begin. The chain that has led to this would be viewed as
implausible in a work of fiction: how a theory of humans causing
climate change could end up in a push for significant worldwide
economic sacrifices at the altar of the god of climate change. The
church that has been set up is the IPCC, with a clear statement of
religious belief that humans are causing global warming in their very
mission statement.
Mr Hartsuyker —Kev wants to be the Pope.
Dr JENSEN —We are now on track to introduce significant damage to our
economy based on a complete turnaround in the onus of proof. The
situation is that we are now looking at imposing a significant impost
on the Australian people, based on an unproven proposition, and stating
that the only way in which that cost will not be imposed is to prove
that human beings are not responsible for climate change, as opposed to
a proposition that people should not be slugged with costs without
proof. Let us have a look at some of the financial aspects and
imperatives associated with this extreme tax system that is being
tagged with the Orwellian label of ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme’.
We hear arguments from the alarmist side that big oil is paying
enormous amounts on climate change denial science, and that is why you
have sceptics with anthropogenic global warming. Nothing could be
further from the truth. And there is a huge industry built around the
belief in anthropogenic climate change. Big oil has averaged paying $2
million per annum for research on this issue over the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, the US government alone has averaged $3 billion to $4
billion per annum over the last 20 years and in total has spent $79
billion, with $7 billion spent this year. Yes, there is a huge
imbalance favouring the sceptics. Do you think that is a lot? According
to the World Bank, the banks traded $120 billion in carbon dioxide last
year alone. This is subprime carbon, and a lot of money is to be made
by the same people who brought you the global financial crisis.
For the government there is the significant issue of pecuniary
interest. There is a significant amount of money that the government
will receive—in Australia’s case $50 billion has been identified. The
government clearly sees a combination of royalties from north-west gas
fields and carbon taxes as being the solution to the massive debt it
has saddled the nation with. In the US, Obama expects $645 billion over
10 years. That is a huge amount of money. Additionally, a huge industry
has built up inside the Beltway in Washington DC. There are 2,300
climate lobbyists in Washington DC, or more than four lobbyists per
congressman or woman.
So there are very definite financial
reasons that this government is pushing for it. The unfortunate reality
is that it will cost Australian families thousands of dollars per year
to achieve absolutely nothing, even if you believe in the consensus
position. I have frequently asked how much the CPRS will reduce global
temperatures. As yet, funnily enough, no-one can tell me. This is a lot
of money being paid for nothing.
Let us have a look at the
science of some of this. Before we do, I want to clarify some issues
about peer review. Peer review does not mean that the science and the
results are correct; it merely means that the method used was
scientifically sustainable. Journals will not publish all papers
accepted by peer review. Indeed, there is editorial pressure, as the
goal is to sell journals. Additionally, there is a predisposition in
science that the review process for an accepted paradigm is less
rigorous than when a paper goes against the prevailing wisdom. I will
give you two fairly recent examples.
The first is the cold fusion
issue of the late 1980s. Fleischmann and Pons, two physical chemists,
published a paper which stated that they had discovered cold fusion.
There was a flurry of activity in the journals, with papers repeating
the results. The problem was that there was no neutron flux, as would
be expected with fusion, but this was not picked up by the reviewers.
The second is the Paul Chu and yttrium-barium-calcium-copper oxide, or
so-called 123 superconductors. The discovery of this was a huge jump in
superconducting critical temperature. Chu was aware of the nature of
the breakthrough and was concerned that one of the reviewers of his
paper might try to pre-empt him, slow down his own review process and
get a paper published himself, so Chu substituted ytterbium for
yttrium, which resulted in a material that was not a superconductor.
Despite this, the paper passed review. Chu substituted the correct
element just prior to publication.
We are told that the globe is
burning—to quote the member from Midnight Oil. We are told that sea
levels are rising dangerously. We are told that ocean temperatures are
warming dangerously. We are told that we are in danger of inundation
due to melting icecaps. We are told that the only way to explain the
observed climate is with anthropogenic factors included. The globe may
have been burning in a metaphoric sense in 1998, but that is certainly
not the case now. Using all four data repositories used by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, it is clear that
temperature trends are negative for this century. They are going down.
This is certainly not what the IPCC models projected. They projected
increasing temperatures for this century, even for the case where
carbon dioxide is held constant at year 2000 levels. These inaccurate
model projections use the same models that are used to explain the
temperature rise between 1975 and 1998 and state that it has been due
to anthropogenic causes.
Let us make sure we are on the same
page. The models have been unable to predict, even to explain, the
temperature reduction of this century, but these selfsame models,
demonstrated to be inaccurate in terms of their robustness in
prediction, are used to state that the science is settled—that human
beings are unequivocally to blame for the 23-year warming trend in the
late 20th century. I note that the IPCC is now covering its bases by
saying that it expects reductions in temperature for the next 10 to 20
years. Guess what? The heating will then come on even stronger than
before. This is not science but religious belief.
The alarmist
scientists are also remarkably shy about sharing their data. The head
of the Hadley Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, said in a request for
data from Steve McIntyre: ‘We have 25 years or so invested in the work.
Why should we make the data available to you when your aim is to find
something wrong with it?’ This is staggering. The whole point of
science is to attempt to find something wrong with it. It is called
falsification. It has now been found that the Hadley Climatic Research
Unit has lost a lot of raw data following the request, but we are
supposed to trust that the adjusted data is correct. I guess the next
time the tax office asks for receipts I should just say: ‘I don’t have
the original receipts. Just trust that my statements on earnings and
outgoings are correct.’
There has also been the hockey stick
controversy. On a hockey stick graph, global temperatures were
supposedly remarkably stable until industrialised society hit the
scene. This not only was used extensively in the IPCC’s third
assessment report but had been through peer reviewed literature, so
theoretically it had been through peer review twice. However, with the
IPCC, the reality was that Michael Mann reviewed his own work, so he
was hardly an unbiased observer. It was found that bad statistical
methods had been used and that in most cases using this technique with
random data would result in a hockey stick shaped graph as well. It has
taken years for McIntyre to get the original raw data, and it is now
apparent that this was worse than bad science; it was fraudulent
science. It turns out that Michael Mann had cherry-picked the data.
This is someone who is still a lead author with the IPCC. So, contrary
to popular propaganda, the globe is not burning and indeed has not been
heating this century.
‘Ah,’ the alarmists now say, and: ‘It is
really the oceans that hold the key. The oceans are the things that
give the state of the planet in heat terms.’ The problem is that the
oceans have not been warming since at least 2003, according to Argo
buoy data. In case there is any doubt here, there is more data
available from between 2003 and now as a result of Argo buoys than
there is for all the rest of recorded history of ocean temperatures put
together. What does the data show? According to the Argo steering team,
there has been no change in temperature over that time. Lyman and
Willis et al—no climate change sceptics, it must be added—found a
decreasing trend, albeit that statistically speaking it could be stated
that there was no trend. Certainly they found no increasing trend.
Loehle, in Energy and Environment, another peer review journal, found a
decreasing trend since 2003. So there has been atmospheric cooling this
century and at best there has been no warming of the ocean since the
Argo buoys entered business.
We have heard of the fears of
inundation due to rapidly accelerating sea level rise. Professor Will
Steffen, Minister Penny Wong’s personal guru on climate change, in a
briefing to some parliamentarians suggested that the work of Domingues
and Church et al in Nature last year should be used for sea level rise.
Problematically, the analysis ends just where the sea level rise
stops—that is, in 2005. There have been accelerations and there has
been a lack of rise in the sea level over a long period of time, but
there has been an underlying upward trend since the end of the last ice
age. In effect, what has been observed is a recovery from the Younger
Dryas ice age.
What about melting polar icecaps? In a global
sense, the area of sea ice today is pretty much the same as it was in
1980. We have all heard about the melting Arctic ice, and it is true
that the area of sea ice in the Arctic has decreased somewhat in the
last 30 years—although there has been some recovery in the last couple
of years. However, how many of you are aware that the Antarctic is
cooling and that the area of sea ice in the Antarctic has been
increasing for those 30 years? As a little clincher, the theory as
accepted by the IPCC is that there should be a hot spot in the upper
troposphere, about 10 kilometres up in the tropics. This is a
fingerprint for well-mixed greenhouse gases causing warming. To date,
despite a lot of looking, no such a hot spot has been found.
So,
all in all, there has been a failure of the premise that human beings
are heating the planet. We are basing everything on a 20-year period of
warming in the late 20th century. The models—the entire ensemble of
models used by the IPCC—comprehensively did not predict the cooling
that has been observed this century. We see no heating of the oceans
since 2003. We see no sea level rise since 2005. We see a relatively
stable global sea ice area. Yet we are supposed to bet significant
damage to the economy on this failure of predictive capacity of the
models. What a joke. Precautionary principle? How about we apply a
precautionary principle based on there having to be a clear threat
before we spend money on this? How about science comes up with
modelling that actually predicts various aspects of global climate,
rather than simply saying that models that are able to hindcast
previous climates have been validated? There is all of this, yet we
know from evidence taken from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology
that we do not even know what causes El Nino events, which are one of
the major drivers of global climate.
We are supposed to trust
forecasts of global temperature going—get this—1,000 years into the
future, from the IPCC Fourth assessment report. This is not science;
this is guys and girls having too much fun playing computer games. We
are supposed to bet our economy on science that at present is unable to
make long-range predictions; we are supposed to believe that they can
confidently predict global temperature 1,000 years hence. We are
supposed to trust economists like Stern and Garnaut with economic
projections 100 years into the future, yet in both cases they were
unable to predict the GFC a mere couple of years prior to the event.
Here we are talking prophets of the grand religion, not serious science
and economics. In order to get a good handle on these issues, I believe
that we need to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the science of
climate change, where those on both sides of the argument have to give
evidence under oath. What is the bet the Rudd government lacks the
intestinal fortitude to accept the challenge?
Another reason for
my concern is that embarking on setting a price on carbon dioxide is
effectively putting a tax on everything and will give the control
freaks a level of control over all human enterprise within a nation not
seen in democratic history. Indeed, we have observed antidemocratic
comments from many so-called environmentalists, calling for the
overthrow of democracy and/or capitalism to save the planet. I stated
this in an opening address to the Australian Environment Foundation
over a week ago, and it turns out that I understated the danger.
Have a look at the draft Copenhagen convention. It looks to, according
to section 36 on page 18, the setting up of a government and
transferring wealth from First World to Third World countries, and,
according to clause 33, page 39:
By 2020 the scale of financial
flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least
USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70-140 billion] per year.
The third point is the issue of this new government being able to enforce these provisions, including:
… the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries.
There is also an attack on market based economics. Page 18, section 36 of the document reads:
It should include a financial mechanism and a facilitative mechanism
drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public
policies, as the prevailing instrument—
and take note of this—
to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate,
in order to assure the full, effective and sustained implementation of
the Convention.
So we should subordinate our national sovereignty
and our entire system of free enterprise so that Kevin Rudd and the
Labor Party can go cap in hand—as opposed to cap and trade—to sell out
the birthright of every Australian! Throughout our history people have
gone to war and died for our sovereignty and way of life. The Rudd
government simply wants to hand it over. This is absolutely scandalous
and I for one will not be a party to it. Kevin Rudd may want to strut
the world stage, but he is so enamoured with the idea that he is
willing to burn our economy and sacrifice our sovereignty and free
enterprise way of life. I find that reprehensible, but I guess that has
always been a Labor dream.
On the science, in my view the IPCC
needs to be dissolved. If it is felt that it is necessary to have a
global organisation examining climate change, the mission statement
needs to change so that human caused climate change is not a given.
Climate change needs to be studied without preconceived outcomes
relating to human causes. The peer review process needs to be genuine,
rather than having comparatively few authors able to simply ignore
reviewers’ advice or comments. In that regard, the IPCC has no genuine
peer review process, not until such time as a reviewer’s comments
cannot simply be ignored, given the predisposition of some authors.
That process leads to the institutionalised groupthink that is endemic
in the IPCC.
Finally, the process needs to be driven genuinely by
scientists in multiple disciplines with differing viewpoints, and the
bureaucrats need to stay out of the system in its entirety. The fact
that the summary for policymakers of the last assessment report came
out months prior to the scientific document and the scientific document
had to be scrutinised for potential inconsistencies against the summary
for policymakers—meaning that the scientific document would be modified
to accord with a bureaucrat’s summary for policymakers—should be
anathema to any scientist. Also of concern is the view that everyone,
including scientists, should be singing from the same hymn book. The
fact is that the scientist who is not sceptical—in other words, who is
a true believer—is the scientist of concern. I seek leave to table some
documents.
Leave granted.
Documents
Dr Jensen, by leave, presented the following documents:
Climate change—
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—Text from the
informal meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative
Action under the Convention held in Bonn, Germany, on 10 to 14 August
2009, 15 September 2009.
Articles on Ocean temperature [5].
Sea ice graphs [3].
Truth, lies and environmental policy: Clearing the hot air on climate—Federal Member for Tangney, Dennis Jensen.
Sea level graphs [2].
Debate resumed.