More from Mr Moore.......;) Dear All, Some readers of The Age might possibly be waiting with baited breath for Abbott’s forthcoming meeting with Obama to reveal “damaging” differences on emission reduction policies and for Obama to insist on climate change being on the agenda for November’s G20 meeting in Australia. While it is difficult to stop such a discussion at any such meeting, Saturday’s Age ran a front page scary article entitled “US ties at risk over Climate” and drew on a World Wildlife Fund publication suggesting emissions reduction targets of certain countries to be lower than Australia’s. But the article seriously misrepresented policies actually operating or likely to become operative to reduce emissions. For a start, it mistakenly reported that the Obama administration will cut carbon dioxide emissions from US power plants by 30% below 2005 levels by 2020 (it is actually by 2030). Also, despite another article in the same Saturday’s Age reporting that China has no cap on emissions, the front pager omitted China (now the biggest emitter) and several other major countries with no emissions reduction targets. Indeed, no mention was made of the fact that lower income countries are now (collectively) the biggest emitters and are highly unlikely to accept any international agreement to a substantive reduction in the use of fossil fuels as principal sources of energy because they recognise that this would reduce their economic growth. Nor was there any reference to the continued failure of official average global temperatures to rise over the past seventeen years, or to the recent detailed and extensive report by the Heartland Institute in the US, compiled by many expert scientists (including Australian, Professor Bob Carter), identifying serious problems with the analyses and predictions in IPCC reports, notably the failure to take adequate account of changes in temperatures which are primarily due to natural influences (see the summary of the NIPCC report hereunder). ******************************* Summary of NIPCC’s Findings, December, 2013. • Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases. • Doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial level, in the absence of other forcings and feedbacks, would likely cause a warming of ~0.3 to 1.1°C, almost 50% of which must already have occurred. • A few tenths of a degree of additional warming, should it occur, would not represent a climate crisis. ***(Something that even Blind Freddie and Dumb Dora would know!)*** • Model outputs published in successive IPCC reports since 1990 project a doubling of CO2 could cause warming of up to 6°C by 2100. Instead, global warming ceased around the end of the twentieth century and was followed (since 1997) by 16 years of stable temperature. • Over recent geological time, Earth’s temperature has fluctuated naturally between about +4°C and -6°C with respect to twentieth century temperature. A warming of 2°C above today, should it occur, falls within the bounds of natural variability. • Though a future warming of 2°C would cause geographically varied ecological responses, no evidence exists that those changes would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being. • At the current level of ~400 ppm we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric levels 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects. • The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities. • Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8% increase in atmospheric CO2, which represents 34% of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution. • CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population. • No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation. • The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multi-decadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years. • Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions. Source: “Executive Summary,” Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science (Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2013). ***************************** New research by physicist, Dr Tom Quirk, adds serious questions about the IPCC analysis. He shows, for example, that the existing maximum and minimum method of calculating averages produces a systematic upward bias, probably as much as 0.3 to 0.4 of a celsius degree; and analysis of published Bureau of Meteorology data on temperatures suggests another upward bias arising from failing to take account of the urban heat island effect from heat retained by buildings. These and other analytical failures by the IPCC and its believers suggest a substantial proportion of the total published temperature increase of around 0.8 of a degree over the last century is due to incorrect data calculations or natural causes. Even so, Obama’s revival of the dangerous warming threat, and his indication that serious attempts may be made to obtain an international agreement for reducing emissions, suggest that the climate change debate is now likely to be more active. For Australia, parts of which have experienced unusually warm May weather (attributed to the development of a high pressure system over the Tasman sea), and which could experience a warm Winter due to natural causes from the development of an El Nino, any increase in temperatures will almost certainly produce Age-like misrepresentations that suggest dangerous global warming is back. However, despite the pathetic attempts by believers to suggest Australia is not doing enough to reduce emissions, estimates of our governments’ expenditure on emissions reductions run to about $15 billion a year, ***(all of which is completely and utterly wasted!)*** including through subsidies to use expensive renewable energy sources. Given the very considerable uncertainties about the effect of emissions on temperatures, there is a strong case for reducing such spending and, in the process, helping reduce the budget deficit. ***(100% correct!)*** Recipients of this message may recall that I was the Principal Petitioner to a petition lodged in Parliament by Dr Dennis Jensen MP, seeking an inquiry by the government on the costs and benefits of policies aimed at reducing emissions. Case Smit was a partner in this exercise. On the 28th of May, I received from the Standing Committee on Petitions, a copy of a letter to Dr Jensen by the Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt. Minister Hunt’s response was largely to say that the government’s policy is to reduce emissions by 5% by 2020 through its Direct Action Plan. He thanked Jensen for bringing the petition to his attention. Relevant here is that Hunt had already sent a letter to Senator-elect Bob Day advising him that a White Paper on the Emissions Reduction Fund had been published and that “the Australian Government accepts the science of climate change and supports national and global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. With assistance from me, Bob Day has now sent a reply to Hunt outlining reasons why the government should not accept the science (See other post). This provides a useful summary of why Australia should reduce expenditure on emissions reductions and not agree to participate in an international meeting seeking an agreement on such reductions. Day’s letter to Hunt has been sent to Abbott. Might we hope he will pass a copy to Obama? - Des Moore.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 13:49:29 +0000
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