After attending the Heartland-3 climate conference in Washington in early June this year, Steve returned to Australia and asked Climate Minister Penny Wong three simple questions about climate change. The Minister replied, first in a meeting at which her Chief Scientist (Penny Sackett) and departmental science adviser (Will Steffen) presented a briefing paper, and secondly in writing. Senator Fielding then asked his advisory scientists – Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kinimonth – to perform an audit of the Minister’s replies to his questions.

Copies of Senator Fielding’s original questions, Minister Wong’s written reply, and other papers relevant to the matter are available for download from: http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/the-wong-fielding-meeting-on-global-warming-documents/

Senator Fielding’s summary of the results of his discussions with Minister Wong can be found here: http://www.stevefielding.com.au/climate_change/.

The Due Diligence Paper has now been released publicly by Senator Fielding’s office (July 3, 2009):  http://jennifermarohasy.com/data/7%20%20Carter-Evans-Franks-Kininmonth%20Due%20Diligence%20on%20Wong-Z%20.pdf

It shows, first, that the Minister and her Department have largely been unable to answer the questions that they were asked. And, second, that the Australian Department of Climate Change has little capacity to assess the science of global warming in an expert, knowledgeable and independent way.

We believe that this is the first time recently that a member of a western parliament has released a public document that makes an independent science assessment of the danger of human-caused global warming (as promulgated by the IPCC), thereby demonstrating (i) the lack of empirical evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are damaging to the environment, and (ii) that ETS are unnecessary.

However, though raising the issue in parliamentary context may be new, our general conclusions are most certainly not, for many other qualified scientists have reached them too; for example, the two independent assessments that have been provided recently by Craig Idso and Fred Singer (NIPCC), and Alan Carlin (EPA): http://cei.org/news-release/2009/06/25/cei-releases-global-warming-study-censored-epa  and http://www.nipccreport.org/

Given the large costs and the industrial and social disruption that established ETS are already causing – for example in Europe, and which will be added to greatly should similar bills pass parliament in Canada, Australia, N.Z., USA and elsewhere – we ask for your help in giving our Due Diligence document wide promulgation.

Kind regards,

Bob Carter, Townsville, Australia 

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Notes and Links

http://jennifermarohasy.com/data/7%20%20Carter-Evans-Franks-Kininmonth%20Due%20Diligence%20on%20Wong-Z%20.pdf

Fielding heard leading atmospheric physicist Dick Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describe evidence that the warming effect of carbon dioxide was much overestimated by computer climate models and remark: “What we see, then, is that the very foundation of the issue of global warming is wrong.

“In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming-climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own quite removed from science.”

Another scientist, astrophysicist Willie Soon, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, commented: “A magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist.” Think about that for a moment with respect to our government’s climate policy.

On his return to Canberra Fielding asked Climate Change Minister Penny Wong to answer three simple questions about the relationship between human carbon dioxide emissions and alleged dangerous global warming.

Fielding was seeking evidence, as opposed to unvalidated computer model projections, that human carbon dioxide emissions are driving dangerous global warming, to help him, and the public, assess whether cutting emissions would be a cost-effective environmental measure.

After all, the cost to Australian taxpayers of the planned emissions trading bill is about $4000 a family a year for a carbon dioxide tax of $30 a tonne. The estimated benefit of such a large tax increase is that it may perhaps prevent an unmeasurable one-ten-thousandth of a degree of global warming from occurring. Next year? No, by 2100.

The questions posed were:

* Is it the case that CO2 increased by 5percent since 1998 while global temperature cooled during the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase, and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?

* Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th-century phase of global warming) were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history? If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO2 emissions and, in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?

* Is it the case that all computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990 to 2008, whereas in fact there were only eight years of warming followed by 10years of stasis and cooling? If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy-making?

As independent scientists attending the meeting, we found the minister’s advisers unable, indeed in some part unwilling, to answer the questions.

We were told that the first question needed rephrasing because it did not take account of the global thermal balance and the fact much of the heat that drives the climate system is lodged in the ocean.

Que? What is it about “carbon dioxide has increased and temperature has decreased” that the minister’s science advisers don’t understand?

The second question was dismissed with the comment that climatic events that occurred in the distant geological past were not relevant to policy concerned with contemporary climate change. Try telling that to geologist Ian Plimer.

And regarding the accuracy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s computer models, we were assured that better models were in the pipeline. So the minister’s advisers apparently concede that the models that have guided preparation of the emissions trading scheme legislation are inadequate.

These are not adequate responses.

It was reported in the Business Age last July that the ministry of climate change’s green paper on climate change, which was issued as a prelude to carbon dioxide taxation legislation, contained scientific errors and over-simplifications. Almost 12 months on, our experience confirms that the scientific advice Wong is receiving is inadequate to justify the exorbitantly costly upheaval of our society’s energy usage that will be driven by the government’s ETS legislation.

All Australians owe Fielding a vote of thanks for having had the political courage to ask in parliament where the climate empress’s clothes have gone. Together with the senator, and the public, we await with interest any further answers to his questions that Wong’s advisers may yet provide.

Bob Carter (also David Evans, Stewart Franks, Bill Kininmonth see below)
Townsville, Australia

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Other authors of this opinion piece include: Carbon modeller David Evans, hydrologist-climatologist Stewart Franks and meteorologist-climatologist Bill Kininmonth.  The four attended the meeting between Steve Fielding, Penny Wong, Chief Scientist Penny Sackett and ANU Climate Change Institute executive director Will Steffen. Chief Scientist Sackett has so far declined to publically responde to Senator Fielding’s questions.  

Republished from The Australian, ‘Wong’s silent treatment clouds emissions credibility’
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25656849-5013480,00.html

The above figure was one of several provided to Senator Wong, with the above questions. 

The figure shows the rate of temperature change for the last 48 000 years in °C/century, based on the analysis of oxygen isotope ratios from the GISP2 ice core in Greenland (after a slide by Andre Illarianov, 2004). Note that during the last 9,000 years of the Holocene, temperature change occurred regularly at rates between +2.5° and -2.5°C/century. Earlier, during the last glaciation, rates of change as high as 15°C/century are indicated.

The rate of temperature rise has therefore many times in the past been higher than it was in the 20th century. The rate of temperature change, both in Greenland and globally, during the late 20th Century Warming was between 1 and 2 deg. C/century. Thus recent, modern rates of warming fall well within the natural rates of change of the last 10,000 years.

In proper context, there is nothing unusual about the rate of late 20th century warming.

Click on the image for a better/larger view.

My main advice to the committee was that making a decision regarding an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) must be considered as a cost:benefit matter.

According to the only estimates that I could find, after ramp-up the cost of the Rudd ETS scheme is going to be about an additional $3,500 tax per year per Australian family. On the other side, the benefit will be a theoretical (i.e. modelled) reduction in temperature of less than 1/1000 deg. C.

I asked the committee if they had such figures in front of them (they didn’t), and expressed willingness to drop my estimates in favour of better-founded ones if the committee could provide them. Not a finger, or tongue, stirred!

Beyond recommending that a proper cost:benefit analysis should apply, I argued also for the implementation of a (Plan B) policy of adaptation to climate change in place of the intended (Plan A) emissions trading system. This follows the policy that I espoused in a recent talk at the New York Heartland-2 Climate Conference, a written version of which has been published in the April edition of Quadrant.

It seems to me that an adaptive Plan B, as well as being hugely cheaper than the tabled carbon dioxide taxation bill that the Senate Committee is now considering, will have the additional advantage of actually doing some good. However, this will be of much lesser importance for the politicians who are now involved, for their self-perceived need is for  a pragmatic solution to what has become a tortuous political problem, quite irrespective of either the cost or of whether any implemented policy actually achieves beneficial ends beyond their own re-election.

I was appearing before the Committee as an expert scientist. Together with my companion Dr. Stewart Franks, I was received most courteously, and accorded every opportunity to explain my views. Looking back at the experience, however, what strikes me most strongly is the irrelevance of the scientific matters that Dr. Franks and I were primarily concerned with.

For it was quite plain that three matters, none of them scientific, were primarily exercising all members of the committee. They were:

1. BEWILDERMENT about being faced by two implacably opposing views from two groups of scientists who, prima facie, seem equally professionally credible, yet are each certain that their view is the right and the other’s wrong.

(Not equally authoritative, of course, for the authority lies overwhelmingly on the IPCC side of the argument).

2. INCREDULITY as to the possibility of a scam of the magnitude that is implied by the sceptics’ view being true. How could so many other official authorities, organisations and highly credentialled scientists be so wrong?

(As I said last week, you do have to admire the job that the Greens have done: since 1990 they’ve slowly and systematically stitched up the education system (schools down to kindergarten level and up to university), business, government bureaucracies (via the IPCC) and politicians alike, and the press were always there with them knitting furiously from the start, egged on by a multitude of self-interested scientists in funding feeding frenzy.)

3. A DEEP NEED to deal with the implacable reality that the members of the Committee perceive that the majority of their constituents believe that there is an AGW crisis, and therefore, to be re-elected, that they have to be seen to do something about it.

(I believe that in most cases this perception is now actually wrong, as indicated by a new poll yesterday that shows that only 1 in 3 Americans now believe AGW to be a significant problem.

Whereas it is true that up until about 2 years ago the public was convinced of the need for action, all the signs have long been that a majority of the public have now rumbled the scam –  though not, of course, those who control the opinion polls and the media, where the alarmism still gets its routine daily push-alongs .)

I stress again, that none of these three matters is scientific. Rather they are entirely sociological/political in nature, from which I draw the key inference that the members of ETS investigatory committees like this one mostly need help with fashioning politically feasible solutions to the incredible mess that they now find themselves in – which, of course, results from both major Australian political parties having long pandered to deep Green ideologies in pursuit of votes.

It is certain that the enactment of the tabled CPRS emissions scheme would be a disaster for Australia, and nearly all Australians (those working for alternative energy providers and the financial markets being two obvious exceptions, for they will do very nicely thank you should the CPRS Bill be passed); indeed, I believe its passage would do immense damage to the national interest and economy, and represent the worst single piece of legislation to be passed by federal parliament since federation.

But stopping the tabled ETS Bill now, and preventing a new but substantially similar Bill being tabled again in the near future, can only be achieved by providing solutions for the various political negatives that current parliamentarians perceive will accompany any defeat or deferring of the Bill. The question of climate change legislation is now a fraught, entirely political exercise, and I believe that it demands new thinking towards an innovative Plan B.

As I wrote in Quadrant:

“A national climate policy that improves our ability to recognise, manage and adapt to natural climate change and events, as could be met by the creation of a HazNet organisation, is an urgent necessity, and would cost but a fraction of the mooted ETS. To boot, contingent damage to the economy, energy systems, the standard of living and the world food supply would be avoided. And, by their very nature, strategies that can cope with the dangers and vagaries of natural climate change will readily cope with human-caused change too, should that ever manifest itself. Why is it so difficult for Australia’s major political parties to discern this obvious truth?”

Bob Carter, Townsville, Australia

POSTSCRIPT

Interestingly, for the first time that I can recall, ABC Radio National reported some of the details of the Senate Committee session to which Dr. Franks and I delivered previously ABC-unmentionable sceptical views. They picked up the point that I made about cost, but not the other half of the equation that shows a miniscule and literally unmeasurable temperature benefit.

And they also reported Dr. Franks’ view that:

“the public, the global public in many senses and certainly in the Western world has been railroaded into this notion of disastrous climate change for which there is no empirical event and that actually there are very real consequences to many climate policies that are being forwarded. And we have seen this recently in the case of the increase in biofuels, the use of good, productive agricultural land in producing biofuels for the decadent West which has been estimated its lead to a 50 to 70 per cent increase in food prices over the last year or two and that has killed people, not here in Australia. And so our climate policy here is here in the West are already killing people and climate change has never been shown to have killed a single person”.

However, ABC being the ABC, they simply couldn’t resist the temptation to add the derogatory ad hominem comment from Dr. David Karoly that “neither Professor Carter nor Franks is recognised as a reputable climate scientist”. Thank you, again, David.

Quite what the ABC expects to achieve, except immunity from being sued themselves, by reporting such gratuitous nonsense is unclear.

Equally interestingly, the TV cameras arrived as Dr. Franks and I were leaving the Senate Committee Room, just in time to film the following group of alarmist scientists who, duly, featured on the evening news! Similarly disgraceful press bias was also apparent in the next day’s Canberra Times, which contained detailed coverage of the alarmist scientists’ view and nary a mention of Stewart or me.

And, determined, continuing TV and radio bias notwithstanding, the last few days have brought an astonishing change in the tone and content of the climate change material being reported in the written press, stimulated by both the Senate Committee hearings and by the release of Ian Plimer’s new book.

Those who are interested in assessing a possible renaissance of the critical ability of Australian newspapers, and perhaps even parts of ABC Radio, may care to browse through the following URLs (listed in no particular order):

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25348908-16382,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25348644-7583,00.html
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/beware-the-climate-of-conformity-20090412-a3ya.html?page=-1
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2543811.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2545650.htm
http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/fielding-urges-delay-on-emissions-trading/1457012.aspx
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2545653.htm
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25348271-11949,00.html
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/planet-doomsayers-need-a-cold-shower-20090417-aa4s.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25356865-16382,00.html

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Notes and Links

Details of the nature of the Committee can be found at its website: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/climate_ctte/index.htm

For Bob Carter’s publications visit:  http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm

To register your opposition to the ETS visit: http://www.listentous.org.au/

Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change.

Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?

There are two fundamentally different ways in which computers can be used to project climate. The first is used by the modelling groups that provide climate projections to the IPCC. These groups deploy general circulation models, which use complex partial differential equations to describe the ocean-atmosphere climate system mathematically. When fed with appropriate initial data, these models can calculate possible future climate states. The models presume (wrongly) that we have a complete understanding of the climate system.

GCMs are subject to the well-known computer phenomenon of GIGO, which translates as “garbage in, God’s-truth out”.

Alternative computer projections of climate can be constructed using data on past climate change, by identifying mathematical (often rhythmic) patterns within them and projecting these patterns into the future. Such models are statistical and empirical, and make no presumptions about complete understanding; instead, they seek to recognise and project into the future the climate patterns that exist in real world data.

In 2001, Russian geologist Sergey Kotov used the mathematics of chaos to analyse the atmospheric temperature record of the past 4000 years from a Greenland ice core. Based on the pattern he recognised in the data, Kotov extrapolated cooling from 2000 to about 2030, followed by warming to the end of the century and 300 years of cooling thereafter.

In 2003, Russian scientists Klyashtorin and Lyubushin analysed the global surface thermometer temperature record from 1860 to 2000, and identified a recurring 60-year cycle. This probably relates to the Pacific decadal oscillation, which can be caricatured as a large scale El Nino/La Nina climatic oscillation. The late 20thcentury warming represents the most recent warm half-cycle of the PDO, and it projects forwards as cooling of one-tenth of a degree or more to 2030.

In 2004, US scientist Craig Loehle used simple periodic models to analyse climate records over the past 1000 years of sea-surface temperature from a Caribbean marine core and cave air temperature from a South African stalactite. Without using data for the 20th century, six of his seven models showed a warming trend similar to that in the instrumental record over the past 150 years; and projecting forward the best fit model foreshadows cooling of between 0.7 and 1 degree Celsius during the next 20-40 years. In 2007, the 60-year climate cycle was identified again, by Chinese scientists Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian, who used a novel multi-variate analysis of the 1881-2002 temperature records for China. They showed that temperature variation in China leads parallel variation in global temperature by five-10 years, and has been falling since 2001. They conclude “we see clearly that global and northern hemisphere temperature will drop on century scale in the next 20 years”.

Most recently, Italian scientist Adriano Mazzarella demonstrated statistical links between solar magnetic activity, the length of the Earth day (LOD), and northern hemisphere wind and ocean temperature patterns. He too confirmed the existence of a 60-year climate cycle, and described various correlations (some negative). Based on these correlations, Mazzarella concludes that provided “the observed past correlation between LOD and sea-surface temperature continues in the future, the identified 60-year cycle provides a possible decline in sea-surface temperature starting from 2005, and the recent data seem to support such a result”.

Thus, using several fundamentally different mathematical techniques and many different data sets, seven scientists all forecast that climatic cooling will occur during the first decades of the 21st century. Temperature records confirm that cooling is under way, the length and intensity of which remains unknown.

Yet in spite of this, governments across the world – egged on by irrational, deep Green lobbying – have for years been using their financial muscle and other powers of persuasion to introduce carbon dioxide taxation systems. For example, the federal Labor government recently spent $13.9million on climate change advertising on prime time television and in national newspapers and magazines.

Similarly, the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research advised the British Government “ultimately, positive climate behaviours need to be approached in the same way as marketeers approach acts of buying and consuming … It amounts to treating climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is, we believe, the route to mass behaviour change.”

Introduction of a carbon dioxide tax to prevent (imaginary) warming, euphemistically disguised as an emissions trading scheme, is a politician’s, ticket clipper’s and mafia chief’s dream. All will welcome a new source of income based on an invisible, colourless, odourless, tasteless and often unmeasurable gas. No commodity changes hands during its trading, and should carbon dioxide emissions actually decrease because of the existence of a carbon dioxide market (which is highly unlikely), the odds are that it will have no measurable effect on climate anyway. Nonetheless, the glistening pot of gold which beckons to be mined from the innocent public is proving nigh irresistible, and it is going to need a strong taxpayer revolt to stop it in Australia.

The present global financial crisis should be inducing politicians not to squander money on non-solutions to non-problems. Yet to support their plans for emissions taxation Western governments, including ours, are still propagating scientifically juvenile greenhouse propaganda underpinned only by circumstantial evidence and GCM computer gamesmanship.

Perhaps a reassessment will finally occur when two-metre thick ice develops again on Father Thames at London Bridge, or when cooling causes massive crop failure in the world’s granary belts.

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Bob Carter is an adjunct professor of geology at James Cook University and studies ancient climate change.  His many publications are listed at his home page here.   This article was first published in the The Australian  and is republished with permission from Prof Carter.   The photograph of Prof Carter was taken in Brisbane in October 2008 by Jennifer Marohasy.

First, global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate or magnitude.

Second, humans have an effect on local climate but, despite the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($70 billion) looking for it since 1990, no globally summed human effect has ever been measured. Therefore, any human signal must lie buried in the variability of the natural climate system.

Third, we live on a dynamic planet; change occurs in Earth’s geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans all the time and all over the world. No substantive evidence exists that modern rates of global environmental change (ice volume; sea level) lie outside historic natural bounds.

Last, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, be it in Australia or worldwide, will likely result in no measurable change in future climate, because extra increments of atmospheric CO2 cause diminishing warming for each unit of increase; at most, a few tenths of a degree of extra warming would result from a completion of doubling of CO2 since pre-industrial times.

These facts notwithstanding, the [Australian] Rudd Government is poised to introduce a CO2 taxation bill on doubly spurious grounds. It presumes, first, that dangerous warming caused by human emissions is occurring, or will shortly occur. And, second, that cuts to emissions will prevent significant amounts of future warming.

There is, therefore, now a dramatic disjunction between scientific reality and the stranglehold that global warming alarmism has on planned Australian climate policy.

Today’s public views about climate change are based upon 20 years of promulgation of dangerous global warming by what has become a hugely powerful coalition of self-interested groups and agencies.

Beneficiaries of warming alarmism include individual scientists, managers of research centres, morally pretentious environmental non-government organisations, prestigious science academies and societies, bureaucrats from government greenhouse and climate agencies, big businesses poised for carbon trading (think Enron and Lehman Brothers), alternative energy providers, those in the media who remorselessly promulgate environmental alarm stories, and, last but not least, those uninformed politicians who seek political advantage from cynical exploitation of the public’s fear of global warming.

The Australian Government does not possess a national climate policy; instead, it has an imaginary global warming policy, based on sub-prime science, sub-prime economics and sub-prime politics.

In dealing with the certainties and uncertainties of real climate change, the key issues are prudent risk assessment and adaptive response. As is the case for other unpredictable and unpreventable natural planetary hazards, policy to deal with climate change should be based on adaptation to change as it happens, including the appropriate mitigation of undesirable socioeconomic and environmental effects.

We therefore need, first, to monitor climate change accurately in an ongoing way; and, second, to respond and adapt to any changes — including long-term warmings, the likely more damaging coolings, and severe weather or climatic events such as cyclones — in the same way that government and voluntary disaster services now deal with hazardous natural events such as bushfires, droughts and floods.

The main certainty is that natural climate change and variation are going to continue, and that some manifestations — droughts, storms and sea-level change, for example — will be expensive to adapt to.
Adaptation will not be aided by imprudent restructuring of Australia’s energy economy in pursuit of the chimera of “stopping” an alleged dangerous human-caused global warming that can neither be demonstrated nor measured. In reality, too, our lack of understanding of all the climatic feedback loops is such that cutting CO2 emissions is as likely to “harm” as to “help” future climate.

New Zealand already has a national monitoring and response system in place for earthquake, volcanic and flood disasters (GeoNet). This is linked, appropriately, to a parallel compensation and insurance system that recompenses victims of natural disaster (the Earthquake Commission).

Even if generous funding were to be provided in Australia towards a similar preparation for climatic disasters (of which drought and flood relief are part), the net cost would still be orders of magnitude less than will be engendered by a fundamentally misconceived emissions trading scheme. To boot, contingent damage to the economy, the standard of living and the world food supply would be avoided.

Attempting to “stop global warming” by limiting CO2 emissions is simply an arcadian fantasy, since making deep cuts to Australia’s emissions would at best help to avert or delay warming by about a miniscule one-thousandth of a degree.

Australia needs a national climate policy that is rooted in sound science, sensible precaution, prudent risk assessment, and efficient and effective disaster relief. Lacking all such elements, the Australian Government’s global warming policy fails the basic test of duty to care for the citizenry.

Bob Carter is an adjunct research fellow at James Cook University, Townsville, and studies ancient climate change.

Republished from today’s The Australian with permission from Professor Carter.

Photograph of Professor Carter taken by Jennifer Marohasy in Brisbane in October 2008.