Original Article: High price for load of hot air | The Courier-Mail
Robert Carter makes the case in the above article that the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming is completely overblown both in its effect and in its realistic level of consequences. Here are a few excerpts with some additional thoughts and perspective.
On the same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a US radio interview that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with“.
NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: “We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well.
“I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change.”
Such a clear statement that science accomplishment should carry primacy over policy advice is both welcome and overdue.
I tend to agree. It is somewhat ironic, however, that Michael Griffin expresses the thought that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with” while James Hansen of GISS is one of the most visible and the most vocal of the Anthropogenic Global Warming proponents. NASA seems a bit schizophrenic on the issue as an organization.
Nonetheless, there is something worrying about one of Griffin’s other statements, which said that “I have no doubt . . . that a trend of global warming exists”.
Griffin seems to be referring to human-caused global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence.
The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.
Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.
So, to summarize Carter’s position, if we adjust the temperature record to account for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions the Earth’s observed warming is minimal despite significant increases in CO2, and given the effects likely to take place from a solar output perspective the next few decades are likely to experience a net cooling.
In fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.
In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations.
As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.
Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.
This is an important point and one that is frequently overlooked. In today’s world we see politicians running around and making outrageous claims with respect to Climate Change based almost entirely on the advice of the IPCC which is at its heart a political, as opposed to a scientific, organization. The reports issued by the IPCC are predominantly written by the politicians first in the form of a summary, and the actual scientific papers are then scrubbed to insure that they do not contradict the political positions. By blindly accepting the positions of the IPCC on Climate Change the world’s nations are effectively delegating their political responsibilities to the bureaucrats of other countries. This is a very dangerous thing to do as most of the other nations in the world have much to gain and very little to loose as part of this exercise.
It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.
Not only do humans not dominate Earth’s current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.
In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.
Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.
The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.
Professor Bob Carter is an environmental scientist at James Cook University who studies ancient climate change.
And here we see that there is an irony that we will be spending $US Billions, or more, to reduce greenhouse emissions in an effort to combat Global Warming inspite of the facts that (a) we are unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on the outcome, and (b) that outcome is likely to be cooling in the next few decades anyway based on the Solar Output trends.
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