The Andrew Bolt Report”>The Andrew Bolt Report
Bob Carter (left) appears with Andrew Bolt (right)
The Gillard Government is adopting as it’s climate policy “a unique line of advice from the IPCC” that is relentlessly repeated but not contested, Professor Bob Carter said today.
“The important thing is that this sort of policy advice be contested,” he told The Bolt Report on Channel Ten.
“The hypothesis of the day that the public is being encouraged to be alarmed about is that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions cause dangerous global warming.
“That’s a testable idea. And the test is: you look at a period of the temperature record and you look at a period of the carbon dioxide emissions. So, step back 10 years to 2001. Since then there’s been a five per cent increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that’s 25 per cent, almost a quarter of all the carbon dioxide we’ve put in the atmosphere since 1751. And what’s happened to global temperature? It’s gone down slightly by a bit less than 0.05 deg. C. As a scientific hypothesis, that’s the test; and the hypothesis fails the test.”
Prof. Carter said the report delivered this week by the Gillard Government’s Climate Commission was not a new report.
“It’s ‘bubble and squeak’. It’s reheated IPCC material from many previous reports,” he said.
Professor Bob Carter is an adjunct Research Fellow at James Cook University (Queensland). He is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than 40 years professional experience. He is the author of Climate: the counter consensus.
Program presenter Andrew Bolt said the station had invited climate commissioners Tim Flannery and Professor Will Steffen, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet and Prime Minister Julia Gillard to come on to the show to defend the report but all had refused.
Commenting on the reluctance of climate change alarmists to debate the science, Prof. Carter said, “There have been one or two public debates in New York and London and what happens whenever they’ve made the slip of agreeing to a public debate is they lose.”
by Don Boudreaux in Cafehayek on May 24, 2011
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Bill McKibben blames deadly recent weather events on climate change. And he snarkily dismisses as naive the argument that humankind can adapt well to such change.
Let’s look at data from the National Weather Service on annual fatalities in the U.S. caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes from 1940 through 2009. Naturally, these data show that the number of such fatalities varies from year to year. For example, in 1972 the number of persons killed by these weather events was 703 while in 1988 the number was 72. On average, however, the trend is clear and encouraging: the number of such fatalities, especially since 1980, is declining.
The average annual number of such fatalities over this entire 70-year span is 248. In each of the four decades prior to 1980, the average annual number of fatalities was higher than 248; in particular:
1940-49: 272
1950-59: 308
1960-69: 282
1970-79: 296
The average annual number of such fatalities over the full 40 years 1940-1979 was 290.
But in each of the three decades starting in 1980, the average annual number of fatalities caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes was lower than 248; in particular:
1980-89: 173
1990-99: 171
2000-09: 238
The average annual number of such fatalities over the full 30 years 1980-2009 was 194. (This number falls to 160 - just over half of the 1940-79 number of 290 - if we exclude the deaths attributed to hurricane Katrina, the great majority of which were caused by a levee that breached a day after the storm passed.)
This decline in the absolute number of deaths caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes is even more impressive considering that U.S. population more than doubled over these 70 years, from 132 million in 1940 to 308 million today.
Seems that McKibben’s apocalyptic prognostications about humanity’s future are as fact-based as are those of the Rev. Harold Camping.
Enlarged.
From Goklany. Global Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events, 1900-2008. Source: Goklany (2009), based on EM-DAT (2009), McEvedy and Jones (1978), and WRI (2009).
See also this post Putting humanity in a Kangaroo Court. You may not have noticed, but last week you were a co-defendant in a court case. In Stockholm, the Third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability met at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The event website proclaimed that ‘humanity [sic] will be on trial as the Third Nobel Laureate Symposium brings together almost 20 Nobel Laureates, a number of leading policy makers and some of the world’s most renowned thinkers and experts on global sustainability.’
The charge against us, humanity, was that ‘our vast imprint on the planet’s environment has shifted the Earth into a new geological period labelled the “Anthropocene” - the Age of Man’. But this was a showtrial. The guilty verdict had been written before the court had even assembled. ‘The prosecution will therefore maintain that humanity must work towards global stewardship around the planet’s intrinsic boundaries, a scientifically defined space within which we can continue to develop’, claimed Professor Will Steffen, showtrial ‘prosecutor’and executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University. The website and literature accompanying the symposium made no mention of the defence’s argument. Indeed, why would a Symposium on Global Sustainability invite a defence that challenged the premises it intended to promote?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Contacts:
Christopher Horner, chris.horner@atinstitute.org
Paul Chesser, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org
MANASSAS, Va. - On Tuesday, more than four months after the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center requested emails and other files from a specifically identified University of Virginia back-up computer, the University was hauled into court and made to stand and agree to comply with the Commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Under Virginia’s FOIA, ATI and co-petitioner Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Manassas) asked UVA to disgorge the emails and files that Virginia’s Attorney General also sought under other authority. The emails are specific communications sent and received by Dr, Michael Mann during his tenure at UVA in which he corresponded with, or discussed other, leading voices that represent the climate alarmist perspective. Seminal among them include discussions about his now infamous and discredited 1,000-year temperature reconstruction known as the “hockey stick.” There also already appears - from records ATI has received - to be additional information of the kind released in the “Climategate” emails that originated at the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.
Under FOIA the University was required to produce the documents within five days of its receipt of payment for “accessing, duplicating, supplying or searching” for the documents. Alternatively they could have entered into an agreement with ATI on when they would supply the documents, or they could have gone to court to ask for more time. They did none of the above. Instead they promised to provide some of the documents “shortly” on April 6; then specifically on May 6, 2011; and always stated they would get to the others later on. They did none of this either, so ATI went to court to compel production and compliance with the law.
ATI finally received the first approximately 20 percent of the 9,000 pages of documents that UVA says are responsive to ATI’s request and that it possesses, only after ATI filed itspetition
The failure of UVA to honor its own commitments or to follow the law forced ATI to petition the court ( http://tinyurl.com/3blfohb ) for relief. ATI filed its petition on May 16th, and the Court heard the matter Tuesday.
It took a petition to force UVA to agree to produce the documents that by statute they should already have produced. The day before the court hearing, UVA finally agreed to a date when they must produce all the documents they believe are not protected from disclosure. The court entered an order (PDF) that forces UVA to honor that agreement and to produce the documents in easy-to-read electronic form so that ATI can make them available to all who wish to review the work of this highly controversial former Virginia employee. They must produce those documents by August 22nd.
In addition ATI has won the right to look at all the documents beginning no later than September 21, including those the University refuses to make public. The court issued a protective order that allows ATI’s attorneys, David Schnare and Christopher Horner, to see them all so that they can challenge any further UVA refusals to supply what the public paid for. The records constitute a history of the “hockey stick” and the activities of Michael Mann, who also during the relevant time served on, e.g., the UN’s IPCC, all of which have been the subject of intense scrutiny.
“By the end of this year, ATI and UVA will obtain judicial review of the University’s obligation to fulfill the public’s right to know how taxpayer-funded employees use the taxpayer’s resources,” said Mr. Horner, director of litigation at ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “The court will determine whether this can be hidden behind the ivy covered walls of our public colleges and universities under a non-existent FOIA exemption of ‘academic freedom,’ which Virginia’s legislature has never recognized.”
ATI also put a final issue before the court. Under the Virginia FOIA, UVA is not allowed to impose fees on ATI to recoup the general costs of creating or maintaining records, or of transacting the general business of the University. The University has already admitted that it must obey several laws in fulfillment of its duty to protect some of its records, such as medical files and student information. This is part of the business of the University, just as any governmental body must protect its sensitive records. UVA, however, demanded that ATI pay $8,500 to offset UVA’s costs of doing precisely this regular business, which must be performed when releasing any information, under any authority. ATI argued, and existing case law indicates, this is simply not allowed. The University disagreed, and the court will issue its opinion on that matter on June 15th. ICECAP NOTE: This despite the UVA administration spending $500,000 on legal fees to try and block adherence to FOIA from ATI even after they obliged Greenpeace with Pat Michaels files without challenge or cost.
“ATI pursues important public issues,” said Dr. Schnare, director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “This case is about whether the government can put up a pay wall to frustrate the public’s right to transparency. If it can, the public can’t hold government employees to the high standards of conduct they should meet.”
See Prince William County (Va.) Court’s Order to Produce Documents in ATI Environmental Law Center’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Production-Order.pdf ).
See Prince William County (Va.) Court’s Order on Protection of Documents in ATI Environmental Law Center’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Protective-Order.pdf ).
For an interview with American Tradition Institute senior director of litigation Christopher Horner, email chris.horner@atinstitute.org or call (202)670-2680.