This is text of the speech (edited for online publication) delivered by professor Bob Carter at the “Convoy of No Confidence” protest in Canberra on August 22, 2011.
Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen.
First, my warm congratulations to every person here for coming to this gathering today. Most of you have paid your own expenses, and simply by being here you are therefore displaying great public generosity on behalf of all your fellow citizens. For, though some remain unaware of it, every single Australian man, woman and child will be hurt should a carbon dioxide tax come into being - and that hurt will be greater for the less well off, and will be imposed for no environmental benefit whatever.
Second, the organizers of this event have made it crystal clear it is a gathering at which ANY Australian, of any shape, size, colour or political inclination, can express his or her opposition to a carbon dioxide tax.
However, a meeting on the lawn of parliament house has inescapable political implications. My perspective is that of an experienced scientist - one who has spent a professional lifetime studying ancient environmental and climatic change. I therefore have nothing to say, and neither should I have anything to say, about the politics of the carbon dioxide tax. Rather, my role today is to share with you a summary of the science that should be, but actually isn’t, illuminating policy making on climate change.
Agreed Facts
Let us start with the three key facts on which nearly all scientists agree:
A gentle warming of up to about 0.5 deg. C occurred between 1979 and 1998; but since 1998 global temperature has now been static or cooling gently for ten years, despite continuing increases in CO2 emissions;
The late 20th century warming of half a degree, and the current pause or cooling, fall well within the bounds of previous natural temperature change; they are therefore not necessarily alarming, nor necessarily of human causation.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, i.e., putting extra into the atmosphere will cause some warming. The scientific argument, then - which is fierce and on which absolutely no consensus exists - is almost entirely about how much warming might be caused by “extra” human carbon dioxide emissions.
Amongst qualified scientists there are no “climate change deniers”, as the press so likes to badge those who do not agree with the warming hysteria. In reality, the great majority of independent scientists are agnostic rather than sceptical about the hypothesis of human-caused warming - it is the likely magnitude of human-caused warming, not the existence of a warming tendency in the first place, that is under debate.
Depending upon the feedbacks that are allowed for (water vapour, clouds etc.), answers to the question “How much warming will occur for a doubling of carbon dioxide?” range from “unmeasurably small” to “6 deg. of warming”. Factual evidence, including both the known history of climate, and recent new papers on atmospheric physics, favours an inconsequential warming of a few tenths of a degree for a doubling of carbon dioxide. It is only the speculative computer models of the UN that project a perhaps more troubling 3 deg. or more of warming for a doubling.
Three other questions of importance that have indeterminate answers
How much of the warming of the 20th century (~0.8 deg.) was natural and how much human-caused?
No accurate answer is known, but almost certainly more than half the warming was natural, i.e. only a few tenths of a degree might have had human causation.
Will the 20th century warming resume or not?
Again, no-one knows for sure. Currently the planet is cooling, and we have a quiet sun - which indicates that more cooling is likely.
Would more warming, if it occurs, be beneficial or harmful?
Both, depending upon geography, but overall the net benefits may well exceed the harm. For it is no accident that text-books call a warmer period that occurred about 8,000 years ago the “Holocene climatic OPTIMUM”.
Not much “settled science” there, then!
The two key policy questions
Against this background of both certain and uncertain science, there are two key policy questions that need to be asked, and together they comprise a cost-benefit analysis. Such an analysis is simple in principle; and it does not require complex Treasury or CSIRO computer models to calculate.
The intended carbon dioxide tax is based upon two assumptions. First, that the dangerous global warming hypothesis is true; and, second, that cutting human emissions will result in significantly less warming in the future.
Let’s see, then:
What is the cost?
At the intended rate of $23/tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, >$100 billion of extra costs will be imposed by 2020, and these costs will be passed down to every citizen of Australia at a rate of about $500/person (or $2,000/family of four) per year.
What is the benefit?
If (and it’s a very big if) implementing the new tax actually does result in a cut of 5% in Australian emissions, which is the government’s target, then the theoretical amount of global warming averted would be much less than one-thousandth of a degree; even cutting Australia’s emissions altogether would avert warming of only 0.02 deg. C (two one-hundredths of a degree).
So the question is “How many people here today are prepared to pay extra costs of $500/person/year in return for a notional warming averted of less than one-thousandth of a degree?”
Public dishonesty
I now wish to move on to the issue of public dishonesty.
In this regard, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave us the “Carbon pollution reduction scheme”; and the ghost of George Orwell surely stirred. Prime Minister Gillard is now giving us a “Clean Energy” bill; well, last week, this further dishonesty stimulated George Orwell to get out of his grave and to walk the 368 km from Albury to Canberra (8 days), to appear in resurrected form at last Tuesday’s rally in the guise of truck driver Mr Troy ("Grover") Logan.
Regarding the dishonest communication that compelled Mr Logan to action, we must surely all agree that the language of the government spinmeisters lately has been compelling:
“Carbon” they say, deliberately invoking images of soot ---- when they mean “carbon dioxide” (a clean, environmentally beneficial gas).
“Pollution” they say ….. when carbon dioxide is the elixir of life, and the base of most of the food chains on our planet.
“Clean energy” they say …… when wind and solar power are hopelessly uneconomic, and wind farms are both environmentally damaging and also (as we saw in a recent Four Corners program) a source of acute social division in formerly close-knit country communities.
“We need to catch up with the rest of the world” they say ….. when only Europe and NZ have any form of carbon dioxide price; USA, Canada, Japan and others are running fast away from imposing one; and China and India will never, ever embrace one.
“New green jobs will be created” they say ….. failing to explain that every new green job costs of the order of $0.5 million to create, and is accompanied by the destruction of 2-3 jobs in conventional industry.
Why this utterly dishonest language and marketing? Why propagandize what is essentially a scientific issue? Why expensive, tax-payer-funded advertising instead of honest communication?
The answer, of course, is that the result of the cost:benefit analysis we have just undertaken is, literally, ridiculous, for it shows that a carbon dioxide tax will yield no benefits whatsoever.
The government’s communication of its global warming policy therefore has to centre on untruth, spin, propaganda and advertising, for there are no real benefits to market. Note too that environmental improvement has nothing to do with the carbon dioxide tax …. except as a cynical marketing hook towards a desired new source of revenue for the federal exchequer.
The way forward: adaptation to all climate change
Ladies and Gentleman, it is important that I end on a constructive note, for once the carbon dioxide tax is defeated or repealed - as it undoubtedly will be - we have to find a better way forward.
We have a baby (which represents dangerous climate change); and we have some very dirty bathwater (which is carbon dioxide taxation). It is vital that in throwing out the smelly bath water we do not at the same time discard the baby. Why so?
Well, the reason is that as Australians we live on what is probably the world’s most dangerous continent for climate-related hazard. Active volcanoes have we none, and compared to New Zealand and Japan our earthquakes are relatively rare and only of moderate magnitude. But when it comes to droughts, floods, cyclones and bushfires - well, as they say, we punch above our weight there, and Australia’s hazards are truly of world class, even textbook, stature.
But do we then follow world-best-practice in the way in which we deal with our dangerous, natural, climate-related hazards?
Well … I suggest that you ask that question of the relatives of the 173 persons who lost their lives in the 2009 Victorian bushfires; or perhaps ask the thousands of persons living near Cardwell and Innisfail, whose homes or livelihoods were damaged during Cyclones Larry and Yasi; or ask the tens of thousands of Brisbanites whose homes were submerged earlier this year during the February floods.
Perhaps ask these persons: “Do you feel you are well protected against Australia’s climate hazards by the government’s plan to tax CO2 emissions?” You and I know full well what their answer will be.
A government has a sovereign duty of care to its citizens to protect them against natural hazard. And the reason that recent Australian state and federal governments have done so poorly in this regard recently is because they have taken their eyes off the ball of natural climate-related hazard, in order to chase the passing political meteorite of hysterical alarm about speculative, human-caused global warming.
For a fraction of the money already squandered on the Kyoto Protocol, and on ineffectual, doomed-to-failure anti-carbon dioxide measures, Australia could already have - but does not have - a world-leading climate hazard response and adaptation system.
The way forward, then, is to fund and manage our relevant research and hazard agencies to better prepare for, and adapt to, all climate-related hazards as and when they occur - and that quite irrespective of the presumed causation of particular events.
To date, and despite all the public hysteria, no scientist has been able to isolate and measure the theoretical warming effect of human carbon dioxide emissions on global temperature. Yet the question was a good one to have first asked back in the 1990s, and it remains possible that some time in the future a measurable human-caused climatic trend might emerge.
In proper prudent fashion, therefore, a policy of preparation and adaptation to the known range of natural climate hazard is also an effective precautionary policy against any human-caused hazard that might, or might not, emerge in the future.
Conclusions
So my final two conclusions, ladies and gentleman, are these. First, we do indeed need to “Axe the Tax”. But, thereafter, we also need to “Adapt to the Fact”. And which fact might that be, you ask? The fact, of course, that natural climate-related events and trends are particularly hazardous in Australia, and that a better national policy is clearly needed to deal with our climate hazards by using strategies of careful preparation and intelligent adaptation.
We, the people, demand of the government and opposition alike that they implement cost-effective policies of adaptation to all climate-related events and change. We, the people, have spoken, and we will be heard.
Canberra, August 22, 2011
Professor Bob Carter is an Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs (Melbourne), Chief Scientific Advisor, International Climate Science Coalition (Toronto), Advisory Council Member, Global Warming Policy Foundation (London), Science Advisor, Science & Public Policy Institute (Washington). He is also the author of Climate: the Counter Consensus (Stacey International, 2010).
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That
From the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
The red line in this image shows the long-term increase in global sea level since satellite altimeters began measuring it in the early 1990s. Since then, sea level has risen by a little more than an inch each decade, or about 3 millimeters per year. While most years have recorded a rise in global sea level, the recent drop of nearly a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter, is attributable to the switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific. The insets show sea level changes in the Pacific Ocean caused by the recent El Nino and La Nina (see for more information on these images). Image credit: S. Nerem, University of Colorado
NASA Satellites Detect Pothole on Road to Higher Seas
An Update from NASA’s Sea Level Sentinels:
Like mercury in a thermometer, ocean waters expand as they warm. This, along with melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drives sea levels higher over the long term. For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world’s ocean in response to global warming.
While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this time, every once in a while, sea level rise hits a speed bump. This past year, it’s been more like a pothole: between last summer and this one, global sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter.
So what’s up with the down seas, and what does it mean? Climate scientist Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., says you can blame it on the cycle of El Nino and La Nina in the Pacific.
Willis said that while 2010 began with a sizable El Nino, by year’s end, it was replaced by one of the strongest La Ninas in recent memory. This sudden shift in the Pacific changed rainfall patterns all across the globe, bringing massive floods to places like Australia and the Amazon basin, and drought to the southern United States.
Data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft provide a clear picture of how this extra rain piled onto the continents in the early parts of 2011. “By detecting where water is on the continents, Grace shows us how water moves around the planet,” says Steve Nerem, a sea level scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
So where does all that extra water in Brazil and Australia come from? You guessed it - the ocean. Each year, huge amounts of water are evaporated from the ocean. While most of it falls right back into the ocean as rain, some of it falls over land. “This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,” says Carmen Boening, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. Boening and colleagues presented these results recently at the annual Grace Science Team Meeting in Austin, Texas.
But for those who might argue that these data show us entering a long-term period of decline in global sea level, Willis cautions that sea level drops such as this one cannot last, and over the long-run, the trend remains solidly up. Water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again.
“We’re heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise,” says Willis. “But El Nino and La Nina always take us on a rainfall rollercoaster, and in years like this they give us sea-level whiplash.”
For more information on NASA’s sea level monitoring satellites, visit: http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/ , http://sealevel.colorado.edu , http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ and http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
h/t to WUWT reader “Pete”
==========================================
[UPDATE by willis]
I trust that Anthony won’t mind if I expand a bit on this question. NASA adduces the following map (Figure 2) showing where they claim the water went.
Figure 2. GRACE satellite changes in land water. Note that for all of the screaming about Greenland melting… it gained ice over the period of the year. In any case, red and blue areas are somewhere near equal, as would be more apparent if they didn’t use a Mercator projection that exaggerates the blue area in the Northern hemisphere.
The sea level was going up at about 3 mm per year. In the last year it fell about 6 mm. So that’s a change of about a centimetre of water that NASA says has fallen on land and been absorbed rather than returned to the ocean. But of course, the land is much smaller than the ocean...so for the ocean to change by a centimetre, the land has to change about 2.3 cm.
To do that, the above map would have to average a medium blue well up the scale… and it’s obvious from the map that there’s no way that’s happening. So I hate to say this, but their explanation doesn’t...hold water…
I suspected I’d find this when I looked, because in the original press release the authors just said:
“This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,” says Carmen Boening.
When people make claims like that, with no numbers attached, my Urban Legend Detector™ goes off like crazy...and in this case, it was right.
Best to all, thanks to Anthony.
w.
By Christopher C. Horner, Washington ExaminerBy Christopher C. Horner, Washington Examiner
Former University of Virginia Professor Michael Mann.The University of Virginia has joined a list of institutions claiming that there has been an actual inquiry into, and even ‘exoneration’ of, scientists exposed by the November 2009 “ClimateGate” leak, while simultaneously through its actions making a mockery of the idea.
UVa’s August 23 release under court order of 3,800 pages of emails - records that UVa previously denied existed - was its second since the American Tradition Institute (ATI) sought judicial assistance in bringing the school into compliance with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA).
The school has spent approximately $500,000 to date keeping these records from the taxpayer, who paid for their production to begin with.
The university again labored to avoid releasing correspondence directly addressing the now discredited “Hockey Stick” graph produced while former assistant research professor Michael Mann worked there.
At least 126 of those emails were sent to or from Mann at UVa and were central to ClimateGate, which exposed a purported, now disavowed temperature record, as well as the Hockey Stick and related activities by scientists to keep dissenting work from publication. The emails showed scientists circling the wagons to protect their claims, funding and careers.
Each of these 126 UVa ClimateGate emails, as with other related Mann correspondence with third parties of which we are aware, is covered by our VFOI request. Not one of them made it into UVa’s releases.
UVa acknowledges withholding between 3,500 and 4,000 more pages. This likely represents around ten times the original number of UVa emails revealed in “ClimateGate.”
Even before ATI was able to review these emails, Mann described the release to Science Magazine, indicating a collaborative effort with the university in what amounts to hiding from the taxpayer efforts to derail exposure of the “Hockey Stick.”
We certainly appreciate that he is worried. But no argument exists that these records belong to Mann. Further, the VFOIA protects the taxpayers’ interests and, secondarily, the university’s. Not former faculty whose actions, once revealed, created a dense cloud of suspicion over their work.
These records are inarguably the property of the University of Virginia and therefore, barring a legitimate exemption under VFOI, the Virginia taxpayer.
A useful example of complying with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act is George Mason University’s prompt release to the media of correspondence from Professor Edward Wegman.
In one of life’s coincidences, these involved Wegman’s work exposing the dubious methods involved in creating the “Hockey Stick.”
ClimateGate emails sent or received by Mann’s UVa email address include certain now-notorious, often nasty missives, many highly questionable from a legal or ethics perspective and most reflecting wagon-circling by alarmists discussing how to defeat substantive challenge and even requests for transparency involving an already published paper.
It is reasonable to surmise that these are among the 9,000 pages UVa finally identified as responsive to ATI. If so, each of them is being withheld on the remarkable claim that they are “Data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty ... in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues.” Really.
Excerpts of apparently scholarly research of commercial intent and value presumably include the ClimateGate gems “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”, and one gleefully noting the death of a skeptic who had dared correspond with them.
This is the sort of Top Secret “proprietary” emails UVa will risk fortune, reputation and sanction to keep from producing. A UVa official informed us on no less than three occasions that the school was, in effect, ignoring the law’s mandate to interpret exemptions narrowly.
Clearly he wasn’t kidding. But will the court will find this funny?
The university’s legal argument remains hazy but, if it is indeed grounded in the such correspondence being somehow “proprietary,” this latest act in UVa’s deeply troubling history on this matter threatens to permanently tar a name built over many years, if by the achievements of others who surely weep in their graves over the ongoing spectacle.
This is a school that prides itself on its honor code. Yet instead of acting forthrightly like its fellow ward of the taxpayer, George Mason University, UVa exacerbates the scandal and the increasingly warranted public distrust of Big Science, particularly “climate” science, an edifice built upon hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually and dedicated to keeping that gravy train rolling.
Why does this matter, outside of basic principles embedded in the law such as the taxpayers’ right to know how their resources are being used, particularly when so much question exists about certain, well-funded activities?
Consider the UK High Court opinion about—per the judge—the global warming movement’s “alarmist” claims, as featured in the film “An Inconvenient Truth:”
“[Claimant attorney] has established his case that the views in the film are political by submitting that Mr. Gore promotes an apocalyptic vision, which would be used to influence a vast array of political policies, which he illustrates in paragraph 30 of his skeleton argument:
“(i) Fiscal policy and the way that a whole variety of activities are taxed, including fuel consumption, travel and manufacturing ... (ii) Investment policy and the way that governments encourage directly and indirectly various forms of activity. (iii) Energy policy and the fuels (in particular nuclear) employed for the future. (iv) Foreign policy and the relationship held with nations that consume and/or produce carbon-based fuels.”
This cannot be attended by such trifling by a public institution with its transparency obligations under the law. That the University of Virginia has chosen to persist in a campaign diminishing its stature and credibility changes nothing under that law. The taxpayers have rights, and we are exercising them.
Christopher C. Horner is director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, which is suing the University of Virginia.