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Climate Change Warms up: the sceptic’s point of view

11:09am Monday, 8th August 2011

The SCEPTIC
David Palmer is unconvinced by the Climate Change science, and acuses the Gillard Government of magical thinking.

(The Climate Change believers point of view will be posted shortly)

Presently, the government’s plan for a carbon tax is floundering.
The question is, why has public opinion turned against the tax when the science on climate change is settled? Surely - for the sake of our children and grandchildren - we know we must act now to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate disasters.
Well, there are reasons why the Australian public is entitled to a degree of scepticism over the carbon tax plan, and they are by no means all related to Mr Abbott’s skill in stoking fear or hip pocket concerns, or the disproportionate influence of the Greens.
In this article I want to explore some of the other reasons why in an affluent country like Australia, its citizens may baulk at a carbon tax.
First, a brief recap on the background to climate concerns which were raised almost 30 years ago regarding a possible link between global warming and the ever increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide.
This concern led to the establishment in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for collating the latest research for publication as Assessment Reports every few years. and the establishment of an international treaty in 1992 known as the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC).
The IPCC has issued four reports, the last one in 2007 and the next due in 2013. The reports have progressively grown more certain that greenhouse gases have been responsible for the 0.8 C° global temperature rise since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and furthermore, that melting glaciers and ice caps, rising sea levels with flooding of coastal regions, is occurring and will get dramatically worse unless carbon emissions can be sharply curtailed. This, it is claimed, might keep the temperature rise within a barely tolerable 2 C°.
However, in late 2009 everything went terribly wrong for the global warming juggernaut.
Here in Australia, Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme ended up in the bin, to be followed by reports of chicanery deep within the bowels of the IPCC scientific community, the so-called Climategate debacle. Compounding this was the discovery of errors in the 2007 IPCC report, the most egregious being the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would all melt by 2035, a claim the IPCC was forced to retract.
As if this wasn’t enough, the meeting in Copenhagen turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.
What is now becoming clearer about climate science is that it is still very much a science in its infancy.
To give a simple but perplexing example to those accepting the IPCC storyline: if increasing global temperature is a consequence of rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, please explain why global temperatures have barely moved over the past 15 years?
Having studied global warming and what to do about it for the past five years, I’m less inclined to dismiss the IPCC storyline out of hand. I’m not scientifically qualified enough to describe myself as a sceptic, nor a believer. However, we are asked to take the IPCC findings on trust, and that is something I cannot do. I remain un-convinced. Personally, I suspect we are still in the throes of a recovery of the little ice age which is generally considered to have ended mid nineteenth century. But then that was the last scientific paper I read.....
Well what of the political response?
Basically, the politicians, encouraged by the environmental groups and the more enthusiastic global warming scientists, have settled for magical thinking, especially the Greens.
Their magical thinking: by setting CO2 reduction targets and by switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources currently available, all will be well. (I don’t actually think they all believe this anymore, but they have yet to tell us about their doubts.)
Before exposing this magical thinking, let us first acknowledge this: God in his amazing providence and according to his mercy has made a wonderful provision in fossil fuels to enable us to live lives that our forebears 200 years ago could never have dreamed of.
Yes, I know we have this image of the industrial revolution cramming carefree and merry yokels into dark satanic mills, but the truth is that, prior to the industrial revolution half the population lived in abject poverty. The rest of the world has seen our story and is determined that they should enjoy such a life.
Cheap and plentiful energy is what China, India and Africa need to pull their people out of abject poverty into the better lives we enjoy.
China already exceeds the carbon emissions of the USA. Looking ahead, all the major forecasters tell us that carbon emissions from the OECD nations will remain essentially flat, but that the carbon emissions of the non-OECD developing world — principally China — will be twice that of OECD countries by 2035.
There will be no international agreement to reduce carbon emissions. What other conclusion can we draw when despite plans to reduce coal consumption at home, our government is doing everything possible to expedite and profit from the export of ever increasing volumes of fossil fuels to the developing world, notably China?
In announcing its carbon tax plans, the Australian Government has reaffirmed two specific policies: 5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2000 levels by 2020, and 20% renewable energy sourced electricity by 2020.
There is no hope that either of these goals will be achieved.
The problem for the 5% greenhouse emission reduction target is that already by 2008, Australia’s carbon emissions were 22% above 2000 emissions.
Currently about 3% of Australian electricity is drawn from renewable energy sources, principally the Snowy Mountain hydropower. To get to 20%, the Australian Government is banking on wind power, with solar rooftop power contributing 2% maximum.
Solar power may be a longer term possibility, but as the Productivity Commission recently reported, it is horrendously expensive.
Both solar and wind farms suffer from having low load capacities. In other words, with solar power, when there is cloud cover, power output falls away, and at night to zero. With wind farms, no wind or even low wind means no power, as does strong wind, when the blades need feathering to avoid damage. Personally, I favour a carbon tax. I would like to see a tax along the lines of the Indian tax, say $5/tonne with the proceeds of the tax earmarked 100% for the development of low cost energy, for uranium and also solar for the longer term. Fossil fuels have a finite future and besides, if the climate scientists are right, we will need to reduce carbon emissions. Without nuclear power Australia will never reduce its emissions.
An earlier version of this essay was printed in Australian Presbyterian, February 2011.This essay was edited by Eternity for length. It was based on a 75 page paper with full citations (223 endnotes) which may be downloaded at:
http://candn.pcvic.org.au/media/pdf/articles_4/ClimateChangeEnergySecurityandtheFuture.pdf.
This paper will be updated as new information is obtained.