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IPCC climate alarm advocacy has failed: what's Plan B?

Article Excerpt
The emissions trading scheme that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented in December is now a nasty headache for the Government. Its problems are both presentational and substantive. More and more, the ETS looks like a costly and ineffective lemon. And there seems nothing in the Government's toolbox of ideas to fix it or replace it with a better model. It is another great "Emperor's New Clothes" moment in Australian public policy-making. Rudd's and Turnbull's advisers do not seem to be giving them all the facts.

--Tom Kevin, Canberra Times, 24 February 2009.

Introduction

As Dorothea Mackellar foreshadowed, Australia needs to possess a sensible climate policy as much as any country on the planet. Yet recent advertisements run by the federal government, at a cost of $13.9 million, make it clear that current "climate policy" is concerned with addressing hypothetical, human-caused global warming rather than the realities of everyday Australian climate variability. In truth, we don't have a national climate policy but an imaginary global warming policy instead.

All competent scientists accept (i) that global climate has always changed, and always will; (ii) that human activities (not just carbon dioxide emissions) definitely affect local climate, and have the potential, summed, to measurably affect global climate; and (iii) that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas. The true scientific debate, then, is about none of these issues, but rather about the sign and magnitude of the global human effect, and its likely significance when considered in the context of natural climate change. The fact that scientific opinion is strongly divided over this issue is not unusual, and is a healthy rather than unhealthy state of affairs.

In February this year, a number of events conspired to bring the government's planned carbon dioxide taxation intentions (aka the White Paper on a "Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme") to the forefront of public debate. Like the Green Paper by Minister Penny Wong that preceded it--and which managed to squeeze no fewer than seven scientific errors into its first sentence--the White Paper is predicated upon unvalidated, speculative computer models which project that human carbon dioxide emissions will cause dangerous global warming, as widely promulgated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The events that concentrated the public's attention were, first, the continuing deterioration in the global and Australian economies, and, second, the co-visitation of massive monsoonal flooding in northern Australia and catastrophic bushfires in Victoria. Other potent background issues, known to many commentators, include the utter failure of the Kyoto Protocol to impact on climate change; the collapse in February of the European carbon dioxide trading market for a second time, with prices falling to euro 8/tonne; and the failure also of carbon dioxide taxation to produce a fall in emissions in early-mover countries like Norway. Emissions trading or carbon dioxide taxes are self-evidently costly, regressive, produce financial instability, and at any foreseeable price level are ineffectual in achieving their aim of reducing emission levels.

By mid-February, these various matters had caused an outbreak of editorial sermonising in Australian metropolitan papers. Staff writers laid especial emphasis on the need for the government to re-examine the merits of a direct carbon dioxide tax instead of the foreshadowed market trading system. The Australian, for example, urged that "We need to hear other ideas on greenhouse gas reduction", thoughtlessly assuming it to be self-evident that any such reduction would be a public or environmental good.

Recalling that the global average temperature has actually cooled over the last 10 years despite an increase in carbon dioxide of around 5 per cent--information which all on its own falsifies the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused greenhouse warming--this ferment of press discussion managed to miss the main point in truly breathtaking fashion. For the key question, of course, is not by WHAT mechanism carbon dioxide is to be taxed but rather WHY it should be taxed at all. We are, after all, talking about an ecologically beneficial trace gas that forms the base of almost the entire planetary food chain, and which currently exists at atmospheric starvation levels of only 380 ppm compared with up to 10 times that concentration and more during the preceding 600 million years of multi-cellular life on Earth.

Which brings us back to the reminder that Mother Nature has just delivered to all Australians about the power and danger of natural climatic events such as...

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