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Article Excerpt
One of the disquieting aspects of 2007, culminating in the November federal election, centred upon "global warming"--or "climate change", as the global-warming proselytisers nowadays prefer to call it, for the usual Orwellian reasons.
During the year the Labor Party used the topic (successfully) to suggest that the "crisis" surrounding it was a major reason for "new leadership". In the face of this it was distressing to see the Coalition capitulate rather than seek to argue the topic. Now the Rudd Government is proposing actions that, in the absence of second thoughts, will damage our economy seriously, on the grounds that "climate change" considerations make that necessary. In some ways most worrying of all, these things have happened despite the fact that, the more the year wore on, the more clear it became that the so-called "settled science" underpinning the globalwarming thesis is not in the least "settled". Even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was finalising its Fourth Assessment Report, any scientific foundations claimed for that report's conclusions were crumbling in the face of new research.
Of course, as to the first point, it is not surprising that a political party should employ a false argument in its quest for office. Had roles been reversed, the Coalition may well have been equally unscrupulous. The more important question here is whether Mr Rudd and his colleagues really believed what they were saying. For example, it was said that global warming is the most important threat to the world today--even greater than fundamentalist Islamist terrorism! Yet the latter poses a threat that is already imminent, and seems likely to become more so with each passing year, particularly given the weak-kneed response to it of the multiculturalists, the "inter-faith dialogue" crowd, and other assorted white-flag-wavers. By contrast, even if you believe everything the IPCC has said on global warming, nobody will be harmed by it for (many) decades yet. In short, the claim is preposterous. I am the last person to approve of people lying, but in this case I would be happier if Labor Party spokesmen were doing so. For all I know, however, they may actually believe such statements. In that case, we really do have a problem.
Still, let us set aside this concern--as being, say, an ephemeral outcome of politics in a democracy--and focus on the others.
As readers may recall, I have written before in this journal on the general topic of "global warming" and the scare-mongering associated with it. (1) In what follows, I first say something about the Coalition's failure to challenge the "conventional wisdom" (sic) on the issue. I then examine the new government's proposals, and the economic damage likely to result if anything remotely approaching them should be enacted. Finally, I canvass the course of the scientific debate over the past 12 months or so and indicate why I believe that, increasingly, the IPCC emperor is being seen to have no clothes.
THE COALITION'S SURRENDER
From a sceptical viewpoint, the Howard Government is to be congratulated for having refused, for the most part, to fall into line with the global warmers during its first 10 years or so. When the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, Australia (along with the United States) refused to ratify it. Indeed, the Howard Government maintained that position throughout its whole time in office, despite the consequent maledictions raining down on it from the Opposition, most of the media, so-called "international opinion" and a bevy of self-styled "climate scientists". The Kyoto Protocol finally came into force in February 2005, when Russia ratified it on purely political grounds having nothing to do with belief in the underlying "science". Since it is now universally acknowledged to have been an almost total failure, the government's stance on the issue appears to have been broadly vindicated.
That, unfortunately, was not the whole story. From the outset, the Howard Government's attitude towards the global-warming thesis was ambivalent. On the one hand, it refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. On the other hand, it refrained from questioning the basic thesis underlying it. It tried, in effect, to have it both ways--not willing to oppose the global-warming fraternity directly, while refusing (rightly) to adopt policies that would be costly to Australia. Alexander Pope's biting appraisal of Addison seems appropriate: "Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike."
One reason for this confusion lay in the succession of ineffective ministers holding the Environment portfolio. The first of these (1996-2001), Senator Robert Hill, is a decent man, (2) but one over-attracted to fashionable environmental issues. He quickly fell under the influence of his officials (including the empire-builders in the National Greenhouse Office), led by his departmental head, Roger Beale--a deeply committed global-warmer. There is no doubt that, had his been the final say in the matter, Australia would have ratified the Kyoto Protocol from the outset. As it was, the "deal" around which Cabinet agreement was reached was that, while Australia would not formally participate in that international treaty, it would agree to obligations in its negotiation that would render it, for most practical purposes, a participant. (3)
After the 2001 election, Hill's place was taken (2001-2004) by Dr David Kemp, with whom I had become...
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