Climate Dissent

Letter

Australian Financial Review

9th November 2006

Stephen Mare asks ("Climate Evidence", Letters, November 3) what if I am wrong in questioning the Stern report's proposal to take urgent and dramatic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

He suggests there are many distinguished scientists who support the view that potentially destructive global warming is being caused by increasing emissions from human activity. But there are also many distinguished scientists who do not support that view.

A distinguished Australian meteorologist, William Kininmonth, wrote last week that "the claim that there is no plausible explanation, other than human activities, for the observed warming of the past thirty years, is wrong".

Professor (of meteorology) Richard Lindzen has exposed as farcical them modeling by Hadley behind the temperature predictions in Stern.

Statistician Bjorn Lomborg has demonstrated that the report contains numerous serious errors and/or questionable assumptions.

I find it difficult to see how any sensible outside observer could accept Stern as providing a basis for fundamental policy changes. Humanity faces many risks but this one calls for no more than marginal policy changes to reduce emissions (such as the government has been adopting).