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As the start of the carbon tax approaches it is important that every opportunity be taken to expose the fallacy that the dangerous warming thesis demands urgent government action to reduce CO2 emissions. The abysmal failure of the Rio+20 conference confirmed that developing countries recognise that such policies would have adverse economic effects. As such countries now contribute 60 per cent of CO2 emissions (projected to increase to 75 per cent by 2020), it is now clear that any meaningful binding international agreement on reducing emissions is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future.

In such circumstances it is difficult to envisage a better time for the Coalition to change its policies on reducing emissions of CO2. In addition to opposing a carbon tax, it could change its policy of reducing emissions by having renewables provide 20 per cent of energy by 2020. Given the now widely recognised adverse economic effects of such policies, the continued pursuit of a renewable policy by 2020 should be made conditional on a meaningful binding international agreement being reached on policies to reduce emissions. Otherwise Australia will be simply pissing in the emissions wind – but at a high cost domestically and a loss of international competitiveness.

Three contributions by expert climatologists published in the media provide a solid basis for effecting such a change. Last week-end Garth Paltridge had a long piece in the AFR and Bill Kininmonth responded in today’s AFR to a critique of Paltridge by an Honorary Fellow of the CSIRO (both below). Yesterday Bob Carter had an excellent op-ed in The Australian explaining that there is no scientific consensus. This is also set out below.

Des Moore


Data does not actually speak for itself
letter published in The Australian Financial Review, 28 June 2012

Gary Meyers has considerably overstated the confidence that can be placed in climate data, their interpretation, and their use in predicting future climate (Real climate data speaks for itself, Letters 27/6). This is not to belittle the work of ‘tens of thousands of dedicated people who have collected the data’. The fact is that there are limitations on the precision and accuracy of the data.

The global temperature record back to the 1850s, as constructed from observations using instruments, contains regular changes to the standards for instrument exposure, changes to the instruments themselves, changes in location, and changes in the environment surrounding the instrument sites. The summation of these changes is that the record is not as accurate as it is purported to be.

Nevertheless, the warming documented in the instrument supports a view of Earth having warmed over the past century and a half. The interesting point is that although Earth has warmed and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has increased since 1900 the changes have not been synchronous. The warming of the period 1910-40 was not in conjunction with significant carbon dioxide increase and the post World War II increase in carbon dioxide was not accompanied by temperature increase until about 1975. Thereafter the rapid increase in carbon dioxide was accompanied by temperature rise but at only about the same rate as the 1910-40 period. For the past 15 years the temperature has not increased despite the continuing increase in carbon dioxide.

The comparison with computer models is equally tendentious. The model performance through the 20th century is tuned by changing the impact of atmospheric aerosols, for which even the IPCC agrees there is only a low level of understanding.

If one takes a truly critical stance the data and current models give little confidence to predicting future climate change.

William Kininmonth
Kew, Vic


Real climate data speaks for itself
letter published in The Australian Financial Review, 27 June 2012

In the polemic on climate change science (“Science held hostage”, AFR June 22), Professor Garth Paltridge makes the same mistake he claims the extreme wing of climate activists are making – he grossly over-states the argument.

Firstly, with regard to the observational data available to assess past climate change, he dismisses the historical data archive as “spectacularly inaccurate” without providing any information on what is actually available.

This dismisses the work of tens of thousands of dedicated people who have collected the data, including mariners, meteorologists, and oceanographers. The available historical data archive has flaws, but it is good enough to accurately assess more than a century of some aspects of climate change, for example global sea surface temperature, and compare the results to climate simulations by computer models.

The errors in mapping climate change from observations are easily evaluated by simple methods, providing valuable information and limits on how well the models are performing. The fact that we have the historical archive that has produced thousands of robust, scientifically assessed descriptions of climate change is a remarkable achievement by the people who have worked on the data over decades.

The body of data and analysis should give confidence to people who are concerned about the impacts of climate change. Extracting a story from the data is not a statistical nightmare as claimed in the polemic. With regard to computer-models of climate, Professor Paltridge says they can be “tuned” to give any “desired result”. This comment is just wrong. Climate models are highly constrained by our understanding of mathematics and physics, and any tuning of the model is always done on the basis of that understanding.

In making his claim, Professor Paltridge ignores the great, ongoing intellectual endeavour to formulate the models in a dozen or more expert-centres around the world. I have no doubts about the honesty of the people doing this work. People can have confidence that computer models are the best possible estimate of what future climate might be. The results cannot be waved away so lightly as Professor Paltridge claims. I hope his article does not make anyone think we can put off moving toward a sustainable energy future because of uncertainties in climate science.

Gary Meyers, Hobart Tas, Honorary fellow, CSIRO Marine andAtmospheric Research


Settled science? No such thing
letter by Bob Carter published in The Australian, 27 June 2012

THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a branch of the UN that advises governments on the topic of global warming allegedly caused by human greenhouse emissions.

Contrary to common assumption, the IPCC does not deal with the wider topic of climate change in general. And neither is it the role of the scientists who advise the IPCC to conduct new research as such (though some, incidentally, do ).

Rather, the IPCC's task is to summarise the established science as represented in the published scientific literature.

On February 3, 2010, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, commenting in The Hindu on the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, said: "Everybody thought that what the IPCC brought out was the gold standard and nothing could go wrong."

By "gold standard", Pachauri was referring to the IPCC's oft-made claim that the scientific literature on climate change it surveyed was only that published in peer-reviewed professional research papers.

Interestingly, Albert Einstein's famous 1905 paper on relativity was not peer reviewed. It is therefore quite clear peer review is not a precondition for excellent, indeed epoch-making, scientific research.

Peer review is a technique of quality control for scientific papers that emerged slowly through the 20th century, achieving a dominant influence in science after World War II.

The process works like this: a potential scientific author conducts research, writes a paper on their results and submits the paper to a professional journal in the relevant specialist field of science.

The editor of the journal then scan-reads the paper. Based on their knowledge of the contents of the paper, and of the activities of other scientists in the same research field, the editor selects (usually) two people, termed referees, to whom he sends the draft manuscript of the paper for review.

Referees, who are unpaid, differ in the amount of time and effortthey devote to their task of review. At one extreme a referee will criticise and correct a paper in detail, including making comments on the scientific content. At the other extreme, a referee may merely skim-read a paper, ignoring obvious mistakes in writing style or grammar, and make some general comments to the editor about its scientific accuracy or otherwise.

Generally neither type of referee, nor those in between, check the original data, or the detailed statistical calculations (or, today, complex computer modelling) that often form the kernel of a piece of modern scientific research.

Each referee recommends whether the paper should be published (usually with corrections) or rejected, the editor making the final decision.

In essence, traditional peer review is a technique of editorial quality control, and that a scientific paper has been peer reviewed is absolutely no guarantee the science it portrays is correct.

Indeed, it is the nature of scientific research that nearly all scientific papers are followed by later emendation, or reinterpretation, in the light of new discoveries or understanding.

A case in point is the recent paper by University of Melbourne researcher Joelle Gergis and co-authors that claimed to establish the existence of a southern hemisphere temperature "hockey stick". Now, the authors have rapidly withdrawn the study after fundamental criticisms of it appeared on Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit blog and elsewhere.

The Gergis paper differs in kind from many other IPCC-related studies by establishment climate research groups only in that the tendentious science it contains has been rapidly exposed as flawed. This exemplifies how the role of nurturing strong and independent peer review has now passed from the editors of journals to experts in the blogosphere, and especially so for papers concerned with perceived environmental problems such as global warming.

Scientific knowledge, then, is always in a state of flux; there is simply no such thing as "settled science", peer reviewed or otherwise. During the latter part of the 20th century, Western governments started channelling large amounts of research money into favoured scientific fields, prime among which has been global warming research.

This money has a corrupting influence, not least on the peer-review process.

Many scientific journals, including prestigious ones, are captured by insider groups of leading researchers in particular fields. In such cases, editors deliberately select their referees from scientists who work in the same field and share similar views.

The "climategate" email leak in 2009 revealed this cancerous process is at an advanced stage of development in climate science. A worldwide network of leading climate researchers was revealed to be actively influencing editors and referees to approve for publication only research that supported the IPCC's alarmist view of global warming and to prevent the publication of alternative views.

Backed by this malfeasant system, leading researchers who support the IPCC's red-hot view of climate change endlessly promulgate their alarmist recommendations as "based only upon peer-reviewed research papers", as if this were some guarantee of quality or accuracy.

Peer review, of course, guarantees neither. What matters is not whether a scientific idea or article is peer reviewed, but whether the science described accords with empirical evidence.

So what about the IPCC's much-trumpeted, claimed "gold standard" of only using peer-reviewed papers? It is completely exposed by Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, who showed an amazing 30 per cent of the articles cited in the definitive Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC were from non-peer-reviewed sources, including student theses and environmental lobbyist reports.

The repetition of the "we only use peer-reviewed information" mantra that is so favoured by climate lobbyists and government-captive scientific organisations signals scientific immaturity.

It also indicates a lack of confidence or ability to assess the scientific arguments about dangerous global warming on their own merits and against the empirical evidence.

Bob Carter is a palaeoclimatologist at James Cook University, Townsville and an emeritus fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs.

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