Pell says tide turning on climate change
Cardinal Pell
“Evidence shows the wheels are falling from the climate catastrophe bandwagon,” Cardinal George Pell, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, wrote in a newspaper column yesterday.
“Originally we were warned about the ‘greenhouse effect’; then it was ‘global warming’, followed in turn by ‘climate change’. Now we talk about reducing the ‘carbon footprint’. The light is dawning and 30 per cent of scientists are sceptics or deniers,” Cardinal Pell wrote in the Sunday Telegraph.
“The tide on climate change is starting to turn. The Australian government is becoming more cautious.
“It is rare to read a new book likely to make a huge difference to public opinion. Professor Ian Plimer’s 500 page book with 2300 footnotes ‘Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science’ is such a book. 30,000 copies were sold in its first month.
“Plimer is not a climate change denier, because history shows the planet is dynamic and the climate is always changing, sometimes drastically.
“Ice Ages have come and gone and we don’t know why. History has seen glaciers at the equator and at one time Scandinavia was under 5 kilometres of ice. Sea levels have been 130 metres lower than today. Some consolation comes from the fact that ice sheets predominated for only 20 per cent of the earth’s history. Plimer demonstrates that a considerable amount of scientific evidence has been produced to counter the still predominant view that human activity, especially through industry, has polluted the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which will produce disastrous climate changes including a rise in temperature, a melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels.
“Contrary evidence is already changing the debate. Australia, with its tiny economy, is no longer aiming to lead the world. The threat of massive job losses and increasing awareness of new evidence will provoke even greater caution in the future,” Cardinal Pell wrote.
Read the full version of Cardinal Pell’s column here.
Prof Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth is available from Australian Conservative.
