Prof Bob Carter reviews the climate debate and Gillard Govt’s irrational response
Professor Bob Carter.(Photo: Bill Crawford, IODP Imaging Specialist.)
In a major three part series starting at Quadrant Online today, Professor Bob Carter covers the most important events which influenced the climate debate in 2011.
The first in the three part series, Prof Carter discusses the way science works and writes that “Climate change is self-evidently a natural process”:
Warmings, coolings, cyclones, floods, droughts and bushfires have been coming and going since long before human industrial processes started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; and, indeed, since before there were humans at all.
The appropriate question is therefore not whether climate change is “real”, but the more specific one of whether human-related greenhouse emissions are causing dangerous global warming.
Professor Carter discusses “the two universes of climate change”. He writes:
In the first universe, independent scientific and public opinion are moving inexorably towards the rejection of climate alarmism and the costly measures that are perpetrated in its cause. An important manifestation of this opinion was the recent publication of a reasoned statement of disagreement with warming alarmism in the Wall Street Journal, signed by 16 independent scientists. Their conclusion is that global warming is not a serious problem, and that even if it were the solutions being offered wouldn’t fix it anyway.
In contrast, the IPCC and its supporters, who include the Australian government as one of the most faithful acolytes, continue to project unrelenting alarmism. Towards which end they encourage the implementation of expensive, unnecessary and ineffectual measures that they claim will mitigate dangerous warming, such as carbon dioxide taxation and the massive subsidisation of feel good eco-bling like solar farms and windfarms.
Visit Quadrant Online for the first part of Professor Bob Carter’s Climate Review.
