Climate Change Reports and Science Update
Whilst most people have heard that the report on Climate Change and Australia by Dr Ross Garnaut recommended drastic cuts to carbon emissions to avoid climate change catastrophe, there are sections of the report that the media is strangely silent about. Andrew Bolt has a good roundup.

Professor Ross Garnaut has discovered a debate on catastrophic man-made global warming that Al Gore, and most journalists and politicians, keep claiming was over years ago.

In fact, he’s even wondering if some scientists have played funny buggers.

Garnaut, hired to tell Labor how to cut greenhouse gases, yesterday released his interim report, saying most scientists felt we were running out of time: “The world is moving towards high risks of dangerous climate change more rapidly than has generally been understood.”

This was honey to alarmists, but Garnaut also admits his review of the global warming science “takes the work of the IPCC as its starting point”.

That’s a problem. This Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change is the United Nations body that persuaded governments we’re doomed unless we get less gassy.

But Garnaut concedes the IPCC has in fact been accused - not least by an all-party British House of Lords inquiry into climate change - of using dodgy science, excluding dissenters and sexying up findings.

Or in Garnaut’s more polite words, of lacking “objectivity” and giving in to “political considerations”.

As Garnaut says, its critics include top scientists such as hurricane expert Chris Landsea, who quit the IPCC to protest (in Garnaut’s words) the “mispresentation of climate science” by colleagues.

What’s more, despite claims the “science is settled”, Garnaut found the science of man-made warming was of a “qualified and contested nature”, and he was in “no position to adjudicate on the relative merits of various expert scientific opinions”.

He just had to go “on the balance of probabilities” - with this controversial IPCC and the majority of scientists whose views it represented.

But he urged that the global debate be made “open to alternative perspectives beyond the IPCC”, and said he’d recommend a “strengthening (of) the pluralist character of the Australian research efforts”.

Debate not over? Check.
IPCC Reports not objective or scientifically created? Check
Still using scare tactics? Check.

Jonathan Lowe does the math and works out just what this excessive hardship of cutting our emissions by 90% would give us.

But how much is Australia's deadly greenhouse gas emissions killing the world? Well Australia emits around 326 million metric tonnes a year. That's compared to a world wide rate of 27 billion metric tonnes. Hence Australia emits around 1.2% of the worlds greenhouse gas.

Now lets assume that we reduce our emissions by 60%, and lets assume that 100% of all warming has been caused by greenhouse gas (note that this assumption is clearly ludicrous but hey for the sake of the example...). With the world increasing at a rate of 0.6 degrees per 100 years, this means that if Australia were to cut our emissions by 60% by 2050, we would cool the globe by around 0.000043 degrees per year.

Yep. Hundreds of billions of dollars, massive inflation and increase in poverty and hardship for almost all Australians, all for cooling the globe .000043 degrees per year, for a grand total of under .002 of a degree. And that is definitely an inconvenient truth for all the scaremongering fear merchants.

Finally, Anthony Watts, (The man doing the job that climate scientists should have done themselves by checking out whether weather stations are recording temperature without biases...hint: they aren't), reviews a recent scientific paper on correlations between temperature trends and CO2, Total Solar Irradiance, and Oceanic cycles. Anthony prints the conclusion of the paper

Clearly the US annual temperatures over the last century have correlated far better with cycles in the sun and oceans than carbon dioxide. The correlation with carbon dioxide seems to have vanished or even reversed in the last decade.

Given the recent cooling of the Pacific and Atlantic and rapid decline in solar activity, we might anticipate given these correlations, temperatures to accelerate downwards shortly.

It seems Oceanic cycles and Solar Cycles show far better correlation than CO2 with temperature. Don't expect to hear about it in the news though.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, February 22, 2008