As for the emissions trading scheme, if the main emitters are not reducing their emissions — as the Government’s 5 per cent target assumes — why go it alone?
And a piece from Bob Carter with some almighty whoppers about the science.
First, global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate or magnitude.
But in 2006, he was saying that it had been cooling since 1998. How strange.
Second, humans have an effect on local climate but, despite the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($70 billion) looking for it since 1990, no globally summed human effect has ever been measured. Therefore, any human signal must lie buried in the variability of the natural climate system.
It’s one thing to dispute the evidence. It’s another to completely deny that it exists. Here’s Figure SPM-4 from the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report. The blue bands show temperatures if you just include natural forcings and natural variability. The red bands include the effects of human activities. The black lines shows actual temperature averages.
Now, maybe there’s something going on here that the scientists don’t understand, but for warming not be caused by humans, there would, despite extensive scientific studies, have to be a completely unknown natural cause for it AND a completely unknown factor that was stopping our activities from causing any significant warming. What are the odds?
Third, we live on a dynamic planet; change occurs in Earth’s geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans all the time and all over the world. No substantive evidence exists that modern rates of global environmental change (ice volume; sea level) lie outside historic natural bounds.
Well yes. At the end of the last Ice Age sea level rose at 5 metres per century. Such a rate of sea level rise would, however, cause some problems for our civilization because we have built all these cities at sea level.
Last, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, be it in Australia or worldwide, will likely result in no measurable change in future climate, because extra increments of atmospheric CO2 cause diminishing warming for each unit of increase; at most, a few tenths of a degree of extra warming would result from a completion of doubling of CO2 since pre-industrial times.
Says who? The only cite that Carter gives is “Independent science”, which I guess means science you won’t find in peer-reviewed science journals. Maybe he’s thinking of Christopher Monckton error-filled paper? Who can tell.