Nine Lies About Global Warming

Nine Lies About Global Warming

The Lavoisier Group

February 2006

Ray Evans

1. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

2. The twentieth century has been the hottest in recorded history and the decade 1990–2000 the hottest ever.

3. The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is decisive.

4. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have already caused significant global warming and must be severely curtailed to prevent future climate catastrophe.

5. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and the global warming caused thereby are responsible not only for higher temperatures and more droughts than in the past, but also for moreblizzards, unseasonal snow, and freezing weather. They are also responsible for increasing numbers of cyclones.

6. Because of anthropogenic emissions, the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. The rising sea levels threaten low lying island states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans with
complete inundation.

7. Unless anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are reduced by 50–60 per cent of current levels by the year 2050, by 2100 our descendants will have to endure global temperatures of between 1.4 to 5.8°C warmer than the present.

8. Tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread from the tropics to the temperate regions.

9. Shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy sources such as windmills and solar panels (or even nuclear power plants) will not cause unemployment
or economic deprivation.

The Nine Lies Nine Lies About Global Warming

Ray Evans

Introduction

People who know that they are morally superior to the rest of mankind are often tempted to ignore the moral norms on which Western civilisation depends. One of the most important of these rules is telling the truth. The Ninth Commandment states ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness….’ Environmentalism, however, is a form of religious belief which fosters a sense of moral superiority in the believer, but which places no importance on telling the truth. As the former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart put it:

No matter if the science is all phony [sic], there are collateral environmental benefits…. Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring aboutjustice and equality in the world.1

Ever since the hot American summers of 1987 and 1988, the international environmentalist
movement has campaigned to establish a global regime of decarbonisation. Their argument has been that increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), brought about by mankind’s use of coal, oil and gas will, through a process of greenhouse gas-induced warming, bring about global climate catastrophe. Although this argument is inherently implausible, they have had the most extraordinary success with their campaign. The Rio Earth Summit of
1992 led to the 1994 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in turn led, in December 1997, to the Kyoto Protocol. The essential element of the Kyoto Protocol was that those industrialised nations which ratified the Protocol committed themselves to specified reductions in CO2 emissions by 2012. The base year of 1990 was chosen and each industrialised country was given a specified target to reach. Australia’s target was 108 per cent of 1990 emissions. Only Iceland, 110 per cent, was given a more generous target. Countries which did not achieve their targets were to be penalised in the years following 2012, and a supra-national inspectorate was to be established to police the global decarbonisation programme.
Australia and the US, however, refused to ratify the Protocol.

Following the 11th Conference of Parties meeting in Montreal in December 2005, the Kyoto Protocol is now almost dead. It was born in 1997 and has been sustained, to this point, through a web of mendacity, fraud and lies. The nine most important lies are listed on the facing page, and a brief examination of them follows.

1. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic gas which is essential to all life on earth. (Carbon monoxide, however, is extremely toxic and, if inhaled, will cause death very quickly.) All green vegetation requires carbon dioxide as plant food, and the process of photosynthesis, in which plants take in carbon dioxide, absorb solar radiation, store the carbon and emit oxygen, is basic to life. As concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, the rates of growth of plants also increase.

Flowers and vegetables grown in hothouses are frequently fed with extra carbon dioxide for faster growth and higher yields. As atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased from approximately 325 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in 1970 to 375 ppmv today, wheat yields in Australia have increased in the last 30 years, in part because of CO2 enrichment.
Every time a story on global warming is featured on TV, either a background image of the cooling tower of a power station, with its plume of minute water droplets above, or a smoke stack belching forth dark plumes of soot, fly ash, and other particulates, is shown. In this mendacious way, carbon dioxide is identified as a serious pollutant, and the US is always labelled as the world’s greatest polluter. (Australia is frequently labelled as second to the US.)
Coal-fired power stations which have modern flue-gas scrubbing equipment built into their exhaust systems, will have smoke stack emissions which are barely visible.

Mark Steyn commented:

In the past third of a century, the American economy has swollen by 150 per cent, automobile traffic has increased by 143 per cent, and energy consumption has grown 45 per cent. During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29 per cent, toxic emissions by 48.5 per cent, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3 per cent, and airborne lead by 97.3 per cent.2 Carbon dioxide cycles naturally through the atmosphere, the earth’s land mass, and the oceans. Huge volumes of carbon dioxide are injected into the oceans and atmosphere during earthquakes and volcanoes. The amount of carbon contained in atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 730,000 million tonnes (730 Gigatonnes of carbon (GtC)). The annual transport of carbon to and from the land surface and the atmosphere, is estimated at 120 GtC; between the oceans and the atmosphere the estimate is 90 GtC. The annual emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
resulting from human activities is about 7 GtC, less than 1 per cent of the total atmospheric carbon mass, and less than 4 per cent of the natural annual emissions from the biosphere and the oceans. Changes in the natural transport of carbon, as well as human activities, have led to recent increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.3

2. The twentieth century has been the hottest in recorded historyand the decade 1990–2000 the hottest ever.

This particular lie has done much to damage the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. The IPCC was established under the auspices of the UNEP (United Nations Environment Panel), and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Its brief was to provide an authoritative international statement of scientific opinion on climate change. It has issued three such reports. The most recent, the Third Assessment Report (TAR), was released in Shanghai in January 2001. The authority of the IPCC has been used by many governments (including the Australian Government) as justification for various perceived decarbonisation policies, such as the subsidies now given to the owner-operators of wind farms, proposed carbon taxes of one kind or another, and various
carbon trading schemes which are merely add-ons to carbon taxes.

At the press conference at which this Third Assessment Report was launched, a backdrop showing a graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from 1000 to 2000 AD was prominently displayed. This graph, known as Mann’s Hockey Stick, was so widely used by the IPCC that it became a corporate logo. From 1000 to 1900 AD the northern hemisphere temperature was depicted as slowly cooling by 0.2°C. From 1900 to 2000 AD the temperature took off in a straight line showing a century of warming of 0.6°C. The graph looked like an ice hockey stick with the handle running from 1000 to 1900 AD and the blade shooting upwards from 1900 to 2000 AD. The lead author of the research which led to this graph was Michael E. Mann
of the University of Virginia.
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The purpose of the graph was to legitimise the claim that twentieth-century warming
is unprecedented; that it is due to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide;
and that the increase in twentieth-century temperatures has been so precipitate
that drastic policies of decarbonisation have to be implemented. In particular, the
well-known history of the Mediaeval Warm Period, 800 AD to 1300 AD, an era
which was warm enough for Vikings to establish a colony in Greenland and which
lasted for 300 years, was to be airbrushed out of the historical record.3 Also deleted
from the record was the Little Ice Age which ran from 1560 to 1850 AD.
It is now established beyond argument that this hockey stick is a fraud. The algorithm
which the authors used to process tree ring data not only produced the hockey
stick published and promoted by the IPCC, but was able to produce a hockey stick
from a series of random numbers. The IPCC has not confessed to fraud. It carries on
as if nothing is wrong with its conduct or its conclusions. If the IPCC were a commercial
corporation operating in Australia, its directors would now be facing criminal
charges and the prospect of going to jail.
There is now a great deal of evidence to show that the Mediaeval Warm Period was
a global phenomenon. It was during this period that Europeans enjoyed agricultural
prosperity with an abundance of food and population growth. They made huge
progress in technology, inventing, for example, mechanical clocks and windmills,
building the great cathedrals, and establishing great trading cities such as Venice,
Amsterdam, and London. It is ironic that the global warmers should seek to erase
from the record this remarkable era of human progress as part of their campaign to
return Western society to a state of extreme energy deprivation.
As far as Australia is concerned, the highest recorded maximum temperatures for
Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney were recorded during heatwave conditions over
south-eastern Australia that persisted from 6th to 14th January, 1939. The table
gives some maximum temperatures for this period.
Maximum Temperatures °C for days in January 1939
8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th
Adelaide 44.0 45.9 46.1 44.2
Melbourne 43.1 44.7 45.6
Sydney 45.3
There were extensive bushfires throughout Victoria, culminating in Black Friday,
the 13th January, when 70 lives were lost. The claim that 2005 was the hottest
Australian year on record is false.4
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3. The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is decisive.

If we plot global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations for the period
1970–2000, we will obtain a reasonably good correlation, and it appears plausible
to argue that anthropogenic emissions are causing global warming. A good correlation,
however, does not prove causality between the two variables, and even more
importantly, if we extend our time scale and plot fossil fuel consumption (a good
proxy for anthropogenic emissions) against temperature change, from 1860 to 2000,
we see no correlation at all.
Here we see that global temperatures rose from 1860 to 1875, then cooled until
1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918 and then rose dramatically until 1941–42. We
then experienced the long cooling until 1976, the year of the Pacific Climate Shift,
and since then temperatures have risen by about 0.4°C. There is zero correlation
between the temperature curve and the anthropogenic CO2 curve over this 140-
year period. This fact alone should have brought the carbon dioxide-induced global
warming debate to an end.

4. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have already caused significant global warming and must be severely curtailed to prevent future climate catastrophe.

Since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change came into force in 1994,
those nations which have ratified the UNFCCC (which include Australia and the
US) send official delegates to annual meetings which are called Conferences of the
Temperature graph
Global Fossil-Fuel Use vs Temperature Change
Source: Klyashtorin and Lyubushin 2003, Energy and Environment, vol. 14, no. 6, Figure 1
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Parties (COP). They are usually held in December, and attract an influx of about
10,000 lobbyists, activists and media personnel as well as government officials and
ministers. The NGO activists are there to generate press coverage and to stage
media events.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the NGOs, the UN bureaucrats who
comprise the Secretariat, and the delegations from the member governments, most
of whom are well paid senior officials of Departments of the Environment. For many
of these officials, global warming is not only a cause they believe in, but also the
best gravy train they can imagine.
A few days prior to COP 10, held in Buenos Aires in December 2004, the journal
Science published a paper by Dr Naomi Oreskes, a professor in history at the University
of California at San Diego. She claimed to have analysed the abstracts—using
the key words ‘climate change’—of all the scientific papers listed on the ISI database
for the decade 1993–2003. Seventy-five per cent of the 928 abstracts she
analysed (that is, 695) fell into the category, ‘either explicitly or implicitly accepting
the consensus view’. For the first time, empirical evidence was presented that
appeared to show a near unanimous scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes
of recent global warming.
Dr Benny Peiser from John Moores University at Liverpool decided to replicate the
study. He found that a search on the ISI database using the keywords ‘climate change’
for the years 1993–2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during
the decade in question. Oreskes then admitted that she had used the keywords
‘global climate change’. This reduced the number of papers under review to 1,247,
of which 1,117 had been abstracted.
Of all 1,117 abstracts, only 13 (one per cent) explicitly endorsed the ‘consensus
view’. However, 34 abstracts rejected or questioned the view that human activities
are the main driving force of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years’.
Oreskes claimed that ‘none of these papers argued [that current climate change is
natural]’. However, 44 papers emphasised that natural factors play a major if not the
key role in recent climate change.
Dr Peiser sent a letter to Science setting out the results of his investigation. Science
refused to publish the letter.
The Oreskes study is still quoted as evidence supporting the ‘consensus’ argument.
A statement by the Royal Society in March 2005, for instance, used Oreskes’ flawed
study as a key argument in the climate change debate.
Statistical analysis apart, a number of the most eminent scientists in the field of
physics and climate science generally have made scathing criticisms of the IPCC
and of the ‘consensus’ view. One such criticism is from Hendrik Tennekes, the world’s
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leading authority on the physics of turbulent flow, and recently retired Director of
Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute:
The climate orthodoxy perpetrates the misconceptions involved by speaking,
as IPCC does, about the Scientific Basis of Climate Change. Since
then, I have responded to that ideology by stating that there is no chance
at all that the physical sciences can produce a universally accepted scientific
basis for policy measures concerning climate change.
Australia’s Garth Paltridge, a distinguished scientist who retired recently from his
post as Director of the Antarctic CRC and IASOS at the University of Tasmania,
commented on the way in which the IPCC and its supporters operate:
Each of the successive summaries [to the IPCC’s Assessment Reports] has
been phrased in such a way as to appear a little more certain than the last
that greenhouse warming is a potential disaster for mankind. The increasing
verbal certainty does not derive from any particular advance of the
science. Rather, it is a function of how strongly a statement about global
warming can be put without inviting a significant backlash from the general
scientific community. Over the years, the opinion of that community
has been manipulated into more-or-less passive support by a deliberate campaign
to isolate—and indeed to denigrate—the scientific sceptics outside
the central activity of the IPCC. The audience has been actively conditioned
into being receptive. It has thereby become gradually easier to sell
the proposition of greenhouse disaster.
After making sceptical comments in the press about the global warming ‘consensus’,
Professor Paltridge was threatened by the CSIRO with major funding cuts to
the Antarctic Research programme for which he was responsible.

5. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and the global warming caused thereby are responsible not only for higher temperatures and more droughts than in the past, but also for more blizzards,
unseasonal snow, and freezing weather. They are also responsible for increasing numbers of cyclones.

As the years passed and North America, the UK and Northern Europe experienced
some rather severe winters (but not as severe as the winter of 1946–47), the global
warming story began to look a bit threadbare. So the words ‘climate change’ superseded
‘global warming’, and explanations were put forward as to why increasing
anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide could lead to severe winters as well as
hot summers. The high point of this campaign was the movie The Day After Tomorrow
which showed New York inundated with snow and ice as global warming triggered
the onset of the next ice age.
One of the most frequent arguments in this genre is the shutting down of the Gulf
Stream by global warming with horrendous consequences for all of Europe. Carl
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Wunsch, Professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT and the world’s leading authority
on ocean currents commented:
The only way to produce an ocean circulation without the Gulf Stream is
either to turn off the wind system, or stop the earth’s rotation, or both.
The Greenpeace protesters at the Montreal COP, held in December 2005, had to
endure blizzard conditions. Mark Steyn, writing in the London Daily Telegraph about
this event, suggested that Montreal had been relocated to
planet Goofy, a strange lost world where it’s perfectly normal for apparently
sane people to walk around protesting about global warming in subzero
temperatures. Or, as the Canadian Press reported: ‘Montreal—tens of
thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures Saturday to lead a worldwide
day of protest against global warming’.
Unfortunately, no one had supplied an updated weather forecast to the
fellow who writes the protesters’ chants. So, to the accompaniment of the
obligatory pseudo-ethnic drummers, the shivering eco-warriors sang: ‘It’s
hot in here! There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere!’ Is this the first
sign of the ‘New Ice Age’ the media warned us about last week?….
But the point is, as Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace puts it: ‘Global warming
can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what
we’re dealing with.’ Got that? If it’s hot, that’s a sign of global warming,
and, if it’s cold, that’s a sign of global warming.
And if it’s just kind of average—say, 9°C, and partially cloudy, as it will be
in Llandudno today—that’s a sign that global warming is accelerating out
of control and you need to flee immediately because time is running out!
‘Time is running out to deal with climate change, says Mr Guilbeault. Ten
years ago, we thought we had a lot of time, five years ago we thought we
had a lot of time, but now science is telling us that we don’t have a lot of
time.’
In recent months Florida, Louisiana and Texas have born the brunt of some severe
cyclones. Katrina, in particular, caused enormous damage in New Orleans. Once
again the global warmers were quick to blame it all on global warming and anthropogenic
emissions. Swiss Re and Munich Re are two very large re-insurance companies
which have been doing all they can to support the argument that anthropogenic
carbon dioxide is the culprit.
There is no evidence at all to support this. There is zero correlation between the
incidence and severity of cyclones with atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Insurance
payouts, of course, have increased greatly. This is because Americans have
been migrating to the warmer south-eastern states. Florida now has a population of
20 million and the value of real estate in that State has increased accordingly.
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6. Because of anthropogenic emissions, the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. The rising sea levels threaten low lying island states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans with complete inundation.

Prior to the AP6 meeting in Sydney on 11–12 January 2006 (the Asia Pacific Partnership
on Clean Development and Climate, APPCDC), a serious public relations
exercise was conducted by representatives of the low lying Pacific Island States.
The claim made by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is that, because of
global warming, sea levels are rising, their islands are being submerged, and in this
particular instance the demand made of the Australian Government was that the
citizens of these states should be given permanent residency visas in Australia.
The problem here again is that there is no evidence to support their claims. The
South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, funded by AusAID and
managed by the National Tidal Facility (NTF), has found no evidence of rising sea
levels.
Professor Nils Axel-Morner, head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department
at Stockholm University, and past president of the INQUA Commission
on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, has debunked rising sea level claims.
His arguments are supported by satellite measurements which show no change in
sea level over the past decade.
Morner and his team did an exhaustive investigation of the claim made by the
IPCC that the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean are at risk from sea level rise
accelerated by global warming. He found considerable evidence that the sea level
in the Maldives has fallen over the past 30 years, and that the islands and their
people survived much higher sea levels in the past. What is rarely mentioned is that
many of these islands are near the boundaries of the earth’s crustal plates, whose
movement is responsible for their uplift or sinking relative to global mean sea level.
The global warmers’ argument for rising sea levels is that the polar ice caps are
melting and therefore sea levels are rising. It is revealing that many global warmers
do not understand that the Arctic Ice Cap, floating as it does in the Arctic Sea,
makes only a small difference whether it is in solid or in liquid form. The solid
form—ice—has a density 90 per cent of the liquid form, which is why it floats—
just—in water.
Whenever rising sea level stories are given a run on TV, we have shots of Antarctic
icebergs calving from the ice shelf. We do not, however, see snow falling onto the
Antarctic Ice Sheets some thousands of metres above sea level where temperatures
are rarely above freezing point. Satellite observations tell us that the Greenland Ice
Sheets are thickening, not diminishing, and that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is close to
balance.
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7. Unless anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are reduced by 50–60 per cent of current levels by the year 2050, by 2100 our descendants will have to endure global temperatures
of between 1.4 to 5.8°C warmer than the present.

This claim is at the heart of the global warming scam. It is based on projections
coming out of models run on the most powerful computers which purport to simulate
the behaviour of the atmosphere as it responds to changes in carbon dioxide
concentrations. The claim that computer models can do this and produce meaningful
results is regarded as nonsense by leading scientists in the fields of fluid mechanics,
numerical modelling of complex systems, and climate science.
For example, Hendrik Tennekes, cited above, wrote recently:
the task of finding all nonlinear feedback mechanisms in the microstructure
of the radiation balance probably is at least as daunting as the task of
finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. The blind adherence to the
harebrained idea that climate models can generate ‘realistic’ simulations of
climate is the principal reason why I remain a climate skeptic. From my
background in turbulence I look forward with grim anticipation to the day
that climate models will run with a horizontal resolution of less than a
kilometre. The horrible predictability problems of turbulent flows then will
descend on climate science with a vengeance.
Reid Bryson, Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin, and regarded by
many climatologists as the ‘father of climatology’ has written:
A model is nothing more than a formal statement about how the modeller
believes the part of the world of his concern actually works … it may be
years before computer capacity and human knowledge are adequate for
reasonable simulation … the main models in use all have similar errors,
but it is hardly surprising, for they are all essentially clones of each other.
Australia’s Bill Kininmonth, director of the National Climate Centre from 1986 to
1998, writes:
The apparent ability of the computer models to simulate the global surface
temperatures of the 20th century comes with too many assumptions and
shortcomings. Despite the IPCC advocacy, it is not possible to isolate
anthropogenic greenhouse gases as the cause (or even a major cause) for
the observed warming of the last two and a half decades of the 20th century.
The world-wide advance of mountain glaciers until the mid-19th century,
and their steady retreat since, point toward large-scale natural processes
systematically affecting the climate system over prolonged intervals.
Whether the systematic processes are internal to the climate system, an
outcome of external forcing, or a combination of these, cannot be
determined with any confidence from existing data and analysis tools. As a
corollary, the sensitivity of the earth’s temperature response to greenhouse
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gas forcing cannot be scaled by reference to the magnitude of recent global
temperature increase and the forcing by anthropogenic greenhouse gases
as represented in computer model simulations of the 20th century.5

8. Tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread from the tropics to the temperate regions.

This claim is astonishing in its mendacity. As soon as the IPCC ran this argument
in 1995, it was pointed out, amongst other things, that Oliver Cromwell had died of
malaria in London in September 1658 at a particularly cold period in English history.
Paul Reiter, formerly Chief of the Entomology Section, Dengue Branch, at the
US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in San Juan, Puerto Rico and now
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris has written extensively on malaria in England and
Northern Europe during the seventeenth century.6 His discussion of ‘the ague’ as it
is described in Shakespeare and other contemporary documents, gives a fascinating
insight into the perils of living in swampy areas such as Westminster and the coastal
marshes of the Thames estuary.

In his submission to the House of Lords Inquiry into the Economic Consequences
of Climate Change, Professor Reiter commented on the IPCC’s discussion of malaria
in its Second Assessment Report:

The scientific literature on mosquito-borne diseases is voluminous, yet the
text references in the chapter were restricted to a handful of articles, many
of them relatively obscure, and nearly all suggesting an increase in prevalence
of disease in a warmer climate. The paucity of information was hardly
surprising: not one of the lead authors had ever written a research paper
on the subject! Moreover, two of the authors, both physicians, had spent
their entire career as environmental activists. [One of these has published
‘professional’ articles as an ‘expert’ on 32 different subjects, ranging from
mercury poisoning to land mines, globalization to allergies and West Nile
virus to AIDS].

Among the contributing authors there was one entomologist, plus a person
who had written an obscure article on dengue and El Niño, but whose
principal interest was the effectiveness of motor cycle crash helmets (plus
one paper on the health effects of cell phones).

Reiter has pointed out that malaria and other ‘tropical’ diseases have more to do
with living conditions than temperature. For example he has analysed the Texas–
Mexico border, where dengue fever was prevalent in Mexico and rare in Texas despite
the similar environmental conditions. The only difference was living conditions.
Malaria is making a comeback in Africa, in central Asia, and other parts of the
world suffering from political upheaval. The IPCC’s attempt to link this to global
warming is farcical, but it is a farce with serious consequences.
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9. Shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy sources such as windmills and solar panels (or even nuclear power plants) will not cause unemployment or economic deprivation.

The Environmentalists persist in denying the economic consequences of
decarbonisation. In one particular sense they are theoretically correct. If we were
all to give up our motor cars and ride bicycles instead; if we were content to use
electricity only when the wind was blowing; if we were prepared to give up the use
of fertilizers and tractors; in effect if we were prepared to accept a standard of living
similar to that of our forebears of the early nineteenth century; we could still all be
employed, although working at night would be difficult in the absence of electricity.
In the early 1990s Aaron Wildavsky noted the implications of decarbonisation:
Global warming is the mother of environmental scares. In the scope of its
consequences for life on planet Earth and the immense size of its remedies,
global warming dwarfs all the environmental and safety scares of our time
put together. Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote
of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of
realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on
rejection of economic growth in favour of a smaller population’s eating
lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower
level of resources much more equally.7

The costs of abandoning coal-based electricity in Australia would result in the demise
of most of our export industries, namely, mining, metals processing, agriculture,
and food processing, which are highly energy intensive and thus benefit from
low-cost electricity. The numbers are important. Coal-based power in Australia
costs about $30–$40 per Megawatt hour (MWh). Nuclear power, the only practical
alternative to coal, costs $70–$80 per MWh, about twice what we now pay. Windmills,
which generate electricity when the wind is blowing, cost about $80–$130
per MWh, but require backup from reliable sources which makes them completely
uneconomic. They are currently being built on pristine coast lines and mountain
ranges because of the substantial subsidies which electricity consumers provide to
the operators of these behemoths. The burning of fuels such as bagasse, straw, sawdust,
to generate electricity is commercially attractive when the fuel is essentially a
waste product (eg bagasse), with a negative value. This happens without the need
for legislation or subsidies. Solar power costs anything between $300 and $500 per
MWh and is available when the sun is shining.

A number of economists have climbed onto the global warming bandwagon in order
to promote so-called market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions. Emissions
trading is a popular proposal. All of these schemes are variants on the market for
taxi-cab licences. Every major city in Australia has a regime of taxi licensing in
which the number of taxis allowed to operate is limited by State regulation. This
creates a scarcity factor which increases the value of the taxi licence, and these licences are traded for sums in the order of $250,000. If the regulation requiring taxi
drivers to have a licence for their taxi was abolished (as happened in New Zealand)
the value of the licence would be zero.

These licences constitute a tax which has to be paid by taxi users. Emission licences for
power stations or petrol refineries would operate in the same way. What is not known is
how great the tax on carbon emissions would have to be to ensure that electricity users
would reduce their consumption by the desired amount. In the first instance, large
electricity users such as aluminium smelters and fertilizer plants would relocate to other
countries. The Australian motor car industry, already under threat from international
competition, would close. And the ripple effect would spread out through the Australian
economy causing unemployment first in one industry and then in another.

The impact of such price increases and consequent economic dislocation would have
political consequences. No government which introduced such a regime of carbon taxation
would survive an election, but the damage that would be wrought in the meantime
would be long-lasting.

Conclusion

The global warming scam has been, arguably, the most extraordinary scientific event
in the post-War period. So many people, and institutions, have been caught up in
the web of deceit, master-minded by environmental activists working through the
NGOs and their manipulation of the IPCC processes, that the integrity of Western
science is seriously at risk. The unravelling of this web will result in the loss of
reputation for many individuals, but more importantly, in the restructuring of those
scientific institutions in Australia and elsewhere which have tied their reputations
to that of the IPCC. That issue is now moving onto the political agenda.

Endnotes
1. Calgary Herald, 14 December 1998.
2. London Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2005.
3. In his book Civilisation, based on the incomparable TV series, Kenneth Clark wrote,
‘There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have
grown warmer or more radioactive…. [one such time] was about the year 1100 that
seemed to affect the whole world but had its most dramatic effect in Western Europe
… The cathedrals of Durham and Canterbury arose out of clusters of wooden houses
… in a single lifetime.
4. See Warwick Hughes’ analysis at: http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool15.htm
5. Bill Kininmonth, Climate Change: A Natural Hazard, Multi-Science Publishing Co.
Ltd, UK, pages 192–3.
6. For example, ‘From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age’,
available at: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol6no1/reiter.htm
7. ‘Introduction’ to Robert Balling Jr, The Heated Debate, PRIPP, San Francisco, 1992.
The Lavoisier Group is named after the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine-
Laurent Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen, identified carbon dioxide as the product
of combustion of carbon in air, and who laid down the theoretical basis of
modern chemistry. He was also an ingenious experimenter and instrument-maker
who insisted on the highest possible accuracy when taking measurements. He
was executed by the French Revolutionary Government in 1794.
The Lavoisier Group was incorporated in April 2000. At that time, the founders
were concerned that the Australian Government might ratify the Kyoto Protocol
without proper understanding of the scientific claims on which it was based, or
of the economic implications of the decarbonisation regime which ratification
would have required.
In June 2002, Prime Minister John Howard stated in the Parliament that Australia
would not ratify Kyoto because it was ‘not in Australia’s interests to do so’. The
ALP has consistently adhered to a policy of ratification, but having lost the
2004 election, the possibility of Australia’s ratification has been deferred until
2007.
Meanwhile the debate has moved on. The Kyoto Protocol is now almost dead;
only two of its parties can possibly meet the 2012 emissions targets which were
accepted in 1997, and no country is prepared to commit to post-2012 emission
targets. Following a change in government, Canada may now formally withdraw
from the Kyoto Protocol, thus setting an example to be followed by other nations.
Nevertheless, there still exists a huge global network of institutions and scientists
who have hitched their wagons to the global warming star. Although the science
debate is now virtually over, the political debate will continue for years to come.
The Lavoisier Group provides a network and a Website which enables Australians
who are concerned about this issue to keep abreast of developments here and
overseas. Those who sympathise with our aims, and wish to join, can apply for
membership through the Website: www.lavoisier.com.au