“No Smoking Hot Spot”
Jul 23rd 2008Wallabynerd alert
A former consultant for the Australian Greenhouse Office writes in The Australian about the lack of evidence pointing to carbon dioxide emissions as the cause of global warming. (He was actually the one who wrote the FullCAM model that measures Australia’s compliance with Kyoto.)
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.
The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.
But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
(Answer: Shout louder that “consensus” “proves” your point, so why talk about the facts when it’s much more effective to show polar bears on ice floes?)
The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.
No – those who want to change things only need to persuade people that the evidence exists, and that those who want to examine that evidence are reactionary ostriches bought by Big Oil. We’ve got a disaster (global warming), we’ve got convenient villains (industry in general), we’ve got people eager to suspend disbelief because Scientists Say It’s So.