david v goliath campaign, page-2

I wrote to my federal MP (a Lib) a while ago, re their Direct Action Plan. As you will see, I don't agree with you. I said :

Much of the Direct Action Plan is good if the cost is modest :

- No carbon tax
- Focussing on positive local environmental outcomes
- revegetation
- investing in soil carbon
- cleaning up power stations
- capturing gas from landfill
- increased energy efficiency
- solar energy (provided that any subsidies are small)

But there are serious problems with :

- advice from the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO
- reliance on the IPCC
- 5% CO2 emissions reduction by 2020 (pointless, see below)
- maintaining or increasing the RET (because it forces up costs for everyone, damages Australia's economy, and cannot ever have any measurable effect on global temperature even if the IPCC report is 100% correct)

As you say - and I agree - there is evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing, based on long term observations of air temperatures, the heat content of the ocean, and changes to glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice. That is exactly as would be expected, climate has always changed, sometimes warming, sometimes cooling. It cooled in the early 1900s, warmed for (about) 30 years to 1940, cooled for 30 years, warmed for 30 years (the period that caused all the fuss), and now hasn't warmed for 15+ years and some scientists are expecting cooling.

What has not been properly established is that the late 20th century warming was caused by man-made CO2. The whole scientific case boils down to two arguments:

1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, ie, increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere causes higher temperatures.
2. Computer models put the amount of warming per doubling of CO2 ("climate sensitivity") at 2°C–4.5°C (IPCC draft report AR5 para TS.5.3).

#1 above is generally not disputed. Scientific papers, cited by the IPCC and generally accepted by "sceptics", suggest that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will increase global temperature by a benign 1.2 deg C.

The problem lies with #2 above. There is no sound scientific basis for a higher climate sensitivity than 1.2 (deg C per doubled CO2). I would particularly like to go through this aspect of the science with you, and it isn't as complex as you might perhaps expect.

But there are some other angles which may be helpful to you, for understanding the limitations to the effectiveness of Australian government initiatives:

China and India will continue to increase CO2 emissions by vastly higher amounts than any reductions that Australia can possibly make in their attempts to reduce global warming. ie, the Australian government will, to put it bluntly, be pissing in the wind [Cambridge dictionary : to be trying to do something when there is no hope of succeeding].
The IPCC report says of climate sensitivity "The most likely value remains near 3°C" per doubled CO2 (IPCC draft report AR5 para TS.5.3, effectively no change from AR4's 3.2°C). It has taken over 50 years for CO2 concentration to increase by just a quarter from 0.032% to 0.04% of the atmosphere:

[graph of Mauna Loa CO2]

At the current rate, it would take two centuries to double the CO2 concentration, by which time we would be getting seriously short of fossil fuel anyway. And bear in mind that it is generally agreed that the first 2 deg C or so of warming from now on would, on balance, be beneficial.

The USA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) report "State of the climate in 2008" (http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf, see p.24/198) stated that a zero trend in global temperature for 15 years or more would "create a discrepancy" between the models and observation - ie, that the models would have been shown to be wrong. The global temperature has now had a zero trend for nearly 17 years.

[graph of RSS Trend from woodfortrees.com]

(The exact period varies between the various global temperature data sets, but all are showing a long period of no statistical warming). In science, observation trumps theory, ie, if observations are contrary to your theory then your theory is wrong. In this case, the climate models are clearly wrong. Specifically, they exaggerate the effect of CO2.

So - not only is there no established danger from CO2, but there is pretty compelling evidence that there is no danger.

Any action by the Australian government should be very low cost, or worth doing in its own right.