In a great victory for common sense, Senator Steve Fielding has rejected the consensus on AGW, namely that anthropogenic CO2 is causing dangerous warming of the planet.

After talks with the government and top scientists, Senator Fielding, whose vote could be crucial in passing the Federal Government’s plan to put a price on carbon emissions, has released a document setting out his position.

“Global temperature isn’t rising,” it says.

Senator Fielding says he would not risk job losses on “unconvincing green science” to set up a carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS).
…
Senator Fielding’s stance appears to torpedo the chance of the scheme passing as the Government would need his support, as well as that of the Greens and independent Nick Xenophon.

Bravo, Senator, for having the courage to stand up to the blinkered dogma of the Rudd government, Penny Wong and the climate change religion, something the Opposition didn’t have the guts to do.

Read it here.

Professor Bob Carter was speaking in Bendigo last night at a climate science meeting, as the Bendigo Advertiser reports:

He said Australians were being conned, as the bill was aimed at carbon dioxide rather than carbon, and carbon dioxide was not a pollutant.

Professor Carter said the public should have access to balanced views on climate change.

Twenty years of intensive research and great expenditure had produced no compelling evidence that humans have had a significant effect on climate.

“I have been described as a sceptic. I am not a sceptic, I am a scientist, and all good scientists should be sceptical.

“I would rather be described as a climate agnostic.”
…
“If the bill is implemented, carbon dioxide emission will be reduced but the cost will be $3000 a head each year in taxes for every Australian.

“And the temperature change will be 0.001C by the year 2100.”

Read it here.

(h/t Watts Up With That). We always knew Hansen was a crazy alarmist, having given evidence in favour of the Kingsnorth demonstrators [vandals – Ed] in the UK. But now he has gone too far, and finds himself in the care of State troopers in West Virginia:

More than two dozen people — including actress Daryl Hannah and NASA climate scientist James Hansen — were arrested Tuesday in the latest protest in a growing civil disobedience campaign against mountaintop removal in Southern West Virginia. Full AP story here.

Hansen said: “I am not a politician; I am a scientist and a citizen.”

As Anthony Watts rightly states:

No Jimbo, you are an activist and an advocate for a cause.

Note to NASA: Now can you fire this guy?

Well said!

Read it here.

Another interesting article in The Australian, currently the only paper that has the guts to put forward any views contrary to the alarmist hysteria (aka “the consensus”) from the Fairfax press. Michael Asten, professorial fellow at Monash University’s school of geosciences, squares up Steve Fielding against Penny Wong:

IT is surprising to see the slow response of Climate Change Minister Penny Wong in fielding a team to counter the arguments assembled by Family First senator Steve Fielding’s team of experts and presented on this page last week. At this stage we don’t know whether the questions are too hard or she has opted for the regal approach of lofty silence. As a mere scientist, I’ll join my colleague Neville Nicholls, whose letter was published in The Australian on Saturday, and step in where others have declined to tread.
…
A crucial issue remains for our two teams to debate when they meet after the next siren. Even though a computer model incorporating CO2 variations and feedback mechanisms gives results consistent with temperature change of the past 50 years, that does not prove the link between CO2 and temperature change, especially if the link fails to be consistent with similar temperature changes in historic times. Are there alternative physical or chemical phenomena not yet incorporated into our climate models? Peter Schwerdtfeger offered one important phenomenon, the role of micro-particulate matter (air pollution), in these pages yesterday (see here).

The highly complex interaction of solar activity, solar magnetic field, solar wind, cosmic rays and cloud formation is another. For examples, see studies by scientists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and the Swiss Institute of Applied Physics and Climate Change Research, published this year in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. The former study, which uses sunspot records instead of tree rings as basic data, observes: “Interestingly, the amplitude of the present period of global warming does not significantly differ from the other episodes of relative warming that occurred in earlier centuries.” It appears that a Dutch referee is affirming team Fielding’s goal.

Read it here.

Despite “climate change” being the greatest threat to humanity since the dawn of time (© Al Gore, IPCC etc etc), the Senate decided to debate other “more pressing” bills [what could be “more pressing” than saving the planet?? – Ed] before the ETS this week, making it almost certain that it won’t be debated before at all before the winter break, which starts next week. The government were also hoping to clear the first hurdle for a possible double dissolution – now that won’t happen until August either.

Penny Wong is livid, of course:

“They have been filibustering, wasting time, using every tactic they can to delay debate on this Bill,” Senator Wong said.

Add to that the possibility of a leadership battle for the Liberals, given Turnbull’s ill-advised attempt to skewer Rudd and Swann in the Ute-gate saga, with any new leader being far less sympathetic to the whole idea of an ETS than Turnbull.

Another few nails driven firmly into the ETS’s coffin…

Read it here.

You can’t tax the sun, or clouds, or the variations in the earth’s orbit, or volcanic eruptions, or water vapour, or a myriad other possible causes of climate change … but you can tax CO2 emissions (or at least you can try). Interesting, isn’t it, that the alarmists would have you believe that the sole driver of “climate change” is the one thing that can be taxed and regulated. Coincidence? You decide.

Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University in Adelaide, is an AGW believer, and yet even he has doubts about the role of CO2.

ALTHOUGH there are many doubters of man-made climate change, I am not yet one of them. But I remain unconvinced that carbon dioxide is the sole bete noire. Two decades ago, I pored over the spectral properties of the infra-red radiation of this gas, which is essential to plant life, and found that it was almost completely overshadowed by the radiative properties of water vapour, which is vital to all forms of life on earth.

Repeatedly in science we are reminded that happenings in nature can rarely be ascribed to a single phenomenon. For example, sea levels on our coasts are dependent on winds and astronomical forces as well as atmospheric pressure and, on a different time scale, the temperature profile of the ocean. Now, with complete abandon, a vociferous body of claimants is insisting that CO2 alone is the root of climatic evil.

He also considers there may be far more serious effects from burning of fossil fuels – namely the particulates released:

Detailed studies led by internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall.

Rosenfeld’s research group has shown that humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2. Rather, pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia.

Whether all this is true or not is to an extent irrelevant. The point is that because the alarmists are so focussed on CO2, proper scientific research into other aspects of the atmosphere and climate is being ignored. As soon as dogma overtakes free-thinking scientific enquiry, we’re back to the Dark Ages.

Read it here.

Speaking on the upcoming vote in the Senate on the ETS:

“I want this debate to go for as long as possible. Call that a filibuster, call it what you want, call it you’re aunt Mary, I will debate this thing until there is not a breath left in me.”

Read it here (h/t Tom Nelson).

Hardly surprising, given that the government cannot answer three simple questions about the climate science behind the ETS.

Senator Fielding says meetings with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and chief scientist Penny Sackett have not convinced him of the science of climate change.

“I’m still open for them to have other information but from what I’ve seen it’s not a convincing argument,” he said.

“I don’t know how any parliamentarian could actually vote for this legislation given that they would have trouble trying to answer a question that the Minister and the chief scientist have had trouble answering themselves.”

Senator Fielding says Australia should not act until after the United Nations conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December.

“It is absolutely crazy for Australia to go it alone; we should definitely wait until Copenhagen,” he said.

“You’ve got China, you’ve got India; we’ve got to wait til Copenhagen. We need to see what the rest of the world are going to do, and then Australia can respond. Because frankly, going alone is suicide.“

Dead right.

Read it here.

The former adviser to Brendan Nelson has written an excellent piece in the Australian Financial Review comparing the likely fate of emissions trading legislation both here and in the US:

When Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama were elected to power, Australia and the United States were expected to implement overdue and concrete measures to slash the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

But a curious thing is happening on the road to the UN post-Kyoto global conference later this year: the legislation to implement an emissions trading scheme (ETS) – the chosen policy that would change the way we use energy – is likely to collapse in both Canberra and Washington.

And the reason for the opposition among politicians and commentators is the same in both Australia and the US: that any serious action to reduce each nation’s carbon footprint would be futile without the support of the developing, big polluting nations, most notably China and India, at the Copenhagen conference.

It was not Adelaide University’s Ian Plimer, but Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein who argued in the Washington Post this month that we “should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before [we] commit… to costly reductions.”

It was not Liberal frontbencher Andrew Robb, but leading Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner who argued in the Wall Street Journal we “cannot reduce the growth of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere without the developing nations cutting their emissions as well.”

And it was not National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce, but Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels who warned in last week’s GOP radio and Internet address that, under an ETS, “our farmers and livestock producers would see their costs skyrocket and our coal miners would be looking for new work.”

Public opinion in the US is also shifting dramatically: according to Gallup, 41 per cent of Americans think climate change is exaggerated (the highest percentage in more than a decade of polling) and among eight environmental concerns, climate change ranked last. Amid the financial crisis, protecting jobs now takes priority over combating global warming.

Just last week, President Obama’s No. 2 special envoy for climate change Jonathan Pershing said the US may miss the December deadline for committing to reduce its emissions, making it impossible for US negotiators to set a target for any successor deal to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen. Simply put, the US will follow its national interest as well as the electoral mood on global warming.

To the extent that such views prevail, they contradict the notion that Obama’s America will lead the world to a post-Kyoto low carbon future. In Australia, the federal Opposition’s support for a carbon pollution reduction scheme is conditional on not just the support of developing nations to cut emissions but also the passage of a US law that sets specific carbon targets. Ditto the governments of Canada and New Zealand.

The Chinese government expects developed nations to not only cut their emissions by at least 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, but donate up to 1 per cent of annual GDP to help poorer nations cope with climate change. The demands won’t be met.

The Australian Government has downgraded target rates to as low as 5 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020 and proposes to hand out free permits to big polluters.

Europe has pledged to cut emissions by 20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. But, despite having already implemented an ETS, it has failed to meet its mandatory carbon targets under the Kyoto protocol and it has fattened polluters’ profits without protecting consumers from higher energy prices.

In the US, the Waxman-Markey bill – named after two leading Democrat congressmen active on climate change – proposes a cut by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020 as well as a host of subsidies and special exemptions, including at least 85 per cent free permits to big polluters. The legislation has just passed a key congressional committee, and it will probably clear the House of Representatives during the northern summer.

But the bill faces a roadblock in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to overcome a filibuster. Most of the 40 Republicans as well as several Democrats from states that rely heavily on coal and whose energy costs would rise under an ETS are likely to oppose. Which means the climate bill will probably crash to defeat just as a similar bill did last year.

The point here is that different nations have different interests, and none is willing to make a serious cut without an equal commitment from others. It’s easy to understand why: if one nation adopts an ETS and its trading competitors do not, the former’s exports would cop a carbon cost not borne by its competitor. What may make sense for a developed country in Europe, moreover, does not work for a developing one in Asia eager to grow its economy and lift its people out of poverty.

Put another way, if every advanced country drastically slashes carbon emissions, cuts would be wiped out by emissions from China, already the world’s largest polluter, and India, coming up fast. Even before the global recession, neither nation was prepared to accept mandatory cuts, lest it hinder economic development.

Source: AFR – 18 June 2009

Bob Carter was one of Steve Fielding’s advisers in the recent meeting with Penny Wong (see here), and he has written about the experience:

Scientific legerdemain, and an apparent inability to discuss the important climate change issue in simple terms that the public can understand, are not adequate responses to the crisp questions that Senator Fielding posed to the Minister and has yet to receive clear answers to.

It was reported in the Business Age last July that the Ministry of Climate Change’s Green Paper on climate change, which was issued as a prelude to carbon dioxide taxation legislation, contained seven scientific errors and oversimplifications in the first sentence of its opening section.

Almost 12 months on, our experience confirms that the balance of the scientific advice Minister Wong is receiving is quite simply inadequate to justify the exorbitantly costly upheaval of our society’s energy usage that is intended to be driven by the government’s emissions trading legislation.

All Australians owe Senator Fielding a vote of thanks for having had the political courage to ask in parliament where the climate Empress’s clothes have gone. Together with the Family First Senator, and the public, we await with interest any further answers to his questions that Minister Wong’s advisors may yet provide.

Read it here.