A climate change text book for our peers

When you are tried by a jury you are said to be judged by your peers, and your peers are held to be competent to make all kinds of decisions, including whether to believe one or another expert witness.

Cartoonist John Spooner, a global warming skeptic, and co-author with geologist Professor Bob Carter, of Taxing Air: Facts and Fallacies about climate change wants to know why, then, when it comes to climate change, so many "experts" say we shouldn't apply the same due diligence to their expertise as our legal system applies to any expertise? What's the difference?

His conclusion is that they have a weak case, and thus the collaboration between him and geologist Bob Carter was born.

Taxing Air is a solid book. If you have been applying your critical faculties to the climate change debate there is nothing surprising in it, but it lays down the facts and the arguments in a question and answer format which makes them easy to follow. And it provides the bullets to shoot back at the other side in the carbon wars.

Added to that it uses the cartoonist's skills to make the arguments more accessible and memorable. While climate change ought to be an area of scientific debate, it has become a battle ground for propagandists, with the loudest voices being politicians, activists, and politician-activist scientists deploying standard rhetorical, as well as some shonky, tricks to win debates rather than prove their argument.

The essence of cartoons is that they make you think by entertaining you at the same time they subtly dislocate your world, making you open to new perceptions. Combining cartoons with solid scientific evidence is a stroke of brilliance.

For those who say "peer review" in a learned journal is all that is required to make a paper true, this is a book which rests on the thesis that the court of public opinion is actually better placed to ultimately tell who is right and who is wrong.

In fact we know that at least half that is published in peer reviewed journals is wrong, so for any public official to take them at face value without applying their own intellect to probing them is an act of complete negligence.

Professor Bob Carter is the source of most of the scientific information in the book, with acknowledgement of the assistance of Bill Kininmonth, Martin Feil, Stewart Franks and Bryan Leyland.

This is a well-credentialed line-up, and Carter, as a geologist, is a climate scientist with a very long and sophisticated view of climate and climate change.

The book acknowledges that there is much common ground in the area. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and all things being equal, more CO2 means a warmer earth. It is also true that the earth has warmed between 0.4 and 0.7 degrees Celsius in the last hundred years.

Carter narrows the argument down to three main points:

• What additional amount of warming can we expect into the future?
• What proportion of warming in the past is due to mankind, and what to natural variability?
• Are the IPCC's models a good predictor of the future

His conclusions are that while there is a human contribution, its effect going forward is unquantifiable and unlikely to be catastrophic, and that there are many other things to be much more worried about.

His proof for this conclusion is logically laid out in chapters such as "The record of climate change", "The Greenhouse hypothesis", "Computer Modelling", "Climate and the Ocean", etc.

It is an arrangement that doesn't require sequential reading. If you hear something about "ocean acidification" you can easily find it in the table of contents, and less easily in the index, and the issue is generally explained along lines of claim and counterclaim.

Why "less easily in the index"? As there is no chance that the ocean will ever become acidic, and as technically the absorption of CO2 by the oceans will only make it less alkaline, ocean acidification is listed under "ocean alkalinity".

Clearly there is some more work to be done on communication, and scientific exactness really can get in the way sometimes.

Another area of weakness is the part of the book dealing with economics, perhaps best exemplified by the heading "Why are economists involved in a scientific matter anyway?"

Having started the book criticising government by experts, this is an unproductive digression. While scientists may have expertise in determining scientific facts they generally have none running economies. Someone has to propose what to do with the facts, and that role falls to economists, amongst others.

And a pricing mechanism, which Carter criticises, is the best way of changing human behaviour.

I would also have liked footnotes in the chapters. When one discusses climate change on the Internet there is always some obsessive with all the time in the day to trawl Google who challenges you to provide evidence in the form of a peer reviewed paper of some incontrovertible fact.

It's tiresome and time consuming, and some footnotes would have made it easier to reference those online conversations.

But the failures are few and the successes are many.

I'm looking forward to future editions, perhaps with access to a website where references can be curated and updated in real time. The science moves on. Since the book's publication the IPCC has released parts of its Fifth Assessment Report, where there is some retreat from previously held positions in the direction that Carter points.

It seems a pity to have to wait years for a new edition of this book in hardcopy revised to incorporate the latest and the best science. Perhaps if the authors sell enough books they may be prepared to invest in some more modern technology. At $30 an edition it's not cheap, but it's still a lot cheaper than investing in pie-in-the-sky climate regulation schemes.