Do we really have control over our climate?

In 1816, the year after Waterloo, England had no summer, followed by massive crop failure. This was the consequence of the eruption of Mt Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago, overlaid on what were already cold and miserable conditions. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide was not in play here.

The 20th century record shows a warming trend from 1920 to 1945, cooling from 1945 to 1976, and warming since then. The only non-trivial correlation between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global temperature is found between 1976 and the present. On this slender thread the entire current anthropogenist hysteria is based.

Former US Vice President Al Gore, in his much celebrated movie An Inconvenient Truth, made much of the close tracking found in the Vostok Ice Cores between global temperatures over the past 500,000 years and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. The correlation is indeed extraordinary, and in the movie Gore climbed up on a step ladder to show that current concentrations exceed those calculated from the ice cores by 150ppmv.

Al Gore with his private jet and his imperial life style reminds me of Elmer Gantry, the fictional American preacher of the 1950s who was against fornication and other sins of the flesh, but whose frailty in these matters matched the vigour of his preaching. In particular I am reminded, from the same era, of the Methodist opposition to fornication, on the grounds that it could lead to dancing. Gore has a similar problem in that the carbon dioxide concentrations from the Vostok ice cores lag the temperature record by between 500 and 800 years.

The climate models which take up so much computer time in the Hadley Centre in East Anglia and the CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Research at Edithvale, Victoria, among seven or eight other such models, are constructed to prove the results required of them. The degree of positive feedback which is necessary to transform small perturbations in carbon dioxide concentrations (a very minor greenhouse gas) into substantial changes in water vapour (by far the dominant greenhouse gas) is so great that the climate models are inherently unstable, and require constant dampening in order to obtain any results.

The explanatory power of these climate models, when the known climate history of the world over the last century is replayed and they are asked to predict what we know has taken place, is zero. But it is because these same climate models predict temperature increases (as in AR4) of 2 to 4.5C as a consequence of doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations, that attempts are being made to bully us into accepting decarbonisation of the Australian economy.

The new Labor Leader, Kevin Rudd, is being disingenuous about the economic consequences of decarbonisation. His statement on January 30, 2007 was reported thus:

The first thing the federal government can do is recognise that climate change is real, … Mr Howard's cabinet still has in it an industry minister who only a few months ago said climate change was a pile of hogwash. … Australia should implement its own national emissions trading scheme and develop an effective renewable energy target. … We need global leadership on climate change, and instead Mr Howard follows (US President George) Bush in ignoring the Kyoto Protocol and ignoring practical programs of action which will help deal with, and turn back, the challenge of climate change.

Kevin Rudd must be aware that an “emissions trading scheme” is just a carbon tax under another name, with the added opportunity for the suits to trade the permits sold or allocated by the state.

He must also be aware that so-called renewable energy, of which wind-mills are the most bizarre example, increase the cost of electricity by a factor of at least three, and that most of those countries, particularly Germany, which have expended huge sums on these symbols of politically correct energy, have begun to draw back from the serious economic consequences of carrying out Green programs of de-industrialisation.

Since World War II Australia has developed as a world class economy based on the comparative advantages we enjoy as a producer of mineral and agricultural commodities. This type of economic success has been much derided by members of the chattering classes who deemed mining, particularly, to be a seriously embarrassing way of earning a living.

But as the current minerals boom reminds us, minerals and wool and grains and other rural commodities have been the source of our enviable wealth since the 1830s, and our huge resources of low cost coal, notably the vast brown coal resources of the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, provide the basis for low cost electricity which powers many billions of dollars worth of exports containing “congealed electricity”, aluminium being the prime example.