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Cool rationality shatters greenhouse hype

By Bob Carter - posted Thursday, 4 August 2005


Presented with these opinions, The Times was moved to comment "Britain's environmental policy is a costly shambles based on dubious predictions about the future".

That global-warming scaremongering has now been clearly identified as such, and influentially contradicted, does not, however, mean that climate change is now an unimportant public issue.

Climate change science is so uncertain that we cannot predict accurately even 10 years in advance, let alone 100, whether average global temperatures will rise (as predicted by some computer models) or fall (as predicted by others).

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Reduced to empiricism, we can only note that for the past several years, global temperatures have been falling, and also that the geological record contains many examples of sharp temperature changes of a degree or more over periods of time as short as several years or decades. That we are unable to predict the similar climate changes that are bound to occur in the future does not make their unheralded occurrence any less likely.

Our next and most vital task, therefore, is to dismantle the greenhouse propaganda industry that rules non-government organisations and the bureaucracies of developed countries.

In its place, organisations are required that provide balanced risk assessments of the likelihood of future climate changes, be they coolings or warmings, and of the best ways to mitigate the changes when they occur. The structure and mission of such new organisations should resemble audit commissions much more closely than they do our current greenhouse policy offices.

Who said that G8 meetings were self-indulgent talkfests that don't deliver real results? The signs are that the Gleneagles meeting may yet prove a historic turning point.

Unbelievably, and at long last, global-warming hype has become unfashionable. Let rational discussion of the real climate change issue commence.

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First published in the Australian Financial Review on July 14, 2005.



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About the Author

Professor Bob Carter is a researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University. Copies of scientific papers and other media articles by Bob Carter can be accessed through his website.

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