At the conference in December 1997, Australian representatives argued that we should be allowed a target of an 8% increase in our emissions because our economy is dependent on fossil fuels. Despite widespread condemnation from both advanced nations who were negotiating to curb their emissions considerably, and developing nations who felt their growth was being unreasonably capped, we stuck to this position and the rest of the world agreed rather than lose consensus. Then, to the horror of every civilised person on the planet, the Prime Minister announced that we would renege on our agreement on the basis that our economic growth was more important than the future of the planet.

Only the US government, which had been opposing the Kyoto Protocol since the Berlin conference of 1995 applauded. Australia’s refusal doubled the number of nations refusing to ratify the treaty and gave the US some credibility as one of two countries that refused to cooperate in a global effort to save the world.

Over the intervening decade we have heard a range of justifications for this anti-social position. The problem is not real, the science is not convincing, the problem might be real but we are not sure of the causes, it does not matter how much greenhouse gas we emit because other nations emit much more, the litany of weak excuses goes on and on.

Living in this country it is almost impossible to imagine the disdain the rest of the world feels for us. We are in a similar position to the children of drunks. We think that getting thrown out of parties is normal and we believe that all hosts are equally unreasonable self centred pigs, because that’s what we hear on the way home.

Leave the safety of our shores and spend any time in Europe, Japan or South America and you realise that the rest of the world is increasingly angry. European car companies, for example, have reduced emission targets by one third, and face further legislated reductions in the coming year. They are spending huge sums of money to comply with this negotiated regime and now demand that their governments place sanctions on products coming from the United States and Australia.

As we approach the next round of negotiations for a global protocol, Australia and the US have decided to use the Australia Pacific Economic Cooperation group to form an alternative strategy on addressing global warming and undermine the Kyoto Protocol. Posing as the architects of a solution that can bring the United States, Canada, Australia, China and India into a binding agreement, it is a thinly disguised attempt to derail attempts to shift the world’s energy production away from fossil fuels.

The screening this week of The Climate Change Swindle on Australia’s public broadcaster, after 47 of the scientists quoted in the film have publicly distanced themselves from it and claimed that the filmmaker has edited their quotes out of context and misused footage is simply another piece of ‘noise’ designed to distract the debate.

It is disgusting that a decade after Kyoto was negotiated that we are still arguing about whether global warming is real. This government has a clear agenda and that is to sell as much coal as possible before the world community forces us to stop. All the political bluster is just a distraction while the real action takes place at the port of Newcastle which ships one tenth of the coal used on the planet.

There is only one solution, evict this government at the next election and give The Greens control of the parliament. The Greens have consistently spelled out the imminent disaster facing the planet for two decades and have been the only party brave enough to grapple with the need to restructure our economy. The party’s position has not changed in all that time but the mainstream view has.

Vote for the party that is building the future. Vote one The Greens.

Indeed, the running time of the 72-minute original, screened in the UK in March this year, has since been pruned by Durkin to 52 minutes. Deletions include the blatant out-of-context quotes of Carl Wunsch (he threatened legal action after the UK screening), a removal of a slew of false statements (such as that volcanoes release far more CO2 than humans, when volcanoes actually release about 50 times less), and a number of distorted graphics, such as a manipulation of 20th century temperature rise. Alas, many others remain.

Amongst the selected contrarian ‘experts’ Durkin has rallied to his cause, there are Tim Ball and Patrick Michaels (who also happen to deny that CFCs cause damage to the ozone layer), and Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen (who, in earlier incarnations, had been active denialists of the link between passive smoking and lung cancer, despite neither having any medical expertise).

Investigative journalism has revealed that many of the interviewees who appear have received "research funds", in various guises, from the fossil fuel industry. Most are retired and have not published a scientific paper in years. Many have not published on climate change at all.

Errors

The GGWS program is riddled with errors and distortions, including howlers from ‘climate scientist’ Tim Ball who says the atmospheric content of CO2 is 0.054 per cent (it is 0.038 per cent – someone who purports to understand the atmosphere should get this basic fact right!) and Fred Singer mis-attributing a statement made by environmentalist James Lovelock to the UK Chief Scientist, Sir David King.

Durkin never states that the mythical charts, which apparently show a medieval warm period and Holocene climatic optimum that were warmer than the present day, come from doctored diagrams produced by a German school teacher, EG Beck (see www.realclimate.org). Moreover, the substantial planetary warming of the last three decades (inconvenient to the filmmaker’s message) was mysteriously lopped off the end of this chart! This list of inaccuracies and misrepresentations goes on (and on), and has been detailed by numerous scientific and media outlets.

Most strikingly, it is not mentioned in the GGWS that total solar irradiance – the factor claimed to be responsible for global warming – has actually weakened over the last 30 years, and that many of the historical correlations presented have been shown to fabricated. This decline in the sun’s output has occurred at the same time as an unprecedented spike in global temperature (which again, is not plotted).

In fact, essentially all the ‘contradictory science’ Durkin presents, such as that the upper atmosphere is not warming, has been debunked by later research. John Christy, the scientist and interviewee on whose work this latter claim is based, seems to have forgotten that he had written in a US Climate Change Science Program report: "This significant discrepancy [between lower and upper atmosphere warming] no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde [weather balloon instrument] data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies".

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, has previously rebuked the arguments of political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, contained in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, for ‘selective inattention to inconvenient literature and overemphasis of work that supports his lopsided views’. This is indeed an apt description of the GGWS.

Omissions

It is remarkable that for each apparent ‘inconsistency’ presented in the program, the well-known alternative (and evidence-based) scientific explanation is never offered. For instance, the cooling from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s in the northern hemisphere is attributable mostly to global dimming (primarily sulphur pollution from post-war industry, prior to implementation of clean air acts).

The 800-year lag between the beginnings of temperature increase and CO2 rise in the polar ice record is because the initial warming that provoked the end of the ice ages was caused by changes in the Earth’s alignment and orbit around the sun; not anthropogenic CO2. But it was an eventual increase in CO2, subsequently released by the oceans and biosphere as a feedback after they had begun to warm, that caused much more substantial global heating, and an eventual sea level rise of 120 metres.

Let me conclude by emphasising that the ‘expert views’ presented in the GGWS in reality represent the opinion of far fewer than 1 per cent of researchers engaged worldwide into research on the causes and consequences of global warming.

It is therefore staggering that such minority views are given such air time by the ABC, and moreover, that they are trumped with such gusto by special interest groups (such as the "Lavoisier group", who were represented on the follow-up panel of debaters) as providing ‘the answer to the lies and conspiracy’. One must wonder, what’s next on the ABC’s agenda? Perhaps it is a documentary on the reality of a 6000-year-old flat Earth, orbited by the sun and other planets, and resting on the shell of a giant turtle?

Professor Barry Brook is the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide and director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability.

Labor climate change spokesman Peter Garrett says Mr Howard is missing the point.

"Cherry picking the individual progress of countries does not in any way take away from the urgent necessity for Australia to set emissions targets itself, and nor to recognise that that is what the EU’s intention is," Mr Garrett said.

"It’s made it clear on the basis of the targets that it’s set to 2020."

Kyoto ratification

Mr Howard says Australia is on track to meet its own Kyoto targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

He says the Government did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol because it would have disadvantaged Australian industry.

"We would have assumed obligations which countries against which Australia competes, such as China and Indonesia, would not have assumed," he said.

"That would have put our industries at a competitive disadvantage."

Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd says the Government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol to ensure Australia is involved in international talks on climate change in the future.

Mr Rudd says ratifying the protocol will make sure Australia is involved in discussions about climate change talks beyond 2012.

"That will critically influence the way in which coal and carbon-based fuels are traded in the future," he said.

"We need to be at that negotiating table and the way to be at that negotiating table is to ratify Kyoto."

Mr Durkin also said a warmer period some hundreds of years ago, referred to as the mediaeval warm period, was even hotter than temperatures today.

Pressed by interviewer Tony Jones on why he did not avail himself of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) graphs available since 1990 – which have shown astronomical rising temperatures and slowing sunspot activity, Mr Durkin said they were unreliable.

“You can’t just get a graph produced by Hubert Lamb on the various statistics and then add another bit of line to it,” Mr Durkin told the program.

“In terms of the error bars of that graph, it is absolutely absurd to quibble on when it finishes in terms of tens of dates.”

Mr Durkin took exception to questions over why he referred, in his program, to temperatures matching sunspot activity “now”, when the graph ended around 1980.

This was despite IPCC reports in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007 showing steady increases in temperatures.

“I’ll tell you exactly why we didn’t use one of those. They were superseded by graphs which eliminated the mediaeval warm period,” he said.

“This is what (his opponents) do. They’ll fix on something which is a moot point.

“Personally, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to refer to the late 20th century as now, just as the IPCC did.”

Read prominent scientists’ concerns about The Great Global Warming Swindle in Open Letter to Martin Durkin
To see the documentary online, click here

Let’s have a minister for climate change: Like some other States and like Labor federally, McKim proposed having a minister for climate change. It was Federal Labor Party policy to have a minister for climate change. In South Australia the Premier was the minister for climate change and in Victoria Thwaites was the minister. "When you have a minister for climate change you get a coherent response to the greatest public policy challenge facing us today. When you have the Minister for Primary Industries and Water overseeing Tasmania’s climate change response you get the deficient and minimalist response to the challenge of climate change that we have seen from Labor in Tasmania," he said.

Strategy with good ideas, but vague: McKim wanted to go into a little more detail on the Greens’ suggestions for a coherent response to climate change based on their submission to the review of the Tasmanian Government’s draft climate change strategy. These suggestions were made in an attempt to be cooperative with the Government, he said. The Greens were glad that the Government chose to commission and publish a draft climate change strategy for Tasmania, but disappointed at its minimalist nature, although there were some good ideas in it. "We are not saying that we have managed to think of every response that the State should enact in relation to climate change, but we have had a good think about it and we have put together what I think is a pretty solid submission that took us some time and effort," McKim said.

Reference: Nicholas McKim – Tasmanian Greens, Member of the House of Assembly, TAS; David Llewellyn – Member for Lyons, Minister for Primary Industries & Water, TAS, 12 June 2007

Erisk Net, 12/6/2007