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Petrol supplier, Caltex, has flagged that it will ask the Australian Federal Government for a petrol price rise of ten cents to address the cost of complying with emission trading schemes. The RACV’s David Cummings has expressed the view that the focus should remain on coal fired power stations. “Drivers are already facing enough taxes. It is way too early for Caltex to ask drivers to pay for their inefficiencies,” he said. In contrast, economics writer Ross Gittins has called repeatedly for the government to increase the petrol excise to begin reducing consumption, fuel investment in renewables and begin future proofing the economy against the impending oil shock. The government is repeating public statements by the oil industry that the price of petrol would fall if governments reduce their stock piles.

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 They were superseded by graphs which eliminated the mediaeval warm period,” he said.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

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."

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.

The politics of climate change: In the course of his PhD research into the politics of climate change, Pearse interviewed scores of key players in the greenhouse policy debate. Most enlightening and, ultimately the most politically damaging, was the information he gleaned from members of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network. "The AIGN is a highly influential collection of Australia’s biggest greenhouse polluters, consisting of a dozen industry associations and a similar number of individual companies that represent Australia’s largest fossil fuel producers and consumers.", Pearse wrote.

The `greenhouse mafia’: Almost all, he discovered, were former federal bureaucrats and/or ministerial staffers from the industry portfolio. They openly called themselves "the greenhouse mafia and made it clear their effect on government policy was far reaching and profound." One even told him: “We know where every skeleton in the closet is. Most of them we buried."

Fallout was swift and final: Even though he was on a fast track to Liberal party pre-selection, Pearse decided the dangers of climate change were too urgent to wait the 20 years it wjould take before he might be able to directly affect policy himself. In February 2006, he made his `greenhouse mafia’ allegations on the ABC’s Four Corners program. The fallout was swift and final. "The government just dismissed the claims the very next day," Pearse said. "I was told to forget about running for office, a couple of MPs who wanted to speak in my defence were told to shut up. The doors just slammed.

"The whistle didn’t work," he said of his Four Corners interview, "so I had to get out my trumpet."
 

Guy Pearse spoke at the Art Gallery auditorium on 6 July at 11.15am, http://www.festivalofideas.com.au

The Advertiser, 6/7/2007, p. 27

Source: Erisk Net