[I recently spoke to a teachers’ group about the state of the evidence on global warming. Having updated myself, and seen various reports of complacency, confusion or plain arrogant stupidity, I have written a summary here.]
As delegates argue in a Cancun resort on your behalf about who will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions first, what’s your own feeling about global warming? With record rain and floods all over the southeast and a big freeze in Europe, it may seem that global warming has taken a holiday.
I recently spoke to a Professional Development program for school teachers, in conjunction with the Australian Solar Energy Society conference. A PowerPoint file is available for download here.
One of the better discussions of the uncertainty about global warming, its implications, and the common misinterpretations of it, deliberate and otherwise:
Newly-installed minority Prime Minister Julia Gillard doesn’t get global warming.
Her chosen minister for “Climate Change” – the sanitised term for global warming – is Greg Combet, a former coal engineer, union official and MP with coal workers in his NSW electorate. He said in an interview with The Australian newspaper, referring to employees of the coal industry,
“I’ve got a responsibility to support those people’s jobs. The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future. What you’ve got to do is look to how we can achieve in the longer term things like carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power stations.”
So there it is. The Gillard government will continue the fantasy that Australia can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while preserving the coal industry.
[Published by On Line Opinion, 24 August.]
As the national election campaign approaches its climax, with global warming all but ignored by the major parties, the Australian Academy of Sciences has issued a report summarising the current state of climate change science. Its conclusions are clear and concerning. Global warming continues to occur, and the evidence is now strong that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause. The evidence supporting supporting climate sceptics is melting like the Arctic snow.
[Updated 21 July 10.] One of the most frequently and loudly repeated claims of climate sceptics is that the Earth has cooled since 1998. What the data have actually been showing is a pause similar to pauses in the 1980s and 1990s. The likely cause of the recent pause has been the El-Niño-La-Niña cycle. So far 2010 has been the hottest year on record, so the pause is over. Let’s see if false claims of global cooling also cease.
[A related article was posted on On Line Opinion 2 Aug 2010.]
The smoke screen obscuring the real obstacles to reducing Australias greenhouse gas emissions is unlikely to be dissipated by the imminent election campaign, whatever the global warming policies the Gillard Government.
The most telling part of the Rudd Governments deferral of efforts to reduce Australias greenhouse emissions is that it wont even look at the issue again until 2012. In other words, it is unlikely Labor will actually do anything in its next term, even though it leaves open the suggestion it might do something in 2013.
[21 April: a version of this has been posted at On Line Opinion.]
The committee charged with examining the quality of the climate science conducted at the University of East Anglia has found “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever”, according to its Chairperson, Lord Oxburgh.
Accusations of fraud or scientific misconduct have been widespread since emails were illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit last year. Oxburgh continued “whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly”. The committee considered that if there had been misconducted they would very likely have found it.
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