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Reason triumphs: Tribunal says warming doom-mongers are exaggerating

February 16, 2007



A brave - as in evidence-based - decision by a Queensland tribunal has
accused prominent global warming prophets of exaggerating and distorting
evidence.



Its devastating findings should give rationalists faith that - glory
be - reason is not yet dead in Australia.



As the ABC reports:

ELEANOR HALL: While the industry's unions may be trying to adjust to
climate change, one of the world's biggest mining companies has just won
a case in Queensland in which the judge questioned the science behind
global warming concerns.



The Queensland Conservation Council had taken action in the Land and
Resources Tribunal in an attempt to force mining giant Xstrata to offset
any greenhouse gas emissions involved in expanding its Newlands coal
mine in central Queensland.



But in a win for the coal industry, the tribunal ruled the mine
expansion would not have an adverse environmental impact, and at the
same time it criticised the international report released by the world's
top climate scientists earlier this month.



Some notable doom-mongers get their come-uppance - like the Australian
Conservation Foundation's Ian Lowe:



Professor Ian Lowe gave evidence on behalf of the Queensland
Conservation Council, saying the proposed mine would contribute to the
cumulative impacts of global warming and climate change.



But the Tribunal criticised that evidence, saying he'd grossly
exaggerated likely emissions by comparing emissions over the 15-year
life of the mine with annual global emissions.



Grossly exaggerated? Ian Lowe?



Ouch. And not just him, of course.



The tribunal was also sceptical of two recent environmental reports,
including the Stern Review and the latest report from Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.



In its decision it said the Stern Review has been criticised on
scientific and economic grounds as biased, flawed and alarmist.



I can't imagine what give the judge that idea. Not if he's an ABC
listener or reader of Fairfax newspapers. But if, for instance, he's
read this, then everything becomes clearer.



And I gather the the tribunal president, Greg Koppenol, isn't much of a
fan of close-our-coal-exports extremists such as Tim Flannery and Bob
Brown, either.



It also said that imposing conditions on the mine would drive wealth and
jobs overseas and have serious economic and social impacts on the state.



More from The Australian:



In an extraordinary decision handed down yesterday, tribunal chairman
Greg Koppenol lashed out at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change and the Stern Review, which have in recent months generated huge
concern worldwide about global warming.



Mr Koppenol accused prominent ecologist and Australian Conservation
Foundation president Ian Lowe of exaggerating the facts by a factor of
218 in his evidence to the tribunal.



And this:



Mr Koppenol said the intergovernmental panel's report, released last
month, had concluded that most of the observed increases in temperatures
since the mid-1900s were due to emissions.



But a "close examination" of the global mean temperature chart, which
was said to support that view, revealed temperatures rose by just 0.5
per cent from 1900 to last year.



The largest temperature rise was 0.75 per cent between 1976 and 1998,
but similar rises occurred in 1852-1878 and 1910-1944.



Mr Koppenol said the chart showed average temperatures had risen by 0.6C
since 1951. As the panel had said "most" of the rise was due to
emissions, an increase of about 0.45 per cent over 55 years seemed a
"surprisingly low figure" upon which to base concerns about global
warming.



UPDATE

The tribunal finding is here.



And it hoes into other environmentalists and scientists for exaggerating
global warming and its effects, too.



There's Jon Norling, of Urban Economics:



Mr Jon Norling spoke about the economic effects of climate change. Like
Professor Lowe, he placed great emphasis upon:

. the British Government's 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate
Change (the Stern Review),3 which concluded that there would be very
serious consequences for humanity because of global warming-induced
climate change if GHG emissions were not severely cut; and

. assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Regrettably, Mr Norling grossly exaggerated references in the Stern
Review to sea level rises: for example, converting Stern's "if" certain
ice sheets melt over "centuries to millennia", to "when" they melt
over
"the next several centuries" and suggesting that sea levels could rise
5m to 12m over the next century-when Stern predicted only 0.09m to 0.88m
and IPCC only 0.18m to 0.59m.



There's last year's much-hyped review of Sir Nicholas Stern, a British
public servant:



However, the Stern Review has been severely criticised on both
scientific and economic grounds. Papers recently published by Professor
Robert Carter et al and Professor Sir Ian Byatt et al concluded that
Stern's claim that the scientific evidence for GHG-induced serious
global warming and climate change was overwhelming was just an assertion
and was wrong-and that the Stern Review was:

. biased, selective and unbalanced;

. scientifically flawed;

. a vehicle for speculative alarmism; and

. not a basis for informed and responsible policies.



Those authors also said that climate prediction is an uncertain new area
and not a mature science and that the rates of modern temperature change
observed fall well within the rates of minor warmings and coolings
inferred for the Holocene (the last 10,000 years of the Earth's history)
in, eg, the GRIP ice core (a 3,029m long ice core drilled in Greenland
from 1989 to 1992).



There's the IPCC report:



[17] Finally, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change's Summary for Policymakers was released on 2
February 2007. It relevantly concluded that is very likely that
human-induced GHGs are causing global warming, and that most of the
observed increases in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th
century are very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic
(human-caused) GHG concentrations. ...



But the fact that very similar rises have previously occurred
(1852-1878, 0.65°C and 1910-1944, 0.65°C) was not specifically mentioned
or causally explained in the Summary. Also not mentioned or causally
explained is the fact that temperatures have actually fallen 0.05°C over
the last 8 years.



Bravo, Greg Koppenol.



http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/reason_triumphs
_tribunal_says_warming_doom_mongers_are_exaggerating/
--



Warmest Regards

Bonzo

"CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on
long, medium and even short time scales." R. Timothy Patterson,
Professor Of Geology, Director Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center,
Carleton University, Canada

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