‘Economy will be wrecked’ in bogus drive to reduce CO2 emissions, he adds

BREAKING NEWS

The Australian scientist who developed his country’s Kyoto accounting protocol says there is no evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming and global warming itself appears to have stopped by 2001, with temperatures now back to 1980 levels.

In an article in The Australian newspaper today, Dr David Evans says that despite years of searching for it, scientists have found no evidence to support the theory that carbon emissions cause significant global warming.

While Dr Evans accepts global warming has occurred, he insists there is no evidence carbon emissions caused it, despite computer modelling that suggested warming would follow higher carbon dioxide emissions.

Further, he says all the evidence is there has been no global warming since 2001, and temperatures are now back to 1980 levels.

“What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise?” he writes. “The [Australian] Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions… When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.”

Dr Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

“I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector,” he says. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office.”

When he started that job in 1999, the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good, he wrote.

“CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects. The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.”

But since 1999, new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming.

“As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir’?

“There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

“One. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it. Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

“If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

“When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

“Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot.

“If you believe that you’d believe anything.

“Two. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

“Three. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the ‘urban heat island’ effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

“Four. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.”

None of these points are controversial, Dr Evans writes. Alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance, he adds.

“The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician’s assertion.

“Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming. So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

“In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

“If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don’t you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

“The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

“What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

“The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.”

Only in Wellington. At lunchtime today, the Governor-General, Anand Satyanand, was standing outside Farmers in Lambton Quay chatting away happily to somebody.

It has always been so. I often saw Dame Silvia Cartwright, when she was governor-general, shopping in Farmers at lunchtimes.

One often sees members of Parliament, and even cabinet ministers, shopping in the Molesworth St New World.

Long may this wonderful informality continue.

Travelling into town today on a Route 17 bus with the Snapper readers disabled, I listened to a Morning Report journalist saying how good this system is and how the bugs have been ironed out of it. I doubt she is a bus user.

The reporter contacted me earlier this week as a result of reading articles on this blog about Snapper, which is a smart-card system that is not only replacing the old 10-trip bus tickets, but can be used to pay for coffee, drycleaning and many other small purchases at retailers that will also have Snapper readers.

I told her that I thought the introduction of Snapper was proceeding in a disorganised way, as, for example, Route 17 buses have been Snapper-equipped for a trial since April, yet late last week users were told by email that from this week, there was no guarantee of getting a Snapper-enabled bus on this route, so we should be prepared to use other forms of payment, such as cash or a 10-trip ticket. And, of five 17s I have caught so far this week, only one has had its Snapper reader working. Just why this should be the case in the week the system was meant to have been introduced across the Go Wellington network is anyone’s guess, and is unacceptably bad customer relations for passengers on a route where every bus had been Snapper-enabled for months and the cards had been used every trip by many passengers.

I also told her I thought the Snapper system was a very good idea, that the technology had been proven overseas (London’s Oyster card and Hong Kong’s Octopus, for example), and that the problems I had noted on this blog were clearly only teething problems, but that Go Wellington seemed to be rushing into its system-wide introduction a little early.

She went to the bus company and came back and told me I was wrong, that everything was fine and working perfectly, according to the bus company, which to prove it provided her with a large number of happy Snappers from the ANZ Bank (who seemed from her report to use it to buy coffee rather than catch buses).

As I said, nothing she said gave me the impression she actually uses the buses.

Does the Pope believe in god? How could he? Christian religious leaders like Pope Benedict XVI who is in Sydney for his church’s World Youth Day are intelligent, educated people, far more advanced in theological thinking than their ordinary followers, many of whom still probably believe in the literal truth of historic church teachings.

Science has long moved past the Bible accounts of the Earth being created in seven days. Mainstream Christian theology has long moved past accepting that Genesis is anything other than a “creation myth” and most Christian religious scholars accept the scientific explanation that the universe was created in a “big bang” some 13.7 billion years ago.

The Big Bang explanation does not disprove there is some kind of godlike creator of the universe. Nor does it mean there must be some kind of supreme power. What happened before the Big Bang? A Big Crunch, maybe, when a previous universe collapsed on its own gravity and spawned a new one, a cycle that could continue forever. Time may be circular rather than in a straight line. But surely it started somewhere, and from something? Even the great physicist Stephen Hawking describes seeking the answers to the beginning of time as knowing the mind of god.

I was born in a Catholic family and raised as a Catholic until I was about seven or eight. My mother and father were respectively from Scots and Irish Catholic families and made a nominal attempt to bring their children up in their parents’ faith. I don’t think either of them were religious. They sent me to Church as a small child but did not go themselves, and I was sent to a local Catholic school when I started school.

Today, we hear lots of stories about Catholic priests sexually abusing children. I was a child who attended church and met many priests and attended a school run by nuns. My memory of all the priests I met is of good, kind men, some of whom like Father Kelly tried to get me (at age six) to join the priesthood but accepted without demur I preferred (even at that age) to grow up, become a journalist, get married and have children (and it happened). My memory of the nuns is of sadistic, nasty tyrants.

Sister Ambrosine, who ran the school I was sent to at age five, was one of the nastiest people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. She spent much of her time belting the hell out of a friend of mine, Michael Keating, because he was left-handed and she was convinced that Satan made him write with his left hand and only her beating him into writing with his right-hand would save him from hell. One day, when I was seven, she started assaulting me for reasons I cannot remember, digging her fingernails into my hand till I started bleeding profusely, saying she would not stop till I cried. Bastard that I was, I said I would not cry, invoking her fury even more. When I got home that day, my parents took one look at my bloody hand and removed me from that school and put me straight into the nearby state school. My education never looked back. Sister Ambrosine was never prosecuted for her sadism, which was inflicted on many more small children than me and Michael Keating.

Despite my Catholic beginnings, I am not, and never was, religious. Nor am I am anti-religious. I don’t believe there is a god and I don’t believe there is an afterlife. If someone wants to believe in a god or a faith or a life after death, that is fine by me. I will not ridicule their faith, and indeed I often admire people of religious conviction for their faith, whatever it is, be it Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever.

Religious faith can give great comfort to people and support a decent belief system that can underpin a strong society. I actually believe that Jesus really existed, for example, and was a Jewish holy man of his time. There is enough historic evidence from his time to support that. I really like his biblical teachings such as who will cast the first stone, and many similar anecdotes. I just don’t believe he was the son of some god. Muhammad also clearly is a genuine historical figure.

With all this background, it has saddened me that almost all the Australian media coverage of Pope Benedict’s visit to Sydney this week has been about the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

I don’t doubt that some Catholic priests abused children, but in my experience as a young child in that church, most priests were kind men and many nuns were the abusers. This has been confirmed to me many times since in conversations with former fellow pupils.

I am much more interested, as someone with a lifelong interest in both science and religion, with knowing more about the theological beliefs of the current pope. He is an educated man of deep conviction and substance. I would like to hear about his views of the existence of the god as taught by the historical church, and how he reconciles those views with the modern science of the universe, which I suspect he is very familiar with. And much, much more of his views about how people of different faiths and backgrounds can get on in this small world.

The recent revival of fundamentalist Islam (which has the same god as Christians and Jews and which says Jesus was the last prophet before Muhammad) is probably one of the most important developments of recent times. In this small world, we all have to live together. I would prefer to be hearing more about Pope Benedict’s plans for dialogue with Islam than with the issues the media has seized upon.

Unfortunately, when the Pope did address issues of Islam-Christian debate, in a theological address at the University of Regensberg in 2006, the media beat-up and distortion of what he said led to an international uproar claiming he had insulted Islam. Churches on the West Bank were torched. The Pope was forced to apologise. Incidents such as that make it less likely we will hear much more of his views.

But I live in hope. Religion (or hopefully faith which is not quite the same thing) has a place in today’s world, but it would be good to see a better debate on its place than the shallow one tossed about in the media. Pope Benedict is a world leader and could do great good for the world.

The petrol price yo-yo I noticed with the 6c rise and fall at my local Mobil this week continues with Shell annoucing a 4c drop, taking 91 Octane to 214.9c a litre.

With world oil prices still falling, the other firms will follow, and indeed, BP and Gull quickly did.

It is good to see an example of an oil company putting down pump prices almost as fast as they are raised in response to international price movements. It’s also a 1c bigger drop than the Automobile Association called for yesterday.

World crude oil prices have fallen $US 10 a barrel to around $US 134 in the past few days and refined products have followed them down.

On Sunday we walked along Wellington’s wild south coast from Owhiro Bay, past Red Rocks to the seal colony at Sinclair Head, by the Pass of Branda-like Devil’s Gate. There were seals galore, scores and scores of them, sunning themselves and barely taking notice of the dozens of humans who were turning up to see them. We sat on the beach for an hour, only metres from the nearest seals, for a little picnic, not wanting to leave, so amazing was it to see so many of these animals.

The seals that come ashore here are male fur seals, which start to arrive in May then leave by October for the mating season. While at the coast, they eat as much as they can (fish and squid, mainly) to be in the best possible shape for the mating season, when they eat very little. They go fishing mostly at night, when their prey is closer to the surface and easier to catch, and loll on the beach (well, on the rocks, mainly, as big rocks are what the beach mostly is here) during the day.

The signs say not to go too close and not to get between a seal and the sea, but none of these big animals seemed aggressive this day. We noticed they had very big front teeth, though!

When I was last there, two years ago, there were only about two seals present, and boy did they stink. Interestingly, there was no foul smell on Sunday – I suspect the heavy rain on Friday and Saturday washed it all away.

Along the way there is a big rock known locally as “Fly Rock.” On my last visit I threw a rock at it and thousands of flying insects streamed out and got into my hair and clothes. This time there appeared to be no insects, and, in the new information centre at the Owhiro Bay carpark, one of the posters asks “what has happened to the flies of Fly Rock?” It doesn’t give an answer. Does anyone know?

The walk from Owhiro Bay to the seals is easy enough to push a baby buggy (which many couples were doing) and very interesting. Steep cliffs rise above the beach, with a trail leading to the Brooklyn wind turbine about halfway along. Several historic baches, close to 100 years old, remain and appear still to be inhabited – there were people at two of them. Red Rocks are just that – a seam of iron-rich rock laid down in an undersea volcanic eruption millions of years ago that now sprawls down the hillside and across the beach. There is a shallow stream that needs fording two-thirds of the way along. It was running deeper on Sunday on account of the rain but was still straightforward to cross.

The beach track is also a designated road but it is closed to motor traffic on Sundays, and good thing too given the hundreds of walkers. Even so, one hoon in a wankmobile came roaring along blasting his horn at people to get out of his way. He must have driven around the closed gate at the Owhiro Bay carpark blocking vehicle access to the beach.

One of the other fine features of Sunday was the weather. I am continually impressed at how accurately MetService forecasts Wellington’s weather. It promised Sunday would be fine, sunny and windless, and it was.

One of the region’s colourful characters, Ian Little of Foxton, died yesterday. Among his many occupations over the years, Ian was in the 1970s a Wellington City Transport bus driver. He acquired a fleet of second-hand trolley and diesel buses from all over New Zealand before moving to Foxton in 1989 and opening a bus museum there. He erected trolley bus wires above a number of Foxton’s streets for the use of his trolleys. He was a delightfully eccentric man, loud of laugh and free with anecdotes. He once let me drive one of his trolley buses, a Dunedin one. His wife, Christina, runs a doll gallery in Foxton that has 500 hand-made dolls. Ian also ran Radio Foxton, a local radio station that broadcasts on Sundays. Trolley bus fans came from all over the world to ride on his buses. Just what will become of the museum, which was his life’s work, is unclear. Ian was only 76. His funeral will be held in Foxton on Saturday and there is talk of his casket being carried along the town’s Main Rd in one of his beloved trolley buses.

My local Mobil has reduced its posted price for 91 Octane to 212.9c a litre, a 6c fall and the same that petrol prices rose by on July 7. I wonder if this is a mistake or if others have also cut prices?

• Update 8am Thursday 17: The price has now gone back to 218.9c, after several days at the lower rate. Very odd.

Air crash investigators have still not reported a definitive explanation for the dramatic crash-landing of a British Airways Boeing 777 at London Heathrow on January 17.

The July bulletin of the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch gives no update at all of its investigation into flight BA38, a 777 that lost power as it was landing at Heathrow and crashed short of the runway after some amazingly courageous flying by First Officer John Coward, who managed to glide the stricken big jet over the roofs of houses and over the adjacent motorway despite lack of engine power at the most critical moment of the landing (look at the dramatic pictures I have linked to, taken by someone photographing the 777 as it came in and then crashed) .

Nobody was killed in the crash, which wrote off the 777, and only a few passengers were injured. It was the first crash of a Boeing 777 since the type first flew in 1994. It is probably the safest airliner ever built.

I am posting this update because every day, without fail, I get Google searches to this blog seeking answers to the BA38 crash mystery, following my earlier articles about it. When the Air Accidents Investigation Branch delivers its verdict, I hope to be among the first to report it.

Flying has never been safer, with very few major fatal airliner crashes each year despite the huge growth in the number of planes in the air and the number of people flying. Modern jets are incredibly safe and have navigation and collision-avoidance systems that ensure they can avoid many of the problems that used to lead to crashes. It is the very sophistication of today’s aircraft that makes the unexplained loss of power of BA38 of such concern.

Preliminary reports suggest a problem with the engine fuel-feed system was behind the BA38 crash-landing, but it does not seem an issue of wider concern, otherwise the investigators would have published a bulletin warning other 777 operators, which include Air New Zealand, which has eight of them.

The Snapper smart cards that have been trialled on Go Wellington’s Route 17 buses since April are being introduced across the Go Wellington system from Monday, but it doesn’t seem to have been that well thought-through.

As one of the regular No 17 users given the chance to trial Snapper, I have received an email saying that the dedicated buses with Snapper readers used on the route are being merged back into the wider bus fleet from Monday and that not all No 17s will now have Snapper readers.

“What that means for you is that the bus that picks you up on Route 17 may or may not be Snapper enabled. To ensure that you are not inconvenienced, please ensure that you have an alternative method of payment available to you,” the email says.

This is not something likely to generate enthusiasm for the new payment system. It means that trial commuters used to using Snapper cards (who were, very generously, given cards with $60 already loaded into them) will now need to again make sure they have cash or a cardboard 10-trip ticket in case the bus that turns up doesn’t have a Snapper reader.

From my general observation, Snapper readers have been installed at the front and rear doors of most of Go Wellington’s trolley and diesel buses, so most passengers will get a Snapper-enabled bus most times.

But my reading of the email suggests not all drivers have yet been properly trained in the use of the new system, so the Snapper readers may not be working on all buses.

There also seem clearly still to be technical issues. Twice last week, the drivers of Route 17 buses I was on had to pull over and stop because the Snapper system had stopped and needed rebooting. This caused such a delay with one bus that the next one caught up with it despite the 15 minute timetabled frequency between the two services. And my observation indicates that some Snapper users still have problems getting the reader to accept their card. I gave up trying to use mine and now use still only my Gold Pass because of this problem.

Such a change should not have been made until all buses and drivers were ready for this system, which will soon replace the 10-trip tickets.

Snapper cardholders can also use their cards to buy coffees and other small purchases in various places round town. You put money onto these smart cards either at the retail outlets that sell bus tickets or over the Net, and readers on the bus or in a café or other store deduct the bus trip, coffee or whatever from the balance on the card.

At present, on bus trips, the cards give a 20 per cent discount off the cash fare, which is the same as with a 10-trip ticket. The email I got said there would be a 25 per cent discount once all buses were Snapper-enabled, which seems good. The savings being made by the bus company are being shared with customers.

I am astonished that many regular bus users still pay cash despite the big savings to be gained from a 10-trip ticket (and now Snapper) and the monthly $95 Gold Pass (which is likely to be incorporated into Snapper later this year; a smart card can handle such a transaction easily by charging for all bus rides up to the $95 maximum in a month and then allowing free rides).

On the No 17 I often catch, I see a woman get on each day and pay the driver in cash (the fare is $3.50) when the 10-trip ticket would save her 70c a ride or $7 a week and a Gold Pass would save her around $60 a month. She stands out because she invariably pays with a $10 or $20 note, too, and delays the bus for precious peak-hour minutes while the driver gets her change together. Grrr.