Archives for October 15, 2005

In his new book the ‘The Weather Makers’ (Text Publishing, Melbourne, $32.95) Professor Tim Flannery suggests that the medieval warm period was unique to Europe with “a survey of global temperature records (from ice-cores, tree-rings and lake deposits) showing that, if anything, Earth was then overall slightly cooler (0.03C) than in the early and mid twentieth centuries”. This according to Flannery shows that the “idea of a global Medieval Warm Period is bunk.” (pg 44)

The real bunk is perhaps Flannery’s claim that the world’s leading science journals are telling us that species are vanishing right now as a consequence of climate change. (pg 6)

He is a good writer though, and there is some interesting stuff in the book including his comment there are three agents of change:
1. shifting continents,
2. cosmic collisons and
3. climate-driving forces such as greenhouse.
Flannery writes that while they all act in different ways, they drive evolution using the same mechanisms “death and opportunity”. (pg 46)

The US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works continues to hear testimonials on climate change and related issues.

Earlier this week Lord Nigel Lawson from Britian’s House of Lords told the Americans what he thought:

“I am grateful for your invitation to testify before you today. I am aware that you have been provided with the Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs on The Economics of Climate Change in advance of these proceedings, so I intend simply to summarise our key findings and to provide some commentary of my own.

By way of background, the Economic Affairs Committee is one of the four permanent investigative committees of the House of Lords, and fulfils one of the major roles of our second chamber as a forum of independent expertise and review of all UK government activity. It is composed of members of all three main political parties. Its climate change report, which was agreed unanimously, was published on 6 July 2005, just ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland.

In summary, the Committee concluded that:

1. The Government should give the UK Treasury a more extensive role, both in examining the costs and benefits of climate change policy and presenting them to the public, and also in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);

2. There are concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, and the influence of political considerations in its findings;

3. There are significant doubts about the IPCC’s scenarios, in particular the high emissions scenarios, and the Government should press it to change its approach;

4. Positive aspects of global warming have been played down in the IPCC reports: the IPCC needs to reflect in a more balanced way the costs and benefits of climate change;

5. The Government should press the IPCC for better estimates of the monetary costs of global warming damage and for explicit monetary comparisons between the costs of measures to control warming and their benefits;

6. A more balanced approach to the relative merits of adaptation and mitigation is needed, with far more attention paid to adaptation measures;

7. UK energy and climate change policy appears to be based on dubious assumptions about the roles of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the costs to the UK of achieving its objectives have been poorly documented, and the Government, with much stronger Treasury involvement, should review and substantiate the cost estimates involved and convey them in transparent form to the public;

8. Current UK nuclear power capacity should be retained;

9. International negotiations on climate change reduction will prove ineffective because of the preoccupation with setting emissions targets. The Kyoto Protocol makes little difference to rates of warming, and has a na