Archives for September 2006

Speaking from New York, Virgin Blue Boss Sir Richard Branson has said transport and energy companies must be at the forefront of developing environmentally friendly business strategies and has pledged to invest US$3bn (£1.6bn) to fight global warming.

Branson said he would commit all profits from his travel firms, such as airline Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, over the next 10 years.

It seems that Branson recognizes anthropogenic global warming is an issue that can potentially be solved through new technologies and he plans to invest in new renewable energy technologies through Virgin Fuels.

This approach is consistent with the approach advocated by the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Also known as the AP6, this group includes ‘kyoto dissidents’ Australia and the US, as well as China, India, South Korea and Japan.

Together these countries account for about half of the world’s GDP, population, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The partnership was announced in Laos in July last year and they met for the first time in Sydney in January.

The AP6, like Branson, recognise that the solution to anthropogenic global warming is potentially in the development, sharing and promotion of new and improved technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course this approach will also solve ‘the peak oil’ problem because once we move beyond our dependence on fossil fuels it won’t matter how much oil is left.

Australia’s tabloid e-news site Crikey has been suggesting that there are only a few misguided global warming skeptics. On Line Opinion’s editor, Graham Young, has written to Crikey suggesting they, rather than the skeptics, are misguided. Anyway, they haven’t published this note which he sent them a few days ago:

Hey Guys,

If you’re going to put Christopher Pearson on your global warming skeptics list because he pointed out that claims that Tuvalu and Kiribati are sinking due to global warming are fraudulent, then you’d better put me on your list too. Check out http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/000593.html and http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/000185.html.

I know Al Gore claims that the islands have already sunk and the inhabitants immigrated to New Zealand, but all that proves is that his documentary is faction, not fact. Maybe you should put your skeptics list in your religion section, if you had one, because it seems to be operating on the same scientific basis as intelligent design. Oh, and for the record, while I believe that carbon dioxide contributes to warming of the globe, I have little faith in the accuracy of climate models. Funnily enough, according to John Quiggin at the BrisScience Forum last night, neither does he, so perhaps you should put him on the list as well.

What’s Crikey trying to do – muscle in on Green Left Weekly’s patch?

By the way, as a declaration of pecuniary interest and potential bias I’ve never knowingly received funding from petroleum companies, but if Shell, Exxon or Mobil want to put a banner, tower or island advertisement on the site, and pay for it, then they’re welcome.

The commonsense view on global warming is that there are a range of scenarios, and one should take precautions for the more likely ones, whilst maintaining an economy robust enough to deal with as many as possible. One should never take at face values the assertion of lobbyists or scientists in the pay of big oil, or global warming driven research grants, or any other scientists or lobbyists for that matter. And limiting carbon dioxide output in the 25% of the world that is industrialised while excluding the other 75% which is racing as quickly as possible to increase its carbon dioxide emissions, was always an absurd way to tackle the problem.

I feel much better now that I have come out of the closet and am looking forward to being on your list of people robust enough to ask the hard questions – the sort of thing that I thought Crikey was all about.

Regards,
Graham Young
Chief Editor, On Line Opinion“

I can’t work out why Gore would make the claims that he does in the movie about the Pacific Islands. He actually says that the citizens of Pacific Islands have had to be evacuated to New Zealand because of rising sea-levels.

I’m happy to be corrected, but this is what I understand the situation to be with respect to Pacific Islands and sea-level:

1. Since the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, global-averaged sea level has risen by more than 100 metres as large ice sheets have melted.

2. There is still a general trend of rising global sea level at the rate of 1.8mm per year over the period 1950-2000 with no evidence of an increase in the rate of sea level rise over this period.*

3. The great majority of oceanic islands, including in the Pacific, were formed by volcanic activity. While the volcanoes are active, the islands rise relative to the global averaged sea-level. When volcanic activity stops, the islands will cool and eventually start to sink. So there are islands rising and sinking all the time.

4. According to Marlo Lewis in ‘A Skeptic’s Guide to the Inconvenient Truth’ ** tide gauge records show that sea levels at Tuvalu actually fell during the latter half of the 20th Century. This is an island often quoted as being lost to rising sea levels including in Al Gore’s book also called ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ where there is a two-page photograph and reference to the islands of Funafuti and Tuvalu and residents having to evacuate their homes because of rising seas.

In summary some Pacific islands are sinking, while some Pacific Islands are rising and it was incorrect of Al Gore to suggest that the issue is “rising seas”.

It is also wrong for Crikey’s journalist Sophie Black to suggest there is something wrong with Christopher Pearson for publicly exposing this inconvenient truth.

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* Church et al. 2004, Estimates of the Regional Distribution of Sea Level Rise over the 1950-2000 Period. American Meteorological Society, pgs 2609-2625.

** I understand this assessment was published by the CEI and that they are funded by Big Oil, and as Graham Young states at a recent blog post: Isn’t it a pity that we have to rely on oil companies to finance the devil’s advocate position on global warming? And if you’re inclined to that style of rebuttal, just bear in mind that Al Gore’s political career was financed in part by the tobacco industry.

I received the followed note and pictures from Neil Hewett of Cooper Creek Wilderness in the magnificent Daintree Rainforest of Far North Queensland. Neil wrote: “These magnificent birds once roamed more than half the land-surface of the planet, but for the inconvenience of global cooling and drying.”

These images were captured at Cooper Creek Wilderness by Brian and Rosemary Mulcahy of Ormond, Victoria.

In an early blog post titled ‘Debate and Dissent is Healthy’, part of my series on Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, I explained how tabloid e-news site Crikey had started a list of global warming skeptics and was suggesting that we were a small and misguided ‘clique’.

According to their journalist Sophie Black I got on the list because I once wrote: “As a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are currently increasing. There is no evidence, however, to suggest this will bring doom or that, by signing the Kyoto Protocol, Australia would make a significant difference to global carbon dioxide levels or to the rate of climate change.”

So it’s not so much that I deny global warming or climate change (and by the way I don’t), or that I deny that increasingly levels of carbon dioxide may drive some warming, but rather I have been labeled a skeptic because I don’t believe in Kyoto or that the current elevated atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide mean we are ruin.

Today Crikey has published the names of MORE so-called global warming skeptics. It includes: Miranda Devine (Sydney Morning Herald columnist), my colleague at the IPA Alan Moran, Prof Jon Jenkins, (NSW Parliament), blogger Tim Blair, radio broadcaster Alan Jones, the Prime Minister John Howard, Alan Oxley (Head of APEC Studies Centre at Monash University), Christopher Pearson (columnist with The Weekend Australian), The Australian Industry Greenhouse Network’s John Eyles and Christian Kerr (Crikey journalist).

But Christian was given the opportunity to immediately deny that he is a skeptics with the comment: “I’m not a climate change sceptic. I’m not a Chicken Little, either. Science shows us that global temperatures have varied throughout the earth’s history. And science has also shown itself more than capable of overcoming remarkable challenges. Sorry if that disappoints the apocalyptically-minded.”

Come on Christian Kerr! If I am a skeptic you’re a skeptic. I also believe in science and technology and haven’t written anywhere that the sky is falling in.

The original global warming skeptics list published by Crikey on Friday included William Kininmonth (former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation), Ray Evans (once executive at Western Mining Corporation), Chris Mitchell (Editor-in-chief of The Australian), Terry McCrann (News Ltd business writer), Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun columnist), Hugh Morgan (head of the Business Council of Australia until 2005), Alan Wood (The Australian’s finance writer), Ian Castles (Former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics), Ian Plimer (Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide), Bob Carter (A former director of the Australian Ocean Drilling Office, Professor of paleoclimatology at James Cook University) and me.

I am going to nominate a reader, commentator and contributor to this blog Paul Williams to the growing clique of global warming skeptics for his great contribution to dissent and debate by way of that blog post titled ‘Hockey Sticks & Ancient Pine Trees’.

And also, On Line Opinion editor and blogger, Graham Young, for suggesting Tuvalu and Kiribati still exist as Pacific Islands in his blog post of 8th May last year entitled ‘Antropophagai anyone’.

I invite others to nominate their favourite skeptic with a short justification by way of comment below.

You may also like to send your nomination and justification to Crikey with an email to boss@crikey.com.au.

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Today’s Crikey list include the following contributions from the named skeptics:
Miranda Divine for ‘Its the End as He Knows it’ published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10th August, and
Alan Moran for ‘Alarm on Global Warming Just a Load of Hot Air’ published in the Age on 8th September.

In ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Al Gore repeatedly suggests that all the ‘so-called global warming skeptics’ are in the pay of a big oil company probably Exxon Mobil. Never once during this so-called documentary does Gore acknowledge that there is potential for an alternative thesis on global warming and the role of carbon dioxide. All dissent is met with ridicule and/or name calling.

Al Gore certainly doesn’t appear to understand the potential value of hypotheses testing. Instead Gore reduces global warming to a moral issue and a contest between the good guys, which according to Gore includes all of the world’s climate scientists, and the so-bad so-called skeptics, who he suggests are all hired guns.

Gore is clearly not a fan of Socrates who once said wrote that the highest form of human excellence is to question one-self and others.

The Gore approach has certainly brought out the worst in some journalists with Sophie Black from Crikey, a so-called independent online media service, ditching independent analysis for branding.

Yesterday, she wrote in a piece entitled ‘The Global Warming Sceptics Club – a Crikey list’:

“But the majority of scientists in Australia believe that reasonable debate about the substance of global warming ended some time ago. What remains at issue is potential rates of change and the scale of destruction, a problem many have moved onto addressing. But even in the most optimistic scenarios, the news is not good.

Which means the doubters are starting to reduce to a small, exclusive clique. Crikey has compiled an unofficial membership list of the Global Warming Sceptics Club — meet the commentators who don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Her list includes me (Jennifer Marohasy) along with William Kininmonth (former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation), Ray Evans (once executive at Western Mining Corporation), Chris Mitchell (Editor-in-chief of The Australian), Terry McCrann (News Ltd business writer), Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun columnist), Hugh Morgan (head of the Business Council of Australia until 2005), Alan Wood (The Australian’s finance writer), Ian Castles (Former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics), Ian Plimer (Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide) and Bob Carter (A former director of the Australian Ocean Drilling Office, Professor of paleoclimatology at James Cook University).

Like Al Gore, instead of analyzing the quality of our argument(s), Black makes one or other of the following comments next to each of our names, and in the context of other comment, insinuates that we have a vested interest in maintaining what she considers to be an increasingly untenable position: “closely associated to the mining industry”, “News Ltd” or “a member of the IPA (Institute of Public Affairs)”.

Most of us might be just independent thinkers who have taken the time and effort to try and understand the issue and have come to a different conclusion and refuse to be bullied into the consensus position.

It is somewhat shocking that in 2006, an independent news service like Crikey, and a much revered so-called documentary like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ can be so openly intolerant and dismissive of any alternative perspective on such an important issue as climate change.

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The Crikey piece by Sophie Black includes links to some recent public commentary by the so-called Clique on ‘An Inconvenient Truth’:

William Kinimonth, Don’t be Gored into going along, The Australian, 12th September: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20393768-7583,00.html

Andrew Bolt, Bulled by a Gore, Herald Sun, 13th September: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20400748-5000117,00.html

Terry McCran, Al Gore’s Day After Tomorrow Sequel, Herald Sun, 12th September :http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20394654-36281,00.html

Chris Mitchell, Editorial: It’s not the end of the world, The Australian, 4th September :http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20346728-7583,00.html

and also An Inconvenient cost, The Australian, 12th September: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20393954-7583,00.html

I will be writing something for my next Counterpoint column on the 2nd October.