The Carbon Sense Coalition submission to the Enquiry into Mandatory Renewable Energy Schemes: download file here [PDF, 80KB]

Dr David Evans
BSc, BE-EE, MA (Sydney), MS-EE, MS-Stat, PhD EE (Stanford)

[A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in The Australian newspaper on Friday 18 July 2008.]

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. 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. FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology, and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.
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By Dirck T. Hartmann Thursday, July 3, 2008

(Editor’s Note: To many in the know, Dirck T. Hartmann, who worked on the Apollo Space Program and many other significant NASA projects, was a fighter pilot in WWII, flying P38s. So when this gifted scientist/engineer/physicist and 87-year-old hero felt compelled to answer the questions of Man Made Global Warming, not only his son and grandchildren knew he had something to say with factual substance, truth and knowledge. What he has to say is clear and concise and should be read by everyone.)

What is your carbon footprint? That is the wrong question to ask. A more meaningful question is – How much carbon dioxide does it take to grow the wheat required to produce a loaf of bread? Or – How much carbon dioxide does it take to grow the corn for the chicken feed required to produce a dozen eggs?
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Opinion piece by Prof. David Bellamy
28 June 08
Cows and Sheep May Safely Graze?

As a youngster in a post war London I was brought up on lamb and anchor butter from New Zealand.

My first dabble into TV commercials was with WOOLMARK NZ, in what became a successful attempt to slow down the ingress of synthetic fibre into the carpet market. I still meet sheep farmers around the world who greet me their thanks and a pint of beer.

I still delight in your butter and lamb which I can buy in my local supermarket, the latter at half the price of the local product sold in our village butchers shop.

What a strange world we live in now bombarded with the rhetoric of food miles let alone tourist miles.
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A response to the Green Paper on Climate Change – a comment by Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition. 16 July 2008

The Climate will fluctuate.
It always has, it always will.
Get used to it.

The Government Green Paper completely ignores the main question – should Canberra try to control the weather, or is it better to foster a strong Australia able to cope with whatever climate change brings us?

The Government also justifies the need for action on completely worthless long term forecasts of Australia’s weather.
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By Bob Long

I notice someone running advertisements saying that as livestock are greenhouse emitters, we should all become vegetarians.

But this business about blaming livestock for greenhouse gas emissions is nonsense. It’s true that livestock do emit CO2 and/or methane (CH4) – but that’s only part of the story. From where does the carbon come that comprises that CO2 or CH4? From the food that the livestock eat. That is plants, which extract CO2 from the atmosphere. So animals don’t generate carbon products – they simply recycle them. In short, livestock are already carbon neutral. Likewise, so are humans (as far as our eating, burping and farting goes) – we eat either carbon neutral animals, or plants.

In fact if the vegetarians claim livestock are bad with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, then becoming vegetarian makes themselves no better than those animals, because livestock are vegetarians, too!

Will Australia and New Zealand be left hanging like dead dingoes on a barbed wire fence?

An Australian Group of Global Warming Sceptics today claimed that the Garnaut Report had totally ignored the three key questions in the debate.
Full news release here. [PDF, 13KB]