Will Anderson, Professor Emeritus, University of Pretoria has written an “Urgent Submission to the SAICE [South African Institution of Civil Engineering] Council on the Likelihood of Severe Water Resource Droughts” with this summary:

1. There is overwhelming evidence of a causal and predictable linkage between variations in solar
activity and climatic responses, specifically rainfall and river flow.
2. There is no evidence of trends in rainfall and river flow data that could be attributed to unnatural
climate change.
3. There is increasing worldwide research that questions the fundamental basis of climate change
theory.
4. The international political situation regarding the implementation of universal measures to
restrict greenhouse gas emissions has collapsed.
5. Recommendations that South Africa should resort to the development of measures to adapt to
human caused climate change will fail because they would be adapting to something that does
not exist.

Read the complete document: www.carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/alexander-2008.pdf [PDF, 266KB].

A Corollary of the Principle of Uniformitarianism

By Howard Dewhirst, Geologist

This document aims to contextualise the scientific debate concerning Climate Change (CC) and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Examining Earth history, it is indisputable that CC has been operating for many hundreds of millions of years, in cycles that span many different time-scales (millennial-plus to decadal), all without human influence. Understanding the causative factors in past CC provides a solid basis for framing the present debate. AGW is a notion which says that human activities, notably the addition of CO₂ to the atmosphere, are causing an increase in the global heat budget. That higher-energy state of Earth’s environment it is argued sets the stage for damaging CC effects. Political and economic decisions have been influenced by this claim. Some of those decisions harm efforts to better the health and welfare of the world’s population, including both the poorest and those who are better off. If the CC and AGW arguments are incorrectly based, as we outline here, there is a need to re-consider those decisions.

CC in Earth History

• Paleo-temperature (of atmosphere and ocean) is taken as a proxy indicator of climate, since climate is a complex concept that includes precipitation amounts and patterns, wind, etc whose history and future cannot be extracted or classified in a satisfactory way
• Earth’s equatorial region has had a consistent temperature during the climate swings over hundreds of millions of years, but the polar areas have varied, thus altering the pole-to-equator gradient of heat energy, which is the principal driver of climate on the planet
• Causes of CC (changes in temperature gradients) are dominated by orbital and solar effects, with added signals from volcanoes (both dust and chemicals), tectonics and plate motions, and biological feedbacks
• Oceans (which cover ~70% of the planet) are the main heat reservoir, but with patterns of warmer and colder water distributions that reveal decadal and longer cyclicity that is not understood

Global Warming

• • Earth’s temperature has been generally rising since the end of the last ice age, with an apparent acceleration during the last century, but not since
  • Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have also been rising more uniformly, now reaching 410ppm or 0.04% of atmosphere
  • CO₂ has been identified as a ‘greenhouse gas’, based on an argument that it traps and reflects heat
  • The physics of CO₂ heat retention are over-stated, as only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths of heat energies) can be captured by this molecule
  • Because CO₂ concentration is rising and is implicated in global warming, and because CO₂ is a by-product of combustion, energy sources from fossil fuels have been demonised – via social and political suppression of their use, and a push towards 100% renewable energy
  • There are three key challenges to the idea that CO₂ is the primary cause of GW:
    •    Long-term records of CO₂ and temperature show good correlation, but the CO₂ concentrations lag behind temperature increases by thousands of years. Thus, CO₂ increase is the consequence of rising ocean temperature, not the cause
    •    Numerical models of climate systems, which involve simplifying assumptions and methods that are associated with serious artefacts, consistently fail to ‘predict’ the known past temperature patterns. Such models cannot justify the suppression of hydrocarbon fuels.
    •    Average temperatures are no longer increasing despite the inexorable rise of CO₂

Human activities are not the driver of global warming (or cooling). Earth’s systems are governed by processes that operate over a wide range of time- and length-scales, many of which far exceed the usual scope of human perceptions. The demonization of carbon is scientifically unjustified.

Howard Dewhirst

Read the open letter: https://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/gsl-open-letter-dewhirst.pdf [PDF, 312 KB]

By Sanjeev Sabhlok  Senior leader and overseas coordinator of India’s Swarna Bharat Party

The Modi government has been shovelling scarce taxpayer resources into solar energy, with a further $6.5 billion promised till 2022. This is over and above indirect subsidies that people pay through higher electricity bills because of renewable energy certificates. And while Donald Trump did the right thing by walking out of the Paris Agreement, Mr Modi unthinkingly remains committed to it and Niti Ayog has been touting subsidised electric vehicles.

Our party disagrees with this approach. First, because we oppose subsidies for any industry. But second, because we believe there is a strong case to impose Pigovian taxes on solar energy given the economic and environmental harm it causes.

Solar energy can do a few useful things. It can power a radio in an off-grid location. But it can’t support our day-to-day life.

Read the full article:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/seeing-the-invisible/solar-energy-badly-harms-the-environment-it-must-be-taxed-not-subsidised/

Germany’s Energiewende – Lessons for Australia from Germany

In March 2017, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy published a brochure announcing that the Energiewende, its renewable energy revolution, was ‘a success story’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Energiewende (Grand Plan) has the goal of making Germany independent of fossil fuels in the long term. Coal, oil and gas were to be phased out, allowing drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. However, these goals have not even begun to be achieved.

The Energiewende was only driven forward in the electricity sector, which, accounts for only one-fifth of energy consumption. There were hardly any successes in the heating/cooling and transport sectors.

And so carbon dioxide emissions in Germany have been rising since 2009, even though well over a hundred billion euros have been spent on the expansion of solar and wind energy over the same period. The financial obligations undertaken in the process will continue to burden taxpayers for another two decades and will end up costing German consumers a total sum of around 550 billion euros.

Despite this enormous effort, security of supply is increasingly under threat. At the same time, people and the biosphere are suffering; wildlife protection has become subordinated to climate mitigation, even though the possibility of achieving the goals of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is becoming increasingly distant and the measures for the energy transition seem to become more and more questionable from a constitutional point of view.

800 regional associations in Germany commissioned a report on the achievements of the Grand Plan, supported by 24 German experts in all relevant fields.

“In this review we would like to inform a public debate and set out a reasonable course for energy policy in Germany.”

It details stark lessons for Australia. They have produced a very clear readable summary of all aspects of the German electricity disaster.

Read more: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/1-6-_kompendium-der-energiewende_englisch_1.pdf [PDF, 2.7 MB]

Source: https://www.vernunftkraft.de/

“The Benefits of Human CO2 Emissions” by Dr Patrick Moore

All life is carbon based and the primary source of this carbon is the CO2 in the global atmosphere.

As recently as 18,000 years ago, at the height of the most recent major glaciation, CO2 dipped to its lowest level in recorded history at 180 ppm, low enough to stunt plant growth. This is only 30 ppm above a level that would result in the death of plants due to CO2 starvation.

It is calculated that if the decline in CO2 levels were to continue at the same rate as it has over the past 140 million years, life on Earth would begin to die as soon as two million years from now and would slowly perish almost entirely as carbon continued to be lost to the deep ocean sediments.

The combustion of fossil fuels for energy to power human civilization has reversed the downward trend in CO2 and promises to bring it back to levels that are likely to foster a considerable increase in the growth rate and biomass of plants, including food crops and trees.

Human emissions of CO2 have restored a balance to the global carbon cycle, thereby ensuring the long-term continuation of life on Earth.

This extremely positive aspect of human CO2 emissions must be weighed against the unproven hypothesis that human CO2 emissions will cause a catastrophic warming of the climate in coming years.

The one-sided political treatment of CO2 as a pollutant that should be radically reduced must be corrected in light of the indisputable scientific evidence that it is essential to life on Earth.

Read More: https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Positive%20Impact%20of%20Human%20CO2%20Emissions.pdf

And here is an improved version: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1353857523

Dr. Patrick Moore is a Senior Fellow with the Energy, Ecology and Prosperity program at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He has been a leader in the international environmental field for over 40 years. Dr. Moore is a Co-Founder of Greenpeace and served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada and seven years as a Director of Greenpeace International. Following his time with Greenpeace, Dr. Moore joined the Forest Alliance of BC where he worked for ten years to develop the Principles of Sustainable Forestry, which have now been adopted by much of the industry. In 2013, he published Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout – The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, which documents his 15 years with Greenpeace and outlines his vision for a sustainable future.

By Keith Orchison

By coincidence I have come across the new “Climate of the Nation” report from the strongly green-leaning Climate Institute on the same day I have been reading the latest Essential Report polling and just after looking at a pre-dawn snapshot of east coast market capacity on a pretty standard winter’s day.

Taking the latter first, at 6.30am today 97.6 per cent of the New South Wales load was being met by black coal generation as the State’s population was getting up and its substantial factory sector was gearing up. If you take NSW, Victoria and Queensland together – they represent 90 per cent of the east coast market – at this point 88.9 per cent of the three-State load was being met by brown and black coal generation with wind power providing 0.4 per cent and solar (naturally as the sun wasn’t yet up) 0.04 per cent.

(Eight hours later, I see, at 2.30pm, black coal generation is still bearing 89.7 per cent of NSW load and coal is accounting for almost 82 per cent of required capacity in the three largest States of the market – with hydro power providing 7.5 per cent and wind/solar 4.3 per cent.)

The question that comes to my mind when I look at data like this is what would be required to replace even half this coal power (let alone all of it) with mostly wind power and solar PVs? What would the total system cost be in a set-up where supply is assured and how would this translate in to retail bills?
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A compilation of books by Peter F Gill.

“Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” Bernie Lewin, GWPF 2017 ISBN 978-0-9931189-9-9

“Climate Change the Facts 2017” Multiple authors edited by Jennifer Marohasy, Institute of Public Affairs, Connor Court Publishing Pty Ltd., 2017 ISBN 978-0-909536-03-9

“Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Rip-Off” Ian Plimer, Connor Court Publishing, 2017 ISBN 9781925501629

“Green Tyranny Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex” Rupert Darwall, Encounter Books, 2017 ISBN 9781594039355

On Monday 13 August 2007, the House Standing Committee on Science and
Innovation tabled its report on the inquiry into Geosequestration Technology
entitled Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

Dr Dennis Jensen MP, Hon Jackie Kelly MP, Hon Danna Vale MP, Mr David
Tollner MP have written a dissenting report:

“We do not believe the evidence unequivocally supports the hypothesis of
anthropogenic global warming (AGW)
“1.1 We dissent from some of the statements made in the report “Between a
Rock and a Hard Place” by the Standing Committee on Science and Innovation
on its investigation into the Geosequestration of Carbon Dioxide.
“1.2 We disagree with the report’s unequivocal support for the hypothesis
that global warming is caused by man-so-called anthropogenic global warming
(AGW).”

Dissenting report is available here:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/geosequestration-dissent.pdf [PDF 211KB]

Source: Inquiry into Geosequestration Technology Web page:
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/scin/geosequestration/report.htm

By Rocky Wood

We all know the maxim that common sense just isn’t that common. Nothing proves this more than the current debate about Climate Change. ‘Global Warming’ has become the propaganda term of choice for those who make a living from scare tactics about the climate. Yet, brave souls in the scientific and political community are offering alternate views, views that receive scant regard in the mainstream media.

In a series of columns for carbon-sense.com we will investigate just how much, or little, common sense is being applied in the worldwide debate. We will expose the facts Al Gore and his cohorts don’t want the average citizen to know; and we will challenge the orthodox view that has enveloped the mass media and politicians of all stripes. More importantly, we will investigate the motivations of many of those who are on the climate change bandwagon – from simple economic avarice right through to an intent to alter the entire economic and political order.
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The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on all farmers and those who eat farm products to raise their voices in opposition to the silly proposals of Australian and New Zealand governments to include emissions and motions from farm animals as a taxable carbon emission.

The chairman of “Carbon Sense” Mr Viv Forbes, claimed that New Zealand has already agreed to include farm animal emissions in their taxable emissions output and Prof Garnaut is also thinking of driving Australian farmers to the Kyoto bail for a similar milching.
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