From: Dr Guy LeBlanc Smith
To: Professor Flannery, The Australian Climate Commission

I would like to submit the following questions to the Climate Commission Ipswich Public Forum on April 7th:

As a retired Principal Research Scientist with CSIRO with a doctorate in sedimentary geology and ancient environmental reconstructions that show climate has always varied naturally – I would like to know the following:

(1) Why has Professor Garnaut not honoured his first term of reference of his review – to show human causation in climate change – he has not yet differentiated human from natural, why?

(2) By how much will global temperature change if Australian human carbon dioxide generation were to totally cease and how much would that cost us? – this is designed to show a base line calibration.

(3) Will you publish graphs of annual global temperature reduction delivered from the proposed Australian carbon tax amount by years – for example say for the next 100 years?

Thanks in anticipation of a focused and evidence backed response.

From: DCCEE – ClimateCommision Secretariat [mailto:secretariat@climatecommission.gov.au]
Sent: Monday, 18 April 2011 10:12 AM
To: Dr Guy LeBlanc Smith
Cc: DCCEE – ClimateCommision Secretariat
Subject: RE: A comment from Dr Guy LeBlanc Smith [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]Dear Guy

Thank you for your email of 2 April to the Climate Commission. The Climate Commission have asked me to respond on their behalf.The Climate Commission was established by the Australian Government to provide all Australians with an independent and reliable source of information about the science of climate change, the international action being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the economics of a carbon price. The Commission is independent of Ministerial direction and does not comment on policy or provide policy advice.

You have raised a number of questions relating to the science of climate change. The Commission appreciates your desire to understand the science of climate change. Because the Commission receives a large number of queries about climate change science, many of which are variants on a limited number of topics, it has been decided to post responses to its website (www.climatecommission.gov.au). The Commission is developing these responses and your questions will be addressed on the Commission website in the near future.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to the Commission.

Yours sincerely,
John Higgins
Director
Climate Commission

PDF version: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/waiting-climate-commission.pdf [PDF, 52 KB]

Children are having nightmares about their carbon footprint. What a pretty pass modern man has brought himself to! Frightening children with scary stories about hell fire is the way our ancestors drilled society into conformity. It might have been hoped that the age of science would bring all that to an end, but now we have entered the post-scientific age, in which a new class of high priest returns to the traditional methods of enforcement.

In order to establish the essential fear-provoking scenario they have nominated in the role of original sin one particular element, one atom out of the whole gamut.

It is a choice that is bizarre to the rational mind, yet one that conforms to the long established principles of the founding of authoritarian religions. Why is it bizarre? If you are of a mind to seek out magic and miracles, look no further than the sixth member of the periodic table of elements. Carbon is the source of all of our food, the founding fire of civilisation, provides much of our energy and is the key element in the cycle of life.

If it is in your nature to give thanks for anything, spare a thought for the much maligned atom that is your primal ancestor and the provider of everything that you are, that you have and that keeps you alive.

For the full article by John Brignell see: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/Carbon.htm

“Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain’s energy policy. It is a world in which Highland glens are buzzing with bulldozers damming streams for miniature hydro plants, in which the Dogger Bank is to be dotted with windmills at Brobdingnagian expense, in which Heathrow is to burn wood trucked in from Surrey, and Yorkshire wheat is being turned into motor fuel. We are going back to using the landscape to generate our energy. Bad news for the landscape.

“The industrial revolution, when Britain turned to coal for its energy, not only catapulted us into prosperity (because coal proved cheaper and more reliable than wood, wind, water and horse as a means of turning machines), but saved our landscape too. Forests grew back and rivers returned to their natural beds when their energy was no longer needed. Land that had once grown hay for millions of horses could grow food for human beings instead — or become parks and gardens.”

By Matt Ridley

See the full article at: http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/6954843/a-green-dark-age.thtml

The truth about greenhouse gases and the dubious science of the climate crusaders.

By William Happer

Will Happer is a physicist at Princeton University. This article appeared in the internet magazine First Things under the title The Truth About Greenhouse Gases.

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

To read the rest of this article, click: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-truth-about-greenhouse-gases.

by Geoffrey Luck
June 24, 2011

Take a big deep breath, Bob Brown – savour the 78 parts of nitrogen, 21 of oxygen, and the smidgen of carbon dioxide – and contemplate the folly of your alternative energy ideas. Renewables are not green. That’s the view of one of the pioneers of climate science politics. Jesse Ausubel, Senior Research Associate in The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, helped organise the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979. He is an avowed ‘deep green’ scientist who believes the essence of being green, and therefore his mantra, is no-new-structures. For years he has been arguing heretical views on energy. In the wake of the Productivity Commission’s scathing comments on renewables, now is the time to listen to him.

Ausubel has a list of heresies that might horrify the true believers in wind and solar power, electric cars and distorting government subsidies:

• Renewables are not green.
• The idea of resource exhaustion is irrelevant.
• Hydrocarbons are not the stored energy of the sun.
• Little more than 50% of energy will ever be electrified.
• Nuclear is green, but nuclear plants must make hydrogen as well as electricity.
• Most surprising of all – decarbonisation has been going on for almost two centuries – without a policy for it.

(more…)

This is a very useful presentation of simple graphs illustrating all aspects of the global warming and carbon demonization scams. Well worth printing in colour for close study:

By H. Leighton Steward:
http://www.nal-jsc.org/Climate_Change_Symposium_Leighton_Steward_Presentation.pdf [PDF, 7.4 MB]

By Viv Forbes September 2012

“To be truly ‘sustainable’, a farm must recycle everything – otherwise it is depleting its soil minerals. Therefore it cannot sell any of its produce. This means it cannot buy items from the outside world, such as machinery, to make labour less arduous, and to produce more food. It is thus an impossible dream.” – Bob Long

The man-made global warming crisis has gone cold, the “man-made extreme weather” scares are wearing thin, and people are waking up to the “tax war on carbon”, so a new theme is needed for handing control of our lives, businesses and property to the world bureaucracy. The theme for the next green alarm is “sustainability” and a favourite target is “sustainable farming”.

We need to recognise some realities. Modern cities are not sustainable without farms, and modern farms are not sustainable without modern machinery, mineral fertilisers and affordable energy. City people should thank the lord for the machinery and cheap energy that produce the surplus food and all the trucks, road trains, refrigerated vans and milk tankers that bring it to their supermarkets every day. The last thing they should advocate is “sustainable farming”.

Unlike most armchair experts on sustainable farming, my early life was spent on an almost-sustainable farm. The memorable lessons we learned are described below.

Cows were milked by hand, ploughing and planting was done with a team of draft horses. Here is how green power works:

Ploughing using Hay-burners
Photo Credit: (c) Kapai / http://www.fotosearch.com

Lucerne was cut using a horse-drawn mower and rake. Haymaking on our “almost sustainable” farm was when everyone got a job with a pitchfork – mine had a special short handle. I still have it. Here is how it was done:

Making Bio-fuel for Hay Burners
Photo credit: http://thekinnickproject.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/75-years-ago-eileens-diary-july-9-1937.html

For more descriptions on how a sustainable farm really works you can quickly download the full article in print-ready PDF at:

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sustainable-farming.pdf [PDF, 132KB]

By Mike Williamson
12 January 2013

There has been much comment on our summer heatwave. This prompted a search for the history of temperatures in S.E. Queensland.

The longest continuous record of local temperatures was from Amberley: the data set was begun in late 1941 and is still active.

See: http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_nccObsCode=36&p_display_type=dataFile&p_startYear=&p_c=&p_stn_num=040004

The record shows that the highest monthly mean maximum temperature for the month of January in each year was way back in 1942 and has not been surpassed since. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1 (click to enlarge)

The linear trend for the years 1942 to 2012, shows is a slight rise in the temperature trend. This is not surprising as the Earth’s temperatures have had several rising phases ever since the last Ice Age ended over 10,000 years ago.

The Amberley data shows that the highest mean maximum January temperatures appear to be fairly similar when they periodically occur. However the lower mean maximums appear to be creating the very slight upward trend.

This does not then appear to support the man-made global warming hypothesis since if carbon dioxide is retaining heat in the atmosphere it should do so at all temperature levels, whether high or low. If carbon dioxide is causing the heating, why is carbon dioxide rising steadily whereas temperatures are not?

A Short Observation on Bushfires

Grass, peat, leaves and timber all ignite at temperatures well above 40^oC. Even highly inflammable, easily ignitable, kerosene needs a spark exceeding 200^oC for combustion to be initiated. Therefore heat wave temperatures cannot cause fires. Something else ignited them. Once ignited, hot temperatures and high winds make the fires more severe, but something else ignited them.

[Mike Williamson is a Graduate Fuel Technologist/Chemical Engineer, with experience in minerals processing and applications of coal technology. He is now retired and has no connection with industry of any kind. As a self-funded retiree he relies upon lifetime savings for his quality of life in retirement. No one paid him or asked him to produce this.]

Alice in Wonderland Science
Our energy and environment deserve better – in South Africa and Qatar

Kelvin Kemm

A few weeks ago, perhaps as a prologue to the “global warming disaster” convention in Doha, Qatar, South Africa’s Department of Environment Affairs took out a full-page advertisement in our country’s newspapers, promoting National Marine Week.

The ad showed a map of the Antarctic continent, from above the pole, surrounded by the vast blue Southern Ocean. It also promoted South Africa’s new Antarctic research vessel, SA Agulhas II.

The advertisement’s text mentioned the massive Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which is responsible for distributing vital nutrients to the world’s oceans. It noted that the truly massive quantities of phytoplankton found in the ocean are vital marine building blocks in ocean processes. All that is true, and I certainly applaud efforts to protect the environment and promote National Marine Week and our country’s research efforts.

But then, sadly, the ad’s discussion of physics content went off the rails. Referring to phytoplankton, it said “these microscopic creatures also use carbon to create energy.” Wrong!
(more…)

Does an increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere increase global temperature or not?

Most climate commentators immediately parrot the conventional wisdom of the climate alarmists – “The atmosphere is a blanket retaining the heat from the sun. Increased carbon dioxide thickens the blanket and will cause dangerous warming, leading to a tipping point where runaway heating becomes irreversible.”

However an experiment conducted in 1909 shows this conclusion to be wrong – the atmosphere acts more like a radiator, quickly removing heat from land and water surfaces, transporting it aloft and radiating much of it back to space. The atmosphere is a great temperature moderator – it stops daytime temperatures from rising too high, and keeps night-time temperatures from falling as low as they would otherwise. The net result, averaged over the whole world, is not known, but the daytime shading probably has a greater effect on surface temperatures than the night-time insulation.

For much more real science from one of the few authors who writes clearly, see this paper:

Klause Ermecke, 2010 – “Rescue from the Climate Saviours – Is there any Danger from “World Climate?” KE Research.

Read the full paper:
http://www.ke-research.de/downloads/ClimateSaviors.pdf [PDF, 1MB]