THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE – RAY EVANS

Issue 3 | 30 June 2009

Ray Evans is the Secretary of the Lavoisier Group, which was founded in 2000. The Lavoisier Group argues that the necessity to decarbonise the economy has not yet been sufficiently scientifically proven, and facilitates a number of publications that argue to that effect. One of these is Ray Evans’ Thank God For Carbon (December 2008) Ray Evans addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 30 June, alongside Ian Dunlop to present another view. It is Ray Evans’ belief that the abandonment of Christianity by Western elites has been followed by the embrace of a belief in “man’s ability to control the earth’s climate”.

THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE

RAY EVANS

The core belief of those who claim we have to do something about “climate change” is that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide in particular, and other greenhouse gases such as methane, control the earth’s climate by acting as a sort of blanket which increases global temperatures.

The first point about this belief is that anthropogenic emissions of CO2, 7 Gt of carbon, comprise about one per cent of the atmosphere’s carbon content. The second is that every year more than 200 Gt of carbon are transferred between the oceans, the biosphere and the atmosphere; and of that 7 Gt, which mankind emits at least half, comes straight back to the biosphere in the form of new tree and plant growth.

There is nothing in the climate record which indicates that atmospheric carbon dioxide, let alone anthropogenic emissions of CO2, has any measurable impact on the earth’s climate. Water vapour, by far the dominant greenhouse gas, adjusts to accommodate changes in CO2.

If this is true, how then do we account for the changes in global temperatures that we do know about over the last two millennia and, in more detail, over the last two centuries?

During the Roman Warm Period (200 BC – 500AD), grapes were grown in Yorkshire and passes through the European Alps were used which only recently have been uncovered.

During the Mediaeval Warm Period (850 – 1350) the population of Europe increased, agricultural production increased, the cathedrals were built and the universities were established, science and technology flourished, and the rule of law which governed trade and commerce  expanded to cover most of Europe.

After the MWP the Little Ice Age (1400 – 1850) set in, population fell, terrible plagues which killed up to 40 per cent of the people living in towns and cities took a terrible toll, agricultural production fell, and it took centuries of adjustment and innovation to return to the levels of population and prosperity that had been reached in the fourteenth century.

The Little Ice Age lasted for nearly 500 years. The most miserable time was the Maunder Minimum (1645 – 1715) which was a period of intense cold and also a period of almost zero sunspot activity. The Dalton Minimum (1795 – 1820) which coincided with the Napoleonic Wars, was also a period of cold weather, poor harvests, and in 1816 a year without an English summer.

Since 1850 the world has warmed by about one degree Celcius, but in that 160 years there have been warmer and cooler periods. Except for the period 1976 – 1998, none of these changes correlated with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Since 1998, global temperatures have either been stationary or have fallen slightly, but CO2 concentrations have continued to rise.  And looking at millennium time scales, there is no correlation at all between atmospheric CO2 and climate.

The other key issue in this debate is the impact of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 on atmospheric concentrations of CO2.  It was automatically assumed for years that the rising concentrations of CO2 during the 1980s and 1990s were the consequence of mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

Close analysis on a year-by-year basis shows that changes in atmospheric concentrations are virtually independent of anthropogenic emissions and that the dominant factor is changes in ocean emissions governed by the El Nino-La Nina episodes.

It is an extraordinary thing that although Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and her advisers are not in any doubt that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the driving factor in the climate changes we are experiencing, and that they are a portent of more dramatic changes to come, neither she nor anyone else in the Rudd Government can tell us anything about the next El Nino-La Nina cycle.

Given that this unpredictable change in the behaviour of the Pacific Ocean dominates Australia’s weather, and particularly rainfall, and has done so for as long as we have records, this incapacity, coupled with unqualified certainty about carbon dioxide, makes us wonder whether Terry McCrann is right when he suggests that the only explanation for this extraordinary behaviour is that our political leaders have been secretly taken over by aliens.

My explanation is that the elites of the Western world, having abandoned Christianity as the doctrinal basis of their understanding of man and his place in the cosmos, have now embraced a new religion – belief in man’s ability to control the earth’s climate through turning the tap of anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide up or down as circumstances require. Right now, it is believed, we have to turn them right off.

This phenomenon brings to mind G K Chesterton’s remark: “When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” It is remarkable how such a belief, with no evidence whatsoever to support it, has become hard-core doctrine for the Environmentalist movement and many Western governments.

For example, Ian Dunlop, a leading business protagonist for the global warming cause, wrote in the Melbourne Age on 8 June 2009: “The latest authoritative science indicates that we may face catastrophic, irreversible outcomes as the full effect of even the current 387 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere unfolds.”

This statement is characteristic of the catastrophism now ubiquitous in the pronouncements of the carbophobes. And it is a catastrophism which relies upon clearly fallacious statements which claim to be “scientific”. Just as Marxism distinguished itself from rival brands of socialist doctrine and obtained early success by defining itself as “scientific socialism”, so the IPCC and the governments which use it as the authority for all pronouncements on climate have trumped all other claims to expertise in climatology by claiming that their arguments are supported by the “overwhelming” majority of scientists. They have never released the names of these people however, and the roll call of distinguished scientists who have declared themselves to be sceptical of the IPCC’s position has become a very long and highly distinguished one.

The senate voted against the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill on 13 August 2009. Minister Penny Wong has promised to bring the Bill back to the Senate on November 13 to try again. If the Bill is passed then Australia will enter into an era of economic decline unmatched in our history.

Ian Callinan, justice of the High Court from 1998 to 2007 summed up the impact of this legislation in these words:

Emissions regulation offers government an irresistible opportunity to centralise and control every aspect of our lives; on our roads, on our travels, in our workplaces, on our farms, in our forests and our mines, and, more threateningly, in our homes, constructed as they will be compelled to be, of very specific materials and of prescribed sizes. It is not difficult to foresee a diktat as to how many lights we may turn on and when we must turn them off: the great curfew. The new regime has the capacity to make the wartime National Security Regulations look like a timid exercise of government restraint. (30 August 2009)

The Senate should reject this Bill again, if only to allow the Australian people to decide whether or not they wish to decarbonise our society and economy.