Simply called “Nine Facts About Climate Change,” this piece carefully outlined the major issues concerning the anthropogenic global warming debate while countering claims by the alarmists including former Vice President Al Gore.
Evans wonderfully categorized the problem at hand in his introduction (emphasis mine throughout):
In January 2006 I wrote a pamphlet entitled Nine Lies about Global Warming in which I sought to summarise for the lay reader the state of the debate about increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and the widespread predictions of catastrophic global warming which would ensue as a consequence of man’s use of fossil fuels. Despite the inherent scientific implausibility of these predictions, and the complete lack of empirical evidence to support them, a number of current political leaders and former leaders, notably UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, former US Vice President Al Gore and Australian Labor Leader Kim Beazley, have embraced these predictions. The Environmentalist movement throughout the West has united behind global warming as its primary campaign ambition, and the political power of the Environmentalist movement has generated very large expenditures as a consequence.
Evans’ introduction continued:
The science debate is at the heart of the global warming campaign. On one side of that debate we have those prominent scientists who preach the gospel of anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide-generated global warming. Without exception, their careers have been made in the shadowy world where science and politics intersect; a world described by the once celebrated but now forgotten novelist of the 1950s, CP Snow. Lord May and Sir David King in the UK, and James Hansen in the US, are outstanding examples of the genre. On the other side of the debate is a long and growing list of scientists whose careers have been built on successful research into the extraordinarily complex physics and chemistry of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans, and the influence which the Sun has on the earth’s climate. The most recent example of devastating critique of the anthropogenist carbon dioxide school comes from William Gray, the doyen of American hurricane scientists.
After his introduction, Evans elaborated on the following nine facts:
- (1) Climate change is a constant. The Vostok Ice Cores show five brief interglacial periods from 415,000 years ago to the present. The Greenland Ice Cores reveal a Minoan Warm Period 1450–1300 BC, a Roman Warm Period 250–0 BC, the Mediaeval Warm Period 800–1100AD, the Little Ice Age and the late 20th Century Warm Period 1900–2010 AD.
- (2) Carbon dioxide is necessary for all life on earth and increasing atmospheric concentrations are beneficial to plant growth, particularly in arid conditions. Because the radiation properties of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already saturated, increasing atmospheric concentrations beyond current levels will have no discernible effect on global temperatures.
- (3) The twentieth century was almost as warm as the centuries of the Mediaeval Warm Period, an era of great achievement in European civilisation. The recent warm period, 1976–2000, appears to have come to an end and astro-physicistswho study sunspot behaviour predict that the next 25–50 years could be a coolperiod similar to the Dalton Minimum of the 1790s-1820s.
- (4) The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is limited to a correlation which holds only for the period 1976 to 2000. Attempts to construct an holistic theory in which atmospheric carbon dioxide controls the radiation balance of the earth, and thus determines average global temperatures, have failed.
- (5) The anthropogenists claim that the overwhelming majority of scientists are agreed on the anthropogenic carbon dioxide theory of climate control; that the science is settled and the debate is over; and that scientific sceptics are in the pay of the fossil fuel industries and their arguments are thus fatally compromised.
- (6) These claims are an expression of hope, not of reality. Anthropogenists such as former US Vice President Al Gore blame anthropogenic emissions of CO2 for high temperatures, droughts, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and retreating glaciers, and a decline in the polar bear population.
- (7) They also blame anthropogenic CO2 for blizzards, unseasonable snow, freezing weather generally and for hurricanes, cyclones and other extreme weather events. There is no evidence at all to justify these assertions. Increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will have negligible impact on the earth’s radiation balance and will promote plant growth everywhere. There is no need to sequester CO2 in the ground or to subsidise nuclear or other non-carbon based methods of energy production.
- (8) ‘Tropical’ diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are not related to temperature but to poverty, lack of sanitation and the absence of mosquito control practices.
- (9) The decarbonisation of the world’s economy would, if attempted, cause huge economic dislocation. Any democratic government which seriously sought to fulfil decarbonisation commitments would lose office. Shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy sources such as windmills or solar panels will cause unemployment and economic deprivation.
Those that are interested in the details should read the entire piece.
As a comical aside, an article about this conference in the Australian publication The Age deliciously reported (emphasis mine throughout, please forgive the vulgarity):
In an interview with The Age last month, Mr Evans acknowledged that last September's visit by former US vice-president Al Gore to promote his Oscar-winning global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth had helped generate a lot of publicity on climate change.
But he described Mr Gore's film as "bullshit from beginning to end".
"The science from the anthropology point of view has collapsed. The carbon-dioxide link is increasingly recognised as irrelevant," Mr Evans said.
I love it. Evans then touched on a side of this debate that speaks for America just as it does Australia:
"But the Government's frightened.
"Cabinet, from what I understand, is by and large still sceptical of climate change, but it is scared of the drought and worried about how Labor will make use of it."
Disturbingly similar to the political situation in the U.S. where the left is clearly using this issue to frighten the masses, wouldn’t you agree?
