If there is evidence for your case, you don’t need activists to glue themselves to the road to try and convince others to believe in your ‘cause’. Armed with evidence, you don’t need to bluster and disparage your political opponents. If you have evidence for your case, you don’t behave like a smug, arrogant ignoramus, inside or outside Parliament.

It was an enfant terrible of the climate alarmist Michael-hockey-stick-Mann, who years ago labelled the climate alarmist movement as a cause when he derided dissenting climate scientist Dr Judith Curry for her views, saying, ‘It’s not helping the cause. Nor her career…’

Mann should be reminded that science does not exist to support ‘causes’.

I am motivated to make these points in the wake of a series of overheated, under-informed comments by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, The Hon. Chris Bowen.

He is so loud and derisory in his Parliamentary outbursts on matters to do with his portfolio that his behaviour invites ridicule. One might say that he exhibits the unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant.

Confucius once said, ‘Real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance.’ And while I’m quoting people, it was Charles Darwin who said, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’

Back in 2010, 43 Fellows of the Royal Society (The United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, a Fellowship of some 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists) wrote to its then president, Paul Nurse, to complain about the unscientific tone of the society’s messages on Climate Change. Eight years later, a group of 33 current and former Fellows of the Geological Society wrote an open letter to their president in similar vein.

The letter notes:

‘The IPCC position matches observations that almost half of the warming that has occurred over the last 150 or so years since industrialisation, had already happened by 1943, well before the rapid rise of industrial carbon dioxide. This difference of opinion is critical, for if carbon dioxide did not cause the pre-1943 warming, the claimed consensus that Catastrophic AGW is caused by human carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution, which is supported by GSL, must be mistaken. 

‘As this letter makes clear, it is not true that 97 per cent of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that carbon and carbon dioxide are ‘pollutants’ and their production should be penalised; how can the primary nutrient in photosynthesis be a pollutant? We also note that 700 scientists have made submissions to the US Senate expressing dissent from the consensus and 166 climate scientists issued a challenge to Ban Ki Moon on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to provide proof of human-induced global warming, which he did not do.’

My point here is that there are plenty of scientists whose work in the wickedly complex field of climate science is available for scrutiny. Ministers should avail themselves of all relevant information to their portfolios before playing with policy blocks.

Not far behind Bowen in blustering rhetoric is the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. Several times he has summoned up the angry gods of extreme weather events as examples of the dangerous ‘Climate Change’ that his government dragon will slay with the Net Zero mantra.

For example, in early July 2022, Albanese was commenting on the floods which had devastated large regions in Sydney’s northwest. He told the media how Climate Change was causing ever-increasing extreme weather events. He repeated this at a news conference in early September.

My concern is that the Prime Minister is making emphatic public statements that are simply wrong and swiftly contradicted by history. Perhaps he has not been properly advised on this topic? His alarmism flies in the face of the IPCC’s SREX special report of 2012 on extreme weather, which conceded that warming could well reduce extremes, rather than increase them – another glaring contradiction. Further, it would be 20-30 years before any climate effects on extreme weather would even be detectable against natural climate variability, if ever. The 2013 IPCC report broadly endorsed those findings.

While the Prime Minister and his ministers continue to peddle false alarms about ‘Climate Change’ using ordinary weather events which contradict even the questionably reliable IPCC Bible on the subject, no one dares to call them out. Does the government have any advisers who can steer them off such … well, inaccuracies?

When the IPCC was set up over 30 years ago its objective was ‘to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., human-induced] interference with the climate system’.

The original mandate from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the IPCC was to address ‘dangerous human-caused Climate Change’. That set the agenda, which became the ruling orthodoxy, a circular argument that starts with the conclusion it is trying to prove.

The main dogma of Climate Change science is stated in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

‘It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period (Figure SPM.3).’ (IPCC 2014)

Chris Bowen, Anthony Albanese, and the whole Parliament wrapped up in the narrative of climate terror may like to heed the words of biosciences researcher Dr Javier Vinós and petrophysicist Andy May:

‘There is no evidence confirming this dogma. It is based on computer model results that were programmed with the same assumptions that emerge from them, in a clear case of circular reasoning.’

Andrew L. Urban is the author of the forthcoming book, Climate Alarm Reality Check – what you haven’t been told (Wilkinson Publishing).

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