CHICKEN LITTLE TIME

I’ve been coming round to this opinion for some time. The thought that just maybe, perhaps, no dammit!  I’ll say it: The Emperor has no clothes. I’m talking about global warming and carbon footprints and the emission trading scheme. And I have joined the Andrew Bolt school of sceptics.

We talked about the supposed climate change crisis on MY 3AW program last Friday after Ross Garnaut revealed his version of Armeggedon at the National Press Club.

And with all the gloom and doom headlines that followed people tended to forget that Garnaut is an economist. He’s no environmental guru or a carbon copy (scuse the pun) of the original doomsayer Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth. Garnaut knows about industrial pollution because he’s a director of the Lihir gold mine in Papua New Guinea.

The Age on Saturday had a banner headline that said: Act Now or Face Disaster. And Garnaut warned of an Australia fifty years from now when Kakadu would be just a memory and the Great Barrier Reef destroyed.

Sounds like a Will Smith movie. Or The Day of the Triffids.

We have been swept along by the Ruddster and if you challenge any of the dogma you are either an imbecile or a selfish, materialistic environmental Nazi who doesn’t give a fig about the future of our children and their children’s children.

This is not to say that we should not be environmentally responsible. I have said many times we treat this planet as if it belongs to somebody else.

But at least let some experts pour some cold scientific water on some of the more outlandish claims.

You don’t have to be reminded that we have been there before. After the Garnaut lecture I received a note from John Michael Howson reminding me that we have  survived the Y2K bug, SARS, The Silent Spring, acid rain, global freezing, world famine, etc. ...and all the other predictions that the end is nigh.  He says ‘We shall survive the new religion of weather’.

One Garnaut sceptic is the New South Wales Labor Government Treasurer, Michael Costa.  He says “Chicken Little’  warnings about the dangers of climate change are no substitute for  a rigorous economic and scientific debate.  Chicken Little, of course kept running around saying the sky was going to fall in.

It is true we are being flooded with the economic arguments. But what about the scientists?

On The ABC the other day Prime Minister Rudd said that we must put a cap on the carbon pollution we put out into the atmosphere because if we just keep letting it rip, then the planet gets hotter and hotter and hotter.

And yet a meteorologist of 35 years experience told me carbon is not a gas nor is it a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is a trace minor greenhouse gas in the greenhouse effect that controls the heat exchange of the planet.

He says water vapour primarily controls the earth’s heat exchange. So ‘when 99% of commentators talk about co2 as the key heat valve
you are seeing profound and basic misunderstanding of what it  is all about.’

That’s why I want to hear more from the scientists and less from economists and politicians who have vested interests. And if that makes me a Doubting Thomas. Well, I can live with that. And sleep at night.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008