Peter Lang

Re Your submission to the Senate you state, initially

• Carbon pricing cannot succeed unless it is global;

• Global carbon pricing is unlikely to be achieved;

• The Australian carbon pricing scheme, if continued, would be high cost and provide little if any benefit.

I agree with your first point. The second, I cannot assume to be correct because my descendants' survival depends upon it being incorrect. At full/near full global participation your third point is moot, as your Figure 1 indicates, and Australia can lead in this, not just follow.

Your basic conclusion is we should simply adapt to whatever temperature we reach. I live in a hot dry place and to adapt to it becoming hotter and dryer has its already near limitations. Compare this with a Siberian who can see local upside in climate change to date.

We have only projections of what an average global temperature increase of something like 4-5 degrees will bring and what tipping points will be reached. We do know what a 4-5 degree decrease brings, an ice-age reducing us to hunter-gatherers.

You're seeing it purely as an economic issue, I'm not. I'm thinking we should do something, you don't, as a free market will determine who the global winners and losers. Survival of the fittest communities, Darwinian, yet I see it as more as survival of the fittest civilization.

The global cost of mitigating climate change is a cost we have to bear, whatever that is.

Lucerface,

Thanks you for reading the submission. I am impressed that you did. However, you have misinterpreted or misunderstood some and have attributed conclusions to me that I most definitely did not draw and do not agree with. See responses below:

>”The second, I cannot assume to be correct because my descendants' survival depends upon it being incorrect. “
That is flawed login on many levels. First it assumes that a policy that cannot not deliver the claimed benefits – i.e. of climate damages avoided – will in fact deliver the benefits because you believe it must. Second, your assumption that ‘dependent’s survival depends on the policy succeeding is not fact. It’s belief.

>”At full/near full global participation your third point is moot, as your Figure 1 indicates, and Australia can lead in this, not just follow.

“The Australia can lead” is ignorance. That’s what Rudd thought when he took his 114 followers to the Copenhagen Conference. We cannot lead. We can be part of the solution. But wasting money on useless policies that cannot succeed won’t lead. Your arguments are based on ideological belief, not rational analysis.

>”Your basic conclusion is we should simply adapt to whatever temperature we reach.”

I never said any such thing. You made that up. The fact that you would do that is a pretty strong indication of intellectual dishonesty.

I argue for the solutions on this thread. Join in and debate it there if you want to: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/4/20/science-environment/ipccs-terrible-three

The rest of your comment shows you are susceptible to believing doomsday stories. It’s just religious-like belief, not from rational analysis.

Luciferase, the only sensible solution is to acknowledge that AGW is a fraud, and the proposed mitigation of human emissions has no science to justify it.

We need immediate dismantling of the IPCC and inquiries into how the fraud originated, and how it was able to develop to the point where our parliament was so misled as to impose the baseless and scientifically unjustifiable carbon tax..

This should have been done immediately the Climategate emails made it clear that IPCC stood for “International Panel of Climate Crooks”

As stated by Professor Bob Carter:
“, with the formation of the IPCC, and a parallel huge expansion of research and consultancy money into climate studies, energy studies and climate policy, an intensive effort has been made to identify and measure the human signature in the global temperature record at a cost that probably exceeds $100 billion. And, as Kevin Rudd might put it, “You know what? No such signature has been able to be isolated and measured
That, of course, doesn’t mean that humans have no effect on global temperature, because we know that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas, and we can also measure the local temperature effects of human activity, which are both warming (from the urban heat island effect) and cooling (due to other land-use change, including irrigation). Sum these effects all over the world and obviously there must be a global signal; that we can’t identify and measure it indicates that the signal is so small that it is lost in the noise of natural climate variation.”
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/tag/professor-bob-carter/

Professor Richard Tol says:
http://richardtol.blogspot.nl/2014/04/ipcc-again.html

“In September 2013, I stepped down from the team that prepared the draft of the Summary for Policy Makers to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This attracted worldwide media attention in April 2014.

As a Convening Lead Author of one of the chapters, I was automatically on the team to draft the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). AR5 is a literature review of 2,600 pages long. It assesses a large body of scholarly publication. In some places, the chapters are so condensed that there are a few words per article in the learned literature. The SPM then distills the key messages into 44 pages – but everyone knows that policy and media will only pick up a few sentences. This leads to a contest between chapters – my impact is worst, so I will get the headlines.

In the earlier drafts of the SPM, there was a key message that was new, snappy and relevant: Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change really are symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.

This message does not support the political agenda for greenhouse gas emission reduction. Later drafts put more and more emphasis on the reasons for concern about climate change, a concept I had helped to develop for AR3. Raising the alarm about climate change has been tried before, many times in fact, but it has not had an appreciable effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

The international climate negotiations of 2013 in Warsaw concluded that poor countries might be entitled to compensation for the impacts of climate change. It stands to reason that the IPCC would be asked to assess the size of those impacts and hence the compensation package. This led to an undignified bidding war among delegations – my country is more vulnerable than yours – that descended into farce when landlocked countries vigorously protested that they too would suffer from sea level rise.

cont ...

Richard Tol says cont ...

The SPM omits that better cultivars and improved irrigation increase crop yields. It shows the impact of sea level rise on the most vulnerable country, but does not mention the average. It emphasize the impacts of increased heat stress but downplays reduced cold stress. It warns about poverty traps, violent conflict and mass migration without much support in the literature. The media, of course, exaggerated further.

Alarmism feeds polarization. Climate zealots want to burn heretics of global warming on a stick. Others only see incompetence and conspiracy in climate research, and nepotism in climate policy. A polarized debate is not conducive to enlightened policy in an area as complex as climate change . The IPCC missed an opportunity to restore itself as a sober authority, accepted (perhaps only grudgingly) by most.

The IPCC does not guard itself against selection bias and group think. Academics who worry about climate change are more likely to publish about it, and more likely to get into the IPCC. Groups of like-minded people reinforce their beliefs. The environment agencies that comment on the draft IPCC report will not argue that their department is obsolete. The IPCC should therefore be taken out of the hands of the climate bureaucracy and transferred to the academic authorities.”

When are we the tax payer going to start insisting on Means Testing politicians rip off pensions and retirement perks ?? In line with the private sector.