Update on video: Bob Carter makes many excellent points during his talk and I recommend it highly.
However, right at the very end he floats the idea of a “Science Court” (an Institution for Scientific Judgment) — an idea he credits to Arthur Kantrowitz, designed to “to settle scientific controversies as they relate to public policy”.
This is a damned idiotic notion.
My friend, Michael Darby, just wrote to let me know about a new book by Professor Carter and others (illustrated by cartoonist John Spooner) which tackles “more than 100 basic questions about global warming and climate change”.
The book is: Taxing Air: Facts & Fallacies about Climate Change.
From the blurb:
- Just 8,000 years ago, there was virtually no summer sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean.
- Sea-level rise is natural, and declining in rate.
- Australian rainfall has not decreased over the last 100 years.
- A previous Australian drought lasted 69 years.
- By catchment management, the Murray-Darling Basin now contains almost 3 times as much water as it held naturally.
- Global air temperature has not increased for the last 16 years, despite an 8% increase in CO2.
- Global ocean temperature is also steady or cooling slightly.
- Australian territory absorbs up to 20 times the amount of CO2 that we emit.
- The CO2 tax will cost about $1,000/person/year; and rising.
- The result of reducing Australian CO2 emissions by 5% by 2020 will be a theoretical (and unmeasurable)
cooling of between 0.0007 degrees Celsius and 0.00007 degrees Celsius by 2100.
- No scientist can tell you whether the world will be warmer or cooler than today in 2020.
Bob Carter will be speaking Melbourne this Tuesday, July 02 2013 at The Avenue Bookshop, 127 Dundas Place, Albert Park.