Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a physicist by training, I am very proud of our physics laureate Professor Brian Schmidt. The winning of the Nobel Prize in Physics makes me think of the way that science operates, which will be part of my discussion today.

We have heard a lot about scientific consensus, meaning that the views of anthropogenic global warming sceptics should be discounted. But let us examine scientific consensus in light of this year's Nobel prizes in both physics and chemistry. Twenty years ago, the unanimous—not just the consensus but the unanimous—view of physicists, cosmologists, astrophysicists et cetera was that the expansion of the universe was slowing as gravity inexorably pulled galaxies towards each other. The question then asked was whether there was enough mass in the universe for the galaxies eventually to collapse towards each other—the so-called 'big crunch'. No-one questioned that view until Professor Brian Schmidt and two others smashed this consensus by discovering that the expansion of the universe was in fact accelerating. As a result, they were awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

Similarly, this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Dr Daniel Shechtman for work on quasicrystals. As a result of this work he was ridiculed by the establishment and was asked to leave his research group at the prestigious National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US. It took a full two years before a peer reviewed journal deigned to publish his work.

This year's Nobel prizes for both physics and chemistry have been awarded for smashing scientific consensus. As I said in a discussion with Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb, major advances are made breaking a consensus, while only incremental advance occurs within a consensus. We need to be careful of mindguards and groupthinkers who insist that simply because a certain view is a consensus view it is correct and must be defended at all costs. So to anthropogenic global warming, where consensus and support from scientific institutions are invoked in defence of this idea. This is despite the science of anthropogenic global warming being less 'settled or secure' than that of quasicrystals or of the universe's expansion decelerating prior to revolutionary thinkers and observers challenging the accepted view. The whole premise of mankind and, in particular, carbon dioxide emissions being responsible for climate change is not the result of fundamental physics but of computer model outputs.

Computer models must be judged in terms of their predictive capacity, and it is here that these models have proved to be lacking. It has been said of computer models it is garbage in, garbage out, except in the case of climate change computer models, where it is garbage in, gospel out. Problematically, the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change using these much venerated models have not matched what has been observed. In terms of global average temperature, the models predicted an increase in the last decade, even for the case where carbon dioxide concentration is held constant. Observations using the IPCC's own Hadley Climate Research Unit dataset show no increase in global temperatures this century.

Ms Hall interjecting—

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