Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those who question the science of anthropogenic global warming are derided as dinosaurs. Those who ask about alternative scientific viewpoints are dismissed, not with reasoned scientific detail but with abuse and condescension. The time of reasoned engagement on this issue is over and minds are closed in this place. That does not serve this nation well. It is not in the best interests of the people who look to this place for confidence and wider understanding of the issues.

The majority of Australians believe that something should be done about global warming. Our children have been taught that man is responsible for global warming, and they have not been offered alternative viewpoints. It is hard to get past what has been ingrained for so long. I do not expect that this speech will change any minds but I do hope that it may open some.

‘ETS’ is a term that everybody seems to know, but nobody seems to know exactly what it involves. Reasonably, Australians may well turn to Google for a simple summary, and they would be disappointed. There are some business related summaries—pretty heavy stuff and not exactly as understandable as many Australians would desire. There is no Australian government website that lays out in a simple to understand format what impact an ETS would have on Australians. There is a website where you can find out how much money the government will give you, while the ETS costs and figures are very hard to find because it is a cost with little return. What a contrast that is.

To make the point very clearly, it suits the Rudd government’s political interests to ensure that the information that is available on the ETS is heavy in technical detail and not easy to understand, because if it was easy to understand then the majority of Australians would say that this ETS will hurt Australians, will fail to achieve any benefits for global climate. I note in a recent report by the Australia Institute, a left-leaning think tank, that it has examined the ETS and found that emissions from black and brown fired coal electricity generation stations are estimated to be stable out to 2033, when Treasury has predicted clean coal technology will suddenly be discovered, at which point they will fall. Clearly this ETS is no panacea for CO2 reduction and its credibility is highly questionable.

We know that the government’s ETS will lift prices. Flow through of this super revenue raising measure will add an estimated 12.5 per cent to the average cost of goods. The Victorian government estimates households will pay $7 a week more for their electricity. There have been other estimates that electricity bills will rise by 20 to 25 per cent. So every time one of my constituents walks into a shop and buys something, they will face that increase. The government should set up a website stating in detail the effects on everyday items. How much will a loaf of bread, a litre of milk and, of course, a birthday cake rise in price?

Access Economics estimates that an ETS will cost 13,000 jobs in Western Australia, with losses from industries concerning black coal, oil and gas, petroleum, chemical rubber and plastics, iron steel and metals, electricity and gas distribution. The reality is that an ETS is not pain-free. It will cost in terms of prices to households, jobs for those households and will cost in terms of reduced business competitiveness, particularly if we adopt an ETS and our regional trading partners and neighbours do not. If we burden this country, its businesses and employers with increased costs, while China, India and others do not, then we risk business closures and those businesses taking jobs offshore, where the lack of controls on emissions and the lower wages make other countries more attractive. Yet the increased costs may be considered acceptable by Australian families if it achieves less CO2 and reduces global temperatures.

To take up the issue of the threat of carbon, with all the talk of human-produced carbon-driven climate change, many people would imagine that carbon dioxide is an increasing proportion of the atmosphere. What would Australians say? Would you find someone on the street who would save five per cent, 10 per cent or 20 per cent and climbing? Surely it must be a big percentage. The reality is that the greenhouse gases in total make up just one per cent of the atmosphere. That is an interesting point, and when I searched Hansard I could not find any mention of that fact.

To go further, of that one per cent of the atmosphere that is greenhouse gases, 95 per cent of that is water vapour. So when we talk of carbon dioxide, it represents just 3.6 per cent of that one per cent of the total atmosphere. But that is not the end of it, because human produced carbon dioxide represents just 3.4 per cent of that figure, and Australia produces 1.4 per cent of that figure. So if my calculations are correct, the carbon dioxide produced by Australians, or within this nation, represents 0.00000017136 per cent of the atmosphere, and that is what the Rudd government’s ETS is trying to reduce—13,000 jobs in WA and price rises of 12.5 per cent on average to reduce that 0.00000017136 per cent by five per cent. So the question is: why would we want to pay that price for so little return?

A central theme to the way this debate is controlled by the government is to always harp back to the IPCC stating, ‘2,500 scientists say the science is settled, so it is settled’. Yet, when you look at the figures, only 600 actually looked at the carbon dioxide science, and then only 308 were part of the second review. In probably the most telling of all the figures, only 62 of the 308 reviewed the last chapter which attributed the cause of climate change. And when you take those with vested interests away, only seven could be described as independent, and two of those seven disagreed with the final statement that carbon dioxide was 90 per cent certain to be the cause of climate change. Well at least there were five independent scientists who agreed out of the 2,500.

There has also been a persistent line which derides scientists who disagree with the man-made global warming view. They are often said to be in the pay of big oil or fossil fuel corporations. I wonder whether that is so different to those on the opposite side of the argument that occupy professorial chairs in climate change or whose research is climate change related, and consequently funded, and who would themselves feel vulnerable if a majority of politicians had not just agreed with one side of the argument. I make the point that 31,000 independent US scientists disputed the findings of the IPCC, and that is worthy of our consideration. We are limited in this place, with very few scientific degrees amongst our number. It is therefore bad judgment to dismiss the views of those that are scientists and stop asking questions in this debate.

Another point to do with science is the matter of sea level. The IPCC predicts that by 2100 sea levels will rise by 59 centimetres. There have been suggestions that rises could be as much as six metres. They are based on modelling. What should be considered is that there is scientific disagreement on this. Swedish physicist and geologist Nils-Axel Morner was a former chair of the INQUA international commission on sea level change. Morner debates the modelling on sea level changes and in 2003 he wrote:

The late 20th century lacks any sign of acceleration.

Satellite altimetry indicates virtually no changes in the last decade … The INQUA Maldives research project has revealed that there, on a regional scale, are absolutely no signs what so ever of any on-going flooding of the Maldives …

In conclusions, there are firm observationally based reasons to free the world from the condemnation to become extensively flooded in the 21st century AD.

I would say that Morner’s view has been questioned. However, Professor Cliff Ollier of the University of Western Australia also reports that sea levels in the south-west Pacific have been stable for about 10 years, and this is a highly concerning contrast to IPCC modelling when the primary data debates and contradicts the modelling. It is known that in the last 150 years of the use of fossil fuels it was only between 1975 and 1998 that fossil fuel use and global temperatures rose at the same time. No correlation existed before, as temperatures had risen and fallen in periods during increased use of fossil fuels. Yet it is the link to carbon dioxide that is the basis for the human induced global warming theory. It is known that since 1998 carbon dioxide has risen in the atmosphere from 365 to 385 parts per million. However, in the same period, the global temperatures, as measured by the Hadley CRUT3v surface temperature measurements and the MSU satellite lower troposphere measurements, have actually been shown to be declining. How, then, can anyone insist that the science is settled, that the argument is over, when there is no correlation between carbon dioxide and global temperatures, as demonstrated by those two measurements?

The science of man-made global warming is not settled. Questions must still be asked. The Rudd ETS will be bad for Australians, and the cost involved to reduce minute amounts of CO2 to fractionally smaller amounts only requires more questions and not blind obedience.