John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to talk on the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009. Could I say, firstly, that carbon is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is an odourless, colourless, non-toxic gas. I want to make that quite clear. When we talk about carbon, remember that 18 per cent of your body weight is made up of carbon. Everything around us exists with carbon. Without carbon, we would not exist—CO2 is a odourless, colourless, non-toxic gas. When we inhale, Mr Acting Deputy President Bernardi, do you realise that we breathe in about 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide? When we exhale, we exhale 50,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide. I suppose that is an idea: the government could put a tax on breathing and they could call it the ‘breath tax’. Imagine the money they would raise from 21 million Australians breathing. Soil nutritionists refer to carbon as a cycle of life. That is exactly what it is. Without carbon in the soil nothing grows. We need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is food for plants, crops, trees and all the things that grow by photosynthesis. Minister Wong prefers to refer to carbon dioxide as a pollutant. I disagree with that.

What is this whole debate about? What is this whole global issue of carbon dioxide about? It is about whether the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is causing global warming. That is the debate. We know for sure that there is more carbon dioxide in the air now than there was, say, in 1750. Ice samples have proved that. We are running, I think, at about 380 parts per million now and back in 1750 it was around 280 parts per million. History also shows that we have had atmospheric levels of some 2,000 parts per million.

I want to look at a few things here. If the increase in carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is definitely causing temperatures to rise then one thing would be for sure: sea temperatures would be rising. Let us have a look at what Lord Monckton has said in his report, which happened to come across my desk:

Since 2003, some 3300 automated bathythermograph buoys have been deployed throughout the world’s oceans in the ARGO program.

Of course there are thermometers with them, measuring and recording the temperature of the ocean.

These buoys have shown no oceanic warming in the five years since they were deployed, contrary to model predictions that pronounced warming would occur. This result is highly significant, because it is the oceans, far more than the atmosphere, that are the real bell-wether of climatic change. The oceans, some 1100 times denser than the atmosphere, would be expected to take up at least 80% of the excess heat generated by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions: yet, despite continuing rapid increases in emissions, the oceans are not warming at all, and may even be cooling a little.

Surely, with the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, if the theory is right the oceans would be warming. That is not an opinion; those are the tests from those 3,300 thermometers that have been out there since 2003, delivering results.

We would also expect that sea levels would rise. Let us face it: if the theory is that the globe is warming, the first thing we would see is sea levels rising. I would like to talk about a man by the name of Dr Nils-Axel Morner. He is a doctor from Stockholm University and he has been measuring sea levels for 35 years. He has not forecast what is going to happen in the future; he has been out there measuring them in places like the Maldives, which they say is one of the places in the world most threatened by sea level rises. He says the ‘claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud’, because they simply are not. They did rise a couple centimetres over 100 years but then started to reduce their levels again. This is a very good point that Dr Morner makes: if sea levels are rising, the diameter of the earth would increase. He says:

… because if the radius of the Earth increases, because sea level is rising, then immediately the Earth’s rate of rotation would slow down.

That is a fact. I could give Senator O’Brien an example: when an ice skater is doing their performance and they have their hands out wide, when they bring them in they spin faster. It is a physical fact that if the global diameter is increasing it will not rotate as fast. That is not occurring. We are not being reduced to 20 hours a day. There is a second question on it.