Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Babet. You've touched on many good issues there. I too support this motion in relation to Rewiring the Nation, because at the end of the day what will start off as a $100 billion investment will end up as much more than that. That figure has been quoted quite a few times. It was first quoted a few years ago, so it would already be considerably more than what is quoted here. I'm glad we've got Senator McAllister here. I asked her in estimates how they are tracking the cost of transmission lines up until 2030 and how many kilometres of transmission lines are needed by 2030. Of course, we can never get a straight answer to any of this sort of question. We know that renewables not only destroy the environment, whether it's our biodiversity et cetera; they are also going to destroy our economy. We have touched on this many times this afternoon and previously in the chamber.

I will take up Senator Babet's comment that the science isn't settled. I actually think the science has been settled for quite a while, and it's actually called the ideal gas law. CO2 is a gas, and one of the things that really annoys me about this argument is that it's about the greenhouse effect into climate change. The problem of climate change is that that's an immeasurable KPI. You can't actually measure climate change. It states the obvious, because at the end of the day you're often asked, 'Do you believe in climate change?' Guess what? Climate change isn't a religion. It's not something you believe in. It's something you understand. I think we all agree that the Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours, rotates around the sun every 365 days and has a slight tilt because of the gravitational pull from the moon, which gives us our seasons. Kepler and Tycho Brahe in the late 1600s and early 1700s came up with the fact that the Earth travels in an ellipsis. All of these factors will contribute to a change in the climate. That's not the issue. The point is whether or not you want to believe that CO2 actually traps heat. That was the initial argument—that somehow suddenly CO2 traps heat. That's an oxymoronic statement, because heat is kinetic energy. It is the energy of motion. If it were true that CO2 were to trap heat, as these people say, then the actual temperature would drop, because temperature is a measure of mean molecular momentum. The slower the molecules move, the colder it gets. Yet again, the logic is completely flawed. But not only that; they love to say that nitrogen and oxygen are transparent to radiation as it bounces off the Earth. Well, guess what. CO2 is pretty much transparent to radiation and bounces off the Earth as well except in a couple of frequencies.

All molecules have what's known as a spectral fingerprint, and you tell how many spectral fingerprints a molecule will have. You take the number of atoms in a molecule and, if it's a linear molecule, you'll multiply by three and subtract six. If it's a non-linear molecule, you'll multiply by three and subtract five. CO2 has three atoms. Multiply it by three. It's a nonlinear molecule because you've got your carbon and two oxygens, which make it triangular in shape, so you get four spectral fingerprints. They are what's known as a vibrational frequency. It's very similar to something like surfing a wave: if you want to actually catch a wave, you've got to paddle onto the wave and be travelling in the right direction and at about the same speed to get on the wave.

It works the same way for carbon dioxide, but here's the rub: one of the vibrational frequencies at which CO2 absorbs photons that come from the Sun is actually at the 2.8 micron phase. Of course, 2.8 microns is incoming radiation. For some particular reason, these people who have come with this greenhouse gas effect theory seem to want to ignore the fact—and the head of the CSIRO has admitted this to me in estimates—that CO2 absorbs radiation at 2.8 microns. Now, it is true that it also absorbs photons on the way out at 14.8 microns. The four vibrational frequencies, just so you know, are 2.8 microns, 4.2 microns and then two vibrational frequencies at 14.8. That matters because we know from Planck's equation, E=hv, that effectively the incoming radiation that CO2 absorbs is actually five times stronger than the outgoing photons it absorbs. Of course, they never take that into account in their calculations, just like how, when it comes to the net zero modelling, they don't take into account the impact of phytoplankton, which is kind of crazy given that that absorbs 70 per cent of the world's CO2 anyway. But that is something that is completely overlooked.

Of course, the other thing that is completely overlooked is Albert Einstein's paper that he did in 1917, 'On the quantum theory of radiation'. On page 14 he says the Maxwellian effect can be ignored. James Clerk Maxwell was a brilliant Scottish physicist who determined in the mid-19th century that electricity, light and magnetism were basically different manifestations of the same phenomenon. This matters. Einstein went on to say in his paper in 1917, on page 14, that radiation is so insignificant with regard to the other properties that it effectively drops out. Those other properties, of course, are convection and conduction.

That's a very important point to make, and we know this because we see this every day: this thing called the wind. That's convection. That follows the second law of thermodynamics, which says the entropy of a system must always increase. That means that it is constantly taking heat and lifting it up into the atmosphere. If you actually go look at the height of the troposphere, you will see—at the equator it is 16 kilometres high, and at the poles it's about six kilometres high. What does that mean? It means that heat is carried up and taken out to space at the equator. Interestingly enough, if you look at the maximum and minimum temperatures of locations around the globe—I will use Singapore for an example. The maximum temperature in Singapore is about 32. I'm talking the record maximum temperature. That is actually much lower than, for example, somewhere in the middle of Australia, where it's very dry and the maximum temperature can hit up to 50 degrees. Why is that? It is because the molecules and greenhouse effect—or what these people refer to—doesn't actually exist. It cools. When I say 'cools', I mean it works both ways. It reduces the volatility between maximum and minimum temperatures. I want to call out these models, because, if we look at the energy budget given to me by the CSIRO, they claim that the downwelling radiation from CO2 is 342 watts per square metre. Yet the amount of energy that comes from the sun is 161 watts per square metre. It is absolutely absurd to think that CO2 has twice the energy of the radiation from the sun.