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

I rise today to speak to this motion about the impact of transmission lines. It's the kind of motion that we've come to know as 'Transmission Tuesday'. But, today being Monday, I'm going to rename this motion 'Mathematics Monday', because for too long we've been told that we have to follow the science, but there's never any attention paid to the actual mathematics that underpins the science. If you look at all the great scientists, they're actually famous not for their theories but for their mathematical algorithms or the constants that they came up with. Whether it be Einstein and his E=mc2, Planck and his E=hv, Avogrado's number, Planck's constant or Wien's law, all of these guys came up with a number. So today I'm going to look at the numbers behind the claim. The reason I am doing this is that, yes, it's true that renewables and transmission lines will have a devastating impact on the environment and they will have a devastating impact on the cost of energy, so let's just acknowledge that.

People love to conflate the issue between the science and the environment. One of our party's values is the need to protect the environment. We can tick all that off. I love the environment and protecting the environment, but I want to focus on the mathematics. Yet again, I absolutely believe in climate change, because the climate changes every day; that's called the weather. We can take that out of the equation and go back to the underlying lie that underpins the justification of this expenditure and waste of taxpayers' dollars and that will have such a devastating impact on our economy and the climate, which is the greenhouse gas theory. It's not a greenhouse gas law; it's a theory. It doesn't become a law until a mathematician proves the theory.

Their theory is that an extra hundred parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere will heat up the atmosphere by one degree. Technically speaking, the CO2 has increased by 140 parts per million in the last hundred years or so, and they're arguing that the temperature of the atmosphere has increased by 1.4 degrees. Effectively, a hundred parts per million has increased the temperature of the atmosphere by one degree. Let's divide that by a hundred. One part has increased the temperature of the 10,000 surrounding molecules of nitrogen, N2, and O2 by one degree. The first law of thermodynamics, which is the science of heat, says that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed or transferred. What that means—ironically enough, I learnt this in maths, too, not physics—is the laws of momentum. Temperature is ultimately a measure of mean molecular momentum. If a car that weighs one tonne is travelling at 100 kilometres an hour, and it hits another stationary car that weighs one tonne, assuming no heat loss, the most that stationary car can travel is at 100 kilometres an hour. The car that hit it, if it was only travelling at 100 kilometres, cannot convert that into 150 kilometres. That is the law of conservation. Energy cannot be created. It can only be transferred or transformed.

With that in mind, we apply that to the molecules in the atmosphere. In order for one molecule to transfer heat to 10,000 other molecules and heat each of them by one degree, the temperature of that molecule has to be 10,000 degrees. I'll qualify that, because CO2 has a specific density of 1.53—in other words is 1½ times heavier than the combined weight of N2 and O2 in the atmosphere. I won't explain that. That's molecular weights. You can work that out yourselves. Long story short, that means that one CO2 molecule has to have a temperature of 6,600 degrees in order to transfer one degree of heat to 10,000 molecules. Here's the thing: the sun has a temperature of only 5,700 degrees Kelvin, so the greenhouse gas theory proponents are saying that the temperature of a carbon dioxide molecule actually has to be hotter than the sun. That is ridiculous. You talk about Jesus feeding 5,000 people with a couple of fish. This is like the Jesus molecule, CO2, which can transfer heat to 10,000 molecules. That cannot happen. That mathematical equation alone destroys their argument just like that.

I won't finish there, because I'll go to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the entropy of a system must always increase. What does that mean? It means that heat rises and heat expands. The greenhouse gas theory has this idea that somehow heat gets trapped in the atmosphere. It's like a blanket in the atmosphere that traps heat. That's not true. It is true that CO2, carbon dioxide, absorbs radiation and photons—I'll come back to that with a third thing I'm going to. But right now there is not a solid object in the atmosphere that traps convection. Yes, CO2 does absorb and emit photons, but it does not trap convection. A greenhouse gas, for example, will allow sunlight in. The air will heat up. It will rise, but it cannot rise outside the greenhouse. Eventually, the heat gets trapped at the top of the greenhouse. Overnight it cools, and then the hot air condenses back into liquid and it goes back into the plants. There is nothing that traps heat in the atmosphere other than gravity itself, which I'll talk about later. We know that. The evidence of that is the fact that the height of the troposphere at the equator is 16 kilometres. The height of the troposphere at the poles is only six kilometres. Why is the height of the troposphere at the equator so much higher than the height of the troposphere at the poles? It's because it's hotter at the equator—because heat does not get trapped; it rises.

Going back to the first law, imagine a carbon dioxide molecule. We've seen what happens when steam runs out of a jug. When the jug boils, the steam comes pouring out of the jug because hot air goes from hot to cold. If you have a shower and you keep the bathroom windows closed, the room steams up. If you open the windows, the heat runs out. It's like having a shower down at the beach or when you go camping. You don't trap the heat; it just disperses into space. You've got to remember that outer space is a very, very big place. The temperature in outer space is actually 2 degrees kelvin, or minus 270 degrees. It is constantly sucking heat out of the atmosphere. This idea that somehow heat gets trapped by CO2 is complete rubbish, because CO2 is not a solid object. It cannot trap conduction.

I've spoken about conduction and convection—the first and second laws of thermodynamics. I'll now speak about the third way in which heat is transferred, which is radiation. I will quote no less a figure than Albert Einstein himself who said, on page 14 of his 1917 paper, that radiation is so insignificant that it drops out as compared to other forms of heat transfer. What he means by that is that radiation is next to nothing. So, if I walk out one sunny day and I feel a bit of heat on my face, that's radiation. But radiation does not have the same force as a flood or the wind, as anyone can tell you who has seen a cyclone and has seen the impact that the wind can have, or who has seen the impact of conduction when we have a car accident or some form of physical contact, which is conduction. That's Einstein proving that.

I'll go further into radiation, because this is the argument they love to confuse people with. I'll admit that the greenhouse gas theory is based on a partial truth. It is true that CO2, carbon dioxide, does absorb radiation. But here's the thing. Every molecule has a certain number of vibrational frequencies. That's based on the number of atoms in that molecule. So CO2, because it has three molecules, has four vibrational frequencies. Those frequencies are at 2.8 microns, which is incoming radiation, an asymmetrical mode at 4.3 microns and then two outgoing modes—two degenerate modes—at 14.8 microns.

The interesting things about this is that it is true that CO2 absorbs the photons that travel with these particular frequencies. The best way to imagine this is to think about learning to surf. In order to stand up and catch a wave, you've got to be paddling in the same direction as the wave, and you've got to be travelling at the same speed in order to get on the wave. That's how it works with radiation. Radiation is transparent to most molecules, unless it's travelling at exactly the same frequency. We know that CO2 absorbs incoming radiation at 2.8 microns, and we know, because of Planck's law, that it also absorbs outgoing radiation at 14.8—let's just call it 15 microns. Again we rely on Planck's law. Max Planck was one of the great scientists of all time. He came up with his theory and said the energy of a wavelength is inversely proportional to the width of the wavelength. Because the incoming radiation at 2.8 is much smaller than the outgoing radiation of 14.8 microns—14.8 divided by 2.8 is about five—the energy absorbed by CO2 on the way in is actually five times more powerful than the energy absorbed on the way out.

We can see that, again, if we look at the equator. The maximum temperature around Singapore, for example, is around 37 degrees. Interestingly enough, I did a post on this back on about 15 or 16 September 2022, where I pointed out that the maximum temperature of Singapore was about 35.6 degrees. Suddenly, within a year of posting that, the all-time record maximum temperature of Singapore is now 37. But, if you look at maximum temperatures of cities around the equator, they will be around that 35- to 37-degree mark. If you compare that to the inland temperatures here in Australia—for example, in Wilcannia—it's closer to 50 degrees. So we know that cities that have high humidity—that is, lots of water vapour in the air—actually have cooler maximum temperatures. But you don't just have to look at cities. You can look at coastal locations. We know that cities that are on the coast tend to be milder and have cooler maximums, albeit that, I admit, they have higher minimums as well. So the water vapour and the greenhouse gases tend to modulate the temperature because they are constantly absorbing and emitting photons. But let's not forget the second law of thermodynamics: it is much harder for an atom up in the air in the cooler parts of the atmosphere to emit a photon downwards, because it's warmer, because heat always travels north. So most of the photons emitted by CO2 will actually still rise.

And let's not forget the first law of thermodynamics: if a CO2 molecule does absorb a photon and absorbs energy, it's not stationary; it's not going to sit in the same spot. If it gets more energy it's going to heat up, and it's actually going to rise by itself. This, yet again, is another thing that invalidates the greenhouse gas theory.

But let's not stop there. I actually asked Larry Marshall, the former head of the CSIRO, if I could have the model that the CSIRO used to calculate net zero, because, being the accountant that I am and being anally retentive, I wanted to drill down into the detail of how we calculate net zero, because I'm of the belief that we actually hit net zero about four times over, thanks to the great work of Ian Plimer, a renowned geologist who understands how the Earth genuinely works. So I already think we're being ripped off.

But here was the reply from the head of the CSIRO. He goes, 'Which model, Senator?' And I go, 'What do you mean: "Which model"?' And he goes, 'Well, there are 40 different models.' 'Oh!' I said, 'If there are 40 different models, how can the science possibly be settled?' And he said, 'Well, it's different in the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere,' and all this stuff—the verbiage started. But here's the thing: if the science is settled, why are there 40 different models to calculate net zero? I thought that if was all settled there'd be one model.

But, you see, here's the rub: if you go and look—and I did a post on this yesterday on Facebook—at these crazy energy budgets that these people put out, they want you to believe that the downwelling radiation from greenhouse gases is 341 watts per square metre, yet the same model proposes that the energy from solar radiation that hits the earth's surface is only 161 watts per square metre. Are you seriously telling me that the downwelling radiation from greenhouse gases is over twice what we get from the sun, which actually emits ultraviolet light as well as visible light, which has energy levels that are between 100 and 1,000 times greater than infrared and longwave radiation? This sort of stuff is absurd. The key point here is always to follow the mathematics or the stoichiometry.

The last thing I want to touch on is to say that you have to ask yourself: is there an algorithm that describes the relationship between pressure and atmospheric pressure and gases and temperature? Yes, it so happens there is. It is called the ideal gas law. That is a combination of Avogadro's law, Charle's law and—