Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this motion today that we should not sacrifice our farmers on the altar of climate change. I have to say, through you, Mr Acting Deputy President Bragg, I'm disappointed that Senator Whish-Wilson didn't refer to me before as well, because I would enjoy the debate about the science very much. You see, the problem with climate change is it's a motherhood statement; it lacks specific equations that show and measure cause and effect. If I were to lodge my tax return and say my income had changed, the tax office would, quite rightly, come back to me and say, 'You need to be more specific.' Yet, we have the government spending taxpayer dollars on this notion of climate change, but they don't really want to define what 'climate change' means.

I've asked the CSIRO in estimates if they could give me the method by which they're going to calculate net zero, and the reply was, 'Well, which method do you want—there are 40 different models.' I think that goes to show that if the experts can't even agree on how to calculate net zero, they clearly aren't very specific about the impacts of CO2 on the environment. The other question I've asked them, while talking about plants, is we forget that the biggest absorber of CO2 in the planet is phytoplankton in the ocean, which absorbs about 40 per cent of the world's CO2. We know, after the bushfires in 2019-2020 there was a phytoplankton bloom in the Southern Ocean because they absorbed all that extra CO2, so the fishes and the whales—our fisheries in Australia are actually quite low compared to other countries, so we need all the CO2 blowing off the land over our coastline to get as much fish and marine life as we can.

It is important to note that CO2 boosts plant productivity—that's well known—but what I want to focus on here today is not the notion of climate change, which is undefinable and indistinguishable—it's just a motherhood statement that has no real cause and effect associated with it—is the greenhouse gas effect. That was the original lie that started this whole climate change discussion in the first place. By the way, I accept the climate changes—it changes every day. And the world has been heating for about 12,000 years—it's called the Holocene period. There are lots of reasons the climate changes. I also believe that CO2 does increase the temperature. We know that, because of the ideal gas law. Now, CO2 is a gas, and if you're going to do proper science, you have to ask yourself, 'Is there an equation out there that demonstrates the cause and effect between gas and temperature? There is: it's the ideal gas law. I've spoken about it before, it's PV equals nRT. Pressure is force over volume, so there's your volumes gone. Force is mass times acceleration. If you take mass and you take your temperature, which is just a measure of mean molecular momentum, you have your mass energy equivalents from Einstein's 1905 paper. That's what it comes down to, that mass is energy. If we looked at it through those eyes, we would then realise that an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of mass and not radiation.

I should note that CO2 absorbs incoming radiation at 2.8 microns, which, as we know per Planck's law, is five times more powerful than the outgoing radiation it absorbs at 15 microns. But ultimately, as per the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the system will always increase, and this is where the greenhouse gas effect falls over. In the greenhouse, you have a solid object that stops hot air from rising, in the atmosphere, it's actually gravity that stops hot air from rising as it pulls the molecules closer to earth, which is the reason Mount Everest, which is closer to the sun, is cooler than the surface of the planet.