Illustration: Edd Aragon
Kevin Rudd went over the top last week in a speech to the Lowy institute, declaring it was "time to remove any polite veneer" from the climate change debate, which he claims is the "moral challenge of our generation".
Then he launched an extraordinary tirade against "the climate change sceptics, the climate change deniers" who he claims are "powerful", "too dangerous to be ignored", "driven by vested interests … quite literally holding the world to ransom … Our children's fate - and our grandchildren's fate - will lie entirely with them."
If he had any shame, the Prime Minister would be mortified to be associated with such a hysterical, undergraduate piece of ad hominem hyperbole. History will record his embarrassment and the debasing of his office. But the speech shows Rudd's desperation in the week before his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (Emissions Trading Scheme) is debated in Parliament and less than a month before the Copenhagen climate summit at which he wants to parade a signed-off scheme. As the public cools towards this new energy tax, politicians, green groups and other alarmists with the real "vested interest" in this debate are stooping ever lower in their attempts to shun dissenters.
One of the few public figures with the courage not to conform, the Liberal senator Nick Minchin, was smeared by anonymous sources in his own party this week as "crazy" for expressing scepticism about the extent of man-made climate change.
As the impacts of the global warming scare already are being felt at home in rising food and energy costs, taxpayers will be demanding credible evidence of the necessity of an ETS. It is unlikely the one-party state Rudd is attempting to fashion will be popular.
Rudd claimed in his speech there would be only "modest cost rises" associated with his scheme. The facts tell a different story.
The "most significant" price rise in the CPI index for the September quarter was for electricity, up 11.4 per cent. The Business Council of Australia's infrastructure report last month predicted prices will double by 2015, with the "first and most significant" driver being the ETS.
I have looked at my Energy Australia bills for the past two years and found large and unheralded price increases already.
From October 2007 to October 2009 the price per kwH of my electricity soared from 10.84 cents to 15.60 cents for the first 1750 KWh, and from 14.76 cents to 23.10 cents for the rest, which usually accounts for one-third to half of electricity used in the average three- or four-bedroom house. This is an increase of 44 per cent and 57 per cent respectively.
That's hardly modest.
Against the apocalyptic rhetoric pushed by Rudd comes a cool-minded new book which unpicks the science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports. Global Warming, False Alarm by Ralph Alexander, an Australian-born US scientist with a PhD in physics from Oxford, is subtitled ''The bad science behind the United Nations' assertion that man-made CO
He became a sceptic when he taught a course on physical science and found the textbook presented the "alarmist line on man-made global warming without question".
"To me that made a mockery of the history of science presented in the course, which featured several examples of how mainstream scientific thinking has been wrong in the past."
The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change says the earth has effectively developed an allergy to CO
Alexander explains the three problems with the hypothesis.
First, recent satellite observations show cloud feedback to be a negative loop, that is, clouds reduce global warming, rather than amplify it in a positive feedback loop, as the panel's models predict. Second, the panel has used flawed data. It "stooped to trickery and rewrote history" to make the temperature and CO
Alexander says data manipulation has been the panel's main tool of deception. For instance, it has ignored the bias in the modern temperature record caused by the "urban heat island effect" that inflates warming near cities.
The panel has also ignored the bias in its temperature data caused by the shutting down of weather stations in cold parts of the world in the 1990s - from about 5000 to 2000 or so - most notably in the former Soviet Union. Again, this artificially increases the recent warming rate. Alexander says the panel has "cherry-picked" 19th century CO
Don't get him started on computer climate models which he says are "full of unfounded assumptions". He points to the drop in the earth's temperature since 2001 which wasn't predicted by the models.
Ultimately, "trillions of dollars could be wasted to fix a problem that doesn't exist''.
Alexander's book is a useful tool to make sense of climate change.
As they did in the republic debate, regardless of elite consensus, Australians make up their own minds, and are probably turned off by official attempts to stifle dissent.
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