I have offered to provide some alternate advice to the Minister, with respect to the ACT Climate Change Council, but so far my offer has not been taken up. Still, I have learned to wait more or less patiently in such affairs, and in the meantime I am boning up on the questions that I might ask the Council, or indeed any body that thinks it has all the answers in the domain of ‘climate change’. They are the sort of questions that anyone can put to a self-proclaimed expert in this area.
I set them down some years ago, when I was especially irritated by one of the ‘experts’, and the grand way in which those of us who had questions to ask were simply dismissed, and our questions waved away. They are still relevant, and I suggest some explanations, as well.
1. If the science is so settled, and the evidence is so powerful, why can’t we just be shown it? (One reason is that the evidence is not strong, and the link to human activity is no stronger. The basis for the scares rests on the scenarios of future climate done for the IPCC. These scenarios do not work at a local scale, despite many efforts to suggest they do. Whether they work at a global scale is also doubtful. They have been quite inaccurate in predicting the continuing stasis in warming.)
2. Why has there been such denial of provision of the supposedly supporting data? (The data allegedly behind many of the central articles in this field, and much of the raw data showing temperature anomalies, are not available for replication, or have been ‘lost’. When attempts to gain the data through FOI have been made, the hosts, universities for the most part, have refused to accept their legal responsibilities.)
3. Why do the major journals in ‘climate science’ not insist that data and procedures be made available for replication by other, as a condition of publication? (This is standard practice in most experimental fields.)
4. Why have all the ‘adjusted’ data that we have been able to see show a stronger warming trend than given by the raw data themselves? (Those for Australia can be very odd in this respect. You would expect, over the long haul, that there would be about even numbers of cooling and warming consequences from what are said to be technical adjustments of one kind or another. I’ve never heard of any that show a cooling trend.)
5. Why did those at CRU in the UK, and their allies in the USA, work to prevent papers that disagreed with their own position from being published, and to get rid of editors who stuck to their guns? (All that is there for all to see in the so-called Climategate emails.)
6. Why won’t anyone in the warming camp argue, in a public forum, against those more sceptical? (Manning Clark House, with which I am connected, once put on a ‘climate change’ seminar in which all three speakers were from the warming camp. When I asked why that was so, it was explained to me that the speakers, all scientists from the ANU, didn’t want to have any critics there, because they would only get in the way of the message!)
7. Why won’t governments shift from the almost inane attack on ‘carbon’ into a serious look at adaptation to climate change, however it is caused? Australia has experienced systematic and large-scale droughts and fires over the last 150 years, and periods of deluges and flooding as well, but we don’t do very much to prepare for the next ones. (I think that the shift towards adaptations is beginning, at least rhetorically.)
8. Why don’t we spend much more money than we do on measuring the basic data more thoroughly — about which Ian Castles, a former Australian Statistician, was insistent. The data points for Australia are very spotty, and those for the southern hemisphere are laughable (it’s mostly water), but we treat the numbers as holy writ. We shouldn’t.
9. Why has there been such denunciation of those who ask these inconvenient questions? (A book can be written in response, and indeed many books have been written.)
The core of the problem is that governments can’t admit to having been wrong, which is why it is so useful for governments to be replaced from time to time. In opposition, political parties can think again. Government have to keep on doing what they were doing, and saying what they were saying, because so much depends on their decisions. Back-tracking is expensive financially and in terms of reputation.
I wrote a couple of rather gloomy pieces about Australian democracy recently, but one of its great virtues is that it is possible for Australians to turf out a government when enough of them have decided that they want something else. They don’t even have to be right; they simply have the power, and it is that power, I think, that safeguards us from tyranny.
Meanwhile, I am sympathetic to the ACT Government in its dilemma. It has a body with a name that seemed right a few years ago, but is likely to be a bit of a dead weight now and in the future. There are still people out there who think ‘climate change’ is the most important issue facing everyone, but their numbers are declining, if opinion polls are any guide.
The Government won’t abolish the body, because that would make it sound like the Abbott Government (hiss). But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Council did in time undergo a name change…