THE SCIENCE OF HOT AIR

Australian economist Alan Wood comments on a bad movie and the support for "Kyoto" by Mark Latham, leader of Australia's Left. Excerpts:

"THE consequences of global warming portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow are so absurd that even the hysterics in the US green movement reportedly feared audiences would laugh it out of the cinema. However, the scientific proponents (and massive financial beneficiaries) of the greenhouse effect are more hopeful.

The general line from climate scientists in the US, the UK and Australia has been that while the science is bad, the film could be helpful in raising awareness of the consequences of climate change. It is revealing that they apparently don't see anything wrong with using bad science to push their case.

It will certainly frighten university students and schoolchildren. After all, they have been assiduously prepared to be frightened. According to Mark Latham last week, one of the three issues always raised with him in high schools and universities is the Kyoto protocol. As Latham said, they have grown up with the issue. It would be more accurate to say they have grown up with teachers pumping ever-so-politically-correct propaganda on Kyoto and climate change down their throats......

Latham will presumably find The Day After Tomorrow a powerful call to action, since he doesn't mind a bit of climate scaremongering himself. He warns that rising global temperatures would have a profound effect on Australia - drying out our dams and rivers, making our bushfire season a nightmare every year, threatening our beaches, destroying the Great Barrier Reef and flooding Kakadu with salt water.

These claims are presumably based on work by the CSIRO, which in turn depends on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's projections on climate change. This is a shaky foundation, as former Australian statistician Ian Castles, who enjoys a high international reputation, points out in a comment on a recent Senate report on ratifying Kyoto.

"The general impression conveyed by the report is that it has been established that human-induced climate change poses an extremely serious problem which demands urgent countervailing action in the form of negotiated emissions reductions, either under the Kyoto protocol or some successor instrument," he says. "But this is far from being the case. To begin with, the IPCC's third assessment report, which the Senate committee report describes as 'the most recent generally accepted authoritative statement on climate change', produced 'projections' - not 'predictions' - of future greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperatures.

"The distinction is crucial. John Zillman, Australia's principle delegate to the panel since 1993, made clear in an address in March 2003 that the projections in the IPCC's report are 'nothing more than what if? assessments', and are 'not, in any sense, to be regarded as predictions of actual future climate'. In the same address, Zillman said the question of how global greenhouse warming will manifest itself at the national, regional and local level 'is, at present, completely unanswerable'."....

If Latham cares about Australian jobs, he should reconsider his simple-minded support of ratification of Kyoto..."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else.

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