Joan Vickers is partly right. The carbon tax is not really intended to cause Australians pain. It just happens that way. The smart way to devise a tax is to levy it on as few organisations as possible (easy to collect), so that they will pass it on in their prices to everybody. While a few companies, such as Coles, say they will absorb the costs, inevitably they will pass it on in price rises, sooner or later. So the tax will be levied, second-hand, on everybody.
While CSIRO opines that increased CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is the main cause of warming the earth’s climate, others disagree. What the CSIRO actually said was: “It is very likely (at least 90 per cent likelihood) that most of the observed global warming since the mid-20th century is due to increases in greenhouse gases from human activities. Human activities also have influenced ocean warming, sea-level rise, and temperature extremes. It is very unlikely (less than ten per cent likelihood) that 20th century warming can be explained by natural variability alone.” (From BoM “State of the Climate 2012”, Climate Snapshot 2012 Brochure pdf, p 10, downloaded 120713. emphasis added.)
An alternative view is given by Scafetta and West: “In conclusion, if we assume that the latest temperature and TSI secular reconstructions, WANG2005 and MOBERG05, are accurate, we are forced to conclude that solar changes significantly alter climate, and that the climate system responds relatively slowly to such changes with a time constant between six and 12 a. This would suggest that the largescale computer models of climate could be significantly improved by adding additional Sun-climate coupling mechanisms.” (Scafetta and West: Solar Contribution to Climate Change. Section 6 – Conclusion para 42, in Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, 2007, downloaded from http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/2007JD008437.pdf 120713).
Rarely noticed is the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE). A study of temperatures in California over the period 1950 to 2000 using 219 to 233 weather stations with long-term continuous data showed that: “most regions showed a stronger increase in minimum temperatures than with mean and maximum temperatures. Areas of intensive urbanization showed the largest positive trends, while rural, non-agricultural regions showed the least warming.” . . . “Using climatic division mean temperature trends, the state had an average warming of 0.99°C (1.79°F) over the 1950–2000 period, or 0.20°C (0.36°F) decade–1. Southern Calif-ornia had the highest rates of warming, while the NE Interior Basins division experienced cooling. Large urban sites showed rates over twice those for the state, for the mean maximum temperatures, and over five times the state’s mean rate for the minimum temperatures.” (“Recent California climate variability: spatial and temporal patterns in temperature trends”, LaDochy, Medina and Patzert, in Climate Research Vol 33, 2007, downloaded 120713, emphasis added). From this, one can say that when the UHIE is removed from data, the temperature records from land stations show very little heating. It leads one to question other land temperature records.
What human-induced warming does not account for is the warm, and sometimes extremely warm, periods in the past.
Unfortunately, the money spent in “renewable energy and other low carbon technologies” is, other than providing more hydro-electric power plants, largely wasted. It would be far better spent on converting coal-fired power stations to nuclear, by replacing the coal burning furnaces with nuclear reactors. If we are serious about reducing Australia’s CO2 emissions, this is what we should be doing.
Dudley Horscroft
Banora Point
