I agree with Fiona Taber when she says that “voters” would benefit from doing their own research on the carbon (dioxide) tax issue (Your Letters, PM Independent 18/8). After fossicking around the internet, my own conclusions at this stage,are that I believe there has been climate change and I believe there has been global warming. I also believe there have been increasing levels of co2 in the air.
However, I found it interesting to discover that temperature recordings from satellites and balloons, taken by the Hadley Centre (UK) and the University of Alabama (US) – both involved with climate science – show that global temperatures have levelled out this past decade, or even lowered slightly.
How does the government and their climate scientists explain this when co2 levels have been increasing? Perhaps that’s the reason why they have changed the terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Furthermore, there are many people who will recall that in the mid 1970’s, the world was warned of the dire consequences of an imminent new Ice Age. (See Time magazine, June 24, 1974 and News Week April 28,1975). These warnings came at the end of a cycle of global cooling which began in the 1940’s. Fact. And during this post-war period, there was extensive industrial activity when the earth’s atmosphere would have been seriously “loaded” with human-induced CO2.
So why was there a cycle of global cooling during this period of industrialisation when CO2 levels would have been “sky high?” (Pardon the pun). Perhaps Mr Oakeshott could ask the CSIRO – whom he seems content to rely on – to explain this. Maybe it would be good for polititians to do some individual research too.
And furthermore, there have been alternating cycles – averaging a couple of decades – of global warming and cooling since about 1860. So what caused the warming cycle in the 1860s – 1870s when industrial CO2 levels were very minimal? This indicates that correlation does not mean causation.(When indeed there has been increasing CO2 levels simultaneous with warming). You can’t have your cake and eat it too. So all this tells me that something else apart from CO2 has been causing global warming.
Apparently global warming computer modelling ignores these alternating cycles, while projecting a continuous and permanent global warming trend, ad infinitum, despite a slight cooling trend already this past decade.
We’ve heard so much about how the tax on CO2 works. We’d like to hear how the science works. Instead, we are being treated like dummies. All we hear is that “thousands of scientists” agree that CO2 is causing global warming, but we’ve been told precious little of their supportive science. One is therefore tempted to suspect that either their science is weak, or it has been compromised by politicians, and they are scared of being shot down in flames.
Bob Donaldson,
Port Macquarie
