Charles Gaitskell (Port Independent 8 Oct) conflates open public debate with denying free speech for Alan Jones and The Climate Sceptics Party.
Alan Jones claims that Australians only produce .001% per cent of the human CO2 contribution to the annual rise in atmospheric levels. The Climate Sceptics Party claims that Jones is nearer the truth than scientists and come up with an absurd figure of .000007% per cent Australian contribution. They maintain that, as humans only add a yearly amount of 3.7 per cent to the total annual carbon cycle, then they must only be responsible for that percent of the yearly increase. As justification, they reference a paper by Knorr (2009) and misrepresent what the paper actually states about the anthropogenic airborne fraction. Reading the paper we find, (Knorr 2009 Introduction) “Of the current 10 billion tons of Carbon emitted annually as CO2 into the atmosphere by human activities, only around 40 per cent remains in the atmosphere, while the rest is absorbed by the oceans and land biota to about equal proportions”. The total Carbon that remained in the atmosphere that year was four billion tons, the exact amount of the human contribution. Australia emitted about 1.37 per cent of the total human contribution, so we must also be responsible for 1.37 per cent of the yearly increase if increase is 100 per cent human caused as confirmed by Knorr 2009.
(To convert Carbon flux to Co2 flux, multiply by 3.67)
John Byatt
