Looks like the climate change cultists have a new heretic to burn!
If you saw sixty minutes last night, you would have been introduced to a new climate change heretic, Dr David Evans:
I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.
FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.
The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.
[...]
1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.
3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the “urban heat island” effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.
4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.
Read it all, basically confirms that the current global warming hysteria is a crock. Not only that, they had Krudd on last night who just made himself look stupid and his inability to provide a factual basis for his argument (that we should destroy the Australian economy with a carbon tax) meant he had to fall back on emotive arguments like “think of the children!”. And to all those climate change cultists who have been attacking me in the Leader (1,2); eat my shorts!.
An interview with Dr Evans on 2GB radio, via the Australian Climate Science Coalition:
Jason Morrison from radio station 2GB Sydney interviews Australian Climate Science Advisor, Dr David Evans about his recent claims that there is no evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Dr Evans worked for six years in the Australian Greenhouse Office and previously held the view that carbon emissions were responsible for global warming. Listen here