KEY POINTS:
It appears the Government, in the words of the Minister of Finance, is basing policy on a huge scientific consensus on climate change.
Does it mean complete agreement or fudging issues within The Issue?
How big is huge? Who determines when consensus is reached?
Is this consensus one
of believers in major man-made climate change, implying those with other views are unprincipled heretics?
Remember, belief does not make fact, good science or truth.
Nor does proclaiming policy as official make it right. Demonstrably, official policy is not always right.
How can disagreement be unhelpful? What is wrong with raising doubts? Doubt, it's often said, is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. United Nations endorsement and blessing don't necessarily make an opinion true, nor does repeated assertion of its probability make it fact.
Why has 90 per cent probability been seized on at the political creation that is the UN to describe the risk?
Why choose 90 rather than 10 or 50? In the absence of evidence to support a forecast, the experts are left with opinion to dress up, some might say as job insurance.
Computers don't make the results of models fact: rubbish in = rubbish out.
Have the UN climate models yet been real-world tested? No.
Weather stations are not equally distributed around the world and vast regions like the oceans are not covered. Many stations are enclosed by urbanisations that make the areas heat tanks.
Temperatures vary throughout a day so which temperature do you take?
How can there be a proclaimed global average temperature when nobody measures a proper local average?
Why does the UN International Panel on Climate Change now talk about projections as if they were forecasts or predictions? It is surely because a forecast needs to be validated; a projection need not.
That can be little different from a guesstimate.
Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist, succinctly said: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
There is another problem.
How big is this man-made climate change contribution to natural climate change which, incidentally, tracks the activity of the Sun?
Climate has been changing, warming and cooling - often hugely - for more than a million years, long before we had steel mills, power stations and motorcars, whatever their fuel. Thanks to warming, the Wakatipu glacier dropped its moraine and we have that beautiful lake.
If you want to solve a problem you first have to define what the problem is and measure how big it is. We have no real word on that. Nor any on what allowance to make for volcanic emissions, whether steady or oft-times catastrophic.
Carbon dioxide is demonised as a pollutant, despite it being a vital component of Earth's greenhouse. But it is relatively minor compared with the big one, water vapour (think of humidity and not steam, mist or clouds which are condensed vapour).
This vapour might account for 36 to 66 per cent depending on place, time and season. Yet it is even less mentioned by fear-hypers than nitrous oxide and methane, and unlike those it isn't noxious.
Neither is carbon dioxide. My Joe Fox tomato plants are saying, thank goodness for that CO2. In fact, life as we know it on Earth would die without it.
We haven't seen the International Panel on Climate Change and national politicians talk much about how we should deal with water vapour to control climate.
The Minister of Finance laced his address, Leadership on Climate Change, with the words "threat", "warning" and "danger" and peppered it with "lead", "leaders", "leading" and "leadership".
With election year pending, they are enough to remind us of H.L. Mencken's warnings to fellow Americans: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it."
* Disclosure: This writer is not a major polluter or emitter of greenhouse gases, though he may burp at times, and he isn't industry funded. In fact, he is unemployed and wageless.