Malcolm McPhee: Emotion and political noise create a climate of fear and more taxes

COMMENT

Gary Taylor's Perspectives article decrying farmers' protests at the planned flatulence tax was at it again - restating climate warming claims as scary facts, creating a climate of fear.

Even usually perceptive commentators such as Colin James seem bewitched: "Is the globe warming? Yes, say almost all scientists ... "

Almost all? We've just read this: "There is no consensus of scientists in favour of human-caused global warming. While opinion polls do not determine truth in science, more than 17,000 American scientists have signed a petition saying, 'There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate'.

'Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environment of the Earth'."

And this: "There is not one experiment ... that demonstrates an effect on global temperature from human activity. This scenario is hypothetical - supported solely by computer models that are known to be so unreliable that their past predictions of atmospheric temperature have been uniformly wrong."

Then there is this: "Temperature fluctuations during the current 300-year recovery from the Little Ice Age correlate almost perfectly with fluctuations in solar activity. This correlation long predates human use of significant amounts of coal, oil and natural gas."

A thousand years ago, the Earth was much warmer than now; it was called the Medieval Climate Optimum. No motor vehicles and coal-fired power stations then.

What about the little-mentioned ash and gas output from volcanoes of which we have a few still smoking - Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and White Island, along with Erebus in our sector of Antarctica?

No one knows how much ash is spouted, though bursts of it do change the climate for extended times.

Among the volcanic gases, water vapour or steam leads the way, joining the much greater evaporation from seas and lakes creating atmospheric moisture, the major climate modifier.

Next comes carbon dioxide. Science News in July quoted reports that satellite measurements between 1982 and 1999 show an increase of 6 per cent in the Earth's vegetation in that time. The satellites measure chlorophyll on the Earth's surface.

"It is estimated that this increase has been primarily caused by an extra 12.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide fertiliser that plants absorbed from the atmosphere during the past 17 years."

Methane is counted as a greenhouse gas. But we've just got news in an item discussing animal methane emissions saying the main producers in the United States are termites. How might they be taxed to behave?

Another alleged climate villain is chlorine for its effect on ozone. It has been suggested volcanoes pump out 36 million tonnes of chlorine a year, while forest fires and primitive slash-and-burn agriculture contribute more than 8 million tonnes. But those are fleabites compared with 600 million tonnes said to be coming from evaporating seawater.

Though self-correcting nature washes out most of it through precipitation, a lot remains to be lifted into the stratosphere by what is described as the pumping action of storms, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, joining the volcanic steam blasted up there.

By contrast it is reckoned only a hundredth of the 750,000 tonnes of chlorine in the maligned CFCs is released.

What of volcanic emissions of sulphur in its varied forms, some of it becoming dangerous sulphuric acid? Much is sulphur dioxide reckoned to cause global cooling by reflecting sun radiation from the Earth.

There are lots of other volcanic gases and particles to take into account - hydrogen sulphide, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, hydrofluoric acid and volatile metals.

This leaves the flatulence and carbon taxes looking like a response to emotion and political noise that have created a climate of fear rather than the result of thinking science. And to what effect?

A European report notes that estimates from all macro-economic models put the global cost of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 30 per cent by 2010, as proposed by the Kyoto Protocol, at $US150 billion ($263 billion) to $350 billion ($613 billion) every year, with marginal effect on extreme weather, while climate models show Kyoto will postpone the temperature rise by just six years, from 2100 until 2106.

What might those dollars buy?

Professor Bjorn Lomborg, noting the Third World's trials in the United Nation's International Year of Freshwater, says: "For the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the single year of 2010 we could permanently satisfy the world's greatest need - provide clean drinking water and sanitation for everybody."

And yes, the International Panel on Climate Change did say this: "Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed change may be natural."

* Malcolm McPhee is a former Herald business editor.