Questions for the Chief Scientist

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"Chubb dismisses arguments that climate change is driven primarily by natural events, not AGHG emissions. "You don't get the Arctic ice melt just by natural events,” he said. “You can't reproduce it through modelling if you just factor in natural events. But if you factor in human activity, then you get what's happening and you get the reduction.”

But how can one “just factor in natural events” when our knowledge of their causes is somewhere between partial and incomplete; when there are no laws of climate change in “the science”, or proven causal linkages? Does any climate model have genuine predictive power? Does evidence of changes in the natural world prove they are “dangerous” and wholly our fault? Is public confidence in climate science low because of its reluctance – or inability - to answer such questions?

Multi-million dollar advertising campaigns depicting carbon dioxide as “carbon pollution” are not working. Will monetising carbon dioxide (taxing us) really enable the government to, as it claims, manipulate the climate, the frequency of “extreme weather events”, save national “icons” and so on?"