Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Still not settled

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"....If we look behind the carefully packaged and promulgated official assessments of the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide we find a range of assumptions, assertions and approximations. There are many uncertainties and unknowns about the climate system and its future state. In its 1990 first assessment report the IPCC honestly concluded in the scientific assessment:
There is a greenhouse effect;
Adding carbon dioxide will enhance the greenhouse effect;
However we cannot be confident of the timing, magnitude nor regional impacts of such enhancement.
That statement is as true today as it was in 1990. Recent global temperature trends strongly suggest that the climate sensitivity is far less than the projections from computer models would have us believe, projections on which governments rely in the formulation of energy policy.
The availability and cost of energy are fundamental to the competitiveness of our industries and the lifestyles we enjoy. The Precautionary Principle may have once been justification for government intervention in energy policy but it is now time to reassess those interventions. The divergence between climate projections and reality suggest that the national and regional energy mix should not be constrained by climate considerations. Models that only approximately represent the climate system and for which there remains many knowledge gaps are proving misleading and inadequate as a basis for energy policy."

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