Ian Plimer
ABC NewsTue, 15 Dec 2009 18:22 UTC
Two Copenhagen climate conferences took place last week. The UN Copenhagen conference was attended by politicians, 16,500 bureaucrats, thousands of journalists, activists and NGOs. Hundreds of limos, over 100 private jets and huge amounts of energy were expended by more than 30,000 attendees. Many of the attendees were ascientific agitators with a political agenda.
Australia's prime minister had a Copenhagen photo opportunity whistle stop in his dedicated jet and expended more fuel on this trip than the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort does in a year. Your taxes payed for 114 Australian bureaucrats to attend this junket yet some 71 UK delegates attended.
The UK Taxpayers' Alliance calculated the conference cost as much as the GDP of Malawi. If such funds were used to provide electricity and drinking water to Malawian families, then land clearing, wood and dung burning and disease would decrease. Now, that would have been true environmentalism!
The carbon footprint of these moralising folk, most of whom are self-appointed, is astronomical. Never fear, their great sacrifices are saving the planet. Saving us from wanton energy expenditure, hypocrisy, blackmail and irrationality at Copenhagen would be a good start.
I attended the Copenhagen Climate Challenge Conference. It was about the science of climate. Speakers were scientists, lawyers and environmentalists.
World sea level expert Professor Nils-Axel Mörner presented data from his 40 years of research on island states. In the Maldives, sea level rose 50cm in the 17th Century, dropped below the present level in the 18th Century, rose 20cm between 1790 and 1970, dropped 20cm in the 1970s and has been stable for the past 30 years.
I showed that there have been six major ice ages in the history of time and each commenced when carbon dioxide was far higher than now. Why was it cold and not warm in past times of high carbon dioxide? Professor Cliff Ollier, from the University of Western Australia, showed that glaciers flow uphill and wax and wane. Adjacent glaciers in Alaska advance and retreat showing that ice sheet changes are complex. Furthermore, the evaporation of steam from ice at African and South American glaciers has resulted in the retreat of glaciers yet temperatures are less than zero. Again, retreat and advance of ice is very complicated and, in some places, may be related to changing land use. Other papers dealt with the Sun, cosmic rays and energy.
The challenge from the Copenhagen scientific conference is: Prove that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive modern climate change. This has never been done. And while you are about it, please explain why there was a 600 year Roman Warming and a 400 year Medieval Warming at times of no major industry and when temperature was much higher than the most sensationalist IPCC future temperature speculations.
Why do records from 89 per cent of the US climate monitoring stations not even meet the US reporting requirements? And why has the keeper of the records, the UN's IPCC scientists at the University of East Anglia, just happened to have "lost" records, amended data, created data ex nihilo and engaged in mafia-type thuggery to avoid contrary science being heard? It is this non-robust science that underpins the Copenhagen climate conference charade.
The conference I attended used science to understand the past, present environments and pollution. This was essentially unreported because journalists are scientific illiterates and this is not sensational news.
The other conference, the UN's political conference, is about the redistribution of your money through sticky fingers.
Let's be honest - climate warming is man made. Just the hot air from politicians alone matches the methane gas output of the world's entire cow population. How they travel and what they spend money on reveals them for what they all truly are - political and photo opportunists.