In his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson produced a layman's summary of the scientific history of the Earth. He managed neatly to sidestep the global warming debate by focusing on the bigger picture, describing the work of scientists whose theories are still accepted as relevant and sketching what's known about the ups and downs of the Earth's climate over many millions of years.
He describes how, for instance, about 12,000 years ago the Earth began to warm, then plunged back into bitter cold for a thousand years or so. After this, average temperatures lept again, by as much as four degrees Celsius in twenty years - much more than the biggest change predicted for our immediate future. And this was all pre-industrial Revolution, so these changes took place independent of any human contribution.
'What is most alarming is that we have no idea - none - what natural phenomena could so swiftly rattle the Earth's natural thermometre', Bryson wrote. 'Climate is the product of so many variables - rising and falling CO2 levels, the shifts of continents, solar activity, the stately wobbles of the Earth - that it is as difficult to comprehend the events of the past as it is to predict the future. Much is simply beyond us. Take Antarctica. For at least 20 million years after it settled over the South Pole, Antarctica remained covered in plants and free of ice. That simply shouldn't have been possible.'
Ask yourself this: given that the scientific community has had very little luck explaining past climate changes despite all the data, how likely is it that theories about the future are correct, when by definition there's no solid data yet? Also, how can there be such a strong consensus among scientists about the warming of the Earth in the future when so little exists about climate changes in the past? It's one thing to observe, by looking at a thermometer, that the temperature is rising but another entirely to figure out why.
To a layman, even at a cursory glance, there seem to be quite a few holes in mainstream climatology theory. For instance, why did global warming (commonly attributed to human impact) begin only in 1975, according to the IPCC's graphs, when the human Industrial Revolution began 300 or so years before? And if, as it's claimed, the planet had simply reached a 'tipping point' after a long build-up of CO2 for many years, why did no one anticipate it?
What's clear, though, is that taken seriously, climatology is a hugely complex science with many variables. The pay isn't good because - unlike space, weapons technology, computing, or anything with a commercial application - there's no money in it, so perhaps it doesn't attract the same grade or number of applicants as disciplines with greater rewards.
That was until the Gillard Government created Flannery's Climate Commission two years ago to scare Australians into paying Labor's useless carbon tax. It employed an army of highly-paid and superannuated bureaucrats and 'Climate Change Commissioners' each on $180,000 a year. The new Liberal Government has given both Flannery and the Climate Commission the royal boot. The only mistake the new Environment Minister Greg Hunt made this week when sacking Tim Flannery, a mammalogist with zero formal qualifications in climate science, was to thank the alarmist for his work.
Thank Flannery? Hunt should instead have asked Flannery how much of his $180,000 a year salary he'd refund after getting so many predictions wrong (e.g. the Arctic could be ice-free by 2013 (ice this year increased instead); "Australia is likely to lose its northern rainfall" (there's actually been more rain); and "Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis" (Perth is now headed for its wettest September in 40 years); "without desalination plants Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane could be out of water by 2009" (instead, floods filled dams in Sydney and Brisbane, and the expensive desalination plants hurriedly built in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide are now all mothballed or scheduled to be).
The Australian of 5th March 2010 quoted a Tim Flannery estimate of a 60 metre sea-level rise (Flannery: "So anyone with a coastal view from their bedroom or kitchen window is likely to lose their house as a result of that change"). That hasn't deterred former Prime Minister Julia Gillard from buying a $2m beachside house in her home town of Adelaide earlier this month.
