A turnaround on climate change

"Public loses faith in climate change" was the headline of a report in Britain's The Guardian newspaper last month.

According to a Mori poll, the proportion of British adults who believe climate change is "definitely" a reality has fallen from 44 to 31 per cent over the past year.  And while only six per cent said climate change was not happening at all, the pollster suggested that because those over 64 were not polled, the survey exaggerates the share of true believers.

In the US, a recent Pew Poll had global warming rating last out of 21 concerns put to respondents.

The Obama administration has shifted cap-and-trade legislation into the impossible category.  Meanwhile, the leading Republican on the Senate environment committee, James Inhofe, is seeking a Department of Justice investigation into research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists including Dr Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In Australia the latest Nielson Poll still has a majority in favour of an ETS.  But the majority has fallen by 10 percentage points over the past year, with respondents offering contradictory answers to questions on the respective schemes of the government and the Coalition.

And last week the Australian Industry Group whose CEO, Heather Ridout, has long been the chief industry cheerleader for the ETS, announced it was conducting a review of all climate change policy options.  The Business Council of Australia is also reconsidering its support for the government's ETS.

It is clear that in the space of the few months, since all the media attention was focused on green groups' Copenhagen street theatre, we have seen a marked turnaround in opinion.

So what has caused this?

There is certainly no new research into the costs of taking action on emission abatement, or the costs if no action is taken.  There is no new data about climate trends.  There are no new findings about species fragility, ocean levels, the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, or the likelihood of people in rich countries contracting heat induced dengue fever.

What we have seen is a slow drip of news that has punctured the deep faith that climate change is an urgent problem and the conviction, best expressed by alarmists like Professor Garnaut, that the world would arrive at a comprehensive agreement on how to tackle it.

The leaking of emails in October last year from the premier global centre of climatic panic, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, provided evidence that scientists leading the charge on climate change were keen to avoid scrutiny.  Even their most faithful journalistic mouthpieces at The Guardian and The New York Times could not avoid wagging fingers at their erstwhile sources of inside information.

Much of the rest of the media went on a feeding frenzy.

This was followed by a gradual puncturing of the sanctity of the IPCC data with its supposed endorsement by 3000 of the world's leading scientists.  A series of mistakes and exaggerations have been progressively uncovered.

These started back in 2003, when Canadian researchers McIntyre & McKitrick undertook statistical analysis of Professor Michael Mann's "hockey stick".  Representing a one thousand year temperature trend, the "hockey stick" with its upward trajectory in the 20th century appeared to refute previous thinking that temperature trends were like the zigzags of an extended accordion.

McIntyre & McKitrick deflated the statistics behind the "hockey stick" which had been the poster child of the IPCC third assessment report published in the year 2000.

The IPCC quietly downgraded the "hockey stick" in its 2007 report.

But the Climategate revelations energised a new questioning of the accuracy of the science as presented by the IPCC and even the integrity of the scientists themselves.

What we have seen over the past few months is scientific evidence that refutes or undermines key elements of the 2007 IPCC report on which all the political urgency for action on climate change has rested.

We have seen the evidence of imminent Himalayan glacier retreat refuted in spite of sneering attacks on the questioners by the IPCC head, Rajenda Pachauri.  We have seen evidence that the Amazon rain forests disappearance is exaggerated, that half of the Netherlands is not, after all, facing oceanic inundation, and that hurricanes are not increasing in intensity or frequency.

And those pesky polar bear populations are actually increasing, thereby defying the evocative pictures of marooned creatures drowning in a balmy Arctic Ocean.

Warming itself has appeared to have stopped, perhaps temporarily, a fact that even the defrocked high priest of the rising temperature trend, CRU's Professor Phil Jones, has been forced to concede.

And the IPCC estimated climate trend prior to 1980, which predates accurate satellite based records, is also under a new assault because crucial data has disappeared and many claim records are contaminated by local warming.

Copenhagen itself turned out to be far from the planned meeting, where the EU and US would have forced developing countries to join them in abating emissions.  The developing countries themselves recognised this as economic suicide, and Copenhagen demonstrated a shift in the balance of world power to China, rapidly assuming industrial dominance while at the same time becoming the mortgagee of the US economy.

China's muscle was demonstrated by their refusal to allow German Chancellor Merkel to announce Germany's own targets.

Where to from here?  It seems inconceivable that global warming as a scare will abruptly go the way of Y2K.

This is because the research grants, taxpayer subsidies to renewables, public statements by political leaders and long lags before there can be certainty about the degree of warming that might take place.  At the same time there will be no international emission restraint on the scale necessary to stabilise existing global levels of CO2.

But the vested interests promoting wasteful expenditures are well established.  The impetus created by over a decade of poor policy is too strong to allow the sort of "peace dividend" like that which came with the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Instead we are likely to see only a gradual reversal of the wasteful abatement expenditures and investment risk measures set in train by the IPCC claims of catastrophic global warming.

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