T. J. Dunleavy
Hon Secretary
Submission on Report of New Zealand Climate Change Commission
Never before in the history of Earth sciences has so much misrepresentation been concentrated into so long a document advocating such complete overthrow of past progress in human life expectancy and wellbeing, socio-economics and technology, in such defiance of the universally-accepted Scientific Method, as in what has been proposed to the New Zealand Government by its recently-appointed Climate Change Commission (CCC).
As a voluntary group of independents drawn from the various fields of Earth sciences, energy generation and reticulation, rural and urban industries, community and political engagement, we are unanimous and unhesitating in advising the Government to set aside this report until the Commission or some other appropriately qualified institution produces solid verifiable empirical evidence for the so-far unproven allegations that the degrees of cyclical changes in regional weather patterns known by the collective term “climate” are in any way unprecedented, dangerous, or incapable of the continued adaptation the world has evolved since time immemorial.
As many of our members have lodged their own individual submissions covering their respective fields of expertise, this submission in opposition to the CCC report is therefore deliberately general.
We find the report useless for the following reasons:
- It does not produce any evidence that confirms that man-made greenhouse gases cause dangerous global warming. (It can, of course, be argued that that was not included in its terms of reference. But surely an outfit that boasts that it gives evidence based recommendations to the government should be looking at ALL the evidence.
- The commission ignores Carbon dioxide is the basis of all life on earth and the oceans.
- It appears to ignore the fact that nothing New Zealand can do can change the climate of the world.
- It recommends policies that would increase worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide.
- It ignores article 2 of the Paris Agreement that says we should do nothing that reduces agricultural productivity
- It is non-transparent and fails to allow access to the mathematical model that costed proposals.
- It fails to disclose the marginal abatement cost of each recommendation.
- It makes no attempt to identify least-cost solutions.
- It ignores the waterbed effect of the ETS
- It recommends that we stop using fossil fuels for heating in advance of eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation. The simple fact is that for every tonne of carbon dioxide saved by switching from a coal-fired boiler to an electric one, Huntly power station will emit 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide. (For those who don’t know, Huntly has been running virtually continuously for the last year and, as gas supplies continued to dwindle, it will burn increasing amounts of coal. If the demand increases or decreases, it is Huntly that changes its output. Genesis has just decided to recommission unit three at Huntly.)
- It seems to ignore the enormous cost of a rapid switch to electric vehicles. Both the extra cost of buying a much more expensive vehicle and the huge cost of scrapping internal combustion vehicles before their life has ended.
- It ignores the problem of charging the 40% or so of vehicles that park on the road.
- It seems to ignore the cost of setting up electric charging stations which will need huge amounts of space and massive power supplies.
- It assumes that the problem of keeping the lights on in a dry year when we lose 10% of annual energy can be solved easily and cheaply.
- It ignores the findings of an earlier report by the Interim Committee on Climate Change.
- It ignores the scientific method that involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.
- It relies on what the Commission itself claims is a “consensus”, ignoring the fact that scientific discovery has never evolved from the political process of consensus (apart from agreement on the acceptance of the validity of the Scientific Method).Remember the quotation attributed to the great Albert Einstein: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
- In summary, the CCC report is little more than alarmist scaremongering.
Scientists who assume recent global warming is due to rising CO2 concentrations have simply argued “there is no viable alternative explanation”. So they assume every change, warming or cooling, drought or flood, is due to rising CO2 concentrations. But atmospheric physicists have shown that CO2 concentrations in the lower atmosphere are now saturated, and the increased “competition” between greenhouse molecules greatly attenuates any additional greenhouse effect imparted by rising CO2 concentrations. At higher altitudes CO2 is not saturated, but because the stratosphere warms with increasing altitude, any increasing stratospheric CO2 will enhance the export of infrared to outer space and cool the earth. To attribute any global warming to rising CO2, the warming effect of redistribution of heat around the world must be precisely measured and factored out. How the calculation of the global average is affected by heat redistribution must be accurately ascertained. Until then, climate dynamics appear to be the better climate control knob and offer the best explanation for both a warming climate and episodes of extreme weather. And natural oscillations suggest a human-caused climate crisis is highly unlikely!
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