Climate

One Nation believes Australia should withdraw from the United Nations Paris Agreement signed in 2016.

Australia has committed to the deepest and most savage carbon emission cuts in the world on a per person basis. This commitment is predicted to slow the Australian economy with enormous job losses. In our view, this economic suicide cannot be justified on the evidence put forward by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

We know that the majority of people believe in man-made global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This belief is reinforced by media coverage of events like forest fires and droughts, but government policy needs to rest on the evidence and there is a growing concern about the evidence on which the claims of man-made global warming rests.

It is just too easy to allow our memories, often unreliable, to accept the often repeated claims that it has never been hotter. Given the economic costs, we believe we need to listen to the evidence.

It is the evidence we should take regard of when making policy. The history of science is that it’s the evidence that counts.

We have confidence in evidence when the experiment can be repeated and the same results are achieved.

We have confidence in science when the evidence is consistent with the theory and that theory predicts events in the future.

Scientists predicted global warming would lead to extremes of weather, which would be more intense and more frequent, but despite media reports extreme weather events were more common prior to 1960 than at any time since.

Climate science suffers from problems not found in other areas. Firstly, there are no accurate records for past temperature and it is difficult to reconstruct those temperatures from proxies. Secondly, it is difficult to arrive at a single temperature for the earth in the past and a single temperature for the earth now, so that the two temperatures can be compared and in that way, we can say there is a pattern of warming not seen before the greenhouse gases increased in the atmosphere.

Central to both these problems is the fact that there is no one place to take the earth’s temperature, but rather an infinite number of places ranging from the equator to the poles. Any attempt to add temperature measurements together creates uncertainty because the average varies depending on how many temperatures are collected in cold places and how many in hot places.

If there is global warming, then we say it should be reflected in a large number of places in different climate zones but in Australia that appears not to be the case.
The longest-running weather collection station in Australia, known as the Nobby’s Weather Station at Newcastle, has shown no pattern of warming since temperature records were collected in 1862. The hottest mean average temperatures at Nobby’s were before 1900 and the highest maximums before 1890.

There are other historical records for temperature kept by telegraph operators on the Overland Telegraph Service from the mid-1800s. They show temperatures were higher and heat waves were longer in duration before 1900.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was established in 1906 and its records start in 1910, but it does not use earlier temperature records.
The IPCC uses a homogenized data set known as HadCrut4, which is a compiled by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

The 2009 Climategate emails from the CRU at the University of East Anglia reveal the problems with the methods used by climate scientists to determine global temperatures. These emails show how difficult it is to recreate past temperatures from tree rings, lake sediment cores, bubbles of air caught in ice cores and other proxies for past temperature.

It is critical these reconstructed past temperatures are right, because any claim of global warming rests on evidence that temperatures were lower in the period before 1850 when industrialisation started to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Climate scientists acknowledge that the earth’s climate has changed in the past including when large parts of the world were covered in ice. The medieval warm period (950-1200) was following by colder and warmer periods.

It is generally agreed that natural events caused these temperature changes. These natural events include volcanic eruptions, and progressive changes in the earth’s tilt, the earth’s path around the sun and the wobble effect of the earth spinning on its axis.

It was only in 2015 that evidence was found of a connection between the earth’s tilt (that shifts through a 41,000 year cycle between 21.5 degrees and 24.5 degrees) and the movement of the low-pressure band of clouds (that is the earth’s largest source of heat and moisture- the Intertropical Convergence Zone). This research suggests severe droughts and severe flooding can be caused by changes in the earth’s tilt.

It is clear to us that climate research needs to continue, but after thirty years of work by the IPCC there is insufficient evidence of global warming of the kind claimed by the IPCC and there is insufficient evidence of the climate catastrophes predicted.

We are the only political party to question climate science. One Nation Senators have taken every opportunity to use the Senate Estimates cycle, to understand the position of government advisers on climate science like CSIRO.