Global Warming Update

Writing in The Australian a few days ago, David Evans offers up some important and under-reported new information about the global warming crisis. Who is this David Evans character, and why should we care what he thinks?

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

Oh, that David Evans. Well, then he must be one of those pernicious Global Warming Deniers who must be silenced, right?

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

Gore protect us, it's worse! He's a believer who's fallen into apostasy! Why, in the name of Gaia and all that's holy, oh why?

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Facts? How dare you try to confuse us with facts! Er, what facts would those be, by the way?

The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before [Emphasis added, ~brb] the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

Now that is going too far! To hint that Al Gore, blessed be His name, is merely yet another common lying self-serving politician trying to panic the voters in order to increase his own political pow—

I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore. Keep a straight face, I mean. So rather than quote and comment on the entire article, I'll just give you a link to the original and tell you that it's full of good stuff and definitely worth reading in its entirety. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.