Tim Lambert reports on the worst argument against global warming, ever. The competition is stiff, what with McKitrick & Michaels, Baliunas and Soon and many other contenders, but this piece definitely raises the bar.

One of the nice things about being the resident opposition at the Financial Review is that, as well as lots of letters, my articles often attract full-length replies. Mostly these are from right-wing thinktanks, but on several occasions they’ve been from government ministers I’ve managed to prod into a response. This kind of thing tells me I’m doing my job (of course, I also welcome support in the form of letters to the Fin or directly to me).

Today’s Fin (Subscription required) has a piece from Ian Campbell, the new minister for the environment, responding to my piece on Kyoto, which I’ve placed over the fold. I’ve heard that my piece, which I thought was pretty mild, upset the government, and that the original draft was considerably hotter than the published version. I’m pleased to say that I agree with a substantial part (though not all) of Campbell’s intro which reads

Without intervention projected changes in global temperatures are expected to cause major environmental and economic impacts on agricultural industries, on human health, on businesses and through a greater number of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, drought, bushfires, storms and flooding.

Contrary to John Quiggin’s assessment (AFR, December 2), it’s precisely because Australia understands that climate change will not go away that we are working to meet our Kyoto target. However, we do not believe the protocol is an effective response to climate change.

At least on the science, this is a clear-cut rejection of the wishful thinking that still seems to have plenty of supporters.
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Tim Lambert links to a not-very-flattering profile of the Lavoisier Group, whose members appear to be mostly elderly gentlemen who believe that, if we all wish hard enough, Tinkerbell will summon the ghost of Lavoisier and make that nasty global warming go away.

Connoisseurs of the Australian network of right-wing front groups will not be surprised to find the inevitable Ray Evans, former executive officer of WMC, President of the HR Nicholls Society, Secretary of the Bennelong Society and Treasurer of the Samuel Griffith Society has found time in his busy life to act as secretary of, and main contact for, the Lavoisier Group.

The front groups I used to deal with thirty years ago, Concerned Stalinists for Peace and so on, made a bit more of an effort than these guys, who even, according to commenter Julian Russell, share the same IP address. I feel sorry for the handful of genuine sceptics who’ve been sucked into this deplorable scam.

Putin has signed the Kyoto protocol, which brings it into force. For the foreseeable future, constructive international action of this kind is going to have to be undertaken without the support of the United States, and therefore of US client states like Australia. However, a designed system of emission credits and taxes may put pressure on non-ratifying countries to cut their emissions – Howard has promised that Australia will do this anyway, which doesn’t make much sense as far as I can see.

The lower house of the Russian Duma has voted to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Although some formal steps remain, this was the last real hurdle to be cleared before the Protocol could come into force.

The only signficant holdouts now are the US and Australia. The Bush Administration has, as expected, said it will do nothing, and Howard will presumably follow. The ratification will pose some significant problems for Kerry, who has tried to sit on the fence so far – his position appears to be that he would seek to renegotiate the treaty to make the terms more favorable to the US. Realistically, this is probably a sensible outcome for the world, but I don’t know in practice how a treaty that’s already in force can be renegotiated unless all parties agree, which seems unlikely.

Antoine Clarke at Libertarian Samizdata writes

I get paid to write the occasional article about environment issues. One story which intrigues me is the often repeated claim that “Half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within 200 or 300 years”. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the source of much of this garbage.

Because half of all the world’s mammal species are supposedly in Australia, this equates to five species of mammal becoming extinct every year, or one mammal extinction every 2.4 months.

I don’t suppose I need to tell Australian readers that this claim is nonsense. The Bio-diversity Audit Project (word file) estimates 331 species: 305 indigenous and 26 exotic species. The FAO estimates the total number of mammal species in the world at over 4000. That is, Australia has about 7 per cent of the world’s mammal species. It took me all of ten minutes to get these numbers using Google, but Clarke apparently couldn’t be bothered.
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Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, AndrewSteven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick‘ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues[1].

This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.

Update 27/8 I’ve had some run-ins with John Brignell of Number Watch, who generally takes a contrarian line on global warming and other environmental issues. So I emailed him pointing out this absurdity to see what would happen. I’m pleased and impressed to say he checked the numbers and posted a link almost immediately (scroll to bottom of page).
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Warwick McKibbin has a piece in today’s Fin (subscription required) endorsing the Castles-Henderson critique of the modelling behind IPCC projections of CO2 emissions. He refers back to a paper, with David Pearce and Alison Stegman, for the Lowy Institute (PDF file). I’ve read the paper and I think it’s broadly correct. On the other hand, I’ve previously argued that the Castles-Henderson critique is invalid (see also here). So what gives?
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