Miranda Devine: Climate change isn’t about science — it’s a hot mess of politics and big money
It’s time to press ‘pause’ on climate change nonsense and put Australia first, writes Miranda Devine. Scrapping energy targets would be a big boost.
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Eco-catastrophists were in full cry before the Paris climate talks.
As usual, they enlisted science to their political cause, and as usual science refused to comply without being verballed.
Now we hear from an eminent whistleblower with America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the organisation used dodgy data to claim the “pause” in global warming from 1998 never existed, and had rushed to publish without the usual checks in order to influence the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The almost 20-year “pause” or “hiatus” in global surface warming since 1998 was confirmed in 2013 by UN scientists and has been an awkward stumbling block for climate alarmists who insist the world’s temperature is soaring skyward at an exponential rate. Thus, Pause Debunking has become a competitive sport for alarmist scientists.
Feted as the “Pause-buster paper”, the misleading NOAA publication was greeted like manna from heaven by Paris climate junketeers and used to allay any lingering doubts governments like Australia’s might have had about risking their nations’ economies on an empty climate gesture.
NOAA whistleblower scientist Dr John Bates told Britain’s The Mail on Sunday newspaper at the weekend that the NOAA paper was based on “misleading, ‘unverified’ data.”
Nor was it subjected to “NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process — which Dr Bates devised” before it was published in June 2015 by the journal Science, on the eve of the Paris summit.
Bates’ “vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’.”
This latest scandal comes on top of previous embarrassments for the climate alarm community. There was the 2009 “climategate” batch of leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that were published on a Russian website three weeks before the Copenhagen summit, revealing a staggering level of fraud, manipulation, and deceit.
Another batch of leaked emails, dubbed Climategate 2.0, a couple of years later, showed eminent climate scientists conspiring to have PhDs stripped from their sceptic rivals, to have journal editors fired for publishing papers they didn’t like, and colluding with the media to slant coverage.
All the fakery adds up to the conclusion that the whole global warming crusade isn’t about science, but politics — and big money.
The NOAA scandal couldn’t have come at a better time for US President Donald Trump to strengthen his resolve to ditch the Paris climate agreement stitched up by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
And in turn Trump’s defection should encourage the Turnbull government to tear up our own Paris climate agreement which they foolishly ratified in November, after Trump won the US presidential election.
Tony Abbott is right: even though it was his government which made the deal, he recognises the changed circumstances of the world. We need to scrap the unreasonably punitive renewable energy targets of 26-28 per cent we have committed to abide by in 2020.
Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg keeps telling us it’s a better deal than the Labor Party’s 50 per cent renewable energy target, but that’s not the point.
Low-cost, coal-fired energy has underpinned this nation’s prosperity. With our abundant resources we should be the world’s low-cost energy superpower, as Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce keeps saying.
Higher RETS equal higher electricity prices, and an unreliable power supply, which is the death-knell to business, as we are seeing in South Australia.
By kowtowing to climate nonsense, successive governments have proven they have no intention of putting Australia first, and this is what is driving the Hanson phenomenon. Scrapping the United Nations control of our energy mix would be an enormous morale boost to the country.
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