Blowing hot and cold on Lomborg doesn’t add up

Your letter writer Douglas Mackenzie (23/7) tries to discredit your recent editorial (“Cooler headed strategy needed, 20/7) by mislabelling Bjorn Lomborg as a global warming sceptic. He does acknowledge that Lomborg’s qualifications are in political science, but then loses his way.

Lomborg is the president and founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre. The centre engages world-renowned economists, including seven Nobel laureates, to study the world’s biggest problems and advise policymakers and philanthropists how to achieve the best results with their limited resources; that is, how to spend their money more effectively. Naturally, climate change is one such issue.

As economists, their study starts by relying on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change science of global warming. From there, it considers the benefits resulting from the monies spent by governments and ranks the outcomes with similar approaches to other significant issues such a nutrition, war, trade, disease eradication and so on. In terms of “bang for buck”, there are many problems that should be tackled ahead of climate change to make our world a better place.

As a taxpayer, this seems to me a more sensible approach to the use of our taxes than abusing those who do not follow “correct thought”.

John Egan, Pymble, NSW

The fear of Labor’s Anika Wells of no Arctic ice (“Apocalypse is always possible, says millennial MP”, 23/7) overlooks the successful navigation of the Northwest Passage in 1906. In 2009, David Suzuki claimed the Arctic would be totally ice free by 2013. He was wrong, as have been many others. This alarmism of millennials seems to have our Liberal progressives rattled. Yet can there be a Coalition government with more political authority than this one to educate and overcome this ideological inertia that has crippled the effective use of our energy and water resources?

The latest peer-reviewed scientific papers confirm yet again that a doubling of the current 400 parts per million of atmospheric C02 will likely increase global temperatures by between 1.1C and 2C, not the apocalyptic 4.5C of alarmists. Again, their costly demands to reduce our latest 1.2 per cent contribution to global emissions is utterly useless in the face of developing nations’ massive 60 per cent and rising. Despite subsidies, intermittent solar and wind power only generated about 20 per cent of our energy last year, and even adding in natural gas, hydro and bio, coal power still provided 60 per cent.

Today’s reality sees scientists trenchantly criticising policy-driven computer models on temperature and sea levels, dramatically higher than observed data over three decades. The typical heatwave hysteria of recent weeks in Europe and in parts of the US overlooks the massive snow and rain falls that both regions suffered just last winter. There should be no hesitation in rejecting climate change as the cause and calling it weather.

Finally, as for the diversion of water westward by gravity into inland rivers instead of being wasted eastward to the sea, has there been a more favourable time to use government bonds to fund off-Budget such highly valuable infrastructure assets and potential wealth creation across our productive farming regions?

Kevin Begaud, Dee Why, NSW

Bob Brown might accept he has more important reasons to oppose massive wind farms in Tasmania than aesthetics and the death of birds. Nature invariably resists change with feedbacks that chemists recognised centuries ago as Le Chatelier’s principle. The larger the stress the larger the reaction and proliferating wind farms in middle latitudes without limit must eventually cool polar latitudes because you are interfering with the progress of heat toward the poles.

Wind turbines can bring colder air to the surface, particularly so with towers almost as high as Centrepoint in Sydney. During inversions (at night), significantly warmer air could be brought to the surface. One recent study (Joule 2,1-15, 2018) estimated that generating today’s US electricity demand from wind power (were it possible) would warm the continent by 0.24C and much more locally. Solar voltaic systems were found to have a similar effect but 10 times smaller. Human experience has shown the benefit of doing everything in moderation.

Ivan R. Kennedy, professor emeritus in agricultural and environmental chemistry, University of Sydney