Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Richard Denniss, Chief Economist of The Australia Institute, has written a rather patronising “back to basics” attack on coal, one of Australia’s major export commodities. The only problem is, he missed some of the basics.
According to Denniss;
You can’t tackle climate change while you are increasing the amount of coal that is being burned. Read that sentence again if you need to, it’s really quite important.
After 20 years of debate about climate change, it seems ridiculous that such a statement of the bleeding obvious needs saying, but – given the statements of Mr Turnbull and Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg – it seems we need to go back to basics.
Step 1 – the more coal that gets burned, the more CO₂ enters our atmosphere and the more global warming we get. The atmosphere doesn’t care how or where the coal is burnt, and it really doesn’t care whether we tell ourselves that we could have burned even more coal if we wanted to.
Step 2 – inventing more “energy efficient” coal-fired power stations could only reduce greenhouse gas emissions if you bulldozed the old power stations and replaced them with the new ones. But, and this is important, when you build hundreds of new coal-fired power stations and you don’t bulldoze the old ones then no matter how “efficient” the new ones are, the extra coal that gets burned causes extra climate change.
Alarmingly, neither Mr Turnbull nor Mr Frydenberg seem to understand this. Maybe the following example would help them. Just as burning too much coal causes climate change, drinking too much alcohol causes drunkenness. And just as the only way to turn around climate change is to stop burning coal, the only way to sober up is to stop drinking alcohol. Are you with me?
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/back-to-basics-on-coals-role-in-climate-change-20151120-gl3q8i.html
There is no dispute that burning coal will contribute to global warming. The question is, how much, and why should we care?
Richard mentions there has been “20 years of debate”. Leaving aside whether that rather arbitrary figure is correct, for 18 of those years, a period during which 1/3 of the rise in CO2 since pre-industrial times occurred, there has not been any global warming.
Arguably there has not been a statistically robust trend over the entire length of the world’s temperature records, other than a transitory blip caused by climate’s long random walk.
In Richard’s Wikipedia entry, he is described as “a constant thorn in the side of politicians on both sides due to his habit of skewering dodgy economic justifications for policy”. It seems a shame Richard doesn’t appear to want to apply this alleged razor sharp insight to the issue of climate change. A “dodgy justification for policy” is a fair summary of the current state of the world’s climate models.
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“What is silly, is the straw man arguments and high school debating tricks being used to prevent Australia from having an honest conversation about coal …”.
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Denniss’s arguments are just that as can be seen during his debate with Lord Monckton at the press club in 2011 where his childish arguments were figuratively eviscerated (available on YouTube) viz. CO2 emissions + precautionary principle = pollution = tobacco smoke = consensus of so-called experts = cancer = global warming (very bad).
In this article he relies on more puerile analogies: “Just as you don’t sober up by drinking less beer than you could have, you don’t tackle climate change by burning less coal than you could have”.
However he does point out Turnbull’s cognitive dissonance.
Thanks, FTOP_T November 20, 2015 at 5:24 am
“There is no proof that burning coal will contribute to global warming” However there is increasing proof that voters become very angry when the power goes off because ‘renewables’ are supplying no electricity and they then become a severe danger to politicians who support CAGW theory.
“There is no dispute that burning coal will contribute to global warming. The question is, how much, and why should we care?”
Actually no! There is a dispute. If surface temperatures can be better explained by atmospheric mass and gravity (which they can by a country mile!!) then burning coal does nothing to cause global warming. Zero. Zip.
Keep burning that coal. Gas too, they are both responsible for giving us record crops of rice, corn wheat etc. What’s not to like about that. The Green Blob would love this: http://pindanpost.com/2015/11/21/mungbeans-that-like-co2/
“The atmosphere doesn’t care how or where the coal is burnt, and it really doesn’t care whether we tell ourselves that we could have burned even more coal if we wanted to.”
I once tried to tell some Australian greenies that Australia can double its CO2 output or cut it to zero and it won’t make a detectable difference to global mean temperatures even using high ECS guestimates because Australia’s contribution is less than 2% of total global CO2 output and the margin of error on ∆GMT measurements is larger than 2%. They tried to convince me that the atmosphere and physics care that Australians’ per capita output is high compared to other countries.
This is the same guy who was given a ‘beating’, in a live broadcast Australian Press Club debate, by Lord Christopher Moncton, a few years ago.
I can say that Denniss talks utter nonsense when it comes to the climate. I just don’t know about his knowledge of economics.
He started the article perfectly… but wrote too much. “You can’t tackle climate change.” End of story. The next fart from Gaia (Pinatubo, Novarupta, Vesuvius) will overwhelm any influence of atmospheric carbon with sulphur. Same as it ever was.
”… the only way to sober up is to stop drinking alcohol. Are you with me?”
If he can admit to his alcohol problem, maybe he can admit to his climate alarmist problem too. He should let us know when he is sober of both issues.
Eamon.
‘Back to Basics’ in UK politics means ‘a load of extra-marital affairs by politicians’……
Hopefully the 10,000 mile distance from the UK will inure the Australians from such practices, especially when so much of it will be going on at COP21…..