"Fran"  wrote in message
news:1192153911.833945.224030@q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> On Oct 11, 3:40 pm, Fran  wrote:
> Climate Change Likely to Increase Fires
>



Total BS Fran baby!



Reason Triumphs: Tribunal Says Warming Doom-mongers Are
Exaggerating

Andrew Bolt

Friday, February 16, 2007 at 04:11pm



A brave - as in evidence-based - decision by a Queensland
tribunal has accused prominent global warming prophets of
exaggerating and distorting evidence.



Its devastating findings should give rationalists faith that -
glory be - reason is not yet dead in Australia.



As the ABC reports:

ELEANOR HALL: While the industry's unions may be trying to adjust
to climate change, one of the world's biggest mining companies
has just won a case in Queensland in which the judge questioned
the science behind global warming concerns.



The Queensland Conservation Council had taken action in the Land
and Resources Tribunal in an attempt to force mining giant
Xstrata to offset any greenhouse gas emissions involved in
expanding its Newlands coal mine in central Queensland.



But in a win for the coal industry, the tribunal ruled the mine
expansion would not have an adverse environmental impact, and at
the same time it criticised the international report released by
the world's top climate scientists earlier this month.



Some notable doom-mongers get their come-uppance - like the
Australian Conservation Foundation's Ian Lowe:



Professor Ian Lowe gave evidence on behalf of the Queensland
Conservation Council, saying the proposed mine would contribute
to the cumulative impacts of global warming and climate change.



But the Tribunal criticised that evidence, saying he'd grossly
exaggerated likely emissions by comparing emissions over the
15-year life of the mine with annual global emissions.



Grossly exaggerated? Ian Lowe?



Ouch. And not just him, of course.



The tribunal was also sceptical of two recent environmental
reports, including the Stern Review and the latest report from
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.



In its decision it said the Stern Review has been criticised on
scientific and economic grounds as biased, flawed and alarmist.



I can't imagine what give the judge that idea. Not if he's an ABC
listener or reader of Fairfax newspapers. But if, for instance,
he's read this, then everything becomes clearer.



And I gather the the tribunal president, Greg Koppenol, isn't
much of a fan of close-our-coal-exports extremists such as Tim
Flannery and Bob Brown, either.



It also said that imposing conditions on the mine would drive
wealth and jobs overseas and have serious economic and social
impacts on the state.



More from The Australian:



In an extraordinary decision handed down yesterday, tribunal
chairman Greg Koppenol lashed out at the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change and the Stern Review, which have in recent
months generated huge concern worldwide about global warming.



Mr Koppenol accused prominent ecologist and Australian
Conservation Foundation president Ian Lowe of exaggerating the
facts by a factor of 218 in his evidence to the tribunal.



And this:



Mr Koppenol said the intergovernmental panel's report, released
last month, had concluded that most of the observed increases in
temperatures since the mid-1900s were due to emissions.



But a "close examination" of the global mean temperature chart,
which was said to support that view, revealed temperatures rose
by just 0.5 per cent from 1900 to last year.



The largest temperature rise was 0.75 per cent between 1976 and
1998, but similar rises occurred in 1852-1878 and 1910-1944.



Mr Koppenol said the chart showed average temperatures had risen
by 0.6C since 1951. As the panel had said "most" of the rise was
due to emissions, an increase of about 0.45 per cent over 55
years seemed a "surprisingly low figure" upon which to base
concerns about global warming.



UPDATE



The tribunal finding is here.



And it hoes into other environmentalists and scientists for
exaggerating global warming and its effects, too.



There's Jon Norling, of Urban Economics:



Mr Jon Norling spoke about the economic effects of climate
change. Like Professor Lowe, he placed great emphasis upon:

. the British Government's 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of
Climate Change (the Stern Review),3 which concluded that there
would be very serious consequences for humanity because of global
warming-induced climate change if GHG emissions were not severely
cut; and

. assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).

Regrettably, Mr Norling grossly exaggerated references in the
Stern Review to sea level rises: for example, converting Stern's
"if" certain ice sheets melt over "centuries to millennia", to
"when" they melt over "the next several centuries" and suggesting
that sea levels could rise 5m to 12m over the next century-when
Stern predicted only 0.09m to 0.88m and IPCC only 0.18m to 0.59m.



There's last year's much-hyped review of Sir Nicholas Stern, a
British public servant:



However, the Stern Review has been severely criticised on both
scientific and economic grounds. Papers recently published by
Professor Robert Carter et al and Professor Sir Ian Byatt et al
concluded that Stern's claim that the scientific evidence for
GHG-induced serious global warming and climate change was
overwhelming was just an assertion and was wrong-and that the
Stern Review was:

. biased, selective and unbalanced;

. scientifically flawed;

. a vehicle for speculative alarmism; and

. not a basis for informed and responsible policies.



Those authors also said that climate prediction is an uncertain
new area and not a mature science and that the rates of modern
temperature change observed fall well within the rates of minor
warmings and coolings inferred for the Holocene (the last 10,000
years of the Earth's history) in, eg, the GRIP ice core (a 3,029m
long ice core drilled in Greenland from 1989 to 1992).



There's the IPCC report:



[17] Finally, the Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Summary for
Policymakers was released on 2 February 2007. It relevantly
concluded that is very likely that human-induced GHGs are causing
global warming, and that most of the observed increases in
globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century are
very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic
(human-caused) GHG concentrations. ...



But the fact that very similar rises have previously occurred
(1852-1878, 0.65°C and 1910-1944, 0.65°C) was not specifically
mentioned or causally explained in the Summary. Also not
mentioned or causally explained is the fact that temperatures
have actually fallen 0.05°C over the last 8 years


-- 

Regards

Bonzo

"In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure
of more than $US50 billion on research into global warming since
1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend,
let alone a dangerous one." Bob Carter, Research Professor of
Geology, James Cook University, Townsville