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Between a Flat Earth and a Hard Place

There has long been the argument that you should never mix science and politics.

That the two are mutually exclusive was made plainly evident with the release of a report on geosequestration (try saying that after a few beers) technology by the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee of Science and Innovation. The report, titled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place", contains a dissenting statement from four of the six Liberal Party members of the Committee that concludes that global warming is a natural phenomenon to which human activity plays no part. Thankfully, Committee Chairman, Petro Georgiou, another Liberal Party member had enough grasp of the science, and reality, to prevent the whole reporting process descending into farce.

The four dissenting MPs, David Tollner, Jackie Kelly, Danna Vale and Dennis Jensen, have combined to present a view which essentially trots out the tired old sceptic's arguments that were recently the subject of the Channel 4 (UK) 'documentary' "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (which it even quotes as a reference source). It's the sun; the IPCC is a political organisation, not a scientific one; that there is no consensus; it's all a conspiracy on the part of scientists to get more research funding; Mars is getting warmer too; and the scientific methodology, particularly the models, are flawed. Excuse me while I yawn. That these people are sitting on a Commitee involving matters of science is a travesty. The flimsy arguments they have trotted out in their dissenting report is school yard stuff and shows a total lack of understanding or reading on the subject. Come on. I mean, the basics are not hard. Carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation and transforms this energy into heat; we know for a fact that carbon dioxide concentrations have been rising as we can measure it; and we can also measure the carbon isotopes in this atmospheric carbon dioxide and know that the increase is due to fossil fuel burning. Simple. Even my kids understand this.

The sun does seem an obvious place to start, but since we've been measuring sun's cosmic rays and sunspot activity for some 50 years and there has been no discernible change (unlike the long term Malenkovitch Cycles which are responsible for ice ages), that can't be the answer. I won't go into the IPCC process, but they don't actually do any research and it is intended to interpret the peer-reviewed literature to provide a decision making framework

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