Sometimes you salivate at the liberty of the backbench to express views unencumbered. For those who are leaving parliament that liberty is accentuated.
Senator Minchin is an example par excellence reflecting a widely held public view that going for the global warming ride should not go unchallenged.
An extensive debate requires the opinion expressed by Senator Minchin to be seen in the context of three eminent professorial views being those of Professors John Christy, Jeff Bennett and Niall Ferguson.
Last week Professor Christy made a submission to the United States Congress inquiry into climate science where he pointed out that warming has been occurring at only about 0.09 degrees Celsius per decade, about a third of what was previously thought.
Professor Christy is not an economist, not a palaeontologist, but a scientist whose PhD involved studying the temperature of the atmosphere. In a 2007 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote: "I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see."
The vast majority of Professor Christy’s IPCC colleagues would not have the credentials in atmospheric analysis that he has. The classic example of this is the head of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who I read from his biography, belongs to the Special Class Railway Apprentices, 1958 Batch, as well as having a degree in Industrial Engineering and a joint PhD in Industrial Engineering and Economics. Now this is all marvellous stuff but railway engines are not prominent in their affect on the climate.
Now to the issue of Australia raising a tax to cool the planet administered from a room on a hill in the middle of your town. It appears that a senior economist from the same Crawford School of Economics as Ross Garnaut believes this is a dangerous frolic. Professor Jeff Bennett of ANU has stated the bleeding obvious that we will do more harm than good re-jigging the nation's economy on a gesture tax.
To quote Professor Bennett from ABC's PM on Friday, “We should be very, very aware of conducting an economic analysis that weighs up the costs of proposed actions, against the benefits. Now the benefits of action are not necessarily the avoided costs of global warming. You see, the policies that we put in place will not avoid global climate change. There may be some impact but my point here is that even the world's best climate scientists will agree that the sort of impact we will make by imposing these taxes or the cap and trade schemes is minimal."
To oppose the carbon tax is now apparently populist. I can assure you I was not too popular when I started my opposition to the ETS. What do we call the rolling retinue of imminent calamity and catastrophe that Senators Wong, Brown and others predict - balanced and conservative? It is banal to hear our Prime Minister on Q&A saying she has to stand against the tide of radio announces who say "carbon dioxide is good". Without it PM there would be no life.
Harvard Professor of economics and historian Niall Ferguson has shown that such scare campaigns have a long history. "What attracts us to the idea of an environmental disaster is not so much the data as the familiarity of the prediction. Since the earliest recorded legends, mankind has been fascinated by the idea of a spectacular end of the world". In another quote he states - "Western elites are beset by almost millenarian fears of a coming environmental apocalypse".
The environmental ‘hype for hire’ seen in the Australian context as Dr Tim Flannery and Professor Ross Garnaut, not that I think they do not believe what they say, is dangerous if you do not consider both sides of the argument. We will be ridiculed by history if we get this wrong because our division of labour theory only heard and funded one side, completely rewriting the economic rule book for no climatic effect but having done serious damage to the cost of living and the politicisation of academia, putting into doubt the professionalism of analysis without favour.