RUTHFULLY YOURS

ANDREW BOLT: GILLARD’S BUNGLING GOVERNMENT AND FALSE HOT AIR POLICIES

Posted By Ruth King on July 8th, 2011

A hell of a trick for a bungling government that’s just accidentally destroyed our live cattle exports.

But most astonishing is that almost no one asks: er, will this actually work?

Will this make the slightest bit of difference to the world’s temperature?

Oops: two people did ask the Government this question this week. And the answers from Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Secretary for Climate Change, Mark Dreyfus, should scare us all.

Fact: we are about to pay a new tax that will cost us billions, slow growth, kill jobs, and potentially drive our electricity generators bankrupt; yet it won’t change the climate by a flicker.

What’s more, the Government knows it. Its advisers know it.

Let me first tell you the best estimate I’ve had done of how much Gillard’s policies could affect the world’s temperature over the next decade, assuming there is a strong link between carbon dioxide and temperature.

Answer: 0.00005 of a degree. Just one of 20,000 parts of a single degree. Tops.

You may think my figure must be false. But see what happens when I try to check it with a Gillard minister or warming adviser.

Here’s some of my exchange on MTR this week with Mark Dreyfus:

Bolt: By how much will the world’s temperature change as a result of what Australia alone will do?

Dreyfus: … It’s a false question. This is a global problem, this is about bringing down global emissions. Australia has to pay its fair share, do its fair share in that regard, and it’s not about saying it will reduce global temperature by x degrees or by point whatever of a degree …

See? A refusal to answer the basic question: what’s the gain for the pain?

Luckily, Dreyfus was more frank when a reader wrote to him, asking: “Can you provide details on how much the global temperature will drop with the introduction of this tax in 2020/ 2025/2065?” His reply then: “The introduction of a carbon tax in Australia will not reduce global temperatures over the time periods you question.”

Dreyfus may have meant to say that while we couldn’t cut the world’s temperature with our sacrifice, we might at least slow its rising.

So let’s ask my question another way: by how much will Gillard’s policies slow any rise in the world’s temperature?

Yet once again, this deceitful Government refuses to say.

Proof? One of the Canberra press gallery’s most vocal warmist journalists, Lenore Taylor, on Monday tried twice – at last – to get the answer from the PM.

Taylor: You’ve warned about what will happen if we don’t do anything, but how much of that (future) warming is already in system even if we take all the actions that you’re talking about?

Gillard’s reply was pure blather: “Well, obviously, having gone to 387 parts per million in late 2010 – yes, you’re right that carbon dioxide’s already in the atmosphere, but I don’t believe that you can use that and say ‘well, we shouldn’t act in the future.” And on and on.

Gillard’s refusal to be upfront exasperated another journalist.

Journalist: Prime Minister, you said that you want the debate to be informed by facts, but twice there Lenore asked you what your advice was on the net effect of our action, taking into account action or lack of action in the rest of the world. Will you provide that fact?

No, she would not, and will not.

Gillard simply cannot afford to admit that her vast economic revolution will have zero effect. But even her closest climate advisers have let slip this truth.

Take Professor Ross Garnaut, on the ABC last month.

Journalist: What would you say to those people who say Australia’s input alone wouldn’t be enough to have any effect really on the world’s atmosphere?

Garnaut: They would be dead right. Well, it would really have a very small effect.

Or take the Government’s chief Climate Commissioner, Professor Tim Flannery, in an interview with me.

Bolt: On our own, by cutting our emissions … what will the world’s temperatures fall by as a consequence? … Are you talking about a thousandth of a degree? A hundredth of a degree? …

Flannery: If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as 1000 years, because the system is overburdened with CO2 …

The Government’s only excuse for doing something so useless has been that our example will inspire the world’s biggest emitters to do the same.

But, as the Productivity Commission warned last month, Australia will be the only country with a carbon dioxide tax covering the whole country. No other nation plans to join us in our folly any time soon. But let’s pretend they will.

What difference then will we together make to the world’s temperatures?

Professor Bjorn Lomborg gives a clue. Assuming the entire world lives up to the promises of the Kyoto Accord, and assuming the theory of man-made warming is accurate, he’s figured we will together lower the world’s temperature at 2100 by just 0.17 degrees.

You’re right. A pitiful result.

And for Australia to start on this work almost alone … well, pitiful doesn’t begin to describe it. Mad does.

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