During my appearance before the ETS Review committee earlier this month I was asked by committee chairperson Peter Dunne to comment on the evidence presented by the submitters who appeared immediately before me — McCabe Environmental Services, being one Bruce McCabe and Kathleen Ryan-McCabe. ACT member John Boscawen was clearly wondering how two sets of evidence could present such diametrically opposed interpretations of the basic facts.
The committee secretariat were kind enough to provide me with a recording of the McCabe’s oral evidence, as well as their written submission. My comments on the MEC submission were delivered to the committee on April 22nd, and are now available on the parliamentary web site here (direct link to PDF). The McCabe’s evidence is here. Not to put too fine a point on it, the MEC evidence is wrong in just about every material respect, choosing as they did to rely on Fred Singer’s Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change booklet as their primary source. You’ll find chapter and verse in my evidence, but I also took the opportunity to provide the committee with a quick list of arguments that signal the presence of cranks arguing for inaction:
- Cooling since 1998, 2001, 2005, etc
- There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature…
- Climate models cannot forecast the future/are unvalidated…
- Future warming from CO2 will be tiny/the greenhouse effect doesn’t work the way the IPCC thinks it does.
- The hockey stick is broken.
- The sun/sunspots/cosmic rays are the real cause.
- “There is no consensus” or “The science is not settled”.
- Any mention of Al Gore.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see how Bob Carter’s evidence (given today) stacks up against that list…
[PS: At the recent European Geophysical Union meeting Fred Singer’ announced his NIPCC is not yet dead. Apparently there’s an 800 page report due this year. Must be costing Heartland a fortune…]