Climate Change Minister Misleading the Public on ETS

“The Minister for Climate Change, Dr Nick Smith is misleading the New Zealand public in an attempt to convince them that the emissions trading scheme (ETS) is good for them,” says Dr Doug Edmeades, the agricultural spokesman for the New Zealand Climate Change Coalition. .

Dr Smith is currently giving a series of talks, particularly aimed at farmers, in a bid to calm their anger about the introduction of the ETS, due to commence on 1 July this year.

“In his presentation, and in a promotional pamphlet being handed out, Dr Smith uses a diagram from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change purporting to show that global temperatures are being driven up by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. The graph is grossly misleading for a number of very important reasons,” says Dr Edmeades.

“The scale of the graph is such that it gives the impression, especially to a lay audience, that the increase in global temperatures from 1880 to 2000 goes hand in hand – in technical terms, is highly correlated to - an increase in carbon dioxide concentration. A high correlation does not prove cause and effect. It does not prove that carbon dioxide caused the increase in global warming. Dr Smith is trained as an engineer. He should know this and warn his listeners accordingly.”

Dr Edmeades explains, “there is clear evidence from ice core studies which shows that changes in carbon dioxide concentrations follow changes in temperature by about 600-800 years. In other words, carbon dioxide does not drive temperature, it is the other way around.”

Dr Edmeades says the Minister is also misleading the people of New Zealand by not pointing out that:
1. Earth has been through many periods of warming and cooling long before humans arrived and long before agriculture was intensified and fossil fuels developed, suggesting that carbon dioxide in not the culprit.
2. The warming that occurred from the end of the little ice age (about mid 1850s) through to about 1940 is regarded, even by the IPCC, as entirely natural and not due to carbon dioxide.
3. From about 1940 to 1970 global temperatures declined despite a large increase in fossil fuel use after WWII.

Dr Edmeades says that Dr Smith’s graph ends at about 2000 but he does not tell his audiences that there has been no global warming in the last decade from 1998 to the present, despite increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. “This omission is also misleading”.

“In his public address in Otorohanga on June 15, Dr Smith accused the environmental skeptics of misleading the public. Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, who professes views on global warming similar to Minister Smith, went further in a recent speech at Victoria University describing skeptics as ‘deniers.’ What he is doing is trying to connect environmental skepticism with Holocaust deniers. Evidence of the Holocaust is based on empirical facts, unlike beliefs in catastrophic global warming. If the science behind man-made global warming is solid, why does Sir Peter stoop to using such denigrating references?” Dr Edmeades asks.

Dr Edmeades concluded, “It is time that Hon Dr Smith and Professor Sir Peter Gluckman used their influence to organize appropriate forums where the science can be discussed and debated, rather than stooping to derisive and divisive statements which do not ennoble science.”

ENDS

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