By Elizabeth Finke
Posted on Aug. 19, 2010. Listed in:
While a journalist’s question to Julia Gillard on whether or not she thinks tomato sauce should be a free condiment with pies seems to have taken over the Australian media limelight, the country’s leading scientific body, the Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS), has released a report that brings to the forefront a topic of higher significance. The report, The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers, lays bare the evidence that human-induced climate change is real and that ignoring the evidence and not adapting will be catastrophic. Elizabeth Finke finds out more.
According to surveys, the percentage of Australians who believe climate change is largely due to human activity dropped from 52 percent in 2008 to 44 percent in early 2010. Among politicians, 30 percent do not believe climate change is human-wrought. Events of the past year have fueled public skepticism, says Michael Raupach of CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra and co-chair of the report's working group. These include the investigation into leaked e-mails from University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) gaffe about rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers, and the failure to achieve a strong outcome at the Copenhagen climate conference last December. "I was frustrated by the press denigrating the IPCC and that equal voice was given to those with no expertise in climate science," says Kurt Lambeck, a AAS former president who commissioned the academy's report last December.
"Our goal was to provide a scientifically rigorous document for the nonspecialist with a frank discussion on the certainties and uncertainties," AAS President Suzanne Cory said at a press briefing to release the report on 16 August. Authored by a nine-member panel, the report consists of seven questions and answers laying out the evidence for human-induced climate change. "Like any other area of science, climate change science develops through debate. Our report draws the distinction between genuine debate and smokescreens," Lambeck says.
Article originally published in Science Insider here.
Download the Australian Academy of Sciences report here.
Climate change is a fact of life. It is what climate does, with or without us, and especially with or without a bogus money grabbing policy of taxing C02 emissions. At least the Aussies are waking up to this barrage of falsified documents and other nonsense from those "expert scientists" (most of which are neither) and know that when a duck is dead it is a dead duck. The global warming farce is over. Nohopeinhagen achieved nothing except setting the destination for the next junket. Cancant was the same result, all that was acheived was the setting up of the next free lunch destination. It's over. Give it up. Instead let's concentrate on something that is real...a period of increasing volcanic and seismic activity coupled with some serious sun action that is the core cause of the real weather on this planet. Much more sensible than feeding money to a foreign big black emissions- tax hole with absolutely no accountability.
Written in April 2011