Wong rewriting history
Climate Change | Jennifer Marohasy
The Land 24th July, 2008
Hottest 12 years in past 13? Wong's not even warm
When Federal Climate Change and Water Minister, Penny Wong, released her Government's Green paper on the proposed new emission's trading scheme (ETS) last week, she said that the 12 hottest years in history have all been in the last 13 years.
This is an outrageous claim which ignores much of geological history. She may may have gotten away with her statement if she'd said something like "of the past 150 years, the past 13 have been relatively warm."
However, to suggest that 12 of the last 13 are the hottest ever is just plain wrong.
Of course everything is relative, and it's about time our politicians and environmental activists started taking a more long-term relative view of climate change.
Planet earth is very old - in fact about 4,550 million years old.
Its climate has always changed, continents have moved, mountain ranges formed, and when continents have pulled apart huge quantities of volcanic water, carbon dioxide and methane have been released into the atmosphere.
Just 120 million years ago Australia was at the South Pole but it wasn't cold.
Global sea levels were about 100 metres higher than at present and the sea surface temperature was 10 to 15 degrees C higher than now.
Indeed, parts of inland Australian were once covered in a shallow tropical sea.
The day before Ms Wong released the green paper on carbon trading claiming catastrophic warming from carbon pollution, the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) released its temperature data for June.
The Arctic sea ice extent at that point ranked third lowest for June since records began in 1979, while at the South Pole sea ice extent for June 2008 was above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking it as the second largest June extent.
So there is still ice in the Arctic and more ice than usual in the Antarctic.
Many scientists now suggest global warming has stalled during the past decade, and some are predicting that it won't resume again until after 2015.
Indeed, according to a recent paper in scientific journal, Nature, there may be a "lull" for up to a decade in global warming despite the elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
I suggest Minister Wong hold off on that new tax for carbon emissions at least until global warming starts again.