Opinion: No time for climate change furphies
By Matthew England
The Family First Senator Stephen Fielding has unfortunately fallen hook, line and sinker for some of the most commonly paraded furphies of the climate change naysayer brigade.
His recent fact-finding mission to the US was aimed at increasing his understanding of climate change science.
Unfortunately for his facts he chose a group of "global warming experts" as anointed by The Heartland Institute, the conservative US think tank made famous for its view that smoking is not a health hazard.
Indeed, the Heartland Institute website includes a cosy-sounding page called the Smokers Lounge - where you can "cut through the propaganda and exaggeration of anti-smoking groups by [having] access to the best available research and commentary from scores of independent research organizations, publications, and government sources".
There are similar claims about the Institute's information on climate science - free from propaganda from alarmist climate experts.
It is little wonder that the Heartland Institute receives financial support from a whole suite of industries, including the tobacco and fossil fuel sectors.
But while those who briefed Senator Fielding are not climate scientists and some are among the pro-tobacco lobbyists of decades gone by; the usual handful of conservative commentators have applauded the Senator's stand.
Yet climate scientists have looked on shaking their heads in collective wonder.
At the heart of Senator Fielding's conversion to climate change scepticism is the apparent contradiction that while carbon emissions have been going up rapidly over the last decade, temperatures have not (well, not by a lot).
How could this be? Well, first up, this is completely consistent with our understanding of the climate system, which has a well-known capacity to vary over inter-annual to decadal time-scales.
Climate scientists have never hinted that there will be a given amount of warming per unit of carbon dioxide released on a year-to-year basis.
That would be like saying every day in summer will be hot. Most days will be but cold fronts will give us respite from time-to-time for periods of a few days or even a week. The cool days do not spell the end of summer. The climate system is no different.
Over the coming century we will continue to experience regular periods of a decade or more of minimal warming - or even slight cooling - in the background of a long-term accelerated warming trend.
We saw exactly this during the 20th Century and future temperature records will be no different, although the rate of warming is set to be far greater over the next 100 years than anything we've measured to date.
This stop-start rise in temperatures can of course only happen if there are decades with much more rapid rates of warming.
The share market is similar: there is an undeniable upward trend over a century time-scale, but plenty of year-to-year bumps and kinks reflecting variability within the system.
In the case that has swayed Senator Fielding, a very strong El Niño in 1998 made that year particularly warm.
El Niños are characterised by warmer than average ocean temperatures across much of the tropical Pacific, and 1998 was a humdinger in that regard.
Since 1998, however, there have been a few La Niña events (this opposite phase of El Niño sees cooler than average Pacific temperatures) and the El Niños that have occurred have been relatively weak.
This means that the anti-climate science lobby groups can cherry pick the post-1998 period to conveniently suggest that global warming has stopped.
But this isn't the case at all. The decade that immediately followed 1998 was the warmest decade ever recorded.
Cherry pick 1999 as your start date, for example, and the trend in the record becomes apparent again.
Indeed, every year this century (2001-2008) has been among the top 10 warmest years since instrumental records began in the middle of the 19th century.
And scientists from the US recently showed that even under a strong century-long warming trend of around 4 degrees C - toward the high end of the projected range for 2100 - we will still see the temperature record punctuated by isolated but regular ten-year periods of no trend, or even slight cooling.
If every time this occurs the naysayers proclaim climate change has stopped, and policy-makers listen, we will surely get nowhere fast in addressing the root cause of climate change.
Senator Fielding also came back from the US with a belief that cosmic rays or solar effects might account for recent warming. Both ideas are patently untrue - the cosmic ray effect was shown to be negligible several years ago and solar forcing declined over the last quarter of the 20th century at a time when temperatures shot up rapidly.
We are also seeing winters warm more rapidly than summers, and night-time warm more rapidly than daytime - exactly the opposite of what would be the case if the sun were driving the change.
The pro-tobacco groups used to love the anecdote about the bloke who smoked a pack-a-day for 60 years and lived a happy and healthy life.
Anybody who fell for that did their health a disservice.
Unfortunately the climate system is global, and climate change will affect every nation on this planet.
With the time for action rapidly passing, we cannot afford our elected leaders to be so easily misled by vocal lobby groups.
Professor Matthew England is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and joint Director of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre.
