- Hundreds of thousands of years worth of climate records
in ice cores show there is nothing unusual in a global warming trend over
the past 25 years.
-
- Marine geophysicist Bob Carter, a professor at Queensland's
James Cook University and leading climate change sceptic, said the effects
of human activity would barely register in the long-term history of climate
change.
-
- He told The Weekend Australian that ice cores from Antarctica
"tell us clearly that in the context of the meteorological records
of 100 years, it is not unusual to have a period of warming like the one
we are in at the moment".
-
- Dr Carter disputed the theory that human activity was
making a current - natural - warm period hotter: "Atmospheric CO2
is not a primary forcing agent for temperature change." He argues
that "any cumulative human signal is so far undetectable at a global
level and, if present, is buried deeply in the noise of natural variation".
-
- Fellow sceptic William Kininmonth, a former director
of the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre, agreed. He wrote
in a 2004 book, Climate Change: A Natural Hazard that there was "every
reason to believe that the variabilities in global temperature and other
climate characteristics experienced over the past century are part of the
natural variability of the climate system and are not a consequence of
recent anthropogenic activities".
-
- But other leading scientists, who blame human activity
for climate change, say the "denialists" are a one-to-99 minority.
-
- Will Steffen, director of the Centre for Resource and
Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, said: "There
is no debate. The debate is over." The evidence that human activity
had increased emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding to
natural warming, was "overwhelming", he said.
-
- For scientist and University of Adelaide academic Tim
Flannery there was also no argument: humans had turned up the heating and
only humans could keep a lid on it. The argument that human activity did
not contribute to global warming was "not a credible hypothesis to
build policy on", he said.
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- http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_pa
ge/0,5744,17752119%255E601,00.html
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