Crying need for doubting Peter

Crying need for doubting Peter - Gerard Henderson - Opinion - smh.com.au

On his ABC Ockham's Razor program, Williams has played
down the views of the political scientist Doug Aitkin and the
British economist Nigel Lawson on the basis that they are not
"science trained". This overlooks the fact that neither Ross
Garnaut nor Nicholas Stern in Britain are science trained. It also
overlooks the fact that Williams's own undergraduate science
training is in biology, which is quite different from
climatology.

Australians do not need to be protected from either the near
consensus scientific view on climate change or from the small
number of scientists who disagree with their colleagues. From a
non-scientist perspective, it is reasonable to assume that the near
consensus view is correct. But this does not lead to any necessary
conclusions about when Australia should embrace an emission trading
scheme in the short term. In criticising the climate change
sceptics on Ockham's Razor in May the US climatologist
Stephen Schneider acknowledged that "a ton of carbon emitted in
Beijing does exactly the same damage to the ecology as one emitted
in Boston or in Brisbane".

So far neither China nor India shows any sign of embracing a
carbon emissions scheme. In the United States both Barack Obama and
John McCain have indicated that they will be more environmentally
friendly than George Bush. But, as president, one or the other will
be subjected to Congress's directives. In early June the US Senate
rejected a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a vote of 48 to
36 - despite the Democrats having a Senate majority. Moreover, the
Clinton administration did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol when the
environmentalist Al Gore was vice-president.