Hot TopicsDr Smith is Misleading the Public on ETS Tuesday, 20 July 2010 New Zealand Climate Science Coalition Dr Smith is Misleading the Public on ETS
“The Minister for Climate Change, Dr Smith is misleading the NZ public in an attempt to convince them that the ETS is good for them,” says Dr Edmeades, the agricultural spokesman for the NZ Climate Change Coalition. .
Dr Smith is currently giving a series of talks, particularly aimed at farmers, in a desperate bid to calm their anger about the introduction of the ETS, due to commence in July this year.
In his presentation, and in a promotional pamphlet being handed out, Dr Smith uses a diagram from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change purporting to show that global temperatures are being driven up by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. “The graph is,” says Dr Edmeades, “grossly misleading for a number of very important reasons.”
“The scale of the graph is such that it gives the impression, especially to a lay audience, that the increase in global temperatures from 1880 to 2000 goes hand in hand – in technical terms, is highly correlated to - an increase in carbon dioxide concentration”.
“A high correlation does not prove cause and effect, Dr Edmeades pointed out. “It does not prove that carbon dioxide caused the increase in global warming”. “Dr Smith is trained as an engineer. He should know this and warn his listeners accordingly.”
To illustrate this point, Dr Edmeades explains, “there is clear evidence from ice core studies which shows that changes in carbon dioxide concentrations follow changes in temperature by about 600-800 years. In other words carbon dioxide does not drive temperature, it is the other way around. This is the fundamental flaw in the hypothesis of human-induced global warming”.
Dr Smith is also misleading the people of New Zealand by not pointing out that:
Dr Edmeades points out the that Dr Smith’s graph ends at about 2000 but he does not tell his audiences that there has been no global warming in the last decade from 1998 to the present, despite increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. “This omission” says Dr Edmeades, “is also misleading”.
Ironically Dr Smith, in his public address in Otorohonga on June 15, accused the environmental skeptics of misleading the public! Sir Peter Gluckman, the PM’s Chief Science Advisor, who professes similar views on global warming to Minister Smith, went further in a recent speech at Victoria University describing skeptics as ‘deniers.’
“What he is doing is trying to connect environmental skepticism with Holocaust deniers. Evidence of the Holocaust is based on empirical facts unlike beliefs in catastrophic global warming.” Dr Edmeades asks, “If the science behind man-made global warming is solid, why does Sir Peter stoop to using such denigrating references?
Dr Edmeades concluded, “It is time that the Honorable Dr Smith and Sir Peter Gluckman used their influence to organize appropriate forums where the science can be discussed and debated, rather than stooping to derisive and divisive statements which do not ennoble science.”
Dr D C Edmeades
07 834 0316
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