Right Pulse

Rudd recently decided to take on Lord Monckton in November with an address at the Lowy Institute on climate change. Monckton has responded with a devastating letter to Rudd, which will be backed up with a visit to Australia latter this month.

The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship.

Which is really what the climate change agenda is all about. After debunking Rudd’s accusations, Monckton precedes to give Rudd a science lesson on what Copenhagen will really achieve – assuming every nation complies with the Copenhagen Accord:

One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars. Do your Treasury models demonstrate that this calculation is in any way erroneous? If they do, junk them….

Remember too that we have assumed the maximum warming that the CO2 imagines might occur in response to a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Yet even the IPCC’s central estimate of CO2’s warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, after a further decade of incomplete compliance and billions squandered, warming forestalled may prove to be just a thousandth of a degree….

Every economic analysis except that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, in whatever direction, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation….

I’ve become more and more convinced that Rudd and those around him do not understand the issue. They simply see it as a pretext for increasing power.