Evans' case about the state of the atmosphere needs to be addressed by people of a contrary view to the alarmists and competent in the relevant science.

I am a skeptic about the changes spoken of on both sides and about the causes and effects spoken of.  I know that in many cases good measurements are the basis of good science. 

In my previous blog on Open Forum I have written that I do not  know what is happening, for good or bad. But I do know for certain that we are pumping and have been pumping for centuries a new component into the atmosphere in vast tonnages, and big as the planet is, I entertain the deduction that we may induce thereby a tipping point which takes us into an irreversible change.  It is reasonable, I would have thought, that we should beware. 

The explanations given  for the melting of the Arctic ice due to the presence of CO2 are at least plausible and so are its consequences upon the Atlantic and the Gulf Stream and thus immediately upon  the lives of all the communities of  the Northern Hemisphere. What the alarmists are saying is, mildly at the least, plausible.

I have a son who for many years has gone there annually and spent at least five months a year at one or other of our  bases in the Antarctic. He tells me that there are  signs on the sea ice of melting down there, too. Not large and striking, but you notice them, sometimes starkly. I acknowledge the phenomenon of natural variability but we are entitled to and wise to look into these matters for causes and effects. 

I don't like coal mining. I lived as a child in a coal mining community.  I have long held land in the Hunter Valley.  I know many men who work in the mines there. What you see there is, for me, awful to behold. Little or nothing is being done to fill them in.  And I have seen the vast, long-abandoned open cut mines in the countryside of Pennsylvania where nothing at all has been done over many decades to make them good. 

Look at the consequences for the workers in the mining communities, for the citizens of Beijing, of coal. Coal creates a mess, everywhere and without exception.  There are better ways to treat a man than blackening him every day or than putting particularates in the lungs of people. On that account alone - aesthetics, the preservation of the countryside, the health of workers and citizens - we should turn now to a clean way to produce energy. 

We should get out of coal and until there is a better idea, solar is quiet enough, clean enough, cheap enough  and abundant enough  to recommend itself to me even if there is no global warming due to the CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere and the oceans (indirectly). 

Currently a director of the Council for Civil Liberties, Jim Staples is a former industrial relations and arbitration judge and, before that, a leading barrister at the NSW and Federal bars.

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RELEVANT CONTENT:

• Solar Compressed Air, Sequestration of CO2 and Coal Exports (by Jim Staples)