Senate debates

Tuesday, 1 September 2020

Adjournment

Renewable Energy

9:23 pm

Photo of Malcolm RobertsMalcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] As a servant of the people of Queensland and Australia, I note that the Moran report cannot be sensibly refuted because it presents the government's own costs from budget programs and government agency reports. The Moran report, which was released on Sunday a week ago, titled The hidden cost of climate policies and renewables, shows that the added cost on our electricity is $13 billion each year. That's $1,300 per household every year. The government says renewable solar and wind energy—or, as they should be called, intermittent energy—is 6.5 per cent of a typical household electricity bill. The reality, from the government's own costs, is 39 per cent, six times higher. Six times higher. The government says the portion is $90 each year, when it is really $536. With indirect costs added, it's a staggering $1,300 each year for each household. No wonder the government stopped providing the consolidated costs.

The policy of funding the parasitic intermittents that add costs to other forms of generation like hydro, coal and gas means that for every solar and wind job 2.2 jobs are lost in the productive economy. Our economy and our lifestyle are being fundamentally changed through decarbonising, and that is really deindustrialising, through a UN agenda in accordance with the UN's 1996 Kyoto protocol and the UN's 2015 Paris Agreement. It is killing our food security, killing our manufacturing, killing our economic resilience, killing our productive capacity and killing our economic and national sovereignty. It perpetuates our dependence on other nations and our loss of security, whereas before these UN agreements we were, as a nation, independent and secure.

That leads to another report, titled Restoring scientific integrity, that I released yesterday. In turn, that raises significant and fundamental questions on the basis for the massive subsidies in renewables and climate. In 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020, I had four presentations from the CSIRO and, after each, I cross-examined CSIRO's client science team. I will share what we learned from the CSIRO's own admissions. By the way, recently I cross-examined 17 internationally respected scientists in climatology, physics, astrophysics, statistical analysis, geology, mathematics, computer modelling, meteorology, sea levels and earth sciences. These eminent, capable and authoritative scientists have confirmed the conclusions that I now share with you from our report titled Restoring scientific integrity.

These are some of the conclusions from the report. The CSIRO has never said that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger—never. CSIRO has admitted today's temperatures are not unprecedented. CSIRO has cited papers that do not show the rate of temperature rise is unprecedented. CSIRO relies on unvalidated models, giving erroneous predictions. CSIRO has never quantified any specific impact from human carbon dioxide and, without that, there can be no policy. CSIRO has relied on discredited and poor-quality papers on temperature and carbon dioxide. CSIRO revealed little understanding of the papers it cited, and that was very embarrassing for it. CSIRO admits to doing no due diligence on reports and data it cites—some of those from overseas, some from within Australia. CSIRO allows politicians to misrepresent CSIRO without correction, so it participates in perpetuating this scam. CSIRO misled parliament.

Let's look at something in particular in one of their papers. CSIRO admitted that today's temperatures are not unprecedented after we tore apart the Marcott paper. It failed under our cross-examination. It submitted the Marcott paper as showing something unprecedented in the earth's climate in the last 10,000 years. The author of the paper on the 20th-century temperature uptick that they show in the paper admitted that it is not robust and not representative of global temperatures. It was fabricated. Initially, the author himself, in his PhD thesis, showed no temperature uptick. He was then joined by two UN authors. They produced the Marcott 2013 paper, and that's where the temperature uptick was fabricated and that's what CSIRO relied on.

Willie Soon, who is an astrophysicist and geoscientist, said: 'Two weeks after publication, this Marcott paper was completely destroyed, and yet someone as high up as CSIRO trying to say this paper is legitimate and can be used as supporting scientific evidence is scientific malpractice.' The paper also admits that the process it uses cannot find temperature trends shorter than 300 years, and yet here's the CSIRO citing this as proof. So they withdrew the paper.

I could go on and talk about the Harries paper that they submitted about carbon dioxide. That shows that carbon dioxide today is unprecedented. That is false, because the current 60-year blip of carbon dioxide levels rising in fact is just a rise of 0.009 per cent from 0.032 per cent to 0.041 per cent. I will say that again: it's a 0.009 per cent rise in just 60 years. When the gaps in the ice cores that Harries cobbled together are 1,000 years minimum and up to 6,000 years you would never see this rise. Then after they withdrew Harries, CSIRO submitted a paper to us—Feldman, 2015—and that paper confirmed that the Harries paper was poor science. It identified the same problems that we identified. The CSIRO is putting out a paper and then another paper that contradicts it, but none of the papers CSIRO cited specified the amount, if any, of human causation. CSIRO had not even read or understood the papers, nor had it done its due diligence.

Thirdly, when it is all stripped away, the CSIRO relies on unvalidated computer models based on a limited and incomplete understanding of climate and giving erroneous projections. These models forecast that the upper troposphere will warm and get more moist, yet it is actually the reverse. It's cooler and drier. The models cannot portray anything about clouds, and that is a significant climate variable. They cannot represent updraughts. Yet this is what a government relies upon for policy, and it's the only thing they rely on, because CSIRO has not got the empirical evidence that should be used. Models are not science, and they are not empirical evidence. They don't produce any confidence levels at all. There is no validation of these models. In fact, they are unvalidated models full stop.

Professor John Christy, one of the world's leading climate scientists and a climatologist in Alabama, has said that he has closely examined CSIRO's access models and found them to be below par, as the projections simply do not match what we actually see in the real world. He says, 'Climate is so complex, our ignorance of the climate system is enormous and the myriad models have not even agreed on a key variable.' They have not even agreed on carbon dioxide sensitivities. Dr David Evans, an Australian and one of the world's top modellers, says, 'CSIRO climate models should not be used for policy, as they are not right yet.' I have made a freedom of information search and a Parliamentary Library search that prove that no CSIRO or Bureau of Meteorology document has been given to ministers or MPs over the last 15 years that contains evidence that we are affecting the climate.

I'll go now to the CSIRO's response to my report. The CSIRO chief executive came out with a response to my report before my report was released, thus his response to my report is not even based on observation or facts. The CSIRO doesn't bother with the facts. The CSIRO chief executive's response yesterday simply recycled his letter to me dated 4 March in response to my letter of 28 February. The chief executive attempts to use nine substitutes for science which are there instead of science and which masquerade as science. He uses pseudoscience. He diverges into implying that my letter smears CSIRO's people, which it does not. This was last February, and it's false. He appeals to a name or a brand or an authority in saying that CSIRO is a prestigious organisation. That is not science. There's no data. There is, repeatedly, no data, no data, no data. His comments are unsupported and therefore unfounded. He ignores completely the facts we provided. The chief executive has already dug himself into a hole and his response is to dig deeper.

We can say that the onus is now on government, which is where it should be, to provide the empirical evidence—the science—to justify their policies. We can also say to them that it's futile for the government because we have the data and it will eventually break. Data always prevails. Truth eventually emerges. It will drag alarmists kicking and screaming into reality, and One Nation will be there to protect the people of Queensland and Australia. (Time expired)

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