Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Roberts has on many occasions asked people to provide him with empirical evidence, and I've sat through extended exchanges at Senate estimates where Senator Roberts engaged with the CSIRO on the extensive science that is in fact in the public domain and available to him. But he's asked particularly what's been provided to him in this chamber, and it has been engaged with on many occasions in the chamber as well. With the agreement of the Senate I would like to table just one contribution, which is a speech I made in 2016, funnily enough in response to a request from Senator Roberts that we put the science on the record. On that occasion I read through the names of the 20 most cited peer-reviewed papers about climate change and its effects, which was compiled by Thomson Reuters. I made the observation at that time that there were, in 2013, 4,000 papers that expressed a view on climate change. There are vast quantities of scientific information available to Senator Roberts; the problem is that Senator Roberts cares not to engage with them. That is the problem with this argument. There is nothing that can be provided in response to this request for more information that will ever satisfy Senator Roberts.