Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak again on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest release, just last month. I want to talk about TS17, where they say there is a 'near linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and maximum global surface temperature' caused by carbon dioxide. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who understands anything about mathematics or science knows that the relationship, at best, is logarithmic, not linear. What do I mean by that? Ultimately all the energy in the atmosphere, in the first place, comes from the sun. On average, across the 24 hours in the day, it hits the atmosphere at about 341 watts per square metre. About half of that gets reflected from the clouds in the atmosphere back into space, and about 160 watts hits the surface. That then bounces off the surface back up into the greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases do absorb and emit radiation. That is one form of heat transfer. But, as anyone who understands anything about physics will know, unlike conduction and convection, where Newton's law of cooling applies and the difference between hot and cold is a direct relationship, radiation transfers basically to the power of four, so the faster it heats the faster it cools. So the idea that you have a linear relationship is completely wrong. The law is called the Stefan-Boltzmann law. It's just another example of how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is telling fibs. But, of course, it's a lot more complex than that, because the carbon dioxide in particular only makes up 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere, so, even if it does absorb heat, through conduction it's going to basically smash into billions and billions of other molecules in one second. (Time expired)