I recently gave a speech in the chamber where I called out climate change for lacking context.
If you lodged your tax return with the ATO and just said your income was changing but didn’t provide context, the ATO would demand you provide more detail and evidence about your “exact” income.
Yet the Government has no problems spraying billions of dollars up against the wall in the name of climate change without actually specifying what the outcome will be.
The whole policy is nothing but a con.
I also touch on conflating climate change with the environment. You can care about the environment without believing in CO2 induced climate change.
The alarmists have done a very good job of conflating two different issues.
Finally there is the Greenhouse Gas Effect. While it is true CO2 absorbs and emits radiation, that impact is cancelled out by convection which is the dominate driving force in the atmosphere. Gravity is what regulates convection, constantly levelling out temperature differentials caused by the uneven heating of the earths surface by the sun.
Gravity in turn is a function of mass as enunciated by Isaac Newton in his 1687 Universal Law of Gravitation and Einstein in his 1905 Mass Energy Equivalence paper.
So to the extent CO2 increases the mass of the atmosphere, that will drive a temperature increase but this is very small – around 0.04 degrees per 100ppm, not over 1 degree as claimed by alarmists.
Long story short though, the government needs to stop wasting taxpayer dollars, driving up energy prices and destroying the environment.
Senate on 27/11/2024
ADJOURNMENT
Climate Change
Senator RENNICK (Queensland) (19:47): I rise tonight to speak about the question that I put to Senator Farrell in question time today. It’s often a question that has been lost in the conflation of the environment, climate change and the greenhouse gas effect. It’s very important that we delineate the differences between these three issues because, while they are all important issues, they need greater context and greater definition.
When it comes to the environment, one of the things I’ve hated about this whole climate change debate and its conflation with the environment is that if you don’t buy into—I want to clarify that I care very much and deeply about the environment. You can do that and not believe in the greenhouse gas effect, and that doesn’t say you don’t think CO2 absorbs and emits photons; it does. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy in to the climate change mantra. This is my problem with climate change.
If I lodged my income tax return with the ATO and put down one line that said my income had changed, the ATO would very quickly reply to me and say: ‘That’s not enough detail. You need to be more specific about your income.’ This is the problem with climate change. We’re spending billions and billions of dollars—and I don’t want to go down the renewables rabbit hole because I’ve done it to death in this chamber—on renewables to supposedly lower CO2, and that is then supposedly going to control the temperature. By how much? We don’t know. This is the point. No-one is able to specify what the outcome will be if we spend this much money.
If we have to be specific when we lodge our tax return with the tax office, I think it’s only fair that governments—and both major parties have hopped onto this climate change mantra—define exactly what it is that we’re going to get for the billions and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. All I’m seeing is our environment being damaged, whether it’s through transmission lines, lithium mines or whatever. I get that mining is important, but let’s not be hypocritical here. It does impact the environment, whether it’s coal mining or lithium mining. We’re not getting a clear outcome. We’re getting higher energy prices, and there are various reasons for that, but the reduction in the use of baseload energy is partly responsible for that as well.
We need greater definition around that, but that shouldn’t be conflated with someone’s passion for the environment. That’s the thing. We can all agree that we want good things for the environment—better and cleaner waterways and riparian zones. We don’t want plastics in the ocean. We want our biodiversity to be protected. We want lots of national parks. We want them to stay clean. We want the feral pests out of them. But we have to address the underlying issue in all of this, which is the greenhouse gas effect itself. I totally refute the idea that the radiation from CO2 is going to change the temperature. I tried to demonstrate that today, and I’ll demonstrate it again.
We know that one of the great scientists, Isaac Newton—and this is what I hate about our education system. We’re taught that he basically discovered gravity because he saw an apple fall from the tree. No, he actually came up with the law of universal gravitation. That is incredibly important. He determined that the rate at which something accelerates is defined by the mass of the two bodies, the attraction between them, over the square of the distance between them. What’s fascinating about this is that he published this book back in 1687, over 300 years ago. About 150 years later in the early 19th century, when they were looking at the orbit of the planets, they knew that they were missing a planet because the planets weren’t orbiting in accordance with this law of universal gravitation. They ended up working out where Pluto must have been. This is how they discovered Pluto. It was purely through the theory of that law.
Take that law. That law involves mass. You then take Einstein’s 1905 law, which is the mass-energy equivalence, and then the 1915 general theory of relativity, which involves acceleration, which combines all three. We need to understand that it’s mass that drives temperature and not radiation.
