The S-Files

A Market in Hot Air

S-Award given to Rodney Hide, ACT Leader

Contra Celsum is pleased to nominate Rodney Hide for a second S-Award (Class I) for plain speaking on the foolish Emissions Trading Scheme.

Citation:

The best citation possible is to let Rodney Hide speak for himself:

Climate Change (Emissions Trading And Renewable Preference) Bill
Speech to Parliament; Tuesday, September 2 2008

I think I will be the only person speaking in this debate who has any qualifications in environmental science.

It is not that that should count, but I think that it is significant for what I am about to say—that is, that the entire climate change - global warming hypothesis is a hoax, that the data and the hypothesis do not hold together, that Al Gore is a phoney and a fraud on this issue, and that the emissions trading scheme is a worldwide scam and swindle.

Enacting this legislation will cost New Zealanders dear—that is the point of it—and it will drive up the costs of basic goods and services for New Zealanders probably by at least $500 or $600 a year.

It will put businesses in New Zealand out of business, and put farmers off their farms. It will put businesses in New Zealand out of business. It will put farmers off their farms. And it will do all this for no impact on world weather, for no environmental gain, and for no conceivable advantage to New Zealand or to the world.

Yes, it is bad that we are rushing this legislation through in the dying days of a teetering regime, propped up by a Minister of Foreign Affairs who is under investigation for serious and complex fraud.

That is bad, but it is the impact that this legislation and this policy will have on New Zealanders that is so truly shocking. All we have in this is a computer model. That is notoriously difficult, because the answers are written in the assumptions. Let me give members just one example.

The problem for the first two Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change reports was what was called the medieval warming period, where a thousand years ago the Earth was warmer than it is now.

Then, magically, an obscure physicist in the US came up with a new bit of analysis — the hockey stick — that showed world temperature to be flat and then rising dramatically as the world became industrialised. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change grabbed this, put it on the front of its document, and repeated it five times.

Researchers all around the world were puzzled by this, because it did not fit any of their data. Eventually they got hold of that computer model and they discovered this: any numbers fed into that model would produce the hockey stick.

We could take the Wellington telephone directory, feed it into the model that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used in 2001, and we would get the hockey stick that saw the world running scared, that saw policy-makers running scared, and saw Al Gore make his movie based on it.

The science was rubbish, because a computer model is not science. Science is about theories, hypothesis, and the testing of these against the facts. That is not what has happened in the basic science here. That is bad enough, but what is worse is the policy rationale underpinning this legislation. The Minister would come before the select committee and talk about a "cap and trade" but, when asked, would say: "Yes, there is no cap." We are creating a market in hot air, without any quantified amount.

Rodney Hide, Leader of the Act Party: S-Award, Class I for actions in the course of duty that have been Smart, Sound, and Salutary.