I imagine the Prime Minister is disappointed at the indifferent quality of Professor Ross Garnaut's draft climate change review report. It is a poorly argued document, ill-conceived and prospectively dangerous.
Poorly argued in the sense, for example, that it is ridiculous to contend that Australia, which produces 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, could set a compelling example to the world's really serious polluters to the extent they would follow us into a national and ultimately a global emissions trading market of the kind Garnaut postulates, involving convoluted mechanisms of governmental control and reliance on market mechanisms that, in environmental terms, continually fail us.
Ill-conceived in the sense an emissions trading system will almost certainly expend most of its energy engaged in speculative churning for the benefit of stockbrokers, banks and taxing authorities, but will not necessarily have any discernible effect on restoring the land and water regimes of the Murray-Darling Basin, enhance public transport, conserve threatened species or enable us to successfully adapt our lifestyles, landscapes and cities in response to climate change imperatives.
Dangerous in the sense Garnaut's retreat into virtual reality, by way of an emissions trading scheme, will allow the Commonwealth and the states to continue their evasion of any direct action to curtail Australia's environmentally catastrophic land use and water utilisation practices that are staring us in the face, as happened at the Council of Australian Governments meeting last week.
Tony Powell, Griffith
Des Moore in his letter (July 7) asserts there has been ''a recent large increase in scientists questioning the basic thesis (of global warming), including the 31,000 who signed a petition of denial in the United States''. While Moore does not source this petition he is presumably referring to the Oregon Petition drawn up between 1999 and 2001 by a group of physicists and physical chemists.
They have been collecting signatures ever since so while some of them are recent many are not. The qualification for signing the petition is to have a degree in a science, computing, mathematics, medicine, engineering or veterinary science. General engineers (9751) make up by far the largest group of signatories and climatologists (40) one of the smallest.
Scientific American took a sample of 30 of the 1400 signatories who claimed to hold a PhD in a climate-related science. By searching databases they were able to identify 26, of whom 11 said they still agreed with the petition one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Of the remainder, six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died and five did not answer repeated messages.
To depend on this petition as an indication there has been a recent surge of informed scientific doubt about global warming is to clutch at a very thin straw.
Paul Pentony, Hackett
Graham Macafee (Letters, July 7) suggests compressed hydrogen for mobile use and piped for stationary use as a solution to CO2 emissions. He might like to tell us, where the electricity is coming from for the electrolysis process to make the hydrogen ?
The suggestion we pipe hydrogen: we already reticulate electricity, so why convert it to hydrogen and then pipe it? What can hydrogen do that electricity can't? Please don't tell me the electricity for the electrolysis process will come from a windmill on Black Mountain or cells on the roof of my house.
Ron Coath, Yarralumla.
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