Tragically for Australia’s future, Peter Dutton has recently confirmed the support of a future Liberal government to net zero. This is despite Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement and the failure of most of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s plans to make Australian a renewable energy superpower. Most of his green hydrogen plans have failed and many of his plans to have huge windmills offshore are not working as planned. On Bowen’s watch, household electricity prices have risen by approximately $1,000 and are likely to rise by another 50 per cent or more in the relatively near future. Could Peter Dutton’s failure to abandon net zero be due to too many wets in his party room? It is hard to believe that Dutton personally supports net zero policies that will almost certainly destroy Australia’s future.

Adherence to the Paris Agreement is supposed to sufficiently reduce fossil fuel and CO2 emissions to prevent an alleged catastrophic rise in global temperature by two degrees. But even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself, which is ultimately responsible for most climate catastrophism, has ruled out the possibility of such predictions in a remarkably honest statement:

‘In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.’

Of course, one might add to this that despite improvements in the accuracy of forecasts over five days, even relatively short-term climate predictions of more than a few weeks or so are exceedingly problematic due to the nature of chaotic systems. The Bureau of Meteorology forecast that the 2024 winter would be relatively warm and dry but cold and massive rainfall has forced them to reverse their forecast: ‘Wetter than average conditions are likely for parts of eastern and south-western Australia.’

Corporate activists and the ABC hardly qualify as experts in the philosophy of science but even a limited understanding might encourage them to mitigate their pronouncements of a forthcoming global warming apocalypse. There is hardly a corporate mouthpiece or activist organisation that does not prognosticate that ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are responsible for causing more extreme flooding, bushfires and tropical storm damage. In fact, there is nothing that cannot be explained by climate change.

But as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Sir Karl Popper pointed out, a theory that explains everything is not ‘scientific’ as it explains nothing: ‘It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.’ A scientific statement is a hypothesis that can rejected by experimental evidence or experience.

Since the climate has been changing for billions of years, it is clearly impossible to refute a change in the climate. Note that the claim of ‘global warming’ was dropped by its advocates when there was little sign of warming for twenty years. It was then replaced by ‘climate change’ which proponents knew could never be refuted.

Moreover, a scientific statement can be rejected but never confirmed as future rejection is always on the cards. For example, despite Newtonian physics remaining useful for many practical purposes, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity either refined or refuted much of Newtonian physics for bodies approaching the speed of light. The theory of global warming and climate change is supposed to explain the alleged increasing severity and rising number of deaths from severe weather events.

The IPCC (2021, p.1586) is responsible for much climate alarmism, points out that ‘cyclone activity in Australia is at its lowest ebb since the days of the Tang dynasty and the decline of the Western Roman Empire’.

Consistent with IPCC findings but entirely contrary to media claims, Danish researcher, Bjorn Lomborg, points out that the ‘data shows climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods and fires have declined by more than 97 per cent from nearly 500,000 annually a century ago to less than 15,000 in the 2020s.’

What if the existential threat to human civilisation is not climate change but rather actions taken to supposedly prevent it? Former Bank of England economist Neil Record asks, what if we immediately shut down oil and fossil fuel use? Well over half the world’s population, namely three billion people, would die within a year. This is because four billion people are dependent on artificial fertilisers made largely from gas and the remainder rely on fossil fuels for heating and life’s essentials. In 2021 the Sri Lankan government provided a foretaste of this devastation by banning the importation of chemical fertilisers made from fossil fuels resulting in a fall in crop yields of 54 per cent to as high as 95 per cent, prior to being forced to relent due to the imminent collapse of the entire economy.

The Albanese government puts its faith in batteries to provide peak load. Apart from being far too expensive, lithium-ion batteries are susceptible to fire and explosions, as illustrated by the almost instantaneous death of 22 workers in a South Korean battery factory explosion recently. Lithium-ion battery waste causes more than 10,000 fires annually in garbage trucks and the like in Australia.  Hence the current energy supply system is very fragile and a purely renewables solution is impossible unless there is an unforeseen technological revolution.

Hence, how is it possible to accurately forecast that temperatures will be higher either five or 50 years from now if man-made CO2 emissions are not curbed? Doubtless and despite fluctuations, northern hemisphere temperatures have risen by up to a degree in the last 200 years or so. I have no doubt that this modest rise from a long period of excessively low temperatures has been beneficial to society. Whether this is simply natural variation or has any association with man-made CO2 is far more problematic.

Why do Dutton and his party not admit that net zero has no scientific basis as it is simply a con, as Donald Trump points out? If he does make this admission, the Liberals will romp home in the election.