When the facts change, I change my mind.

Says David Evans,

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

What has the good doctor found on his quest to save the planet?

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.
3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980)….
4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

Now, here's the punchline: "None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance." Evans goes on to say, "The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming." In other words, the facts don't fit the Alarmists' agenda (keeping their jobs, political power, etc.) so they set them aside and call them irrelevant. If that's the kind of science that the supposed consensus is built upon, you can keep it.

The alarmists might be right about one thing, namely that we have to act before it's too late. We can continue to throw billions of dollars at this fairy tale goblin, effectively consigning the planet's poorest citizens to perpetual poverty and hunger, or we can start to make rational decisions about being good stewards of the Earth and its resources while, at the same time, helping the world's developing nations to care for their people.