Guest essay by David Archibald

For the first time a major political party has gone into an election with an anti-green platform and won big time. Specifically the Conservative Party platform for the Ontario election on 7th June promised:

This means no carbon tax or cap-and-trade schemes. Stop sweetheart deals by scrapping the Green Energy Act.

The Conservatives made some other promises too but what was interesting about dropping the carbon tax etc. was the lack of agonising over the science, the planet, polar bears, the Great Barrier Reef or anything else. While the Trump administration recently hired a climate agoniser to head NASA, and the head of the EPA hasn’t moved against the endangerment finding on CO2, Ontario voters in a record turnout voted to make global warming a non-problem by forgetting about it, and getting on with their lives.

Ontario may or may not have had global warming in the late 20th century but there is a whole continent that missed out on it together. The following chart shows the lower troposphere temperature anomaly for Australia since the satellites went up in 1978. The data is from Dr Roy Spencer’s group at the University of Alabama, Hunstville.

Australia’s atmospheric temperature has been a paragon of stability. There has been no increase over the last 40 years. Since global warming has to start in the atmosphere, there has been no global warming in Australia. No Australian under the age of 40 has experienced global warming. Given the way the Sun is going, they are likely to miss out altogether.

If they missed out on global warming, perhaps they have experienced sea level rise? No luck there either. One of the longer sea level series is from Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour with records from May 1914. This is how that data plots up:

There appears to be a slight rise but that is deceptive. The first record in May 1914 was a mean level of 1.111 metres. The last record, for February 2018, is 1.018 metres – 93 mm lower. There can be other interpretations of what it all means but there is no emergency. There isn’t even a trend, unless flat counts as a trend. And in the end the voters are likely to pull an Ontario and decide that there are things that are more important. The Conservatives in Ontario promised to spend C$100 million on autism.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare

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