I am writing in relation to Bill Stefaniak’s first article in his new regular column, Fit The Bill, ‘Addressing climate change in a nutshell: China‘ (CW, p10, 16 September 2021).
Congratulations, Bill on a great article which corrects the narrative on climate change in a small way and I hope it is the first of many which may shed light of the “facts” of climate change and not just the narrative that some would prefer us to have.
People need to realise the truth about where Australia stands in the climate change league table and that we are NOT the big enemy of climate change that some may believe when we are compared with (in order) China, USA, EU, India, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, etc., (Wikipedia, “List of countries by greenhouse gas emissions”). The table puts Australia at #14.
I have recently finished reading Dr Steven E Koonin’s great book, Unsettled (2021) which gives some actual details as to the reports, etc., that actually go into producing the IPCC’s “Assessment Reports” such as AR6 (2021) and the Working Groups (WG) inputs of which WG-I seems to be the most important.Â
Among other reports, etc., used are the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) (AR6 to be based on CMIP6), the Climate Science Special report (CSSR) and the National Climate Assessment (NCA) with NCA5 being due out in 2023. Koonin’s books goes into some details on how to correctly interpret the data collected in various different “models”, etc.
The IPCC works on a “Likelihood Scale” assigning terms from “Virtually certain” with a probability of “99-100%”, to “Exceptionally unlikely” with a probability of “0-1%” (Koonin, pg 20). The IPCC also uses a 3×3 “Agreement/Evidence” table (Koonin, pg 20).
So, again, congratulations Bill on a great first article and I look forward to reading many more.
– P. Myers, Karabar NSW
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