It is a dark day when Australia decides to jump on the world-renowned climate scaremongering team.

If you understand the science behind global warming being attributed to the “enhanced greenhouse effect” then you understand that you don’t understand the science of climate change. Any other position is an outright lie.

Julia Gillard announced a new tax aimed at increasing the cost of using carbon to (eventually) price it out of our economy; she repeatedly used the term “carbon pollution” and she claims that most Australians will not be worse off – although if this were truly possible then it would eclipse the incentive for business to curb CO2 emissions, they are inversely related to each other.

There is a vast gap between “knowledge” and “theory” with this matter. In my series on science I even brought to attention some of these “leaps of faith” in other areas. Let’s have a look at what scientists purport to know with certainty:

1. Human activity has altered the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (and to a lesser degree other minor gasses).
2. In the 20th century the planet warmed up 0.7 degrees, continuing a warming trend from the 19th century at an accelerated rate.
3. Increasing greenhouse gasses warms the planet.

Let’s first acknowledge these statements as more-or-less true. Statement 3 is a half-truth, but I’ll get to that in a bit. At the moment climate scientists are in denial that CO2 breaks down on its own in the atmosphere; there is some science behind this, but it’s still an assumption. Thus they have a highly developed idea of the global carbon cycle which includes emitters and sinks and precludes the possibility of atmospheric breakdown.

In 2000, NASA founded research officially released a contradicting story where the non-CO2 GHG’s were the real culprit.

In 2004, NASA came forward with information to the effect that areoles are the culprit with arctic warming, not CO2.

In 2005 NASA said Methane may be twice as responsible as previously thought.

In 2011 NASA released information to the effect that removing black-carbon and ozone emissions that are created by humans would reduce the immediate global-warming trend into the future by “about half” over the next 40 years. This follows earlier work where NASA’s computer modelling showed the respective responsibility of the global warming trend to be: 43% CO2, Methane 27%, Black Carbon 12%, CFC’s 8%, CO and volatile organics 7% (funny how this wasn’t widely reported isn’t it?)

No one knows exactly how much the greenhouse effect warms the planet, no one knows exactly how much CO2 is responsible, nor precisely the amount of the other GHG’s. It is well acknowledged that water vapour is the main component and accounts for 90-95% of the effect, but in terms of the atmospheric amount of GHG’s it accounts for greater than 99.99%. The fact that is rarely acknowledged by scaremongering climate scientists is that CO2 already absorbs the vast majority of the solar radiation that it is capable of absorbing (same for water vapour). Just because you can keep increasing the concentration of CO2 doesn’t mean an increase in suitable CO2-absorbable solar-radiation will also occur, in fact this is one of the biggest mistakes in the science: it does not account for the fact that there is (for simplicities sake) a static amount of solar radiation! Therefore, even if CO2 has been increasing its contribution to the greenhouse effect, as more and more of it is added the amount of increase declines rapidly until it can’t contribute any more.