I STAND BY WHAT I SAID, MR FINKEL

ALAN Finkel is our Chief Scientist, supposedly driven by facts, so his “correction” to my column last week is a worry.

I wrote that even Finkel, a global warming worrier, admits that even if we ended all Australia’s emissions — junked every car, shut every power station, put a cork in every cow — the effect on the climate would be “virtually nothing”.

Finkel now claims “those are Andrew Bolt’s words, not mine, and they are a complete misrepresentation of my position”.

Really? I was quoting this exchange, where Senator Ian Macdonald asked Finkel what would happen if Australia ended all its human-induced emissions — 1.3 per cent of the world’s total.

Macdonald: If we reduce the world’s carbon emissions by 1.3 per cent, what impact would that have on the changing climate of the world?

Finkel: Virtually nothing. But Finkel insists my words “misrepresented” him because they “suggest we should do nothing to reduce our carbon emissions”.

Actually, I’ve never said this was Finkel’s stance, although logic says it should be. So there was nothing to correct.

Finkel continues: “Doing nothing is not a position that we can responsibly take because emissions reductions is a little bit like voting, in that if … no one voted, we would not have a democracy.”

That analogy is absurd. One vote in an election could decide a seat. All votes together decide a government.

But cutting emissions decides little. Dr Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that even if every country cut emissions by 2030 in line with the Paris Agreement, it would still make virtually no difference: “The total temperature reduction will be 0.048°C by 2100.”

Minuscule. And what’s the problem it’s meant to fix?

There has been virtually no extra warming this century, and we’ve had fewer cyclones, no increase in drought, and record crops. Trying to “stop” global warming costs us much, much more than does warming itself.

But Finkel concludes: “Sitting on our hands while expecting the rest of the world to do their part is simply not acceptable.”

Actually, what’s not acceptable is doing something useless and damaging in the naive expectation that the rest of the world will be inspired to do useless and damaging things, too.

The riots in France against their global warming tax on diesel — now scrapped — says they won’t.