CORE PRINCIPLES

CLIMATE SCIENCE

1. Global climate is always changing in accordance with natural causes, and recent changes are not unusual.

2. Science is rapidly evolving away from the view that humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gases' are a cause of dangerous climate change.

3. Climate models used by the IPCC* fail to reproduce known past climates without manipulation and therefore lack the scientific integrity needed for use in climate prediction and related policy decision-making.

4. The UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers and the assertions of IPCC executives too often seriously mis-represent the conclusions of their own scientific reports.

5. Claims that ‘consensus’ exists among climate experts regarding the causes of the modest warming of the past century are contradicted by thousands of independent scientists.

6. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant—it is a necessary reactant in plant photosynthesis and so is essential for life on Earth.

7. Research that identifies the Sun as a major driver of global climate change must be taken more seriously.

8. Global cooling has presented serious problems for human society and the environment throughout history, while global warming has generally been highly beneficial.

9. It is not possible to reliably predict how climate will change in the future beyond the certainty that multi-decadal warming and cooling trends, and abrupt changes, will all continue, underscoring a need for effective adaptation.

10. Since science and observation have failed to substantiate the human-caused climate change hypothesis, it is premature to damage national economies with 'carbon' taxes, emissions trading, or other schemes to control greenhouse gas emissions.

*United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

 

ENERGY

1. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity—energy production, transportation, cement production, heating and cooling, etc.—appear to have only a very small impact on global climate.

2. So-called new renewable energy technologies are extremely expensive and rely on huge subsidies. To use such intermittent and diffuse power sources requires that the consumer pays between three and ten times the price of power from conventional sources (coal, oil, natural gas, hydro and nuclear). Regardless, it is not currently possible to safely replace a significant fraction of our conventional energy supplies with alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and most biofuels.

3. New renewable energy technologies have only a minimal effect on carbon dioxide emissions because none of them can be relied upon to be available when needed. Therefore, conventional fossil fuel-fired power stations must be kept on standby in case the wind drops or a cloud passes over the Sun. This leads to additional emissions of carbon dioxide that, to a large extent, offset the reductions made by the renewable energy technologies.

4. "Energy independence" is not a good reason for promoting new renewable energy technologies. Energy independence is more easily–and much more cheaply–attained by exploiting abundant national fossil fuel reserves, and spending some of the wealth created on research into potential new energy technologies.