Senate grills 'global warming' Garnaut on self-serving Melbourne hail storm claims ...
Excerpt from the Australian:
Hail fears put Ross Garnaut out in cold
31 May 2008
Kevin Rudd entrusts Ross Garnaut with Australia's long-term response to global warming, but the economics professor is in a tangle over how climate change will hit his own back yard.
In a bid to build a sustainable second house behind his home in inner-Melbourne Princes Hill, Professor Garnaut has told the City of Yarra Council that global warming will lead to more hailstorms in Melbourne - a claim, it now emerges, at odds with those of leading climate change scientists.
In a letter to the council, the economist uses his expertise to argue that heritage traditions, including a slate roof, should not apply to the property when defending what objectors say is an ugly, curving steel roof set to dominate the streetscape at the rear of the property.
He points out the greater resilience of a steel roof over slate given the increasing hailstorm threat. He says he has consulted the insurance industry in the course of his climate change work to back up his argument.
But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report, Climate Change 2007 - Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability - says in chapter 11: "Decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne and Mt Gambier."
It does not back up Professor Garnaut's letter, which says: "Severe and more frequent hailstorms will be a feature of this change."
Professor Garnaut was quizzed about the letter at a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra on Thursday night.
...
See - The Australian - Hail fears put Ross Garnaut out in cold.
Climate change is increasingly used to justify anything a so-called 'climate change expert' wants to do - including putting a steel roof on a house.
How this economics professor could now be asked to prepare a report on Australia's climate change response is beyond belief ...
posted by Concerned Ratepayer at 8:12 AM
6 Comments:
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1:36 PM, May 31, 2008
Comment deleted.
11:37 AM, June 02, 2008
The Australian
Garnaut target thwarts experts
June 02, 2008
THE cost of deep cuts in carbon gas emissions proposed by the federal Government's climate change adviser Ross Garnaut is so severe it cannot be reliably predicted by existing computer models.
Economists working for the Treasury and Professor Garnaut, using three sophisticated computer models, have struggled to measure the effect on the economy of a 90 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.
The scale of the cuts mooted by Professor Garnaut in an interim report in February overwhelmed the models and work has been delayed until August, barely a month before Professor Garnaut's final report is due.
The lack of definitive modelling results means Kevin Rudd may be forced to compromise his hardline election commitments on emission trading to create a scheme with enough flexibility to cope with unexpected problems that emerge after the proposed start date in 2010.
Last week, the Prime Minister left the door open to excluding petrol from emissions trading, a move that would increase power bills and limit the effectiveness of the scheme.
His move came as draft modelling by power generators suggested three out of the four brown-coal power stations in Victoria's Latrobe Valley would close by 2020 and household power prices would increase by 50 per cent under modest cuts in greenhouse emissions. Draft modelling yet to be made public shows Victoria would bear the brunt of a national emissions trading scheme as the value of its emissions-intense power stations could fall by up to 80 per cent.
The Rudd Government has asked Treasury to inform the independent review of climate policy by Professor Garnaut and the Department of Climate Change, which is drafting emissions trading legislation by the end of this year.
Treasury has enlisted the aid of the three major computable general equilibrium models available to weigh the impacts of different emissions cuts and prices on the Australian economy.
The models from Monash University, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Reserve Bank board member Warwick McKibbin have been developed to measure how the economy would respond to shocks from the introduction of greenhouse gas emission cuts.
Economic modelling is being done for Treasury on the impact of more modest cuts, and for Professor Garnaut, who is understood to be looking at what effect his posited 90 per cent emissions cuts by 2050 would have on the economy.
Professor McKibbin told The Australian that, while it was important to model the impacts of major policy reforms, the scale of the changes meant the results could not be used to establish the likely cost of any "timetable and target" strategy.
"The transformation required is so big that the models we have at our disposal just would have a great deal of difficulty dealing with it," Professor McKibbin said.
"That's why you design policy with all sorts of safety valves and a capacity to adapt over time if itturns out the models were completely wrong."
The modelling process is already delayed until August, after the release of Professor Garnaut's draft report and the Government's green paper in July.
Australian Industry Greenhouse Network chief executive Michael Hitchens said the delay made it difficult to respond to both key documents and threatened to compress the time needed to have a robust debate over the economic impact of targets.
"Until you know what they have in mind for it to do it's a bit of an intellectual discussion," Mr Hitchens said.
The Energy Supply Association and the National Generators Forum have been modelling the national electricity market under different scenarios and the Brumby Government in Victoria is also preparing its own analysis due in July.
Draft modelling estimates that a $45-a-tonne price on carbon would be needed to deliver a 10per cent cut in emissions by 2020, which would shut down almost all remaining brown coal plants in Australia. This would require the construction of cleaner power stations capable of producing 14,000 megawatts within a decade, which could cost up to $50 billion.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has been meeting senior executives from the power industry and other major emitters over the past two weeks in the lead-up to the release of the Government's green paper. Some of these meetings have revealed tensions between emitters and the Government.
Concerns include the Government's unwillingness to reconsider its election promise of a renewable energy target of 20 per cent of generation by 2020, despite economists' doubts about its cost and efficiency.
Some in industry are concerned about the optimistic assumptions used by Treasury and the perception that the sector was simply "rent seeking" by presenting its frightening scenarios of an industry in meltdown if the Government got it wrong.
"They simply don't believe us," one industry source said.
A spokeswoman for Senator Wong said research commissioned by industry groups and companies "added a great deal to our policy deliberations".
11:38 AM, June 02, 2008
Sounds a bit like the Y2K bug to me.
It fizzled out to nothing in the end.
2:14 PM, June 02, 2008
The Australian
Ross Garnaut in spat on a hot tin roof
June 03, 2008
KEVIN Rudd's climate change guru, Ross Garnaut, has again been caught apparently failing to practise what he preaches.
In a letter to the local Yarra council seeking approval to build a new home behind one he owns in Melbourne's inner-north, Professor Garnaut espouses the virtues of steel over slate, citing climate change predictions.
Yet neighbours protesting against the new house, in Park Street, Princes Hill, say Professor Garnaut just two years ago refurbished the roof of the existing house on the block using slate almost exclusively. "He seems to have changed his tune," the neighbour said last night.
The Prime Minister may have entrusted him with Australia's response to global warming, but Professor Garnaut has certainly found himself in a tangle when it comes to his own backyard. The matter is expected to unravel in public today when it goes before a hearing in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Melbourne.
...
10:39 AM, June 03, 2008
Obviously I cannot comment directly regarding the allegations pertaining to Professor Garnaut, but I do know that normally City Of Yarra are very stringent when considering heritage factors in their permit approval process. At times City Of Yarra planning policy is normally so stringent that it can borders on the absurd, even where applications are considered for minor developments in far less heritage sensitive areas than Professor Garnaut.
I am not sure if this is allowed but decide for yourself if you want to publish this link for your readers and they can judge for themselves, as the story here speaks volumes about City Of Yarra's normal planning standards.
http://investmentbug.com/townurbanplanning/index.html
On this basis I find the fact that Yarra City has approved Professor Garnaut’s application , despite the strong objections of ten neighbours making case for stringent heritage policing, is just something I cannot fathom.
Sources:
http://newmatilda.com/2008/02/22/we%2526%2523039%3Bve-already-hit-code-red
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23786397-25658,00.html?from=public_rss
4:15 PM, June 12, 2008
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