If Hugh Morgan is saying it, it must be wrong.
Recall the businessman’s previous campaign against the High Court’s Mabo decision — which extended to a defence of terra nullius and warnings that Australia’s territorial integrity was under threat — or his glowing 2010 endorsement of the young Australian Workers’ Union boss Paul Howes as a future Labor leader, after his starring role unseating a first-term prime minister.
And so it was again yesterday with Morgan’s declaration in an interview with The Australian that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be remembered as a “Chicken Little”, like the Club of Rome.
Morgan is a long-time president of the climate sceptic Lavoisier Group and was a member of the Business Advisory Council on Climate Policy, established in May 2011 by then-shadow environment spokesman Greg Hunt. (Did they meet often, I wonder, in their quest for a non-policy to solve a non-problem? Does it matter?)
Morgan told the Oz that the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, based on research by a team of scientists from MIT (not mainly European, as the article states), “illustrates the dangers of academics talking about things they know nothing about”:
“‘The IPCC will be remembered in the same way as the Club of Rome for its “Chicken Little” approach.’
“Mr Morgan said political leaders should reread The Limits of Growth to understand the dangers of modelling and the risk of believing ‘academics who think they can see the future’.
“He said the Club of Rome’s prediction that most major commodities would run out within a few decades had been proven wrong because of the scientists’ failure to consider technological innovation in the resources industry and their inability to understand how companies made decisions.
“‘It completely presumed there was a standstill in technology,’ Mr Morgan said.
“He cited the shale gas revolution in the US as an example of technological change leading to increased reserves of a key commodity. The move towards deep-sea drilling for oil had also led to new discoveries in areas previously discounted.”
It is hardly worth attacking Morgan, who is entitled to his opinion, and good luck to him. But it is definitely worth defending the Club of Rome against such repeated misrepresentation, which crops up too often.
Published in 1972, Limits to Growth was the most popular environment book in history, selling 30 million copies in 30 languages.
In 2008 and 2012 CSIRO research scientist Graham Turner looked at how the real world was tracking, using three and then four decades of historical data, against the business-as-usual scenario outlined in Limits to Growth, which forecast the collapse of the environment, the global economy and subsequently the population, in mid-century. The answer is: we’re on track — the data matches “surprisingly closely” (Turner outlines this well in a seven-minute podcast). He takes on the critics of Limits to Growth for misrepresenting the modelling:
“Many asserted, falsely as it turns out, that the Limits to Growth predicted we would have run out of resources by 2000 and the economy would have collapsed by then, so they then say that the Limits to Growth was wrong. This turns out not to be the case. The Limits to Growth never said that at all.”
It’s a long-running debate, partly around the estimation of reserves of various commodities. The Limits to Growth forecast that resource depletion would be exponential, not linear, assuming economic growth, and was based on estimates of current reserves, acknowledging that these could expand.
Even on his own terms, Morgan’s argument makes no sense, blaming the Club of Rome for “scaring the hell out of everybody” so “everybody invested and you had a massive oversupply” of commodities, which kept prices low for 20 years. That is a huge achievement for a bunch of academics supposedly out of their depth tinkering with computer models. In my experience the intelligent actors in the resources industry and commodities markets don’t scare so easily, for so long, and certainly not based on misinformation.
Morgan cites the unconventional oil and gas revolution, but the jury is still out there. Yes, we have found plenty of recoverable unconventional oil and gas, but the decline rates from these fields are still being evaluated, and in today’s Australian Financial Review (for example) scientists are warning the shale revolution could be a “temporary bonanza” . In any case, conventional oil and gas resources are still declining fast and the era of cheap energy remains a distant memory, with oil still trading at $US95 a barrel.
The irony is that while Morgan has campaigned against climate action, his former company Western Mining, which developed the enormous copper/uranium mine now known as Olympic Dam, was bought by BHP Billiton partly in expectation of increased demand for cleaner energy to combat climate change.
Former Shell executive and coal industry chief Ian Dunlop, now a safe climate advocate who is in the middle of a campaign for a seat on the board of BHP, is a member of the Club of Rome. In a letter to The Australian (which may or may not be published), Dunlop writes:
“Hugh Morgan needs to take his own advice and read the Limits to Growth again because he has completely misunderstood what it said. It was not a prediction in any sense but a set of scenarios that indicated how the world might evolve under various assumptions of population and growth increasing exponentially. It didn’t predict running out of anything. It did allow for the impact of technological innovation.”
Like an episode of The Walking Dead, the climate sceptic zombies are coming from everywhere now. The challenge is not getting infected.
27 thoughts on “Beware Hugh Morgan and the climate sceptic zombie attack!”
David Hand
November 5, 2013 at 7:10 pmHey Mr. Breakfast,
I don’t recall inventing entrenched opposition to nuclear power or fighting the proposal to export LNG from Queensland. I read about them in the newspaper. Maybe even Crikey.
The thing is, both these anti-growth campaigns are left wing, especially nuclear power which the left has opposed for decades. Both would have a powerful positive impact on carbon emissions.
Both campaigns also require elevated fear of climate change to gain support. Threats to the reef are exaggerated in an industry where hundreds of coal carriers pass through it every month.
But you’re being hard on scientists, mate. The spruikers, activists and angry young people who fill our TV screens with climate alarm are not scientists.
Warren Joffe
November 5, 2013 at 11:36 pmIt is sad that Paddy Manning got the sack for uttering truths incontinently about Fairfax Media as it has now become but maybe an element of the cavalier with the truth and infestation with youthful ideological certainty that was understood as arrogance contributed. It wouldn’t have been difficult to check that Hugh Morgan is not properly (unless for meretricious effect as a proper objective) described as the “long-time president of the Lavoisier Group”. That description might have described the Hawke government’s former minister for resources and Finance Minister Peter Walsh as the long-time president whose ill health only made him retire about 2009 or 2010.
Then there is the casual sneer about terra nullius as support for the Manning view that if it was said by Hugh Morgan it must be wrong. Presumably Manning, unlike Morgan, is not the possessor of a four year law degree and articles in a distinguished law firm as well as associateship to a judge before he left the law for business. Terra nullius or, in practice, the notion that the condition of indigenous use of the land didn’t qualify as establishing ownership recognised by the law brought by the First Fleet to Australia, was nothing but the legal position established by court decision and practice and maintained for nearly two hundred years until the High Court, by a majority, overthrew it. So Morgan didn’t follow the majority fashion of the time for change. Nor did a lot of competent respected constitutional lawyers.
And what a pity that the then activist High Court’s changes prevailed unless one can bury the evidence of the waste of lives and resources that has occurred for almost no good result for even a few aborigines which can be sourced to Mabo. What a price real aborigines, though mostly the minority still living in remote areas, have paid for the fantasies of the post-Hasluck government do-gooders under the influence of Nugget Coombs and later fantasists.
While I might have prided myself on being one to find a way to bury terra nullius elegantly I hope I would not now pretend that opposition to overthrowing terra nullius had no good legal or philosophical basis or that it had actually done any good worth the price paid then and since.
Warren Joffe
November 5, 2013 at 11:56 pmPerhaps some of those who make confident statements about what climate science says about AGW, even if, like me, not amongst the perhaps one in a million Australians whose qualifications and personal research entitles them to confident utterance, might care to follow up what one Bob Tisdale says about ENSO and his purported demonstration that warming proceeds from the oceans not the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning (even including, presumably the high proportion which derives from forest burning). I see there is a book inter alia. My attention was drawn to his work by accidentally coming across a near hour long presentation by him on YouTube which is a challenge to finish watching and listening to. (I haven’t). But it seemed more than plausible to one who has come across recent work by a couple of Australian physicists, one retired, that purports to show that the CO2 increases of the last 50 years have come from the oceans (presumably following their warming) and not from fossil fuel burning, the thesis including that fossil fuel emissions in the Northern Hemisphere are taken in extra forest growth. Anything known?
BTW don’t go with c**p about peer review unless you have thought deeply about it and reviewed peer review itself in the contemporary world. But maybe you have a legitimate question about why the sceptical scientists are only just beginning to get up momentum. My impression is that heavyweight scientists in relevant areas didn’t need the funding from IPCC related sources and didn’t imagine that some new scientific entrepreneurs were going to take off with such unlikely stuff that would need a lot of work to definitively refute, even supposing they felt a duty to do it. And only recently have some funding sources, like the Koch brothers, given anything to support sceptical scientists.
David Hand
November 6, 2013 at 12:38 pm“Peer review” in the context of climate change is a distortion of what it means within the scientific method.
Usually, if a scientist wants to publish a paper laying out the results of an experiment or research, a peer or two will look through all the work done, interview the researcher, maybe even do the experiment themselves. This adds rigour to the publication, protects the scientific journal from publishing errors and ensures that the total body of scientific knowledge is based on sound science.
In the IPCC world, thousands of people flick through a draft report and say “yeah, looks ok to me”. We know his from the vast numbers they refer to as they spruik their credibility.
The outcome is that the reports contain errors, can be challenged by sceptics, drive policy makers to wrong decisions and of course, allow climate druids like Flannery to pepper their speculations with phrases like “peer reviewed” or “the science says”.
It sets them up for ridicule when their predictions are wrong and it undermines, fatally, good policy development to tackle climate change.
Look at those redundant desalinisation plants, the Brisbane flood disaster caused by the engineers following politicians’ instructions to keep the dam full for water supply rather than empty for flood mitigation, the original reason the dam was built.
Mike Smith
November 6, 2013 at 3:00 pmDesalinisation plants in Australia will never be redundant, AGW or not. We have cycles of multiple years where we get minimal rain (El Nino) and traditionally at these times have water rationing. We could do with sewer treatment too, so we can re-use that on gardens (a lot more expense there, you’d need dual supply systems)
heavylambs
November 6, 2013 at 3:09 pmWarren Joffe, Bob Tisdale has demonstrated nothing about warming physics and mechanisms, and steadfastly refuses to discuss how extra GHGs cause net warming in an ocean. He simply insists that because oceans show warming and ENSO variation simultaneously, then ENSO is the source. But ENSO is a redistributive mechanism: opposing phases affect regional medium term weather and seasonal characters in opposing hemispheres, overall cooling or warming periods of time. ENSO cannot heat the ocean/atmosphere system as it shows no trend over the long term.
K.D. Afford
November 6, 2013 at 5:37 pmSome one knocked of seven of my neighbour’s lambs, have you got them?
Hamis Hill
November 7, 2013 at 9:58 amIt seems to be “instinctive” with these Climate Sceptic Zombies.
Myrtle Tuttle
November 7, 2013 at 5:52 pmDavid Hand wrote: “Threats to the reef are exaggerated in an industry where hundreds of coal carriers pass through it every month”
The threats are not exaggerated. I snorkelled there 25 years ago and went there again recently. I was shocked at the degradation of the reef, especially the loss of red corals. It ain’t what it used to be and it’s going downhill. That’s the truth seen with my own eyes and corroborated by the staff working there.
Please, if you are going to play politics, at least make yourself aware of what you’re talking about.
I take issue with your describing yourself as a “frustrated believer”. Are you a gravity believer too? A spherical earth believer? Science is simply the act of observation and measurement and requires no belief – ever. Speculation, projections, imaginative leaps are a necessary part of research but they are things to think about, not believe in.
So I am not a “climate believer” (or other such political labels) but I take the scientists’ observations and reports seriously. Maybe if I studied their topic for a few decades I might have the ability to argue with their findings.
I take politicians and other players far less seriously, as should we all. The projections so far have been pretty spot on.
K.D. Afford
November 7, 2013 at 6:21 pmWell said Myrtle, I used to believe in the Easter Buuny, Father Xmas and a religion, but once I got old enough to think for myself, not any more, there is no science to back them, just belief…science is physics, it is solid.