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You will have heard on the news over the last 3 weeks of the activities of Senator Steve Fielding in Australia. Steve is an independent cross-bench senator who holds a casting vote over the passage of the Australian ETS (termed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme).

After attending the Heartland-3 climate conference in Washington in early June this year, Steve returned to Australia and asked Climate Minister Penny Wong three simple questions about climate change. The Minister replied, first in a meeting at which her Chief Scientist (Penny Sackett) and departmental science adviser (Will Steffen) presented a briefing paper, and secondly in writing.

Senator Fielding then asked his advisory scientists - Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kinimonth - to perform an audit of the Minister's replies to his questions. Copies of Senator Fielding's original questions, Minister Wong's written reply, and other papers relevant to the matter are available for download from Joanne Nove's blog (below).

The Due Diligence Paper has been released publicly by Senator Fielding's office today (July 3; together with the two covering press releases). It shows, first, that the Minister and her Department have largely been unable to answer the questions that they were asked. And, second, that the Australian Department of Climate Change has little capacity to assess the science of global warming in an expert, knowledgeable and independent way.

We believe that this is the first time recently that a member of a western parliament has released a public document that makes an independent science assessment of the danger of human-caused global warming (as promulgated by the IPCC), thereby demonstrating (i) the lack of empirical evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are damaging to the environment, and (ii) that ETS are unnecessary.