From the Institute for Public Affairs
Written by John Abbot
A new paper from Dr. John Abbot, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, shows that records of living and fossilized corals show natural temperature fluctuations that go back thousands of years.
Dr. Abbot urged Australia’s government-funded research institutions to resume the coral core and trending data release program that appeared to have stopped in the early 2000s, as detailed in the recent IPA documentation Finding Porities.
The research paper What Corals Can Tell Us About Climate Change: Temperature Variability Over Millennia was released today by the IPA to advance this week’s High Court hearing on Dr. Peter Ridd, of James Cook University, because of his criticism of the quality of reef research by some of his colleagues.
“We are constantly being informed that the world is in the midst of a climate crisis and current atmospheric temperatures are unprecedented, but this should be seen in the context of past events,” said Dr. Abbot.
“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution about 130 years ago, the public and politics have been conditioned to associate ‘climate change’ with the destructive behavior of generations of people. However, the scientific literature informs us that climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred over millennia and there is no reason to believe that this process is not underway.
“Studies on corals can add to our knowledge and understanding of these natural processes that contribute to current climate change, and also allow us to quantify the contribution of human activity,” he said.
Dr. Abbot used the evidence gathered in his research in the coral records to identify Dr. In contrast, those by Dr. Abbot cited studies on corals that sea surface temperatures have risen since about AD 1790 after a decline of at least several centuries.
Source: IPA, Ljungqvist, FC, (2010) A new reconstruction of the temperature variability in the extra-tropical northern hemisphere over the past two millennia.
This fits with temperature profiles showing evidence of the Little Ice Age, roughly in the period AD 1600-1800, after a relatively warm period known as the Medieval Warm Period around AD 1000.
Dr. Abbot holds a BSc in Chemistry from Imperial College, London, an MSc from the University of British Columbia, Canada, a Master of Biotechnology from the University of Queensland and a PhD in Chemistry from McGill University, Canada. He has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed scientific literature. He also earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Queensland and was admitted to the Queensland bar and later earned an LLM from the University of Queensland.
Download the report here.
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