THE POLITICISATION OF SCIENCE & THE DESTRUCTION OF AUSTRALIA'S COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE

I was awarded an Honours degree in Zoology and Geology in 1973 from the University of Reading. It was a time when universities were moving curricula from comparative anatomy and stratigraphy to interdisclinary studies in ecology, environmental sciences, and animal behaviour.

It was also a time when universities were becoming more capital intensive and research oriented. That generated a "grants" culture around the world which were sourced in the main from governments and intergovernment agencies, including the United Nations.

We were told then by an american scientist, one Paul Ehrlich, that since the world was cooling - yes cooling - and the population was growing, that we would all run out of food and starve. This Malthusian prophecy was obviously completely wrong, and since then, not only has the world population doubled, but the quality and quantity of food has significantly improved in much of the West and in Asia. At the same time, the real cost of many foodstuffs has declined with increasing proportions of the population able to afford more and better foods.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and now we are told that the world's climate is heating from so-called anthropogenic sources with likely catastrophic results. The Australian Financial Review (3rd April) reprinted a chart from the Economist ("Hot Air") which demonstrates that these predictions, like Ehrlichs' before them, are sadly and dangerously wrong.

Studying natural sciences in a politically unbiased way, teaches you that climate is infinitely variable, and as Ian Plimer has written in his book "Heaven and Earth", subject to influences totally beyond the control of mankind.

The present follies, highly politicised, are in part a result of the grants system for research, and the politicisation of that. Woe betide a university researcher if you don't agree with the established, politicised view. All at huge tax payer expense. Like the predictions from Australia's own very expensive Climate Commissioner (Australian April 3rd).

The expense is not only now being measured in the accounting dollars for tax payer funded grants and salaries. The real cost of politicised science is yet to be measured, but it will include the utter destruction of Australia's competitive advantages in energy, resources and agriculture if this nonsense does not stop.

This destruction is starting to wreak havoc. It is a slow motion economic train wreck, inflicted by an academic and political class that puts preferred policy before facts. Never again should there be a statute called the "Carbon Pollution Reduction.....". The title is of itelf a lie. Carbon is fundamental to life and carbon dioxide is the food of plants, without which we would all assuredly starve.

The world has been far warmer, wetter and richer in carbon dioxide than today, yes richer: that is why we have coal in such abundance. That is why large animals like cold blooded dinosaurs prospered for millenia. What happened when natural climate change resulted in the Ice Ages: they all died.

A warmer, wetter climate will open vast areas of North America and Russia to agriculture. Mankind will not generate such a result, but climate change from known natural causes may. Or maybe we start to cool off? Who knows? Certainly not our politicised scientists.