HERE are 10 anti-commandments, 10 selected facts about global warming which have been largely ignored amid the orthodoxies to which we are subjected every day. All these anti-commandments are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.
1. The pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.
2. US President Barack Obama supports building nuclear power plants.
Last week, in his State of the Union address, he said: ''To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.''
3. The Copenhagen climate conference descended into farce.
The low point of the gridlock and posturing at Copenhagen came with the appearance by the socialist dictator of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-capitalist diatribe drew a cheering ovation from thousands of left-wing ideologues.
4. The reputation of the chief United Nations scientist on global warming is in disrepair.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is being investigated for financial irregularities, conflicts of interest and scientific distortion. He has already admitted publishing false data.
5. The supposed scientific consensus of the IPCC has been challenged by numerous distinguished scientists.
6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries.
After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.
7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.
Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.
8. The Kyoto Protocol has proved meaningless.
Global carbon emissions are significantly higher today than they were when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced.
9. The United Nations global carbon emissions reduction target is a massively costly mirage.
10. Kevin Rudd's political bluff on emissions trading has been exposed.
The Prime Minister intimated he would go to the people in an early election if his carbon emissions trading legislation was rejected. He won't. The electorate has shifted.
None of these anti-commandments question the salient negative link between humanity and the environment: that we are an omnivorous, rapacious species, which has done enormous damage to the world's environment.
Nor do they question the warming of the planet.
What they do question is the morphing of science with ideology, the most pernicious byproduct of the global warming debate. All these anti-commandments were brought into focus this past week by the visit of the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, better known as Lord Christopher Monckton, journalist by trade, mathematician by training, provocateur by inclination.
Last Wednesday a conference room at the Sheraton on the Park was filled to overflowing, all 800 seats sold with a standing-room only crowd at the back, to see the Sydney public appearance of Monckton, a former science adviser to Margaret Thatcher. At the end of his presentation he received a sustained standing ovation.
Monckton is the embodiment of English aristocratic eccentricity. His presentations are a combination of stand-up comedy, evangelical preaching and fierce debating. Almost every argument he makes can be contested, but given the enormity of the multi-trillion-dollars that governments expect taxpayers to expend on combating global warming, the process needs to be subject to brutal interrogation, scrutiny and scepticism. And Monckton was brutal, especially about the media, referring to ''all this bed-wetting stuff on the ABC and the BBC''.
There has also been a monumental political failure surrounding the global warming debate. Those who would have to pay for most of the massive government expenditures proposed, the taxpayers of the West, are beginning to go into open revolt at the prospect.
Last week the Herald reported that Monckton told a large lie while in Sydney.
On Tuesday it reported: ''He said with a straight face on the Alan Jones radio program that he had been awarded the Nobel, a claim Jones did not question.''
The Herald repeated the accusation on Thursday. It was repeated a third time in a commentary in Saturday's Herald.
In 2007 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the former US vice-president Al Gore. The prize committee, in citing its selection of the IPCC, said: ''Through the IPCC . . . thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of [global] warming.''
Thousands of people were thus collectively and anonymously part of the prize process.
So what lie did Monckton tell about the prize? Despite the gravity of the accusation, the Herald never published the offending remark. Here, for the record, is what he actually said:
Monckton: ''I found out on the day of publication of the 2007 [IPCC report] that they'd multiplied, by 10, the observed contribution to sea-level rise of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. By 10! I got in touch with them and said, 'You will correct this.' And two days later, furtively, on the website, no publicity, they simply relabelled, recalculated and corrected the table they'd got wrong.''
Alan Jones: ''But this report won a Nobel Prize!''
Monckton: ''Yes. Exactly. And I am also a Nobel Prize winner because I made a correction. I'm part of the process that got the Nobel Prize. Do I deserve it? No. Do they deserve it? No. The thing is a joke.''
* Paul Sheehan is Sydney Morning Herald journalist.
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