Fed: Fielding wants Labor to consider alternate climate change theory
08 Jun 2009 3:48 PM
CANBERRA, June 8 AAP - Family First senator Steve Fielding wants to debate the cause of global warming with government scientists before he votes on Labor's climate change legislation.
Senator Fielding recently returned from a trip to the United States where he met with climate change sceptics who blame global warming on solar flares, not human activity or carbon emissions.
It is a theory he believes has some credibility.
"The issue that has been put forward is that over the last decade carbon emissions have been going up but global temperature hasn't," he told ABC Radio on Monday.
"What I heard at the conference was that solar activity seems to be more closely aligned to global temperature changes over a long period of time."
Senator Fielding said there hadn't been a proper debate on the science behind climate change and that up until now, there was only a blanket acceptance that carbon emissions were the cause of global warming.
He will meet with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong this week and said he'd be presenting her with information supporting the solar flare theory.
"I intend to take some of the graphs and the charts that I've actually got ... and ask her to explain why what they've put forward isn't credible," Senator Fielding said.
Labor wants its emissions trading scheme legislation passed in the Senate later this month.
But with the opposition vowing to vote against it, the government needs the support of the Australian Greens, independent senator Nick Xenophon and Senator Fielding.
Senator Fielding said he wanted to talk to the government's environmental scientists about solar flares and their impact on global warming before he casts his vote.
"What I want to do is take the information that I've currently got and give it to the Rudd government and their scientists and see what they say about it," he said.
"If the answer is 'look, it's just rubbish and we're just going to discount it', well I think that's not good enough.
"You need to argue your case on a scientific basis because this is a huge issue that if we get it wrong it's going to actually end up costing Australia very, very dearly."
