Farmers of New Zealand Inc. wrote to Minister for Climate Change, David Parker, to gain a greater understanding of the government’s stance on climate change. The text is as follows;

There is a significant amount of media hype around this important subject that inevitably leads to questionable information being published in the media. Since you have reportedly stated that climate change is real and have denied the people of New Zealand a Royal Commission to independently investigate the issue we thought you may have evidence on the subject of global warming not easily available to the general public on which you base decisions.

The government’s determination to proceed with the Kyoto Protocol and an emissions trading market will have a dramatic effect on the nation’s investment and purchasing habits. The costs to our economy could be measured in the billions of dollars. An economy that you are no doubt aware is already suffering from extremely poor productivity, low wage rates, and a high cost of investment capital. The government must be absolutely certain that this is the right course of action for it to pursue such a bold policy and therefore we have assumed you are privy to more information than we are.

Our investigations conclude:

1.     Due to the nebulous and mostly unverifiable carbon accounting the scheme is open to considerable cheating and litigation. Even the best guess’s verified by field trials have a variation of plus or minus ten percent.

2.     Since 1999 scientific observational evidence continues to weaken the theory that carbon emissions cause global warming.

3.     We are advised that since 1998 temperature has not increased which contradicts the hypothesis that increasing carbon emission increases temperature.

4.     We cannot find in any of the literature we have investigated any observational evidence that warming is caused by anthropological carbon emissions. After twenty years of intense worldwide study we would have thought scientists would have found something.

5.     It appears that the only reason we blame carbon emissions is the predictions of climate models that to date have been shown to be highly inaccurate and reliant on numerous assumptions.

There are many other observed facts, including the now correct interpretation of ice core data, that make us uncertain that the current belief regarding carbon is justified, hence the letter.  We acknowledge that global warming has occurred and accept that there may be observations that support some model. Models can and are altered as conflicting data is observed but this does not validate the model to correctly predict the future. We believe no responsible government should invest so heavily without supporting evidence from repeated scientific observation. We also acknowledge that many countries internationally accept the carbon argument but this in itself is evidence of a political herd mentality not validation of anthropological global warming.

We would like you to make public the observational evidence of anthropological global warming you must hold in your possession for the government to embark on such an extensive rebuild of our economy. We would also like to know who made the scientific observations, when were they made, what did they observe, and how does the evidence support the notion that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming.

If you are not in possession of such data and are relying on computer modelling to make predictions could you make the model fully public with all the working scientific code and all the documentation so others can peer review the results on independent computers. We would like to know what assumptions have been made and if it is run with different inputs what future temperature variations it may predict.

If New Zealand is going to the expense of being first in the world to become carbon neutral it is reasonable that the information used by the government to make these decisions is fully scrutinised in the public arena. Since the government has stated that global warming caused by carbon emissions is a scientific fact you should have no problem fulfilling our request.

We look forward to your response.

Whether  you support the global warming argument or not for the government to spend tax payers money on any scheme we must have confidence that it will be money well spent. We suspect there has been little due diligence behind the decision to impose billions of dollars in costs on our economy. I hope the Minister can give us a clear response to ease  our concern.