‘Radical’ historian Blainey challenges climate-change orthodoxy

From the Sydney Morning Herald

By Tony Wright

July 5, 2019 — 11.11am

Australia’s best-known historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, has challenged the concept the present degree of local weather change is both distinctive or largely the results of human behaviour.

Whereas agreeing the Earth was experiencing a warming interval which had been underneath method for a number of many years, he stated this on no account in contrast with a lot higher local weather change in human historical past.

Controversial historian Geoffrey Blainey says human behaviour “could” play a component in world warming.Credit score:Paul Jeffers

Professor Blainey, 89, the influential and generally controversial writer of virtually 40 books on Australian and world historical past, made plain he didn’t settle for the overwhelming view of local weather scientists that the altering local weather required a novel, trendy rationalization restricted to human behaviour.

He stated human behaviour “could also be half” of the rationale for present world warming.

Nonetheless, he stated this didn’t clarify how or why the local weather had modified extra dramatically previously.

“The nice interval of local weather change in Australia’s human historical past was in Aboriginal occasions, when the seas rose and minimize off Tasmania and minimize off New Guinea from Australia,” he stated.

He added that ice-core samples from Antarctica had proven that as just lately as 1173AD – the time of Francis of Assisi – had marked the beginning of a “horrible” 39-year drought.

“It’s a must to be very cautious that you just’ve obtained good explanations for the previous in addition to for the current,” he stated, in relation to local weather change.

Professor Blainey, whose opposition to what he known as the “black armband view of historical past” was utilized by Prime Minister John Howard throughout the so-called “tradition wars” on the flip of the century, stated he didn’t contemplate himself a conservative.

“I’m a radical,” he stated. “I’m pro-change.”

Local weather change was “probably the most tough and attention-grabbing mental argument of the final 100 years”, he stated. However he conceded he didn’t have solutions for a lot of of his personal questions on the topic.

“I want I had one other 100 years to see what occurred,” he stated.

See full story right here.

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