Climate Change – the truth

Climate Change is a topic that is rarely out of the news these days. If one listens to the ramblings of the B.C.C. aka the Brussels Brainwashing Commissariat you could be forgiven that it is an accepted scientific fact that human beings through their consumption of fossil fuels and, inter-alia their CO” emissions are responsible for “climate change”; and that the planet earth is warming fast that at any time in recorded history and that we are approaching “tipping points” at which the consequences will become irreversible.
If it sounds like scare-mongering it is because that is precisely what it is. In keeping with its aim of “Speaking the Truth unto the Nation”, the British Gazette will have as its editorial policy the promotion of the true state of affairs so far as “climate change” is concerned. And now to shed some light on the global warmist darkness:
There is a tale of a little boy walking with his mother across Hampstead Heath in a gale. The wind kept blowing off the little lad’s cap and, as he looked at the bending trees, he turned to his mother and exclaimed, “Mummy, if the trees didn’t wave it wouldn’t wind!” We are amused at this childish misunderstanding of the relationship between cause and effect. However if an adult were to put forward such fancies as factual we would not be so amused and indeed might become very alarmed if the grown-up then announced that all the trees on Hampstead Heath must be cut down to prevent the gales. I tell this story for a reason: Those currently promoting the Enhanced Greenhouse Hypothesis (EGH) that man-made CO2 is warming the planet are guilty of precisely the elementary error of that little boy. Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth is based entirely upon it.
The EGH has always been on shaky ground scientifically. In science a hypothesis (that’s an idea not a fact) is developed and tested against observations. When observations fail to support a hypothesis, then it is either modified or abandoned. The EGH came to the fore about 20 years ago as a possible explanation of the mild warming observed over the last 150 years (about 0.8-dgrees C – see footnote one). Because it is a simple idea – that man-made CO2 from burning fossil fuels is warming the planet, it quite caught the public’s imagination. Unfortunately this has now developed into a form of hysteria, pushed forward by those for whom such an agenda is of benefit. The IPCC reports are regarded by most reputable scientists as mere political propaganda dressed up as science (footnote two). Because scary headlines are the food of journalists, they too have jumped on the bandwagon – the BBC perhaps being one of the worst culprits. Meanwhile, serious climate scientists have been patiently testing the hypothesis against the evidence. The hypothesis drew on the
Greenhouse effect. The effect is small but crucial to our survival on the planet – without the effect of water vapour, CO2 and other gases such as methane, the planet would probably be an iceblock. Water vapour contributes more than 95 per cent of the greenhouse warming.
The EGH suggested that the extra CO2 put into the atmosphere by human industrial activity etc would therefore warm the planet. The computer models (and this is really the only support the hypothesis has: Computer models, as it turns out, that totally fail to explain past temperatures, let alone forecast future ones) predicted that this warming would affect the atmosphere (more than the ground) and the polar icecaps most strongly. So far so good. Here’s an hypothesis which is making predictions whereby it can be tested against reality. This is the normal way any scientific idea progresses. However…
Inconvenient truth number one:
When these two predictions were tested against reality neither of them were found to be occurring, which should have suggested to its proponents that something wasn’t right.
Inconvenient truth number two:
It did not explain the rapid (relatively: We are looking at mere points of a degree) warming in the late 19th century and again in the 1920s and 1930s, but the sudden cooling for 30 years between 1945 and 1975 at a time when man-made emissions of CO2 were most rapidly increasing (see footnote three) – and temperatures basically flatlining or even falling since 1998.
Inconvenient truth number three:
The discovery that the greenhouse effect of CO2 is not linear but rapidly tails off: Going from nought to 200ppm the effect is relatively substantial, from then on each incremental increase in CO2 has less and less further effect. The CO2 levels could double to 800ppm without much difference to its greenhouse effect.
Inconvenient truth number four:
If what is happening today in the atmosphere is unusual or man driven, then studying the past climate of the Earth should highlight today’s changes as anomalous. Unfortunately studies from around the globe of ice cores and many other proxy measurements show that it is not anomalous at all and, what is fatal for the EGH and for the premise of Al Gore’s film, that earlier periods of warming are also associated with rises in CO2 levels like today – but that these rises invariably follow the warming (sometimes lagging by up to 1,000 years), as melting ice and warming oceans deliver up dissolved CO2 in quantities that dwarf all human emissions. Therefore CO2 rises cannot be what is driving the warming. ‘If the trees
didn’t wave it wouldn’t wind.’
Inconvenient truth number five:
NASA reports the fact that the planets (and their moons) have shown signs of warming – this clearly cannot be as a result of human CO2 emissions. This accumulated evidence renders the EGH dead in the water. It has ceased to be a viable hypothesis for global warming in serious science. Nor is the increase in CO2 anything but a bonus – it causes more plants and crops to grow (there has been a steady increase in vegetation globally of about four per cent per decade – producing what is called ‘global dimming’), helping to feed hungry mouths – as has happened globally in past warm periods such as the Roman warm period and the Medieval warm period – both warmer than today (eg vines were growing north of Hadrian’s Wall in Roman times – see footnote four).
So what is the prime forcing factor for planetary warming ? It is the sun.
It has been discovered (by satellite measurement) that the sun is not a constant but has periods of higher and lower intensity. The sun’s energy has been increasing since the 1970s by about .05 per cent per decade. Strangely such variations in the sun and the warmth of the globe with its knock on effect of better harvests were observed by the astronomer William Herschel when he noted the connection between corn prices and the number of sun spots. When he published this result in 1801 he was laughed at by
all the scientists of his day – an instance, by the by, of consensus! They all were wrong and he was right. What he didn’t know was the subtle mechanism that connected these two things. Today this is beginning to become clearer and a very intriguing mechanism it looks to be.
High energy cosmic rays, as they pass through the atmosphere, cause low-level cloud seeding. A more active sun shields us from some of this cosmic radiation, thus reducing the cloud cover and thereby warming the planet (see footnote five). Clouds are a far more significant factor for global temperatures than greenhouse gases. If one were to compare the complex interaction of forces in the climate to a large orchestra, then cloud cover compared to CO2 warming is as the whole brass section in full
flood to a single triangle. If this matter were merely a debate within academia, the whole thing would be of only moderate interest – theories in science come and go. However in this instance, incredibly expensive and highly dangerous policies based on a discredited idea are being enacted which will have appalling consequences for the world’s poorest peoples. One thinks of the terrible consequences of Lysenko’s ‘science’ in the old USSR, where similarly a discredited science, amplified by a not wholly dissimilar hardened ideology, led to the starvation and death of millions. Or the manslaughter of upward of 30 million people from malaria since the 1970s when DDT was effectively banned after hysteria about its supposed dangers – which proved to be baseless. Affordable and reliable energy is what helps brings people out of subsistence living and enables them to have access to clean water, safe cooking and heating, education, effective crop management, health care, communications and good transport. The only reliable source of energy available today is fossil fuel – of which there is no shortage.
So why are those, who would appear to be concerned for the underdeveloped nations, so set on denying them the very resource that would get them on their feet – just because they believe in the discredited dogma of man-made global warming ?
Notes
1. This figure needs to be reduced by approximately 40 per cent using satellite and balloon measurements.
2. Examples: Prof Frederick Seitz, former president of the American National Academy of Science, stated, “I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.” A writer of the section on the supposed dangers of the spread of disease was an expert in… crash helmet design!
3. The IPCC produced a hypothesis about sulphate aerosols causing cooling – which has turned out to be merely a ‘fudge factor’. However the cooling fits better with sun intensity data – see graph.
4. The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC in 2000 published the now infamous ‘Hockey-stick’ graph produced by a Dr Michael Mann in an attempt to erase evidence of the global Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age from Earth’s climate history. It was never properly peer reviewed. The graph has turned out to be spurious – bad statistical methodology and shoddy science – but, like so much misinformation, it got all round the world before the truth even got its boots on. It is now discredited.
5. Of considerable interest also is the Pacific Ocean Heat Vent discovered in 2001 by the study of data from Japan’s GMS-5 geostationary satellite, whereby the Earth has this extra means of losing heat into space – like a huge safety valve. A quite remarkable phenomenon, but apparently unknown and certainly unpredicted in Greenhouse circles.
Sources
The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, CUP 2002
Cool It, Bjørn Lomborg, Marshall Cavendish 2007
Unstoppable Global Warming – every 1500 years, S F Singer and D T Avery,
Rowman and Littlefield 2007.
The March of Unreason, Lord Taverne, OUP 2007
The Great Global Warming Swindle, Channel 4 – a polemic – but an accurate one. See http://www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.com
Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, Paul Dreissen, Merril Press 2003
The Chilling Stars, Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, Icon Books 2007
An Appeal to Reason, Nigel Lawson, Duckworth 2008
http://www.nzclimatescience.org
Philip Foster MA pf.smp@dial.pipex.com