Thank You Very Much Global Warming Alarmists --- More Job Losses, More Human Suffering

Yes it is a long hot summer, but not as uncomfortable as it is becoming in Britain where energy costs are rising and availability is shrinking. There is one major group to blame: those promoting the myth of man-caused global warming. They say: "stop the use of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) they cry; save the planet from all that global warming carbon dioxide! And if we can't get people to voluntarily comply then these fuels must be taxed into non-existence." The global warming alarmists (some of them) actually believe this will be a good thing. If people have to suffer, they insist, it is for their own good.

If only this were some kind of academic game. Unfortunately this is deadly serious business and real people are already beginning to suffer. At the top of my list of utter idiots and hypocritical scoundrels are the infamous, discredited embarrassments to humanity Al Gore and John Kerry. Do a search of this blog for those two alone. Their dirty laundry list is appalling.
Peter

Ta Ta, Tata (source)

The UK may be waving goodbye to Tata Steel and some other large industrial concerns as the government piles on more green costs, making it almost impossible for global businesses based there to compete.

Companies including Tata Steel Ltd. and GrowHow U.K. Ltd. may leave the U.K. as climate-protection policies boost electricity and natural-gas costs.

Factories will pay 18 percent to 141 percent more for gas, electricity and carbon-reduction programs by 2020, adding about 7 million pounds ($11 million) to the bill for a typical large energy consumer, the London-based Energy-Intensive Users Group and Britain’s Trades Union Congress said in a report on the impact of climate policy released today.

“The combined impact of the government’s climate change policies is imposing significant costs on the U.K.’s energy- intensive industries, and without urgent review could see some companies leaving the U.K. for good,” according to the report.

…

It’s the second report this month suggesting potential job losses in Britain because of climate policy.

the future, not so bright green after all

Large industrial concerns are likely to quit Britain not just because of direct cost increases, but also because soon there just won’t be enough power available to them, thanks to a completely clueless Energy Minister:

…in the real world, the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close.

The headline answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.

As a 24-carat green ideologue, he is viscerally opposed to replacing the ageing nuclear and coal-fired plants which currently provide us with more than half our electricity.

Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before him, he dreams we can somehow fill that gap by erecting 6,000 wind turbines in the seas around Britain’s shores, and thousands more across many of the most beautiful parts of our countryside.

What is truly terrifying about Mr Huhne as our energy minister is that he seems so astonishingly ignorant about even the most basic principles of how electricity is produced.

He boasts about how the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the ‘capacity’ to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity.

Capacity is the crucial word here. As he could see from figures on his own department’s website, thanks to the fact that the wind blows only intermittently, the amount of power these windmills actually produce is barely a quarter of that.

In other words, the amount of electricity generated by all those turbines put together, at a cost of billions of pounds, is no more than that provided by a single medium-size conventional power station – equivalent to a mere two per cent of the electricity we need.

Good luck Britain, you’re going to need it.

The Economy and The Environment: An Essay From Britain

Here is a thoughtful essay from the British Newspaper "The Observer". Britain is undergoing a banking crisis and some people are predicting a recession. Similar opinions are being heard about the American economy. Some polls show that the economy is now the number one concern among voters and politician's responses might determine the outcome of this year's Presidential election.

What makes the following essay interesting is Mr. Cohen's belief that a faltering economy will harm the still growing environmental movement. Basically, he is saying that when people can't pay the rent, or heating bills, or put food on the table, things like stopping global warming get left by the wayside. Frankly, I see that as a good thing. People are going to see the myth of man-caused global warming and the efforts to control it, as the big scam that it is. Hopefully the hype and hysteria will subside and disappear as we face new challenges.
Peter

Blame the greens when the lights go off
Environmental campaigners will face a backlash if they do not drop their hardline attitude to energy
.
source:

by Nick Cohen
Sunday January 13, 2008The Observer
In 1851, Friedrich Engels looked at Britain and concluded that its crashing economy would force the working class to unleash red revolution. 'The iron trade is totally paralysed and two of the banks which supply it with money have gone broke,' he gloated. 'There is the prospect of next spring's convulsions on the Continent coinciding with quite a nice little crisis.'
Engels's ghost is still waiting for the revolution he predicted, but as banks crash for the first time since the 19th century, his delusory assumption that recessions are good for the left persists.

I can see why people think that way, as I have myself. When markets crash, people should realise that they've wasted money on fripperies they never needed and are burdened with debts they can't clear, the argument runs. Homes and pensions they assumed to be safe shrivel in value. Jobs they had taken for granted vanish. Surely they will make a radical critique of the system which has let them down.

In practice, they don't - or most don't. Although the collective memory of the Thirties includes grainy pictures of the Jarrow march, the Great Depression didn't produce a radical upsurge. The Labour party split and Britain was ruled by the Conservative or Conservative-dominated governments of MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain. Nor did economic crisis of the Seventies send Britain leftwards. Laboursplit again and Margaret Thatcher destroyed union power.
Far from being the product of hardship, the triumph of centre-left ideas from the early Nineties on coincided with low inflation and economic growth. The huge increases in public spending and the new concerns about the degradation of the environment and plight of the poor world were made possible by a benign economy. Voters need to feel secure before they can accept the altruistic arguments of the left and I think it's fair to predict that their security will soon disappear.

We need to be careful because, as ever, there are disputes among the forecasters. Harry Truman once grew so exasperated by his advisers saying 'on the other hand' that he pleaded for a 'one-armed economist'. The wildly varying predictions of their successors range from those of optimists who say Britain will merely experience a slow-down, via pessimists who say that the banking crisis makes a recession inevitable to catastrophists who predict the worst slump since the Thirties.
You can take your pick, but, tellingly, no one thinks Britain's economy will carry on as before or improve.

Whatever happens, the public sector bonanza is over. The government has spent so much it has nothing in reserve to revive the economy if the pessimists are right and hard times come. Inflation is back making energy and food dearer. In the changed circumstances, ideas that were taken for granted in the boom of the past 15 years are about to be tested. Is, for instance, today's commitment to environmentalism a luxury? Like expensive holidays and restaurant meals, will it be one of the first casualties of a recession?

There is a danger that it will because the weakness of green political ideas to date has been their failure to break out of the middle class. The majority of the population still has little or no interest in them. At the New Year, a food company called Whole Earth released the findings of a poll which found that two-thirds of respondents were baffled by the terms 'sustainable' and 'genetically modified' and almost half thought that 'macrobiotic' meant a type of bacteria - I won't sneer because I had to look it up too.

Perhaps the general confinement of green thinking to the comfortably off is unavoidable. Maybe people can only worry about the environment when they are not worried about how to make their pay last until the end of the week. It's certainly easier to live off organic food if you have a comfortable income and to recycle if you can afford a house with a garden for a compost heap. But even if the rich have greater scope to be greener than the poor, the possibility that the momentum behind the environmental movement will dissipate with a crash is exacerbated by the failure of its leaders to think hard enough about how the policies they recommend hit those in straitened circumstances.

I've heard officials with homeless charities deride Friends of the Earth for its opposition to Gordon Brown's plans for a house building programme - 'bearded nimbies' is their only printable comment. The fashion for counting 'food miles' and feeling righteous if you buy locally produced food doesn't concern itself with the question of how farmers in poor countries will be affected if consumers in rich export markets make a virtue of boycotting their products.

But the greatest scope for a backlash comes from hardline attitudes to energy. In successive weeks, Greenpeace has denounced proposals for new coal-fired power stations and a new generation of nuclear power plants. It may be true that clean-coal technology is a long way off, but whatever other complaints can be made about it, nuclear power is an alternative to fossil fuels and honest greens are hard-headed enough to admit it.

James Lovelock, the greatest environmentalist of our time, describes it as 'the one safe, available, energy source' and despairs at the green movement's 'irrational' objections.
Those suffering - and in some cases dying - this winter because they can't afford to heat their homes may not care about the technical arguments. They are more likely to see the green movement as their enemy if every time a new source of power is proposed an environmentalist pops up to explain why it can't be built.

At its best, green politics isn't food faddery or yet another means for the refined middle class to distinguish itself from the masses, but altruism in action. It urges us to make sacrifices now so that future generations will not have to endure the consequences of global warming. Although they may not realise it, the greens need economic growth because the lesson of history is that when growth goes, altruism goes with it.

The Great Bali Global Warming Hypocrisy.......

Since global warming is a world-wide issue, I think it is fitting to listen to someone other that the mainstream true believers in the United States. Here is an example from Britain.
Peter




At last, the media appear to be rumbling (about) the sheer nonsense and hypocrisy that is the 13th U.N. Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which began today in beautiful Bali. Nice conference if you can get it!


First, just listen to the scepticism in John Humphrys’ (“For it is he!”) voice (“Does it really take 10,000 delegates to set an agenda!”), as he interviews a waffling Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s ever-eager Environment Correspondent, on what Bali is supposed to be about [‘Today’, BBC Radio 4, December 3, c. 6.48 am: you can listen again here. Choose the 06.30 - 07.00 slot; the interview is around 06.48-55. After today, select ‘Monday’, and then, after 7 days, ‘Audio Archive’]. My wife declared that listening to Roger rabbit on this morning about Bali was “a laugh-a-minute”. Roger talks a lot about what the EU wants from Bali. I’ll believe the EU when it stops having two parliaments and a secretariat in three different countries!

Secondly, The Daily Telegraph (December 3) gets it absolutely right in an excoriating ‘Leading Article’, which I recommend wholeheartedly: ‘A blast of hot air at Bali’s climate conference’:

“It’s not the waste that rankles so much as the hypocrisy. Some 15,000 politicians, officials, quangocrats and assorted busybodies are descending on Bali for a jamboree that will produce more than 100,000 tons of CO2 emissions. The purpose of their trip? To discuss how to reduce CO2 emissions.

We wonder whether there would be so many observers and hangers-on if the venue were, say, Düsseldorf. For many of those attending have no direct involvement in the talks.

For example, 19 MEPs, accompanied by advisers and staff, are in Bali, staying at a luxurious spa hotel. Not only will their fares, meals and accommodation be paid for by the rest of us, but they will also claim a further £95 per day.”

Nice work if you can get it! After more scathing comment and analysis, this excellent ‘Leader’ concludes:

“The Kyoto agenda is not principally about affecting climate change. Even if we accept all its proponents’ figures, we would succeed in reducing the projected temperature rise by just 0.3F over the next century (at a cost of an almost unbelievable £3 trillion).

No, the Bali meeting is not really about doing anything. It is about feeling smug; and getting paid for it.”

I think you may also enjoy some of the reader comments which now follow at the end of the article, especially one by a particularly pithy Mr. Kaminski.

I wonder if Bali will prove a Green indulgence too far? The hypocrisy is so blatant that even the media seem less willing than usual to indulge international ‘greenfoolery’.

One of my best correspondents e-mailed to say that she gave ‘global warming’ nonsense five more years before world agendas experience a continental drift. Europe had better watch out.

Judge Rules Against Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"

And Al Gore is being considered for a Nobel Prize and people want him to run for President again? The global warming nonsense just keeps getting more, and more ridiculous. Maybe this is what it will take to reveal the hoax of global warming........legal action......
Peter

Judge Rules Against Al Gore's Global Warming

by Mitch Battros - Earth Changes Media
A High Court judge just ruled that former US vice president Al Gore's moving, 'An Inconvenient Truth', promoting what many scientists call "science fiction", has now been court ordered to provide a listed document explaining nine scientific errors in Al Gore's film when distributing this "politically biased" film to schools. The Government had pledged to send thousands of copies of the film to schools across the country, but a Kent father challenged that policy saying it would "brainwash" children.

A judge was asked to adjudicate between Stewart Dimmock and the Department of Children, Schools and Families. Mr Justice Burton ruled that the film could be sent to schools, but only if it was accompanied by new guidelines to balance the former US vice-president's "one-sided" views. The judge said some of the errors were made in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration" in order to support Mr Gore's thesis on global warming.

He said that while the film was dramatic and highly professional, it formed part the ex-politician's global crusade on climate change and not all the claims were supported by the current mainstream scientific consensus. He went on to list those errors:-

Error one Al Gore: A sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future".The judge's finding: "This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore's "wake-up call". It was common ground that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia."-

Error two Gore: Low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls are already "being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming."Judge: There was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.-

Error three Gore: The documentary described global warming potentially "shutting down the Ocean Conveyor" - the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe.Judge: According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it was "very unlikely" it would be shut down, though it might slow down.-

Error four Gore: He asserted - by ridiculing the opposite view - that two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed "an exact fit".Judge: Although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, "the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts".-

Error five Gore: The disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was expressly attributable to global warming.Judge: This "specifically impressed" David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, but the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.-

Error six Gore: The drying up of Lake Chad was used in the film as a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming, said the judge.Judge: "It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution. It is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability."-

Error seven Gore: Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans to global warming.Judge: There is "insufficient evidence to show that".-

- Error eight Gore: Referred to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears were being found that had actually drowned "swimming long distances - up to 60 miles - to find the ice". Judge: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm." That was not to say there might not in future be drowning-related deaths of bears if the trend of regression of pack ice continued - "but it plainly does not support Mr Gore's description".-

Error nine Gore: Coral reefs all over the world were bleaching because of global warming and other factors.Judge: The IPCC had reported that, if temperatures were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and mortality, unless the coral could adapt. But separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as over-fishing, and pollution was difficult.

Schools Must Warn Of Gore Climate Film Bias

It looks like our British friends are finally beginning to catch on to the hoax that Al Gore is perpetuating about the myth of man-caused global warming. Hopefully this represents the "tipping point" and this nonsense and fear-mongering about global warming will fade away like Al Gore.

Peter

from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=485336&in_page_id=1811

Schools must warn of Gore climate film bias

Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" has been called unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.

The move follows a High Court action by a father who accused the Government of 'brainwashing' children with propaganda by showing it in the classroom.
Stewart Dimmock said the former U.S. Vice-President's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.
He wants the video banned after it was distributed with four other short films to 3,500 schools in February.

Mr Justice Burton is due to deliver a ruling on the case next week, but yesterday he said he would be saying that Gore's Oscar-winning film does promote 'partisan political views'.
This means that teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.
He said: 'The result is I will be declaring that, with the guidance as now amended, it will not be unlawful for the film to be shown.'

Al Gore talks about Hurricane Katrina in a scene from the controversial movie

The outcome marks a partial victory for Mr Dimmock, who had accused the 'New Labour Thought Police' of indoctrinating youngsters by handing out thousands of Climate Change Packs to schools.
Mr Dimmock, a lorry driver from Dover with children aged 11 and 14, said at the outset of the hearing: 'I wish my children to have the best education possible, free from bias and political spin, and Mr Gore's film falls far short of the standard required.'
His solicitor John Day, said yesterday that the Government had been forced to make 'a U-turn', but said it did not go far enough.

He said 'no amount of turgid guidance' could change the fact that the film is unfit for consumption in the classroom.
The case arises from a decision in February by the then Education Secretary Alan Johnson that DVDs of the film would be sent to all secondary schools in England, along with a multimedia CD produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs containing two short films about climate change and an animation about the carbon cycle.

David Miliband, who was Environment-Secretary when the school packs were announced, said at the time: 'The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.'
But during the three-day hearing, the court heard that the critically-acclaimed film contains a number of inaccuracies, exaggerations and statements about global warming for which there is currently insufficient scientific evidence.

The Climate Change Resource Pack has now been sent to more than 3,500 schools and is aimed at key stage 3 pupils - those aged 11 to
Children's Minister Kevin Brennan said last night: 'The judge's decision is clear that schools can continue to use An Inconvenient Truth as part of their teaching on climate change in accordance with the amended guidance, which will be available online today.
'We have updated the accompanying guidance, as requested by the judge to make it clearer for teachers as to the stated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change position on a number of scientific points raised in the film.'

Britain Having Second Thoughts About Climate Change Bandwagon?

This article caught my eye, note it is from "grist" the online environmental website. It seems that at least some people in Britain are questioning the logic of focusing completely on the global warming and climate change issue, to the detriment of other more pressing environmental issues. I think maybe people are beginning to see what a big scam the global warming scare-mongers are pulling off. They don't like it, and they are going to like it even less as it continues.
Peter



from: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/8/20/11026/6273?source=weekly

Brit's Eye View: Are we too obsessed with climate change?
Other enviro issues are getting less attention
Posted by Peter Madden at 4:23 AM on 21 Aug 2007

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
Are we too obsessed by climate change? Over here, climate change is coming to completely dominate the sustainability agenda. This is true in politics, business, the media, and civil society.
I was talking to our new secretary of state for the environment, Hilary Benn, the other day, about his department's strategy. He argued that all the other issues -- such as air quality, waste, water, and so on -- could all be dealt with under the climate change umbrella; government action on climate change would deliver for the other issues, and vice versa.

When we talk to companies or public authorities, it is the same. All they want is advice on going low-carbon. And since this is where the money and political attention are going, the NGO activity seems to follow, reinforcing the trend.
Of course, this is a good thing in many ways. Climate change is the major challenge we face. Sir David King, the U.K. Government's chief scientific advisor, was right when he reminded his government colleagues that "climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism."

For those of us who want to see green thinking integrated into other areas of life, climate change works well. It can't be thought of as peripheral. It will affect everything, including how we run the economy and how we live our lives.

I worry, however, that we risk missing other important stuff too. Twenty-five years ago we hardly knew about climate change, which was then mostly the preserve of a few scientists. Pollution, biodiversity loss, waste, resource use, and protection of special habitats were the things that obsessed us; and they should be still.
Of course, climate change will touch everything. If the earth warms as predicted, we may not have tropical forests or the special habitats we are trying to protect. On this basis, many argue that we should focus solely on climate change. There is some merit in this argument. But I also think that an overemphasis on climate change does bring some risks.

Climate change does not touch people in the heart. It is a very complicated concept to get across. This is fine for people who deal well with graphs, and projections, and abstract concepts. But we all need to relate to real-life experiences, too. Very few of the public are motivated and changed by rational abstractions, or by things that won't happen for decades.

The environment most of us experience is the one we meet when we step outside our front doors. We need to respect and tap into more immediate motivations for people. This is a lesson the green movement in the U.K. learned back in the early 1990s. The major environmental groups were so focused on big, faraway issues that ordinary people switched off. Instead, there was a flowering of local protest groups concerned with their own backyards.

Is there also a danger that policy-makers can use the long-term nature of climate change as an excuse not to take action on other issues today? By talking up targets for 2020 and 2050, we might miss urgent problems that are with us now, such as overfishing, deforestation, and the loss of species.

There certainly are trade-offs between tackling different environmental issues. And with a limited pot of money, other important areas can suffer. Policies can be in conflict, too. Remember the catalytic converter in the 1980s: good for tackling pollution, but bad for fuel efficiency. And bad for biofuels today, which may be good news for tackling climate change; but if poorly sourced, is very bad news for orangutans.

This is a difficult one to call. Climate change is a huge problem, and maybe we should give it priority over everything else. Or maybe we could do a better job of remembering that there are other important environmental issues out there.

British Environmentalists Planning Protest Against "Climate Criminals"

Do these British environmentalists know anything about global warming and the science behind it? It will be interesting to hear what their ideas are.
Peter


Green Activists Plan Mass Action Against 'Climate Criminals' at Heathrow

By Kevin McCandless CNSNews.com Correspondent August 13, 2007
London (CNSNews.com) -

Hundreds of environmental activists will descend on Heathrow Airport this week to protest climate change supposedly caused by an expanding economy. They said they want to strike a blow against the "corporate climate criminals of the world."

Organizers behind the Camp For Climate Action said they intend to open up a "temporary eco-village" next to one of the world's busiest airports on Tuesday, charging that it was time for governments and corporations to get serious about global warming. Coming at the peak of the British vacation season, the camp will monitored by scores of police officers, potentially setting the stage for internationally televised clashes between demonstrators and law enforcers. On Sunday, an advance guard of 150 activists began setting up tents, compost toilets, and kitchens in a sports ground just north of the airport perimeter fence. The Guardian newspaper reported that police, in turn, blocked all approaches to the camp, as well as stopping and searching anyone suspected of planning to join the protestors. The camp is scheduled to run for seven days, with most of the time spent on a variety of workshops on climate change. However, organizers also are planning 24 hours of mass action and civil disobedience, beginning at noon on Sunday.

Spokeswoman Alex Harvey said the exact nature of the mass action would be decided by camp participants during the week. Despite speculation that protestors would invade the airport itself, Harvey said that any action would steer clear of the runways or doing anything that would endanger lives. The British press has been reporting on the planned camp in recent weeks, but London police say they have very little firm information about what is going to happen. Jo Kaye, the commander in charge of security operations around the camp, told reporters on Friday that organizers have not been open about their plans. He acknowledged that Heathrow is a potentially hazardous environment, but said the London Metropolitan Police is "very experienced" in handling these kinds of protests. "We've planned for what we know and looked at a huge range of contingencies," Kaye said.

"The plan that we have in place is based on our experience and is flexible enough to deal with a range of events. "Police in northern England made over 35 arrests at last year's Camp For Climate Action, held outside one of Europe's largest coal-fired power stations. Kaye urged organizers of the Heathrow camp to work more closely with police. "I would like to stress that what we want to do is facilitate lawful and legitimate protest," he said. "That is our role and we want the protestors to work with us so we can safely make it happen. "In the run-up to the camp, the British Airports Authority (BAA), which operates Heathrow, tried to get a court injunction against protestors. However, despite warnings that the camp could be a dangerous distraction in a time of possible terrorist attacks, BAA was only successful in banning three named activists from entering the airport. A BAA spokeswoman said Heathrow security has been planning for the protest camp for months, together with police.

Travelers from the United States should not have to worry about any disruption, she said.All three major British political parties have endorsed the need to combat "global warming," but the Camp For Climate Action organizers say mainstream solutions are not enough to "save the world."They argue that it is not possible to have an endless expanding economy "on a planet that's not getting any bigger," dismissing as a myth the view that consumers can avert catastrophe by becoming more green-minded.
digg_skin = 'compact'

Climate Chaos? Don't Believe It

This article was published a little over a year ago but it is still relevant. It touches on most of the major issues related to the idea of man-caused global warming and climate change. I found it very well done. Global warming and what to do about it is not just a local, or an American problem as it sometimes seems. This comes from Britain, but the economic and political consequences are truly global.
Peter



Climate chaos? Don't believe it


By Christopher Monckton, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:14am GMT 05/11/2006
Download Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations [pdf]
The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth

Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?
Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.



The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.



In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.



This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.
Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.



So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.



Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "



So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:



• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).



• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.



• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".



• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.







Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.
The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.


The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.


In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:


• The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.


• Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.


Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.


Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.


The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.
Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.
Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling.


In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations.


The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.


Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.
You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.


The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.


On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.


A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter.


Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.
Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.


Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.


Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.