This article by Roger Helmer MEP in the Washington Times recently ...
Around the world, the fight against "climate change" and carbon dioxide emissions is costing literally hundreds of billions of dollars - and this at a time when the Western world is ravaged by recession.
We can ill afford these sums. Many scientists think CO2 emissions have a trivial effect on climate, but even those who support the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) generally agree that the efforts we are making will result in changes so small that they cannot even be measured.
Given that China is building a new coal-fired power station every week, with India not far behind, it's a fair bet that CO2 emissions will increase for decades regardless of what we in the West do. If the United Kingdom, for example, were to turn off its economy totally and not burn so much as a candle, China would make up our emissions savings in about 12 months.
Just 70 years ago, at the height of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill gave what became perhaps the most famous political speech in British history. Were he here today and able to comment on the great climate debate, he might well be saying, "Never in the field of public policy has so much been spent by so many for so little."
They say there's "a consensus" of scientists who support AGW. But science proceeds by hypothesis and falsification (what? Does he mean “verification”? - GOS), not consensus. As author Michael Crichton famously put it, "If it's science, it's not consensus. And if it's consensus, it's not science."
We are told that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents a consensus of 2,500 experts in the field. Yet when we look at the details, we find that the IPCC process, and especially the Summary for Policymakers, is in the hands of a small group, no more than two or three dozen.
The practically incestuous links among these scientists were revealed in a 2006 report by a team led by George Mason University statistics professor Edward Wegman at the request of Congress following a report by the National Research Council. These people work together, publish papers together and peer-review each others' work. And we now know from the "Climategate" leaks that they also cobbled together unrelated data sets, sought to "hide the decline," to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period from the record, to prevent publication of alternative views and to bring about the dismissal of editors who took a more open-minded approach.
Science is supposed to follow the facts and seek the truth. These guys started with a conviction about climate change and sought to make the data fit the preconception. They called themselves the "Hockey Team," and they included Michael Mann, creator of the infamous "hockey stick" graph - perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science - which nonetheless took pride of place in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report.
To understand climate hysteria, we need look no further than the Watergate advice: "Follow the money." Governments, think tanks, institutions and universities spend huge sums on climate research. Academics can't obtain work, tenure, grant funding or publication without toeing the line. Even researchers in unrelated fields can ensure funding by adding the context of climate change to their proposals. Thousands of jobs in government, academia, the media and industry depend on the climate issue.
The East Midlands region of the United Kingdom, which I represent in the European Parliament, has just committed $1.5 million to "climate change skills training" (read "propaganda").
And the propaganda works. Every schoolchild knows about dangerous sea-level rise. But the children don't know that it's simply a projection of a virtual-reality computer model. They don't know that in the real world, sea-level rise (at around six to seven inches in 100 years) is the same as it has been for centuries, that the Maldives and Tuvalu aren't sinking beneath the waves. They don't know that successive IPCC reports have consistently reduced their alarmist estimates for sea-level rise by 2100.
Every schoolchild knows that the ice caps are melting - but glaciers and ice fields accumulate snow (which compacts to ice) at high levels, while chunks of ice break off at the margin. Vast blocks of ice tumbling into the sea make great video footage, but they say nothing about warming or cooling. That's simply what ice sheets do.
There has been some retreat of glaciers since about 1800 (long before CO2 became an issue), but geological evidence shows that glaciers regularly advance and retreat with the Earth's climate cycles. We are simply seeing a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. And global ice mass is broadly constant. In 1942, six Lockheed P-38F Lightning fighters were lost in Greenland. In 1988, they were rediscovered under 270 feet of solid ice. That's an ice buildup of nearly six feet a year.
Every schoolchild knows about the plight of the polar bear (the alarmists' pin-up species), threatened by climate change. But how many know that polar bear numbers have increased substantially in recent decades and that polar bears are thriving?
In each of these cases, the alarmists put the projections of virtual-reality computer models ahead of real-world observation. Yet these models are programmed with a wide range of estimates and assumptions, including the assumption that CO2 is a major cause of warming. Little surprise, then, that they predict that outcome.
The models are seeking to make predictions about climate, which is a complex, chaotic nonlinear system. Yet a key feature of such systems is that they are hugely sensitive to initial conditions and therefore simply cannot be predicted in the long term. But all the models make one clear prediction - that with a CO2 greenhouse effect, the maximum warming will occur high in the atmosphere and over the tropics. Here at least we have a prediction we can test.
And the models fail the test. Observation shows the greatest warming at ground level and in the Northern Hemisphere. Because science moves forward by falsifying predictions, this one fact refutes AGW theory.
There is another way. It is possible to apply purely statistical/mathematical analysis to the climate record, to identify patterns and extrapolate those patterns into the future. Several researchers have done so. They find that climate is cyclical, with a temperature peak around 2000 and subsequent decline. Right on cue, the record shows that, indeed, the Earth has cooled slightly in the past decade. Solar scientists also are pointing to a period of very weak solar activity as a possible precursor to global cooling.
Dan Quayle reputedly said, "Forecasting is difficult, especially about the future." He's right: it's a mug's game. But if I were a betting man, I'd bet that 2030 will be cooler than today.
Well said, that man. Roger Helmer is a member of the European Parliament and a former member of its Environment Committee and its Temporary Committee on Climate Change.
Some of the Washington Times' readers had some interesting points to add ...
”I see that “c(r)ap and trade” is next on the Obama agenda to fix the world’s climate issues (it has been getting warmer for 10,000 years, so we need to fix it). We already have Obamacare, which is c(r)ap and trade on our healthcare (I’ll get my broken leg fixed, but I have to forego getting the cancer cured in exchange).
So you are a believer in the anthropodic (manmade) global warming scientific consensus, are you? Did you also believe in these scientific consensuses?
1. George Washington died in 1799 because of scientific consensus. His learned doctors - following then current scientific consensus - used leeches to bleed him of five pints of blood. He died from his treatment, not the disease. Scientific consensus can actually hurt you it seems.
2. Remember this one? Pluto was a planet, and then it was arbitrarily changed in 2006 to a dwarf world. Poor Pluto. Amazing how scientific consensus works, huh? You just vote on it. No facts needed, since consensus is merely opinion.
3.Since the founding of earth science, the continents were considered fixed and immutable by geologists. That was their scientific consensus. In 1912, Alfred Wegner, the meteorologist, proposed the idea of continental drift, but he lacked a mechanism to explain the movement. By the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics was articulated and the fixed continents dogma died, ruining many stodgy geologist careers. Scientific consensus is hard to kill because scientists build their careers around it, then defend it as though their paychecks depended upon it.
I’m sure you can come up with dozens of these lame consensus vignettes. Scientific consensus is worse than any religion in that its dogma is much more inflexible. The church had the inquisition; scientific consensus uses the denial of peer review to maintain its dogma.
This current manmade global warming scientific consensus is about research funding for climate models. Do you know what a climate model is? It is a simplification of the real world. You feed your model your assumptions and then it regurgitates a solution that seems credible to the model developer. Note the word credible. That means believable. It does not mean the truth. Climate models don’t create truth or even valid climate predictions; they just deliver credible (believable to the climatologist) results.
Many climatologists are just well educated welfare recipients who are on the public research teat. I wish the FBI would investigate how these climate research dollars are being misspent. From my vantage point, I suspect high crimes and misdemeanors are being propagated on the American taxpayer. It is about to get worse, much worse. The pending Obama c(r)ap and trade legislation will siphon billions of tax dollars to big business and Democratic Party contributors (such as BP). Follow the money, if you can stand the stench.”
... and this ...
“Measurement of even so fundamental a figure as mean annual global temperature is no 'settled science.' Even in modern times, sites have had to be moved to accommodate urban development; equipment has been upgraded without correlation of the characteristic errors of the old and new instruments; the urban heat island effect is constantly changing and we can't even be sure that temperatures are read on the same day throughout the world (important because not all sites have thermographs). When we attempt to extrapolate temperature graphs into the past by means of proxies, things get even more iffy. Sites in the tropics can seldom use oxygen isotope ratio proxies, for instance (there needs to be a handy glacier), and the accuracy of the technique decreases as the time span increases. Tree rings are thoroughly discredited as proxies. Other techniques exist, but the conversion characteristics are sometimes poorly understood and it is always hard to correlate them with today's observations, such as they are. And is there an agreed procedure for combining the data from hundreds of measurement sites across the globe? There may be, but no paper I have read has seen fit to describe it.
What level of accuracy can honestly be claimed for this? Plus or minus half a degree Celsius? That would perhaps be believable; but the 'experts' are basing their predictions on a fifth of this!
My point: 'climate scientists' are trying to convince me that they can see into the future with present measurement and computer models. Forgive me for doubting that the models are better than the data? I have read no more than a dozen technical papers on 'climate change' but none of their authors has managed to convince me that he/she/they have taken all factors into account and can with confidence predict what will happen to the climate. The best of them (most honest?) don't try.”
... and this ... Test your assumptions about Global Warning and Environmental Activism: assume that global warming is real and that catastrophe will visit us within 25-50 years.
Can we stop global warning by curtailing the burning of fossil fuels in first world nations? Not possible. Even if we stop immediately, fossil fuels will be burned in developing nations and the amounts will increase exponentially. Can we bully developing nations to stop burning fossil fuels? Not possible. They may sign various accords but they will not stop burning coal and oil. Should developed countries stop burning fossil fuels because every little bit helps? No, according to global warming experts, the amount of reduction required to reverse the trend cannot be accomplished by drastic reductions in developed nations alone. We are past the point of no return. Deployment of solar panels, wind turbines and geothermal systems to supply energy for the entire world is geographically and economically impossible. So we should give up on a plan to reduce fossil fuel use? No, but we should base our actions on reality and not myths.
Which of the following are environmental myths?
The world's rain forests are being devastated at an ever increasing rate.
Returning to small farms, gardening, planting trees etc. will help the environment.
Nuclear power is dangerous, expensive and leaves a tremendous amount of harmful waste products.
Wind turbines kill millions of birds and should be restricted.
Solar panels, wind turbines plus transmission lines are good for the environment.
Answer: all of the above. All of the above are myths.
The worlds rain forests are currently growing back 55x faster than being destroyed.
Small farms especially in the third world are an environmental catastrophe. Moving to cities is the greenest solution.
Nuclear power is the only green energy source, waste disposal is easy, and costs less over a plants lifetime than any other source on a kilowatt basis. All environmentalists should support nuclear power.
Cats kill more birds than wind turbines, so we should kill all cats to protect them.
Solar farms and wind turbines are placed far from the user and required very expensive transmission lines to reach the user. More birds die on those lines than cats kill.”
... and this ...
“An audit by Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong states that the IPCC WG1 report violated 72 of 89 identified weather prediction principles and yet the IPCC report is the basis for using carbon emission as a single variable that can control the climate.”
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