Democrat November-December 2013 (Number 138)
Global warming and climate change
Contribution to discussion by Stuart Delvin
I found Jean Johnson's article (July-August 2013) refreshing. As a Geology graduate I am quite at ease with the notion that the environment, including climate, has changed over the eons, well before man industrialised.
The New York Times of 30 March 2009 contained a full page advert by the CATO Institute which featured a quote from Barack Obama saying, 'Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.'
There then follows a quote which reads, 'With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true. We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. After adjusting for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather related events. The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behaviour. Mr. President, your characterisation of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.'
Below that quote there are over a hundred names, most with Ph.D after. These include Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in The Sunday Telegraph 29 October 2006 wrote an article along those lines.
Another signatory was Professor of Biology David Bellamy. On 22 January 2013 The Daily Mail published Jane Fryer's interview with him, which included, '….Until that is, we touch on climate change and the vicious backlash he suffered when, in 2004, and in the face of scientific convention and public opinion, he dismissed man made warming as "poppycock". "From that moment, I really wasn't welcome at the BBC. They froze me out, because I don't believe in global warming. My career dried up. I was thrown out of my own conservation groups ….. For the last sixteen years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker…." '.
A third signatory was eminent Australian geologist Professor Bob Carter. On the internet he has written, 'Climate change takes place over geological time scales of thousands through millions of years, yet unfortunately geological datasets do not provide direct measurements, least of all of global temperature. Instead, they comprise local or regional proxy records of climate change of varying quality. Nonetheless, numerous high quality palaeo-climate records, and especially those from ice cores and deep sea mud cores, demonstrate that no unusual or untoward changes in temperature occurred in the 20th and early 21st century.
Nor are carbon dioxide levels high compared with the geological past. Despite an estimated spend of more than $100 billion since 1990 looking for a human global temperature signal, assessed against geological reality no compelling empirical evidence yet exists for a measurable, let alone worrisome, human impact on global temperatures. Meanwhile, the difficulties encountered around the world in implementing carbon dioxide trading or taxation partly reflects that such mechanisms are expensive, socially disruptive and ineffectual ….'
Some investigators claim that the United Kingdom contributes only about 2% of man made CO2, which in its entirety constitutes about 3½% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere, which in turn only contributes about 5% of the greenhouse gas effect.
It is perhaps no surprise to see the EU involved in all this scaremongering. Foreign wind turbine makers and rich landowners are paid large sums, whilst foreign owned energy companies make huge profits. This is all at the expense of the British taxpayer, some of whom are faced with a 'heat or eat' situation in mid-winter. Whilst the elite benefit there will always be 'a consensus' – at least until the next ice age sets in.
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