Daily Mail, August 12 2002

Well, golly gosh and my oh my, it’s been raining a lot in Britain. So what’s new about the great British holiday washout?

Many of us have less than fond memories -- going back decades -- of shivering under umbrellas in August as the rain bucketed down in Broadstairs or the heavens opened in Hove.

Last week served up torrential rain, flash floods and the odd tornado. A Great British tradition, you might think. But oh no, not a bit of it for the Green lobby, for whom the summer downpours are instead further proof that the end is nigh for the planet.

Just as very hot summers are held to be evidence of global warming, so washed-out summers are held to be evidence of – yes, global warming. Indeed, every single meteorological or climatological deviation from what Greens claim to be the norm is said to furnish conclusive evidence that the planet is about to fry and western man is to blame.

But the truth is that these environmental doom-mongers generate more hot air than is to be found in the upper atmosphere. Their predictions are all demonstrable nonsense, and have much more to do with global politics than warming.

Take, for example, the claim that the Arctic is melting away before our very eyes, parroted by environment minister Michael Meacher. He has now been triumphantly restored to the vast British contingent attending this month’s Johannesburg Earth Summit on ‘sustainable development’ -- the notion that technological change must not harm the natural environment -- after the outcry over his summary removal.

Backing up his contention that ‘the glaciers are melting extraordinarily fast’ through climate change, Greenpeace released last week startling ‘before and after’ pictures showing the virtual disappearance of the Blomstrandbreen glacier off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard in the Arctic. But Svalbard scientists say this is meaningless and misleading. Glaciers shrink and grow all the time as part of the natural cycle.

Indeed, on the other side of Svalbard the Friddjovbreen glacier -- like dozens of others -- has advanced by more than a mile in the past seven years. And far from warming, the temperature there has been stable and may even have started to drop.

Now look at what environmentalists are saying about the recent storms. They claim that such violent ‘monsoon’ conditions will become more prevalent as global warming takes hold. All because the first six months of this year were the warmest ever since -- well, since the last period that was the warmest ever since records began,143 years ago.

The ignorance behind all these assertions is simply staggering. Weather is not the same as climate. Monsoons are caused by an extreme series of events that occurs uniquely over the Tibetan high plateaux in which the jet stream reverses itself, a phenomenon which does not occur anywhere else.

Calling our downpours ‘monsoons’ is simply offensive to all those in Africa and Asia who suffer from the real thing. It is also absurd to suggest that anything extraordinary is happening to the world’s weather. Sure, there has been bad weather in parts of Europe, too. But other places, such as Denmark, have been enjoying a better summer than usual.

According to the Met Office, the explanation is simple. The jet stream, which normally drives bad weather away from Europe during the summer, happens to be further south than normal. And the rainfall this year has not been exceptional either. In other words, there are no long-term trends here at all.

What’s more, we have seen far worse storms in previous centuries. These were associated not with warming but -- on the contrary -- a catastrophic cooling of the atmosphere. In the latter part of the 16th century, in the middle of a cold period known as ‘the Little Ice Age’, storms increased by 85 per cent and severe storms by no less than 400 per cent.

As Brian Fagan records in his book, The Little Ice Age, the great storm of 1570 -- remembered for generations as the All Saints Flood -- left much of Rotterdam and other Dutch cities under water and drowned at least 100,000 people.

In 1588, the ships of the Spanish Armada were pulverised by a series of savage storms around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, causing Sir Francis Drake to report – in the middle of August, no less – ‘a very great storm considering the time of year’. As Fagan remarks, the Armada lost more ships to this episode of bad weather than in any conflict with the English.

So the idea that our recent rains are either unusual or a harbinger of a heated-up apocalypse is simply barmy. It is no coincidence, though, that such prophecies of eco-doom are occurring ever more feverishly in the run up to Johannesburg.

For this summit is exposing the contradictions at the heart of ‘sustainable development’ in an argument which the Greens are losing. The poor peoples of the third world are saying that only development will rescue them from poverty, malnutrition and disease. This is, of course, an anathema to the Greens, whose ‘sustainability’ analysis rests on the premise that western development is killing the planet.

Having been forced onto the moral back foot, the Greens are even more desperate to prove that global warming and climate catastrophe are the fault of western man. There is no doubt that we need to clean the environment, and to do this we need to prevent pollution. But the fact remains that there is simply no credible evidence that global warming is happening, or if it is that man-made carbon dioxide is the culprit.

The climate change that has occurred is well within the bounds of the cyclical changes throughout history. In 1200, Europe was 2 degrees warmer than it is now, with vineyards as far north as Northumberland and Norse settlements in Greenland. Yes, the climate has warmed up by some 0.6 per cent over the past century; but thank goodness it has, since from 1400 to the late 19th century Europe endured the Little Ice Age, and if it hadn’t got warmer since then we really would be complaining.

The seas, in general, are not rising. The ice, in general, is not decreasing. The air overall has not warmed but has cooled. The earth’s natural resources are becoming more, not less, abundant.

And if the atmosphere was getting warmer, it is exceedingly unlikely that carbon dioxide would be the culprit since it accounts for only a fraction of the atmosphere. The computer models that have generated Green climate propaganda have failed to factor in the huge number of variables that influence climate change, such as water vapour, clouds, ocean currents and the effects of the sun.

Global warming is no more than an ideological scam being used to attack the west from within. The Green movement is deeply reactionary and anti-human, as the rows over the Earth Summit clearly show.

In the 16th century, the extreme hardships and destruction caused by global cooling prompted widespread pogroms against witches, who were blamed for the abnormal weather and the famine and epidemics brought in its train.

Five centuries on, a similar witch-hunt is on over climate change. This time, the targets are capitalism, western values and America; but the principal victims are the world’s poor -- and truth itself.

Posted by admin at August 12, 2002