Daily Mail, February 25 2002

The first cuckoo may not yet have been heard, but the noise of its human namesakes is loud in the land. Despite the weekend’s blizzards, spring has sprung unseasonably early. Daffodils are already nodding, hawthorn is budding, lambs are gambolling.

So, according to daft naturalists who have been popping up like the crocuses, it’s apocalypse now. This is, they tell us breathlessly, the warmest winter since records began three hundred years ago – further proof of global warming.

It is an article of faith that the planet is about to fry. The fact that something funny is going on with the weather only serves to confirm it. Does it not?

Well, actually, no. It proves nothing except the existence of that natural phenomenon, the human herd instinct, and its closely related marvel, cosmic credulity. For, believe it or not, there is in fact nothing at all strange or untoward about our current temperatures.

This warm spell is well within the normal cyclical fluctuations in temperature from century to century. In 1200, for example, Europe was a full 2°C warmer than it is now. Vines were grown in Britain as far north as Northumberland.

That was followed by a period known as the ‘little ice age’, which lasted from about 1400 to the latter part of the 19th century. So it is hardly surprising that since then, temperatures have warmed up a bit. But it is only a bit – a mere 0.6°C rise in the last 150 years.

Compare that, after all, with the period known as the Younger Dryas nearly 11,000 years ago. Temperatures then dropped by as much as 10°C , followed at the end by a rise of between 7°C and 15°C over no more than 50 years.

The theory that the earth is heading for environmental catastrophe rests on two assumptions: that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that man-made carbon dioxide is to blame. The Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a rise in temperature of between 1.4°C and 5.8°C by 2100. This led to the Kyoto protocol, which required swingeing cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by the industrialised nations.

But there is simply no scientific evidence to support this theory. Indeed, many of the scientific claims made by the global warming industry are demonstrably wrong.

Global warming is a scam. The latest evidence is provided in a report published today by the European Science and Environment Forum, in which a group of the most eminent scientists from Britain and America shred the theory and with it the credibility of the IPCC.

This panel got it wrong, these scientists say, because it used wholly inadequate computer models. These omitted numerous factors contributing to climate change such as clouds, water vapour, atmospheric and ocean currents and the effects of the sun.

In addition, they failed to deal with the complex reactions involved in climate change. One study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National American Space Agency revealed the effects on heat levels of high level clouds, which knocked the climate models for six.

Computer modelling is in general a dubious scientific tool. When it comes to climate change, it uses partial data to transform flawed hypotheses into prophecy. It is of little more use than a ouija board.

As for mankind’s involvement in climate change, this is even more debatable. Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas for which industrial man is blamed, accounts for only a minute proportion of the atmosphere.

Hair-raising claims by the warming lobby have been shown to be false. The ice sheets, for example, are not shrinking but are actually increasing overall. Evidence about sea-level rise is contradictory, but in general the seas are not rising.

As for air temperatures, past calculations which mistakenly used the seas as a gauge over-estimated air temperatures as a result by one third. When air alone was measured, it was found to have got cooler, not warmer, over the past two decades.

Now even James Hansen, the NASA scientist whose predictions of a huge rise in global warming helped light the bonfire 14 years ago, has stood on his head. He now agrees with the sceptics that the world will most likely heat up during this century by no more than 0.7°C, virtually identical to the rise in the last hundred years.

So why have so many scientists produced ‘evidence’ to support a theory which doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny? The brutal explanation is that they don’t get grant money or the approval needed for promotion unless their work supports the politically motivated theory of the times.

Look at what’s happened to Dr Bjorn Lomberg, a Danish statistician and former member of Greenpeace. In his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, he shows how green doom and gloom has been wildly exaggerated.

Natural resources are not running out but becoming more abundant; only a tiny fraction of species is likely to become extinct in the next fifty years; and – heresy of heresies – richer countries are cleaner countries.

For this, Lomberg has been subjected to relentless and vicious attack by the massed battalions of the heavyweights of science.

But why is global warming so popular politically? The short answer is that a doctrine which declares that industrialisation and globalisation are enemies of humanity is a wonderful stick with which weaker western economies can beat up America, and clothe anti-western self-hatred in ostensibly scientific respectability.

The longer answer is that the roots of the environmental movement go back to Thomas Malthus, the 18th century thinker whose dire predictions that the world’s population would outstrip its food supply led to the rise of eugenics, the theory of racial enhancement through selected breeding.

After the Nazis took this theory to its grotesque conclusion, eugenics went deep underground and re-emerged under the cover of the world-wide birth control and environmental movements – both of which view the third world as a threat to be contained.

Wouldn’t the billions being poured into funding the global warming theory be better spent providing clean water for Africa and Asia?

Now President Bush has presented his own alternative to Kyoto, which involves voluntary and market-based methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions instead of mandatory targets. But in seeking merely to protect America’s interests, he has missed the point completely. Forget the prescription – the diagnosis is wrong.

The misuse of facts by the global warming lobby may destroy the credibility of both scientists and the green movement, making it less likely that people will take the action that is necessary to protect the environment.

For we do have a duty to steward the world’s resources, to find new sources of energy and act against pollution. But false theories will prevent us from adapting responsibly to inevitable change.

Put that apocalypse on hold. Take pleasure in those green shoots. They are a signal not for despair but for realism and for hope.

Posted by admin at February 25, 2002