Daily Mail, 13 January 2006

Truly, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

For almost twenty years, we’ve been whipped into a panic that the world of vegetation on which the planet depends is being threatened with wipe-out by the wicked, profligate, energy-burning habits of irresponsible mankind.

We are imperilling the biosphere, we are told, by chopping down the tropical rainforests. The whole planet is about to fry because of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions, one of the antidotes to which is the beneficent oxygenation of the earth by the tree world which soaks up carbon dioxide.

The driving message of the eco-doomsters has been ‘green plants good, man bad’. This has become a received wisdom that simply cannot be questioned. It is taught in our schools as fact. It has spurred each of our political parties to turn a deeper shade of green than the others. Anyone foolhardy enough to challenge this orthodoxy is mercilessly mocked or vilified as stupid, insane or in the pay of the evil oil lobby.

Yet lo and behold, what do we now read? That the forests are actually partly responsible for global warming. Rather than ‘save the trees’, it seems, it’s ‘blame the trees’!

According to a new study, living green plants may be contributing as much as one third of the methane in the earth’s atmosphere – and methane is second only to carbon dioxide in the rogues’ gallery of greenhouse gases said to be responsible for global warming.

Until now, methane was thought to be produced mainly by decomposing organic matter. But this study has now found that the methane emitted in normal, oxygen-rich surroundings -- in other words, by green plants -- is between ten and one thousand times the amount produced by dead material.

This has apparently come as a terrible shock to our poor scientists. Somehow, they all managed to overlook entirely this crucial factor in the make-up of the atmosphere. Somehow, these experts who constantly preach about plants and greenhouse gases were all entirely ignorant of what greenhouse gases plants actually produce.

This new study, we are further told, clears up one or two unexplained features about the environment – such as the fact that the rise in methane in the atmosphere has been slowing down for the past ten years. The study argues that ‘tropical deforestation may be a factor there’. So, far from destroying the planet, cutting down the rain forests may actually be a way of preventing global warming!

Faced with this remarkable turn of events, Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation the Hadley Centre could merely say that it ‘adds an important new piece of understanding of how plants interact with the climate’.

Dr Betts is clearly a master of understatement, if not of greenhouse gases. The ‘important new understanding’ is actually that the old understanding is completely wrong, and that climate change scientists have been talking through their collective green hat.

One might ask how all these experts could have overlooked this evidence. According to the leader of the new study, Dr Frank Keppler, all the relevant textbooks agree that methane can only be produced in the absence of oxygen. ‘For that simple reason’, he said, ‘nobody looked closely at this’.

Oh dear. No doubt Galileo had the same problem when all medieval parchments agreed that the sun went round the earth; or Christopher Columbus, when all navigational maps agreed that the earth was flat.

If scientists can’t even get the mundane activities of the plant world right, we are entitled to wonder what else they have got wrong in their prediction of environmental catastrophe for the entire planet. The fact is that, for all the furore about global warming, the scientists who proclaim it as a demonstrable fact really haven’t got much of a clue.

Their ostensible scientific authority melts under scrutiny faster than Arctic ice. There is no proof that global warming on an alarming scale is actually happening; and even if it is, there is no proof that man-made emissions are the villain of the drama.

People say ‘something funny is happening to the weather’. Maybe; but the rate of warming over the past century is nothing out of the historical ordinary. It was, after all, some two degrees warmer in the 11th century, when vines grew in Northumberland.

People say ‘the ice caps are melting’. Well, some are; but others are growing. People say ‘the seas are rising’. Well, some are, but others are falling; and where they are rising, the cause often lies in the movement of land rather than any effects of climate change.

There are many more such claims made by the green lobby which just don’t stack up. The evidence of imminent apocalypse provided by such phenomena is, to put it mildly, inconclusive.

And if the climate is indeed overheating, that does not mean that man-made emissions are necessarily to blame. Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that they would be since carbon dioxide forms a relatively small proportion of the atmosphere, in which the biggest greenhouse gas is water vapour.*

Furthermore, some of the principal studies upon which global warming theory is based have been shown to be fatally flawed. The key evidence at the core of the conclusion by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global warming was happening and human activities were responsible was the ‘hockey-stick’ curve, which purportedly showed a 700-year period when temperatures remained relatively constant followed by the last 100-plus years when temperatures shot upwards.

But no fewer than five separate studies have concluded that this study was nonsense because it managed to miss out altogether the 850 years of both the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ and the ‘Little Ice Age’. Climate change scientists clearly make a habit of overlooking the evidence which happens to blow a hole in their entire theory.

The global warming industry has been created and sustained by three sources of gross scientific fallacy. The first is the use of computer modelling. The earth’s climate is influenced by a vastly complex series of factors which interact with each other in literally millions of ways. Computer models, which have created global warming theory, simply cannot deal with all these factors. If over-simplified material is fed into the computers, over-simplified conclusions come out at the other end.

The second factor is the ideological agenda at the heart of the green movement which is anti-capitalism, anti-big business and anti-America. And the third is the sheer weight of conformity, in which the surest way to obtain research funding is to produce yet another study confirming global warming theory – and the surest way to academic ostracism is to deny it.

What this new and comical discovery of plant-produced methane tells us, however, is that we actually know next to nothing about how climate change works. It also tells us something about the cynicism and gullibility fuelling the green agenda, and the dismaying extent to which reason, evidence and objectivity have been squashed under the stampede of ideology, irrationality and pseudo-scientific sloppiness.

Politicians throughout the developed world are being pressured to put a brake on progress to slow down man-made global warming. Human welfare is thus being compromised by one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age. Go hug a tree and find out.

*The version of this article published in The Daily Mail said in error that water vapour formed most of the atmosphere.

Posted by melanie at January 13, 2006