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Wintonsweek
Al Gore Climate Emergency Ideas Tendentious, Superficial, Wrong
If The Plan Was To Induce Panic, He’s Certainly Done That
Ice Not Melting, Sea Not Encroaching, Hurricanes Aren’t Building
If The Temperature Is Rising, It’s Probably Down To Nature

As the conventional wisdom moves into top gear to frighten us into believing that we are all guilty, and we are going to fry because of global warming unless we change our selfish ways, it seems a good time to point out the flimsiness of the scientific case purporting to show that human action is overcooking the planet.

You might think this is a pointless exercise.

Surely, the media, most of our political leaders and all respectable scientists can’t be wrong. After all most of them tell us that increasing use of carbon dioxide, CO2, is trapping gases in the upper atmosphere because of the greenhouse effect. More gases are being trapped around the earth with more heat being retained rather than escaping into space.

Governments even organised the Kyoto Treaty to save us from ourselves by seeking to cut CO2 levels to 5.2 % below 1990 levels by 2012. Never mind that if the targets were taken seriously, western economies would collapse, third world peoples would sink back into even more abject poverty, and the world’s temperature might fall by a barely measurable amount in 100 years.

Al Gore, the failed Democratic Party candidate for President of the U.S. in 2000, and the first ever loser to un-concede a concession of defeat, has made a movie called “An Inconvenient Truth”, which says we are in for a “planetary emergency” because global warming will melt ice sheets and flood low lying areas of the world, induce catastrophic hurricanes which will flatten huge coastal populated areas, increase heat which will induce tropical disease and famines, and no doubt bring on the four horsemen of the apocalypse too.

Right-wing nutters
You can hardly watch a news bulletin on the BBC these days or a “documentary” without catastrophic climate change featuring as an inevitable consequence of our use of cars in particular and power

in general. It is always reported as fact. The only time there is any mention that there might be counter arguments out there, the advocates are traduced as nutters, right-wing of course, or if they are particularly articulate and convincing in expressing their doubts, they are in the pay of “big oil”. No member of “big oil” has any children or family or any stake of any kind in the future, which they are willing to destroy in the name of “loadsamoney”.

It seems like every week that BBC “Science” Correspondent David Shukman will lead the national news from the Arctic or the Antarctic or a glacier in the Himalayas saying, look at the ice melting, it won’t be long before the floods come and get us. A couple of days later, a respected scientist or institution will put out a press release saying, on the contrary, the reverse is the truth. This will of course get zero air time.

Conventional wisdom is nonsense
But there are experts out there with superb qualifications in the science of climate who will tell you that the conventional wisdom is nonsense. Professor Richard Lindzen is one such expert. He is not a chemist, or statistician or sociologist trying to ingratiate himself with his government. Lindzen, Alfred P Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, is an expert on climate.

He pours scorn on those who would invoke the notion that there is some kind of “consensus” on our involvement with climate change. And even if there was, “consensus” is not a scientific concept. Scientific concepts have to be proven. The fact that lots of “scientists” think a notion is true is a worthless consensus. Its provability is the only important thing. Consensus and a dollar will get you on the subway, or whatever it now costs to ride the New York City underground.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal on June 27 Lindzen said Gore’s film is shrill alarmism.

“To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Artic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country which is depicted so ominously in Mr Gore’s movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming,” said Lindzen.

Glaciers retreating since 19^th century
“Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19^th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don’t know why,” he said.

Former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Tim Ball said Gore’s data about the retreating ice in the Artic is based on selective data and is wrong.

“The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology,” said Ball.

Professor Fred Singer of the University of Virginia agrees that Gore’s data is dodgy and points to a study from the University of Massachusetts which shows that in South America’s Andes Mountains, glaciers advances and retreats have not been governed by CO2, but by small variations in the sun’s intensity. Singer also points out that world temperatures have followed, not led, rising levels of CO2.

“Higher temperatures have produced more atmospheric CO2, rather than CO2 producing higher temperatures. That’s because most of the planet’s CO2 is stored in the oceans, and as the seawater warms, it can’t hold as much CO2,” he said.

Temperatures fell after 1940
“If CO2 is the driving climate force, why did the earth begin warming in 1850, while human CO2 emissions didn’t start to really expand until about 1940? Mr Gore doesn’t tell us the answer. Why did the earth’s temperatures decline from about 1940 to 1975, even as CO2 emissions were soaring? Mr Gore doesn’t say,” said Singer.

Lindzen points out that malaria, claimed as a by-product of warming, thrives in Siberia and doesn’t need tropical warmth. The idea that hurricanes are increasing because of global warming is also not true.

“Even among those arguing, there is a general agreement that we can’t attribute any particular hurricane to global warming,” said Lindzen.

Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes that the earth will start to cool within 10 years. Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center has said that global warming is a hoax. But Al Gore and his ilk still try and pretend that the argument is over and everybody of importance agrees with them.
Gore’s arguments pathetically weak

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, was quoted by the Canada Free Press in June 2006 saying that Gore was not credible.

“Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention,” said Carter.

These experts are not alone in their questioning of the conventional wisdom. They are part of thousands of highly qualified climate experts without links to government or industry who doubt purely on scientific grounds that human emissions of CO2 are causing significant climate change.

Professor Lindzen accuses Gore of scaremongering.

“Mr Gore’s approach is to ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse,” Lindzen said.

Lindzen said despite not being scientifically demonstrated, the idea that human’s are causing the climate to warm was accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body set up to examine the issue, and not to be confused with the Metropolitan Police’s Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). 

IPCC research twisted
But in fact the conclusion in the “summary for policy makers” that said the hand of man was proven in climate change and which led directly to the panic measure known as the Kyoto treaty, was not born out by the research in the report. The research was manipulated by politically motivated members of the IPCC, Lindzen said.

A later report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences was summed up by summary which said “The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability”.

“This was sufficient for CNN’s Michelle Mitchell to declare that the report represented a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room,” reports Lindzen.

Argument by repetition
Not true, he says.

“That to me means the case is still very much open,” he said in the article.

Lindzen concludes his Wall Street Journal article with 3 points.

·      Non-scientists do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists – especially those outside the area of climate dynamics.

·      Given that human involvement can’t be proven, its use in promoting visions of disaster is a “bait-and-switch scam.

·      There is a clear attempt to establish the truth not by science but by repetition.

As U.S. syndicated columnist George Will put it in the Washington Post in 2005, “this belief in human induced global warming is now so conventional it seems to require no supporting data.”

Perhaps the most telling postscript to the Gore terror is this simple idea.

Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide as “global warming pollution”, when in fact it is no more pollution than oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis, without which the Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ball of ice.

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 Neil Winton – June 30, 2006 

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