Global Warming: The Bogus Religion of our Age
by Professor Richard Lindzen

The world is heading for environmental catastrophe - or so we are constantly being told by the politicians and self-appointed experts. They warn us that unless we take drastic action, the earth will soon be devastated by climate change and global warming. Entire species will be lost, crops will be obliterated, floods and famine will sweep across the planet, and western economies will slide into depression.

Tonight, Channel 4 will broadcast The Great Global Warming Swindle, which suggests that the whole subject has become such a political hot potato that other explanations for climate change are not being properly examined.

Certainly, there have been many sweeping predictions of global ruin, few more emphatic than the report from Sir Nicholas Stern into the economics of climate change, which states with an air of unchallengeable conviction: 'The scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Climate change presents very serious global risks and it demands an urgent global response."

His study, commissioned by the Government in July 2005 and published amid much Whitehall hype in October 2006, seemed to carry all the more weight because Stern is one of the most senior civil servants in Britain, the head of the Government's economic service.

His conclusions appeared to be based on powerful scientific authority, since his team of 20 or so officials had drawn on a wide range of published papers and data.

Tony Blair has described it as the most important document produced during his ten years as Prime Minister, and urged that the Stern blueprint, with its calls for more regulation and taxation, be adopted in full.

"The disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future, but in our lifetimes," said Blair, who went on to claim that the "the world faces nothing more serious, more urgent and more demanding of its leadership than climate change."

All this has helped put the Stern report at the very forefront of the debate. The central theme of it is that there is a near universal consensus of opinion within the scientific community about the dangers of climate change. But this is not true.

There is no such unanimity among scientists.

Throughout the 550 pages of his document, Stern continually strikes a confident note, as if there were no dispute about the issues.

COMPLETELY DIVORCED FROM SCIENTIFIC REALITY
Yet this self-assured stance is completely divorced from scientific reality. It is an inconvenient truth for Stern and his political allies that there is, in fact, precious little hard evidence to back up his claims.

In a revealing recent comment, Stern admitted that when he was appointed by the Government, he 'had an idea what the greenhouse effect was but wasn't really sure'. This lack of understanding of science shines through every chapter of his report.

He is guilty of misreading the data, of distorting the evidence to suit his political masters' dogma, of throwing numbers about with reckless abandon, of promoting alarmism in place of rational discussion, and of reinventing climate history.

There are fundamental misconceptions throughout the document. He seems to think that climate prediction is a mature science stretching back to the early 19th century, hence the confident tone of his pronouncements. But in reality climate prediction is a relatively modern science, which has emerged only in recent decades thanks partly to the emergence of computers.

So there are no easy certainties about the past - or the future.

Stern states boldly that the scale of global warming has been unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years, but he cannot possibly be sure on this point because data from previous centuries is unreliable.

At most, we have a 50-year span of accurate measurements. The only genuine global records of temperature come from weather balloons, since 1958, and from microwave sounding units, since 1978.

What they indicate is a very gentle warming trend, nothing approaching the apocalyptic vision of Sir Nicholas. Moreover, this minor trend could easily have been caused by irregularities such as volcanic eruptions or El Nino events (major fluctuations in ocean temperatures in the Pacific which affect climate).

STERN'S REPORT 'IGNORES EVIDENCE
THAT DOES NOT SUIT HIS IDEOLOGY'
In support of his gloomy thesis, Stern, like all global warming enthusiasts, ignores the evidence that does not suit his ideology. He glosses over the fact that, according to a host of historical accounts, Europe was far warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, or that the 17th century was much colder, prompting what was known as 'The Little Ice Age', when the Thames was often frozen over for months at a time.

Stern also refers to 'significant melting of and an acceleration of ice floes' near the coast of Greenland because of global warming. Yet several reputable scientific studies have shown that the mass of the Greenland ice sheet is actually expanding, while Stern also fails to note that the temperature of Greenland is now lower than it was in 1940 and little changed from the first measurements in the 1780s.

Environmentalists are fond of jerking heartstrings with pictures of polar bears struggling on supposedly melting icebergs, but it is estimated that there are now 22,000 polar bears compared with 5,000 in 1940.

Nor can we be sure that any long-term changes in our climate are due to mankind. There is any number of other possibilities and the programme tonight examines the possibility that the sun's radiation is primarily responsible for climate change.

Indeed, the climate can fluctuate without any external cause at all - something again ignored by Stern, who wants only to indulge in the fashionable notion that western capitalism is entirely to blame for every drought and disaster. Further, Stern takes no account of the capacity of mankind to adapt to, and improve his environment.

There can be little dispute that, more than a century after the peak of the 19th-century industrial revolution, Britain is a cleaner, healthier, less polluted country than it was in the late Victorian age, when smog, disease and slums were rife.

Genuine science is about gathering evidence and testing the veracity of theories, not cheerleading for a particular ideology. That is what is so disturbing about the current debate on global warming. Healthy scepticism, which should be at the heart of all scientific inquiry, is treated with contempt.

Far from being the powerful masterpiece Blair claimed, Stern's report is manifestly incompetent. It is another dodgy dossier, where assertions are presented as facts and data is twisted to suit a political purpose.

I agree with the economist critic who noted: "If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood, I would give him D for diligence, but more likely I would give him an F for fail." We are shifting away from science into the realm of religious fanaticism, where the followers of the creed, brimming with self-righteous fury, believe that they are in possession of a higher truth.

Like a religion, environmentalism is suffused with hatred for the material world and again, like religion, it requires devotion rather than intellectual rigour from its adherents. It is intolerant of dissent; those who question the message of doom are regarded as heretics or 'climate-change deniers', to use green parlance. And just as in many religions, the route to personal salvation lies in the performance of superstitious rituals, such as changing a light bulb or arranging for a tree to be planted after every plane journey.

What is so tragic is the way that this dubious ideology has achieved such dominance in our public life.

Politicians love the green agenda, of course, because it means more control, more regulation, more taxes, more summits, and more opportunities for displays of self-important zeal. The tragedy is that the likes of Sir Nicholas Stern are using bogus science to push forward this agenda.
The Daily Mail, 8th March 2007
Richard Lindzen is Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Green Tax Won't Help the Planet or the Tories

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published last month, gave the impression that the debate about the reality of global warming and its man-made causes is over: the earth is heating up, and increased CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are to blame.

That impression is false, however, or at least misleading: there are still many uncertainties in climate science and prediction, and there are many reputable scientists who do not accept that the ever-increasing amounts of CO2 human beings are pumping into the atmosphere are responsible for whatever changes in planetary temperature are happening.

Some of those dissenting voices were on display in The Great Global Warming Swindle, a powerful programme broadcast last week. Channel 4 is to be congratulated for not being intimidated or bullied out of transmitting the documentary: it is difficult to imagine today's BBC having the courage to assault a doctrine so entrenched in politically correct opinion.

While it will not have convinced die-hard advocates of the view that global warming is man-made, the programme certainly demonstrated that the appearance of unanimity among scientists is deceptive. There are scientifically serious voices raising doubts about humanity's contribution to climate change. They have found it hard to get a hearing, not least because the oil companies did immense damage to any form of scepticism about global warming when it became apparent that they had bribed hundreds of scientists to act as PR lobbyists for the claim that "global warming isn't happening and if it is, it isn't caused by CO2 emissions". This immediately made anyone who raised doubts about the relation between CO2 emissions and global warming look like the executives from big tobacco companies who tried to claim that there was no evidence that smoking causes cancer.

David Cameron has embraced the orthodoxy on global warming with a passion. This may be due to his conviction that if he did not do so the Conservative Party would be perceived as the political equivalent of a greedy and selfish cigarette manufacturer. He has already changed the party logo from a blue torch to a green tree. Next week, at Mr Cameron's behest, Al Gore, evangelist-in-chief for the cause of reducing CO2 in order to diminish global warming, will lecture the shadow cabinet on what should be done. And George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, will announce a raft of new "green taxes" as "options to be looked at".

Mr Osborne's potential proposals include VAT on flights, new taxes on jet fuel, and a "green air mile allowance" for each person which, if exceeded, will trigger ever-higher financial penalties. All the proposals involve hitting the ordinary traveller with higher taxes for going on holiday. And yet Al Gore was revealed last week to have a "carbon footprint" 20 times that of the average American: whatever else he has been doing, Al Gore has not diminished his CO2 emitting power.

Mr Cameron deserves more than the benefit of the doubt for his attempts to widen the appeal of his party and change perceptions of its motives. But he is running risks with these proposals: Labour may portray him as wanting to increase taxes on hard-working people by penalising those who spend their money on holidays for their families. Furthermore, there are now signs that the so-called "unanimous consensus" on climate change is disintegrating. Mr Cameron may be about to learn that the danger inherent in following political fashions is that they can change very quickly.

A less alarmist and more thoughtful consideration of the nature of the risks we face and of the most appropriate action to deal with them would be a better way.
The Sunday Telegraph, 11th March 2007

Scientists Threatened for ' Climate Denial'
By Tom Harper

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming. "Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," said the professor. "I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal."

Last week, Professor Ball appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle, a Channel 4 documentary in which several scientists claimed the theory of man-made global warming had become a "religion", forcing alternative explanations to be ignored.

Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who also appeared on the documentary - recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."

Dr Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. He said: "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."
Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said: "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."
The Sunday Telegraph, 11th March 2007

Put an End to all this Green Muppetry
by Richard Littlejohn

[David Cameron/Conservative leader] misses no opportunity to flaunt his green credentials, even posing at the weekend in a pair of shoes made out of a recycled fireman's uniform.

Now Gordon has weighed in, claiming there's no "quick fix". What, like his vindictive tax on air travel?

But instead of opposing Gordon's latest grab, the Tories are planning to load even more taxes on flights. It would cost frequent flyers hundreds of pounds a year and heap an added burden on those taking package holidays. And for what? The whole point about global warming - if such a thing exists - is that it is global.

I read recently that if China, which is opening five new coalfired power stations every week, continues to expand its economy at the present rate, within a couple of years it will be generating as much greenhouse gas as there has ever been, anywhere - as Clarkson would say -in the wurrld.

Ever.

Nothing we do in this country in isolation will make the slightest bit of difference. Yet politicians and the chatterati are in the grip of a kind of mental illness over "climate change".

As usual, it involves making the rest of us feel guilty just so they can feel good about themselves. Most of this nonsense is simply an excuse to screw more money out of us.

Red Ken is planning to charge drivers of 4x4s in London £25 a day, while continuing to pollute the atmosphere with his absurd, diesel-powered bendy buses.

I've been wondering how to get round this and I think I've got the answer.

I'm going to buy a Winnebago.
The Daily Mail, 13th March, 2007

A Dangerous Climate
by Bob Carter

The Latest IPCC report, published on Friday, is the most alarming yet: not for its claims of human-caused global warming, write the leading environmental scientist Bob Carter, but for its lack of scientific rigour.

Clouding the issue The media deluge us daily with alarmist stories about global warming caused by humans. But their main sources is the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose rhetoric has got stronger as its evidence gets weaker

At 4C, it is cold in the storage refrigerator. One Needs to Rug Up well to work here. I am in the US headquarters of the Ocean Drilling Programme at Texas A & M University, studying seabed cores from the southwest Pacific Ocean.

As the cores pass through the logging sensor that measures their character, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is displayed before me. Friendly, fossiliferous brown sands for the warm interglacial periods, and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations.

For more than 90 per cent of recent geological time, the cores show that the earth has been colder than today. We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent, and welcome, warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

Backwards for hundreds of thousands of years, the core alternations march. Some, metronomic in their occurrence, are ruled by changes in the earth's orbit at periods of about 20,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years; others are paced by fluctuations in solar output on a scale of centuries or millennia; and others display irregular yet rapid oceanographic and climate shifts that are caused by…… we know not what. Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly in either direction: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, often for reasons that we do not yet fully understand.

Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed - not preceded, but followed - by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. Yet the public now believes strongly that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that naturally postdates its supposed effect.

Am I the first scientist to have observed these climate patterns? Of course not. That climate changes frequently, rapidly and sometimes unpredictably has been conventional knowledge among earth environmental scientists since the early days of ocean drilling in the 1970s.

Yet we do not read about natural climate change in the everyday news. Instead, newspapers, radio and television stations bludgeon us with a merciless stream of human-caused global-warming alarmism, egged on by a self-interested gaggle of journalists, environmental lobbyists, scientific and business groups, church leaders and politicians, all of whom preach that we must "stop climate change" by reducing human CO2 emissions.

The body from which most of these groups get their information is the Inter-govern-mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is also the organisation that advises national governments. The IPCC has issued three substantial statements, the First (1990), Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, each of which incorporates the research and opinions of many hundreds of qualified scientists. Its 20-chapter, 1,572-page Fourth Assessment Report was released on Friday. The full reports are detailed and compendious, and each is therefore accompanied by a short chapter termed a Summary for Policymakers (SPM) that is designed for political application.

Many distinguished scientists refuse to participate in the IPCC process, and others have resigned from it, because in the end the advice that the panel provides to governments is political and not scientific. Although at least $50 billion has been spent on climate research, the science arguments for a dangerous human influence on global warming have, if anything, become weaker since the establishment of the IPCC in 1988.

Yet the rhetoric of IPCC alarm has been successively ramped up, from "the observed [20th-century temperature] increase could be largely due to….. natural variability" (1990); to "the balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate" (1995): to "there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities" (2001); to it is "90 per cent probable" that the recent warming is "due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations" (2007). What can the evidence be for these increasingly dramatic warnings?

The IPCC advances three main categories of argument for a dangerous human influence on climate. The first is that, over the 20th century, global average temperature increased by about 0.7C, which it did, if you accept that the surface thermometer record used by the IPCC is accurate. More reliably, historical records and many geological data sets show that warming has indeed occurred since the intense cold periods of the "little Ice Ages" in the 14th, 17th and 19th centuries. The part of this temperature recovery which occurred in the 20th century is the "global warming", alleged by climate alarmists to have been caused by the accumulation of human-sourced CO2 in the atmosphere.

However our most accurate depiction of atmospheric temperature over the past 25 years comes from satellite measurements rather than from the ground thermometer record. Once the effects of non-greenhouse warming (the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific, for instance) and cooling (volcanic eruptions) events are discounted, these measurements indicate an absence of significant global warming since 1979 - that is, over the very period that human carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing rapidly. The satellite data signal not only the absence of substantial human-induced warming, by recording similar temperatures in 1980 and 2006, but also provide an empirical test of the greenhouse hypothesis as understood by the public - a test that the hypothesis fails.

The second category of alarmist argument rests upon circumstantial evidence. It is epitomised by the former American vice-president Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, which claims that human greenhouse emissions are causing accelerated melting of icecaps, dangerous increases in the rate of sea-level rise, increases in the frequency and intensity of droughts or catastrophic storms, and enhanced rates of biodiversity loss.

Every such circumstantial argument ignores two basic facts. The first is that all environmental phenomena fluctuate in their rate, frequency or intensity as part of the normal workings of our dynamic planet. The second, which follows, is that whether a particular short-term change over, say, the early 21st century has any human causation can only be assessed when all the causes of natural environmental change are fully understood.

Many different fields of study are involved and all are the subject of intensive ongoing research. From this research emerges one inescapable fact: that in no case yet has any climate-sensitive environmental parameter been shown to be changing at a rate that exceeds its historic natural rate of change, let alone in a way that can be unequivocally associated with human causation.

This generally happy news does not mean that the planet has rendered a judgment of "not guilty" upon us, but that while the jury remains out a presumption of innocence applies. The scientific equivalent of this is Occam's Razor (the principle of simplicity), under which environmental change is assumed to be natural until cause can be demonstrated otherwise.

The third line of the IPCC argument, and the least convincing of all, is the use of computer calculations to assess the likely future course of the climate. Many billions of dollars have been expended by major climate research groups around the world on honing complex General Circulation Models (GCMs) of the ocean and atmosphere. Each of these models comprises more than a million lines of code and all are deterministic, which is to say that they specify the climate system from the first principles of physics.

However, GCMs are not predictive tools, which is why even their proponents refer to their output as climate "scenarios" and not "predictions". For many parts of the climate system, such as the behaviour of turbulent fluids or the processes that occur within clouds, our knowledge of the physics is incomplete, which requires the extensive use of "parameterisation" (for which read "educated guesses") in the computer models.

Hendrik Tennekes, a former director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute who pioneered methods of multi-modal forecasting, remarked recently: "A [GCM] prediction 50 or 100 years into the future is an idle gesture." That the IPCC relies so heavily upon complex GCM-generated scenarios as the basis for its climate alarmism is alarming in its own right; it also reflects the absence of any strong empirical evidence for human-caused climate change, as outlined earlier.

So the evidence for dangerous global warming forced by human carbon dioxide emissions is extremely weak. That the satellite temperature record shows no substantial warming since 1978, and that even the ground-based thermometer statistic records no warming since 1998, indicates that a key line of circumstantial evidence for human-caused change (the parallel rise in the late 20th century of both atmospheric carbon dioxide and surface temperature) is now negated.

In February this year, the IPCC released the SPM for its Fourth (Science) Assessment Report, followed on Friday by the full report. Using GCMs, the new report projects a temperature increase by 2100 of between 1.1 to 6.4C. This is a wider range than the 1.6 to 5.8C projected in the third assessment report, which implies less rather than more certainty regarding future temperature trends. The report also continues the regrettable IPCC practice of allocating arbitrary numerical probability estimates to the causes and risks of future climate change.

In the present state of knowledge, no scientist can justify the statement: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due [90 per cent probable] to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations," as stated in the 2007 SPM.

The environmental catchphrase of the moment is "sustainability". It is therefore a good question to ask how much longer politicians, responding to pressure from the IPCC and other lobby groups, can sustain the fiction that dangerous human-caused climate change is upon us.

That climate change is part of our planet's normal, dynamic behaviour is not in doubt. Nor should there be any doubt about the need for governments to prepare sensible response plans for future climate change, both warmings and coolings. But reflection on recent climatic episodes like the "little Ice Ages" makes it plain that future climatic coolings will cause much greater damage to our societies than will mild warmings similar to that of the 20th Century.

That 20th-century warming, the most recent of many previous warm phases of similar or greater magnitude, was dangerous or human-caused, or even that the warming has continued after 1998, both yet remain to be demonstrated.
The Sunday Telegraph, 8th

*Bob Carter is a research professor at James Cook University, Australia and former chair of the Earth Sciences Panel of the Australian Research Council and former Director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Programme. His webpage is http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new-page-1.htm