Introduction to the Man-made Global Warming Scam

The year, 2006, marked a turning point for me and my belief in the concept of man-made (anthropogenic) global warming. I must admit that I was already somewhat sceptical as I had lived through some pretty noticeable changes in the British climate between my childhood in the 1940s and the end of the twentieth century. Over that relatively short period of time in climatic terms we experienced thirty years of ever cooler weather during which I used to skate on the canal, small lakes and a park’s open-air swimming pool; and by the late 1970s I couldn’t get to work for the several feet of snow blocking the road here I lived. Scientists predicted the onset of a catastrophic ‘new Ice Age’. Well, they said, it was around 10,000 years since the last Ice Age and another was certainly due. Those gloomy predictions then changed radically when thirty years of cooling stopped and it was followed by a couple of decades up to the end of the century during which winter temperatures became less severe and summers were warmer and sunnier. As a consequence, scientists stopped talking about a coming Ice Age, and switched completely to predicting an equally catastrophic runaway global warming.

There was no doubt now, we were told, that increasing emissions of ‘greenhouse gasses’ into the atmosphere from cars, buses, planes, industry and more, plus the destruction of rain forests, were responsible for what would be an unprecedented increase in global temperatures. Such a situation would mean that life as we know it would come to an end. The temperatures in the British Isles would rise to the level of present-day Mediterranean regions; tropical countries would rapidly become deserts and millions would starve; there would be more storms, hurricanes and tornadoes, and they would be more violent; the polar ice caps would melt and sea levels would rise by several metres drowning coastal cities; many of the world’s capitals and largest cities such as London and New York, situated near coasts, would disappear beneath the waters; thousands of species would become extinct; tropical diseases would spread to the temperate regions; it would be a total disaster which mankind would probably not survive.

And it would be all our own fault.

In October, 2006, Sir Nicholas Stern produced a 700-page report on the economics of this expected change of climate. Man-made global warming was such a threat, he said, that we must spend a mind-staggeringly huge amount, and very quickly, to ensure that it didn’t happen. The resources and money this would need would be enormous; this would undoubtedly put serious strains on world economies; living standards in the richer nations would have to fall. But all of that would pale into insignificance beside the economic ruin that doing nothing would cause, or so we were told.

But then in December 2006, ITV, in its news programmes, ran a series of special reports about the effects of man-made global warming on various places and people around the globe. These were meant to reinforce the message that man-made global warming was real; it was already happening; the consequences were already dire; and we were responsible.

But for me this propaganda exercise was so obviously false it had exactly the opposite effect.

ITV’s first report concerned supposed rising sea levels in the tiny, remote Carteret Islands in the South Pacific. These islands are home to only about 1,000 people but global warming, ITV told us, was rapidly affecting on their lives. ITV went on to inform its watchers that ‘the inhabitants are among the first to pay the price for global warming as their islands disappear beneath rising sea levels’.

The islands, named after the British navigator Philip Carteret who discovered them in 1767, have a maximum elevation of just 1.5m above sea level. The ITV report stated that the islanders had fought a 20-year battle against the rising ocean but their land was expected to be fully submerged by 2015. Showing concerned Carteret Islanders standing waist-deep in sea water, where not long before their houses had been, ITV stated that the sea had risen by a metre. This, the report stated, was as a result of man-made global warming and claimed that the Carteret Islanders were the first climate change refugees. The Carteret Islanders talked of suing the US government for causing this catastrophe and the loss of their homes and islands.

It was a very moving programme.

And I didn’t believe a word of it.

The reason I knew this was a con was because I was in the south Pacific: Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Tahiti, Fiji, and New Zealand, only a short while before – and the sea levels hadn’t risen at any of them. Now, how can you have a whole metre rise in one part of an ocean, but no rise at all only a few hundred miles away? Water just doesn’t do that.

For the rest of that week ITV showed a number of other, similarly flawed reports about ‘man-made global warming’ which were also no more than man-made propaganda. By this time, we had been told over and over again that all climate scientists were agreed that man-made global warming was real and that we had to deal with it as a matter of urgency.

In which case, I wondered: if the evidence is so strong, why do they have to resort to lies?

The Royal Society says there’s a worldwide consensus amongst scientists that man-made global warming is real. But I soon found that there isn’t – not by a very long way.

The Royal Society also brands climate-change-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. Well, I certainly am not; I am totally independent.

We are assured that the debate over whether there is global warming and, if there is, whether humans’ activities are to blame, is over. Oh, no, it isn’t.

The only point on which there is consensus is that there are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit. That is as far as it goes. And even that isn’t clear-cut because, although atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to rise, the global temperature has fallen since 1998. If the ‘warmers’ were right, that couldn’t happen.

So far, highly-paid climate scientists – those who use high-tech computers to model climate change and foretell what is going to happen – have generally been completely wrong. For example, those who predicted the next Ice Age was upon us in the mid-twentieth century; and James Hansen, a climatologist who told the US Congress in 1988 that global temperature would rise 0.3ºC by the end of the century. It didn’t. He also predicted that sea level would rise by several feet. It rose by just one inch.

While the United Nations set up Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is we in the UK who unwittingly meet its entire costs. In 2001 the IPCC produced a document of Biblical proportions, its Third Assessment Report, which foretold an apocalypse far beyond previous forecasts, and which appears to me to be based on little more than myth.

But before you make up your own mind about what is true and what is not, I want to try and show how these forecasts have come about; what the data really add up to; and how reliable those data really are. While this isn’t my field of expertise, understanding it really isn’t that difficult. A little common sense is all that is really required to sort fact from fallacy.

So we’ll look at the ‘warmers’ arguments for the notion that we humans are the cause of global warming, and at those of the ‘sceptics’ who believe that climate change is a natural process against which we can do little or nothing.

The climate is always changing

There is not one shred of doubt that Earth’s 4.5 billion year history is one of continual climate change. There have many Ice Ages and many interglacial warm periods. No serious scientist disputes this; and no serious scientist disputes that these variations were and are entirely due to natural causes – at least up to the beginning of the Industrial revolution.

As you will see, during recorded history, we have had times – the Mediaeval Warm Period – that are considerably warmer than they are today; and we have had a few centuries of ‘Little Ice Age’ which we are even now still recovering from. The climate is always changing, always has changed and probably always will change. There is only one real argument and that is whether any current change in the climate is due to human activity and whether we can do anything to about it.

And there is now a different problem, particularly for someone like me, writing about a subject like this. Recently there was an important vote in the British parliament on the Climate Change Bill. Only three MPs voted against it. One was Ann Widdecombe, MP. Writing in the Daily Express, Ms Widdecombe said that she chose to vote in the way that she had because the Bill ‘will cost Britain hundreds of billions of pounds, will not mean any other country has to follow suit and, as we are responsible for only two per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, will make no difference to the climate or to global warming’.

She continued:

‘Climate change has become a religion, with anyone who dares to throw out a question or two instantly accused of heresy.

‘I have had my doubts for some time, and certainly about major unilateral action on the part of the UK, but these have crystallised since reading Nigel Lawson’s book An Appeal To Reason, subtitled A Cool Look At Global Warming.

‘Appallingly, this gem could not find a British publisher because none was brave enough. One wrote: “My fear with this cogently-argued book is that it flies so much in the face of prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide market”.’

That is the new problem: it is not politically correct to question man-made global warming. If you do, you are regarded as akin to a holocaust denier. I am lucky that I do have a British publisher willing to take that risk. Nevertheless this illustrates a serious difficulty when trying to research and make sense of this subject. Getting articles published which do not conform to politically correct thinking, even in the professional journals where debates should take place, can be extremely difficult or even impossible. For this reason, much of the data is published on sceptical Internet websites independently by concerned scientists, as will become apparent with some of the references I have been forced to use.

References

1. http://www.itv.com/News/newsspecial/thebigmelt/Carteret-Islands-in-danger.html
2. Ann Widdecombe. YES, I AM A HERETIC ON GLOBAL WARMING. Daily Express, 18th June 2008.

Last updated 18 March 2009