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Stranger than Fiction

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Carbon Dioxide is not the Culprit!

The Greenhouse Effect

Man-made global warming is no longer just a theory about climate, it is a defining moral and political cause of our age. Campaigners say the time for debate is over and any criticism, no matter how scientifically rigorous, is illegitimate, even worse dangerous.

Everywhere we are being told that man-made climate change is proved beyond doubt. But, we are being told lies!

Professor Tim Ball of the Department of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg "When people say I don't believe in global warming, I tell them that I believe in global warming but I don't believe human generated CO² is causing that warming".

Each day the news reports grow more fantastically apocalyptic. Politicians no longer dare to express any doubt about climate change. Global warming has gone beyond politics, it is a new kind of morality.

Yet, as the frenzy over man-made global warming grows ever shriller, many senior climate scientists say the actual scientific basis for the theory is crumbling.

Professor Nir Shaviv of the Institute of Physics at Jerusalem University points out "There are periods in Earth's history where we had three times as much CO² as we have today or periods where we had ten times the CO² we have today. If CO² has a large effect on climate then we should see it in the temperature reconstruction".

Prof. John Christy

Professor John Christy former Lead Author with the IPCC agrees "I've often heard it said that there's a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue who think humans are causing a catastrophic change in the climate system. Well I am one scientist, and I know of many others, who simply think this is not true".

Man-made global warming is no ordinary scientific theory. It is presented in the media as having the stamp of authority from an impressive international organisation; The United Nations Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.

Professor Philip Stott from the University of London disagrees "The IPCC, like any UN body, is political. The final conclusions are politically driven". Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute adds "The IPCC claim to have the world's top 1500 or 2500 scientists is misleading. You look at the bibliographies and find that many of them are non-scientists".

Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace is disillusioned "I don't like to call it an environmental movement anymore, because really it is a political activist movement and they have become hugely influential at a global level".

This has become a distortion of a whole area of science, how a political campaign has become a bureaucratic bandwagon, about censorship and intimidation and how westerners are invoking the threat of climatic disaster to hinder vital industrial progress in developing countries.

We are told that the Earth's climate is changing. But the Earth's climate is always changing. In Earth's long history there have been countless periods when it was much warmer and much cooler than it is today. When much of the world was covered by tropical forests or else vast ice-sheets. The climate has always changed, and changed without help from us humans.

We can trace the current warming trend back some 200 years, to the end of a very cold period in Earth's history. This cold spell is known to climatologists as "The Little Ice-Age".

If we look back further in time we find a balmy golden era when temperatures were higher than they are today. A time known as "The Medieval Warm Period".

Further back still we find a period during The Bronze Age, known to geologists as "The Holocene Maximum" where temperatures were significantly higher for three millennia.

Climate variation in the past is clearly natural, so why do we think it is any different today? In the current panic about global warming, the culprit is an industrial society Luxuries once enjoyed exclusively by the rich are now available to all. Industrial progress has changed our lives, but has it also changed our climate?

The Industrial Revolution really began after the Second World War which was followed by four decades of temperature decrease. This confounds the theory somewhat.

Since the mid 19th century, the Earth's temperature has risen by about half a degree Celsius. This warming began long before cars and planes had been invented. What's more, most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940 when industrial production was relatively insignificant.

Why do we suppose that carbon dioxide is responsible for our changing climate? CO2 forms only a very small part of the Earth's atmosphere. In fact changes in CO² levels are measured in tens of parts per million. It measures about 0.054% of the atmosphere.

Although CO² is a greenhouse gas, it is a relatively minor one, water vapour is, by far, the biggest player

A scientist largely responsible for measuring the Earth's atmosphere is Professor John Christy. In 1991, he was awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and in 1996 he received a Special Award from the American Meteorological Society for fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate. He reports "What we've found, consistently, in a great part of the planet, is that the atmosphere is not warming as much as we see on the surface". This suggests that the warming is not a result of greenhouse gases.

Former Vice-President Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" is widely regarded as the definitive popular presentation on the theory of man-made global warming. His argument rests on one all-important piece of evidence taken from ice-core surveys These ice-cores trap climate information from hundreds of thousands of years ago. The first ice-core survey took place in Vostok, Antarctica. What it found was, as Al Gore pointed out, a direct correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature. But there was one important factor in the ice-core data that Al Gore failed to mention.

Carbon Dioxide Lag

When the ice-core data was analysed in detail, it could be seen that the changes in temperature occurred about 800 year before the corresponding changes in CO². Al Gore's presentation had the data the wrong way around. Carbon Dioxide is not the cause of temperature change, it is a product of it.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it is a natural gas essential to every living organism on the planet. Humans are not the largest producers of CO². Volcanoes produce more CO² than all the world's factories, cars and planes put together. More comes from animals and bacteria. An even larger source is dying vegetation. But the biggest source of CO², by far, is the oceans.

Professor Carl Wunsch from the Department of Oceanography at MIT explains "The ocean is the major reservoir into which carbon dioxide goes when it comes out of the atmosphere and from which it is readmitted to the atmosphere. When the surface if the ocean is heated it emits carbon dioxide, and similarly when it cools it will absorb carbon dioxide".

So why is there a time lag of several hundred years between a temperature change and CO² being released or absorbed by the oceans? The oceans are so big and so deep, this is how long it takes for them to change to match the atmospheric temperature.

Solar Physicist Dr Piers Corbyn tells us "The origin of our solar techniques of weather forecasting come from the study of sun-spots and the desire to predict these".

Sun-spots, we now know, are intense magnetic fields which appear at times of higher solar activity. For many hundreds of years, long before this was properly understood, astronomers would count the number of sun-spots in the belief that more spots heralded warmer weather.

In 1893, the British astronomer Edward Maunder observed that during The Little Ice-age there were barely any spots visible on the sun.

Appearance of sun-spots

In 1991, senior scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute decided to compile a record of sun-spots in the 20th century and compare it with the temperature record. What they found was an incredibly close correlation between what the sun was doing and changes in temperature on Earth. To test this further, Professor Friis-Christensen and his colleagues examined 400 years of astronomical records and found the same correlation between solar activity and Earth temperatures.

Obviously, the sun affects us directly with the heat it radiates. It is also believed that it affects us indirectly. Clouds are formed when cosmic rays, from far out in the Universe, enter the atmosphere and meet water vapour rising from the planet surface to form waters droplets. When the solar wind is strong, from increased activity on the sun's surface, fewer cosmic rays get through and fewer clouds are formed.

The climate is being controlled by clouds, clouds are controlled by cosmic rays and cosmic rays are controlled by the sun. The sun drives our climate, carbon dioxide is irrelevant.

Doom-laden predictions about climate change are not new. In 1974, the BBC warned us of an impending disaster, which might seem strangely familiar, only this time they were predicting an imminent ice-age.