Climate Change?

The great obsession of the present time is “Climate Change”, really an each-way bet lest “global warming” turn out to be the furphy that it is – for all to see!

We are constantly told, “The science is settled! We have consensus.”

Really! Is man-made global warming indeed an established fact of science? Or is it really “junk science”?

Consider Al Gore’s movie (more below): one does not need to get past the advertising poster and introductory frame to see how this “documentary” begins with an egregious error, viz. a row of factory stacks allegedly venting off polluting gases, in turn building up the “greenhouse layer”.

Likewise, so often the mainstream media portray images of factory chimneys and cooling towers (such as in the Latrobe Valley), supposedly belching off airborne “pollution”, to warn of the apocalyptic prospect of CO₂ heating us to a devastating doom, and over-full oceans drowning us all in metres of water, making the 2004 tsunami look like a gentle lap.

However, a scientific reality check: as even a lower-form high school science student should tell you, CO₂ is invisible! It is both colourless and odourless. If you can see it then it’s not CO₂. What you see coming from factory stacks is for the most part steam – water vapour! Yes, there are a few other gases such as sulphur dioxide, plus airborne micro-particles, but the main one is ordinary old steam. Yet I don’t hear anyone branding steam as a pollutant which endangers our planetary climate!

You don’t believe me? You will see the same phenomenon on a cold winter’s day: water vapour condensing from your own breath. Then look at the photo (left) from the ABC’s own website, showing the cooling towers near Morwell in the Latrobe Valley, whose caption admits that it exhibits clouds of steam arising from the stacks.

Global warming is perpetrated by the Left, whose various organisations (Club of Rome, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc.) concocted this scare campaign in the early 1990s in the wake of the collapse of Communism. Where was the Left to go with no Communist monolith by which to attack capitalism and consumerism, engineer big government, and move towards global totalitarian rule? Answer: “climate change”.

Conspiracy theories have their hazards, indeed, but this time it should be clear that the Left IS engaged in a massive scare campaign by which to achieve their goals as stated above. As for bogus scare campaigns, remember “the ozone hole”? Y2K? Or further back the “global energy crisis” of the 1970s, and the fear of “global cooling”? And the left-wing media dutifully beating up the scary scenarios? How dumb so many were, yet the media just as quickly drop something that might harm their credibility, e.g. after the Y2K fizzer that very quickly vanished from the media radar screen!

And now we have “global warming”! And promoted by apocalyptic scientists - and non-scientists such as Al Gore! When will the nonsense end? In the nineties it was called “the greenhouse effect”. It should be called instead “the greenhoax syndrome”.

The Al Gore Movie “An Inconvenient Truth”

This movie is so riddled with lies it is nothing more than tawdry propaganda:

1. The scene which purports to show giant ice walls breaking up because of global warming (so runs Gore’s added commentary) is in fact borrowed from the movie “The Day after Tomorrow” (admitted by its producers), which in turn was not filmed in the wild, on location in the Arctic, but was computer-generated from Styrofoam models in a studio!!!
See here for the vidclip.

2. The famed “hockey stick“ curve, which in 2001 launched the GW “crisis“. It became “Exhibit A” for the GW scaremongering campaign. At best this showed a statistical link of temperature rise to carbon dioxide emissions. But the statistics were shoddy and contrived from the start, and its author, Dr Michael Mann, was criticised from very early on: first by a low level Canadian scientist, Stephen McIntyre, who recognised its flaws from his background in the mining industry. Few took any notice of McIntyre, however, but when world-renowned statistician Dr. Edward Wegman weighed into the debate and confirmed all that McIntyre had been insisting the IPCC quietly dropped the “hockey-stick” curve from its Summary for Policymakers in 2007. Moreover, the “Mediaeval ‘Warm Period“ of c.950 to 1300 A.D. was deliberately omitted; likewise the “Little Ice Age“ of c. 1350 to 1750. Warm-mongerers have tried to deny the historical existence of the Mediaeval Warm Period, but the evidence is too strong in its favour. For example, the Vikings settled Greenland and grazed stock there for some 300 years until the ice-sheet expanded and the settlements were abandoned (c.1300). The remains of these Greenland settlements are still to be seen, and archaeological work on graves at the site show no evidence of permafrost at the time of burial: quite the opposite. That is, there was a Mediaeval Warm Period! Then finally the upward shoot of the curve at the end of the graph is gratuitous extrapolation. The warmest year in recent times was 1934 (verified by NASA), and following the warm year of 1998 the earth has cooled, or at the very least levelled out.

3. The movie fails to mention that CO₂ is NOT a major greenhouse gas, but is only a trace gas in the earth’s atmosphere (between 300 and 400 ppm and stable), and that water vapour is far more significant. Lower-level high school science should have informed Mr. Gore of these facts. Another factor in this connection is that CO₂ DOES NOT stay in the atmosphere for decades, even centuries, on end. Its lifetime as an atmospheric gas is at most 12 years (See L. Solomon, The Deniers, pp.82-83).

4. The movie fails to mention that global warming has been verified for Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, and even Pluto through observations from both visiting spacecraft and the Hubble telescope. This is powerful evidence that if global warming is real it is due to astronomical sources, such as solar activity and/or cosmic rays, and not CO₂.

5. When Gore appeals to the planet Venus he reveals his ignorance: the incredibly dense Venerian atmosphere is composed mostly of CO₂ (not a mere trace gas!), plus liberal amounts of sulphuric acid, and its surface pressure is enormous: 90 atmospheres! Besides, it is one third closer to the Sun than the Earth (67 million miles as opposed to 93 million miles). Between the Earth and the planet Venus there is NO comparison!

And there’s more; much more! In all, there are something like 35 errors in the movie, nine of which were identified by a senior British judge, Michael Burton, in 2007, who instructed that the movie should not be shown to schoolchildren without mentioning these caveats. In his his finding Justice Burton commented that Al Gore’s film is “not simply a science film...it is a political film”, and further, “The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.”

See Monckton’s discussion: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html

The Burton decision: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/corporate_law/article2633838.ece

See here for Al Gore’s scientific credentials, or the total lack thereof.

The Oregon Petition, which voices the concerns of qualified scientists (a large number of them in the climatology or related fields), rejects the theory of man-made global warming. This petition now has in excess of 31,000 signatories! There are similar declarations from other centres expressing the same views from scientific communities.

See the Petition on http://www.petitionproject.org

Likewise the Manhattan Declaration from the (largely unreported, but well attended) climate change conference in New York in March 2008:

http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=1

See further the following sites opposing the global warming obsession:

http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050 (with lots of links)

http://www.climatepolice.com/

Also, are the polar ice sheets really receding, as warming zealots grimly warn? On the contrary, they are expanding, especially in the Antarctic. But the Arctic ice is increasing too, as shown by these satellite-generated pictures showing the extent of the Arctic ice sheet on two corresponding days in consecutive years. Mid-October is an appropriate time, as it comes just prior to the winter freeze.

(Source: Cryosphere Today, University of Illinois, http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh
Key in any set of dates from 1979 to the present)
Note: snow levels are not shown in these pictures; land ice appears solid white, while purple areas indicate sea ice.

See further: http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/

and, http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2007/09/antarctic-sea-i.html

See the recently published book by Lawrence Solomon, The Deniers, Richard Vigilante Books, 2008.

You think it’s all really an argument about science? Then if you share the position above try declaring your hand to a warm-mongerer: the response will be not a reasoned discussion and appeal to evidence (what science is all about), but a bellicose and virulent volley of abuse. In other words, it is a religious agenda: there are believing green “saints”, and unbelieving redneck “sinners”. Likewise, it is also a very political agenda.

Hence when you hear the mantra, “The science is settled! There is consensus”, you are not really hearing a scientific statement. What you are hearing is intimidatory rhetoric designed to silence opposition and bludgeon you into submission. “Consensus”, scientifically speaking, is a furphy. As Einstein once remarked, “It takes only one person to be right!”

STOP THE MAD RUSH FOR CARBON CREDIT SCHEMES!
THEY WILL ONLY BANKRUPT OUR COUNTRY, AND THROW MULTITUDES OUT OF WORK!

AND FOR WHAT?

IT’S THROWING GOOD MONEY INTO A BOTTOMLESS PIT!

REMEMBER PREVIOUS SCAMS: GLOBAL COOLING (1970s); Y2K; THE OZONE HOLE!

EXPOSE THE SHAM – AND SCAM - OF GLOBAL WARMING!

For some real agents of climate change, as opposed to the current hype, see here (in preparation).

Likewise, for indications of climate change in antiquity, which of course can have nothing to do with industrial CO₂ emissions, see here (in preparation).