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As the estimated cost
of measures proposed by politicians to "combat global warming" soars
ever higher – such as the International Energy Council's $45 trillion –
"fighting climate change" has become the single most expensive item on
the world's political agenda.
As Senators Obama and
McCain vie with the leaders of the European Union to promise 50, 60,
even 80 per cent cuts in "carbon emissions", it is clear that to realise
even half their imaginary targets would necessitate a dramatic change in
how we all live, and a drastic reduction in living standards.
All this makes it
rather important to know just why our politicians have come to believe
that global warming is the most serious challenge confronting mankind,
and just how reliable is the evidence for the theory on which their
policies are based.
By far the most
influential player in putting climate change at the top of the global
agenda has been the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), set up in 1988, not least on the initiative of the
Thatcher government. (This was why the first chairman of its scientific
working group was Sir John Houghton, then the head of the UK's
Meteorological Office.)
Through a succession
of reports and international conferences, it was the IPCC which led to
the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, soon to have an even more ambitious successor,
to be agreed in Copenhagen next year.
The common view of the
IPCC is that it consists of 2,500 of the world's leading scientists who,
after carefully weighing all the evidence, have arrived at a "consensus"
that world temperatures are rising disastrously, and that the only
plausible cause has been rising levels of CO2 and other man-made
greenhouse gases.
In fact, as has become
ever more apparent over the past 20 years –not least thanks to the
evidence of a succession of scientists who have participated in the IPCC
itself – the reality of this curious body could scarcely be more
different.
It is not so much a
scientific as a political organisation. Its brief has never been to
look dispassionately at all the evidence for man-made global warming: it
has always taken this as an accepted fact.
Indeed only a
comparatively small part of its reports are concerned with the science
of climate change at all. The greater part must start by accepting the
official line, and are concerned only with assessing the impact of
warming and what should be done about it.
In reality the IPCC's
agenda has always been tightly controlled by the small group of
officials at its head. As one recent study has shown, of the 53
contributors to the key Chapter 9 of the latest report dealing with the
basic science (most of them British and American, and 10 of them
associated with the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office), 37 belong
to a closely related network of academics who are all active
promoters of the official warming thesis.
It is on the
projections of their computer models that all the IPCC's
predictions of future warming are based.
The final step in the
process is that, before each report is published, a "Summary for
Policymakers" is drafted by those at the top of the IPCC, to which
governments can make input.
It is this which makes
headlines in the media, and which all too frequently eliminates the more
carefully qualified findings of contributors to the report itself.
The idea that the
IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific "consensus" is a complete
fiction. Again and again
there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote
the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious "hockey
stick".
Initially the
advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over
the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is
today.
This was so generally
accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work
by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in
what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the
1990s.
The trouble was that
this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by
recent man-made CO2.
Then in 1999 an
obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like
nothing seen before.
Instead of the
familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the
line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a
hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on
record.
This was just what the
IPCC wanted. The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the
record.
When its next report
came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right
at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more
times in the report proper.
But then two Canadian
computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how
Mann had arrived at his graph.
When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded
Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his
programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape
whatever data were fed into it.
Even numbers from the
phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.
By the time of its latest report, last year, the IPCC had
an even greater problem. Far from continuing to rise in line with rising
CO2, as its computer models predicted they should, global temperatures
since the abnormally hot year of 1998 had flattened out at a lower level
and were even falling – a trend confirmed by NASA's satellite readings
over the past 18 months.
So pronounced has this
been that even scientists supporting the warming thesis now concede
that, due to changes in ocean currents, we can expect a decade or more
of "cooling", before the "underlying warming trend" reappears.
The point is that none of this was predicted by the
computer models on which the IPCC relies.
Among the ever-growing
mountain of informed criticism of the IPCC's methods, a detailed study
by an Australian analyst John McLean (to find it, Google "Prejudiced
authors, prejudiced findings") shows just how incestuously linked are
most of the core group of academics whose models underpin everything the
IPCC wishes us to believe about global warming.
The significance of
the past year is not just that the vaunted "consensus" on the forces
driving our climate has been blown apart as never before, but that a new
"counter-consensus" has been emerging among thousands of scientists
across the world, given expression in last March's Manhattan Declaration
by the so-called Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.
This wholly repudiates the IPCC process,
showing how its computer models are hopelessly biased, based on
unreliable data and programmed to ignore many of the genuine drivers of
climate change, from variations in solar activity to those cyclical
shifts in ocean currents.
As it was put by Roger
Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process,
who long accepted its orthodoxy: "I was appalled at how flimsy the case
is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped
produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.
"In particular I am
referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down
debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defence of bogus
science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science
process itself."
Yet it is at just this
moment, when the IPCC's house of cards is crumbling, that the
politicians of the Western world are using it to propose steps that can
only damage our way of life beyond recognition.
It really is time for
that "counter-consensus" to be taken seriously.
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So folks, how do you feel now that you
know you are being conned yet again by political extremists who just
wish to feather their nests? More importantly, what are you personally
going to do about it? Write to you MP and the Press exposing the
whole plot. People have a right to know the truth. Or are you not
bothered that heavy taxes are being levied based on false information? |
