Human Production Of CO2 Isn’t Warming The Planet

Jonathan PorrittWarmists Reliance On Failed Computer Models Ridiculed

Models Claim To Predict 2100, But Failed To See Current Weather

“CO2 Is Good For You”

 “Kyoto-Like Agreements Will Lead To A World Command Economy With Totalitarian Overtones”

   Thank goodness they weren’t a bunch of bearded, sandal-wearing nutters. I spent a day in Brussels this week at a contrarian climate change conference organised by former Tory now “non-attached” MEP Roger Hellmer, and as a journalist who has relentlessly pedalled for years the idea that the conventional wisdom that humans were warming the climate was wrong, I had this nagging thought at the back of mind that perhaps in the flesh, these professional climate change deniers might turn out to be a bunch of maniacs with a few lose screws who write protest letters in green ink.

    Nothing could be further from the truth.

    The presentations were powerful, lucid and compelling. The speakers were impressive, convincing and fluent, each one an obvious master of his trade. To divert the audience momentarily from this serious subject, James Delingpole,  Spectator columnist and author, had the audience in fits of laughter as he lambasted Prince of Wales adviser Jonathon Porritt for taking himself much too seriously despite being wrong about everything. Porritt caused outrage earlier this year when he said fat people were bad for the climate, and that families should not have more than two children to keep their carbon footprint low. Delingpole said it was important to ridicule the likes of Porritt and Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who would have us back living in caves if their policies were taken seriously.

    Condemned

    But I came away fearing that the free world is about to condemn itself, via a climate treaty in Copenhagen, to a form of unaccountable world government which will impose huge taxes, ruin the world economy and our standard of living, and of course have no impact at all on the climate. If the Copenhagen conference fails to agree a new climate change treaty next month, as seems likely, it can’t be long until it finally does. Despite the overwhelming feeling at the conference that the Warmists’ theories make no sense, that doesn’t seem to be percolating through to the political powers that be.

     One speaker at the conference, Dr Benny Peiser from Liverpool John Moores University, expressed the strong conviction that the media bias towards embracing the notion that humans are changing the climate was on the wane. I’m not so sure. There’s not much sign of this in Britain, where the likely incoming Conservative government next year seems to have been taken over by the Warmists, who have installed radical environmentalist Zac Goldsmith as a top adviser. British Conservatives talk of introducing carbon ration books, and banning internal flights. Party members have been trying to outbid the Labour party in the race to embrace greenery, saying we must cut CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050.

    Data or models

    The keynote speaker was Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and this venerable gent didn’t disappoint.

    Singer, who founded the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change and was editor of its 2008 report “Nature-Not Human Activity-Rules the Climate”, made the stark and unanswerable point that the warmists have to address. Given that the world’s temperature has been falling since about 1998 while CO2 output has relentlessly increased, how can the two concepts be linked? As Singer put it, are you going to believe the predictive models or the actual data which shows the computers are wrong. He was referring to the computer models compiled by Warmists and led by the U.N.’s IPCC, which predict various disaster scenarios by the end of the century if CO2 emissions are not slashed. The public is asked to believe that these computer models can predict the weather in 2100, when they failed to predict the actual falling temperatures from 1998.

    Singer also made the point, using Al Gore’s favourite “Inconvenient Truth” graphic which showed CO2 and temperature to purport to show CO2 was heating the planet. Singer said that the graphic shows just the opposite. The graphic shows that CO2 reacts over the centuries to changing temperatures; as temperatures rose, the oceans release more CO2 and vice versa.

    Unreliable

    U.S. Meteorologist Anthony Watts said in a speech that much of the data collected to back claims of a warming climate was taken by instruments that failed basic location rules which should determine that readings are accurate. About 90 per cent of the instruments were sited on concrete, or gravel, or alongside airports or sewage plants or on tops of roofs next to air conditioning units, which would provide basically useless data, but which was likely to record temperatures artificially higher because of their location. Professor Ross McKitrick of Canada’s University of Guelph, who helped destroy the infamous Hockey Stick graph with Stephen McIntyre, attacked those who relied on computer modelling for their projections, saying his researches showed models predicted more warming than was actually being recorded.

    Humans make four per cent of total CO2

    Professor Tom Segalstad of the University of Oslo, Norway, said it wasn’t surprising that there was little correlation between rising human produced CO2 levels and temperature because artificially produced CO2 only made up about four per cent of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. 96 per cent of CO2 was produced by natural causes. Contrary to what Warmists believed, CO2 only lasted in the atmosphere for about five years, not the 200 years or 1,000 years of popular myth. Rising levels of CO2 were good for agriculture, and the world should worry about falling levels of CO2 because this could threaten agriculture efficiency.

    Professor Fred Goldberg from Stockholm, Sweden warned that sun-spot activity, or rather the lack of it, pointed to an imminent cooling trend. Dr Hans Labohm, economist, and former Dutch delegate to the OECD, wasn’t impressed with European renewable energy schemes, and pointed out that Denmark and Germany, which made a big show of building windmills, hadn’t yet closed a single conventional power station. Wind power was three to four times more expensive than conventional coal or nuclear power, while solar was twenty times pricier.

    Renewables would never account for more than two or three percent of total energy, which didn’t matter, according to Labohm because “CO2 was good for you”, agreeing with previous speakers like Professors Segalstad and Singer. Labohm worried about what would happen to the world if the Copenhagen deal was completed in its mooted form.

    Totalitarian

    “Kyoto like agreements will lead to a world command economy with totalitarian overtones,” Labohm said.

    Most delegates to the conference, “Have Humans Changed the Climate” agreed that this wasn’t the case, but the overwhelming position in the real world where politicians rule is that CO2 is evil and the creation of carbon must be stopped, even if it means bankrupting Western economies and forcing us all into poverty. It remains to be seen if this movement will survive when voters find the bills for this exercise landing on their doormats, or are forced out of their cars and on to the buses, or are priced away from their exotic foreign holidays. There has been a flurry of opinion polls in Europe and the U.S. recently showing increasing disbelief in this climate emergency scenario. Maybe Dr Peiser is right, and the tide is turning. Fingers crossed.

 Neil Winton – November 19, 2009

U.N.’s IPCC fiddled climate change data – Christopher Booker

    World leaders at the Copenhagen Climate summit next month will be determined to save the world, but according to a new book by British iconoclast Christopher Booker, the science purporting to show that humans are destroying the climate is wrong, and some U.N. data justifying harsh action to curb CO2 has been falsified.

    This data will be used to justify wrong-headed actions which will destroy western economies, and have no impact on the weather.

    In his book “The Real Global Warming Disaster”, Booker said the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used distorted data in the infamous “Hockey Stick” graph, often re-wrote the “Summary for Policymakers” to draw conclusions about the fate of the climate that weren’t substantiated by the science, and were party to political pressure to silence dissenting scientific voices.

    The IPCC’s computer model-generated forecasts call for substantial, climate-wrecking temperature increases over the next century, unless CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil are slashed. Some Western nations now say they will cut CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050. Expect most of us to be back living in caves if that happens. 

    Most governments and many scientists beg to differ with Booker and say a Copenhagen meeting in December must agree severe limits on CO2 to stop catastrophic warming. Curiously, the world’s mainstream media has given warmists a free ride, possibly on the grounds that checking the facts might ruin a good story. It’s much more interesting to write about how we are all going to die unless our heroic politicians step in and save us. But as pay day looms, maybe we can expect a change of heart.

    Our “heroes” in the E.U. are suggesting that we pay upwards of €100 billion a year to poor nations by 2020 so they can avoid increasing their consumption of fossil fuels on their way to combating poverty and disease.

    According to Booker, this is a potentially disastrous course of action which will cripple western economies, and have no discernible influence on the climate.

    Booker said IPCC scientists, which Al Gore was telling BBCTV’s NewsNight include up to 2,500 of the world’s top scientists from Albania to Zimbabwe, were in fact a clique of about 50 mainly British and U.S. scientists with axes to grind.

    The “Hockey Stick” graph, which showed that current temperatures were the highest for 1,000 years and climbing, was in fact generated by using a computer programme which ignored data unfavourable to the cause, and was designed to produce the inevitable result. Booker points out that global temperatures climbed to substantially higher levels by 1200, some 600 years before the Industrial Revolution’s coal-burning started, slipped down from 1350 to 1850, before climbing erratically to present day levels still below 1200’s. Booker says that if, as the IPCC claims, global temperature reacts to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2), this data has to be explained.

    During the twentieth century, global temperatures declined from the 1940s to mid-1970s as CO2 emissions accelerated, rose again until 1998, and have been sliding since, as CO2 emissions climbed. This would seem to suggest that CO2 is not linked to global warming.

    Last month BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson pointed out that the IPCC’s computers had failed to predict the downturn in temperatures since 1998, but this hasn’t curbed the clamour by the so-called “warmists” to save the world.

    Booker says many eminent scientists now say that anyone looking for an explanation for climate change would be better off looking at the influence of the sun, but governments aren’t listening.

    He quotes Professor Richard Lindzen, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who he describes as the world’s leading atmospheric physicist, pointing to this wealth-threatening hysteria.

    “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21^st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age,” Lindzen said.

BNP’s Griffin humiliated by BBC, but that will probably help not hinder

    It made sense for Nick Griffin to emerge from BBCTV’s Question Time as the victim rather than an aggressor, and he certainly achieved that, although I doubt if that’s the way he planned it.

    Also not emerging with much credit were the unbearably smug trio of mainstream political non-entities Messrs Straw, Huhne and “Baroness” Warsi. Poor Bonnie Greer was hopelessly out of her depth, as usual. Why does the BBC bother re-inviting this woman. She seems perfectly nice, but has nothing to say, apart from a few right-on thoughts lifted straight out of the Guardian. The more Straw, Huhne, Warsi, Chairman Dimbleby and the invited audience combined to humiliate Griffin, the more likely his impact was going to be favourable. Lots of high-falutin Congressional committees in the U.S. always look like unbearable bullies when they line up, say 20 strong, surrounding one hapless testifier. Even if it was Jimmy Hoffa, you couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the little guy.

    I had sat down, armed with my lap-top and tuned into my Twitter page, to say I told you so every time Griffin said something about his political philosophy which showed he clearly came from the left, as fascists do. But I waited in vain. The BBC had obviously other things on its mind than letting the viewers have any idea about the BNP’s (Banque Nationale de Paris) policies.

    Listening to the odious Peter Hain today still going on about how we are all too stupid to be able to listen to the BNP without becoming fascist beasts ourselves is getting a bit hard to handle. The Labour party has failed its core working class vote, by allowing their northern carzees to be over-run by unemployment and immigrants. This means that in the upcoming general election, even hard core Labour strongholds will be lost to the BNP. Silencing Griffin is all about this, not some breach in standards of decency.

    It was interesting to hear that Jack Straw’s father was a Conchie. That will surprise nobody who knows this amoral lawyer, who will happily spout the line that the last person paid him to speak. Listening to him when he was Foreign Secretary justifying the Iraq war was always nauseating. If he had been in opposition he would have said exactly the opposite. But Straw can’t be all bad. Did you notice how he dumped his provincial librarian specs in favour of contact lenses when he had the hots for U.S. Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice?

    Griffin at least had his moment in the spotlight, even if the BBC made sure we only heard about racism. He did manage to get in a word towards the end about the teaching of sex to school children, which will have gone down well with his prospective voters. Griffin thought this shouldn’t happen, presumably because this is a moral matter best left to parents, not agents of the state.

    It was interesting to hear Times columnist David Aaronovitch saying today that Griffin’s thoughts on homosexuals and sex education (Griffin said he was disturbed by men kissing in the street, just like almost everybody else except Aaronovitch) showed how out of touch Griffin was. I’d wager that any politician advocating that sex education should be handled by parents and not schools would find themselves in a huge majority, with the likes of Aaronovitch out in the cold.

    Well done to the BBC for at least allowing us to meet Griffin. It was a pity that we were denied his views on the politics that matter, rather than outdated and boring arguments about holocaust denial and race.