Contribution to Economist blog

"Since when was carbon dioxide a “pollutant”? Carbon dioxide is what makes things grow. Pollutants are things that we would be better off without. If we removed all the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, all life  on the surface of the Earth would die very rapidly. In the days of the dinosaurs, carbon dioxide levels were much higher than they are today.  Coral reefs thrived and all the plants grew like mad. Which is why we have lots of coal to mine. 

 

The “evidence” that man-made carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming exists only in computer models which, in fact, are programmed to predict warming with increased carbon dioxide. So it is not the computer models that predict warming, it is the person who programmed them. Without the “forcing factors” they program into the computers, a doubling of carbon dioxide causes only a small warming.

 

And now we have evidence from China that, over the last 2000 years, warming led to prosperity and cold periods led to war, disease and famine. We already know that the Medieval warm period was prosperous and that the little ice age brought plague, wars and famine.

 

There is now compelling evidence that a long sunspot cycle is followed by severe cooling. Cycle 23, that has just ended, lasted 12.5 years - 3 years longer than cycle 22. Cycle 24 will be weak.  With great confidence, it is possible to predict that temperatures will drop by between one and two degrees C over the next 10 or 20 years.  From the Southern Oscillation Index, which predicts temperatures seven months ahead, we know that the world will cool around the end of this year.  If we lived in a rational world, we would be preparing to cope with this natural but dangerous climate change.

 

It is high time that the Economist returned to its traditional objective stance and looked at the evidence rather than believing in climate models and a “consensus” that, when examined, does not even exist."