Bryan Leyland- Climate Change Article
Submitted by climaterealists on Fri, 23/12/2011 - 10:51
by Bryan Leyland
An enormous amount of misinformation has come out of the climate conference in Durban and from the likes of Greenpeace. These people, backed by a small group of extremist climate scientists, refuse to consider the proposition that the climate changes naturally and that any man-made climate influence is small. Instead, they endlessly tell us that the world is warming rapidly, that the warming will be dangerous, that sea levels are rising rapidly and that if we get a temperature increase of 2° we will reach a “tipping point" that will cause untold damage to the world.
None of these statements are in line with the latest science either from the IPCC or from independent climate scientists who have looked closely at the evidence.
For instance, although the world did warm by about 0.7° between 1975 and 1988, there has been no significant warming since then. All the major temperature records show that global warming has flattened off. Looking ahead, the fact that we are in a la nina situation tells us that the world will remain cool for another 7 months at least. Going beyond that, the fact that the last sunspot cycle was long and that sunspots are declining indicates that we could be in for a period of cooling. It is possible that the cooling will be quite severe. History tells us unequivocally that cooling brings famine, disease and war while warming brings prosperity and good health. Only the IPCC and its minions tell us that warming is bad.
Regarding sea levels, the highly accurate sea level gauges installed around Australia and on the Pacific Islands (including Tuvalu) in the early 1990s showed that sea level rise is small–less than 3 mm per year–and that in recent years, it has leveled off. The 3 mm a year is consistent with the sea level rise that we have experienced since the end of the Little Ice Age. So the only strange thing that is happening is that we cannot explain why the sea level is no longer rising.
There is a lot of loose talk about a 2° tipping point. There is no evidence to support this assumption. None. It is purely a figment of people's imagination. What we do know is that during the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warm Period, temperatures rose by 2° or so and civilisation and people prospered. Anyway, if a tipping point did exist, it would have been triggered millions of years ago when carbon dioxide levels were much higher and we would not even exist. All the evidence of history tells us that the climate changes naturally and flips in and out of ice ages for reasons that we do not yet understand.
The climate models predict that an increase in carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming. In fact, they had been programmed to do just that. The science tells us that if we double carbon dioxide from the present level, a warming of about 1° could result. The climate modelers escalate this 1° to 3°–with little supporting evidence–and then, quite predictably, the models show a much higher rate of warming. But if you talk to the modelers, they will tell you that the big unknown is the effect of clouds because they cannot model them with any accuracy. There is more and more evidence that an increase in temperature brings an increase in clouds and this has a cooling effect.
In New Zealand, Greenpeace have recently claimed that the world is warming rapidly, that Tuvalu is suffering from rising sea levels and we have to take drastic steps immediately. Either they are not up-to-date with the latest information or they are being deliberately misleading. I suspect it is the latter.
So why are we being misled by lots of people who should know better? The reason seems to be that politicians, carbon traders, developers of renewable energy, environmental groups, climate researchers and many others all benefit in one way or another by perpetuating the myth of dangerous man-made global warming. It was heavily promoted by Enron, who, even though an internal report told them that probably wasn't happening, saw it as a way of making heaps of money from carbon trading.
Promoters of heavily subsidised wind and solar power realise that without the subsidies the industries would collapse overnight. So they employ lobbyists to tell the politicians that the world is warming and that (against all the evidence) new renewable energy technologies can make a big difference. Climate scientists have quickly learned that any research designed to show the dangers of global warming is happening will get funded and any research questioning its existence will not. The Climate gate 2 emails tell us that some climate scientists have gone to quite extreme lengths in attacking climate scientists who have tried to publish peer-reviewed papers that show that man-made global warming is not in line with the evidence.
In New Zealand, we have an additional problem that the people who are advising the government are firmly locked into the IPCC process. The same people occupy senior positions in NIWA, the IPCC and the Royal Society climate panel. So no matter where the government turns, it gets the same advice from the same people. Yet one of these people told me, in effect, that he accepted that the world was not warming and that he didn't really know when it would restart.
A prudent government would be looking at all aspects of the evidence rather than relying on one source that has a vested interest in perpetuating the myth. If they accepted what the science told them, it would probably abandon the emissions trading scheme immediately.
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