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.
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