GLOBAL WARMING

[AgentAxeman 189]

Not certain what to make of this. could it be we've been lied to all along?

 

Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

 

Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

 

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday's Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming.

A picture of polar bears on the melted ice of the Arctic Circle which was used by former US vice president Al Gore, in his book An Inconvenient Truth on global warming

 

A picture of polar bears on the melted ice of the Arctic Circle which was used by Al Gore, in his book An Inconvenient Truth on global warming

 

Hundreds of emails leaked from the internal computer system of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how a small group of highly influential senior British and U.S. scientists have for years been secretly discussing ways in which their evidence could be manipulated to make the threat posed by global warming sound much worse than it is.

 

To place the significance of these revelations into context, let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government's own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion a year - that's £720 for every household in the country - every year from now until 2050.

 

We shall be paying this through soaring 'green taxes' on everything from air travel to the £3,300 tax being proposed on each new car; through rocketing fuel bills to subsidise thousands more wind turbines and to pay for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

 

In fact, the true cost of the act, if complied with to the letter, would certainly be far higher, because what it lays down is that, over the next 40 years, we must cut our emissions of carbon dioxide by over 80 per cent.

 

Pretty well every aspect of our lives in today's industrialised society involves emitting carbon dioxide - and short of some technological revolution as yet undreamed of, the only way we could meet that target would be to close almost every part of our economy. Yet, astonishingly, scarcely a single MP even questioned the need for such a law; only three voted against it.

 

I recently published a book on what I have no hesitation in calling the most alarming story I have ever reported in all my years as a journalist.

Emissions rising from Drax Power Station near Selby, Yorkshire - the climate change act will cost the UK £18billion a year

 

This is the story of how the belief that the world has to fight the threat of global warming has crept to the top of the political agenda, to the point where, not just in Britain but across the world, governments are solemnly discussing by far the most costly series of measures any bunch of politicians has proposed.

 

This is what they will all be discussing at next month's great UN conference, when 20,000 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists from all over the world gather in Copenhagen to discuss a new treaty to decide just what measures we shall all have to accept to keep the supposed threat of global warming at bay.

 

We all know the basic thesis: that thanks to mankind burning fossil fuels, the world's temperatures are hurtling upwards, and that unless the most drastic action is taken, we can look forward to an unprecedented global catastrophe - droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps, sea levels rising to the point where many of the world's major cities are submerged.

 

All this is what has been predicted by the expensive computer models relied on by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), which the politicians tell us we must trust as the ultimate source of authority on the future of the world's climate.

 

On every side we are told that 'the science is settled', that '2,500 of the world's top climate scientists' agree that these terrifying predictions will all come true unless we take the most drastic action. So carried away have they all been by this belief that scarcely a single politician dares question it.

 

Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening, certainly not in the way those computer models have been predicting. Although carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, temperatures have not been rising in the way the computer models all agree they should have done.

 

In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down.

 

The hard evidence tells us that there have actually been fewer major droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades.

 

There is no less ice at the Earth's poles today than there was 30 years ago. Sea levels may have been rising very slowly, but no faster than they have been for 200 years.

 

In other words, as a growing army of genuine experts across the world has been trying to tell us, there is not a single item on the list of apocalyptic predictions we have been fed for so long by the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore which is not being called into question by what is actually happening to the world's climate.

 

The scientists who have been challenging almost every aspect of the official theory on global warming have ranged from world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professors Will Happer and Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, to 700 scientists of many disciplines.

 

These include Nobel Prize-winners and former contributors to the IPCC, who signed a 'minority report' of the U.S. Senate's environment committee.

Cutting carbon emissions from aeroplanes is one the many legislative changes that the Government are implementing in order to avoid increased global warming

 

It is beginning to look as though the panic over global warming, which has our politicians so in its grip, may have been no more than a colossal scare story - to line up alongside all those other scares which have raced in and out of the headlines in recent decades, such as the 'Millennium Bug', which at midnight on December 31, 1999, was going to crash the world's computers.

 

So the real question which arises from this most terrifying of all scare scenarios is: why did the world's politicians get swept along by it?

 

One of the more suspicious features of the man-made global warming theory is precisely this extraordinary pressure, which has been built up to insist the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it is a moral crime to question it.

 

For several years, anyone daring to doubt the theory - not least some of the world's most eminent climate scientists - has been vilified as a 'denier', to be compared with those who try to deny the historical reality of Hitler's Holocaust.

 

Al Gore was one of the first to condemn as 'flat earthers' anyone who was sceptical of his reckless scaremongering, likening such people to the cranks who believe the Moon landings were all somehow 'faked on a movie lot in Arizona' (delightfully, among the scientists who have come out as 'climate sceptics' are two of the U.S. astronauts who did land on the Moon, Dr Buzz Aldrin and Dr Jack Schmitt).

 

In the scientific world, notably in the U.S. and Europe, it has long been a major scandal that those daring to doubt the official orthodoxy on global warming face ostracism from their academic colleagues, have had research funding withdrawn and have not been allowed to publish their papers in the leading scientific journals.

A layer of smog is seen over Paris - scientists who support climate change theories say that it is one of the main causes of increasing global temperatures

 

But equally suspicious has been the way the advocates of the warming orthodoxy have been repeatedly shown to have fiddled the scientific evidence being used to promote it.

 

The most notorious example of this was the so-called 'hockey stick' graph, which for years was brandished to show that, after flat-lining for 1,000 years, global temperatures had suddenly soared upwards in the late 20th century to levels never known before in recorded history.

 

The hockey stick was used by the IPCC and Gore as the supreme icon of their cause. Then, two statisticians revealed that the graph had been created by a computer model programmed to produce hockey stick shapes whatever data were fed into it.

 

And now come these leaked emails showing that the very scientists who were responsible for championing the hockey stick - all at the heart of the IPCC establishment - have been regularly discussing how the evidence could be manipulated to promote their cause.

 

The greatest myth of all in this story is the claim that the succession of alarmist reports produced by the IPCC represents a 'consensus' of the views of '2,500 of the world's top climate scientists'.

 

In every way, this is wildly misleading. The vast majority of those who contribute to those IPCC reports are not climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all, but economists or sociologists - even just environmental activists with no scientific qualifications whatever.

 

The IPCC was never intended to be an impartial body, weighing the evidence for and against man-made global warming and coming up with objective conclusions.

 

It was set up by a small group of scientists already so firmly committed to the belief in 'human-induced climate change' that they were not prepared to examine any evidence which contradicted it.

 

A detailed study of the contributors to the most recent IPCC report has shown that the number of scientists responsible for the key chapter on the extent and causes of global warming - on which everything else in the report depended - was not 2,500, but barely 50.

 

Almost all this handful of scientists were firmly committed to the official view on global warming before they were appointed - and they include those whose leaked emails have now created a shock wave running around the world.

 

Tellingly, what they also all have in common is that their findings are based on computer models programmed to assume the chief cause of global warming is the rise in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

 

It is precisely this assumption which more than anything else has been called into question by the fact that global temperatures have not been continuing to rise as the computer models insisted they should.

 

Even some of the most committed scientific supporters of the global warming theory now admit the warming process has come to a halt - although they insist that in a decade or two it will re- emerge again stronger than ever.

 

The fact remains that the models on which the whole global warming panic was based have been proved dismally wrong, suggesting that the theory on which they were programmed may itself have been fundamentally flawed.

 

Yet on this basis, the world's politicians, led by our own in Britain, are nevertheless proposing the most damaging measures ever put forward in history - cuts in carbon emission which, if implemented, would plunge our world back into the Dark Ages - to meet a crisis which it now seems was never going to happen anyway.

 

Before it is too late, we must insist our politicians re- examine the increasingly shaky scientific case on which all those proposals are based.

 

For nearly 20 years, from Al Gore to President Obama, they have been intoning to us that 'the science is settled'. But as ever more scientists from outside the IPCC's self- selected 'magic circle' now maintain, it has never been more obvious that this simply isn't true.

 

No one has put this better than Professor Lindzen, one of the world's leading climatologists, when he wrote: 'Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age.'

 

With the entire future of our civilisation at stake, it is no longer good enough for our politicians just to shout 'deniers' and 'flat earthers' at all those genuinely expert scientists now begging them to look properly at the evidence. They must be prepared to listen - and, for the sake of our planet, to think again.

[Guest alex]

Do I get a prize for guessing this was in today's Mail? That's before I've read it btw.

[The Fish 10971]

It's simple maths iyam.

 

We're carving through forests at an appalling rate, we're dramatically increasing pollutants in the atmosphere and we're burning through fossil fuels as if they'll go on forever. If you truly believe all this will not have a lasting effect on climate you're a moron.

 

The fact the stats don match computer models don't mean global warmin is a myth it just means weather patterns are so preposterously complicated we're as yet unable to accurately predict them.

 

Whether the timescale is millenia or minutes, is up for discussion, whether man has affected all this shouldnt be.

[Renton 22003]

Do I get a prize for guessing this was in today's Mail? That's before I've read it btw.

 

Saturday's Mail.

 

If ever a paper had an agenda it's the Mail. For some reason their agenda seems to be spouting utter bullshit.

[AgentAxeman 189]

whoa guys, no need to be nasty. ffs, i only asked a question!

[Renton 22003]

whoa guys, no need to be nasty. ffs, i only asked a question!

 

could it be we've been lied to all along?

 

Answer: no.

[Park Life 71]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

[Renton 22003]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

[wykikitoon 20743]

Said all along its bollocks

[AgentAxeman 189]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

i wish i was as absolutely, positively certain as you Renton, but i'm not.

 

tbh, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the 2 arguments

[Guest alex]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

Yes,

 

Its the only way most of them can get funded.

 

No one is saying putting bad stuff in the air is good, but mankinds contribution combimed with pollutants released via volcanoes, the sea and the like is miniscule. Also the scare mongering has been ridiculous.

You think the environmental lobby is more powerful than oil companies etc.? How would that work exactly?

[Park Life 71]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

It's how they get fat juicy grants...Or do they work for free?

[Renton 22003]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

Yes,

 

Its the only way most of them can get funded.

 

No one is saying putting bad stuff in the air is good, but mankinds contribution combimed with pollutants released via volcanoes, the sea and the like is miniscule. Also the scare mongering has been ridiculous.

 

I hold scientists in much greater esteem than you it seems. I also think such wide scale falsification is virtually impossible, along with nearly all conspiracy theories. It's very convenient for people to hold an alternate view though for selfish reasons.

[NJS 4411]

tbh, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the 2 arguments

 

Despite being very pro-science, I do think that the "we'll be fucked by 2050" lobby have gone too far but thats probably due to needing to get politicians to act. If they were perhaps honest and said "there will be serious changes within 200 years" then the chances of action would be lost.

 

I still hope to see a clean replacement for oil in worldwide use in my lifetime - I think that's the key.

[Park Life 71]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

Yes,

 

Its the only way most of them can get funded.

 

No one is saying putting bad stuff in the air is good, but mankinds contribution combimed with pollutants released via volcanoes, the sea and the like is miniscule. Also the scare mongering has been ridiculous.

 

Agreed.

[JawD 99]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

i wish i was as absolutely, positively certain as you Renton, but i'm not.

 

tbh, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the 2 arguments

 

Is usually the case in most things

[Park Life 71]

tbh, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the 2 arguments

 

Despite being very pro-science, I do think that the "we'll be fucked by 2050" lobby have gone too far but thats probably due to needing to get politicians to act. If they were perhaps honest and said "there will be serious changes within 200 years" then the chances of action would be lost.

 

I still hope to see a clean replacement for oil in worldwide use in my lifetime - I think that's the key.

 

I think 'scientists' have run out of things to 'panic' about, so are looking at this as one last big payday. Confrenece in Hawaii anyone?? ha ha

[Park Life 71]

If we killed all the pets in the UK we'd reach our Co2 tagets for the decade.

[NJS 4411]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

i wish i was as absolutely, positively certain as you Renton, but i'm not.

 

tbh, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the 2 arguments

 

Is usually the case in most things

 

Classic philosophy from Babylon 5:

 

"Understanding is a three-edged sword - my side, your side and the truth".

Edited November 23, 2009 by NJS

[Renton 22003]

It's all made up. New scam to sell us all the things we already have again.

 

Coming from the man who thinks HIV is a scam to sell antiviral drugs iirc?

 

Do you seriously think all the world's climatologists (or the vast majority of them) are in on it?

 

 

i wish i was as absolutely, positively certain as you Renton, but i'm not.

 

tbh, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the 2 arguments

 

Is usually the case in most things

 

Classic philosophy from Bayblon 5:

 

"Understanding is a three-edged sword - my side, your side and the truth".

 

That's what confidence intervals are for.

[AgentAxeman 189]

If we killed all the pets in the UK we'd reach our Co2 tagets for the decade.

 

 

 

but shirley when they degrade they will release NO2? which is classed as a greenhouse gas?

 

or you could incinerate them i suppose, but that'll just achieve the same thing i would guess?

 

[Happy Face 29]

Deja Vu

[Park Life 71]

It's like when they admitted tap water was better than most bottled waters, that butter was better than margerine, that fat stored vitamins, that there actually is water on the moon.........

[Park Life 71]

Wasnt it all the deed fishies from the sea that killed off the dinasoars?

 

 

What dinosaurs??

[donaldstott 0]

Article is drivel. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that climate change is happening.

 

Whilst I trust most scientists, I have a natural mistrust of American scientists because of the power of the oil lobby.

 

Shamefully it looks like America is still not going to agree to binding targets, which will inevitably mean India and China won't either (why should they)..

 

Whilst i think the climate change argument is overwhelingly convincing, the need to replace fossil fuels with new sources of power is just as powerful an argument.