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making sense of change
 
 
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The danger is hot air, not global warming
« on: 2005-02-02 10:15:09 » |
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The Sunday Telegraph includes no less than two frontal attacks on the increasingly desparate doom-mongers here in the UK. A number of end-time prophets have set the countdown to apocalypse, but as usual, fanatics differ on the exact date of their predicted catastrophe.
While the IPPR report gave the apocalyptic "point of no return" as soon as ten years from now, others now claim that the world has twenty years before catastrophic climate 'rupture (see BBC News Online: "Climate change 'disaster by 2026'" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/4218441.stm).
Attached below is Ross Clarke's op-ed. Robert Matthews' article on climate hysteria and the recent paper by Ruddiman et al. ("Global warming? We need it to prevent and ice age") is not available online but I think it has been posted on CCNet.
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The danger is hot air, not global warming
The Sunday Telegraph, 30 January 2005
SOURCE: LINK
By Ross Clark
To lift Africa from the ravages of poverty and Aids would to most world leaders seem a big enough topic to fill a single speech. But not Tony Blair. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, the Prime Minister moved swiftly between the subjects of Africa and climate change. "On both," he said, "there are differences which need to be reconciled. If they could be reconciled or at least moved forward, it would make a huge difference to the prospects of international unity, as well as to people's lives and our future survival."
The implication was that anyone who supports development in Africa ought also to support measures to combat global warming. It is a link unlikely to be shared by African nations themselves, who made it clear at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg that they are more concerned with trade and economic growth than with climate change.
The reality is that measures to cut carbon emissions, widely blamed for global warming, have an enormous cost in terms of global development. You can either make a priority of combating global warming or you can make a priority of international development, but not both. As the economist Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out in these pages before, the effect of enacting the Kyoto treaty – which demands that the world reduce its carbon emissions to 1990 levels and keep them there – would be to limit global economic growth to the tune of $150 billion a year: twice the sum that would be required to provide the developing world with the education, healthcare and clean water that they so desperately need. Yet restrictions on carbon emissions will have a disproportionate impact on the developing world, whose less sophisticated industries rely more heavily on burning fossil fuels – limiting their ability to provide themselves with education, healthcare and clean water.
Fortunately for Africa, there is scant sign that Tony Blair is serious about taking his mission on climate change much beyond the platitudes of the international conference chamber. If Mr Blair really believed that cutting carbon emissions was crucial to the world's future survival, he would hardly have abandoned, in the face of the petrol tax protests in 2000, the fuel duty "escalator" introduced by the last Conservative government with the very purpose of cutting fossil fuel use. What he would have done is to have embarked on a programme of building nuclear power stations: the one alternative to coal and gas that produces sufficient energy without carbon emissions.
The measures he has taken to cut atmospheric CO2 have been token ones: forcing homeowners to fit double glazing when replacing windows and subsidising wind farms. In spite of their ugly dominance of the landscape, the 1,200 heavily subsidised wind turbines currently in operation are generating only 1 per cent of Britain's electricity.
There is, however, a political purpose behind Tony Blair's mission on global warming. It would considerably enhance his reputation as a world leader, especially among those whom he offended by going to war in Iraq, were he to go down as the man who succeeded in persuading George W Bush to make a gesture on global warming. When, early in his first term, President Bush withdrew from the Kyoto protocol, it was condemned as the act of an isolationist. More recently, he is said to have softened on the issue. One more push from Blair, goes the theory, and the President might just be prepared to back the Climate Stewardship Act: a measure introduced by the former senator John McCain that would commit the US to stabilising its carbon emissions at 2000 levels, but which has failed to become law. If Tony Blair does succeed in extracting a gesture from the US, it might silence those who claim he is Bush's poodle, but it would do little to alter mankind's chances of survival.
The US President is not quite such an isolationist on global warming as is commonly supposed. While the world's leaders and pop stars were in Davos, a group of dissenting climatologists and oceanographers met at the Royal Institution in London to question the scientific orthodoxy on global warming. They were supported by the former editor of Nature, John Maddox who, though himself hardly a noted champion of scientific dissent – he declined to publish studies questioning the link between HIV and Aids – has nevertheless been moved to describe the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "monolithic and complacent".
It is not hard to see what Maddox means. While all work questioning the extent of global warming tends to be dismissed by the global warming lobby as propaganda on behalf of the oil industry, wild theoretical predictions of global warming are allowed to stand without challenge. Last week, Nature carried the results of a project called climateprediction.net, which has harnessed the spare capacity of 90,000 personal computers to run and re-run simulations of climate change. An accompanying news story in Nature was headlined "Biggest-ever climate simulation warns temperatures may rise by 11 degrees C". Inevitably, the story was widely reported in these alarmist terms. Yet when read in detail, the Nature paper told a different story.
The climate change simulations were run 2,000 times, each time with slightly different assumptions. Only the very highest estimate predicted a rise of 11C. Most simulations suggested a rise of around 3.4C, while several actually predicted a fall in global temperatures (though these were discarded by the researchers on "technical grounds"). Moreover, the simulations proposed no timescale for the predicted changes.
One might reasonably conclude, given the wide variation in results, that the computer simulations so far devised to predict global warming are of little use and should not be relied upon in order to make decisions affecting the global economy. All the research team would say is "there's lots and lots more to do".
When global warming first emerged as an issue in the late 1980s, it was grimly forecast that the low-lying Maldives would soon be consumed by a rising Indian Ocean. Yet a Stockholm University project has discovered that sea levels there have actually fallen over the last 20 years.
If a computer simulation proves so inaccurate over 20 years, what chance is there that it will prove accurate over 100 years? The truth is that nobody yet has any idea whether the small increases in global temperatures so far measured are the start of a trend caused by fossil fuel burning, or whether they are part of natural, cyclical changes in the Earth's climate. What is certain is that measures to combat global warming will harm economic growth, and in doing so will put the world's poor at particular risk.
Copyright 2005, The Sunday Telegraph
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