The Copenhagen Summit is now almost over. While many observers believe that the conference is unlikely to come to any substantial agreement, that will not stop true believers and would-be messiahs from doing all they can to make a name for themselves.
Kevin Rudd, who at times thinks he is the Prime Minister of the world, and not just Australia, is certainly working feverishly to secure some kind of victorious outcome, hoping to cement his name in history – or infamy. Ditto with President Obama, who will do all he can in the last day or two to broker a deal.
While all the politicians and bureaucrats are huffing and puffing on the international stage, the actual issue of climate change tends to be clouded over in image and rhetoric. Actual scientific substance seems to be in short supply.
Thus it is worth coming back down to earth, and looking at a few scientific facts. And one of the biggest facts to be overlooked at Copenhagen is that climate change seems to be natural, and that humankind plays a very minor role in all of this.
In fact, the European Foundation has just released a dossier offering one hundred reasons why climate change is not man-made, but is in fact quite natural. I here offer the first twenty of these reasons. The full list can be accessed via the link below.
1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” – suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming.
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11) Politicians and activists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago.
12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds.
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”.
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control.
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century – within natural rates.
Until there is much more certainty on the role that humans play in climate change, it seems that the whole Copenhagen event has been one big exercise in futility and folly.
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/146138
[823 words]