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.
5 Replies to “Copenhagen and Natural Climate Change”
Hi Bill, thanks for the list. I read through it a few days ago as well (if it’s the same list, I’m struggling to open the link at the moment?) and some of the later reasons seemed quite strange, more like random statments not saying anything against man-made global warming theory? Not taking anything away from the valid reasons though, here are new reports from Russia I came across where further cherry picking tactics are likely being exposed: http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/16/climategate-just-got-much-much-bigger/
Servaas Hofmeyr
Wao that awesome lists, thanks bill for all this detail and all the list that you have put on, man i’m honour you as a prophet. And if there is anything i can pray for you, just let me know.
Kevin Chai
Since the demise of the cold war and the nuclear winter and sundry other calamities, man has sought to hang his fate onto some other catastrophic event. AGW fits the bill very nicely indeed and provides a reason for man to negate and reduce his impact on gaia.
Perhaps in ten or twenty years or less we can all breath a collective sigh of relief. Hopefully by then we won’t have caused too many hiccups in our economic wellbeing.
Gerry Van Hees
It may be only a matter of time before someone comes up with the ‘final solution’ to the Climate Change crisis: ie – overpopulation. But interestingly some of the current Copenhagen delegates have already been there and done that. Population control was the stated ‘solution’ of the influential (anthropologist Margaret Mead and team. In 1975, Mead organized the ‘The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering’ Conference in the US, attended by fellow anti population enthusiast, John Holdren.
Holdren, who Barack Obama’s has since appointed as his Science Advisor, was the co author of the 1977 book Ecoscience, which advocates for involuntary, forced abortion, mass sterilization, redistribution of wealth and a “Planetary Regime” to which national sovereignty is ceded – among other ‘enlightened’ measures. Holdren’s subsequent ‘spin’ to explain away these views that he’s elaborated on over 30 years, is not convincing.
Stephen Schneider, another of Mead’s 1975 Conference team, is now also an Advisor to Obama and a prominent player in the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC – a precursor to Cophenhagen. Schneider has flip flopped from climate cooling proponent to global warming advocate: in 1971 he said “Our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 °C. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age”!
In 1989 Schneider told Discover magazine “To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”
This lack of honesty seems to have become a recurring problem in light of the Climategate emails, with Mr Rudd himself being accused of untruthfulness.
Interestingly these ‘beliefs’ in people being the problem rather than the solution, and how to effectively limit them, harks back to another earlier and increasingly questionable theory, that of evolution. It was Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton who in 1883 first used the term “eugenics” a term which has come to encompass not just ‘selective breeding to improve the race’ but those measures that were ultimately taken by Hitler as the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. It was in fact the writings in 1914 of Madame Blavatsky’s and her Aryan doctrine that would influence the young Adolf Hitler.
The polarizing question concerning a reduction of the population is, who’s going to lead the way? Surely it should be those who have advocated this ‘solution’. However this could be a way off as it now seems with the climate cooling, they could well develop ‘cold feet’.
Michelle Shave.
Thanks Bill.
This list could be extended considerably, not least by the very recent study by Lindzen and Choi which concludes from actual observational data that the “feedbacks” (i.e. responses to incident radiation on the Earth’s surface) over the last 20 years show no change in the amount of radiant heat from the Earth into space. Iow, the heat incident on the earth is being re-radiated into space just as it always has been, and there is no increase in the amount trapped in the lower atmosphere (i.e not being radiated into space). This study was published in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this year. But of course, the alarmists and carpetbaggers have ignored it, sneered at it, and attempted to shoot the messengers etc in their usual style.
What we have seen in Copenhagen is a farce of global and monumental proportions. It has nothing whatever to do with science. All we see is world leaders and various hangers-on, bereft of their God-given reason, gone utterly stark raving mad. It is not a pretty sight. And the worst of it is that ignorami like Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision, having bought into this scam big time, has the temerity to hector Tony Abbott and Steve Fielding for their scepticism.
Hi Bill, thanks for the list. I read through it a few days ago as well (if it’s the same list, I’m struggling to open the link at the moment?) and some of the later reasons seemed quite strange, more like random statments not saying anything against man-made global warming theory? Not taking anything away from the valid reasons though, here are new reports from Russia I came across where further cherry picking tactics are likely being exposed:
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/16/climategate-just-got-much-much-bigger/
Servaas Hofmeyr
Wao that awesome lists, thanks bill for all this detail and all the list that you have put on, man i’m honour you as a prophet. And if there is anything i can pray for you, just let me know.
Kevin Chai
Since the demise of the cold war and the nuclear winter and sundry other calamities, man has sought to hang his fate onto some other catastrophic event. AGW fits the bill very nicely indeed and provides a reason for man to negate and reduce his impact on gaia.
Perhaps in ten or twenty years or less we can all breath a collective sigh of relief. Hopefully by then we won’t have caused too many hiccups in our economic wellbeing.
Gerry Van Hees
It may be only a matter of time before someone comes up with the ‘final solution’ to the Climate Change crisis: ie – overpopulation. But interestingly some of the current Copenhagen delegates have already been there and done that. Population control was the stated ‘solution’ of the influential (anthropologist Margaret Mead and team. In 1975, Mead organized the ‘The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering’ Conference in the US, attended by fellow anti population enthusiast, John Holdren.
Holdren, who Barack Obama’s has since appointed as his Science Advisor, was the co author of the 1977 book Ecoscience, which advocates for involuntary, forced abortion, mass sterilization, redistribution of wealth and a “Planetary Regime” to which national sovereignty is ceded – among other ‘enlightened’ measures. Holdren’s subsequent ‘spin’ to explain away these views that he’s elaborated on over 30 years, is not convincing.
Stephen Schneider, another of Mead’s 1975 Conference team, is now also an Advisor to Obama and a prominent player in the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC – a precursor to Cophenhagen. Schneider has flip flopped from climate cooling proponent to global warming advocate: in 1971 he said “Our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 °C. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age”!
In 1989 Schneider told Discover magazine “To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”
This lack of honesty seems to have become a recurring problem in light of the Climategate emails, with Mr Rudd himself being accused of untruthfulness.
Interestingly these ‘beliefs’ in people being the problem rather than the solution, and how to effectively limit them, harks back to another earlier and increasingly questionable theory, that of evolution. It was Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton who in 1883 first used the term “eugenics” a term which has come to encompass not just ‘selective breeding to improve the race’ but those measures that were ultimately taken by Hitler as the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. It was in fact the writings in 1914 of Madame Blavatsky’s and her Aryan doctrine that would influence the young Adolf Hitler.
The polarizing question concerning a reduction of the population is, who’s going to lead the way? Surely it should be those who have advocated this ‘solution’. However this could be a way off as it now seems with the climate cooling, they could well develop ‘cold feet’.
Michelle Shave.
Thanks Bill.
This list could be extended considerably, not least by the very recent study by Lindzen and Choi which concludes from actual observational data that the “feedbacks” (i.e. responses to incident radiation on the Earth’s surface) over the last 20 years show no change in the amount of radiant heat from the Earth into space. Iow, the heat incident on the earth is being re-radiated into space just as it always has been, and there is no increase in the amount trapped in the lower atmosphere (i.e not being radiated into space). This study was published in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this year. But of course, the alarmists and carpetbaggers have ignored it, sneered at it, and attempted to shoot the messengers etc in their usual style.
What we have seen in Copenhagen is a farce of global and monumental proportions. It has nothing whatever to do with science. All we see is world leaders and various hangers-on, bereft of their God-given reason, gone utterly stark raving mad. It is not a pretty sight. And the worst of it is that ignorami like Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision, having bought into this scam big time, has the temerity to hector Tony Abbott and Steve Fielding for their scepticism.
Murray R. Adamthwaite