2018 has seen another great push for action on Climate Change. This included the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issuing a report warning that the world has:
‘only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report.
Among the report’s recommendations are that we move away from eating meat, dairy and eat locally sourced food (yes we have no bananas). It also recommends that we annually spend $2.4 trillion on greening the energy system between 2016 and 2035. This equates to over 3% of global GDP.
They warn that the world is currently 1 degree C warmer than pre-industrial levels. This report was covered as if holy writ by the mainstream media across the globe, but the basic premise of the report raises some interesting concerns.
- What is the figure for pre-industrial temperature? Even when it’s explained it doesn’t make much sense https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2017/defining-pre-industrial/.
- What pre-industrial era is the right one?
- We know temperatures used to be higher when the Romans grew grapes in Britain, and Vikings farmed Greenland.
- We had the Little Ice Age in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period.
- Tree rings show that between 1211 and 1225 was a period of sustained rainfall and mild weather which coincided precisely with the meteoric rise of Genghis Khan’s empire.
- In 2016 we passed 10 years since Al Gore warned we had ‘10 years to save the planet’ and that New York city would be under water by now. This hasn’t happened, so why should we believe them now?
We are being asked to commit to a further loss of national sovereignty and join a global $2.4 trillion effort on climate change that would necessarily impose changes of diet on the British people. For this to happen I believe the following 3 tests must be passed.
- The globe is warming – the climates always changes, only the original concern of global warming is meaningful.
- The warming is man-made – if this isn’t as a result of human influenced greenhouse gas emissions, then the prescribed actions are meaningless.
- The warming will be catastrophic – there is little point in taking action if the impact is only two more weeks of summer and not much else.
The answers to these tests must be a matter of science not feelings or politics. Credit must go to Dennis Prager and his show for these.
Does the sciencesupport that Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming ishappening?
Addressing the first test ‘the globe is warming’. The official NASA global temperature data shows from February 2016 to February 2018 “global average temperatures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius”. The biggest two-year drop in the past century, but you may not have heard this in the media. Global temperatures have not increased for much of this century.
Is the warming man-made? Despite some in the media saying the Sun doesn’t cause global warming (it really does), there is evidence that the warming isn’t man-made. Sun spot activity has been on the increase in the time that the globe did warm and “will probably be able to account for somewhere between half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century“. Volcanos beneath the Antarctic ice sheet are ‘contributing to rapidly melting glacier’. Again from Prager University we need to ask ourselves, What Do Scientists Say? It is also worth asking what caused previous climate change and why would this simply not be the same now? – https://youtu.be/RkdbSxyXftc.
Is the warming catastrophic? Bjorn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a believer in man-made global warming doesn’t seem to think so https://youtu.be/3PWtaackIJU. Nigel Lawson sums up the concern of catastrophic climate change in his paper The Trouble with Climate Change when he says:
‘The fact remains that the most careful empirical studies show that, so far at least, there has been no perceptible increase, globally, in either the number or the severity of extreme weather events. And, as a happy coda, these studies also show that, thanks to scientific and material progress, there has been a massive reduction, worldwide, in deaths from extreme weather events.’
So is the scare about ‘climate change’ really a question of science or politics? Patrick Moore who helped to create Greenpeace, and then left it, explains in this video https://youtu.be/BpBnJq19R60 ‘What began as a mission to improve the environment for the sake of humanity became a political movement in which humanity became the villain and hard science a non-issue’.
We often hear 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real. Alex Epstein, founder of the Centre for Industrial Progress, reveals the origins of the bogus “97%” figure Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?
Whilst it is clear the climate is changing, it is not clear that Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming is happening. What is however clear, is that we shouldn’t squander our sovereignty and wealth on a battle that will impoverish the developing world, and strip us of freedoms we enjoy today.
Author Mike Swadling 18th December 2018
