You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? Al Gore’s full-of-holes science film An Inconvenient Truth wins him a Peace Prize, but Channel 4’s counter to it, The Great Global Warming Swindle, “did not fulfil obligations to be impartial”.
Well, Mr Gore is certainly not impartial, and nor are the one-sided environmental lobby who have shamelessly manipulated the media and the public into believing that human-influenced global warming is a fact.
So successful have they been that regulator Ofcom decided that people were not misled by the Channel 4 documentary because “the link between human activity and global warming … became settled before the film was broadcast”.
The science is far from settled, of course. It is becoming less and less settled, with more and more embarrassing evidence coming to light – demonstrated by Lawrence Solomon’s iconoclastic book, The Deniers. Mr Solomon, a widely respected environmentalist, started out to discredit opposition to human-influenced global warming, but found so many distinguished experts in the relevant fields challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that he was forced to change his views.
Central planks of the global warming lobby have been blown out of the water, but mysteriously no-one takes any notice.
The famous Mann hockey-stick proof of unnatural warming? Shown to be misconceived. Drowning polar bears? They can swim, and they’re multiplying. Melting Antarctic? Most of it is cooling. Hurricanes? Nothing whatsoever to do with warming air. And to cap it all, the earth is actually cooling and will be for at least another seven years – maybe more, since solar physicists say the earth has entered a 30-year period of global cooling.
All the most recent evidence is against human-influenced climate change, but the green lobby have a stranglehold that they relish, because it gives them power. They must be delighted, and a little surprised, that we still believe. We have been brainwashed, and most of us love it.
Typical of the media desire to avoid challenging the green consensus is an article in the respected Eastern Daily Press last week, on the subject of economist Sir Nicholas Stern and his report, The Economics of Climate Change. It admits there was a nasty smell at the UEA while he was there, but this turned out to be some unidentified gas – and not carbon dioxide, for a change.
Still, possibly symbolic, thought the EDP does not explore this. Instead it headlines the piece “Together we can save the planet” – manifestly untrue – and concludes: “But if Lord Stern (as he is now, so it obviously hasn’t done him any harm) can see the chance to make the difference, then surely we must too.”
Hardly objective reporting, but it’s a signed piece by the environment correspondent, so I suppose that’s all right. Presumably no obligation to be impartial here, despite Lord Stern’s report being pretty much demolished shortly after its publication by distinguished environmental economists such as Dr Richard Tol. He details a number of major failings in the report, saying that the conclusions reached are twisted and absurd. He concludes: “The Stern Review can be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent.” Very strong words from an authority on the subject, so why are they ignored by the media? For those who are interested in both sides of the argument, there is much more in Mr Solomon’s book.
I am not saying that book – or the documentary – should be taken as gospel. There are mistakes in most things. No-one’s perfect. What I object to (when I’m not laughing) is the assumption that climate change orthodoxy is gospel, and that no-one is allowed to challenge it. Which is where we seem to be.
All the usual suspects welcomed Ofcom’s decision on The Great Global Warming Swindle and, quite typically, misrepresented it. To avoid wasting space here, details can be found at Climate Audit. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Except…except that top Russian scientists have now gone on the attack, saying: “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round.” Ice core results have always suggested this, though the figures have been typically twisted by green activists.
Russia’s signing up to Kyoto was purely political, says Oleg Sorokhtin, of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ocean Studies: “The Kyoto Protocol is a huge waste of money. The Earth’s atmosphere has built in regulatory mechanisms that moderate climate changes.”
In America influential physicists are suggesting that the IPCC has ignored the key question of climate sensitivity – how much the climate is influenced by levels of carbon dioxide. Not much publicity is given to the fact that this is likely to be “harmlessly low”, since the effect is logarithmic and not cumulative.
A paper published by the American Physical Society’s Physics and Society Forum plumps for natural variability of most of the earth’s recent warming and points out: “In the past 70 years the sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon and Pluto warmed at the same time as the earth.”
Climate change research scientist Dr Roy Spencer has similar views on climate sensitivity, backed up by recent evidence. His comments can be found here.
In Australia, Dr David Evans, a scientist who devoted years to measuring the country’s compliance with Kyoto, has come to the conclusion that “since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”
Well if you’re on the global warming gravy train, it seems you either keep quiet or misrepresent the evidence. And as for those, including the media, who back the establishment without knowing very much about the details, the words of pre-global warming US journalist Walter Lippmann seem appropriate: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”