For at least a decade, intimately connected with energy use, have
been claims on climate change. Richard Lindzen, arguably the
world’s most renowned climate scientist, describes our
understanding of the science of climate as “primitive.” Yet many
in the media persist in treating alarmist “climate experts” as
“all-knowing.” But then the same media have a long history of
taking up “end is nigh” scaremongering. It’s good for ratings. We
have had a litany of warnings that “billions could die” when
AIDS, Avian flu, SARS, Ebola, mad cow disease, the millennium bug
— the list is endless — hit the headlines. When they didn’t of
course, media alarmists shrugged, claimed they “simply report the
facts” and moved on to warn about the next looming disaster.
Since man set foot on the earth, however, nothing has quite
gripped the angst-ridden imagination like the weather gods
visiting their fury at human behavior and life, so much connected
with the use of fossil fuel energy. Media editors know this.
Where once we banished such “end is nigh” eccentrics to the
limits of society, today, they are fêted for spinning prediction
as science and conducting publicly funded research to “save the
planet.” Their messages are aided by apocalyptic video game
scenarios passing for media news reports.
Nowhere has this been thrown into more graphic relief than in two
international climate conferences held in March this year. The
“expert” conclusions of each could not have been more starkly
divergent. But it is in the aims, nature and public
pronouncements of each conference that we discern where the real
science of climate understanding lays, and thus who are the real
“climate deniers.” All of which has profound implications for the
future of energy, energy policy and energy investment.
The Alarmist Conference
The climate alarmist conference met in Copenhagen March 10-12 and
was attended by over 2,000 activists, mostly non-scientists. It
was billed as an “emergency summit” ahead of next December’s UN
global climate summit to be held in the same city. Such is the
panic among climate/political activists that world governments
will use the economic crisis as an excuse to avoid committing to
binding national carbon targets come December, it was felt vital
to up the political ante. If you thought that would mean
scientists pointing to the latest accruing scientific evidence of
impending disaster, however, you would be wrong. Far from
presenting any new (or old) actual evidence, the
conference majored on politicians doling out the media’s
headlines based on the latest apocalyptic computer-modeled
predictions.
The conference duly warned of even higher sea levels and
even higher global temperatures all presaging
even greater catastrophes. Apparently warnings of
temperature rises of 2 to 3 degrees C. clearly were not shocking
us enough. Now they could be as high as 4 or 5 degrees
C. The London Times
reported the conference as claiming the “ice sheets are
melting” and that increased global warming would lead to
other “impacts,” including more hurricanes, floods, and
starvation.And just to show how previous prevarication by world
leaders has already cost us, we learned that “two years ago it
was widely thought that holding temperature increases to a
maximum of 2C was achievable if governments made the effort to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. It is now
recognised that an 80 percent cut is needed.”
To sum up, the alarmist conference in Copenhagen was not about
science, it was about politics and prophecy. For the actual
science, including the latest scientific evidence and trends,
observers in Copenhagen would have had to travel to New York.
The Non-Alarmist Conference
Seven hundred climate “skeptics,” many of them scientists,
including Richard Lindzen of MIT, attended the Second
International Conference on Climate Change, “Global Warming: Was
It Ever Really a Crisis?” The conference sponsored by the
Heartland Institute, was held in New York on March 8-10. This was
a wholly different kind of affair. It focused on the
empirical science of climate, the latest scientific data
and climate trends. As such, in dealing with the gritty reality
of climate science, it duly got almost zero mass media coverage.
Most journalists, it seems, do not like dealing with real science
and allaying public scares is just bad for business.
In complete contrast to Copenhagen, the New York conference was
addressed by a who’s who of distinguished climate scientists. As
well as hearing from Professor Lindzen, the conference was
addressed by Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the
International Arctic Research Center, Professor Paul Reiter of
the Pasteur Institute, and Dr. Willie Soon of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to name but a few.
These eminent scientists are the very ones the media likes to
smear as “crackpots” and “climate deniers.” What the conference
received was the fruit of real research and study that showed sea
levels, far from experiencing dramatic rise, are seeing the same
level of rise they have been seeing for over 200 years. Professor
S. Fred Singer, highlighting the claim of one alarmist who warned
a rise of even 18 cm over a century would be “catastrophic,”
pointed out that the gentleman concerned is “apparently unaware
that 18cm a century is the ongoing rate of rise — which implies
no additional rise in sea levels. In other words, the human
influence is zero.”
Alarmist claims over the “melting of the Western Antarctic ice
sheet” also got short shrift as it was revealed the long-term
melting of the Western ice sheet has been known about for
decades. Far more significant was the data that confirmed how the
Antarctic is not melting at all except for one tiny corner, the
Antarctic Peninsula. The lack of scientific evidence that global
ice was in meltdown was tied in with the fact that key
computer-modeled temperature predictions — upon which the whole
alarmist edifice stands — assume a linear rise in temperatures
as carbon emissions rise. But such computer predictions were
shown to have proven consistently and hopelessly inept. Far from
following the linear rise anticipated by the alarmists, the
actual satellite-measured global temperature data reveals that
global temperatures have flattened out in recent years and, more
recently, dropped. On the plain scientific data, if the present
trend continues, the world will in fact be 1.1 degree C.
cooler by 2100. In short, the world’s ice is not in
meltdown. Similarly, claims that hurricane activity was rising
was refuted by the scientific data showing hurricane activity,
currently, is at a 30-year low.
Much more could be said, but reading the New York presentations
(linked below) one can only be impressed by the standard of
empirical scientific study and debate and, in Copenhagen, the
distinct lack of it. The juxtaposition of these two conferences
is thus iconic of the entire climate debate — or rather the mass
media’s collusive and shameful closing down of it. Unfortunately,
many political leaders have simply bought the media-dominating
alarmist line.
Vaclav Klaus, keynote speaker at the New York conference and
current president of the European Union, lamented that, “the
minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the
fantasies of the scaremongers.” Yet it’s those same leaders who
are about to consider diverting vast economic and energy
resources at the current G20 and at December’s “Kyoto II.”
Frightening, when you consider they will do so based on an agenda
propagated by a highly anti-intellectual, exclusively prophetic,
anti-science ‘faith’ movement — the real climate
deniers.
(Go here
for a list of links to the audio, video, power point and pdf
presentations from the ICCC’s “Global Warming: Was It Ever Really
a Crisis?” — decide for yourself.)
