Climate Con?

This is obviously a very hot topic just weeks before the Copenhagen Summit in which the leaders of the world  will agree on a plan of action to save the world from all sorts of disasters......!

The most interesting part of this debate is how one-sided it is and how a few have rail-roaded the entire debate away from whether Climate Change is really caused by (man-made) CO2 emissions and that EVERY politician has jumped on the band wagon.

I’m no scientist but I have read a few of the books on the subject including Tim Flannery’s book, “The Weather Makers” and “The Chilling Stars” by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder to mention a few. I am also not in favour of pollution or the destruction of the planet, making thousand of species extinct, but there is no longer a debate about how to utilize the available resources - it has been decided that this is the greatest threat to the planet AND that we can do something about it. It may well be a serious threat to our planet, but is it really something caused by man and is it really something we can do something about? If one is questioning this ‘fact’ then one is now considered on par with a holocaust denier!

Another interesting fact is that the scientists agreeing with this theory are granted loads of funds and resources and the ones questioning the theory are having their grants and funding taken away - it speaks volumes for ‘independent’ research.

Recently my godfather wrote a presentation on the subject which I found very insightful and interesting (he visited Greenland last year) and has seen first hand what is are called the frontier of Climate Change.

I will not re-write the entire piece but instead try and post it on my blog (unfortunately it’s written in Danish with a few quotes etc in English), but the main points are that the climate has always changed - we have data going back hundreds of thousands of years - but the entire theory is based on the development since 1850 and even in that period the majority of the change occurred between 1910 - 1940.

It has been much warmer in the past than it is currently (in the Bronze Age and in the Middle Ages from 900 - 1300 AD) and there are all sort of potential explanations, the sun and it’s activity being one of them as we should not forget that without the sun the temperature on earth would be -273C.

Since I started penning this piece the most interesting developments have taken place after the University of East Anglia’s servers were hacked and a great deal of email correspondence has been posted on the web. This calls into question whether the lead scientist(s) have abolished science for politics as they seem to have been as ivolved in dis-crediting anyone challenging their ‘beliefs’ as they have been in genuine research. 

What is even more disturbing (and completely new to me) is that the raw data used for establishing historical global temperatures has been deleted. The reason this is important is that the entire theory behind man-made climate change is based on this data which has then been ‘adjusted’ - the adjustment is a scientific one as the way in which the data was collected since 1850 has not been as consistent as it is today. There would have been a number of data points throughout the years for different days and different places around the world. Turning that into an average temperature for the planet is obviously not that straight forward. What we are now left with is the ‘adjusted’ data. Requests for the original data have been rejected and now appear to be impossible to satisfy as the data has been lost or destroyed.

The key reason this analysis is important is that earlier periods’ warming looked a lot like the current warming e.g. the medieval warm period. Research led by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University suggested that while the Atlantic (think vineyards in Britain and Vikings sailing everywhere in open long boats) was much warmer the Pacific had been cooler. Without this research there wouldn’t be a climate change movement, because there would be no scientific evidence to suggest that the period since 1850 is extraordinary. That the data on which this whole argument is based may be lost is beyond belief....! Is it just me or does it sound a little bit like the weapons of mass destruction that weren’t really there, but served a purpose in getting a particular course of action through?

The one piece of good news is that Nigel (now Lord) Lawson has announced the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to bring “reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant”. This is desperately needed and maybe the timing will enable it to have a better chance of getting media coverage, than it otherwise would have!