Monday, September 20, 2004

Neil Collins: Afraid of Global Warming? Chill Out

(Filed: 20/09/2004)

First there was Frances, then came Ivan, and now Jeanne is stirring herself to do her worst. They are, of course, the hurricanes that are promising to make it the windiest season ever recorded in the Caribbean. Who knows, as we grind through the alphabet, we may even get to Hurricane Tony, named after the man who last week set out on a new mission to save the planet.

Even by his own low standards, the Prime Minister's speech marked a deep meteorological depression. To maintain, as he did, that climate change is the gravest threat we face, is arrant nonsense. Compared with, say, an atomic bomb in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square, it's almost benign.

But surely, you protest, we're squandering the Earth's scarce resources, pouring poisonous gases into the atmosphere as never before and stand, as a particularly unctuous Thought for the Day put it last week, "on the edge of environmental catastrophe"?
Everyone, from St Tony and his chief scientific adviser, David King, to (regrettably) Michael Howard and (inevitably) the sandals brigade of the Lib Dems, is agreed: global warming is a terrible thing, and it's all our own fault.
The only path to redemption is to cut our output of carbon dioxide, before the Earth cooks and we drown under the melted ice caps.

All these hurricanes merely ram home the point; global warming isn't going to mean vineyards in the Scottish lowlands, but more storms, floods and pestilence.
Just look at those vast swarms of locusts that are eating Africa, following the unusual weather of last year. Oh, and don't forget Boscastle, the Cornish village that was almost buried under the weight of BBC reporters and cameramen that swept down the main street after the flood.

Next week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Vienna. The IPCC is a particularly smug body, with much to be smug about. The Kyoto accord is based on its findings, and since science is not John Prescott's strong suit, he could hardly question whether it made sense for Britain when he signed up to it. Besides, in the Year Zero of 1997, he'd have claimed that New Labour could walk on water by 2012.

Kyoto ranks as the most expensive confidence trick pulled on the world since Yalta in 1945. The IPCC's science is nothing of the kind, being merely a series of "scenarios" of what the weather might be like at the end of the century. Since it's hard enough to predict it for the middle of next week, to say that there are difficulties in long-term projections is putting it mildly.

As Martin Ågerup, president of the Danish Academy for Futures Studies, has said: "We simply do not know how much warmer the climate will be in 2100. In fact, the degree of (compound) uncertainty is so large that the mere exercise by the IPCC of providing temperature intervals is highly misleading and provides phoney confidence."*
The evidence that the world is warming is now pretty conclusive, but it's far from clear why, and the consequences are not obvious, either. Kyoto fingered CO2, perhaps because burning all that fossil fuel must surely do something bad, and every schoolboy knows about the greenhouse effect.

A warming world will melt the icecaps, and raise sea level, won't it? Well, not so far. Nils-Axel Mörner, head of paleo-geophysics at Stockholm University, has been studying the subject for 35 years. As he puts it: "No one in the world beats me on sea level."
He's been to the Maldives, often tipped as the first place to disappear under the waves, and can find no evidence that it's doing so. Satellite altimetry has only been going for 14 years, but it tells the same story.

If man-made CO2 was causing a rise in sea levels, we'd surely notice some effect over the past decade and a half. His best guess is for a rise of a couple of inches in sea level by the end of this century, which hardly threatens life as we know it.
Ah, but surely the weather is getting more violent? Barely a day goes by without more dramatic pictures of extreme conditions.

Madhav Khandekar has been studying weather patterns for 47 years, mostly for Environment Canada, and his conclusion is that it's the perception that has changed. More people and global television mean that freak events are less likely to escape detection, and do more damage because of the higher value of what's in their path. The weather itself isn't getting any worse.

The central mystery is why our politicians are so blinkered on this subject when, as Ruth Lea argues on the back page of today's paper, the policies we are following are clearly going to make us poorer, with slower growth and lost manufacturing jobs.
The scientists have been trying to get their message across, but at the last boondoggle on this subject, in Moscow in July, Prof King infuriated them by refusing to let them contribute.

The meeting mattered because, unless either Russia or the United States signs, the Kyoto treaty won't come into force. The Americans have no intention of doing so, and the Russians have resisted tremendous political pressure; even though they would get a multi-billion dollar windfall from selling the right to excess carbon emissions, President Putin's chief economic adviser believes that bad science is bad economics.
Forecasting is always difficult, especially for the future, as the old saw goes, and we love to spook ourselves with projections of doom and disaster. Here's one.
The last 600 years have seen a series of mini ice ages, well documented by those who shivered through them. They coincide with periods of low solar activity, and the next one is due in the middle of this century. So perhaps, instead of prostrating ourselves on the altar of global warming, we should be worrying about global cooling.

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