By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
March 12, 2009
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
The atmosphere is cooling, the ice is expanding, the seas are not rising -- even though carbon emissions are increasing. The evidence is now crystal clear to anyone with an unwashed brain that man-made global warming theory is sheer unadulterated bunkum. So how do the warmers react to the ever more embarrassing evidence that they have hitched their reputations to the biggest anti-scientific scam in history? By ratcheting up the hysteria to fever pitch and shrieking that their predictions about the impending irreversible environmental apocalypse have grievously underestimated the catastrophe which is going to be far, far worse.
At the international climate change conference in Copenhagen this week, we were told that the seas would rise by as much as a metre by 2100, that they would turn into acid, and that even the rainforests would be felled not by the loggers’ chainsaws but by the greatest pollutant in the history of the universe, carbon dioxide.
Read these reports carefully and you can see the scam at work. All of these hysterical predictions revolve around a massive ‘if’. They are all based on the assumption that rising carbon dioxide levels produce runaway global warming and inevitable ecological catastrophe. Ignoring the self-evident fact that this theory has already been proved false – as CO2 levels have risen, the climate has stayed pretty flat and in recent years has even cooled -- they then apply this bogus premise to topics not previously covered – the acidity of seas, rainforests – and hey presto, a fresh range of even greater catastrophes is conjured up from their crystal balls....er, computer models.
The Independent reported:
Sea levels are predicted to rise twice as fast as was forecast by the United Nations only two years ago, threatening hundreds of millions of people with catastrophe, scientists said yesterday in a dramatic new warning about climate change. Rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are likely to push up sea levels by a metre or more by 2100, swamping coastal cities and obliterating the living space of 600 million people who live in deltas, low-lying areas and small island states.... The Greenland ice sheet, in particular, is not simply melting but melting ‘dynamically’ - that is, it is collapsing in parts as meltwater seeps down through crevices and speeds up its disintegration.
Well that’s mighty strange, because here’s an article in Science last January, drawing upon a meeting of the American Geophysical Union the previous month, which said the precise opposite:
So much for Greenland ice’s Armageddon. ‘It has come to an end,’ glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the United Kingdom said during a session at the meeting. ‘There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off ‘ of the speed-up, she said. Nearly everywhere around southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000. An increasingly warmer climate will no doubt eat away at the Greenland ice sheet for centuries, glaciologists say, but no one should be extrapolating the ice’s recent wild behavior into the future.
News of a broad slowdown comes from a wide-ranging survey of glacier conditions across southeastern Greenland. Researchers reported in 2007 that two of the area's major outlet glaciers--Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq--had slowed by the previous summer. But at the meeting, Murray and 10 of her Swansea colleagues reported results from their 2007 and 2008 surveys of the shape and appearance of the 14 largest outlet glaciers of southeast Greenland.
When glaciers speed up, they thin, and their lower, leading edge that floats on the sea retreats. So the Swansea researchers flew laser altimeters over the glaciers to estimate their changing volumes and, indirectly, their changing velocities. They also studied satellite images and aerial photographs in order to track the movements of natural markings on the ice.
Taken together, the data show ‘there's a pattern of speeding up to maximum velocity and then slowing down since 2005,’ Murray said. ‘It's amazing; they sped up and slowed down together. They're not in runaway acceleration. Something happened that has switched off’ the acceleration event of 2003 to 2005.
Now look at what another expert said at Copenhagen:
Jonathan Bamber, an ice sheet expert at the University of Bristol, told the conference that previous studies had misjudged the so-called Greenland tipping point, at which the ice sheet is certain to melt completely. ’We're talking about the point at which it is 100% doomed. It seems quite an important number to get right.’
It certainly does.
‘We found that the threshold is about double what was previously published’, said Bamber. It would take an average global temperature rise of 6C to push Greenland into irreversible melting, the new study found. Previous estimates, including those in the recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the critical threshold was about 3C - which many climate scientists expect to be reached in the coming decades. ‘The threshold temperature has been substantially underestimated in previous studies. Our results have profound implications for predictions of sea level rise from Greenland over the coming century,’ the scientists said.
Profound implications indeed – the first being that Greenland’s melting ice sheets are probably not going to drown the world after all, and the second being that once again the IPCC got the science wrong.
And now look at something else Bamber told the conference:
He said evidence from past climates confirmed that Greenland should be able to survive temperature rises higher than 3C. An ice sheet about half the size is known to have persisted there during the Eemian period, about 125,000 years ago, when temperatures were about 5C higher than today.
Greenland was 5 degrees warmer 125,000 years ago than it is today, eh? Must’ve been all those motor cars and coal fired power stations and industrialisation. And it wasn’t the end of the world either. Fancy!
Professor Nils-Axel Mörner is the former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is past president of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project. He is probably the foremost expert in the world on the subject of sea-level rise. This is what he said in 2007 about the alleged sea level rise at that point. There was no evidence of sea level rise anywhere. None. There was no trend to report. Sea level rise was a myth. Prof Mörner was an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is what he said about the process which led the IPCC to make its predictions of alarming (if subsequently reduced) sea level rise:
Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a ‘correction factor,’ which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow— I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
That is terrible! As a matter of fact, it is a falsification of the data set. Why? Because they know the answer. And there you come to the point: They ‘know’ the answer; the rest of us, we are searching for the answer. Because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don’t find it!
I have been the expert reviewer for the IPCC, both in 2000 and last year. The first time I read it, I was exceptionally surprised. First of all, it had 22 authors, but none of them— none—were sea-level specialists. They were given this mission, because they promised to answer the right thing.
For this heresy, Prof Mörner is undoubtedly to be damned along with the rest of us for being a global warming ‘denier’ (or even more dementedly, a ‘climate change creationist’ -- yes, I know, I know, but when did elementary logic ever make an appearance in such circles?).
Unfortunately for the warmers, more and more such distinguished scientists are now openly denouncing the scam – and such sceptics now have the wind in their sails. Virtually unreported this week, a parallel international conference on climate change was taking place in New York. This conference attracted no fewer than 800 scientists and others to discuss ‘Global warming: was it ever a crisis?’ The BBC, whose Today programme yesterday devoted its prime 0810 slot to unchallenged ‘melting ice/rising seas/we are all doomed’ propaganda, has not even mentioned the New York conference. And as far as I can see, of the British papers only the Guardian attended it – not to report the proceedings, but to sneer. Thus Suzanne Goldenberg wrote:
It would be easy to dismiss this gathering as a pity party for people on the fringes of modern thought
which of course she proceeded to do. The attendees were
almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age
and worse still, other than the academics,
they are affiliated with rightwing thinktanks.
Well, say no more.
Even Goldenberg, however, could hardly dismiss as some maverick nutter one of the speakers, the eminent meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT. Having crisply observed that most scientists are unaware that doubling or even tripling CO2 would have only a marginal impact on global temperature, Lindzen explained why so many scientists have gone along with the man-made global warming scam:
Most funding that goes to global warming would not be provided were it not for the climate scare. It has therefore become standard to include in any research proposal the effect of presumed AGW on your topic, quite irrespective of whether it has any real relevance or not. Lindzen asserted that it boils down to a matter of scientific logic against authority. The global warming movement has skilfully co-opted sources of authority, such as the IPCC and various scientific academies... the pro-alarm policy statements that are issued by various professional societies express the views of only the activist few, who often control the governing Council.
But it was the Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, who knows a thing or two about totalitarian ideologies, who summed up the phenomenon:
He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person. The environmentalists say that the planet must be saved, but from whom and from what? ‘In reality’, the President commented, ‘we have to save it, and us, from them’.
Quite.
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