Man-Made Global Warming: Fact Or Fraud?

Written by Andy Rowlands on August 22, 2019. Posted in Current News

Almost every week over the last few years we hear about terrible storms, massive flooding, heatwaves, droughts, famines, freak weather events, rising sea levels and the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide, all leading to dire predictions about the Earth’s future climate.

It seems the climate alarms are ringing all over the world, and the vast majority of climate scientists agree that we are in grave danger of turning the planet into a greenhouse from which there is no escape. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called it the most important issue of our time.

My aim in creating this article is to examine the facts, the claims, the climate models and the recorded observations, to get a true picture of what is actually happening to our climate.

I present the results below, which are derived from numerous documentaries and recordings of official hearings on the Internet, climate websites, respected authors, peer-reviewed studies, official governmental and university think tanks.

Atmospheric CO₂

No-one disputes the level of atmospheric CO₂ is rising, and that Mankind may be partly responsible for at least some of the present upward trend from burning of fossil fuels, and we are told this increasing level of CO₂ is causing a rise in global temperatures.

When photosynthesis began around four billion years ago, the level of atmospheric CO₂ was around 1200 parts per million (ppm), suggesting that is the ideal level, as chemical reactions only take place when the conditions are optimal or close to it.

During the Cambrian period, between 541 million years ago to the beginning of the Ordovician Period 485 million years ago, geologic records show it was as high as 7000ppm, which we are told should have been disastrous for life, but it was during this very time the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ occurred, which produced the progenitors of every species of animal that has lived since then, including Mankind.

Atmospheric CO₂ was first noted as rising in the mid-1700’s, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when it was recorded at 280ppm, and has been rising steadily since. Significant increases began in earnest in the mid-20^th Century, and it now stands at slightly over 400ppm, a 40% increase in the last 238 years. This is one of the central tenets of the global warming hypothesis, and is often quoted as leading to a dramatic increase in global temperatures, but does it? The simple answer is no.

Carbon dioxide has never driven temperature in the past, so why should it suddenly start doing it now? In fact this is exactly reversed. Temperature dictates the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and there is an approximate 800-year time lag between cause and effect. The temperature moves first, and CO₂ follows it 800 years later. So the current level of atmospheric CO₂ is the result of climatic conditions 800 years ago, which corresponds precisely with the height of the Medieval Warm Period.

If atmospheric CO₂ drove temperature, then over the last 238 years we should have expected to see a significant global temperature increase to match the increase in atmospheric CO₂, but what has been observed is an increase of just 0.8 of one degree C.

The reason there is a time-lag between cause and effect is that the oceans are so vast and so deep it takes hundreds of years for them to warm or cool. Warmer water emits more CO₂ and absorbs less CO₂, cooler water emits less CO₂ and absorbs more CO₂.

It can clearly be seen in the graph above that while CO₂ has gone up significantly recently, the temperature has not gone up to match, which disproves CO₂ as the driver of temperature.

The global atmosphere weighs approximately 5700 trillion tons, and is made up of various gases, the most important ones I reproduce below, with their percentage of the total atmosphere and concentration in parts per million.

Carbon dioxide accounts for just over 0.04% of the global atmosphere, and has only a 3% effect on global temperatures. Around 70% of global temperature is governed by water vapour and the Sun. Their effects are discussed separately in this essay.

During ice ages, levels of atmospheric CO₂ were significantly lower than today, as CO₂ is more soluble in cooler water, and conversely less CO₂ is soluble in warmer water, leading to a rise in atmospheric CO₂.

Humans are not the main source of atmospheric CO₂. Dying vegetation produces around 440 billion tons of atmospheric CO₂ per year. The oceans produce around 330 billion tons. Animals and bacteria produce about 150 billion tons per year, compared to around 35 billion tons from human activity.

Volcanoes produce around 200 million tons annually. It is estimated that within the next century or so, unless new reserves are found, we will start to run out of oil, natural gas and coal. When fossil fuels are exhausted, their contribution to net CO₂ emissions will cease and levels of rise in atmospheric CO₂ may start to flatten out.

In submarines it is very difficult to maintain a proper atmosphere, and they have extensive air conditioning systems to prevent levels of CO₂ becoming high enough to cause problems, as submariners have to be on top of their game all the time. Levels of CO₂ are maintained at 5000ppm with no ill effects.

It could be argued that the current level of atmospheric CO₂, instead of being dangerously high as many would have us believe, is in fact dangerously low. Below 150ppm photosynthesis stops, plants would start to die and we would be in danger of losing our supply of oxygen. During ice ages, it drops very close to the danger line of 150ppm.

During the last ice age it dropped to around 180ppm. All trees and many other plants, wheat, rice, soybeans and cotton, are handicapped because by historical standards, there is too little CO₂ in the atmosphere, not too much. We are effectively being starved of CO₂, and higher levels of atmospheric CO₂ will produce more abundant plant and crop growth and result in a ‘greener’ world less susceptible to droughts, so we should be glad the level of atmospheric CO₂ is rising, not trying to find ways of reducing it.

For the record, what you see coming out of power station chimneys and cooling towers is not pollution, nor is it CO₂, it is mostly water vapour. CO₂ is colourless (and odourless), or you would see it every time you exhale. What you see if you exhale in the winter is water vapour.

The effect of increased CO₂ on plant growth

We are often told how increasing levels of atmospheric CO₂ will have a disastrous effect on agriculture, and lead to millions dying from starvation, but will it? Again, the simple answer is no. Agricultural trials with different levels of CO₂ have shown plant growth is stimulated with elevated levels of CO₂, and a 2016 study showed a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the abovementioned effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The increased greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent to an area twice the size of the continental United States.

Green leaves use energy from sunlight through photosynthesis to chemically combine carbon dioxide drawn in from the air with water and nutrients tapped from the ground to produce sugars, which are the main source of food, fibre and fuel for life on Earth. Studies suggested, and now actual observations prove, that increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.

Carbon dioxide fertilization isn’t the only cause of the increased plant growth – nitrogen, land cover change and global temperature change, precipitation and sunlight changes all contribute to the greening effect.

To determine the extent of carbon dioxide’s contribution, researchers ran the data for carbon dioxide and each of the other variables in isolation through several computer models that mimic the plant growth observed in the satellite data.

“Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect”, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. “The second most important driver is nitrogen, at nine percent. So we see what an outsized role CO₂ plays in this process.”

Since 1960 there has been an increase in world grain production of between three and five times compared to before levels of atmospheric CO₂ started increasing more rapidly, which proves increasing levels of CO₂ are benefitting the world not harming it, despite the IPCC continuing to claim it will severely damage production. Maize, rice, soybeans and wheat all do better with higher levels of CO₂.

The effect of water vapour on global temperatures

Carbon dioxide is neither the largest contributor to global temperatures, nor the most important. By volume, CO₂ is approximately 0.04% of the atmosphere. Water vapour is a hundred times more abundant and is the joint largest contributor to the Earth’s greenhouse effect. On average it accounts for around 70% of the warming effect. The so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ that has maintained the Earth’s temperature at a level warm enough for human civilization to develop over the past several millennia is controlled by non-condensable gases, mainly water vapour, with smaller contributions from CO₂, methane, CH₄, nitrous oxide, N₂O, and ozone, O₃.

There are two schools of thought concerning the effect water vapour has on the climate. One is that since the middle of the 20th century, small amounts of man-made gases, mostly chlorine and fluorine-containing solvents and refrigerants, have been added to the mix. Because these gases are not condensable at atmospheric temperatures and pressures, the atmosphere can pack in much more of these gases. Thus, CO₂ (as well as methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone) has been building up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly since the end of World War II, when we began burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

If there had been no increase in the amounts of non-condensable greenhouse gases, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere would not have changed with all other variables remaining the same. The addition of the non-condensable gases causes the temperature to increase and this leads to an increase in water vapour that further increases the temperature. This is an example of what is known as a positive feedback effect. The warming due to increasing non-condensable gases causes more water vapour to enter the atmosphere, which adds to the effect of the non-condensable gases.

The other school of thought is that adding more water vapour to the atmosphere could produce a negative feedback effect. This could happen if more water vapour leads to more cloud formation. Clouds reflect sunlight and reduce the amount of energy that reaches the Earth’s surface to warm it. If the amount of solar warming decreases, then the temperature of the Earth would decrease. In that case, the effect of adding more water vapour would be cooling rather than warming. But cloud cover does mean more condensed water in the atmosphere, making for a stronger greenhouse effect than non-condensed water vapour alone – it is warmer on a cloudy winter day than on a clear one. Thus the possible positive and negative feedbacks associated with increased water vapour and cloud formation can cancel one another out, but also complicate matters. The actual balance between them is an active area of climate science research.

Global temperature increase

In 1974, after four decades of falling average global temperatures, a BBC programme called The Weather Machine predicted the world could well be heading towards a ‘mini Ice Age’, but interestingly, it said that if average global temperatures continued to rise, it may well forestall it. In 1977, Time magazine famously had the headline on one of their issues that read “How To Survive The Coming Ice Age”. This has conveniently been forgotten by alarmists in the current furore surrounding global warming.

Many of the surface temperature monitoring stations are now in built-up areas, and are affected by what is known as the ‘Urban Heat Island’, which produces artificially increased temperature readings, as the air temperature in cities is always higher than in open land.

By far the most accurate way of measuring a planet’s temperature is with orbiting satellites and high-altitude weather balloons. Satellites in orbit are continually decaying slowly due to Earth’s gravity, and as they get lower, the distance between the detector and the land decreases, but the satellites have altimeters, so this can be compensated for.

The models are the dashed red line, the blue line is actual observations

It can be seen from the graph above that between 1880 and 1915, average global temperatures fell. Between 1915 and 1945, they rose. Between 1945 and 1977 they fell. Between 1977 and 1999 they rose. From 1998 to the present they have been relatively stable.

The warmest period of the 20^th century is not the last decade as we are often told, but the 1930’s. The warmest year was 1936, followed by 1934, 1939, 1931, 1930, 1933, 1938 and 1932. Temperature records have been broken in the last 20 years, but only a quarter of those broke records from the 1930s.

The graph above shows there was no average global temperature increase between February 1998 and October 2015

The UK had the coldest winter since 1963 in 2012/13, and the former Soviet Union had its’ coldest winter for 100 years. At the same time, Antarctica recorded a record low of minus 76C. In 2018, Siberia recorded it’s lowest ever temperature of minus 62C.

Climate models and future predictions

All climate models are the result of hundreds of inputs, the vast majority of which are assumptions based on recorded data from the past, and what we think will happen in the future. Altering these inputs can, and does, give very different end results in the models.

If your input assumptions are wrong, the results of the models will be wrong. There is an old saying from the world of computing; GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

The green circles are the average of four high-altitude weather balloon datasets, the blue squares are the average of two satellite datasets. The combined models predicted a 1.1 degree C rise by 2015. What was actually observed was a 0.45 degrees C rise. The current models are predicting two or three times what is actually being observed, apart from, ironically, one Russian model.

The models should coincide precisely with what has already happened, but apart from the Russian one they do not, apart from one point in 1979. If these models cannot reproduce what has already happened to our climate, how can we have any confidence at all that they can accurately predict what will happen in the future? The simple answer is we can’t.

As Richard Feynman once said “If your hypothesis doesn’t match the observations, your hypothesis is wrong”.

Alabama state climatologist Professor John Christy, who created the graph above, was asked on January 26^th 2015 by Senator Jeff Sessions if he could provide a graph of the latest temperature results for a Senate hearing the following day. He sent that graph to Sessions, who showed it the following day at the Senate hearing. Along the top of the chart someone had added the words “The temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted just 10 years ago.” A patently untrue statement.

Past temperature and CO₂ records

The climate of Earth has been very much different in the geologic past than we see today. Atmospheric CO₂ has also been very different in the past. We are still effectively recovering from the Little Ice Age, a period from the 13^th to 19^th centuries, during which Europe and North America were subjected to much colder winters than during the 20th century. Historical records show farms and villages in the Swiss Alps were destroyed by encroaching glaciers during the mid-17th century.

Canals and rivers in Britain and the Netherlands were frequently frozen deeply enough to support ice skating and winter festivals. The first River Thames frost fair was held in 1608 and the last in 1814. Freezing of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the Great Belt to Denmark to attack Copenhagen.

In the winter of 1780, New York Harbour froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan Island to Staten Island. The winter of 1794–1795 was particularly harsh: the French invasion army under Pichegru was able to march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, and the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour.

Prior to this there was the Medieval Warm Period, from around 950AD to 1200AD, where northern Europe experienced temperatures several degrees warmer on average than today. It was sufficiently warm in the UK for vineyards to be grown as far north as Northumberland.

The Roman Warm Period occurred between around 250BC and 400AD, which was most notable in southern Europe, and tree ring data from Italy in the late 3rd century BC indicates a period of mild conditions in the area at the time that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants.

Between 5000 and 8000BC what is known as the Holocene Maximum occurred. This period saw temperatures in the northern hemisphere significantly higher than today for an extended period. This was the time of the Neolithic monument builders in Britain, Ireland and Brittany in France.

Before this there was the Younger Dryas, a period between approximately 12,800BC and 10,000BC, when a sharp decline in temperature over most of the northern hemisphere was noted, as much as 28 degrees colder. This temperature change occurred at the end of what is known as the Pleistocene epoch and immediately before the warmer Holocene era, which we are still in.

The Younger Dryas was the most recent and longest of several interruptions to the gradual warming of the Earth’s climate since the last ice age 27,000 to 20,000 years ago. This change appears to have been relatively sudden, taking place over a few decades, and it resulted in significant advances of glaciers on Greenland, extensive sea ice and drier conditions, over much of the northern hemisphere.

Sea ice extended to south of the UK. It is thought to have been caused by a decline in the strength of what we call the North Atlantic Conveyor, which transports warm water from the Equator towards the North Pole.

The last three million years have been characterized by cycles of ice ages and interglacials within a gradually deepening longer period of significantly lower temperatures. Currently, we are in an interglacial period which began about 20,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

The graph above shows average global temperatures for the last 11,000 years

Rising sea levels and polar ice cover

Sea level rise is something that concerns many people, but it is perhaps the most difficult one to measure accurately. Tide gauges have been installed along many coastlines around the world, that record high and low tides. They were even in use in ancient Egypt. Anchored into bedrock, they produce long-term stable readings. Tide gauge data for the 20^th Century suggests an increase of 0.8 to 3.3mm a year, with an average increase of 1.8mm per year.

The problem with any tide gauge is that it cannot respond to the level of the land rising and falling, due to plate tectonics; the continuous movement of the continents, and also isostatic rebound from the ending of the last Ice age.

England is a typical example. The east coast is, and has been for several hundred years at least, experiencing increasing coastal erosion and increased flooding, while the west coast is becoming drier, has less flooding and the sea level is falling. How can this be? It is because the UK is gradually tipping over towards the east. Tide gauges are the only available long-term sea-level measurement available, but must be trusted only in areas with no land movement up or down.

Other things that can affect sea levels are thermal expansion, polar ice sheets and the effect of the Moon on tides. Thermal expansion is where water increases its’ volume as it warms, thus slightly increasing global sea levels.

If polar ice sheets increase in size, as is happening in the Antarctic, they displace more water, thus slightly increasing global sea levels. With Arctic ice gradually reducing, this effectively cancels out any effect from the Antarctic. The Moon has probably the largest effect on the oceans, it pulls on them every day, creating both high and low tides. The amount of influence the Moon causes on the oceans varies. Over a four-year cycle, the Moon’s gravitational influence varies up to 47% up and down, and that will affect sea levels on coasts.

Earth’s gravity is also not constant all over the planet, due to the positions of the continents and oceans. Where there is a slightly higher gravity, this will compress the oceans slightly, and where there is slightly less gravity, the oceans will bulge upwards slightly. Both of these will give misleading sea level readings.

There is no ice cap at the North Pole and no glaciers, there is only sea ice, which averages between two and three metres thick. It is true that the level of Arctic ice had been slightly decreasing over the last 30 years, but in 2017 it started increasing again. There has been no observed reduction in the Antarctic ice sheet since records started in the 1957 Geophysical Year.

In fact, it has increased slightly. Ice around the coast of Greenland is melting faster than it has for some time, but on the high plateau interior it is increasing through increased snowfall; two feet extra thickness since 1991. In July 2017, the lowest July temperature so far recorded in the northern hemisphere; -33C, was seen on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

This was the middle of the annual melt season on Greenland, yet temperatures didn’t get above -10C. In fact, Greenland gained a near-record amount of ice in 2017, yet a report on the internet the following day had the title ‘Scientists grapple with the mystery of Greenland’s melting glaciers’.

There is calving of sea ice at both poles and glaciers at Greenland & Antarctica, but this happens every year, and it’s called the Spring Break-Up.

The graphs above show Arctic ice had been reducing between 1979 & 2018, when it started increasing, while in the Antarctic it has been stable with a slight average increase.

To produce the kind of alarming sea level rises that have been predicted, it would require pretty much the total melting of both the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. This would require an increase in temperature of around 20 degrees for Greenland, around 30 degrees for the Arctic and at least 50 degrees for the Antarctic just to get above zero C, but with the observed average global temperature increase of 0.8C over the last 238 years, this is unlikely in the extreme.

Another disaster prediction is the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. This ice sheet is extremely stable and has been since records have been kept on it. If it were to collapse, it would take about 400 years to fully break-up and melt, and this would produce a sea-level increase of around 15-20 feet over that 400 years.

You can see from the graph above the sea levels over the last 35 million years have varied considerably, from about 60 metres above today’s level, to almost 150 metres below today’s level. For about 30 million years, sea levels were over 50 metres higher than today, and three times during the last half million years they have been over a hundred metres lower than today. During the last ice age, which ended 20,000 years ago, sea levels dropped to 140 metres lower than today.

Over most of geologic time, the long-term mean sea level has been significantly higher than today. Only at the Permian–Triassic boundary around 250 million years ago was the long-term mean sea level lower than today.

When the world was recovering from the last ice age, the sea levels were around 140 meters below their current level. There was a fairly constant sea level rise coincidental with the retreat of the glaciers and the collapse of the ice sheets.

The most recent three, from geologic evidence based largely upon analysis of deep cores of coral reefs, were a 13.5 metre rise around 14,200 years ago, a 7.5 metre rise around 11,000 years ago and a 6.5 metre rise around 8,000 years ago, adding up to a 27.5 metre rise which ended 8000 years ago.

Since then, global sea levels have been relatively stable, with the best guess from the available data suggesting there has been an average global increase of 0.8mm – 3.3mm per year for the last 2000 years. If you take the lower figure of 0.8mm per year, that equates to approximately five feet. Taking the higher figure of 3.3mm per year, that equates to approximately 21 feet. So the global sea level rise in the last 2000 years has been somewhere between five and 21 feet.

At present, sea levels globally are rising about one inch per decade, the last vestiges of the end of the last ice age, an amount which is barely noticeable, and which is likely to continue for some years yet.

This of course does not account for local flooding from storm surges etc, but those are brief events over relatively small areas. Nor does it account for those areas where the land is rising and falling.

It is often reported that the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia is dying because of warming of the ocean. The actual reason for this decline is due to large areas of the reef being exposed at low tide.

If more of the reefs are being exposed, that means sea levels around the east coast of Australia are falling, or the land is rising. If the ocean around the reef warmed and sea levels increased or the land fell, the coral would flourish, as coral prefers warmer deeper water.

It is also often quoted that global warming is making the oceans more acidic. This first started to appear in 2003, when papers were first published claiming that increased levels of atmospheric CO₂ will result in oceans warming and absorbing more CO₂, some of which reacts with seawater to become carbonic acid, thus leading to destruction of coral reefs as they will cease growing and start to dissolve.

This is yet another falsehood, the oceans are not becoming more acidic, in fact they are not acidic at all. They have a Ph of between 7.9 and 8.3, which makes them well into the range of alkalinity. Neutral Ph is 7, so only below 7 does water become acidic. If the oceans warm, they absorb less CO₂ and they become slightly less alkaline, but at no time do they become acidic.

It should be noticed that ‘normal’ rain is slightly acidic, and some soils are quite strongly acidic, as are many of the foods we eat. Climate alarmists’ computer models have predicted a reduction in the Pacific Ph to 7.8 by 2100, but the ocean around Peru is already at 7.7, and the population of anchovies fished there for us to eat is thriving.

Increasing storms

We are often shown news footage of increasingly furious storms in various parts of the world, and these are often blamed on human-caused global warming. In fact, the number of hurricanes in the US has decreased since 1951, global hurricane and tropical storm frequency has declined since 1998, and the number of tornados has decreased slightly since the 1970’s.

Tropical Cyclones have been gradually decreasing since 1961. Global droughts have been slowly decreasing since 1982. The number of people killed by ‘extreme weather events’ has fallen from over 300,000 in 1950, to about 25,000 by the year 2000.

Extreme weather events, superstorms, droughts, heatwaves, are all unpredictable and no amount of tampering with the Earth’s natural processes will stop them. Even the IPCC says there is probably no connection between extreme weather events and increasing temperature and / or increasing atmospheric CO₂.

In 2005, the UN Environment Programme stated that by 2010 there could be 50 million ‘climate refugees’ entering North America because of extreme weather events. In 2011, after nothing happened, they revised the statement to 50 million by 2020.

The role of the Sun and Precession on global climate

The other joint largest contributor to Earth’s climate, along with water vapour, is the Sun. Solar activity dictates the amount of incoming solar radiation. This influences cloud formation, and more clouds reflect more solar radiation back into space, which influences temperature.

The Earth rotates around the sun in an orbit that varies between almost circular, and an elipse, caused by the gravitational effect of Jupiter. The Earth’s axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees from the vertical, but this tilt changes.

During a cycle that averages about 40,000 years, the tilt of the axis varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees. Because this tilt changes, the seasons as we know them can become exaggerated. The Earth also wobbles on its’ axis, an effect known as Precession. All these things affect how much solar radiation we get from the Sun, and it’s intensity, and this can change the climate considerably. Therefore, the Sun is the main driver of climate, not CO₂.

The Sun oscillates between periods of high and low activity. This is an observed cycle of 11 years between a Solar Maximum, with many sunspots, increased radiation into space, increased heating of Earth and often disruption of radio, tv and data transmissions, and a Solar Minimum, with few sunspots, and reduced solar heating of Earth.

The Sun is about to enter another Solar Minimum, with less activity and less sunspots. As the last three periods of Solar Minimum have been weaker than the previous one, and this coming one already appears as if it will be weaker still, there will be a period of significantly less solar warming, and the average global temperature is likely to either remain stable or decrease over the next few decades, as in fact has been happening since warming stopped in 1998.

Effects of vulcanism on climate

I don’t think anyone would deny that volcanoes have an impact on the climate. The most famous recent one is perhaps Tambora in 1815, which erupted enough material to produce a thin layer in the lower stratosphere, causing partial blocking of the Sun’s heat, and the following year was particularly cold, with almost none of the usual summer warming.

Mount St. Helens in 1980 was a large eruption, but because most of the material was ejected sideways when it collapsed, hardly any got into the stratosphere, so climate effects were minimal. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it erupted three cubic kilometres of material and caused poor summers in 1992 and 1993 in the northern hemisphere.

Volcanoes in the geologic past have caused climatic events that dwarf any seen in recent human experience, and have caused species extinctions. The Siberian Traps Flood Basalt eruption occurred 250 million years ago, and lasted about two million years, depositing thick viscous lava over an area approximately the size of North America. Equatorial waters warmed by up to 40 degrees C, and 96% of marine species & 70% of land animals went extinct.

The 97% consensus on climate change

This is often quoted as being the reason we should all believe in global warming, because 97% of those ‘in the know’ agree it is down to our actions as industrialised nations, and up to us to put a stop to it before it causes irreparable damage to the climate, by introducing draconian measures which will have the effect of reducing our standard of living, and forcing us to abandon our current way of life.

When you actually look at this 97%, a rather different picture emerges. The “97% consensus” first appeared prominently in 2009, when University of Illinois master’s student Kendall Zimmerman and her ‘adviser’, Peter Doran, sent out 10,257 questionnaires to climate scientists asking if they thought global warming was real. They got 3146 responses back. Of those, they selected the 79 that were in broad agreement that global warming is real. That is 79 out of 3146.

They then asked those 79 if they thought humans were causing climate change. 77 responded ‘yes’ and two responded ‘no’. That gave them the oft-quoted 97% consensus. But, and this is a huge but, it was 97% of those they asked the second question. 97% of 79 people. 77 out of the 3146 who responded is approximately 0.02% not 97%. 77 out of 10,257 is 0.007%.

Perhaps the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook – author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand and creator of the blog Skeptical Science. In an analysis of 11,944 papers published between 1991 and 2011, he says he found “…a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.”

“Among papers taking a position” is very significant. When David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who formerly headed the university’s Center for Climatic Research, recreated Cook’s study, he found that only 34 of the 11,944 papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about climate change at all. 33 of those 34 papers endorsed human-caused climate change, so Cook appears to have divided 33 by 34 and got 0.97 – 97 percent. 33 papers out of 11,944 is approximately 0.002% not 97%.

Science is not done by consensus, it is done by empirical evidence. Therefore the “97% consensus” that humans cause global warming is a totally fraudulent statement.

Closing statement

As far back as 1990, Channel 4 television produced a programme called The Global Warming Conspiracy, highlighting areas where real-world observations did not match the dire predictions. In 2007 they produced a follow-up programme called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which showed nothing had changed with the science or the observations, but revealing the warnings of imminent global disaster had reached near hysterical proportions. There was significant criticism of both programmes post broadcast, mainly from outraged advocates of the human-caused issue, which is nothing less than would be expected.

Perhaps one of the most ridiculous statements to come out of this entire issue is from Maurice Strong, who was head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and former Executive Officer For Reform in the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations. In an interview he stated “What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet the group decides ‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised nations collapse?’. Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”

In it’s 2^nd Assessment Report in 1995, the IPCC ‘Pre-final draft’ had the following statements:-

“None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”

“No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of climate change] to anthropogenic causes.”

“While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.”

“Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”

“When will an anthropogenic link on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to that question is ‘we do not know.’”

These five key passages were removed by the IPCC ‘lead authors’, and re-written to read that the “…evidence now points to a discernible human influence on global climate.” The report was then published without the five authors knowing their work had been altered.

In August 1999, NASA issued a statement by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makito Sato, which read:-

“Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s ‘Dust Bowl’. In the US there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases – in fact there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.”

This begs the question why has NASA since been tampering with data to show rises in temperature when in 1999 they admitted there were none.

In February 2005, a request for original data from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University in England, to be part of an upcoming paper, yielded the following response from Dr Phil Jones: “I should warn you that some data we have we are not supposed to pass on to others. We can pass on the gridded data – which we do. Even if the WMO [World Meteorological Organisation] agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

Gridded data is data which has been ‘adjusted’. An adjustment is defined as “making a small alteration or movement, made to achieve a desired fit, appearance or result.”

In its’ 3^rd Assessment Report in 2001, the IPCC said in paragraph 14.2.2.2 “The climate is a complex non-linear chaotic object and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”. That should have seen the end of the IPCC, yet today it is still expounding its’ doom and gloom climate predictions.

In January 2007, Heidi Cullen, author of the book The Weather of the Future, and host of the weekly tv programme ‘The Climate Code’, called on the American Meteorological Society to revoke the ‘Seal of Approval’ for ‘broadcast meteorologists’ (weather forecasters) if they express skepticism about whether human activity is causing a ‘climate catastrophe’.

In its 4^th Assessment Report, released in 2007, the IPCC had committed what came to be known as ‘Glacier-gate’ when it asserted that Himalayan glaciers “…are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” In March 2014, they finally admitted they had made a massive miscalculation over this, and the Fifth Assessment Report downgraded the Himalayan glacier projection to “…glaciers would shrink by 45 percent by 2100.” A rather big difference.

The NASA Aster satellite, launched in 1999, took 50,000 photographs between 2000 and 2016 of the Himalayan glaciers. The results showed the glaciers are retreating by 20cm (eight inches) a year. At this rate, they would have retreated just 53 feet by 2100, and shows just how inaccurate the IPCC estimates are.

In 2009, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University was found to have manipulated data to show CO₂ was forcing a temperature increase. This became known as ‘Climategate’.

In 2012, James Hansen predicted a five-metre rise in global sea levels by the end of this century.

In March 2013 at a US Senate Energy, Environment, and Communications Committee hearing, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University Don Easterbrook revealed NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are ‘adjusting’ data they receive to show warming where the raw data shows either cooling or no change.

The graph above shows how NASA are altering temperature records to achieve

the desired fit with human-caused global warming.

In May 2014 it was reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, New York Times and Boston Globe that a ‘Catastrophic collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet is now underway’, when in reality nothing was collapsing and Antarctic ice was increasing.

In July 2014, at the 9^th International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas, it was revealed by Dr Jennifer Marohasy that data ‘adjustments’ are being made by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Berkeley University to homogenise raw data from various locations in Australia, some of which showed warming, and some of which showed cooling, into one data set that showed an increase in surface temperatures. The net effect of this is to artificially lower past temperature records, and artificially raise more recent temperatures.

In September 2016, newly elected Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts spoke out in support of Dr Marohasy in his first speech, and bitterly criticised the IPCC for continuing to promote a falsehood.

The other way to misrepresent data is by compressing graphs horizontally, as in the example below.

By doing so, you can make any increase shown to appear steeper and more alarming.

Climatologist Dr Richard Keen, a former contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who it would appear are mostly, but not all, climate alarmists, says they have also manipulated data to achieve a desired result.

Keen says an IPCC panel of politicians approves the outline of a report they want to produce before the authors are selected, then chooses the authors whose views fit with the result they are seeking. ‘Lead authors’ then review and often edit the other authors’ papers to ensure “consistency with the summary for policy-makers” before the IPCC approves the final report for publication. Papers that are not consistent with the summary will not be included in the published report.

This shows how data can be manipulated to produce the desired result, and thereby government policy-makers and the public are being given misleading data.

Those climate scientists who support human-caused global warming make false or misleading statements, backed up by false or misleading data, then the media, always on the lookout for sensational headlines, translate this into alarmist declarations, demonising carbon dioxide as an Earth destroying pollutant, and politicians respond by feeding these scientists more money.

The reason so few research papers are published or publicised denying global warming as a problem is that the editors of virtually every scientific journal, certainly in the USA, such as The Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, Science and Nature, as well as The Guardian in the UK, will not publish anything that speaks out against CO₂ being bad or human-caused climate change as being false. News media in both the US and UK are extremely reluctant to give air time to anyone who dares to speak out against human-caused global warming being a proven fact.

I will end this statement by giving some examples of dire predictions that were spectacularly wrong. In 1968, American biologist Paul Erlich wrote a book entitled The Population Bomb, which claimed the Earth would soon reach a population large enough to make the entire world face starvation. His solution was to forcibly sterilise Africans.

In February 1969 the New York Times predicted the Arctic would be ice-free within 20 years. Three days later, they predicted a new ice age. In 1970, Paul Erlich predicted that by 1980 the world’s oceans would be dead and America would have run out of food and water. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen (who began the whole global warming scare that same year) said Lower Manhattan would be under water due to rising sea levels sometime between 2008 and 2018.

In April 1990, Paul Erlich was reported as saying Africans were not the problem, and the problem was because there were too many rich people in the world.

In August 2000, the New York Times incorrectly reported a large area of Arctic ice had melted and was open ocean. In May 2004, the then Chief Scientist of the UK; Professor David King, said that ‘a few breeding couples’ would need to move to Antarctica to survive the coming global climate catastrophe which would wipe out the rest of Mankind.

In 2008 James Hansen told President Obama he had only four years to ‘save the planet’ from ‘devastating climate change’. In 2009, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicted a permanent drought for Southeast Australia. Also in 2009, US Senator John Kerry and former Presidential candidate Al Gore both predicted the Arctic would be totally ice-free by 2013.

In February 2012, the then UK Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman predicted the UK would have to deal with a permanent drought from that point due to global warming. Shortly afterwards, there was a period of heavy rain with significant flooding.

In Spring 2018 reports appeared in the media claiming the Arctic was 40 degrees warmer than normal, and this was, obviously, due to human-caused climate change. When you look at the data from the Danish Meteorological Institute, it does indeed show an increase of 40 degrees. 40 degrees Fahrenheit, or 22 degrees Celsius.

This temperature anomaly occurred in February, and the 22-degree increase was from -30C to -9C. This is still nine degrees below zero so could not cause any melting, but the public was not told that, and giving the rise in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius makes a 40 degree rise sound more alarming than a 22 degree rise & therefore it represents a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.

During the summer three-month melt season, the temperature rises a few degrees above zero, and this summer it was slightly lower than usual, before dropping again into the winter temperatures of around -30C.

The temperature in the graph above is in degrees Kelvin, and the blue line is zero C.

The other thing the public was not told is that immediately after the temperature spike in February, it plummeted back down to -28C, before resuming its’ normal gradual rise towards the summer melt season. The graph above was uploaded by the Danish Meteorological Institute to their website on December 20^th 2018. In August 2018, the New York Times said the Arctic ocean could be ice free by the end of the year. You can see from the graph above it wasn’t.

Conclusion

The global warming controversy has developed into an entire industry, with thousands of people now employed in it. If human-caused global warming were accepted as, or proven to be, false, all these people would be out of a job, so they have a vested interest in keeping the alarm bells ringing with ever more extreme warnings of impending doom.

Some of the more extreme environmentalists are even claiming that humans are the enemy of the planet and should be removed wholesale, with of course, the exception of themselves. Some people have even called for skeptics to be compared to Holocaust deniers, and advocate ‘Nuremburg-style war crimes trials’ for them, followed by prison sentences or even execution.

I would argue that instead of vilifying skeptics, they should be being praised for bringing this fraud to the world’s attention, and those who deliberately create misleading data are the ones who should be jailed.

Perhaps the most contentious issue surrounding global warming is when we hear of the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, most number of storms, largest level of sea level rise ‘since records began’ or ‘in recorded history’. This is a very important point, possibly the most important point. Since records began.

In the industrialised nations, accurate weather recording has been done for about the last 300 years, and in China for about 800 years, but this is a tiny blip compared to the geologic past, where I have shown the global climate has been very different, sometimes for millions of years.

We are in nothing more than a warming trend that is not unusual compared to past historic temperatures, in fact our current climate is the coldest it has been for the last 540 million years. The world has been very much warmer, colder, wetter and drier in the geologic past. Since the planet stopped warming in 1998, the term ‘global warming’ was gradually ditched in favour of ‘climate change’ and now ‘climate disruption’.

Now, every time there is a heatwave, it’s blamed on climate change. Every time there is a very cold snap or unusually cold winter, it’s blamed on climate change. Every drought, famine, flood, extreme weather event, everything is now blamed on climate change, and it’s all your fault. Whereas in reality, the world’s climate constantly ebbs and flows between different states, and we have little or no control over it.

Trying to stop the climate changing is as absurd as trying to prevent the next earthquake or volcanic eruption. Climate alarmism is based on lies & ignorance, and has been dubbed ‘junk science’ and pseudoscience. Observation data is routinely ‘adjusted’ to produce misleading results.

In 2006, the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research produced a report called Warm Words, with the subtitle How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better? This report stated:-

“It is not the task of climate change agencies to persuade by rational argument. Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.”

“Ultimately, positive climate behaviours need to be approached in the same way as marketeers approach acts of buying and consuming. It amounts to treating climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is, we believe, the route to mass behaviour change.”

In 2014, the US Brookings Institute published a report entitled ‘Why the best path to a low-carbon future is NOT wind or solar power’. They concluded that wind power increases fuel costs by 50%, and solar increases fuel costs by 150%. If you had wind and solar power generation as your primary source of electricity, you would still need to keep 100% of the existing fossil-fuel or nuclear generating stations in full working order, for those times when the sun is not shining and there is no wind. Unless of course, you were happy to accept the frequent power outages that would occur in your homes, schools, factories and hospitals.

Alabama State Climatologist John Christy has said if the USA ceased to exist tomorrow; no road or rail vehicles, no industry, no aircraft, no people, the difference in global temperatures would be less than one degree by 2100.

Trying to predict the future is about as difficult as it gets, as most of us are not Seers, so we should be extremely cautious of making far-reaching and economically damaging environmental & energy policies based on demonstrably false, or at the very least highly questionable, data.

These policies will significantly increase energy bills, which will impact the poorest members of society the hardest, and will have a negligible effect on the climate. Less than one degree C in the next 80 years.

Mankind has been building on known flood plains, in low-lying coastal areas and in areas known to be seismically active, so it should not be a surprise when weather and geologic events cause problems in these areas.

They seem to be happening more now because people can see and record those events, often in real-time, and the world’s media distributes it round the globe much faster than in the pre-digital era, whereas the reality is these events have always happened, and will continue to happen.

It is now the most politically incorrect thing you can do to speak out against this being a reality. When people speak out against climate change being caused by Mankind, they are often ostracised by colleagues, smeared and demonised by people who disagree with them, verbally, and on at least one occasion physically, attacked, investigated by authorities to discover where their funding comes from, with the expectation they are being paid by oil or gas companies to make these claims, and risk losing their jobs.

The truth is, these sceptics are lucky if they get funding at all, there is almost no money flowing to those who speak out against global warming being real, so much of this work is conducted in their own time and at their own expense. The sceptics claim there are many others who support their views, but keep quiet for fear of the repercussions listed above. This is unverifiable of course if those people remain silent.

Andy Rowlands

I am indebted to Gregory Wrightstone, who publishes the Inconvenient Facts internet blog, for reviewing this essay and suggesting factual corrections and amendments.

The graphs and some of the comments are taken from written articles on the internet, or transcribed from internet documentaries and recordings of official hearings.

People I quoted include:-

Tim Ball – former professor of climatology

Nigel Calder – former editor of New Scientist magazine

Bob Carter – Paleoclimatologist and Professor

John Christy – Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center University of Alabama in Huntsville

Ian Clark – Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa

John Coleman – Meteorologist & founder of the US Weather Channel

Piers Corbyn – Meteorologist who holds degrees in physics and astophysics

Judith Curry – Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Georgia Institute of Technology

Professor William Happer Professor of Physics Princeton University

Tony Heller – software engineer & publisher of the Real Climate Science Youtube channel

Nigel Lawson – former Chancellor of the Exchequer during Margaret Thatcher’s reign

Richard Lindzen – Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT

Lord Christopher Monckton – mathematician and former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher

Patrick Moore – co-founder of Greenpeace

Philip Stott – Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a former editor (1987–2004) of the Journal of Biogeography

Dr Fred Singer – physicist and Professor Emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia

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