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To those that don't believe that we have a global warming crisis, have a look at the C02 vs golbal temperature curve.

The current scientific consensus on climate change is that recent warming indicates a fairly stable long-term trend, that the trend is largely human-caused..

But just ask yourself who stands to benefit from questioning golbal warming?

Tuvalu Is Not Sinking

By Brian Carnell

Thursday, March 28, 2002

The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu made waves last year when it claimed that global warming was causing the gradual sinking of its land mass. Tuvalu, which is north of Fiji, wanted compensation from nations such as the United States to help evacuate the island. A new report suggests there was good reason to be skeptical of Tuvalu's claim.

The bottom line is that Tuvalu is not going anywhere. Australia's National Tidal Facility at Flinders University in South Australia, which is charged by the government of Australia to monitor sea levels in the Pacific, reports that there has been no significant rise in the Pacific Ocean.

NTF has had a monitoring station in Tuvalu since 1993 and over the last nine years, the sea level around Tuvalu had risen an average of 0.9 millimeters per year -- that's a whopping 0.03 inches per year or a grand total of .27 inches since 1993.

Going back and comparing current sea levels to those of 1978, the sea level has increased a mere 0.07 millimeters or 0.002 inches. Yeah, with that enormous amount it's surprising the island hasn't been swept away outright.

So where is the water coming from that Tuvalu complains about? There could be any number of reasons, but a likely explanation is that it is a combination of a number of things including the residual effects of World War II, the destruction of coconut trees, and pollution.

It turns out the United States used the main Tuvalu island as a base in World War II and created an airfield by essentially digging up about a third of the island. The areas dug up were never repaired, causing problems for Tuvalu's water table. Combined with other related land degradation problems such as the chopping down of coconut trees which could affect the hydrology of the island, the problem is likely home grown rather than the fault of global warming.

johnsher - They're not my photographs.

Substantiate the claim that "they're in the employ of oil companies bs (you'll find most of them aren't)".

Who are "the prophets of doom" that have stolen all my money in taxation?

Maybe you can bother to add some substance to your condescension rather than add some comment from skeptecism.net?

rather than add some comment from skeptecism.net?

Its time to wind up to the reality

The claim is that global temperature has risen .6C +-.2C in the past 100 years. The first problem with this is that we can currently only measure global temperature to within +-.7C.

Rofl. Yes, very entertaining.

Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!
by Professor David Bellamy

Daily Mail, July 9, 2004

Whatever the experts say about the howling gales, thunder and lightning we've had over the past two days, of one thing we can be certain. Someone, somewhere - and there is every chance it will be a politician or an environmentalist - will blame the weather on global warming.

But they will be 100 per cent wrong. Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.

Instead, they have an unshakeable in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.

They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock. Unfortunately, for the time being, it is their view that prevails.

As a result of their ignorance, the world's economy may be about to divert billions, nay trillions of pounds, dollars and roubles into solving a problem that actually doesn't exist. The waste of economic resources is incalculable and tragic.

Dreaded

To explain why I believe that global warming is largely a natural phenomenon that has been with us for 13,000 years and probably isn't causing us any harm anyway, we need to take heed of some basic facts of botanical science.

For a start, carbon dioxide is not the dreaded killer greenhouse gas that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol five years later cracked it up to be. It is, in fact, the most important airborne fertiliser in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all.

That is because, as any schoolchild will tell you, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of a little sunshine, convert them into complex carbon compounds - that we either eat, build with or just admire - and oxygen, which just happens to keep the rest of the planet alive.

Increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, double it even, and this would produce a rise in plant productivity. Call me a biased old plant lover but that doesn't sound like much of a killer gas to me. Hooray for global warming is what I say, and so do a lot of my fellow scientists.

Let me quote from a petition produced by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which has been signed by over 18,000 scientists who are totally opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, which committed the world's leading industrial nations to cut their production of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels.

They say: 'Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to experimental knowledge.'

You couldn't get much plainer than that. And yet we still have public figures such as Sir David King, scientific adviser to Her Majesty's Government, making preposterous statements such as 'by the end of this century, the only continent we will be able to live on is Antarctica.'

At the same time, he's joined the bandwagon that blames just about everything on global warming, regardless of the scientific evidence. For example, take the alarm about rising sea levels around the south coast of England and subsequent flooding along the region's rivers. According to Sir David, global warming is largely to blame.

But it isn't at all - it's down to bad management of water catchments, building on flood plains and the incontestable fact that the south of England is gradually sinking below the waves.

And that sinking is nothing to do with rising sea levels caused by ice-caps melting. Instead, it is purely related to an entirely natural warping of the Earth's crust, which could only be reversed by sticking one of the enormously heavy ice-caps from past ice ages back on top of Scotland.

Ah, ice ages... those absolutely massive changes in global climate that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon.

It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.

Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun.

Melted

The glaciers melted, the ice cap retreated and Stone Age man could begin hunting again. But a couple of millennia later, it got very cold again and everyone headed south. Then it warmed up so much that water from melted ice filled the English Channel and we became an island.

The truth is that the climate has been yo-yo-ing up and down ever since. Whereas it was warm enough for Romans to produce good wine in York, on the other hand, King Canute had to dig up peat to warm his people. And then it started getting warm again.

Up and down, up and down - that is how temperature and climate have always gone in the past and there is no proof they are not still doing exactly the same thing now. In other words, climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon, nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels.

In fact, a recent scientific paper, rather unenticingly titled 'Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations Over The Last Glacial Termination,' proved it.

It showed that increases in temperature are responsible for increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around.

Ignored

But this sort of evidence is ignored, either by those who believe the Kyoto Protocol is environmental gospel or by those who know 25 years of hard work went into securing the agreement and simply can't admit that the science it is based on is wrong.

The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperature - is water vapour, 99 per cent of which is entirely natural.

If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent.

Although we wouldn't be around, because without it there would be no green plants, no herbivorous farm animals and no food for us to eat.

It has been estimated that the cost of cutting fossil fuel emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol would be £76trillion. Little wonder, then, that world leaders are worried. So should we all be.

If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.

The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.

Wrong problem, wrong solution
Last Updated: 1:59am GMT 15/11/2006Page 1 of 3


Tilting at windfarms: It would take a windfarm the size of greater
Manchester to match the output of one nuclear power station

Readers' responses to Christopher Monckton's first article [PDF]

Christopher Monckton created considerable controversy last week with his article (Climate chaos? Don't believe it) questioning the science that claims human activity is responsible for climate change. Now he challenges the economic assumptions of the Stern report

In the climate change debate, one figure is real. The Sunday Telegraph's website registered more than 127,000 hits in response to last week's article revealing that the UN had minimised the sun's role in changing past and present climate, persisted in proven errors and used unsound data, questionable graphs and meretricious maths to exaggerate future warming threefold.

The views of 200 readers who emailed me are in the link above. About a third are scientists, including well-known climatologists and a physicist who confirmed my calculations. Some advise governments.

Nearly all condemn the "consensus". Most feel that instead of apologising, the UN has misled them, especially by using the defective "hockey-stick" temperature graph.

Here's how an apology is done. Last week I said that James Hansen had told the United States Congress that sea level would rise several feet by 2000, but it was the US Senate, and by 2100; I added a tautologous "per second" to "watts per square metre"; and I mentioned the perhaps apocryphal Arctic voyage of Chen Ho. Sorry.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on climate-change economics says the world must spend 1 per cent of GDP from now on to avert disaster. The current draft of the UN's 2007 report says up to 5 per cent. Sir Nick's team tell me: "We are confident that the UN will publish a range for costs next year in which ours will be centrally placed." So some quiet high-level co-ordination is going on. The oddest thing about Stern's curious report was its timing. Publication of the UN's next major science assessment is only months ahead. Why not wait and base the economics on that?

The UN needed Stern more than he needed the UN. Its 2001 report had numbers more extreme than anyone else's, so sceptics abounded. This time, an international spinfest is shutting off dissent in advance. First, the damage done by the hockey-stick graph had to be repaired, so a series of papers supporting its conclusions quickly appeared, many written by associates of its authors.

Next, the failure of temperature to rise as the UN projected had to be explained. Hence another flurry of learned papers, this time about the "ocean notion" – the maritime heat-sink into which the missing temperature rise might be vanishing.

Above all, it was vital that this time the UN's report should not be seen to print the biggest exaggerations around. Enter Stern.

My calculations last week had to be rubbished. Separately, The Sunday Telegraph's letters editor and I received emails saying I'd wrongly assumed the Earth was a "blackbody" with no greenhouse effect at all (I hadn't). The www.realclimate.org website, run by two of the "hockey-stick" graph's authors, said the same in a blog entitled "Cuckoo science".

On Thursday, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, compared climate sceptics to advocates of Islamic terror. Neither, she said, should have access to the media.

At whom is this spin aimed? At the Chinese, the Indians and the Brazilians. China has 30,000 coal mines. It is opening a new power station every five days till 2012. The Third World is growing. It won't be told it can't enjoy the growth we've already had. It wouldn't sign Kyoto till it was exempted, so, under President Clinton, the US Senate voted unanimously to reject Kyoto. Whatever the West does to "Save the Planet" is mere gesture unless the developing world agrees to give up its right to grow as we've grown.

Sir Nick says if we spend 1 per cent of GDP now and for ever we can reduce "the chances of temperature rises of 4-5C and above – at which levels some of the worst impacts occur". The crucial number when evaluating the income stream from forward investments like this is the discount rate: the annual percentage by which any forecast of tomorrow's revenue is cut to allow for the risks inherent in not getting it today. Stern discusses the rate at length, and even has a technical annexe on it, but, astonishingly, not once in 700 pages does he put a figure on it. I gave his team 24 hours' notice of the question: What discount rate or rates, and why? Six hours after my deadline, as the Treasury was closing, they said they might answer "next week". The following morning, with the page held for my copy, I rang and asked again. "There's nobody in who worked on that part of the report," they said. But they admitted they'd used several rates, all of them low because "if you're richer in future you value each unit of output a bit less", and because they hadn't discounted the future just because it was the future as that would be intertemporally inequitable (in English: not fair to the kids). Too low a discount rate makes spending 1 per cent of GDP now look cheaper than waiting.

They are also coy about what value our $500 billion a year would buy us. They say that if the world stabilises atmospheric CO2 at about 485 parts per million we'll have spent 1 per cent of GDP to get – er – a 1.1 per cent fall in consumption. If we stabilised at 400ppm, consumption would fall by only 0.6 per cent, but that's a pipedream: we're at 380ppm already, and, on Stern's figures, we'll reach 400 in just eight years.

By 2035, says Sir Nick, temperature will have risen by "over 2C". It sounds alarming. What he means, though, is over 2C since 1750, when we don't know what the temperature was. Stern's 485 parts per million by 2035 is based on the UN's worst case. Even then, the increase compared with today would be just 0.7C. On the UN's lower projection, implying 425ppm by 2035, only 0.3C.

The UK accounts for just 2 per cent of global emissions, and falling. Even if Britain stopped using energy altogether, global temperature by 2035 would be six thousandths of a degree C less than if we carried on as usual. If we shut down once a week on Planet Day, make that less than one thousandth of a degree. Even if every Western country complied with Kyoto (and most won't), Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma says temperature a century from now would be a 25th of a degree lower than without Kyoto.

In that context, the few femtowatts you will save by not leaving your television on standby don't matter. It is not that energy efficiency, renewables and recycling will not make enough difference. They will hardly make any.

We are addressing the wrong problem. In the UK, energy is about to run out. In 10 years, a third of our power stations will be worn out or against EU pollution laws. By 2035, oil prices could be ten times today's. Our children would be far better off if we sequestered North Sea oil by leaving it in the ground than if we sequestered carbon dioxide at Peterhead.

While the Government quixotically tilts at wind power, the Danes, who did it first, have stopped building bird-slicers. You need a wind farm the size of Greater Manchester to match the output of one nuclear power station, and you get not a watt if the wind isn't blowing. As for hydro, if you want to build a plant with more than a megawatt of output in Scotland, you can't, because for the past year two bureaucracies have been arguing about which of them should grant planning permission.

The UK needs to start building (not designing, or arguing about in ten-year planning enquiries) 12 nuclear power stations this year. Nuclear power does not emit CO2. The French, 80 per cent nuclear, have half the UK's carbon footprint. And what is Stern's policy on nuclear power? "We argue that a portfolio of technologies will be needed."

Sci-fi panics such as climate change are dangerous because they distract politicians from what really needs doing. Y2K bug: correct solution, laugh; actual solution, Y2K Office. Result: nothing, at great cost. Energy shortages and climate change (if you believe that man is responsible): correct solution, go nuclear and reverse 20th-century deforestation. Actual solution: windmills, rampant deforestation, EU paying farmers not to plant trees or anything else. Result, energy crisis, species loss and no fall in CO2.

Shouldn't we take precautions, just in case? No. The "precautionary principle" kills. Example. DDT: correct solution, limit it in agriculture but allow indoor spraying against malarial mosquitoes. Actual solution: give the inventor a Nobel Prize, then say the chemical is cancerous (it's safe enough to eat) and ban it, especially for indoor spraying. Result, only this year, after 30 million and more have died from malaria, has the WHO agreed to recommend indoor spraying.

Carbon taxes? Bizarrely, the UK's climate-change levy taxes all forms of electricity generation, even if they don't emit CO2. David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, told the BBC last week how good it was. The BBC didn't argue.

Emissions trading? The daft EU scheme allows more emissions to be traded than are being emitted, except in the UK, whose business-unaware Government disadvantages us by imposing a lower limit and not even exempting the NHS. Result: poor hospitals have to buy emission rights from rich oil companies. Miliband told the BBC how good it was. The BBC didn't argue.

All such interventions advocated by the climate-change "consensus" will be expensively futile without the consent of the Third World's fast-growing nations. That consent will rightly be withheld until the UN produces soundly based, scientifically honest, fair and realistic projections. Meanwhile, cut out and keep this article. If Margaret Beckett has her way, you won't ever see one like it again.

I've heard that view many times before on here and I'm not sure whether I agree or not. Certainly, the overwhelming weight of public opinion (in most countries round the world, at least) seems to believe that it IS a problem.

Yes and no. They are tougher on some pollutants and not on others - also the test cycles are a bit different. Not better, not worse, just different. I don't think a US car that meets Californian emissions requirements will automatically pass the European ones (and vice versa).

Much of the green bandwagon needs very careful scrutiny in a system context. There are big big questions...

- Do photovoltaic solar cells take more energy to produce than they will ever produce? (I think they do.)

- Do wind farms take more energy to produce than they will ever produce? (I think they do.)

- Do hybrid vehciles like the Prius save energy over a lifetime (dust to dust energy cost?) (no chance).

Have we got any 'green' policies that are systematically sound beyond the obvious 'waste less' layer?

- Do hybrid vehciles like the Prius save energy over a lifetime (dust to dust energy cost?) (no chance).

I agree - but maybe we're missing the point a bit. When the Honda NSX was launced, it was trumpeted as the first all-aluminium car. We laughed our socks off because it was so heavy but the point was that Honda got lots of valuable experience in developing aluminium structures.

The same might be true of the Prius. It's not that good but it is giving them valuable development of electric drives and control systems so that they'll be ready for when (and IF) fuel cells (or something similar) become viable.

Before you even take into account the extra manufacturing and disposal cost they are no more efficient in real world driving than a similar sized and performing diesel car.

This is part of the reason why California cant have the WV TDI engines even though they're really clean and efficient.