The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

I often hear from otherwise normal, rational, intelligent people how the weather is getting more and more extreme. And that this is proof that we humans have somehow messed up the climate with our carbon emissions. I argue that it isn't so, that the floods, hurricanes, hot spells and even the record cold and snowfalls are not signs of extreme weather brought about by anthropogenic global warming, er climate change. After all, most of the "records" we have been experiencing recently impact only the last 40 or 50 years, a relatively short time span in the historical record and the global climate change business.

That's why it was encouraging to see this study:

The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

It is all too easy for climate alarmists to point to recent extremes of weather and cry "we must do something before it's too late". We need to keep in mind that while the weather around the globe can and has been experiencing extremes, this doesn't signify anything out of the historical norm.

BBC host fries head of the Met Office

For your amusement. Enjoy.


I don't watch the BBC so I don't know who Andrew Neil is, but we need more journalists willing to ask questions like he does.

h/t The Daily Bayonet.

Global warming delusion

PJM: A poll of climate scientists reveals they still believe in AGW, though they do not believe their models are any good. Now that's delusion.

It's not obvious what it's doing and why it's doing it

What you won't see reported in the Canadian media. A professional programmer is interviewed by the BBC on the Climategate computer code.



h/t: Kate.

Heaven and Earth

An Australian's passion for global warming cools in the face of evidence:

Former believer Paul Sheehan, in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, develops a new respect for informed dissent

WHAT I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. The subject of this column is a book entitled Heaven and Earth, written by one of Australia's foremost earth scientists, Ian Plimer.

Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive".

Plimer does not dispute the dramatic flux of climate change but he fundamentally disputes most of the assumptions and projections being made about the current causes, mostly led by atmospheric scientists.

"To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science."

(He argues that) the hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archeology and geology.

"But evidence no longer matters. And any contrary work published in peer-reviewed journals is just ignored. We are told that the science on human-induced global warming is settled. Yet the claim by some scientists that the threat of human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech. It has no mathematical or evidential basis."

Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.

Heaven and Earth

Doom and Gloom from Copenhagen

The following video was produced by CO2 Science:

"At a recent meeting of climate alarmists in Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the event's co-chairs -- Katherine Richardson -- stated that "the worst-case IPCC projections, or even worse, are being realized." According to the report of the meeting published in Science, she said that "emissions are soaring, projections of sea level rise are higher than expected, and climate impacts around the world are appearing with increasing frequency." These are powerful headline-grabbing contentions. But are they correct?

H/t to Icecap, where Dr. Brian R. Prattwrites:

Global Warming: An Alternative View

By Brian R. Pratt, P.Geo., Ph.D.

FACT AND FICTION

Even though I consider myself a dedicated environmentalist I cannot accept the claims of anthropogenic - human caused - global warming. My research involves deducing climate back in what we call ‘Deep Time’ - geological eras of millions and billions of years ago - so I think I have enough background to understand the evidence. I know that the factors controlling climate work as an extremely complex, integrated system that cannot be resolved by debate and exchange of opinion.

Therefore the suspicions of any scientist should be aroused by glib assertions like “the science is settled” or “there is a consensus,” because this is not how scientists and engineers operate. Al Gore’s movie and books are so appallingly riddled with mistakes and outlandish exaggerations that they would be laughable if they weren’t taken so seriously by so many. Legislators have even passed laws declaring CO2 to be a pollutant, seemingly unaware of photosynthesis, respiration and biodegradation. Should I feel guilty that my beer gave off CO2 during fermentation and when I opened it? I need something to cry into when I hear of the measures planned to reduce “carbon emissions”, because of the threat these pose to our already economically fragile society.

Here are the facts, as I understand them: solar heat varies cyclically at different frequencies, from the decades to the hundreds of thousands of years. Atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature are linked, but rather than the former driving the latter, it is the other way around and there is a nearly thousand-year lag in the response. The oceans are the great sink for CO2.

Atmospheric CO2 concentration is not uniform around the globe and regional variations are tied to sea-surface temperature because CO2 dissolves in colder sea water while it degasses from warmer sea water. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, yes, but it absorbs only a very small portion of the infrared spectrum and its capacity to do so declines exponentially with concentration. It’s a fact of physics that the CO2 molecule radiates almost none of the heat it can absorb. Moreover, it is such a trace gas that this effect is negligible, and even less so at the low pressures and cold temperatures high in the atmosphere.

All of this explains why, when CO2 concentration is thought to have been much higher in Deep Time such as during the Paleozoic, the surface of the globe did not overheat and the polar regions were still cold.Water vapour is what insulates the Earth and CO2 concentration has nothing to do with cloud generation. Why, then, have anthropogenic global warming promoters seized upon CO2 as the culprit?

BEYOND THE SCIENCE

Climate change has now become so highly politicized that one wonders whom or what to trust. It turns out that the legitimate science in the successive UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports was laundered to such a degree by a very small and select group of experts and bureaucrats charged with preparing the “summaries for policymakers” that they are often contradictory - indeed, some of the scientific contributors have since distanced themselves from these reports.

There has grown a whole industry of taxpayer-funded climate modellers whose equations can�t reproduce last week’s weather let alone past climate change at all, but whose crystal balls universally forecast impending disaster (and of course the urgent need for more research money). Why haven’t physicists pointed out the basic mistakes in the science? Read more here.

The Copenhagen Cabal: Doom and gloom pervaded an international meeting of climate alarmists in this famed city. Click on the image below (or larger image here) to watch a CO2 Science produced video presentation of this editorial.

Stimulus plan meets global warming

Leftist heaven...

President Barack Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus plan, has morphed into an appropriations bill devoid of debate. The process forgoes any pretense of targeting unemployed people and resources.

For instance, the bill reads “Provided further, That not less than $140,000,000 shall be available for climate data modeling.” This raises the question of how many unemployed climate modelers are out there pounding the pavement.

When presented with that question, last Friday, Pat Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists stated “I don’t know one unemployed modeler.”

Whether or not another $140,000,000 for climate data modeling is a good idea, it is hard to see an immediate, economy-stimulating impact from this item.

What’s the rush? Maybe they need to get all their modeling done before another cool year highlights how bad the models are.

Monckton: Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing

Christopher Moncton's latest report comes to us via the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Earth has shown an under-reported cooling trend for eight straight years, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the UN’s climate projections, since not one of the computer models on which it relies had predicted so long and steep a cooling, says a new review paper -- Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing --from the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The paper posits that “The chief reason for scepticism at the official position on “global warming” is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic “global warming”; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.


“In short,” writes Monckton, “science is being artfully manipulated to the point of what are in essence political and not scientific conclusions – a conclusion that is congenial to powerful factions whose ambition is not to identify scientific truth but rather to advance the special vested interests with which they identify themselves.

The paper demonstrates that if CO2 concentration continues to rise more slowly than the IPCC had predicted, and if climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration is in any event well below the IPCC’s projected range, the likelihood of any “global warming” >2 °C/century to 2100 is vanishingly small.

Monckton also demonstrates that official sources have:
• relied upon questionable and occasionally downright dishonest methods to inflate the observed rate of temperature increase
• created the false impression that the rate of increase is itself rising when an identical argument can be used to demonstrate that it is falling
• diminished earlier and warmer temperatures in this century
• abolished the mediaeval warm period
• diverted attention away from the fact that throughout almost all of the Holocene, and throughout all four previous interglacial periods, surface temperatures were considerably warmer than they are today.

Says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson, “When the climate science is wrong, the policies are wrong, and then both people and the environment are harmed. It is past time that the media and elected officials stop treating “man-made global warming” as a religion and started asking some serious and pointed questions. This paper lays the ground work for that.”

Emphasis added by moi.

WaPo: Are scientists overselling climate models?

Via the Washington Post:

To what extent should we accept these projections at face value? How certain is the stated range of uncertainty? Can today's climate models provide credible predictions of the regional impacts of climate change (e.g., on the scale of U.S. states or most European countries)?

These questions are addressed in a series of recent articles and exchange of comments in New Scientist.

Carter: Facts Debunk Global Warming Alarmism

Bob Carter is an adjunct professor of geology at James Cook University. He writes:

THE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that October in the US was marked by 63 record snowfalls and 115 lowest-ever temperatures.

Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change.

Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?

Can you say computer models?

Computer climate models are the heart of the problem of global warming predictions.

Entire global energy and climate policies are based on the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their conclusions are based on climate models that don't and cannot work. This article explains how the situation developed and why the models are failures.

By Dr. Tim Ball

2008: the year man-made global warming was disproved

Via Christopher Booker in the Telegraph:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare.

(...)

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed...

(...)

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Dr. Tim Ball

"The only place where CO2 is causing temperature increase is in the IPCC computer models"

Rodney Hide is right

Rodney Hide is an MP in the New Zealand Parliament. The following are his comments regarding NZ's proposed Climate Change (Emissions Trading & Renewable Preference) Bill published by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition:

I think I will be the only person speaking in this debate who has any qualifications in environmental science.

It is not that that should count, but I think that it is significant for what I am about to say—that is, that the entire climate change - global warming hypothesis is a hoax, that the data and the hypothesis do not hold together, that Al Gore is a phoney and a fraud on this issue, and that the emissions trading scheme is a worldwide scam and swindle.

Enacting this legislation will cost New Zealanders dear—that is the point of it - and it will drive up the costs of basic goods and services for New Zealanders probably by at least $500 or $600 a year.

It will put businesses in New Zealand out of business. It will put farmers off their farms. And it will do all this for no impact on world weather, for no environmental gain, and for no conceivable advantage to New Zealand or to the world.

Facing an impending election call here in Canada this week Stéphane Dion, the current leader of the opposition Liberal Party, made some hasty changes to his own unpopular shifty green carbon tax proposal. But the problem, Stéphane is that Rodney Hide is right.

The problem for the first two Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change reports was what was called the medieval warming period, where a thousand years ago the Earth was warmer than it is now.

Then, magically, an obscure physicist in the US came up with a new bit of analysis - the hockey stick - that showed world temperature to be flat and then rising dramatically as the world became industrialised. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change grabbed this, put it on the front of its document, and repeated it five times.

(...)

The science was rubbish, because a computer model is not science. Science is about theories, hypothesis, and the testing of these against the facts. That is not what has happened in the basic science here.

The IPCC models were wrong. The data in the IPCC reports was skewed and biased. The conclusions of the IPCC were wrong. Carbon emissions do not cause "global warming" or "climate change". Neither a "cap and trade" system or a shifty green carbon tax will do anything to protect the earth's climate.

Dion's Liberals want a shifty green carbon tax because it is just that. A new tax. Global warming is an irresistible excuse for "tax and spend" liberals to bring in new taxes.

Speaking to his caucus on Wednesday, Mr. Dion said a Liberal government would set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to help groups likely to be hard hit by his proposed new fossil fuel taxes.

If his new carbon tax was truly "revenue neutral" as Dion claims, then why would he need hundreds of millions of dollars to help Canadians who are "hard hit" by his new shifty green carbon tax?

As Rodney Hide says, it's a "worldwide scam and swindle".

h/t: Newsbeat1

Polar Bears listed by US

The polar bear is now officially the pawn of the global warming alarmists.

The U.S. government has decided to list polar bears as a threatened species under its Endangered Species Act because of the effects of global warming

This decision comes despite the fact that polar bear numbers are actually increasing. But the doomsayers and alarmists have never allowed little things like facts to get in the way of their agenda.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, who made the announcement in Washington on Wednesday, said the decision was based on findings that polar bears' sea ice habitat, vital to their survival, has dramatically melted in recent decades.

He said computer models projected declines in sea ice averaging 30 per cent by the middle of the century. Scientists predict that as a result, two-thirds of polar bears could disappear by then.

There we go again - making policy based on computer models. Last week the alarmists were all in a tizzy and had to make excuses for their computer models when it became clear that mother nature is not paying attention to all their doomsday predictions and we might be heading into a period of global cooling.

Oh, and as for all that great loss of sea ice, here's a recent item titled Report: Global Sea Ice at 'Unprecedented' Levels:

“On a global basis, world sea ice in April 2008 reached levels that were ‘unprecedented’ for the month of April in over 25 years,” Steve McIntyre wrote on Climateaudit.org on May 4. “Levels are the third highest (for April) since the commencement of records in 1979, exceeded only by levels in 1979 and 1982.”

When arctic sea ice decreased last summer it was all over the news. But how many news stories did we hear that the ice had recovered and reached "unprecedented" levels?

Now that those cuddly polar bears are on the endangered species list, you can brace yourself for an onslaught of activists demanding legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

Update: Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee

“Unfortunately, the decision to list the polar bear as ‘threatened’ appears to be based more on politics than science,” Senator Inhofe said. “With the number of polar bears substantially up over the past forty years, the decision announced today appears to be based entirely on unproven computer models. The decision, therefore, is simply a case of reality versus unproven computer models, the methodology of which has been challenged by many scientists and forecasting experts. If the models are invalid, then the decision based on them is not justified. It’s disappointing that Secretary Kempthorne failed to stand up to liberal special interest groups who advocated this listing."

FOX: Cold Water Thrown on Antarctic Global-Warming Predictions

via Fox News:

Antarctica hasn't warmed as much over the last century as climate models had originally predicted, a new study finds.

[...]

The new study, detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, marks the first time that researchers have been able to give a progress report on Antarctic climate model projections by comparing climate records to model simulations.

[...]

"This is a really important exercise for these climate models," said study leader Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co.

Monaghan and his team found that while climate models projected temperature increases of 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 degrees Celsius) over the past century, temperatures were observed to have risen by only 0.4 F (0.2 C).

Once again observed real data does not support the alarmist predictions of computer climate models.

Climate models for all occasions

We've often said that the IPCC's climate models were terribly unreliable and should not be relied upon. Well, there's a new study out that uses climate models and it predicts a period of no warming or even cooling for the next decade.

Here's some interesting commentary from Canadian newspapers today. First up is Lorrie Goldstein in the Toronto Sun: Global warming on hiatus

Let's call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily.

German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015.

In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore's simplistic and propagandistic An Inconvenient Truth, global temperatures aren't moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn't settled and we don't know everything we need to know.

David Warren offers more in this post from the Ottawa Citizen:

The news, for what it's worth, comes from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, in Kiel, Germany, prominently played in the international science journal Nature. The authors of the study applied existing knowledge of oscillations in ocean temperatures, especially in the North Atlantic, to computer models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that show consistent upward trends. This had not been done before, and when it was, the IPCC's predicted 0.3°C rise in global atmospheric temperatures over the next decade was cancelled out.

Now to be fair, it must be said that these new predictions are based on the same IPCC computer models used to predict global warming. The same models which we know have been terribly unreliable.

Besides, the authors say that this newfound effect is probably only temporary and that global warming will likely resume again in 15 or 20 years. Talk about maintaining the party line while covering your ass at the same time! Actually, Roger Pielke Jr. sums it up pretty nicely this quote that I found at FuturePundit:

I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.

This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy. I am sure that some model somewhere has foretold how the next 20 years will evolve (and please ask me in 20 years which one!). And if none get it right, it won't mean that any were actually wrong. If there is no future over the next few decades that models rule out, then anything is possible. And of course, no one needed a model to know that.

So if temperatures go up with GHG emissions, they have a model for that. If temperatures go down while GHG emissions go up, they have a model for that too!

Update: Steven Milloy - Can global warming’s vested interests close the deal on greenhouse gas regulation before the public wises up to their scam?

Climate models: garbage in, gospel out

From Investors Business Daily:

Global warming? Don't worry about it. It's over. No longer does Al Gore have to fly around the world in private jets emitting greenhouse gases to save the world from — greenhouse gases.

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization is reporting that global temperatures have not risen since 1998. That would be the same temperatures that models from the U.N.'s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change said would be scorching the earth into an unlivable wasteland — except for those coastal areas flooded by seas gorged with water from melting ice sheets.

(...)

Were the IPCC not dedicated to spreading fear, it would admit its climate models, on which much of the global warming madness is based, are flawed. While pandering politicians, media sycophants and Hollywood dupes desperately seeking significance have lectured us about our carbon monoxide emissions, real temperature changes measured over the past 30 years have not matched well with increases predicted by the IPCC's models.

This is not some gas-guzzler's fantasy but the finding of a credible study published last year in the International Journal of Climatology. Looking at the data, four researchers concluded "the weight of the current evidence . . . supports the conclusion" there is no agreement between the models and the observation temperatures.

That means that projections of future warming are too high, that the entire global warming assumption is suspect, and that Gore should find something more productive to do with his time.

It also proves that Howard Hayden, physics professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, was correct in describing the machinery of the climate model-hysteria industrial complex as one that takes "garbage in" and spits "gospel out."

The global warming debate is not over. Indeed, the debate is beginning to favor the skeptics.

Links added. Source.

The Epicycles of Global Warming

How are the "True Believers" of anthropogenic global warming coping with the reality of this coldest of cold winters and an observed annual drop in temperature of 0.6 Degrees? Well, it seems that they're hopping on their "epicycles" and peddling them as hard and as furious as they can.

Courtesy of American Thinker.

Today we see a spate of new computer models showing up in science journals, each one attempting to rescue some piece of the ecological goose that laid the golden egg. These are often not called "models." With utter dishonesty, they are labeled "new studies of the climate." But they are not empirical studies at all. They are little math models with new epicycles, but still based on the same gross oversimplifications. To reassure the True Believers, they always end with the same punch line: Yes, Virginia, there really is a global warming faerie, and all the doom-sayers are right.

More...

No Regrets

A report on the recent Manhattan Conference on Global Warming:

The Carbon Sense Coalition based in Australia, says that the science and empirical evidence on Global warming is now clearly indicating that a “No Regrets” policy is the best course for the world to follow.

The Carbon Sense Coalition was one of the 52 organisations from 20 different countries which co-sponsored the recent International Conference on Climate Change in New York. Al Gore was invited to address the conference (he was even promised his $200,000 fee) but he declined to appear. Jim Hansen of NASA, another prominent alarmist, was also invited, but declined. (Contrast this with the Bali conference when a delegation of prominent sceptical scientists sought to present their petition to the UN. They were denied admission and refused an audience.)

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense” Mr Viv Forbes, who attended the conference along with about 20 other Australian and New Zealand speakers and observers, said that with over 500 delegates attending over 100 sessions presented and discussed by scientists, economists, politicians and policy analysts (many of world standing) there was no aspect of global warming science and policy that was not examined in the light of current knowledge and evidence.

For more information on the conference see:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22875 and
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/ny_climate_conference_journey.html

Forbes claimed that a number of clear conclusions arose from the conference:
1. There is no doubt that the earth is in a warming phase, and has been in this phase for some 300 years. Warming started after the frigid years of the Little Ice Age, and has continued, in waves, ever since.
2. There is no doubt that the short warm eras in earth’s history have proved very beneficial for life on earth as evidenced by the rising population, increased prosperity, increased life span, increased food production and the flourishing of art and architecture that has accompanied every one of the recent warm eras. Ice Ages, not Warm Ages, are the big threats to life on earth.
3. There is considerable uncertainty about the future trends in earth’s temperature. However, there is close correlation between past temperature trends and variations in solar output and planetary cycles, and these indicate that the current warming is likely to end, no matter what man does, maybe within decades. The cooling may have already started.
4. It is very clear that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen, but close study of the correlations between CO2 and temperature shows that it is far more likely that temperature changes trigger changes in CO2 levels. Past records also show that current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are neither unusual nor concerning.
5. There are no credible claims or evidence from any quarter that current or projected levels of CO2 in the atmosphere pose any other threat to human, animal or plant life on earth. CO2 is not a contributor to air pollution; in fact it is a precious plant food on which all life on earth depends.
6. Man’s activities contribute less than 5% of total emissions into the atmosphere, and this addition has had only minor effect (probably undetectable) on the rising temperature trend.
7. There is good evidence that oceans, volcanoes and other natural sources expel large but variable quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Oceans expel CO2 as they warm and absorb it as they cool.
8. It is agreed in all quarters that the computerised General Circulation Models utilised heavily by the IPCC to produce their warming alarms have no proven ability to forecast climate even one year in advance, let alone the 50 or more years that some people have quoted.
9. It is a fact that CO2 and the other atmospheric gases provide an insulating blanket to the earth, keeping surface temperature higher than it would otherwise be. However, science is agreed that CO2’s warming potential is almost exhausted, and even if current levels of CO2 doubled, it would not on its own cause alarming global warming. There is nothing to fear from CO2 induced warming.
10. The large positive warming feedbacks assumed by the IPCC are quite likely to be much smaller or even negative. Recent work is showing that the earth has a huge capacity to distribute and dissipate heat via winds, ocean currents, evaporation, precipitation and radiation to space. There is a large degree of self regulation in the natural global temperature controllers.

“In summary, man is not as important or as smart as some people believe he is. He is nowhere near to understanding the complex interactions between the big climate players – the sun, planetary cycles, atmospheric circulation, volcanoes and the dominating role of water in clouds, in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and in snow and ice. Moreover, his tiny contribution to an extremely minor atmospheric gas such as CO2 is highly unlikely to be the main driver of world climate.

“The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the above observations is that man is unlikely to achieve any positive climate benefits from a very costly and disruptive policy of forcible decarbonisation of all human activities. The earth will largely ignore him.

“This indicates that the huge sums of money contributed by consumers, taxpayers and businesses to this futile war on carbon will be largely wasted, and future generations will have great regrets that their parents were so profligate with their
inheritance.

Forbes claimed that the nations of the world should follow a “No Regrets Policy” which yields dividends no matter what the future climate holds.

“We should abandon all policies that assume either warming or cooling, because there is no clear evidence on what the future holds.

“We should be strengthening our ability to adapt our lifestyle and our economy to whatever climate the future holds for us. We can be certain that climate will change, perhaps dramatically, but no one is yet competent to predict it, and man is
powerless to have significant effect on it.

“A “No Regrets” policy means exposing all people to the full cost of their actions, and allowing the climate and the market to deter silly practices and encourage sensible ones.

“Specifically, all governments should assist their communities to adapt to whatever changes are surely in store for us by ceasing to mandate market shares for any particular energy source, and abolishing all discriminatory energy taxes and
subsidies and all limits, caps and taxes on harmless emissions of CO2. They should also abandon all plans to mandate the Emissions Trading Game – leave that to the gamblers who choose to play. It will be more fun than Monopoly with a
similar outcome – a few big winners and all the rest losers.

“No one has the right to gamble the seed corn of the community on preparing for last year’s climate crisis. Governments are currently planning to spend huge and growing amounts of money on the very dubious assumption that global warming is a clear and present danger. This money would be far better spent on infrastructure to insulate us from future shortages of water, energy or food, procuring emergency equipment that can cope with ANY natural disaster, tackling real air or water pollution problems or designing policies that ensure that rising prices are left free to discourage the waste of scarce resources.

“Useful equipment and facilities and sound stable policies will serve us well in drought, flood, fire, tempest, tidal wave, global warming or global cooling.

This indeed would be a policy of “No Regrets”.

“Man believes he is a heavy hitter, confident in his ability to dominate and manipulate the climate. But he needs to remember, “Nature bats last”.