Similarly cogent arguments could be made, I’m sure, for the urgent need to enact a massive, worldwide ray-gun-building programme. The size of weaponry we’re talking about here would be hugely expensive. Almost as much as we’re planning to spend on climate change, probably. But again, the consequences of not doing so could be disastrous. We know, after all, that it would only take one asteroid strike to send us all the way of the dinosaurs.
We also know, thanks to the Drake equation, that there might possibly be extra-terrestrial life out there – and that there’s no guarantee they’re cute ones with long arms, big eyes, sweet croaky voices and darling little hearts that glow when they’re trying to send out a signal to their mothers. It might equally be that they’re much more like the scorpion/ant/nightmare horror creatures in Starship Troopers, hell-bent on chopping us in half with their hideous pincers or coating us with acid slime that burns through us like napalm, or… Well, that’s the thing about outer space. The possible threats when you start thinking about them are legion and therefore clearly a very pressing case for the application of that all-important precautionary principle – and to hell with the cost!
I was debating this issue recently with a committed AGW believer, who mocked my realism thus: ‘And I suppose you think it’s a good idea not to look left and right before you cross the road?’ This is a classic straw-man argument. No one is claiming that it is not sensible to take precautions before crossing the road because, knowledge and experience tell us, roads are full of fast-moving vehicles that could easily splat us. The precaution is worth taking because the inconvenience (glancing right, left, then right again) is small, while the threat is proven and genuine. Quite the opposite is true with AGW.
In fact, when you stop to think about it, it’s amazing the Warmists still dare show their faces in public, let alone have the gall to go on arguing that more and more of our money should be thrown at their imaginary problem. They lost the debate in 1998. That’s when global warming stopped. That’s when, by rights, they should have thrown up their hands and gone: ‘All right. It’s a fair cop, guv. Man-made CO2 obviously isn’t the driver of dangerous global warming. Maybe the sun has more to do with it, after all…’
Yet they continue to defend their threadbare theory, with a chutzpah so brazen it almost defies satire. But I’ll try. It’s akin to William Pirrie, co-designer of the Titanic, staging a press conference in late April 1912, to rebut the outrageous claim by certain despicable sceptics that the Titanic did not safely cross the Atlantic on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York:
Reporter: Hang on. So what you chaps are saying is that, er, the Titanic didn’t hit an iceberg and sink on the night of April 14th with the loss of 1,517 passengers and crew?
William Pirrie: What we are saying, sir, is that the Titanic is unsinkable.
Reporter: Er, right. But the thing is, Lord Pirrie, we have evidence to suggest it, er, did sink. We have eyewitness accounts by survivors. We have reports of the distress signals the Titanic sent before she sank. We have corroboration from the fact that the Titanic never arrived and that no one has seen her since April 14th. Are you saying that unbeknownst to us, the Titanic is still currently afloat, full of paying passengers and happily plying her trade back and forth across the Atlantic?
William Pirrie: Thank you, but I refuse to take impertinent questions from someone who is almost certainly in the pay of our arch rivals, the Cunard Line. Now, I’ll pass you over to expert members of our design team, who will explain why the tensile strength of the steel used in our watertight bulkheads and the particular quality of the rivets we used render the Titanic impervious to damage from even the largest whale or similar floating marine object. Then our science advisors will explain how the current period of global cooling renders it quite impossible that any icebergs could possibly have strayed into so southerly a latitude.
Reporter: But–
William Pirrie: I am also happy to announce that we are setting up a news agency – RealTitanic – which will provide an invaluable resource for those responsible reporters in the respectable branches of the press in need of swift, detailed, expert rebuttals of the pernicious ongoing myth that our splendid ship suffered any kind of mishap on April 14th.
You think I’m exaggerating? OK, let’s have a look at some of the claims made by climate alarmists to support their case for urgent, concerted and expensive action to ‘combat climate change’ and see how they stand up.
Pacific Islands such as Tuvalu will soon be swamped by rising sea levels, creating thousands of climate refugees.
The ‘climate refugee’ claim, made by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, was found by a London High Court judgment to be entirely untrue. There is no evidence that Tuvalu has been subject to abnormal or dangerous sea-level rises. Independent analysis by Willis Eschenbach gives a best estimate of an MSL (mean sea level) rise of a mere 0.07mm per year. Paleogeophysicist and sea-level expert Nils-Axel Mörner says that the seepage of sea water into Tuvalu’s inland fresh water is probably the result of environmentally unfriendly activity by the Japanese pineapple industry.
The Maldives are in trouble, though. They must be. What about that dramatic photograph of the Maldives government holding a cabinet meeting underwater?
For anyone who can find a way to milk it, climate change is the cash cow that keeps on giving. So, of course, it makes sense for small nations like the Maldives to hire press advisors and stage publicity stunts and appear in tendentious movies like The Island President (‘to save his country, he has to save our planet’) in order to extract large sums of guilt-money from the richer industrialised nations – and never mind awkward details like factual accuracy. No, there is no sea-level rise problem in the Maldives. Around 1970, the sea level actually fell about 20cm. In the last forty years it has not risen at all. This has naturally proved most inconvenient for green campaigners. One of the signs that the sea level has not risen in the Maldives used to be an old tree so close to the shoreline it would have been swamped by the slightest sea rise. It was recognised as a marker by locals and featured in a documentary made by Professor Mörner. Unfortunately, it’s no longer there. According to eye-witness accounts related by locals to Mörner, it was destroyed by an Australian sea-level team of climate change activists funded by the IPCC.
OK – so what about the millions of people threatened by flooding in Bangladesh?
Of course the Bangladeshis are threatened by flooding. Bangladesh sits squarely on the Ganges Delta – it’s low, flat and densely populated. A sea-level rise of just one metre would flood almost 20 per cent of the country’s land area, displacing around twenty million people. But this is an unfortunate fact of geography rather than – as charities like Oxfam would have us believe – a function of the callous indifference by the industrial West to the potential damage created by climate change. Yes, sea level is rising: it has been for several millennia. For the last 150 years, it has risen at an average residual rate of around 1.8mm per year, with no sign of any recent acceleration. This means that Bangladeshis will have plenty of time to do what humans have always done in response to climate change: adapt. There will be parts of Bangladesh that need to build flood defences, as would be entirely normal and sensible for any population living on a flood plain. Alarmists rarely mention that the land mass of Bangladesh is growing, thanks to sediment carried down the Ganges which settles in the delta and adds nearly 20km2 of coastland every year.
But the poor polar bears…
Nope. They’re not in trouble either, unless you count a doubling in the population since the mid-1960s as the sign of an ‘endangered’ species. The reason Ursus maritimus landed itself the ‘threatened’ status in 2008 from the US Fish and Wildlife Service was due to pressure from green activists who recognised the bear’s tremendous value as a poster creature for the ‘ice-caps-are-melting-and-it’s-all-our-fault’ lobby. Those four drowned polar bears cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth were the victims not of hunger desperatio
n but – it subsequently emerged – succumbed during a severe storm. Polar bears are strong swimmers and have been found as far as 60 miles from land without coming to any harm. Anyway, it’s homo sapiens we should be worried about, not Ursus maritimus. Which species, after all, will be better equipped for dealing with the next (overdue) ice age?
The Arctic is melting!
Yes, it does so every summer. In all, about 3.8 million square miles of sea ice melts each year. Then, in winter it grows back again, thanks to a complex process known as ‘freezing’. Though it’s true that in the summer of 2007, Arctic ice coverage shrank to a near-historic low, it staged a massive comeback in the winters of 2008 and 2009. There is no evidence to support the alarmist claim that the Arctic will be ‘ice-free by 2030’.
Ah, then how do you explain the recent opening of the Northwest Passage?
This is another variation on the popular melting Arctic theme. In 2007 Robin McKie, science editor of the left-leaning Observer newspaper, reported: ‘The Arctic’s sea ice cover has shrunk so much that the North West Passage, the fabled sea route that connects Europe and Asia, has opened up for the first time since records began.’ Al Gore’s hero Bill McKibben grew similarly excited: ‘By the end of the summer season in 2008, so much ice had melted that both the Northwest and Northeast passages were open. In other words, you could circumnavigate the Arctic on open water… Even sceptics can’t dispute such alarming events.’
But why would they even bother? As New Zealand journalist Ian Wishart records in his indispensible book Air Con (2009), Roald Amundsen navigated a ship through the passage in 1903, while in the 1940s – when the Arctic actually was warmer than it is today – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police regularly forged the Northwest Passage on patrol duties.
Extreme weather events
Yep, there’s no doubt about it: during the twentieth century the number of reported natural disasters increased drastically, as did the cost of damage in billions of US dollars. According to the World Bank: ‘In the aggregate, the reported number of natural disasters worldwide has been rapidly increasing, from fewer than 100 in 1975 to more than 400 in 2005.’ And according to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, this can only get worse due to our old friend that begins with ‘C-’ and ends in ‘-limate change’:
Projected climate-change related exposures are likely to affect the health status of millions of people, particularly those with low adaptive capacity, through … increased deaths, disease and injury due to heat waves, flood, storms, and droughts…
Case closed, then? Hardly. The reason for the increase in reported natural disasters is, fairly obviously, because of the dramatic improvement in communications. And the reason for the increased cost of damage is that the world has become much wealthier, meaning there’s more expensive property – often built in more precarious but desirable waterfront locations – to be destroyed by natural disasters.
In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that the so-called ‘extreme weather events’ of the last thirty years – Hurricane Katrina, say, or the flooding in Queensland when monsoons dumped more than 1.2 metres of water in just seven days, or the bush firestorms that ravaged the state of Victoria in southern Australia – are anything other than an entirely normal expression of natural processes which have been occurring for millennia.
This has not, of course, stopped alarmists from claiming otherwise. In 2004, Dr Chris Landsea (one of the world’s leading authorities on hurricanes) was appalled to read a press release from IPCC lead author Dr Kevin Trenberth, titled: ‘Experts to Warn Global Warming Likely to Continue Spurring More Outbreaks of Intense Hurricane Activity.’ This entirely contradicted not just Landsea’s research, but every other study into the subject of which Landsea was aware. Not even the first two IPCC reports, to which Landsea had contributed, made such a claim.
Despite protests from Landsea, Trenberth went ahead and announced his spurious claim in a press conference held at Harvard Medical School. It was eagerly picked up by the world’s media. Reuters reported: ‘Recent storms, droughts and heatwaves are probably being caused by global warming, which means the effects of global warming are coming faster than anyone had feared, climate experts said on Thursday.’
Except most hurricane experts, including Landsea and Bill Gray of Colorado State University, were saying no such thing. Landsea wrote to IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri asking for assurances that this unsupportable claim would not be repeated in its next assessment report. But instead of backing down, Dr Pachauri took Trenberth’s side, arguing that his claims ‘accurately reflected’ the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Landsea replied that this was hardly plausible given that he himself had written the relevant sections of that report. He then tendered his resignation as an IPCC author.
The IPCC, wrote Landsea, has been ‘subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost…’ He went on: ‘I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by preconceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.’
Landsea’s resignation went virtually unreported. The IPCC caravan trundled on, regardless.
Ocean Acidification
An important topic, not because it is any more real a threat than the other chimeras mentioned above, but because of what it implies about the changing tactics of climate-change alarmists. Since global warming stopped in 1998 (invalidating their greenhouse hypothesis), they have been forced to find a new excuse to blame man-made CO2 for all the world’s ills. The handy one they have settled on is ‘Ocean Acidification’, first popularised by a 2005 report by the (fanatically alarmist) Royal Society. This report used computer models to predict that if global emissions continue to rise at present rates, ‘the average PH of the oceans will fall by up to 0.5 units by 2100’. Subsequent reports by well-funded alarmists have predicted that this will result in skeletal thinning in planktonic micro-organisms and the death of coral reefs.
Despite any number of expert scientific rebuttals to all this scaremongering – studies, for example, showing that coral and plankton have actually benefited from increasing warmth and CO2 – the ocean acidification myth has become yet another article of faith for greenies. Or, as I prefer to think of it, their ‘Siegfried Line’. The Warmists won’t give up on their man-made global warming meme just yet, but if (as will most likely happen within the next decade) they are forced into retreat by a succession of freezing winters and miserable summers, they can always fall back on this second line of defence: ‘All right, so maybe we weren’t as right as we thought about that silly idea, whatever it was, oh yeah, “man-made global warming”. But that doesn’t mean all our schemes to have CO2 designated a form of poison by the Environmental Protection Agency, and have it taxed and regulated as a dangerous eco-hazard, were a waste of time and money. No sirree. Why, just look at this scary photo we’ve taken of a dying coral reef….!’
Ah, but what about Larsen B in Antarctica, and the ‘melting’ Greenland ice sheet and snowless Mount Kilimanjaro and the shutdown of the Gulf Stream and the rising number of wasp stings in Fairbanks Alaska, and the decline in tree colour and the increase in tree colour and the spread of Lyme disease and the flooding of Venice and the rise in shark attacks, and the invasion of king crabs and the balding of hedgehogs and the rampaging of robins and Chinese inflation and the orphaning of walrus pups, and the souring of grapes and the threat to Japan’s cherry blossom and the death of the Loch Ness monster – to name but a few of the global tragedies which have variously been invoked as evidence of ‘global warming’? (For the full 800-plus Complete List of Things Caused by Global Warming, go to http://www. numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm)
Well, obviously, I’d love to cover these in more detail – especially the Loch Ness monster one. But I hope, by now, that you’ll have seen sufficient evidence of the unreliability of the ‘science’ behind Man-Made Global Warming for you to be able to take such claims with a hefty pinch of salt. What you won’t perhaps be convinced of yet, though, is that
there’s any viable alternative. ‘Surely doing SOMETHING to save the environment is better than nothing,’ you may be thinking. Or: ‘Well, there’s got to be more to life than economic growth.’ Or: ‘Overpopulation: that’s the real elephant in the room.’ Or: ‘What about future generations? What are they going to do when we’ve used up all their fossil fuels?’
This is the subject of the rest of this book.
SEVEN
WATERMELONS
Global warming is the mother of all environmental scares. In the scope of its consequences for life on planet earth and the immense size of its remedies, global warming dwarfs all the other environmental and safety scares of our time put together. Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realising the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favour of a smaller population eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 14