Junk Science Week: No climate death in Venice

[Editor: This is published for educational purposes only under the fair use clause that science classes and the general public can be exposed to the truth about the junk in science.] 

Terence Corcoran  Jun 15, 2011 – 9:16 PM ET | Last Updated: Jun 15, 2011 9:32 PM ET

Reuters

St. Mark’s Square in Venice has been ­subject to periodic flooding for years.

By Terence Corcoran

We interrupt our scheduled Junk Science Week material to bring you news from the front line of the global climate scare.

First, we take you to Venice, Italy. The news is that Venice will not disappear, contrary to scaremongering from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Back in 2007, on the release of an IPCC report, United Nations climatologist Osvaldo Canziani warned that rising sea levels caused by global warming would create an environmental catastrophe at one of the world’s greatest artistic and architectural treasures.

“The water of the lagoon will continue to rise. If things carry on like this, Venice is destined to disappear,” said Mr. Canziani, then deputy head of the IPCC, an organization expert in generating headlines.

But now, following a pattern of science backtracking over IPCC alarmist claims about the threat of global warming, a new science report says Venice is safe. In fact, it will be more secure against water surges than it is today.

In a paper published in the journal Climate Change, Alberto Troccoli, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, and scientists in the U.K. and Italy say that their global climate simulations suggest “a decrease in extreme tides” as sea levels rise. Storm surges will also be fewer in the Northern Adriatic where Venice is situated. The conclusion is that by the end of the 21st century “tidal flooding events might not be exacerbated … with potentially beneficial consequences for the conservation of the city.”

Coral islands may grow as sea rises, new study finds

In another development, fears that small islands in the Pacific Ocean might also ­disappear may be unfounded.

In the Small Islands section of its 2007 report on climate-change impacts, the IPCC had warned that rising temperatures and sea levels would pose “great challenges and high risk, especially to low-lying islands that might not be able to adapt.” Island coasts would be at “great risk,” and “anticipated land loss” would “threaten the sustainability of island agriculture and food security.”

But a new study by scientists in New Zealand and Fiji published in the Global and Planetary Change journal found that Pacific islands have been growing, rather than disappearing. Paul Kench, of the University of Auckland, said his study found that because low-lying Pacific islands are made of coral debris, “you have continual growth.” In an interview with New Scientist magazine, Mr. Kench said: “It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown. But they won’t. The sea level will go up and the island will start responding.”

New Scientist also quotes Barry Brook, a climate scientists at the University of Adelaide in Australia who is a supporter of Campaign 350, which aims to reduce the volume of carbon in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, down from about 400 currently. The objective is to impose tough carbon controls around the world in part to save low-lying islands, including the Maldives, from being swamped.

Mr. Brooks told New Scientist that while he was initially surprised by the new study’s findings, he agrees with the analysis. “It does suggest that islands have been able to adapt to sea-level rises.”

Campaign 350 was founded by American environmentalist and author Bill McKibben. But there are no signs that Campaign 350 is backing down on its extreme targets, despite this and other evidence that many of the most alarmist IPCC warnings have proven to be unfounded.

In summary, add disappearing Venice and drowning Pacific islands to scores of other IPCC myths about the impact of climate change.

Financial Post
For more reports and the latest news on climate science, politics and economics, visit the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Posted in: FP Comment  Tags: Climate Change, Flooding, Junk Science Week 2011, Pacific Islands, Sea Level Rise, Venice

Lorne Gunter: Global warming? Try global cooling.

Lorne Gunter  Jun 16, 2011 – 9:52 AM ET | Last Updated: Jun 16, 2011 11:15 AM ET

I once asked readers to take a quick quiz. “Which,” I wondered, ’is usually warmer, day or night? And what is typically the warmest part of the day? The warmest time of year? And the warmest kind of weather, cloudy or cloudless? If you answered day, afternoon, summer and cloudless,” I concluded, “you may be beginning to understand why the sun, and not manmade greenhouse gas, is the cause of global climate change.”

Most of the historic periods of major solar activity correspond very well with past eras of extra-warm climate on Earth. Meanwhile, a period known as the Maunder Minimum (from roughly 1650 to 1720) corresponds to the coldest period of the Little Ice Age that occurred between the early 14th Century and about 1850. In other words, the sun is the biggest driver of climate change on Earth, not idling SUVs or oilsands mining.

So we should be concerned that good old Sol appears to be turning itself down for a while. As a result, far from dangerous warming, the Earth may be heading into a prolonged period (two to three decades) of very cold weather.

I’m not talking about -30C in July. But we could be headed for but cooler summers with fewer frost-free days and shorter growing seasons, as well as longer, colder winters.

Delegates to the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in New Mexico heard from three separate groups of researchers that the current period of solar activity (Cycle 24) is already one of the weakest on record. Meanwhile, the next one (Cycle 25) — they come in waves of roughly 11-years duration each — could well be the most inactive since the Maunder Minimum.

Here is how one respected climate-change blogger described it:

A missing jet stream (in the sun’s interior), fading spots, and slower activity near (it’s) poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all.

The results were announced at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Here’s another story that explains well what is going on.

Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory told reporters “If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades. That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.” Prof. Hill later told Reuters that he was not predicting an end to the threat of global warming. But frankly, that is the kind of don’t-rock-the-boat butt-covering that many scientists are engaged in these days. The climate-change orthodoxy in academia is so entrenched (and so able to control grants, tenures and reputations) that many scientists with contrary views are reluctant to voice them. Dr. Hill may well believe that a deep reduction in solar activity will have little impact on projected global warming. Or he may believe the warming is natural and will be little effected by sun-spot hibernation. Or he may sincerely believe the sun-climate connection is too weak to overcome the CO2-climate connection that many environmentalists and climate scientists see.

The main point to take away from the AAS meetings is that there are powerful forces that have great influence over our climate that warming-alarmist scientists and activists have barely taken into account — if at all — when forecasting doom and gloom for our planet if we don’t all change our lifestyles dramatically and put the UN in charge of industrial planning.

The science of climate change is far from settled, despite all the hysterical reporting to the contrary.

National Post

Follow Lorne on Twitter @lornegunter

Posted in: Environment, Climate Change, Environmentalists, Lorne Gunter

Lorne Gunter: The IPCC loses its last credibility

[Editor: The following is presented here for educational use only and is presented under the fair use provision Title 17 U.S.C. 107. It is also presented as a public service to inform those who have fallen for the junk science cult.]

Lorne Gunter: The IPCC loses its last credibility

Lorne Gunter  Jun 17, 2011 – 7:30 AM ET | Last Updated: Jun 16, 2011 6:39 PM ET

The period from November 2009 to March 2010 was a bad time for climate-change alarmists. That four-month period included the posting of thousands of emails and computer files from leading climate scientists showing that they had been cooking their global-warming data, working together to keep independent researchers from examining their raw figures and pressuring academic journals against publishing studies that contradicted the man-made climate-change orthodoxy.

Also during that time, it was shown that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had included questionable data on Himalayan glacier melt in its major 2007 climate assessment report and that it had done so deliberately to provoke government leaders to speed up environmental legislation. Indian climate scientist Murari Lal, the scientist in charge of the IPCC’s glacier chapter, admitted he was aware at the time that the melt prediction had not been peer-reviewed, but included it anyway because “we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

By the end of March 2010 it had been shown that at least 16 claims of impending climate doom in the IPCC’s vaunted 2007 report had been based on work done by environmental activists, most of which had not received independent reviews before being swallowed whole by the UN climate body. For instance, the IPCC’s insistence that up to 40% of the Amazon rain forest was under imminent threat came from a World Wildlife Fund-International Union for the Conservation of Nature joint report written by a scientist-consultant and a freelance environmental journalist.

Of course, since that dark period, the environmental Sanhedrin has worked hard to re-establish its control over the climate-change debate. Four whitewash investigations — one conducted by one of the leading investors in wind power in Europe — have sought to exonerate the scientists most deeply enmeshed in the Climategate email scandal.

Pressure to conform to the alarmist orthodoxy is once again so great, that even scientists who discover data that contradicts alarmist scaremongering feel obliged to defer to the mongers anyway. Just in the last few months there have been major studies showing that the sea level is not rising dangerously and that solar activity is about to enter a phase so quiet that we could experience two or three decades of global cooling. Yet the authors of both studies have felt obliged to caution reporters that their findings in no way upset the IPCC’s forecast of dangerous warming ahead.

Still, who could have imagined that the IPCC would have emerged from these setbacks so cocksure that it would return to its old ways of conflating environmentalist propaganda with scientific investigation? But it has.

Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre discovered earlier this week that the IPCC’s recent report on alternative energy — which asserted that it was possible to convert the world to 80% green energy by 2050 if politicians would simply tax conventional sources and spend billions on alternative sources — was lifted largely from Greenpeace reports.

The lead author of the IPCC report turns out to be Sven Teske, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner, who the IPCC does not identify as such in either the report or its media releases. Mr. Teske is also the author of much of the Greenpeace material on which the IPCC report is based, in effect making him a peer reviewer of the validity of his own material.

Imagine the reaction, for instance, if a government had produced a fossil-fuel friendly report based on work by an oil sands engineer, without revealing the source, and had paid the same engineer to write its own summary of his initial work.

That is what the IPCC has stooped to in this case and it eliminates any credibility the organization had left on the climate file.

National Post

Tags: Global Warming, Climate Change, IPCC, Lorne Gunter

Read more:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/06/17/lorne-gunter-the-ipcc-loses-its-last-credibility/

Exhibit One: How junk science has become a religion

Editor: The following is presented for educational purposes only and is subject to the provisions of the fair use law found elsewhere on this site. It would not need to be written or presented here if the evangelists of science who have made a religion out of their beliefs repented and starting doing real science again. Read below and once again, see why ....................

Rex Murphy: Climate scientists make a mockery of the peer-review process

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Rex Murphy  Jun 18, 2011 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Jun 17, 2011 4:42 PM ET

One of the disturbing practices revealed by the great cache of emails out of the University of East Anglia — the so-called Climategate emails — was the attempted shortcutting or corruption of the oh-so precious peer-review process. The emails contained clear declarations of how the grand viziers of climate science would lean on journals and reporters to make sure certain critics did not get the validation, the laying on of peer-reviewed hands, so critical to full participation in the great climate debate. This was most succinctly expressed by the beautiful quote from Dr. Phil Jones of East Anglia that, “We will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what peer-review literature is.”

Much of what the world bizarrely allows to be called climate “science” is a closet-game, an in-group referring to and reinforcing its own members. The insiders keep out those seen as interlopers and critics, vilify dissenters and labour to maintain a proprietary hold on the entire vast subject. It has been described very precisely as a “climate-assessment oligarchy.” Less examined, or certainly less known to the general public, is how this in-group loops around itself. How the outside advocates buttress the inside scientists, and even — this is particularly noxious — how the outside advocates, the non-scientists, themselves become inside authorities.

RELATED

• Lorne Gunter: The IPCC loses its last credibility

It’s the perfect propaganda circle. Advocates find themselves in government offices, or on panels appointed by politicians disposed towards the hyper-alarmism of global warming. On the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) boards and panels, like seeks out like. And when the IPCC issues one of its state-of-the-global-warming-world reports, legions of environmentalists, and their maddeningly sympathetic and uninquisitive friends in most of the press, shout out the latest dire warnings as if they were coming from the very mouth of Disinterested Science itself.

An early and particularly graphic illustration of this vicious circle came when the IPCC 2007 report warned that most the great Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035. Not only was the claim of a massive melt the very height of ignorant nonsense — the sun would have to drop on the Earth to provoke a melt of this proportion — it was also plucked from a seven-year-old publication of the ever busy World Wildlife Federation (WWF). As the Times of London put it, the claim itself was “inherently ludicrous” culled from a “campaigning report” rather than “an academic paper,” was not “subject of any scientific review” and despite all these shortcomings became “a key source for the IPCC … [for] the section on the Himalayas.”

A scare report, seven years old, from the an environmental advocacy group, became the key document for a major report released under the authority of the IPCC, the world’s best and brightest global warming minds. Sir Isaac Newton would be so proud.

Now we have an even more telling illustration of this same sad, vicious circle. It was first reported on by Steven McIntyre on his blog, Climate Audit (and was run on the FP Comment page of Friday’s National Post). McIntyre revealed that the IPCC used a Greenpeace campaigner to write a key part of its report on renewable energy and to make the astonishing claim that “close to 80% of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies.” He further revealed that the claim arose from a “joint publication of Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC).” And it turns out that while working for the IPCC, the Greenpeace campaigner approvingly cited a Greenpeace report that he himself was the lead author of. He peer-reviewed himself. 

[Editor: A true priest of the new religion of "science", no doubt. Take what he says on faith or question it if you know science not junk-science.] 

A report on renewables, by the Renewable Energy Council of Europe, and Greenpeace, peer-reviewd by the man who wrote it. All they need add is a citation from the Suzuki Foundation and an endorsement from Elizabeth May and “the science will be settled” forever.

This is not just letting the fox into the hen house. This is giving him the keys, passing him the barbeque sauce and pointing his way to the broiler. Or, as McIntyre put it in plainer terms: “A lead author of the IPCC report, and of the hyped 80% scenario, is Sven Teske of Greenpeace International, whose official contribution is essentially based on a Greenpeace report cooked up with Europe’s renewable energy industry.”

Kind people may put this down to pure sloppiness on the part of the IPCC. Coming after its disastrous handling of the Himalayan glacier melt, however, it looks to me more like deliberate mischief. The IPCC cannot be that stupid by chance. Why these stories, and others of comparable magnitude, have not worked their way into the consciousness of the world’s politicians despite such clear demonstrations of the IPCC’s ramshackle processes is a mystery. But thanks to Steve McIntyre and others of near-equal courage, standing firm against the rage and mockery of the alarmist warming establishment, at least some of the IPCC’s dubious and chillingly erroneous practices are revealed.

National Post

Three Myths About Carbon Dioxide

Emeritus professor of Chemistry talks about the Myths of Carbon Dioxide in his letter to the National Post.

Three myths about carbon dioxide

National Post · Jun. 6, 2011 | Last Updated: Jun. 6, 2011 2:03 AM ET

Re: Gas Prices Would Double Without Ethanol, Ken Field, May 28. Ken Field dispelled three myths surrounding ethanol. I would like to do the same for carbon dioxide.

Myth 1 Man-made CO 2 causes global warming.

Fact 1 Compared to water, CO 2 d

Fact 1 Compared to water, CO 2 does not absorb enough heat energy to be a significant greenhouse gas. There is approximately 40 times more water vapour than CO in the atmosphere.

2 Myth 2 Reducing our carbon footprint will save the Earth from global warming.

Fact 2 Man-made CO 2 is a relatively small amount to the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Myth 3 CO 2 is a pollutant.

Fact 3 Oxides of nitrogen and sulphur are pollutants. CO 2 is not. It is

a colourless, odourless gas that does not create smog and is essential for life on Earth.

H.F. (Gus) Shurvell, emeritus professor of chemistry , Kingston, Ont.

Climate Change Reconsidered - May 24, 2011

Climate Change Reconsidered:

The Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change

New Material Posted on the NIPCC Web site Active Tornado Seasons, Big Outbreaks and Stronger Tornadoes Have Been Shown to Be Associated With La Niñas and Natural Variability in the Pacific (24 May 2011) Very active tornado months in May 2008 and April 2011 have been attributed by some to climate change. Numerous authors have instead found that stronger La Niñas, which are more frequent during cold Pacific (negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation) eras, are characterized by such outbreaks, active months, and strong tornadoes ... Read More Ocean pH Tolerance in Two Important Antarctic Invertebrates (24 May 2011) New findings "do not support a view that polar species are more affected by lowered pH compared with temperate and tropical counterparts" ... Read More What Does the World Health Organization Study of Global Health Risks Imply about Global Warming's Health Risks? (24 May 2011) It attributed 154,000-166,000 deaths worldwide and 5.5 million lost Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) in 2000 to global warming. The methodology, however, used to develop these estimates is suspect because ... Read More Pasture and Rangeland Responses to Rising CO2 Concentrations and Projected Changes in Climate (24 May 2011) Overall, the response of pasture species to increasing CO2 is expected to be "consistent with the CO2 response of C3 and C4 crop species," both of which are positive ... Read More Chinese Locust Plagues of the Past Millennium (24 May 2011) Results suggest that "global warming might not only imply reduced locust plague[s], but also reduced risk of droughts and floods for entire China" ... Read More The Greening of Earth's Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (24 May 2011) Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations initiate the process, while a host of other phenomena combine to enhance it ... Read More Climate Models Need to Render the Past Before Projecting the Future (25 May 2011) One of the chief criticisms of model projections of future climate in the climate change debate is that the general circulation models (GCMs) are not fully able to replicate past climate reliably due to "well-known" deficiencies in the models. One way that modelers attempt to overcome these is through the use of ensemble techniques, or multiple runs of the model. This provides for a future scenario that can be expressed as a range. But, even these cannot overcome all the shortcomings found in the models ... Read More Plant Species' Range Shifts in Mountainous Areas (25 May 2011) Although there is indeed a general tendency for plant species to move upward in elevation at their cold-limited range boundary in response to rising temperatures, some remain stationary and some even move in the opposite direction, while at their heat-limited range boundary, many do not move at all ... Read More Southern Scandinavian Storminess (25 May 2011) Data reveal that "there is no significant overall long-term trend common to all indices in cyclone activity in the North Atlantic and European region since the Dalton minimum" ... Read More Fluctuations in Air Temperature and Certain Cloud Parameters (25 May 2011) Apparently, some weather and climatic parameters have not become more variable or extreme with the passage of time, even over the last few decades, when climate alarmists claim the earth warmed at a rate and to a level not experienced over the past millennium or more ...Read More Climate-Driven Adaptations of Balsam Poplar Trees (25 May 2011) How did the trees change as they expanded their ranges in response to the warming that followed the last glaciation? ... Read More Roots of CO2-Enriched Trees Seek Out Needed Nitrogen (25 May 2011) As atmospheric CO2 enrichment provides an opportunity for trees to enhance their growth rates, it also seems to provide a way for them to find the extra nitrogen they need to do so ...Read More

Are The Oceans Really Rising?

Lorne Gunter in National Post cites studies by sea-level experts who after examining historic data for the 20th century say there is NO evidence of significantly higher levels. Comments with references are solicited. Included is one comment that disagrees.

Lorne Gunter: Despite UN’s Best Guess, Earth Has Not Been Flooded

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 20:59 Lorne Gunter, National Post

A great deal of wind has gone out of the climate-change sails since the revelations a year-and-a-half ago of major data manipulation by many of the world’s leading climate scientists.

Late last month, a report by two sea-level experts — James Houston, director emeritus of engineer research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida — examined historic data from tidal monitors around the United States, and determined that sea levels rose very little in the 20th century and that, to the extent they rose at all, their rate of rise has begun to fall.

Sea levels have not exactly begun to fall yet, but the rate at which they are rising has slowed considerably and this deceleration has likely been occurring for the past 80 years.

This finding, the researchers added, is consistent with what they and others have found from checking tidal gauges worldwide, too. What little sea-level rise there was in the last century was insignificant. Moreover, the rate at which the seas are rising has decelerated appreciably in the last few decades, contrary to the predictions by computer climate models that show the sea rising quickly and catastrophically as global warming melts glaciers and polar ice caps.

According to Messrs. Houston and Dean, were the 20th-century trend to continue, the world’s oceans would only rise about 15 cms between now and 2100. That’s about ankle depth, far from the one to three metres predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and way below the 20 to 30 metres forecast by Pope Al Gore of the Gaian Church of Environmental Harridans.

Why, the authors wonder in the Journal of Coastal Research, has “worldwide-temperature increase not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years.” And “indeed why [has] global sea level possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years,” despite what many scientists insist have been unnatural and dangerous global temperature rises over the same period?

Good questions.

Another good question would be: “Why do Western politicians continue to propose economically crippling solutions to man-made climate change when there is increasing evidence that such climate change is not occurring, or at least not occurring at a threatening or alarming rate?”

In Canada’s current federal election campaign, the Liberals have proposed a cap-and-trade regime that would add tens of billions of dollars to the cost of manufacturing, energy supply and transportation, and raise the cost of consumer goods, food and gasoline. Meanwhile, the New Democrats have promised to restrict development in the oil sands in the name of saving the planet without offering any concrete examples of how they will replace the national income, jobs or energy their moves would affect.

There have in the past few months been major studies projecting that hurricanes will not become more numerous or more severe, and concluding that ocean cycles — Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) — best explain climate fluctuations, not man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

There was even a prediction last fall from William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the U.S. National Solar Observatory, that sunspots could all but disappear beginning in 2015 (their number has already been greatly reduced over the past 18 months). And since the sun has a great deal more impact on Earth’s climate than do idling SUVs and oil sands mining, we might be headed for another Little Ice Age, such as the one that dominated Northern Hemisphere weather from 500 years from the 14th through the 19th centuries.

Even the UN was forced to make an embarrassing admission last week that it was wrong six years ago — spectacularly wrong — when it issued a dire warning that by now 50 million people would have been forced to become environmental refugees by the onset of global warming.

A great deal of wind has gone out of the climate-change sails since the revelations a year-and-a-half ago of major data manipulation by many of the world’s leading climate scientists. Still the “green” desire to micro-manage individual lives and regulate whole cultures still exists, so environmentalism remains a movement that needs to be kept in check.

National Post, 20 April 2011

Global Warming Questionable: Climate Changes in Cycles

Note: This is part of an ongoing debate with a neo-atheist called Brian and absolute believer in all science, junk or not. I respect Brian as a person but I can not respect his double standards and his logical fallacies that he uses to give "proof" for his point of view.

Just today we have another scientist who denies the conclusions of the almighty United Nations group. This again throws theories of man causing critical global warming out both windows and then a drop of 10 stories to the street below!

Here is Brian's statement:

Those that do sloppy or biased science are eventually weeded out. So when a majority of climatologists say climate change is real and it's man made, you can bet that there was a lot of double checking ofeach others work and disappointment when a competitors work was verified instead of disproving it.

Editor: REALLY! COULD THERE BE OTHER REASONS BRIAN?

Reference here:

http://www.financialpost.com/news/Climate+models+cold/4579652/story.html

This is quoted here under the fair use doctrine

Climate models go cold

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The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings.

David Evans, Financial Post · Apr. 8, 2011 | Last Updated: Apr. 8, 2011 9:25 AM ET

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.

Let's set a few things straight. The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Let's be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet's temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three -so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

That's the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, '80s and '90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point, official "climate science" stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory -that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.

But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.

They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade -yet they have the gall to tell us "it's worse than expected." These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.

One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.

The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source.

Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?              

The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.

We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government -how exciting for the political class!

Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold -in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: Sorry, but you've been had. Yes, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it's so minor it's not worth doing much about.

- David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia's carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The comments above were made to the Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally in Perth, Australia, on March 23.

Have you been conned? If so, could you be conned in other areas of your life?

Have a good!

-c