The Global Warming Hoax

In the last two decades there has been increasingly strident noise about global warming purportedly due to human activity. This insane hysteria by doomsday eco-chondriacs, eco-alarmists and other such nut-jobs, is not supported by facts.

Global temperatures have actually fallen in the last one and half decade, with the current winter in Europe and North Eastern United States being particularly severe leading to dozens of fatalities and disruption of air, road & rail transport. In North East USA, government and business activities were grounded for a whole week because of the severe winter.

Last April, the British Antarctic Survey reported that the Antarctic ice sheet is increasing. Hear them: “Satellite images show that since the 1970s the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade." Furthermore, recent NASA satellite images disclosed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), reveal that the supposedly endangered polar ice caps have now recovered. Gilles Langis, a senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service affirms that parts of the Artic ice are now thicker than usual.

Just last month (Jan 2010) in a scandal dubbed glacier-gate, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reversed its erroneous prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Dr Murari Lal, the IPCC scientist behind the falsehood admitted it wasn't based on any sound scientific research, but was an alarmist ruse to bamboozle world leaders into precipitous action.

Glacier-gate isn't the only scandal exposing the falsehoods feeding the global warming hysteria. Climate-gate was another such scandal in November last year at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of University of East Anglia. Hacked e-mails revealed CRU climate “scientists” manipulating and cooking scientific data, as well as an orchestrated conspiracy to silence scientists skeptical of global warming by refusing to publish or cite their papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Data from CRU are a major input to IPCC climate projections.

London Telegraph newspaper dubs Climate-gate the greatest scandal of the century, and the British weather service is investigating the fraud including full review of 160 years of temperature data used by the University of East Anglia's CRU.

The conspiracy of crooked CRU scientists to thwart publications by global warming dissenters in peer-reviewed scientific journals is just one of the plots to intimidate and frustrate global warming skeptics. Way back in 1990, a British Channel Four TV documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy, exposed discriminatory blockage research funds to scientists skeptical of global warming.

In a 2007 interview with Investor's Business Daily, Professor William Gray of the Atmosphere department, Colorado State University lamented that “fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong. Because they know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out”.

Media badmouthing of dissenters is yet another weapon in the arsenal of global warming propagandists, with CBS News' Scott Pelley equating global warming critics to “holocaust deniers”.

Threats are also on the table, as global warmists like Weather Channel's climatologist Dr. Heidi Cullen advocate withdrawal of American Meteorological Society approval from skeptical TV weathermen.

Nonetheless, undaunted critics like the Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre have taken up the gauntlet against global warming conspirators. He and his colleague Ross McKitrick successfully debunked the scary Hockey stick curve - a graphical representation purportedly showing marked rise in global temperatures between the 19th and 20th century supposedly due to human industrialization.

Never mind that the Medieval Warm Period (1000-1400AD) when there were no carbon dioxide emitting power stations or SUVs, was warmer than today's industrialized world. Even much warmer was the Holocene Thermal Maximum some 6000-8000 years ago when there was virtually no human civilization.

In a seminal treatise published in 2003, “M&M” - as the duo of McIntyre and McKitrick have come to be known in global warming circles - demonstrated flaws in the data samples and computer models used by Micheal Mann et al (1998) to concoct the phony Hockey stick. The computer model used was programmed to always produce the frightening Hockey Stick regardless of data input. This is the kind of wish-washy dubious “science” on which anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming is based.

In 2006, a US Congress commissioned investigation team led by Edward Wegman not only debunked the Hockey stick curve and other faulty climate presumptions, they concluded that global warming “cannot be supported” by scientific facts.

An audit of NOAA temperature monitoring stations - used to collate temperature data - by meteorologist Anthony Watts and Colorado state University climatologist Robert Peilke found that contrary to US National Weather Service guidelines, 89% of the temperature stations were sited less than 30 metres from a heat source, resulting in spuriously high temperature data.

In another recent study, Kester Green and Scott Armstrong of the US National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) audited the global warming climate forecasts in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and discovered that the IPCC violated 60 of the 127 principles relevant in assessing climate predictions.

The intellectual dishonesty of the global warming propagandists knows no bounds. In 2002, a UK court ruled that former US Vice President Al-Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth contained numerous falsehoods.

Proponents of anthropogenic global warming falsely ascribe it to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from combustion of fossil fuels for energy. So much so that the Obama administration even got the United States EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to declare CO2, which we all exhale a danger to public health.

Thus the cap & trade nonsense might well apply to we humans and other animals in order to stop us from polluting the atmosphere with the CO2 we breathe out, which plants require to grow.

As Craig Idso of the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change rightly points out, increased atmospheric CO2 is actually a boon for plant life that can help boost agricultural output for the growing human population. In a 2002 New Phytologist review of over 150 scientific studies involving 79 plant species, Jablonski et al affirmed that extra CO2 boosts plant production of flowers, fruits and seeds.

Human activity accounts for less than 3.4% of global CO2 emissions, nature being responsible for the remaining 96.6%. In other words even if there were no human activity, 96.6% of global CO2 production would continue unabated.

Furthermore, CO2 constitutes a meagre 0.038% of all atmospheric gases and is not even the major greenhouse gas - water vapour is, accounting for up to 90% of greenhouse effect.

Add to this the much more important non-greenhouse factors influencing global climate - solar variation, ocean currents, volcanoes, earth's axis tilt & orbit, atmospheric aerosols etc - then the fallacy of the human generated greenhouse gases causing global warming becomes even more spurious.

Several scientific reports even disconnect global warming from atmospheric CO2. Nature online asserts that the polar ice caps were formed when atmospheric CO2 was 760ppm (parts per million), and the present CO2 is just 380ppm. Furthermore as Dr. Holly Fretwell of George Mason University rightly points out, data from the last 650,000 years tell us that temperatures changes actually precede changes in atmospheric CO2.

So CO2 emissions can't be causing global warming. Even an IPCC scientist, Dr Vincent Gray agrees - “There is no relationship between warming and the level of gases in the atmosphere.”

Other dissenting IPCC scientists include Yuri Izrael, the IPCC Vice Chair who in February 2007 wrote that the “the panic over global warming is totally unjustified…there is no serious threat to the climate”.

Following release of the IPCC 2001 report, its lead author, Dr. John Christy rebuked media sensationalism, “The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints … the worst-case scenario is not going to happen.”

No more than 50 CRU-type “scientists” of IPCC's inflated 2500 figure are responsible for its misleading alarmist reports about CO2 emissions from human industry. On the contrary, over 4000 scientists including 72 Nobel laureates have signed on the Heidelberg Appeal (1992) calling for an end to the irrational scare-mongering about human industry.

The eminent scientists noted: "We are…worried at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development…Humanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing nature to its needs and not the reverse.”

Global warming is part of regular cyclical change that began long before humans evolved on this planet. In the last 1billion years, there has been at least four ice ages interspersed with warming periods. During previous warming periods between ice ages, the earth was much warmer than today with no ice sheets even at the poles.

At that time humanity didn't even exist. It is therefore preposterous for today's eco-alarmists to claim that humanity is responsible for global warming. Presently we are in the interglacial period of an ice age that began some 2 million years ago in the Pleistocene epoch, as evidenced by the prominent Antarctic & Arctic ice sheets. So apocalyptic global warming is way off.

Perhaps because of the aforementioned widely reported global cooling events, the apocalyptic global warming doomsayers have now switched gears and now talk of anthropogenic “climate change”, as if climate was static prior to human industrialization.

Under this new rubric of ��climate change”, all manner of climate related disasters are now attributed to man-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These include hurricanes like Katrina and the advancing Sahara desertification. Never mind that the Sahara was desertified from the thriving savannah it once was thousands of years ago when there was no human industrial activity.

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data debunk any connection between hurricanes and human industrialization. In a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters (Jan' 2008), the NOAA actually documents a decrease in hurricane activity over the last century. Last year there were no major hurricane scares even though human CO2 production has not declined.

Here in Naija, the Climate Action Network even includes gully erosion as a global warming issue. Really? Do the follow-follow egg-heads there really believe reducing CO2 emissions will stop gully erosion in the South East? Instead of chasing shadows at recently concluded climate summit in Copenhagen, they should go after our thieving politicians and bureaucrats who steal and misappropriate Ecology funds meant to solve the problem.

Thankfully Copenhagen was a flop, and hopefully all other such idiotic machinations by climate change wackos will also come to naught.

This of course is not to deny that there are pressing environmental challenges that need to be addressed; such as wanton deforestation, advancing Sahara and drying up of Lake Chad. Drastic innovative solutions are required not unrealistic idiocy of shutting down industries that are required to cater for growing human population.

Need we remind these climate change nut-jobs that de-industrialization of the Nigerian economy is largely responsible for our astronomical unemployment rate with attendant increased crime wave – kidnapping, armed robberies, ethno-religious clashes etc?

Switching power production to “green energy” sources (solar, wind etc) is totally unrealistic as their low power output is grossly inadequate for growing industrialized economies. Nuclear power is currently the major greenhouse gas free energy source that can easily rival or even replace dependence on fossil fuels, but this option is completely abhorrent to the global warming crowd. The Eco-wackos also often object to hydroelectric power on the grounds of adverse environmental impact.

With regards to the advancing Sahara, the technology already exists to afforest the entire Sahara and eliminate the desert even if it means constructing desalination plants and piping fresh water through the desert.

There are already tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines for crude oil and natural gas, so why not for freshwater which is a much more sustainable resource of much greater long term benefit? The Sahara's underground water reserves would also be useful in this regard.

There is therefore an urgent need for a Sahara Afforestation Commission whose membership should include all the affected West & North African Countries.

Current piecemeal efforts of planting a few hundred or thousand trees on several acres won't stop the world's largest desert which is larger than Europe. Neither would shutting down all industries, grounding all aircraft, scrapping all SUVs and switching to green energy that are cost ineffective and can't meet global energy needs.