Transcript of The Great Global Warming Swindle
Channel 4 (English Television)
Written and Directed by Martin Durkin (Wag TV)
Aired March 08, 2007
Tim Ball: “When people say we don’t believe in global warming I say no, I believe in global warming; I don’t believe human CO2 is causing that warming.”
Nir Shaviv: “A few years ago if you would ask me, I would tell you it’s CO2. Why? Because, just like everyone else in the public, I listened to what the media had to say.”
Each day the news reports grow more fantastically apocalyptic. Politicians no longer dare to express any doubt about climate change.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: “There is such intolerance of any dissenting voice. This is the most politically incorrect thing possible; is to doubt this climate change orthodoxy.”
Global warming has gone beyond politics; it is a new kind or morality. Yet as the frenzy over man-made global warming grows shriller, many senior climate scientists say the actual scientific basis for the theory is crumbling.
Nir Shaviv: “There were periods, for example, in Earth’s history when we had three times as much CO2 as we have today. Or periods when we had ten times as much CO2 as we have today. And if CO2 has a large effect on climate then you should see it in the temperature reconstruction.”
Ian Clark: “If we look at climate through the geological time frame, we would never suspect CO2 as a major climate driver.”
Piers Corbyn: “None of the major climate changes in the last thousand years can be explained by CO2.”
Ian Clark: “You can’t say that CO2 will drive climate; it certainly never did in the past.”
John Christy: “I’ve often heard it said that there is a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue, and that humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system. Well, I am one scientist, and there are many, that simply think that is not true.”
Man made global warming is no ordinary scientific theory. It is presented in the media as having the stamp of authority of an impressive international organization: the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
Philip Stott: “The IPCC, like any UN body, is political. The final conclusions are politically driven.”
Paul Reiter: “This claim that the IPCC is the world’s top one thousand five hundred, or two thousand five hundred scientists; you look at the bibliographies of the people and it’s simply not true. There are quite a number of non scientists.”
Richard Lindzen: “And to build the number up to twenty-five hundred they have to start with taking reviewers and government people and so on; anyone, whoever, came close to them. And none of them are asked to agree; many of them disagree.”
Paul Reiter: “Those people who are specialists but don’t agree with the polemic and resign, and there have been a number that I know of, they are simply put on the author list and become part of this two thousand five hundred the world’s top scientists.”
Richard Lindzen: “People have decided you have to convince other people, that since no scientist disagrees you shouldn’t disagree, either. But whenever you hear that in science that’s pure propaganda.”
This is a story of how a theory of climate turned into a political ideology.
Patrick Moore: “See, I don’t even like to call it the environmental movement anymore because, really, it is a political activist movement, and they have become hugely influential at a global level.”
It is the story of the distortion of a whole area of science.
Roy Spencer: “Climate scientists need there to be a problem in order to get funding.”
John Christy: “We have a vested interest in creating panic because then money will flow to climate science.”
Richard Lindzen: “There’s one thing you shouldn’t say, and that is ‘this might not be a problem.’”
It is the story of a how a political campaign turned into a bureaucratic bandwagon.
Patrick Michaels: “The fact of the matter is that tens of thousands of jobs depend on global warming right now. It’s a big business.”
Philip Stott: “It’s become a great industry in itself, and if the whole ‘global warming’ farrago collapsed there’d be an awful lot of people out of jobs and looking for work.”
This is a story of censorship and intimidation.
Nigel Calder: “I have seen and heard their spitting fury at anybody who might disagree with them, which is not the scientific way.”
It is a story about Westerners invoking the threat of climatic disaster to hinder vital industrial progress in the developing world.
James Shikwati: “One clear thing that emerges from the old environmental debate is the point that there is somebody keen to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop.”
Patrick Moore: “The environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries.”
The global warming story is a cautionary tale of how a media scare became the defining idea of a generation.
Nigel Calder: “The whole global warming business has become like a religion, and people who disagree are called heretics. I’m a heretic; the makers of this program are all heretics.”
In 2005 a House of Lords inquiry was set up to examine the scientific evidence of man made global warming. A leading figure in that inquiry was Lord Lawson of Blaby who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer [the title held by the British Cabinet minister responsible for all economic and financial matters] in the 1980s, was the first politician to commit government money to global warming research.
Lord Lawson: “We had a very, very thorough inquiry took evidence from a whole lot of people expert in this area and produced a report. What surprised me was to discover how weak and uncertain the science was. In fact, there are more and more thoughtful people, some of them a little bit frightened to come out in the open, but who quietly, and privately, and some of them publicly, are saying, ‘Hang on, wait a minute, this simply doesn’t add up.’”
We are told that the Earth’s climate is changing, but the Earth’s climate is always changing. In Earth’s long history there have been countless periods when it was much warmer, and much cooler, than it is today, when much of the world was covered by tropical forests, or else vast ice sheets. The climate has always changed, and changed, without any help from us humans.
We can trace the present warming trend back at least two hundred years to the end of a very cold period in Earth’s history. This cold spell is known to climatologists as the Little Ice Age.
Professor Philip Stott: “In the fourteenth century Europe plunged into the Little Ice Age, and where we’d look for evidence of this are the old illustrations, and prints, and pictures of Old Father Thames, because during the hardest and toughest winters of that Little Ice Age the Thames would freeze over. And there were wonderful ice fairs held on the Thames; skating and people actually selling things on the ice.”
If we look back further in time before the Little Ice Age we find a balmy golden era, when temperatures were higher than they are today, a time known to climatologists as the Medieval Warm Period.
Professor Philip Stott: “It’s important people know that climate enabled a quite different life style in the medieval period. We have this view today that warming is going to have apocalyptic outcomes. In fact, wherever you describe this warm period it seems to be associated with riches.”
In Europe this was the great age of the cathedral builders, a time when, according to Chaucer, vineyards flourished in the north of England.
Professor Philip Stott: “All over the city of London there are little memories of the vineyards that grew in the Medieval Warm Period. So this was a wonderfully rich time, and this little church, in a sense, symbolized it, because it comes from a period of great wealth.”
Going back in time further still, before the Medieval Warm Period, we find more warm spells, including a very prolonged period during the Bronze Age known to geologists as Holocene Maximum, when temperatures were significantly higher than they are now for more than three millennia.
Professor Ian Clark: “If we go back eight thousand years in the Holocene Period, our current interglacial, it was much warmer than it is today. Now the polar bears obviously survived that period; they’re with us today, they are very adaptable, and these warm periods in the past we call hypseethermals (sp?) posed no problem for them.”
Climate variation in the past is clearly natural so why do we think it’s any different today? In the current alarm about global warming the culprit is industrial society. Thanks to modern industry, luxuries once enjoyed exclusively by the rich, are now available in abundance to ordinary people. Novel technologies have made life easier and richer. Modern transports and communication have made the world seem less foreign and distant. Industrial progress has changed our lives, but has it also changed the climate?
According to the theory of man made global warming industrial growth should cause the temperature to rise, but does it?
Professor Patrick Michaels: “Anyone who goes around and says that carbon dioxide is responsible for most of the warming of the twentieth century hasn’t looked at the basic numbers.”
Industrial production in the early decades of the twentieth century were still in its infancy, restricted to a mere few countries, handicapped by war and economic depression. After the Second World War things changed. Consumer goods like refrigerators, and washing machines, and TVs, and cars began to be mass produced for an international market. Historians call this global explosion of industrial activity the Post Warm Economic Boom. So how does the industrial story compare with the temperature record?
Since the mid-nineteenth century the Earth’s temperature has risen by just over half a degree Celsius, but this warming began long before cars and planes were even invented. What’s more, most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940 during a period when industrial production was relatively insignificant. After the Second World War, during the Post War Economic Boom, temperatures, in theory, should have shot up, but they didn’t; they fell, not for one or two years, but for four decades. In fact, paradoxically, it wasn’t until the world economic recession in the 1970s that they stopped falling.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu: “CO2 began to increase exponentially in about 1940, but the temperature actually began to decrease 1940, continued ‘til about 1975. So this is the opposite configuration, with the CO2 increasing rapidly but yet the temperature decreasing then we cannot say that CO2 and the temperature go together.
Tim Ball: “Temperature went up significantly up to 1940 when human production of CO2 was relatively low. And then in the Post-War years when industry and the whole economies of the world really got going, and human production of CO2 just soared, the global temperature was going down. In other words, the facts didn't fit the theory.”
Nigel Calder: “Just at a time when, after the Second World war, industry was booming, carbon dioxide was increasing, and yet the Earth was getting cooler and starting off scares of a coming Ice Age, it made absolutely no sense; it still doesn't make sense.”
Why do we suppose that carbon dioxide is responsible for our changing climate? CO2 forms only a very small part of the Earth's atmosphere. In fact we measure changes in the level of atmospheric CO2 in tens of parts per million.
Time Ball: “If you take CO2 as a percentage of all the gases in the atmosphere, the oxygen, the nitrogen, and argon and so on, it's 0.054%. It's an incredibly small portion, and then of course you've got to take that portion that supposedly humans are adding, which is the focus of all the concern, and it gets even smaller."
Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gases themselves only form a small part of the atmosphere. What's more, CO2 is a relatively minor greenhouse gas.
Tim Ball: “The atmosphere is made up of a multitude of gases. A small percentage of them we call greenhouse gases. And of that very small percentage of greenhouse gases, 95% of it is water vapor; it's the most important greenhouse gas.”
John Christy: “Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, by far the most important greenhouse gas.”
So is there any way of checking whether the recent warming was due to an increase in greenhouse gas? There is only one way to tell and that is to look up in the sky, or a part of the sky known to scientists as the troposphere.
Richard Lindzen: “If it's greenhouse warming you get more warming in the middle of the troposphere, the first 10, 12 kilometers of the atmosphere, than you do at the surface. There are good theoretical reasons for that having to do with how the greenhouse works."
The greenhouse effect works like this: the Sun sends its heat down to Earth. If it weren't for greenhouse gases this solar radiation would bounce back into space, leaving the planet cold and uninhabitable. Greenhouse gas traps the escaping heat in the Earth's troposphere, a few miles above the surface. And it's here, according to the climate models, that the rate of warming should be highest if it's greenhouse gas that causing it.
Frederick Singer: “All the models, every one of them, calculates that the warming should be faster as you go up from the surface into the atmosphere. And in fact the maximum warming over the Equator should take place at an altitude of about 10 kilometers.”
A scientist largely responsible for measuring the temperature in the Earth’s atmosphere is Professor John Christy. In 1991 he was awarded NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement, and in 1996 he received a special award from the American Meteorological Society for fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate. He was a lead author on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
There are two ways to take the temperature in the Earth's atmosphere, satellites and weather balloons.
John Christy: “What we found consistently is that in a great part of the Planet that the bulk of the atmosphere is not warming as much as we see at the surface in this region, and that's a real head scratcher for us because the theory is pretty straight forward, and the theory says that if the surface warms the upper atmosphere should warm rapidly. The rise in temperature of that part of the atmosphere is not very dramatic at all, and really does not match the theory that climate models are expressing at this point.”
Patrick Michaels: “One of the problems that is plaguing the models is that they predict that as you go up through the atmosphere, except in the polar regions, that the rate of warming increases, and it's quite clear from two data sets, not just satellite data, which everybody talks about, but from weather balloon data, that you don't see that effect. In fact it looks like the surface temperatures are warming slightly more than the upper air temperatures. That's a big difference.”
Richard Lindzen: “That data gives you a handle on the fact that what you're seeing is warming that probably is not due to greenhouse gases.”
Frederick Singer: “That is, that the observations do not show an increase with altitude. In fact, most observations show a slight decrease in the rate of warming with altitude. So in a sense you can say that the hypothesis of man made global warming is falsified by the evidence.”
So the recent warming of the Earth happened in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Most of the warming took place in the early part of the 20th Century and occurred mostly at the Earth's surface, the very opposite of what should have happened according to the theory of man made global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s emotional film, “An Inconvenient Truth" is regarded by many as the definitive popular presentation of the theory of man made global warming. His argument rests of one all-important piece of evidence taken from ice core surveys in which scientists drill deep into the ice to look back into Earth's climate history hundreds of thousands of years. The first ice core survey took place in Vostok in the Antarctic. What it found, as Al Gore correctly points out, was a clear correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature.
Al Gore [snippet of Inconvenient Truth film]: “…The relationship is actually very complicated, but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this: when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer."
Al Gore says the relationship between temperature and CO2 is complicated, but he doesn't say what those complications are. In fact there was something very important in the ice core data that he failed to mention.
Professor Ian Clark is a leading Artic Paleontologist who looks back into the Earth’s temperature record tens of millions of years.
Ian Clark: “When we look at climate on long scales we're looking for geological material that actually records climate. If we were to take an ice sample for example, we use isotopes to reconstruct temperature, but the atmosphere that's imprisoned in that ice we liberate and then we look at the CO2 content.”
Professor Clark, and others, have indeed discovered, as Al Gore says, a link between carbon dioxide and temperature. But what Al Gore doesn't say is that the link is the wrong way around.
Ian Clark: “So here we’re looking at the ice core record from Vostok, and in the red we see temperature going up from early time to later time at a very key interval when we came out of a glaciation, and we see the temperature going up, and then we see the CO2 coming up. CO2 lags behind that increase; it’s got an eight hundred year lag. So temperature is leading CO2 by eight hundred years.”
There have now been several major ice core surveys; every one of them shows the same thing. The temperature rises or falls and then after a few hundred years, carbon dioxide follows.
Frederick Singer: “So obviously carbon dioxide is not the cause of that warming. In fact we can say that the warming produced the increase in carbon dioxide.
Ian Clark: “CO2 clearly cannot be causing temperature changes, it's a product of temperature, it's following temperature changes.”
Tim Ball: “The ice core record goes to the very heart of the problem we have here. They said if the CO2 increases in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas then the temperature will go up, but the ice core record shows exactly the opposite. So the fundamental assumption, the most fundamental assumption of the whole theory of climate change due to humans, is shown to be wrong.”
But how can it be that higher temperatures lead to more CO2 in the atmosphere? To understand this we must first restate the obvious point that carbon dioxide is a natural gas produced by all living things.
Nigel Calder: “Few things annoy me more than to hear people talking about carbon dioxide as being a pollutant. You’re made of carbon dioxide; I’m made of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is how living things grow.”
What's more, humans are not the main source of carbon dioxide.
John Christy: Humans produce a small fraction, in the single digits, percentage-wise of the CO2 that is produced in the atmosphere.”
Volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all the factories, and cars, and planes, and other sources of man made carbon dioxide put together. More still comes from animals and bacteria which produce about 150 gigatons of CO2 each year, compared to a mere 6.5 gigatons from humans. An even larger source of CO2 is dying vegetation, from falling leaves for example in the autumn, but the biggest source of CO2, by far, is the oceans.
Carl Wunsch is Professor of Oceanography at MIT, he was also Visiting Professor in Oceanography at Harvard University, and University College London, and a Senior Visiting Fellow in Mathamatics and Physics at the University Cambridge. He is the author of four major text books on oceanography.
Carl Wunsch: “The ocean is the major reservoir into which carbon dioxide goes when it comes out of the atmosphere or to where it is readmitted to the atmosphere. If you heat the surface of the ocean it tends to emit carbon dioxide. Similarly if you cool the ocean surface the ocean can dissolve more carbon dioxide.”
So the warmer the oceans the more carbon dioxide they produce, and the cooler they are, the more they suck in.
But why is there a time lag of hundreds of years between a change in temperature and a change in the amount of carbon dioxide going into or out of the sea? The reason is that oceans are so big and so deep they take literally hundreds of years to warm up and cool down. This time lag means the oceans have what scientists call a "memory" of temperature changes.
Carl Wunsch: “The ocean has a memory of past events running out as far as ten thousand years. So, for example, if somebody says, ‘Oh, I'm seeing changes in the North Atlantic this must mean that the climate system is changing.’ It may only mean that something happened in a remote part of the ocean decades or hundreds of years ago, whose effects are now beginning to show up in the North Atlantic.
The current warming began long before people had cars or electric lights. In the past hundred and fifty years the temperature has risen just over half a degree Celsius, but most of that rise occurred before 1940. Since that time the temperature has fallen for four decades and risen for three. There is no evidence at all from Earth's long climate history that carbon dioxide has ever determined global temperatures.
But if CO2 doesn’t drive Earth’s climate, what does?
The common belief that carbon dioxide is driving climate change is as odds with much of the available scientific data, data from weather balloons, satellites, from ice core surveys, and from the historical temperature records. But if CO2 isn’t driving climate, what is?
Philip Stott: “Isn't it bizarre to think that it's humans, you know, when we're filling up our car, turning on our lights, that we're the ones controlling climate. Just look in the sky. Look at that massive thing, the Sun. Even humans at our present six and a half billion are minute relative to that.”
In the late 1980s solar physicist Piers Corbyn decided to try a radically new way of forecasting the weather. Despite the huge resources of the official Met Office, Corbyn's new technique consistently produced more accurate results. He was hailed in the national press as a super weatherman. The secret of his success was the Sun.
Piers Corbyn: “The origin of our solar weather technique of long-range forecasting came originally from study of sunspots and a desire to predict those, and then I realized it was actually much more interesting to use the Sun to predict the weather.”
Sunspots we now know are intense magnetic fields, which appear at times of higher solar activity. But, for many hundreds of years long before this was properly understood, astronomers around the world used to count the number of sunspots in the belief that more spots heralded warmer weather.
In 1893 the British astronomer, Edward Maunder, observed that during the Little Ice Age there were barely any spots visible on the Sun, a period of solar inactivity, which became known as the Maunder Minimum.
But how reliable are sunspots as an indicator of the weather?
Piers Corbyn: “I decided to test it by gambling on the weather through William Hill [online sports betting] against what the Met Office said was, you know, a normal expectation, and I won money month after month after month after month. Last winter the Met Office said it could be, or would be, an exceptionally cold winter; we said no, that is nonsense, it’s going to be very close to normal, and we specifically said when it would be cold, i.e., after Christmas and February. We were right, they were wrong.”
In 1991, senior scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute decide to compile a record of sunspots in the twentieth century and compare it with the temperature record. What they found was an incredibly close correlation between what the Sun was doing and changes in temperature on Earth. Solar activity, they found, rose sharply to 1940, fell back for four decades until the 1970s, and then rose again after that.
Eigil Friis-Christensen: “When we saw this correlation between the temperature and solar activity, or sun spot cyclings, then people said to us, ‘Okay, it can be just a coincidence. Sow how can we prove that it’s not just a coincidence?’ Well one obvious thing is to have a longer time series, or different time series. Then we went back in time.”
So Professor Friis-Christensen and his colleagues examined four hundred years of astronomical records, to compare sunspot activity against temperature variation. Once again they found that variations in solar activity were intimately linked to temperature variation on Earth. It was the Sun it seemed, not carbon dioxide or anything else, that was driving changes in the climate.
In a way it's not surprising, the Sun affects us directly of course when it sends down its heat, but we now know that Sun also affects us indirectly through clouds. Clouds have a powerful cooling effect, but how are they formed?
In the early twentieth century scientists discovered that the Earth was constantly being bombarded by sub-atomic particles. These particles, which they called cosmic rays, originated, it was believed, from exploding super-novae far beyond our Solar System. When the particles coming down meet water vapor rising up from the sea, they form water droplets and make clouds. But when the sun is more active and the solar wind is strong, fewer particles get through and fewer clouds are formed.
Just how powerful this effect was became clear only recently when an astrophysicist, Professor Nir Shaviv, decided to compare his own record of cloud-forming cosmic rays with the temperature record created by a geologist, Professor Jan Veizer, going back six hundred million years. What they found was that when cosmic rays went up the temperature went down, when cosmic rays went down the temperature went up. Clouds and the Earth's climate were very closely linked.
To see how close you just flip the lines [graph shown].
Nir Shaviv: “We just compared the graphs, just put them one upon the other, and it was just amazing. Jan Veizer looks at me and says, ‘You know, we have very explosive data here.’”
Ian Clark: “I’ve never seen such vastly different records coming together so beautifully to show, really, what was happening over that long period of time.”
The climate was controlled by the clouds, the clouds were controlled by cosmic rays, and the cosmic rays were controlled by the Sun. It all came down to the Sun.
Nigel Calder: “If you had x-ray eyes, what appears as a nice friendly yellow ball would appear like a raging tiger. The Sun is an incredibly violent beast and it’s throwing out great explosion and puffs of gas, and endless solar wind that's forever rushing past the Earth. We're in a certain sense inside the atmosphere of the Sun. The intensity of its magnetic field more that doubled during the twentieth century.”
In 2005, astrophysicists from Harvard University published the following graph in the official journal of the American Geophysical Union. [Graph shown] The blue line represents temperature change in the Arctic over the past hundred years. And here is the rise in carbon dioxide over the same period. The two are not obviously connected. [Another graph shown] But now look again at the temperature record and at this red line, which depicts variations in solar activity over the past century, as recorded independently by scientists from NASA and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Ian Clark: “Solar activity over the last hundred years, over the last several hundred years, correlates very nicely on a decadal basis with sea ice and Arctic temperatures
To the Harvard astrophysicists and many other scientists the conclusion is inescapable.
Piers Corbyn: “The Sun is driving climate change. CO2 is irrelevant.”
But why, if this is so, are we bombarded day after day about new items about man made global warming? Why do so many people in the media, and elsewhere, regard it as an undisputed fact? To understand the power of Global Warming Theory we must tell the story of how it came about.
Doom laden predictions about climate change are not new. In 1974 the BBC warned us of pending disasters, which might seem strangely familiar.
[Voice of Unknown Speaker in ‘The Weather Machine’]: “Again and again the news reels have been showing us disasters of the weather. The American Midwest suffered its worst drought since the 1930s, and tornadoes were on the rampage.”
And what was going to be the cause of these disasters? The man behind the series was former New Scientist Editor, Nigel Calder.
Nigel Calder: “In ‘The Weather Machine’ we reported the mainstream opinion of the time, which was global cooling, and the threat of a new ice age.”
After four decades of falling temperatures experts warned that a cooler world would have catastrophic consequences. But amid the doom and gloom there was one voice of hope. A Swedish scientist called Bert Bolin tentatively suggested that man made carbon dioxide might help to warm the world, although he wasn’t sure. [Snippet of Bolin speaking]
Nigel Calder: “We were also the first to put Bert Bolin of Sweden on international television talking about the dangers about carbon dioxide, and I remember being bitterly criticized by top experts for indulging him in his fantasy.”
At the height of the cooling scare in the ‘70s, Bert Bolin’s eccentric theory of man made global warming seemed absurd. Two things happened to change that. First, temperatures started to rise, and second, the miners went on strike.
To Margaret Thatcher energy was a political problem. In the early ‘70s the oil crisis had plunged the world into recession for the miners had brought down Ed Heath’s [Edward Heath] conservative government. Mrs. Thatcher was determined the same would not happen to her; she set out to break their power.
Nigel Calder: “The politicization of this subject started with Margaret Thatcher.”
Lord Lawson of Blaby: “She was very concerned, always, I remember when I was Secretary of State for Energy, to promote nuclear power long before the issues of climate change came up because she was concerned about energy security. She didn’t trust the Middle East and she didn’t trust the National Union of Mine Workers, so she didn’t trust oil and she didn’t trust coal. So, therefore, she felt that we really had to push ahead with nuclear power. “And then when the climate change, global warming thing came up, she felt this was great, this was another argument because it doesn’t have any carbon dioxide emissions; this is another argument why you should go for nuclear, and is really what she was largely saying. It’s been misrepresented since then.”
Nigel Calder: “She said to the scientists, she went to the Royal Society and she said, ‘There’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff.’ So of course they went away and did that.”
Philip Stott: “Inevitably, the moment politicians put their weight behind something, and attach their name to it in some ways of course, money will flow; that’s the way it goes. And inevitably research, development, institutions started to ‘bubble up,’ if you put it that way, which were going to be researching climate but with a particular emphasis on the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature.”
At the request of Mrs. Thatcher the UK Met Office set up a climate modeling unit, which provided the basis for a new international committee called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
Nigel Calder: “They came out with the first big report, which predicted climatic disaster as a result of global warming. I remember going to the scientific press conference and being amazed by two things. First, the simplicity and eloquence of the message and the vigor with which it was delivered, and secondly, the total disregard of all climate science up ‘til that time including, incidentally, the role of the sun, which had been the subject of a major meeting at the Royal Society just a few months earlier.”
But the new emphasis on man made carbon dioxide as a possible environmental problem didn’t just appeal to Mrs. Thatcher.
Nigel Calder: “It was certainly something very favorable to the environmental idea, what I call the ‘Medieval Environmentalism’ of let’s get back to the way things were in Medieval times, and get rid of all these dreadful cars and machines. They loved it because carbon dioxide was, for them, an emblem of industrialization.
Frederick Singer: “Well, carbon dioxide clearly is an industrial gas so it's tied in with economic growth, with transportation in cars, with what we call civilization, and there are forces in the environmental movement that are simply against economic growth. They think that’s bad.”
Philip Stott: “It could be used to legitimize a whole suite of myths that already existed, anti car, anti growth, anti development, and above all anti that great Satan, the U.S."
Patrick Moore is considered one of the foremost environmentalists of his generation; he is co-founder of Greenpeace.
Patrick Moore: “The shift to climate being a major focal point came about for two very distinct reasons. The first reason was, because by the mid eighties, the majority of people now agreed with all of the reasonable things we, in the environmental movement, were saying they should do. Now when a majority of people agree with you it’s pretty hard to remain confrontational with them, and so the only way to remain anti establishment was to adopt ever more extreme positions. When I left Greenpeace it was in the midst of them adopting a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. Like, I said, ‘You guys, this is one of the elements in the periodic table you know, I mean, I’m not sure if that’s in our jurisdiction to be banning a whole element.’ The other reason that environmental extremism emerged was because world communism failed, the wall came down, and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement bringing their neo-Marxism with them, and learned to use Green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anti capitalism, and anti globalization, than they have to do with ecology or science.”
Lord Lawson of Blaby: “The Left have been slightly disoriented by the manifest failure of socialism and, indeed, even more so of communism as it was tried out and, therefore, they still remain as anti capitalist as they were, but they had to find a new guise for their anti-capitalism.”
Nigel Calder: “And it was a kind of amazing alliance from Margaret Thatcher on the Right through to very Left Wing anti capitalist environmentalists. That created this kind of momentum behind a looney idea.”
By the early 1990s man made global warming was no longer a slightly eccentric theory about climate; it was a full-blown political campaign. It was attracting media attention and, as a result, more government funding.
Richard Lindzen: “Prior to Bush the Elder, I think the level of funding for climate and climate related sciences was somewhere around the order of a hundred and seventy million dollars a year, which was reasonable for the size of the field. It jumped to two billion a year, more than a factor of ten, and yeah, that changed a lot. I mean a lot of jobs, it brought a lot of new people into it who otherwise were not interested, so you developed whole cadres of people whose only interest in the field was that there was global warming."
Nigel Calder: “If I wanted to do research on, shall we say the squirrels of Sussex, what I would do, and this is anytime from the time of 1990 onwards, I would write my grant application saying, ‘I want to investigate the nut gathering behavior of squirrels with special reference to the effects of global warming.’ And that way I get my money. If I forget to mention global warming I might not get the money.”
Frederick Singer: “There’s really no question in my mind that the large amounts of money that have been fed into this particular, rather small area of science, have distorted the overall scientific effort.”
Richard Lindzen: “We’re all competing for funds, and if your field is the focus of concern you have that much less work rationalizing why your field should be funded.”
By the 1990s tens of billions of dollars of government funding in the U.S., UK, and elsewhere were being diverted into research related to global warming. A large portion of those funds went into building computer models to forecast what the climate will be in the future. But how accurate are those models?
Dr. Roy Spencer was Senior Scientist for Climate Study at NASA’s special space flight center. He has been awarded medals for exceptional scientific achievement from both NASA and the Meteoroligical Society.
Roy Spencer: “Climate models are only as good as the assumptions that go into them and they have hundreds of assumptions. All it takes is one assumption to be wrong for the forecasts to be way off.”
Climate forecasts are not new but, in the past, scientists were more modest about their ability to predict the weather.
[Narrator from ‘TheWeather Machine’ from BBC Television]: “Any attempt at forecasting changes of climate meet skepticism from the men who model the weather by computer.” [Man Speaking]: “In making decision which affect people a bad prediction as to what the climate of the future will be can be far worse than none at all. I’m afraid that our understanding of the complex weather machine is not yet good enough to make a reliable statement of the future.”
All models assume that man-made CO2 is the main cause of climate change rather than the Sun or the clouds.
Tim Ball: The analogy that I used is that my car is not running very well, so I’m gonna ignore the engine, which is the Sun, and I’m gonna ignore the transmission, which is the water vapor, and I’m gonna look at one nut on the right rear wheel which is the human-produced CO2. It’s that the science is that bad.”
Ian Clark: “If you haven't understood the climate system, if you haven't understood all the components: the cosmic rays, the solar, the CO2, the water vapor, the clouds, and put it all together, if you haven't got all that, then your model isn't worth anything.”
The range of climate forecasts varies greatly. These variations are produced by subtly altering the assumptions upon which the models are based.
Carl Wunsch: “The models are so complicated you can often adjust them in such a way that they do something very exciting.”
Ian Clark: I’ve worked with modelers, I’ve done modeling; with a mathematical model, and you tweak parameters, you can model anything. You can make it warmer; you can make it get colder by changing things.”
Since all the models assume that man-made CO2 causes warming, one obvious way to produce a more impressive forecast is to increase the amount of imagined man-made CO2 going into the atmosphere.
Patrick Michaels: “We put an increase in carbon dioxide in them that is 1% per year. It's been 0.49% per year for the last ten years, 0.42 for the ten years before that, and 0.43 for the ten years before that. So the models have twice as much greenhouse warming radiation going in them as is known to be happening. It shouldn't shock you that they predict more warming than is occurring.”
Models predict what the temperature might be in fifty or a hundred years time. It is one of their peculiar features that long-range climate forecasts are only proved wrong long after people have forgotten about them. As a result there is a danger, according to Professor Carl Wunsch, that modelers will be less concerned in producing a forecast that is accurate, than one that is interesting.
Carl Wunsch: “Even within the scientific community you see it's a problem. If I run a complicated model, and I do something to it like melt a lot of ice into the ocean, and nothing happens, it's not likely to get printed, but if I run the same model and adjust it in such a way that something dramatic happens to the ocean circulation, like the heat transport turns off, it will be published. People will say this is very exciting, it will even get picked up by the media, so there is a bias, there's a very powerful bias, within the media and within the science community itself toward results which are dramatizable.”
Carl Wunsch: “The Earth freezes over; that’s a much more interesting story than saying, ‘Well, you know, it fluctuates around. Sometimes the mass flux goes up by ten percent, sometimes it goes down by twenty percent but, eventually, it comes back.’ Well, you know, which would you do a story on, I mean that’s what it’s about.”
To the untrained eye computer models look impressive and they give often wild speculation about the climate the appearance of rigorous science. They also provide an endless source of spectacular stories for the media.
Nigel Calder: “The thing that has amazed me, as a life long journalist, is how the most elementary principles of journalism seem to have been abandoned on this subject.”
In fact the theory of global warming has spawned an entirely new branch of journalism.
Nigel Calder: You’ve got a whole new generation of reporters: environmental journalists. Now if you're an environmental journalist and if the global warming story goes in the trash can so does your job. It really is that crude, and the reporting has to get more and more hysterical because there are still, fortunately, a few hardened news editors around who will say, ‘You know, this is what you were saying five years ago.’ [Speaking as if he were the environmental journalist]: ‘Ah, but now it's much, much worse, you know. There's going to be ten feet of sea level rise by next Tuesday.’ Or something; they have to keep on getting shriller, and shriller, and shriller.”
It is now common in the media to lay the blame for every storm or hurricane on global warming, but is there any scientific basis for this?
Richard Lindzen: “This is purely propaganda. Every textbook in meteorology is telling you the main source of weather disturbances is the temperature difference between the Tropics and the Pole, and we're told in a warmer world this difference will get less. Now that would tell you you'll have less storminess, you'll have less variability, but for some reason that isn't considered catastrophic. So you're told the opposite.”
News reports frequently argue that even a mild increase in global temperature could lead to a catastrophic melting of the Polar Ice Caps. But what does Earth's history tell us?
John Christy: “We happen to have temperature records of Greenland that go back thousands of years. Greenland has been much warmer. Just a thousand years ago, Greenland was warmer than it is today. Yet it didn't have a dramatic melting event.”
Philip Stott: “Even if we talk about something like permafrost; a great deal of the permafrost, that icy layer under the forests of Russia for example, seven or eight thousand years ago melted far more than we're having any evidence about it melting now. So in other words, this is a historical pattern again but the world didn't come to a crunching halt because of it.”
Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu is head of the International Arctic Research Centre in Alaska. The IARC is the world’s leading arctic research institute. Professor Akasofu insists that over time the ice caps are always naturally expanding and contracting.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu: “The reports from time to time of big chunk of ice grow, breaking away from the Antarctic continent. Those must have been happening all the time, but because now we have a satellite that can detect those, that's why they become news.”
This data from NASA's meteorological satellites shows the huge natural expansion and contraction of the Polar Sea Ice taking place in the 1990s.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu: “Actually, all the TV programs that relate to global warming show big chunk of ice falling from the edge of the glaciers, but people forget that ice is always moving.”
News reports frequently show images of ice breaking from the edge of the Arctic. What they don't say is that this is as ordinary an event in the Arctic as falling leaves on an English Autumn day.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu: “They ask me, ‘Did you see ice falling from edge of the glaciers?’ Yes, that’s the Spring break-up, that’s happen every year. Press come to us all the time, you know, ‘I want to say something that the greenhouse disaster.’ I say there is none.”
Alarming television programs raise the fearful prospect of vast tidal waves flooding Britain. But what causes the sea level to change, and how fast does it happen?
Philip Stott: Sea level changes over the world in general are governed fundamentally by two factors. What we would call local factors, the relationship of the sea to the land, which, often by the way, is to do with the land rising or falling than anything to do with the sea. But if you're talking about what we call eustatic changes of sea level, world wide changes of sea level, that's through the thermal expansion of the oceans; nothing to do with melting ice, and that 's an enormously slow and long process.”
Carl Wunsch: “People say ‘Oh I see the ocean doing this, last year. That means that something changed in the atmosphere last year.’ And this is not necessarily true at all, in fact it's actually quite unlikely because it can take hundreds to thousands of years for the deep ocean to respond to forces and changes that are taking place at the surface.”
It is also suggested that even a mild rise in temperature will lead to the spread northward of deadly insect-borne tropical diseases like malaria. But is this true? Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasture Institute is Paris is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on malaria, and other insect borne diseases. He is a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee, was chairman of the American Committee of Medical Entemology of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, and lead author on the health section of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability. As Professor Reiter is eager to point out mosquitoes thrives in very cold temperatures.
Paul Reiter: “Mosquitoes are not specifically tropical. Most people will realize that in temperate regions there are mosquitoes. In fact, mosquitoes are extremely abundant in the Arctic. The most devastating epidemic of malaria was in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. There were something like thirteen million cases a year, and something like six hundred thousand deaths; a tremendous catastrophe that reached up to the Arctic Circle. Archangel had thirty thousand cases and about ten thousand deaths, s o it's not a tropical disease, yet these people in the global warming fraternity invent the idea that malaria will move northwards.”
Climate scare stories cannot be blamed solely on sloppial, biased journalism. According to Professor Reiter, hysterical alarms have been encouraged by the reports of the United Nations Interpanel on Climate Change, or IPCC. On the spread of malaria the IPCC warns us that, “mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18 degrees Celcius.” According to Professor Reiter this is clearly untrue.
Paul Reiter: “I was horrified to read the second and the third assessment reports because there was so much misinformation without any kind of recourse, or virtually without mention of the scientific literature, the truly scientific literature, the literature by specialists in those fields.”
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Professor Frederick Seitz, former President of America’s National Academy of Sciences revealed that IPCC officials had censored the comments of scientists. He said that, “But this report is not what it appears to be – it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page.” At least fifteen key sections on the science chapter had been deleted. These included statements like, “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.” “No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes.” Professor Seitz concluded, “I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”
In its reply, the IPCC did not deny making these deletions, but it said there was no dishonesty or bias in the report, and that uncertainties about the cause of global warming had been included. The changes had been made, it said, in response to comments from governments, individual scientists, and non-governmental organizations.
Paul Reiter: “When I resigned from the IPCC I thought that was the end of it, but when I saw the final draft my name was still there, so I asked for it to be removed. Well, they told me that I had contributed so it would remain there, so I said no, I haven’t contributed because they haven’t listened to anything I’ve said. So in the end it was quite a battle, but finally I threatened legal action against them and they removed my name, and I think this happens a great deal. Those people who are specialist but don’t agree with the polemic and resign, and there have been a number that I know of, they are simply put on the author list and become part of this ‘Two Thousand Five Hundred the World’s Top Scientists.”
Research related to man-made global warming is now one of the best-funded areas of science. The U.S. government alone spends more than four billion dollars a year. According to NASA climatologist Roy Spencer, scientists who speak out against man-made global warming have a lot to lose.
Roy Spencer: “It's generally harder to get research proposals funded because of the stands that they've taken publicly. And you'll find very few of them that are willing to take a public stand because it does cut into the research funding.”
It is a common prejudice that scientists who do not agree with the theory of man-made global warming must be being paid by private industry to tell lies.
Philip Stott: “I get it all the time, ‘You must be on the pay of the multi-nationals.’ Sadly, like most of the scientists you’ll talk to, I haven’t seen a penny from the multi-nationals.”
Tim Ball: “I’m always accused of being paid by the oil and gas companies. I’ve never received a nickel from the oil and gas companies. I joke about it, I wish they would pay me then I could afford their product.”
Nigel Calder: “Whenever anybody says that I’m in the pay of an oil company, I say my bank manager would wish.”
There is almost no private sector investment in climatology and yet to be involved in any research project which involves an industry grant, no matter how small, can spell ruin to a scientist's reputation.
Patrick Michaels is Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. He was Chair of the Committee on Applied Climatology at the American Meteorology Society, President of the American Association of State Climatologists, the author of three books on meteorology, and an author and reviewer on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. But when he conducted research, which was part-funded by the coal industry, he found himself among those under attack from climate campaigners.
But reasoned debate is not the only casualty in the global warming alarm. As international public policy bears down on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, the developing world is coming under intense pressure not to develop.
Delegates from around the world are flying into Nairobi for a conference sponsored by UN to talk about global warming. Civil servants, professional NGO campaigners, carbon offset fund managers, environmental journalists, and others will discuss every aspect of man-made climate change, from how to promote solar panels in Africa to the relationship between global warming and sexism. The conference lasts ten days; the number of delegates exceeds six thousand.
John Christy: “The billions of dollars invested in climate science means that there is a huge constituency dependent upon those dollars, and they will want to see that carry forward. It happens in any bureaucracy."
Nigel Calder: “Where I live we have a local council global warming officer. There’s a huge tail out there of people who have, in one way or another, been recruited to join this particular bandwagon.”
Lord Lawson of Blaby: “Anybody who then stands up and says, ‘Hey, wait a minute, let's look at this coolly, and rationally, and carefully, and see actually how much merit, how much this stands up.’ They will be ostracized.”
Scientists accustomed to the relative civility and obscurity of academic life suddenly find themselves publicly attacked if they dare to challenge the theory of man-made global warming, vilified by campaign groups and even within their own universities.
Tim Ball: “It’s the old English saying, ‘If you stand up in the coconut shire they’re gonna throw at you.’ So I understand there’s going to be some of that, but it gets pretty difficult, and pretty nasty, and very personal, and there have been death threats and all sorts of things, so I’m not doing it for my health.”
Patrick Moore: “These days if you are skeptical about the litany around climate change you’re suddenly like as if you are a holocaust denier. The environmental movement really it is a political activist movement, and they have become hugely influential at a global level, and every politician is aware of that today whether you're on the Left, in the middle or the Right, you have to pay homage to the environment.”
In the past month the global warming campaign has won a great victory. The United States government, once a bastion of resistance has succumbed: George Bush is now an ally. Western governments have now embraced the need for international agreements to restrain industrial production in the developed and developing world, but at what cost?
Paul Driessen is a former environmental campaigner.
Paul Driessen: “My big concern with global warming is that the policies being pushed to supposedly prevent global warming are having a disastrous effect on the world's poorest people.”
Global warming campaigners say it does no harm to be on the safe side, even if the theory of man-made climate change is wrong we should impose draconian measures to cut carbon emissions just in case. They call this the precautionary principle.
Paul Driessen: “The precautionary principle is an interesting beast. It’s basically used to promote a particular agenda and ideology; it's always used in one direction only. It talks about the risks of using a particular technology, fossil fuels for example, but never about the risks of not using it. It never talks about the benefits of having that technology.”
Abu Migella (spelling?) is about to cook a meal for her children. She is one of the two billion people, a third of the world's population, who have no access to electricity. Instead they must burn wood or dried animal dung in their homes. The indoor smoke this creates is the deadliest form of pollution in the world. According to the World Health Organization four million children under the age of five die each year from respiratory diseases caused by indoor smoke, and many millions of women die early from cancer and lung disease for the same reason.
James Shikwati: “If you were to ask a rural person to define development, they'll tell you, yes, I'll know I've moved to the next level when I have electricity. Actually, not having electricity creates such a long chain of problems, because the first thing you miss is the light, so you get that they have to go to sleep earlier because there's no light, there's no reason to stay awake, I mean you can't talk to each other in darkness.”
No refrigeration or modern packaging means that food cannot be kept. The fire in the hut is too smoky and consumes too much wood to be used as heating. There is no hot water. We in the West cannot begin to imagine how hard life is without electricity. The life expectancy of people who live like this is terrifyingly short; their existence impoverished in every way.
A few miles away the UN is hosting its conference on global warming in its plush gated head quarters. The gift shop is selling souvenirs of peasant tribal life while delegates discuss how to promote what are described as sustainable forms of electrical generation. Africa has coal and Africa has oil, but environmental groups are campaigning against the use of these cheap sources of energy. Instead they say Africa and the rest of the developing world should use solar and wind power.
A short drive out of Nairobi we find our first solar panel. A Kenyan public health official has brought us to a clinic, which serves several villages. The only electrical implements in the clinic are the electric lights and the refrigerator, in which to keep vaccines, medicine, and blood samples. Electricity is provided by two solar panels.
The solar panels allow Dr. Samuel Mawangee (spelling?) to use either the lights or the refrigerator, but not both at the same time. If he does the electricity shuts down. Wind and solar power are notoriously unreliable as a source of electricity, and are at least three times more expensive than conventional forms of electrical generation.
James Shikwati: “The question should be how many people in Europe, how many people in United States, are already using that kind of energy, and how cheap is it. You see, if it’s expensive for the Europeans, if it’s expensive for the American’s, and we’re talking about poor Africans, you know it doesn’t make sense. The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us, we are still at the stage of survival.”
To former environmentalist Paul Dreissen, the idea that the world’s poorest people should be restricted to using the most expensive and inefficient forms of electrical generation, is the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign.
Paul Dreissen: “Let me make one thing perfectly clear: if we're telling the Third World that they can only have wind and solar power, what we are really telling them is, ‘You cannot have electricity’.”
James Shikwati: “The challenge we have when we meet Western environmentalists who say we must engage is use of solar panels and wind energy is how we can have Africa industrialized? Because I don’t see how a solar panel is not going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power some railway train network. It might work, maybe, to power a small transistor radio.”
Patrick Moore: “I think one of the most pernicious aspects of the modern environmental movement is this romanticisation if peasant life, and the idea that industrial societies are the destroyers of the world.”
James Shikwati: “One clear thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that there's somebody keen to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop.”
Patrick Moore: “The environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries.”
James Shikwati: “We’re being told, ‘Don't touch your resources, don't touch your oil, don't touch your coal.’ That is suicide.
Patrick Moore: “I think it’s legitimate for me to call them anti-human. Like, okay, you don't have to think humans are better than whales, or better than owls, or whatever if you don't want to, right, but surely it is not a good idea to think of humans as sort of being scum you know. That it's okay to have hundreds of millions of them go blind or die or whatever. I just can’t relate to that."
The theory of man-made global warming is now so firmly entrenched, the voices of opposition so effectively silenced, it seems invincible, untroubled by any contrary evidence, no matter how strong. The global warming alarm is now beyond reason.
Frederick Singer: “There will still be people who believe that this is the end of the world, particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the UK telling people that by the end of the century the only inhabitable place on the Earth will be the Antarctic, and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic. I mean this is hilarious; it would be hilarious, actually, if it weren’t so sad.”
The Great Global Warming Swindle
