A Proper Focus in the Climate Change Debate

Serious participants should focus on the following central arguments –

The Debate Is Not Over. Early in 2007 there was a concerted, international effort among climate alarmists to suggest that the science was so certain that debate was no longer possible. That effort had no impact on the scientific community, which continues to debate climate change vigorously and sometimes even acrimoniously in the peer-reviewed, learned journals. The debate continues.

Climate change has always been real, but the fact of climatic variability tells us nothing of its cause. The more the climate is researched, the less likely it appears that humankind has had any significant climatic impact.

Climate change is not unprecedented. The mediaeval warm period was warmer than the present. Even now, melting glaciers in the Alps are revealing mediaeval trackways, silver-mines and even entire forests that have been buried under ice since the Middle Ages. Some of the Viking settlements in Greenland are still under permafrost to this day.

The chicken and the egg: The temperature changes that led to the ice ages and interglacial period preceded changes in CO2 concentration.

The central calculation: The UN says a doubling of CO2 concentration will push global temperatures up by 3C. Others say less than 1C.

Will warming be harmful? Almost certainly not. Warming is better than cooling. We now know that neither droughts nor floods nor storms have increased or are likely to increase as a result of anthropogenic warming; these events come and go in natural cycles which have scarcely altered over the past 100 years.

What is the cause of the present warming? Even if one assumes that the UN’s estimates of recent warming are not themselves an exaggeration, observations do not confirm the presence, in any climatically-significant degree, of the characteristic signature of anthropogenic warming – namely, a greater rate of increase in temperature at altitude, particularly at low latitudes, than at the surface. These results provide proof that much of the present warming is not anthropogenic but natural, caused partly by millennial alterations in patterns of ocean circulation and partly by the Sun, which has been more active, and for longer, in the past 70 years than at almost any time in at least the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005).

Will proposed mitigative measures cost more than they achieve? Now that the predictions of the extremists have been discredited even by the UN, it is near-certain that the cost of almost any measure to mitigate the volume of anthropogenic CO2 emissions will outweigh the effectiveness and economic benefit of that measure. Most proposed measures would not make any significant climatic difference even if implemented. The few measures that might have some impact would have only a small impact, but will prove impossible both politically and economically, and will not be achieved, though much money will be wasted in the attempt. It is the poorer nations who will suffer most grievously by the proposed restrictions on CO2 emissions.