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| Letter to Represenatives Ed Markey & Joe Barton |
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| Written by Christopher Monckton | ||||||||
| Tuesday, 14 April 2009 | ||||||||
Page 5 of 6 Red flag 36: Sea-level rise is often cited as the most severe consequence of “global warming”. In reality, however, sea level is rising at a mere 8-12 in/century, about one-fifth of the mean centennial rate of rise of 4ft/century over the past 10,000 years. There is little sign of acceleration in this rate: indeed, in the past three years there has been no statistically-significant rise in sea level at all (JASON satellite data, 2009). Red flag 37: Nor is there a shred of evidence that sea level will imminently rise by 20 ft, as suggested by Al Gore in 2005. Gore cannot have believed his own prediction: that year he bought a $4 million apartment in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf. As the London High Court bluntly found in 2007, “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.” Red flag 38: A fortiori, Dr. James Hansen’s recent statements that “global warming” will raise sea level by 246 feet may be dismissed as mere rent-seeking rodomontade, tinged with hysteria at the continuing failure of his apocalyptic predictions. Professor Moerner told a recent debate on “global warming” at the University of St. Andrews that “sea level is not an issue”. The undergraduates duly rejected a motion that “global warming is a global crisis”. The UN has reduced its high-end projection of anthropogenic sea-level rise this century from 3 feet to less than 2 feet, with a central estimate of 17 inches. Moerner (2004) projects a sea-level rise of just 8 inches to 2100, similar to the sea-level rise that was observed in the 20th century. Certain coastlines may be affected by regional tectonic subduction and other factors that cause the land to subside. These coastlines include that of Chesapeake Bay and of Louisiana. It is important, therefore, to distinguish carefully between components of sea-level rise – the component that arises from the long-run natural warming trend, the very much lesser component that arises from anthropogenic “global warming” even if the UN’s exaggerated climate-sensitivity estimates are correct, and the regionally substantial component that may arise from changes in land surface levels. It is neither prudent nor scientifically justifiable merely to ascribe every encroachment by the sea on to the land to “global warming”. Representative Markey also mentioned the imagined threat from hurricanes. As I have established supra, the threat posed by hurricanes occurring more frequently because of “global warming” is more imagined than real. Representative Upton said “climate change” was a “global problem” that required a “global solution”. Climate has always changed, and will continue to do so. Anthropogenic climate change, however, is a non-problem that requires no solution. Red flag 39: A Representative from Michigan expressed concern about “extinctions”. More than 99% of all species that have ever lived became extinct through natural processes long before humankind ever walked the Earth. No one knows how many species there are, even to within three orders of magnitude. No one knows at what rate new species are coming into being, or at what rate old species are dying out. However, it is known that most species on Earth live in the tropics, where it is warm, and fewer than 1% live at the poles, where it is cold. It is cold, not warmth, that causes extinctions. The planet has been 12.5 Fº warmer than the present for almost the whole of the past 600 million years: yet we are here. Even if the warming projected by the UN were actually to occur (which it will not, or at any rate not by any human agency), it would be entirely within the natural variability of the climate over the past 10,000 years. The notion of mass extinctions arising from “global warming” is a baseless fantasy. Representative Shimkus rightly pointed out that the Earth, compared with almost all of the past 600 million years, is currently “carbon-starved”. Almost throughout the period since the Cambrian era, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has been at least twice what it is today, and has on occasion been 20 times what it is today. It is worth putting the anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide concentration into perspective. The proportion of the atmosphere occupied by carbon dioxide has increased by just one part in 10,000 in the quarter of a millennium since 1750. That is all. Red flag 40: A Representative from California spoke of floods and droughts. Once again, it is prudent not to attribute every natural disaster to “global warming”: indeed, it has been pointed out repeatedly by the IPCC that it is not possible to attribute any particular natural disaster to “global warming”. The droughts of the American Great Plains in the early part of the 20th century were far worse than anything that has been seen since: one has only to read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to appreciate how harsh conditions were then. Likewise, flooding such as the recent floods on the Red River has had many precedents early in the 20th century. Such extreme events are no more common than they were, but they affect more people as population and infrastructure grows, and there is greater awareness of them thanks to the instant television reporting that is available today. It is all too easy to confuse matters and assume that a greater awareness of widely-reported natural disasters indicates that their frequency or severity has increased, when if anything it has diminished. Red flag 41: A second Representative from California said that infectious diseases would spread because of “global warming”. However, as Professor Paul Reiter of the Institut Pasteur has repeatedly pointed out, most of the diseases that are described as “tropical” occur in the tropics solely because bad government and poor public health measures facilitate transmission. To take one example: the anopheles mosquito that carries the plasmodium parasite that causes malaria requires a minimum temperature of 60 ºF during its short breeding season, but is otherwise well capable of surviving Arctic temperatures. The largest outbreak of malaria in modern times occurred in the 1920s in Siberia, not noted for its tropical climate. Some 13 million people were infected; 600,000 died; and 30,000 of the deaths occurred in the Arctic sea-port of Arkhangelsk. There is no basis for the frequent assertion that warmer weather will spread tropical diseases. The principal reason for the 40 million excess malaria deaths that have occurred in the past 40 years was the scientifically-unfounded decision – by precisely the rent-seekers who now cry “Wolf!” about “global warming (the Environmental Defense Fund, the Environmental Protection Agency, for example) – to ban DDT, the only effective agent against the anopheline mosquito. Dr. Arata Kochi, of the World Health Organization, announcing the official end of the DDT ban on 15 September 2006, said that in this field politics usually prevailed, but that the WHO were now going to take a stand on the science and the data, and were going to recommend DDT once again as the front line of defence against malaria. Red flag 42: The Representative from California also mentioned drought in the Horn of Africa – a region that has long been prone to extreme drought. However, in the past 30 years the Sahara Desert, for instance, has shrunk by 300,000 square kilometers as vegetation has greened what was once a wasteland. Nomadic tribes have been able to return to lands they had not settled within living memory. Regrettably, the news media tend to comment only on the bad news, omitting the good news. This entrenched bias makes it easier for the wolf-criers to spread their false message of climatic alarm. Red flag 43: A Representative from Louisiana implied that Hurricane Katrina was caused by “global warming”. It was in fact no more than a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall. It did disproportionate damage not because of “global warming” but because of the failure of the local administration to put pressure on the Corps of Engineers to maintain the levees adequately. As noted supra, there is no basis for the assumption that “global warming”, if and when it resumes, will cause any appreciable increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical storms. Red flag 44: The Representative from Louisiana also said that sea temperatures were increasing, leading to inundation of the Louisiana coastline. However, in the five years since the elaborate network of 3175 automated bathythermographs of the Argo project were deployed throughout the world’s oceans, there has been no statistically-significant rise in sea temperatures and, indeed, if anything there has been a slight fall. Sea temperatures have of course been many degrees warmer than the present for most of the past 600 million years. Inundation of the Louisiana coastline is not occurring because of sea-level rise but because of a regional subsidence of the coastline. Red flag 45: A Representative from Wisconsin talked of the Red River flood in North Dakota. This flood cannot be attributed to “global warming”. Such events occur from time to time. She also mentioned that snowfall had been 40% higher this winter. On any view, the greater snowfall that accompanies a cold winter cannot be reasonably attributed to “global warming”. A Representative from North Carolina said that global temperatures would continue to rise. First, they will have to stop falling. Though it is in general true that enrichment of the atmosphere with any heteroatomic gas such as carbon dioxide will be more likely than not to cause some warming, I have established supra that the amount of warming that is likely to occur is an order of magnitude less than the warming imagined by the UN, and is accordingly harmless and beneficial. Mr. Karl’s testimony colourfully listed many imagined disasters arising from “global warming”. None of these disasters is likely to arise: for the effect of humankind on the climate is negligible. Red flag 46: Mr. Schweiger’s testimony, on behalf of the National Wildlife Federation, talked of “unchecked” “global warming” (it has been in check for seven years), and said “global warming” was worse than expected (it cannot be, after seven years of global cooling that not one of the UN’s models had predicted). Red flag 47: He also said that polar bears were threatened with extinction (there are five times as many of them as there were in the 1940s, hardly the profile of a species in imminent danger of extinction); that the “precautionary principle” should rule (but the “precautionary principle” must also be applied to the precautions themselves, otherwise disasters like the biofuel scam will kill millions by starvation, a killing that has already begun); and that there would be the “extinction of a million species” (a figure plucked from the air). Mr. Waskow’s testimony said that reducing disaster risks “saves $4 for every $1 spent”. It might, in theory, do so, but only if there is some rational basis for assuming that a given category of disaster might actually occur. However, the influence of carbon dioxide on temperature is so small, as the temperature and long-wave radiation measurements conclusively demonstrate, that planning for “disaster” caused by “global warming” is a waste of time, labor, and taxpayers’ money. Red flag 48: A Representative from California said that glaciers were in recession and that snowpack was in decline. Neither of these statements is in substance true. Most of the world’s 160,000+ glaciers are in Antarctica, and are too high in both latitude and altitude to be affected at all by “global warming”, particularly since Antarctica has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002). A recent attempt to demonstrate that the cooling of Antarctica was really a warming was produced by the same scientists who had attempted to abolish the medieval warm period, and by similarly questionable methods. The 9575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India are following a pattern of advance and recession that shows no significant change in the 200 years since the Raj first kept records (Professor M. I. Bhat, Indian Geological Survey, personal communication, 2007). Red flag 49: The Furtwangler glacier at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, a poster-child for “global warming” alarmism, has been receding since at least 1880, and half of its ice had disappeared before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936. In 30 years of satellite monitoring, the temperature at the summit of Kilimanjaro has never risen above –1.6 ºC, with a mean of –7 ºC (Molg et al., 2003). The glacier has not, therefore, been melting because of “global warming”: it has been ablating (passing directly from the solid to the gaseous state of water) because of regional cooling, combined with desiccation of the atmosphere accelerated by imprudent post-colonial deforestation in the region. Most other mountain glaciers worldwide have been receding since at least 1880 at a near-linear rate, with little or no evidence of recent acceleration in the rate of recession. In the tropical Andes, all but the very highest peaks in the Cordillera de Merida were ice-free throughout most of the past 10,000 years, but there is now more ice than usual (Polissar et al., 2006). In the Alps, recent glacial recession has revealed mountain roads, forests, and even an entire medieval silver-mine that were covered by snow, firn, and eventually ice as the Medieval Warm Period gave place to the Little Ice Age. In Greenland, some glaciers are receding and others are advancing, much as they have since ice began to accumulate there 850,000 years ago. The Viking burial-ground at Hvalsey, the largest medieval settlement on Greenland, is under permafrost today: it was not under permafrost when the Vikings were buried. Red flag 50: Finally, Representative Inslee, supported by one or two members of his party, said that ocean acidification was becoming a problem and asked me whether I was concerned about it. There is no need for concern: carbon dioxide concentration has been at least 1000 ppmv (compared with <400 ppmv today) for most of the last 600 million years, without ill effects on marine life. Indeed, the calcite corals first appeared in the Cambrian era, when carbon dioxide concentration was 7000 ppmv (IPCC, 2001); and the more delicate aragonite corals first appeared in the Triassic era, when the concentration was 6500 ppmv (IPCC, 2001). Representative Inslee said the corals had now become accustomed to low concentrations of carbon dioxide and would be unable to adapt to increasing acidification of the oceans. However, he did not adduce any scientific data to back this insupportable assertion. The biochemistry of bicarbonate ions is such that powerful homoeostatic mechanisms, some of them only recently discovered, prevent acidification of the oceans. Indeed, even the most imaginative models (in the absence of the worldwide monitoring and sampling over time that would be necessary to arrive at a fair empirical result) do not find that the reduction in ocean alkalinity (the ocean remains safely alkaline) is more than about 0.1 acid/base units. Without objection, Representative Inslee agreed that I might enter into the record a short book written by my distinguished friend Dr. Craig Idso, summarizing the extensive literature that gives the lie to the notion that “ocean acidification” is a real danger. It is not. |
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