Position statement: Politics, Global Warming and reality

Many scientists within the scientific community have been continuing to do impartial and objective science. Many of them have resigned from the scientific institutions of which they were formerly members because they object to the administrators who run those institutions making position statements on ‘global warming’ despite the high level of uncertainty on key issues such as the attribution of climate change to specific causes.

Given that science has not a clue whether the climate is going to remain warm, get warmer or get cooler, the only sensible policy to invest in is that of readiness for change, whichever direction that change takes.

In deciding how much of a priority determining policy and spending levels for climate change should be, we need better assessments which are made against data which are produced in accordance with agreed standards. That is standard practice in other areas of science and policy activity and climate science should not be exempt.

There was a strong push from interested parties to railroad the public into massive spending and lifestyle change during the period when the temperature measurements seemed to indicate a rapidly accelerating change in climate. But for the last decade, the measured surface temperature has changed very little, apart from years when natural phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have been dominant. Time to take stock and reorientate ourselves as a society with a precious and precarious knowledge system.

During the last decade, it has come to light that there has been a goodly amount of data bending going on with the temperature records in many countries. The recent scandal in New Zealand is a good exemplar. This matter is now before the courts. Furthermore, the theory on which the claim that human activity has strongly influenced surface temperature is based have been taking a lot of hits as science moves on and makes new discoveries.

Cardellini et al’s 2011 empirical work on measuring the co2 emission from old lava fields in central Italy at 9 Giga-tons a year is a case in point. This calls into question the assumption that humans are responsible for all the increase in airborne co2 since the 50’s, which is based on theoretical calculations which put the global emission of co2 from volcanic sources at 0.138 giga-tons a year – nearly 100 times less than a small part of Italy.

Science progresses, new facts are discovered, old tired theories sometimes need to be discarded. But when politics and money rule science, dogma trumps truth. We need to embrace new knowledge, not be in denial of it in order to suit  politically or emotionally driven agendas.

I care about our environment and it grieves me to see the environmental lobby hitching its horse to the global warming bandwagon. When the theory falls, as it will, the environmental movement will suffer in the backlash. We need to be dealing with real environmental issues, not tilting with windmills.

The politicians love ‘global warming’ because it gives them a platform to make high sounding speeches about saving the planet while reaping tax and doing nothing. If the co2 emissions really were a serious threat, the 210 Billion Euro used to prop up the European ‘carbon market’ which disappeared into the fat cats pockets could have replaced the European continent’s fleet of coal fired power stations with gas turbines and cleaner coal fired plants using the latest flue emission technology and cut co2 emissions across the continent by 40% or more. It would also have solved the unemployment crisis.

At  the Talkshop, we will continue to lay open the truths about ‘global warming’, and investigate national and international climate policy, and the interests which drive it.  We will also continue to pursue and develop new  ideas which offer alternative explanations for the evolution of Earth’s climates within the context of the solar system in which it is embedded.

In the face of uncertainty, plurality of theory development is the only sensible course.