By Clive Wakely. Climate change, as the term suggests, is an ongoing process that has existed since our planet first evolved an atmosphere; it being dependent upon the presence of an atmosphere, irrespective of that atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content.
As we are all aware many thousands of years ago the earth was in the grip of an extended period of intense cold popularly known as the “Ice Age”.
During this period continental ice sheets and glaciers greatly extended, some remnants of which, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets for instance, being still with us.
Some 12,000 years ago this age of intense cold gradually morphed into a succession of relatively short-term periods of global warming and cooling, which have continued up to the present day.
Between 5000 and 3000 B.C., global temperatures are believed to have been generally higher than today. It was during this period that the first great human civilizations began to establish themselves and flourish.
Between 3000 and 2000 B.C., a period of global cooling occurred, resulting in a drop in sea levels as ice sheets and glaciers advanced again.
Later still, between 2000 and 1500 B.C. the earth experienced yet another period of global warming – which was followed by another cool period.
The Roman Empire (150 B.C. – 300 A.D.) occurred during this cooling period, which lasted throughout the “Dark Ages” until around 900 A.D.
The period 900 A.D. until 1200 A.D. was a time of global warming, referred today as the Medieval Warming Period, or Little Climatic Optimum.
There are indications that global temperatures then were at least as high as today and it was during this period that Viking settlements were established in previously inhospitable Greenland and Iceland.
As the Medieval Warming Period abated it was replaced by another period of global cooling. Between 1550 and 1850, temperatures were colder than at any other time since the end of the previous Ice Age, which is why it is often referred to as the “Little Ice Age”.
This is the time of “ice fairs” on the River Thames and frequent poor harvests resulting from long cold winters and mediocre summers.
However, since 1850, we have experienced a period of warming that coincided with the Industrial Revolution.
This period has also witnessed the greatest output of human induced carbon dioxide (CO2) ever, leading some in more recent years to speculate that the rise in atmospheric CO2 level is responsible for the increase in global temperature.
Proponents of this theory point to statistical evidence that suggests a correlation between the two factors, from which they conclude that one event is largely responsible for the other.
Even if this were true in this instance, it cannot explain previous pre-Industrial Revolution periods of global warming or cooling.
Indeed, it is one thing to plot statistical data on a graph, but quite another to correctly interpret it.
One of the primarily lessons of statistics is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
Simply put, two factors lining up on a graph do not necessarily imply a cause and effect relationship between them.
For instance, one could produce a graph plotting the growth in the size of the UK’s population against ever increasing petrol prices and conclude that the increase in this country’s population is because of the government’s fuel duty increases.
An alternative interpretation could be that ever-higher petrol prices are directly responsible for the explosion in UK population.
Simply because there appears to be a correlation between two factors, does not prove that there is; neither does it establish a cause and effect relationship between them.
Global Warming protagonists would have us believe, for a number of reasons, that there is a cause and effect relationship between a rise in atmospheric CO2 and an increase in global temperature.
That this is an interpretation, one that ignores the evidence which suggests other possibilities (derived from our planet’s historical climate change record), is an inconvenient truth too far for some; particularly those seeking to profit from carbon credit trading and investment in alternative green energy development.
US politician and alternative energy hedge-fund guru Al Gore popularized the CO2/temperature connection in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which the alleged correlation between the two factors was demonstrated using the now notorious “Hockey Stick” graph.
His information was derived from research into CO2 atmospheric emissions in ancient ice core samples that initially appeared to support his case.
However in 2007, further paleoclimatic research concluded that deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2 at the ending of the last ice age.
The importance of this finding is that it establishes that historically the rise in greenhouse gases, such as CO2, is more likely a result of warming than the cause of it.
In actual fact this was not new news. The same conclusion had been reach some four or five years previously in a less publicized study into microscopic air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice core samples. These revealed a precise record of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from which it was concluded that atmospheric CO2 increases lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by between 600 to 1000 years.
Put simply global warming is followed by CO2 atmospheric increase – not the reverse as the pro-global warming lobby would have us believe.
Al Gore’s “Hockey Stick” graph, for whatever reason, was interpreted as showing a direct correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming, with the former being responsible for the latter.
However, what pro-global warming proponents did not consider (or chose to ignore) was whether the increase in CO2 preceded or followed temperature increase.
For whatever reason their unshakeable conclusion was that because temperature and CO2 happen to line up on a graph, that CO2 must be the “smoking gun” and that vast investment in carbon credit trading and clean green alternative energy development was the only way to avoid Armageddon in the shape of runaway global warming.
Benjamin Disraeli is sometimes accredited with saying “there are lies, damned lies and statistics” – as far as global warming is concerned he was probably correct.
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“since 1850, we have experienced a period of warming that coincided with the Industrial Revolution.
This period has also witnessed the greatest output of human induced carbon dioxide (CO2) ever, leading some in more recent years to speculate that the rise in atmospheric CO2 level is responsible for the increase in global temperature.”
This statement is misleading in that most ‘global warming’ scientists and indeed the preeminent James Lovelock acknowledge that from about 1850 onwards the earth has been heating (getting warmer) naturally. The main argument put forward by Lovelock and his proponents is that human induced carbon dioxide will further increase the earths temperature rendering the earth to become too hot to be habitable by man. Globalisation and capitalism expedite the destruction of the planet. All the time the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
Are you saying CO2, methane and water vapour are not “greenhouse gases”?
The following is a letter published in the West Sussex Gazette on 25 June 2008. I think you’ll agree that it makes a pretty impressive case.
Christopher Woodward’s letter concerning global warming (June 4) hits the nail on the head.
As a chemical engineer with some knowledge of thermodynamics – which is what global warming by the greenhouse effect is all about – I have spent several months calculating just how effective carbon dioxide is in comparison with cloud and water vapour, the two dominant greenhouse agents.
With an intrinsic (ie, molecule-for-molecule) potency around three and two and a half times greater than carbon dioxide respectively, and a combined average concentration in the troposphere (which forms the bulk of the greenhouse blanket) more than ten times greater, atmospheric moisture accounts for more than 95% of the Earth’s total greenhouse effect.
The most profligate use conceivable of the world’s fossil fuels could hardly push up carbon dioxide levels to more than about 600 parts per million by volume (ppmv) compared with the present 380 ppmv.
I calculate that, with no change in the Sun’s radiative power, this would increase the Earth’s global mean surface temperature by no more than about 1/4 degree C, far less than the 2-3C (by the end of this century, no less) proclaimed by the global warming scare mongers who seem to have grabbed the world’s news media – and even some technical journalists who should know better – by the throat.
This is trifling compared with the natural cyclic variation of about 13C every 100,000 years or so between Ice Ages and interglacial warm periods.
To explain the major part of this phenomenon, I maintain that the Sun is a variable star with an energy range of about 20 per cent between maximum and minimum.
The Earth’s orbital characteristics (axial tilt and eccentricity changes) do have some effects, but these are small compared with the Sun’s internal thermonuclear variations.
No-one else seems to have grasped the importance of the published evidence (from ice core samples in Greenland and the Antarctic) which shows this to be so.
I have developed a simple theory to explain this but that is more suited to discussion in a scientific journal!
As a corollary of my study, I calculate that even if we were able to ‘bust a gut’ internationally and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to somewhere near the 250ppmv level of the 18th century (some hope!), we still couldn’t reduce the Earth’s global mean temperature by more than 1/4C.
What an achievement! And at what a cost! Fatuous, as Mr Woodward says!
I should add that no-one with whom I have so far corresponded has been able to refute my arguments.
Roderick Taylor, CEng, MIChemE
Abbotsbrook
Bourne End,
Bucks
Nationalist have more many years been in the forefroint of “green” ideas . We were green before there were “Greens”. I am therefore baffled why on the single issue of climate change some Nationalists, notably but it now seems not only Nick Griffin, have seen fit to get into bed with the likes of Sarah Palin (politically at least!) and sundry reactionary and Big Business Americans. People we would otherwise not touch with a bargepole.
The mechanism whereby higher levels of CO2 and methane trap more solar energy reflected from the Earth is well understood scientifically (if probably not by Messrs Palin and Griffin).
What is not understood is what effect this will have on the global climate. If things go on as they are we shall certainly find out – we are performing a very interesting scientific experiment, but we are trapped in the test-tube! Not the best place to be, one suspects!
This is yet another effect – as is mass Immigration -of the unchecked rampage of the Capiltalist global greed machine. The main source of rising greenhouse gases is now the industrialisation of India and China as they are sucked into this machine.
We can rightly oppose stupid and tokenistic policies such as the defiling of our landscape by wind turbines and indeed the attempts to deindustrialise the West promoted by the usual ethnomasochists without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and aligining ourselves with a bunch of know-nothing cranks and aplogists for Big Oil and Big Mines.
There is an opportunity here that rejection of climatic change theory suggests we do not want. Put simply, british industry has fallen behind much of the rest of the world over the last few decades due to a laissez faire attitude to industry and other factors such as our high wage economy. To maintain our living standards,w e are not going to institute mass wage cuts, but we should recognise that the move to non-fossil fuel sources allows the british economy the opportunity to develop industries based on alternative power sources. With sufficient incentives, Britain can lead the world in the development and introduction of these technologies. This will have the added bonus of increasing our energy security.
In summary, it doesn’t matter if you believe in climate change or not, the potential in itself creates an economic opportunity which the UK shouldn’t miss.