Elliot Lee

Not everyone agrees with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I’m currently watching a video on The Great Global Warming Swindle, and it’s certainly convincing. After all, climatologists need us to believe global warming is real in order to keep getting funding for research. Otherwise, it’s not a problem, and we can go on with our economic growth.

Here are some of my notes from watching the video. I haven’t verified whether this is all true, or to what extent it’s true, but this is from the video. But it’s really fascinating, so I’ll write about it. And this would be an intriguing topic to research in the future. Of course, the global warming scam, if it is one, is what makes it interesting.

Temperature is leading CO2 by about 800 years. CO2 is following temperature changes. How can it be that a higher temperature causes more CO2?

CO2 is a gas produced by all living things. We’re all made of carbon dioxide. Humans aren’t the main source. Volcanoes, animals and bacteria, dying vegetation, and the oceans produce a lot more. The ocean has a memory of temperature changes. Here’s the video… you can play/listen to it while you look over my own notes below.

If CO2 doesn’t drive earth’s climate, what does? Look at the sky; the gigantic thing called the Sun. The origin of long-term weather forecasting is the Sun. It’s much more interesting to use sunspots to predict the weather. Sunspots are intense magnetic fields. Astronomers used to count the number of spots thinking that more spots meant warmer weather. During the little ice age, there were few sunspots visible.

There’s a close correlation between what the sun’s doing and temperature here on earth. The sun is driving changes in the climate. It also affects us indirectly through clouds. How are clouds formed?

Cosmic rays meeting water from the sea, they form water droplets, creating clouds. When the sun is stronger, fewer particles get through, and fewer clouds get formed. The climate was controlled by the clouds, controlled by cosmic rays, controlled by the sun. The intensity of its magnetic field more than doubled in the 20th century.

What causes the increase in natural disasters? Global cooling and the threat of a new ice age was the problem in the 1970s. Experts warned that extreme cold temperatures would be a terrible problem. One scientist suggested that increased carbon dioxide output by humans could help to warm the earth.

Why did this theory go away? (1) Temperatures rose and (2) the miners went on strike. Nuclear is misrepresented. Since nuclear has no carbon dioxide emissions, prove that carbon dioxide is a problem. Then, nuclear power will be really pushed over oil and coal. Mrs. Thatcher set up the IPCC which produced a report suggesting global disaster as a result of global warming. He noticed the ignorance of all scientific data up to that point, such as the emphasis on the sun.

This was also attractive to medieval environmentalists. They loved it because CO2 is clearly an industrial gas, tied in with economic growth and car transportation. Basically: civilization. There are people who think economic growth is bad, and global warming could be used to justify a whole range of myths. It’s also anti-US.

Now in the 1980s, a majority of people agreed with environmentalists. You can’t be confrontational that way. So you need to take increasingly extreme standpoints. Also, the failure of global communism meant that communists took their anti-capitalist views with them elsewhere.

It was attracting more media attention, and thus, more government funding. $170 million a year, which was reasonable.. but then it jumped to $2 billion a year, and that brought a lot of jobs and new people who otherwise weren’t interested. You have whole cadres of people whose only interest is that there is global warming. If your field is the one of concern, you have to do less work showing why you should get funding. It’s a small part of science, but funding is going into global warming and distorting its part.

Climate models are only as good as their assumptions. A bad prediction could be far worse than none at all. All models assume man-made CO2 is the main source of climate change, instead of the sun, water vapor, and clouds. The models are so exciting that you can change a subtle detail and make something exciting happen. You can model anything.

An impressive way of making a more interesting forecast is by saying there will be more manmade CO2 than there is. Climate forecasts are only proved wrong long after people have forgotten about it. Forecasters are more concerned about making a model that’s impressive.

If you run a model and nothing happens, then it won’t get printed. If you run the model and something amazing happens, people will say it’s exciting and it’ll get picked up by the media. There’s a bias towards results that are dramatizable.

Environmental journalists? If the global warming story goes into the trash can, so does their job. The story has to get more dramatic because otherwise hardened news editors will think: “oh, it’s the same thing you reported 5 years ago.”

Catastrophic melting of the polar ice caps? Greenland was much warmer than it is just 1000 years ago. Yet there wasn’t a major meltdown event. The ice caps are always expanding and contracting, according to Professor Akasofu. This is becoming news now only because we have satellites that can now see this. People forget that ice is always moving. Falling ice in the arctic is as ordinary as falling autumn leaves. It happens every year. There’s no evidence of catastrophe due to global warming.

Just because you saw something happen to the ocean last year doesn’t mean something changed in the climate last year. In fact, that’s pretty unlikely, since it takes hundreds of years for the deep ocean to change, and then reflect that on the ocean surface.

Mosquitoes aren’t tropical; they thrive in cold temperatures. They’re extremely abundant in the arctic. In the 1920s, there was an epidemic of malaria, with about 600,000 deaths. It’s not a tropical disease. People in global warming invent scare stories that it will spread north due to warmer temperatures.

More than $4 billion a year is spent on global warming. Scientists speaking out against it are much more likely to lose. Few take a stand because it does cut into research funding. People think that these people are paid off by the oil and gas companies. But they’re not; there’s almost no private sector funding of climatology.

This is putting pressure on developing countries, suggesting that they shouldn’t develop. The UN is sponsoring a conference about global warming in developing countries. How to promote solar panels in Africa? Billions of dollars in climate science means there’s a lot of people dependent on those dollars, and they want to see that carry forward. They have a Global Warming Officer! There are a lot of people, in some way or another, dependent on it. People who dare challenge man-made global warming are vilified. If you’re skeptical about climate change, it’s like you’re a holocaust denier. Environmentalists are influential on a global level, and politicians know this.

The US government has succumbed in the past month, and now they are investigating environmental problems in the developing world. The policies being pushed are having a disasterous effect on the world’s poorest people. They also have the Precautionary Principle, and it’s used in one direction only: the risk of using fossil fuels, but not the risks of not using it. It never talks about the positives of using the energy!

500 million children die by indoor smoke because they have to burn things for fuel in developing countries. They don’t have electricity, which creates a long chain of problems. No refrigeration or modern packaging, so food can’t be kept. And there’s no hot water. The life expectancy of people living without electricity is short.

My own question. What about before electricity was widely used? Electronics are only an invention of the past couple hundred years. Humans lived long before that.

People promoting solar and wind power really like the idea of global warming. Personally, that includes me. But it’s true that they are notoriously unreliable, as the video claims. And they are a lot more expensive, too. It’s expensive for the Europeans and Americans, but for Africans, it’s about survival! This promotes the idea that the world’s poorest should be restricted to the most expensive types of energy. Saying they must use solar panels means that they can’t have electricity!

Also, there’s a romanticisation of the simple life. I agree: it’s really not that great. I love living in modern society here in California. Industrialization is really a good thing, no matter how much those people try to make it sound bad.

via Joel Comm