Excerpts from a British article published today ( Latest UK and World News, Sport and Comment - Express.co.uk ):
Climate change campaigners: 100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made
Tuesday December 15,2009
HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:
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There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
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Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
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After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
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Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher: more than ten times as high.
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The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
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The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
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Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct [result] of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago.
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Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity.”
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The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
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Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control.
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A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
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It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries.
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It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder.
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The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’ species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles.
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Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.
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The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles.
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Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.
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It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere.
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There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.
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Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’ many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms.
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Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful.
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Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests.
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The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations.
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In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.
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Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at the top end of IPCC estimates.
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The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot.
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William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”
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Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.
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It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.
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Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.
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Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty.”
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The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.
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Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.
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There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures: in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.
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It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.
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Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
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If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
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A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”