The Great Global Warming Swindle
By
S.
Fred Singer
Al
Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth has met its match: a devastating documentary
recently shown on British television,
which has now been viewed by millions of people on the Internet.
Despite its flamboyant title, The
Great Global Warming Swindle is based on sound science and interviews with real climate
scientists, including me. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other
hand, is mostly an emotional presentation from a single politician.
The scientific arguments presented in The Great Global Warming
Swindle can be stated quite briefly:
1. There is no proof that the current warming is caused by the
rise
of greenhouse gases from human activity. Ice core
records from the past 650,000 years show that temperature increases
have preceded—not resulted from—increases in CO2
by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans
is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the
dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor is far, far more important
than CO2. Dire predictions of future warming are based almost
entirely on computer climate models, yet these models do not
accurately understand the role or water vapor—and, in
any case, water vapor is not within our control. Plus, computer
models cannot account for the observed cooling of much of the
past century (1940–75), nor for the observed patterns of warming—what we call the “fingerprints.” For
example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming.
And where the models call for the middle atmosphere to warm
faster than the surface, the observations show the exact opposite.
The
best evidence supporting natural causes of temperature fluctuations
are the changes in cloudiness, which correspond
strongly with regular variations in solar activity. The current
warming is likely part of a natural cycle of climate warming
and cooling that’s been traced back almost a million
years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period around 1100
A.D., when the Vikings settled Greenland and grew crops, and
the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 A.D., which brought
severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests,
starvation, disease, and general misery. Attempts have been
made to claim that the current warming is “unusual” using
spurious analysis of tree rings and other proxy data. Advocates
have tried to deny the existence of these historic climate
swings and claim that the current warming is "unusual" by
using spurious analysis of tree rings and other proxy data,
resulting in the famous “hockey–stick” temperature
graph. The hockey-stick graph has now been thoroughly discredited.
2. If the cause of warming is mostly natural, then there is
little we can do about it. We cannot control the inconstant
sun, the likely origin of most climate variability. None of
the schemes for greenhouse gas reduction currently bandied
about will do any good; they are all irrelevant, useless, and
wildly expensive:
-
Control of CO2 emissions, whether by rationing or elaborate
cap–and–trade
schemes
- Uneconomic “alternative” energy, such as ethanol
and the impractical “hydrogen economy”
-
Massive installations of wind turbines and solar collectors
- Proposed projects for the sequestration of CO2 from smokestacks
or even from the atmosphere
Ironically, even if CO2 were responsible for the observed
warming trend, all these schemes would be ineffective—unless
we could persuade every nation, including China, to cut fuel
use by 80 percent!
3. Finally, no one can show that a warmer climate would produce
negative
impacts overall. The much–feared rise in sea
levels does not seem to depend on short–term temperature
changes, as the rate of sea–level increases has been
steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many
economists argue that the opposite is more likely—that
warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and
standards of living. Why do we assume that the present climate
is the optimum? Surely, the chance of this must be vanishingly
small, and the economic history of past climate warmings bear
this out.
But
the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much
broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to
what is essentially a non–problem, and ignore the real
problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human
rights—not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear
wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters;
pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even
the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the
dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of
the world prefer to squander our limited resources to fashionable
issues, rather than concentrate on real problems. Just consider
the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible
world figures: the chief scientist of Great Britain tells us
that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light
bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by
2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the
human race. Seriously!
I
imagine that in the not–too–distant future all
the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should
decide to cool—as it did during much of the past century;
we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998.
Future generations will look back on the current madness and
wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An
Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great
Global Warming Swindle to remind them.
S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is Research Fellow
at the Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former founding
Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. He is author
of Hot
Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished
Debate (The Independent Institute, 1997).Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.
Editor's Note: This article was published by The Independent Institute, on
March 19, 2007. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our
readers.
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