News from the New Party

Sunday, March 11, 2007

A convenient lie?

Thursday's eye-opening Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle put forward an entirely different analysis of global warming which it seems that the scientific establishment is not keen to allow to be heard. The basic thrust of the arguments, put forward by a string of eminent climatologists and scientists of related disciplines from various universities and institutions, was as follows:

there never has been a link between carbon dioxide and global warming;
increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a consequence of global warming and not a cause of it;
the current increase in global temperatures is not significant in historic terms, and temperatures were higher as recently as the Middle Ages;
that global temperatures fell between 1940 and 1975, the period of greatest expansion in CO2 emissions;
man-made global carbon emissions are in any case dwarfed by natural emissions of CO2 from volcanoes, for example, and other sources such as rotting vegetation;
there is, however, a link between global climate change and fluctuating solar activity measured over time.

We are obviously not in a position to arbitrate on matters of a specialist scientific nature, but nevertheless one thing is certain: those who claim that there is no debate to be had over whether the current global warming is due to man-made or natural causes either do not know what they are talking about or are lying.

It should not be difficult to establish whether increased carbon dioxide precedes (as claimed by global warming campaigners) or whether increased carbon dioxide follows a period of global warming (as claimed in the Channel 4 documentary). This is hardly rocket science (although several of the scientists interviewed in the programme have medals from NASA). So why is it so hard to get at the truth?

One reason alluded to in the programme was that the Climate Change Industry is now just that: an industry. Worldwide investment in climatology research has increased more than tenfold since the global warming panic ensued, and thousands of jobs are dependent on it. So it is a bit rich for environmentalists to accuse scientists who are sceptical of global warming of being in the pay of the oil industry.

Another reason is political. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, pinpointed the influx of radical Marxists into the environmental movement following the collapse of Communism. Environmentalism always has been an ideology (some have even called it a religion), but since the early 1990s the movement has acquired a more explicitly totalitarian angle. The aim is to dismantle modern industrial society, and replace it with a medieval-style peasant economy. Ironic then, that the programme showed the effect of inflicting "renewable" energy on Africa. Much of Africa has no access to electricity. One medical centre shown in the programme has, however, been supplied with solar panels, which means that it now has electric lighting and a fridge. Unfortunately, the lighting and the fridge cannot be used at the same time, otherwise the system overloads and shuts down - a fitting metaphor for the state the world economy is likely to be in thanks to the current global warming hysteria, and worse, a confirmation that the same hysteria will have the worst effect in the most economically fragile parts of the world.

Even if global warming itself is not man-made, the hysteria surrounding it certainly is: it has an ideological base, that base is totalitarian and anti-democratic. Scientists who oppose the climate change orthodoxy are harassed. The documentary itself was brave, but the scientists who appeared in it were braver. We need real answers and a real debate. We hope that the schoolchildren who are about to be exposed to Al Gore's emotive climatological blockbuster An Inconvenient Truth will also be shown The Great Climate Change Swindle.

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A convenient lie?