What Global Warming?
Discussion
Published in today's Scotsman.
-------------------------------------------------------
A dash of cold water for global warming forecast
GEORGE KEREVAN
FOREST fires rage out of control despite water-bombing by helicopters. A sweltering heatwave grips the outback. Is this Australia? No, it’s Scotland enjoying its driest spring on record. The war might have come and gone, and we might be having an election next week, but all Scotland can talk about is the odd weather. Welcome to global warming.
Or is it? I remain doggedly unconvinced. Certainly, the past decade has seen shorter winters in Scotland. But that only proves the climate is highly variable. Certainly, we are seeing a global bounce in temperature since the mini cold spasm that gripped the northern hemisphere for 600 years ended in the mid-19th century. But before that it was even warmer than it is now. As for a runaway global warming caused by the side-effects of nasty Western industrialisation - there is no unambiguous proof. Indeed, the one bit of proof there supposedly was has just been revealed as bogus.
Suppose I told you that North Korea will soon have a higher standard of living than the United States. Doubtful, since its benighted population are starving. Or would you be willing to bet that Swaziland and Gabon in AIDS-plagued Africa will overtake Australia economically before long? Well, somebody is seriously predicting these fantasies will become reality: the scientific experts of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who preach the gospel of global warming.
These are the economic growth forecasts used by the IPCC to calculate the likely emissions of greenhouse gases from industry. Last year, the IPCC released, as the main result of its massive Third Assessment Review, a set of figures that have since become the most cited numbers in environmental politics. The panel reported that the Earth’s average "surface temperature is projected to increase by 1.4 to 5.8C over the period 1990 to 2100".
When the IPCC appeared with this forecast, there were widespread media stories referring to its dire claims. One Scottish newspaper likened the predictions to the world turning into the dark, wasted planet depicted in the science fiction movie Bladerunner. The IPCC report serves as the basis for all international climate negotiations, including the Kyoto Convention on reducing greenhouse gas emission.
But now evidence is emerging that the scientific foundations of the 2001 report are deeply flawed. If this analysis is correct, the central scientific tenets of global warming are grossly exaggerated. Two distinguished academics have examined the IPCC report in detail and declared it "technically unsound" - a euphemism for being so wrong as to be useless.
They are Dr Ian Castles, formerly the head of Australia’s national office of statistics, and David Henderson of the Westminster Business School in London and formerly the chief economist of the OECD, the major international development body. Their findings are published this month in the scientific journal Energy and Environment.
According to Castles and Henderson, the IPCC got it wrong for the simplest of reasons - the climate scientists were not versed in economics. So they made the most elementary mistakes in economic forecasting, as they tried to predict the growth of industry and the resulting demand for fossil fuels. The IPCC report vastly overstates the growth rates for developing countries and consequently greatly overestimates the magnitude of global warming over the next 100 years. The false methodology in the IPCC Third Assessment came to light only after it was published, when the data on which the projections were based was released on the IPCC website.
According to Castles and Henderson, the first mistake the IPCC has made is the central "scenario" which predicts how the world economy will evolve over the next century. The IPCC assumed that the US (and most of the developed world) would stop growing by 2030, while the rest of the developing world would catch up in terms of per capita income, then surge ahead. This absurd vision was adopted so as not to upset the Third World nations that form the bulk of UN membership.
In 1990, the combined national income (GDP) of the rich OECD nations, including Japan, North America and Europe, was $16.5 trillion, while the combined GDP of the major developing regions - Africa, Latin America and Asia - totalled only $3.5 trillion. But the IPCC projections propel the developing nations on to a growth trajectory that overtakes OECD nations in only 30 years, and then soars to three times the OECD levels by 2100.
Once these false economic predictions are fed into the climate change models, they vastly exaggerate the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the IPCC estimated that in this decade alone carbon emissions would increase by 800 million tonnes in the developing world. But that would be greater than the increase for the world as a whole between 1990 and 2000.
Castles and Henderson claim the IPCC has made an even more elementary error in its sums. This concerns how the size and growth of different economies are measured against each other. Different countries use different currencies. To compare them you have to convert one currency into another - but at what exchange rate? There are two choices: the current market rate or what is called purchasing power parity (PPP), which measures the true spending power of the local currency.
The market rate method used by the IPCC distorts reality. Based on market exchange rates, the current average per capita income in Asia is $500 compared to $20,000 in the rich OECD nations - that is a gap of 40 to one. Castles says that, properly measured on a PPP basis - which accounts for basic items being cheap in poorer nations - the real income gap between the two groups is actually ten to one. If the gap is only ten to one, then the amount of economic growth needed to catch up with the West would be far smaller than that projected by the IPCC. It follows that the rise in carbon emissions would also be far smaller.
But IPCC was not just involved in perpetrating bad science. There is evidence the IPCC team tried to persuade reputable scientists to deliberately distort their data to fit the climate outcomes they wanted to see. One person approached was the leading economic modeller John Reilly, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s joint programme on the science and policy of global change. According to Reilly, the IPCC group attempted to find economists to "tweak" long-range models to get the desired emissions results. "They wanted our group [at MIT] to do this, but we just refused."
Where does all this get us? It is certainly not carte blanche to pollute the atmosphere. But it suggests we need to accept the weather has a will of its own - and we are lucky enough to be living in one of its more benign dispensations. Better then to put our cash into genuine economic growth in the Third World than investing in faddish "green" technologies in the West which add to costs unnecessarily. And we need more public discussion of the findings of Castles and Henderson. After all, only the future of the world is riding on the outcome of this academic dispute.
-------------------------------------------------------
At last, a newspaper and journalist prepared to question the whole Global Warming lobby and its methods of twisting the facts to suit its case.
For too long these environmentalists have been trying to scare the bejesus out of people with their horror predictions. Millions of tax payers money is being handed to these "scientists" to fund their anti-car research. It serves as an illustration of how the likes of Transport 2000 get funding, and how they may, perhaps, just twist and massage the data to suit their own ends. The more they scare the electorate, the more money the electorate will give them to solve the non-existent problems.
>>> Edited by Mad Jock on Monday 21st April 12:09
-------------------------------------------------------
A dash of cold water for global warming forecast
GEORGE KEREVAN
FOREST fires rage out of control despite water-bombing by helicopters. A sweltering heatwave grips the outback. Is this Australia? No, it’s Scotland enjoying its driest spring on record. The war might have come and gone, and we might be having an election next week, but all Scotland can talk about is the odd weather. Welcome to global warming.
Or is it? I remain doggedly unconvinced. Certainly, the past decade has seen shorter winters in Scotland. But that only proves the climate is highly variable. Certainly, we are seeing a global bounce in temperature since the mini cold spasm that gripped the northern hemisphere for 600 years ended in the mid-19th century. But before that it was even warmer than it is now. As for a runaway global warming caused by the side-effects of nasty Western industrialisation - there is no unambiguous proof. Indeed, the one bit of proof there supposedly was has just been revealed as bogus.
Suppose I told you that North Korea will soon have a higher standard of living than the United States. Doubtful, since its benighted population are starving. Or would you be willing to bet that Swaziland and Gabon in AIDS-plagued Africa will overtake Australia economically before long? Well, somebody is seriously predicting these fantasies will become reality: the scientific experts of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who preach the gospel of global warming.
These are the economic growth forecasts used by the IPCC to calculate the likely emissions of greenhouse gases from industry. Last year, the IPCC released, as the main result of its massive Third Assessment Review, a set of figures that have since become the most cited numbers in environmental politics. The panel reported that the Earth’s average "surface temperature is projected to increase by 1.4 to 5.8C over the period 1990 to 2100".
When the IPCC appeared with this forecast, there were widespread media stories referring to its dire claims. One Scottish newspaper likened the predictions to the world turning into the dark, wasted planet depicted in the science fiction movie Bladerunner. The IPCC report serves as the basis for all international climate negotiations, including the Kyoto Convention on reducing greenhouse gas emission.
But now evidence is emerging that the scientific foundations of the 2001 report are deeply flawed. If this analysis is correct, the central scientific tenets of global warming are grossly exaggerated. Two distinguished academics have examined the IPCC report in detail and declared it "technically unsound" - a euphemism for being so wrong as to be useless.
They are Dr Ian Castles, formerly the head of Australia’s national office of statistics, and David Henderson of the Westminster Business School in London and formerly the chief economist of the OECD, the major international development body. Their findings are published this month in the scientific journal Energy and Environment.
According to Castles and Henderson, the IPCC got it wrong for the simplest of reasons - the climate scientists were not versed in economics. So they made the most elementary mistakes in economic forecasting, as they tried to predict the growth of industry and the resulting demand for fossil fuels. The IPCC report vastly overstates the growth rates for developing countries and consequently greatly overestimates the magnitude of global warming over the next 100 years. The false methodology in the IPCC Third Assessment came to light only after it was published, when the data on which the projections were based was released on the IPCC website.
According to Castles and Henderson, the first mistake the IPCC has made is the central "scenario" which predicts how the world economy will evolve over the next century. The IPCC assumed that the US (and most of the developed world) would stop growing by 2030, while the rest of the developing world would catch up in terms of per capita income, then surge ahead. This absurd vision was adopted so as not to upset the Third World nations that form the bulk of UN membership.
In 1990, the combined national income (GDP) of the rich OECD nations, including Japan, North America and Europe, was $16.5 trillion, while the combined GDP of the major developing regions - Africa, Latin America and Asia - totalled only $3.5 trillion. But the IPCC projections propel the developing nations on to a growth trajectory that overtakes OECD nations in only 30 years, and then soars to three times the OECD levels by 2100.
Once these false economic predictions are fed into the climate change models, they vastly exaggerate the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the IPCC estimated that in this decade alone carbon emissions would increase by 800 million tonnes in the developing world. But that would be greater than the increase for the world as a whole between 1990 and 2000.
Castles and Henderson claim the IPCC has made an even more elementary error in its sums. This concerns how the size and growth of different economies are measured against each other. Different countries use different currencies. To compare them you have to convert one currency into another - but at what exchange rate? There are two choices: the current market rate or what is called purchasing power parity (PPP), which measures the true spending power of the local currency.
The market rate method used by the IPCC distorts reality. Based on market exchange rates, the current average per capita income in Asia is $500 compared to $20,000 in the rich OECD nations - that is a gap of 40 to one. Castles says that, properly measured on a PPP basis - which accounts for basic items being cheap in poorer nations - the real income gap between the two groups is actually ten to one. If the gap is only ten to one, then the amount of economic growth needed to catch up with the West would be far smaller than that projected by the IPCC. It follows that the rise in carbon emissions would also be far smaller.
But IPCC was not just involved in perpetrating bad science. There is evidence the IPCC team tried to persuade reputable scientists to deliberately distort their data to fit the climate outcomes they wanted to see. One person approached was the leading economic modeller John Reilly, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s joint programme on the science and policy of global change. According to Reilly, the IPCC group attempted to find economists to "tweak" long-range models to get the desired emissions results. "They wanted our group [at MIT] to do this, but we just refused."
Where does all this get us? It is certainly not carte blanche to pollute the atmosphere. But it suggests we need to accept the weather has a will of its own - and we are lucky enough to be living in one of its more benign dispensations. Better then to put our cash into genuine economic growth in the Third World than investing in faddish "green" technologies in the West which add to costs unnecessarily. And we need more public discussion of the findings of Castles and Henderson. After all, only the future of the world is riding on the outcome of this academic dispute.
-------------------------------------------------------
At last, a newspaper and journalist prepared to question the whole Global Warming lobby and its methods of twisting the facts to suit its case.
For too long these environmentalists have been trying to scare the bejesus out of people with their horror predictions. Millions of tax payers money is being handed to these "scientists" to fund their anti-car research. It serves as an illustration of how the likes of Transport 2000 get funding, and how they may, perhaps, just twist and massage the data to suit their own ends. The more they scare the electorate, the more money the electorate will give them to solve the non-existent problems.
>>> Edited by Mad Jock on Monday 21st April 12:09
Hmm, yeah - global temperatures have varied a lot over the past few thousand years, and when Greenland was "discovered" it really was green (ish) ... and people trying to distort evidence to suit their own pet theories is sadly hardly new (eg Speed causes X% of accidents, where X is a random number between 6 and 110 ... )
But CO2 levels have apparently risen faster in the past 100 years than ever before - in which case, there is a case to answer. And there is a need to be a bit cautious - waiting for absolute proof before taking action to reduce warming may be leaving it too late ...
The trouble with short warm winters is that the midges and wasps aren't killed off in decent quantities before the summer
But CO2 levels have apparently risen faster in the past 100 years than ever before - in which case, there is a case to answer. And there is a need to be a bit cautious - waiting for absolute proof before taking action to reduce warming may be leaving it too late ...
The trouble with short warm winters is that the midges and wasps aren't killed off in decent quantities before the summer
JohnL said
waiting for absolute proof before taking action to reduce warming may be leaving it too late ...
John....take a poke around www.john-daly.com (including links)
You might change your mind
"But CO2 levels have apparently risen faster in the past 100 years than ever before"
Maybe, but recent ice core research indicates that rises in CO2 FOLLOWED temperature rises, rather than caused them.
And CO2 is nowt, compared to water vapour.
This guff serves only to line the pockets of "scientists" and make the control freaks happy.
Maybe, but recent ice core research indicates that rises in CO2 FOLLOWED temperature rises, rather than caused them.
And CO2 is nowt, compared to water vapour.
This guff serves only to line the pockets of "scientists" and make the control freaks happy.
I am a graduate in Environmental Sciences, and used to be a big global warming disciple. (This was before l decided l wasn't going to waste my life just so everyone else can carry on without a second thought...oh and l became a pistonhead. 
)
I think the world is warming up. It is likely part due to our emissions but mostly due to planetary cycles. Also the contribution cars make is tiny compared to industry, power, agriculture etc..
Yep, cars have been used to distract people from looking at the problem holistically (bit like the speeding/road safety 'debate'). Apparently we could meet our Kyoto emissions treaty tomorrow by closing 10 factories in this country.
Also if they want to cut down on emissions
They should STOP MAKING SHITE DISPOSABLE CARS. A car takes more energy to produce than it uses in its operational lifetime, so you want to save the planet?Keep that banger classic on the road.
Which brings me to another gripe, bloody
s who think they are doing the world a favour by buying cheap cars and driving them without any maintenance until they literally cave in. Of course a car in good nick that they looked after would damage their peer group cred, funny old world. /rant
:apologies,atwork,normalservicewillberesumedshortly:
) I think the world is warming up. It is likely part due to our emissions but mostly due to planetary cycles. Also the contribution cars make is tiny compared to industry, power, agriculture etc..
Yep, cars have been used to distract people from looking at the problem holistically (bit like the speeding/road safety 'debate'). Apparently we could meet our Kyoto emissions treaty tomorrow by closing 10 factories in this country.
Also if they want to cut down on emissions
They should STOP MAKING SHITE DISPOSABLE CARS. A car takes more energy to produce than it uses in its operational lifetime, so you want to save the planet?Keep that banger classic on the road. Which brings me to another gripe, bloody
s who think they are doing the world a favour by buying cheap cars and driving them without any maintenance until they literally cave in. Of course a car in good nick that they looked after would damage their peer group cred, funny old world. /rant :apologies,atwork,normalservicewillberesumedshortly:
even worse - the most obvious reason for global warming, that there is more energy input into the ecosystem, doesn't have the required data to prove or disprove.
It's entirely feasible that the Sun could be putting out 0.01% more power than it used to, or whatever small figure would account for the current trend in global temperatures. But the instruments on satellites used to measure this don't have the necessary precision (or continuity) to show a statistically significant trend.
So it's become a political argument between the pro-CO2-mediated global warming zealots and the oil-industry-funded antis.
I still reckon more nuclear power is what we need (and the concomitant research to make the technology safer / more manageable) - leave the oil for our fast cars.
It's entirely feasible that the Sun could be putting out 0.01% more power than it used to, or whatever small figure would account for the current trend in global temperatures. But the instruments on satellites used to measure this don't have the necessary precision (or continuity) to show a statistically significant trend.
So it's become a political argument between the pro-CO2-mediated global warming zealots and the oil-industry-funded antis.
I still reckon more nuclear power is what we need (and the concomitant research to make the technology safer / more manageable) - leave the oil for our fast cars.
funkihamsta said: Dunno chap,
Guess whatever it burns does the damage. Airliners probably do more damage overall. Ozone's a different beast in any case. There's a much better case for the hole in the ozone than global warming in my opinion.
i did read somewhere that a jet going from london to new york uses the equivelent in fuel to a car travelling 70,000mls!!!
christ knows how much emissions they give out and the effect they have being released at 30,000ft!
>> Edited by cortinaman on Tuesday 22 April 03:43
cortinaman said:
i did read somewhere that a jet going from london to new york uses the equivelent in fuel to a car travelling 70,000mls!!!
christ knows how much emissions they give out and the effect they have being released at 30,000ft!
Quite credible - apparently (Apparently again!) a 747 uses as much fuel as having every passenger do the same journey by moped ... you'd think there'd be some economy of scale, even if it is a little faster
apache said: funki, I heard that the space shuttle was one of the biggest hooligans when it comes to the ozone layer.....but when it has just punched a big hole it just closes up again, true or urban legend/ankle
If the shuttle makes a hole due to its exhaust emissions, the hole would close up fairly quickly where it is.
Basically, due to the rotation of the earth, the ozone will tend to concentrate towards the equator - so any losses will appear as holes or thin patches above the poles.
In other words, a hole made by the shuttle will close, but the ozone over the nearest pole will thin or any hole already there will grow.
That's interesting, got any more info on this? A reliable website?
John....see
www.john-daly.com/press/press01a.htm#PROOF
As you might expect, the self-interest groups (some are even well meaning) hi-jack scientific research and use it to their own ends. A quick browse of the science coming out of mainstream respected institutions seems to show that there is no conclusive evidence one way or the other. C02 fuelled global warming looks theoretically plausible, but there is no clear evidence that it is actually occuring or isn't countered by some other process. But you wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to measure the effect either, even if it were occuring. Net net is that we don't know if its happening or not, and anyone who claims they do is either a grade a certified genius or a twat. A quick survey of the pavements leads me to conclude the world has more twats than geniuses.
mans input to global warming is insignificant when compared to natures, ie volcanic output of co2 and sulphurous gases. when combined with planetary shifts, earth is at one of its closest points to the sun for 35 million years(saw that on discovery a few nights ago) might explain why we are heating up a bit.
its all cyclical. the pistonheaders of the 31st century will be complaining of cold temperatures.
its all cyclical. the pistonheaders of the 31st century will be complaining of cold temperatures.
cortinaman said:
funkihamsta said: Dunno chap,
Guess whatever it burns does the damage. Airliners probably do more damage overall. Ozone's a different beast in any case. There's a much better case for the hole in the ozone than global warming in my opinion.
i did read somewhere that a jet going from london to new york uses the equivelent in fuel to a car travelling 70,000mls!!!
christ knows how much emissions they give out and the effect they have being released at 30,000ft!
>> Edited by cortinaman on Tuesday 22 April 03:43
I heard recently that Airbus are getting excited at the moment cos they have just produced a plane that is as efficient per passenger as taking a car. (ie MPG)They're quoting 3litres per 100km per passenger for "many" of their aircraft: www.airbus.com/airbus4u/articles_detail.asp?ae_id=1249 As most of the fuel is used in take off I assume that they are quoting best figures for long journeys with full aircraft.
Just done the maths: 93 MPG. Was expecting it to be worse, but not sure how they calculated it.
Gassing Station | Motoring News | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff