1.WHY THE SCEPTICS ARE WRONG ABOUT CLIMATE 

The arguments put forward by Nigel Lawson, Melanie Phillips and Christopher Booker often sound convincing.  But they are absolutely wrong.  Let me begin by taking the main arguments they use and answering them one by one..

First sceptical argument.    The scientists are divided on the issue.  There are large numbers of them trying to alarm us about global warming because they want to attract grants and funding.   

Answer.  It is true that the scientists are divided, but only in the sense that 100 can be divided into 99 and 1.   In her Spectator article Greenwashing A Jury of 11^th September 2008 Melanie Phillips tells us ‘The mmgw industry is in disarray.  More and more climate-related scientists are coming out and saying the whole mmgw theory is wrong or fraudulent…..’.   To support her in this assault on man-made global warming, she quotes Dr William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Bio-systems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa,   Stanley B. Goldenberg of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Professor Kunihiko Takeda, Vice-Chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University, and an organization grandly called The Space and Research Centre, which had announced in the previous July that a period not of global warming but global cooling has now begun.  Of these authorities one is a retired professor of engineering.   When you go to the website of   the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration you find that it is not an organization concerned with long term climate change at all, but with short term weather prediction for the benefit of sailors and fishermen.  Does Professor Takeda  have any  qualifications in climate science? Vice-chancellors rarely do.  According to the quotation from his writings which Melanie Phillips admiringly provides for us he believes that the sun is to blame for rising temperatures (hardly supportive of Melanie’s claim in the article that temperatures are falling, but so small a contradiction, which perhaps she didn’t notice, seems in no way to faze her). The lack of increase in sunspot activity over the last thirty years appears to have escaped his attention.  When we turn to The Space and Research Centre’s website we find mention of only three scientists, one John L: Casey together with a Tanzanian and a Bulgarian.  It describes itself as ‘the leading science and research company internationally’.

So here we have six named scientists, none of whom appears to be a major expert on climate science.  Against this, we must put the 2,500 working for the International Panel on Climate Change at which Melanie Phillips scoffs so much.  The sceptics have been officially condemned not only by IPCC but by the Royal Society, The American National Academy of Science, The Tyndall Centre, The Hadley Centre for Climate Research, The American Geophysical Union and virtually every other official scientific body in the world.  The Royal Society rebuts all the major arguments put forward by the sceptics on its website.  Of course, academics obviously want to get funding if they can.  But what evidence is there that they are deliberately exaggerating the climate issue in order to get hold of more money?  Are they really such scoundrels? Are we really to believe that members of the Royal Society, and the climate experts at the Tyndall Centre and the Hadley Centre, are so unprincipled as to distort their scientific findings to their own financial advantage?   What there is, though, is evidence that some climate sceptics are being funded by oil companies, if they happen to agree with the point of view that oil companies would like to promote.  The Royal Society has taken the unusual step of writing to Exxon Mobil and asking them to stop doing it.                                                                                                        

We are in the position of a householder who is visited by ten fire officers, nine of whom tell him that there is a grave danger that he and his wife and children will be burnt to death one night unless he takes steps to fireproof his house, and a tenth who tells him not to bother, because the other nine are only scaremongering so that they can keep their jobs.  What kind of a fool is going to believe the tenth and not the nine?  Some mishtake shurely, Melanie.  But what a mistake.   If we follow Melanie Phillips’ advice, and it turns out that she is wrong and the great majority of climate scientists are right, the consequences will be uniquely and catastrophically grave.   Surely only an idiot would believe Melanie Phillips and not the overwhelming majority of climate scientists.   It seems that the world is full of just such.

Second Sceptical Argument.  Climate scientists are basing their predictions on computer models of the future.  But the world’s weather is so complex, and there are so many unknowns, computer models are bound to mislead.

Answer.  It is true that computer models cannot predict the future with complete accuracy.   No-one knows how humanity will respond to the climate crisis, how much economic activity there will be during this century, how quickly the methane deposits in the frozen tundra will melt, all of these and many other unknowns will affect the extent of global warming.  Computers can therefore only give a range of possibilities, with different outcomes based on different assumptions that may or may not happen.  But this does not mean that they cannot predict the general trend.  The major drivers of man-made climate change – the balance of the carbon cycle, the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, the present rate of increase – are already fully known and it is these that make it certain that future temperatures will rise.  The only doubt is as to how great the increases will be, and the computers can tell us with relative certainty what effects different base assumptions will have.  They can tell us, for example, that if we continue to increase carbon emissions by 2 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere per year, which is the current rate, average temperatures will rise by at least three degrees above pre-industrial revolution levels, with all the severe consequences that would involve.

The great champion of the computer model is James Hansen; ‘a propaganda barrage from mmgw fanatics, including the pioneer evangelist James Hansen’ as Melanie Phillips sarcastically jeers.  Though you do have to be impressed, Melanie, by the number of times Hansen has stuck his neck out on the basis of his computer models, in forecasts that were at the time supported by few of his colleagues, and how often he has been proved right.  Few in the late eighties, except him, were forecasting that the effects of global warming would be felt before the end of the twentieth century.  Most believed that 2020 was the earliest, but it was he who was right.  After the volcanic explosion on Mt Merapi in Indonesia in January 1992 he predicted, on the basis of his models, that the resulting dust cloud would bring exceptionally cold weather to the western United States and Western Europe six months later.  His predictions proved to be remarkably accurate.  Most alarming of all, the IPCC which, despite the gaudily deceiving paint in which Phillips and Lawson portray them, is, we have to remember, a highly conservative and cautious scientific body reluctant in the manner of scientists to predict outcomes for which there is not as yet firm evidence, forecast in their fourth report of May 2007 a rate of ice-cap melting that would produce a corresponding rise in sea levels of 28 to 60 centimetres during this century (this is not, incidentally, for the simple reason  that melting ice will fill the sea up with more water, the causal chain is far more complex).  Hansen predicts a rise of at least a metre and possibly five metres, which would bring severe threat to all the world’s major coastal cities, including London.  In 2007 IPCC said ‘late-summer sea ice is projected  to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21^st century…..in some models’.  But in November 2008 The Public Interest Research Centre reports that climate scientists are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years.[i]  No climate scientist now doubts, only a year later, that the 2007 IPCC report was far too timid about the melting of sea-ice.  It is proceeding far faster than anybody, except Hansen, predicted. Once again Hansen is being proved right.  In the light of this record, who is it more sensible to believe, the ‘pioneer evangelist Hansen’ with his support group of ‘mmgw fanatics’ or Melanie Phillips?  No contest, shurely.

Third Sceptical Argument.  Although carbon emissions have increased since 1998 temperatures have not. This shows us that there is no connection between the two. In his book, Nigel Lawson gives us the figures for temperature increase so far in the twenty-first century, based on statistics released by the Hadley Centre and the Climate Research Centre of the University of East Anglia.   They are.

2001              0.40

2002              0.46

2003              0.46

2004              0.43

2005              0.42

2006              0.41                                                                                                                                

These figures record increases above the average global temperature during the period 1961-90, and all of them are lower than the 1998 figure which was 0.52.  Lawson points out, correctly, that these small rises are due to global warming in the twentieth century which has still having an effect, but they show indisputably, again correctly, that no further warming has occurred since the turn of the millennium.

Answer   .Nigel Lawson’s claim was comprehensively demolished by the Meteorological Office, in a comment on his book published on September 22^nd 2008.  According to the Met Office an overall upward trend in temperature does not mean that in specific years, or periods of years, there will not be relative falls.  The recent period of cooling has been caused by the phenomenon well known to meteorologists, although not to Nigel Lawson it seems, of La Nina and El Nino.  The exceptionally hot year of 1998 was caused by El Nino, a current that increases the warmth of the water on the ocean surface in large parts of the globe.  The opposite phenomenon, La Nina, forces cold water to the surface, with resulting cooler temperatures, and it is this that has been pertaining in recent years.  If you take these factors out of the equation, 13 of the last 16 years have been the hottest on record.  Not to recognize that a rapid overall rise in temperature is taking place is ‘to have your head in the sand’ said the Met Office. Who should we believe, Nigel Lawson who does not even mention these well known complicating phenomena, or the experts at the Met Office?

Fourth Sceptical Argument.   Even if temperatures do rise by 3 degrees during the 21^st century, which is IPCC’s most likely forecast, this only means an average rise of 0.03 per year.  We have already sustained an average rise of 0.02 during the twentieth century, and with the improved technologies that we can confidently expect will be developed, there is every reason to think that we will take 0.03 in our stride without any need to modify our industrial way of life.

Answer.  It would be hard to exaggerate the fallacy in this argument, put forward by Nigel Lawson on page 27 of his book.  It misses to a staggering degree the main point that the scientists are making, showing no understanding whatsoever of the delicate balance of the carbon cycle.  Global warming is itself a good thing and if there had been no carbon in the atmosphere the earth would have been too cold to support life.  It is true too that the earth naturally produces huge amounts of carbon emissions, compared with which the human contribution is minuscule.  Every living thing that dies surrenders its carbon debt.  But most of this carbon is soaked up and turned into oxygen, some by trees and some by ocean algae. To these, we have to add a third factor that naturally keeps the earth at an even temperature, the reflection of the sun’s rays back into space by the ice-caps.   Astonishingly, this balance between carbon emissions and cooling mechanisms has kept the earth at the right temperature for life for many hundreds of thousands of years.  Here, however, is the rub.  Once these mechanisms fail, not only do they stop cooling the world, they go into reverse and start adding to its heat.  Every tree that catches fire not only ceases to store carbon, it releases that already stored into the atmosphere.  Dead algae also release carbon, and already in 2005 at the Exeter Conference the shocking revelation was that 30% were even then dead, surrendering their carbon and poisoning the oceans.  Once the ice-caps melt, not only do they cease to reflect heat back into the atmosphere, they turn into water which stores it and slowly releases it.  This is why the balance of the carbon cycle is so delicate, and why mankind’s relatively tiny contribution is so important.           

Once we tip the balance even by a little, positive feedback will start and global warming will begin to cause itself, on a far vaster scale than any we could directly produce, and it will then escape our ability to halt it.  The idea that the rise in temperature over the century can be reduced to an average takes no account of this feedback mechanism, which is why it is such a truly major fallacy.  The scientists are telling us that we may only have until 2015 to arrest the present annual increase in emissions.  If we fail to do that, there will be no way of stopping average temperatures reaching the ‘tipping point’ of two degrees above pre-industrial levels, although that crucial mark would not actually be reached  until, probably,  about 2030.  This two degree tipping point is so significant because it is at two degrees that it is thought positive feedback will begin, and global warming will start to cause itself.  At that level the earth will have become hot enough for significant numbers of trees to start catching fire, in the hot summers that there will then be, in the Amazon forests.                      

As they do so they will release carbon that will make the next year hotter, and that will make the next year hotter still,  and so on inexorably, until a point is reached where temperatures will be hot enough to melt the frostbound arctic tundras, and so release the billions of tons of methane locked up in them.  Methane is twenty three times more dangerous a greenhouse gas than CO2.  Once its effects are added to the feedback process, the rate of temperature increase will start to gallop.   Nobody knows whether this will happen, but if it did temperatures could rise this century by anything between three and six degrees.  Again nobody knows, and it is this uncertainty that the sceptics have been able to exploit to deadly effect.   But what we do know is that it is a very real danger.  It could happen.   The scientific logic says that to a greater or lesser extent it certainly will, unless we take drastic action to prevent it.  This is all very well known science.  Is it really sensible not to pay heed to these dire warnings?  Why is Nigel Lawson not telling us about it in his book?   In assuming that IPCC is saying that temperature will rise by three degrees and working on that assumption, Lawson has completely misunderstood the point that they are making.  What they are saying is that temperatures could rise during this century by anything between 1.5 and 6 degrees, depending on a number of unknowns, by far the most important of which is humanity’s response to the climate crisis.  Three degrees is only the mean average of these different scenarios.  Ironically, if we follow Lawson’s advice and take no serious action to halt climate change, the likelihood grows that we shall not see a mere three degree rise but the release of natural self-promoting mechanisms that will take us closer and closer to six.

Fifth Sceptical Argument.    The IPCC’s so-called hockey stick graph shows global temperatures holding absolutely steady until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and then escalating at an ever increasing rate.  But this is a false picture.  It takes no account, for example,  of considerable differences in temperature between the medieval warm period and ’the little ice age’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  These were caused by solar activity.  There is no difference today.

Answer.   This is another example of an argument that sounds convincing but is in fact entirely fallacious.  It is true that variations in solar heat do cause differences in the earth’s temperature.  This is for two reasons.  One is that eccentricities in the earth’s orbit sometimes take it closer to the sun, so that it receives more heat, and sometimes farther away so that it receives less.  The other is that sunspots, explosive flares on the sun’s surface, sometimes cause the sun to give out more warmth.  Because the earth’s orbit follows a mathematical logic, its course in the past can be deduced and plotted against known conditions in the history of the earth.  When this is done the matches between eccentric solar orbits and what is known about both ice ages and inter-glacial warm periods, and the medieval warm period and the little ice age, fit exactly.  We know therefore that plotting the sun’s orbits is a very good indicator of what the earth’s mean temperature at any one period should be.  What this tells us about the present day is that the earth’s average temperature should be much lower than it is.  There must therefore be some other cause for what we are witnessing.  There is none on offer, except man’s own production of greenhouse gas. The correct conclusion to be drawn from the relation between the earth’s orbits and temperature is exactly the opposite from the naïve one drawn by the sceptics.  It shows conclusively that they are wrong.  The same conclusion follows from the observation of sunspots.  If this were the true cause of the present warming, then sunspot activity should have been observed.  But none has been during the last thirty years.  If we follow Sherlock Holmes’ advice and eliminate all other possibilities, then the only remaining one must be the true solution, however unlikely it might seem.   That one remaining possible explanation, my dear Watson, is human use of fossil fuels.

Sixth Sceptical Argument.   Even in the most pessimistic of IPCC’s six scenarios for economic growth during the twenty-first century, it is assumed that poor countries will have advanced to 75% of the standard enjoyed by developed countries today.  In the best scenario, even present day poor countries will be three times as well off as the US is today.  According to Nigel Lawson, if we factor into these projections a cost caused by global warming of 3% of GDP in the developed world, and even if we raise it as high as 10% in the developing world, it would only mean, at worst, that our great grandchildren in the rich world would be 2.6 times better off in a hundred years time rather than 2.7, and people in poor countries, only 8.5 times as well off as they are today instead of 9.5.  In the best of IPCC’s scenarios, the rich would be 4.7 times as well off instead of 4.8, and people in the developing world only forty-five times as well off as they are today rather than fifty times.  What is all the fuss about?  (Lawson op.cit. chapter 2)

Answer.   You do sometimes wonder whether economists are in any way adjacent to the real world.  IPCC’s forecasts are assuming in this case, as are Nigel Lawson’s, that economic growth will continue at its present rate and all other factors will be equal.  But they will not be equal.  According to Lester Brown[ii], at present rates of growth, by 2030 China alone will be consuming two-thirds of the whole world’s current grain harvest, more than double the whole world’s present consumption of paper, will be driving 1.1 billion cars as opposed to the whole world’s present fleet of 800 million, and will be consuming 99 million barrels of oil a day, 15 million barrels more than the whole world’s present daily use.  Already by 2003 China was consuming 258 million tons of steel as opposed to the US’s 104 million, in 2005 consumed 67 million tons of meat while the US only ate 38 million, was using nearly twice as much oil as the US, and more cell phones, television sets and refrigerators.   Is it really feasible that these crazy rates of growth can be maintained, let alone the much higher rates of growth that Nigel Lawson envisages, over the whole century?  Common sense surely tells one that, even if the world can keep up its present rates of growth let alone exceed them, and even if the earth continues to be as fertile in the provision to man of its raw materials as it now is, it cannot sustain this massive and increasing onslaught on its resources.  Unfortunately, every indicator tells us that it will not continue to be as abundant in its provision.  Before writing his book Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet, Mark Lynas claims to have read 7000 scientific papers.[iii]  I doubt if Lawson can match that huge arsenal of authentication.  The results of Lynas’s researches are alarming and horrifying to a unique degree.  What his researches tell us is:

At 2 degrees China will be suffering from severe droughts, despite the Chinese Government’s current huge project to divert water from south to north.  There will be severe agricultural losses in northern India and northern Australia, but these will be balanced to some extent by increased fertility in western Europe and the northern central United States.  By 2040 hot summers will be causing considerable heat stress, and, judging by 2003, hundreds of thousands of Europeans will die.  In such years, which will become more and more frequent, harvests in southern Europe will be devastated.  Poor countries that have reduced purchasing power on the world markets will have slipped into structural famine, although, by a cruel irony, they will be the ones least responsible for global warming.  In the increasingly acidic oceans shell fish will die, because the acids will dissolve their shells, and fish will be struggling to survive.  The polar bear will have become extinct.

At 3 degrees drought will have become permanent in southern Africa, and millions, who even now only just support themselves by growing sorghum and maize, will starve.  Even in winter, sea ice at both the poles will be severely reduced, and some scientists – including Hansen inevitably - think that El Nino could become permanent, causing disastrous droughts and floods across the globe.  The gulf stream could suddenly switch off, with the ironic consequence that, for some decades, western Europe might experience near-Siberian conditions.  At 3 degrees the Amazon rain forests will be doomed, and once the process of self-destruction starts it is thought that they will disappear altogether by 2080.  Life in Australia will be increasingly untenable, and hurricanes will be more severe and more frequent.  The Indus will dry up, bringing starvation to millions, as will the Colorado.  California will be devoured by forest fires.  New York will be under threat of flood and Bangladesh mostly under water.  Even in areas that are still fertile, grain yields will be severely affected by thermal stress, bringing starvation to many tens of millions of people.  Even at three degrees the arctic tundras could start to release their methane

At 4 degrees much of humanity will be short of water for drinking and irrigation.  The Himalayan snow water that irrigates much of the agriculture of Asia will have run dry, and the monsoon rains, on which 2 billion people depend, may have altered irrevocably.  Deserts will have spread into Mediterranean Europe, most of southern Africa and the western United States.  There will be heat waves of unimagineable ferocity, and even in the UK summer temperatures could reach those of present-day Morroco.  Morocco itself will be uninhabitable. Even crops genetically modified to resist heat and drought will not survive the more extreme conditions at this level.  A mass extinction will have started that could wipe out half of existing species.

At five degrees all ice on earth would have disappeared, together with all the rainforests.  The whole equatorial region would be uninhabitable and those humans left would be seeking to eke out an existence in far northern latitudes.  There would be a mass extinction of deep sea life, and, at this level, a real possibility that deposits of methane on the sea beds, called clathrates and holding far more methane that the tundras, would start to melt.  The effect of this would be so catastrophic that, if this did happen, the progress from five to six degrees would be almost certain.

At six degrees no-one knows what would happen.  The last time the earth’s temperature rose by six degrees was 250 million years ago, and then 95% of all species were wiped out.   But then it happened relatively slowly, and some species at least had time to adapt so that they were able to survive even in these extreme conditions.  If so great a catastrophe happened this time, it would be extremely quick.   Some life probably would survive.  But not life as we know it.  Would any humans survive?  Probably not

We always have to bear in mind the self-confirming multiplier effect that is runaway global warming’s essential dynamic.  Once we cross the two degree threshold, we shall have released natural forces that are all too likely to lead on to three degrees.  The heat produced by three degrees will of itself produce the conditions that will lead to four degrees.  Four degrees is more likely still to lead on to five.  And five will almost certainly trigger six.