Man-Made Climate Change Is Bunk

Some of the government's tax raising agenda in this week's budget has been justified on the grounds that it is "good for the environment" as it will help prevent "anthropogenic climate change". For this reason I thought it timely to remind ourselves why the idea that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last few years has led to an increase in global temperatures is poppycock.

1) The ice core record clearly demonstrates that increases in global temperatures precede increases in atmospheric CO₂ by periods of several hundred years.

Take the word of Prof. John Mitchell OBE FRS, Chief Scientist at the UK Met Office (a major beneficiary and champion of the global warming agenda):

Over the several hundred thousand years covered by the ice core record ... changes in temperature did drive changes in carbon dioxide.

2) Palaeoclimatological evidence, which is grounded in the geological study of very long periods of time, shows that over multi-hundred-million year periods there has been no connection between temperatures on Earth and atmospheric CO₂ levels.

An article called "Climate And The Carboniferous Period" uses data from Yale geologist R A Berner and University of Texas geologist C Scotese to demonstrate this:

The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today -- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today.

3) Climate models based on anthropogenic warming have been proved wrong.

All major computer climate models have predicted a constant, steady increase in temperature from the end of the 20th century based on continuing increases in atmospheric CO₂.

The actual data from major scientific institutions for the 21st century (so far!) - as presented by professional meteorologist Anthony Watts - show quite clearly that the Earth's temperature has in fact remained constant.

In other words, as those of us languishing through the coldest winter for many years could attest (e.g., e.g., e.g.) the climate models based on all that bad science are straightforward, if expensive, junk.

So why are we all being forced into costly and inconvenient changes in lifestyle?

As Canadian journalist Peter Foster put it recently in his article "The New Road To Serfdom":

It was a combination of the success of the environmental Left -- in particular activist non-governmental organizations -- in stoking the concerns of the electorate, and of the desire of bureaucrats and policy-makers to stay relevant, busy and in power ...

The environmental movement has also been astonishingly successful in co-opting education systems, and highly skillful at exploiting universal psychological tendencies to social conformity and deference to "authority" ...

The new Left ... has thus co-opted a huge coalition of self-interested or naive supporters, who are attracted by the prospect of preening as saviours of the planet. Together they are threatening to carry the globe down a new road to serfdom.

Don't fall for it. Be sceptical; be informed; challenge the unholy alliance of leftists, environmentalists and control freaks behind the global warming scare with the facts.

I hope this post will help you to do so.