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Global warming: the bogus religion of our age
PROF. RICHARD LINDZEN
UK Daily Mail
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

The world is heading for environmental catastrophe - or so we are constantly
being told by the politicians and self-appointed experts.

They warn us that unless we take drastic action, the earth will soon be
devastated by climate change and global warming.

Entire species will be lost, crops will be obliterated, floods and famine
will sweep across the planet, and western economies will slide into
depression.

Tonight, Channel 4 will broadcast The Great Global Warming Swindle, which
suggests that the whole subject has become such a political hot potato that
other explanations for climate change are not being properly examined.

Certainly, there have been many sweeping predictions of global ruin, few
more emphatic than the report from Sir Nicholas Stern into the economics of
climate change, which states with an air of unchallengeable conviction: 'The
scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Climate change presents very
serious global risks and it demands an urgent global response.'

His study, commissioned by the Government in July 2005 and published amid
much Whitehall hype in October 2006, seemed to carry all the more weight
because Stern is one of the most senior civil servants in Britain, the head
of the Government's economic service.

His conclusions appeared to be based on powerful scientific authority, since
his team of 20 or so officials had drawn on a wide range of published papers
and data.

Tony Blair has described it as the most important document produced during
his ten years as Prime Minister, and urged that the Stern blueprint, with
its calls for more regulation and taxation, be adopted in full.

'The disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future, but in
our lifetimes,' said Blair, who went on to claim that the 'the world faces
nothing more serious, more urgent and more demanding of its leadership than
climate change.'

All this has helped put the Stern report at the very forefront of the
debate. The central theme of it is that there is a near universal consensus
of opinion within the scientific community about the dangers of climate
change. But this is not true.

There is no such unanimity among scientists.

Throughout the 550 pages of his document, Stern continually strikes a
confident note, as if there were no dispute about the issues.

Completely divorced from scientific reality

Yet this self-assured stance is completely divorced from scientific reality.
It is an inconvenient truth for Stern and his political allies that there
is, in fact, precious little hard evidence to back up his sweeping claims.

In a revealing recent comment, Stern admitted that when he was appointed by
the Government, he 'had an idea what the greenhouse effect was but wasn't
really sure'.

This lack of understanding of science shines through every chapter of his
report.

He is guilty of misreading the data, of distorting the evidence to suit his
political masters' dogma, of throwing numbers about with reckless abandon,
of promoting alarmism in place of rational discussion, and of reinventing
climate history.

There are fundamental misconceptions throughout the document. He seems to
think that climate prediction is a mature science stretching back to the
early 19th century, hence the confident tone science stretching back to the
early century, hence the confident tone of his pronouncements.

But in reality climate prediction is a relatively modern science, which has
emerged only in recent decades thanks partly to the emergence of computers.

So there are no easy certainties about the past - or the future.

Stern states boldly that the scale of global warming has been unprecedented
for at least the past 1,000 years, but he cannot possibly be sure on this
point because data from previous centuries is unreliable.

At most, we have a 50-year span of accurate measurements. The only genuine
global records of temperature come from weather balloons, since 1958, and
from microwave sounding units, since 1978.

What they indicate is a very gently warming trend, nothing approaching the
apocalyptic vision of Sir Nicholas.

Moreover, this minor trend could have easily have been caused by
irregularities such as volcanic eruptions or El Nino events (major
fluctuations in ocean temperatures in the Pacific which affect climate).

Stern's report 'ignores the evidence that does not suit his ideology'

In support of his gloomy thesis, Stern, like all global warming enthusiasts,
ignores the evidence that does not suit his ideology. He glosses over the
fact that, according to a host of historical accounts, Europe was far warmer
in the Middle Ages than it is today, or that the 17th century was much
colder, prompting what was known as 'The Little Ice Age', when the Thames
was often frozen over for months at a time.

Stern also refers to 'significant melting of and an acceleration of ice
floes' near the coast of Greenland because of global warming.

Yet several reputable scientific studies have shown that the mass of the
Greenland ice sheet is actually expanding, while Stern also fails to note
that the temperature of Greenland is now lower than it was in 1940 and
little changed from the first measurements in the 1780s.

Environmentalists are fond of jerking heartstrings with pictures of polar
bears struggling on supposedly melting icebergs, but it is estimated that
there are now 22,000 polar bears compared with 5,000 in 1940.

Nor can we be sure that any long-term changes in our climate are due to
mankind. There are any number of other possibilities and the programme
tonight examines the possibility that the sun's radiation is primarily
responsible for climate change.

Indeed, the climate can fluctuate without any external cause at all -
something again ignored by Stern, who wants only to indulge in the
fashionable notion that western capitalism is entirely to blame for every
drought and disaster.

Further, Stern takes no account of the capacity of mankind to adapt to, and
improve his, environment.

There can be little dispute that, more than a century after the peak of the
19th-century industrial revolution, Britain is a cleaner, healthier, less
polluted country than it was in the late Victorian age, when smog, disease
and slums were rife.

Genuine science is about gathering evidence and testing the veracity of
theories, not cheerleading for a particular ideology.

That is what is so disturbing about the current debate on global warming.
Healthy scepticism, which should be at the heart of all scientific inquiry,
is treated with contempt.

Far from being the powerful masterpiece that Blair claimed, Stern's report
is manifestly incompetent.

It is another dodgy dossier, where assertions are presented as facts and
data is twisted to suit a political purpose.

I agree with the economist critic who noted: 'If a student of mine were to
hand in this report as a masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood, I
would give him D for diligence, but more likely I would give him an F for
fail.' We are shifting away from science and into the realm of religious
fanaticism, where the followers of the creed, brimming with self-righteous
fury, believe that they are in possession of a higher truth.

Like a religion, environmentalism is suffused with hatred for the material
world and again, like religion, it requires devotion rather than
intellectual rigour from its adherents.

It is intolerant of dissent; those who question the message of doom are
regarded as heretics, or 'climate change deniers', to use green parlance.

And, just as in many religions, the route to personal salvation lies in the
performance of superstitious rituals, such as changing a lightbulb or
arranging for a tree to be planted after every plane journey.

What is so tragic is the way that this dubious ideology has achieved such
dominance in our public life.

Politicians love the green agenda, of course, because it means more control,
more regulation, more taxes, more summits, and more opportunities for
displays of self-important zeal.

The tragedy is that the likes of Sir Nicholas Stern are using bogus science
to push forward this agenda.

Richard Lindzen is Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.