Misinformation and the global warming debate

The satellite measurements showed a trend quite different to the surface measurements purporting to show a warming of 0.4 C since 1979. The satellites were showing a warming of less than 0.1 C which was not evenly spread across the 21 years, nor was it global. This restricted warming apparently resulted from the El Nino of 1997-98. Before that, the satellites were showing a slight global cooling, which is still persisting in the southern hemisphere (see Daly at www.vision.net.au/~daly). There is thus a major and vital discrepancy between the surface measurements and the satellite measurements. The weather balloon measurements are highly consistent with the satellite measurements.

The United States National Research Council Panel of eleven, in its January, 2000 report, reached the extraordinary conclusion that both surface and atmospheric records are right, conjecturing that the discrepancy may be due to some unknown process, perhaps volcanoes or ozone depletion, which no models can detect. Readers are urged to inspect the Panel’s highly qualified conclusions which acknowledge, but do not explain, the crucial disparity between the suspect surface measures (see below) and the more reliable satellite and balloon measurements.

Satellites can now measure surface temperatures and this, hopefully, will overcome the problems of surface measurements, to which we now turn. A full description of these problems is to be found in the Daly net reference above. Briefly, however, the main ones are ‘heat island’ effects for measuring instruments located in or near towns, cities, industrial complexes, airports, etc., and variations across the world in the care with which the measuring instruments are maintained and the measurements accurately made.

It is puzzling and highly significant, for example, that the surface and atmospheric measurements are not diverging everywhere. In North America, Australia, and Western Europe, where the records have been properly collected and the instruments well maintained, the surface records are in close agreement with the satellite measurements. Elsewhere, including countries subjected to warfare, political and economic upheaval, and civil turmoil, the surface measurements show the degree of surface warming referred to earlier.

The most reasonable conclusion from all this is that human-caused greenhouse emissions, especially carbon dioxide emissions over the last 60 years, have made no noticeable contribution to global warming. Whatever recent global warming might have taken place (a highly debatable claim as we have seen) is almost certainly due to natural forces, such as variations in solar activity and radiation, which have characterised the whole of the Earth’s history, as have the advance and retreat of glaciers and much else.

A subsidiary question is whether more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (on a world scale, only a little more) is a bad thing anyway. In terms of increases in human and animal food production, agricultural output generally and the flourishing of forests, carbon dioxide fertilisation is showing measurable benefits. The United States Forestry Service, for example, says that large standing timber in the USA has increased by 30 per cent since 1950 and, because of the increase in plant food, animal numbers are increasing as well. There is other good news from this story than space allows for the telling. One would have expected that an organisation supposedly dedicated to conservation would inform us of such welcome developments.

On the contrary, after belatedly acknowledging that "there is some uncertainty in the global warming debate", but either concealing or ignorant of the crucial and sobering measurement data I have summarised, Mr van Rood nevertheless goes on to repeat the extravagant scare scenarios (described by him as "predictions") about catastrophic floods, droughts, cyclones, dead coral reefs and so on, which have no sound scientific basis but which serve to worry the trusting and the uninformed. He follows with snake-oil economics about alternative energy sources being cheaper whilst keeping silent about the huge costs of the changes he would have us unnecessarily make. One cannot help wondering what the Conservation Foundation’s true objectives are.

There is no real evidence that human beings and their industrial, agricultural and pastoral activities are causing global warming. To act as Kyoto would have us do under the false premise that we are causing global warming, would inflict on the world, including the most desperate, more hunger, more poverty, more disease, and more death. For Australians, it will make us poorer and more vulnerable for no good reason whatsoever.