A blow for science, sovereignty and sanity

President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the 2015 Paris climate accord has been received with predictable hysteria. Nothing could better illustrate the parlous state of western society than this irrational, ignorant and ideological reaction.

Trump is being accused of being anti-science. On the contrary: it’s the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) scam that’s anti-science. Here are some elementary facts.

• Observable fluctuations in global temperature are within the normal historic pattern of atmospheric variation. The world has always warmed and cooled; the climate changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly.
• Global warming theory rests on the belief that rising CO2 levels drive up atmospheric temperature. But there is no straightforward link between CO2 and temperature. From 1860 to 1875 temperatures rose, then decreased from 1875 to 1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918, rose dramatically until 1941, then cooled until 1976.
• Historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Moreover, there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterised not by warming but by glaciation.
• The warming that was observed between 1978-1998 has stopped and global temperatures have plateaued. This disproves the entire theory that carbon emissions – which have been rising – inexorably drive up global temperature. Faced with the consequent contradiction in the IPCC prediction of an 0.3°C global average temperature rise over a decade, AGW proponents claimed that the prediction allowed for pauses. It didn’t.

• The seas are not generally rising any more than they have done for thousands of years.

• The icecaps are not generally melting; Antarctic ice is actually increasing.

• The polar bears are not dying out but increasing in number.
• There is no upward trend in the occurrence of virtually any extreme events such as tornados, hurricanes, droughts or floods, and some are in fact decreasing.
• Predictions of planetary temperature apocalypse derive from computer modelling.

  The assumption that highly complex natural systems can be predicted at all, however, is absurd. And climate change is arguably the most complex system there is: coupled, non-linear, chaotic. The number of feedback mechanisms involved is vast. Computers cannot accommodate such myriad variations. And the idea that by changing just one factor – and a minute factor at that – a predictable outcome can be achieved is scarcely any more believable than the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers in Jonathan Swift’s satirical island of Laputa.

  The claim that AGW science is “settled” is itself anti-scientific. Science can never be “settled” but must always remain open to fresh evidence and analysis.The claim that “97 per cent of scientists support AGW theory” is itself bunkum, as shown here.

  The reason why so many scientists produce research purporting to demonstrate AGW is that grant-funding and academic advancement depend upon producing such a finding. Even so, as I noted in my 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, by 2009 700 scientists, several of them current and former participants in the IPCC, had gone on record to voice significant objections to the theory.

  Richard Lindzen, the eminent Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Emeritus at MIT, has repeatedly denounced the sophistry and dishonesty of global warming alarmists, most recently in this article which shredded the claim that AGW theory was based on science.

  Among many other distinguished scientists who have also spoken out against AGW are:

  • Christopher Landsea, a former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones and an IPCC author, who discovered that the IPCC was telling lies about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes;
  • Zbigniew Jaworowski, former chairman of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, who says the IPCC’s ice-core research is wrong and that therefore it has “based its global warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false”.
  • Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, who has written: “I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle.”
  • Gerhard Gerlich, of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig in Germany, and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner, who co-authored a devastating paper in 2007 entitled Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics. This stated that there was no scientific basis to anthropogenic global warming theory whatsoever.

  Not to mention the serial academic misdemeanours exposed in “Climategate”, the huge release of emails from various AGW zealot scientists revealing the suppression of opposing views, the intimidation of editors and the manipulation of data.

  Despite all this, western economies have adopted suicidal energy policies on the basis that the AGW scam is true. In Britain as elsewhere, one of the reasons poor people cannot afford to heat their homes is the enormous extra costs imposed by adopting ruinous policies to reduce carbon emissions. In 2013, Der Spiegel declared that as a result of Germany’s disastrous expansion of wind and solar power, electricity had become “a luxury good.”

  As Trump said yesterday, according to the National Economic Research Associates the Paris accord would have cost America $3 trillion in lost GDP and as many as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.

  Trump is putting the interests of American workers in places like Pittsburgh ahead of this agreement. The fact that the Democrat mayor of Pittsburgh declares, however, that he will continue to implement Paris accord-style policies illustrates a further enormous problem America now faces.

  Trump correctly observed that there were “serious legal and constitutional issues” with the accord. “Our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty.”

  True and very necessary and overdue, and this will doubtless be cheered by the actual workers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere whose interests their President is choosing to prioritise over and above any crackpot ideological theories. Nevertheless, his policy is being opposed by Democrat mayors and governors, along with multinational corporate giants with either an ideological or financial interest in maintaining the AGW-catastrophe fiction.

  It is therefore the latest and perhaps most graphic example of the lethal divide that has opened up in the US between, on the one hand, the President allied with America’s blue-collar workers and, on the other, the intellectual, political and corporate elite which is absolutely determined to thwart the agenda the President was elected to deliver. This is a dagger at the heart of American democracy.

  in Britain, the idea that there is a legitimate view at all against AGW theory is simply suppressed. I listened in vain to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning for a single speaker suggesting Trump might have a point. There was none. This was not a news programme. It was propaganda.

  It did not see fit to mention, for example, that the Paris accord empowers some of the world’s worst polluters such as China and India. It allows China to increase its carbon emissions for 13 years since it is only committed to begin reducing them by 2030. India has made no commitment on emissions at all, pledging only to make progress on efficiency at half the rate of recent years. Pakistan merely offered to “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.”

  As Trump said: “In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries. This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.”

  In denouncing the US move, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasised Germany’s continued commitment to the Paris accord which she called a “cornerstone” of efforts to protect “creation”. Yet as Transport Environment reported, Germany has now seen two straight years of emissions increases due to close of nuclear power station and and replacing it with coal and natural gas after the failure of solar and wind power because of … not enough sunshine or wind. Duh!

  In other words, the idea that the Paris accord will do anything to reduce carbon emissions, let alone address the warming of the climate, is patently ludicrous.

  In his article, Prof Lindzen says this about climate:

  “The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science’.”

  In substituting ideology for evidence, the AGW scam represents the repudiation of reason itself. President Trump has struck a blow for science, sovereignty and sanity.