The Great Global Warming Swindle
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The Independent Institute
Commentary
March 19, 2007
by S. Fred Singer
Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, has met its match: a devastating
documentary recently shown on British television, which has also been viewed
by millions of people on the Internet. In spite of its flamboyant title, The
Great < HYPERLINK "http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831" \o "Open URL: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831" \t "linkWin" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831> Global
Warming Swindle is based on sound science by recording the statements of
real climate scientists, including me. An Inconvenient Truth mainly records
a politician.
The scientific arguments presented inThe Great Global Warming Swindle can be
stated quite briefly:
1. There is no proof at all that the current warming is caused by the rise
of greenhouse gases from human activities, such as the generation of energy
from the burning of fuels. Observations in ice cores show that temperature
increases have preceded-not resulted from-increases in CO2, by hundreds of
years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of
the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor is
far, far more important than CO2, yet not well handled by climate
models-and, in any case, not within our control. Greenhouse models also
cannot account for the observed cooling of much of the past century
(1940-75), nor for the observed patterns of warming-what we call the
"fingerprints." For example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict
warming. And where the models call for the middle atmosphere to warm faster
than the surface, the observations show the exact opposite.
But the best evidence we have supports natural causes-changes in cloudiness
linked to regular variations in solar activity. Thus the current warming is
likely part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that's been
traced back almost a million years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period
around 1100 A.D., when the Vikings were able to settle Greenland and grow
crops, and the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 A.D., which brought
severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests, starvation,
disease, and general misery. Attempts have been made to claim that the
current warming is "unusual"; a spurious analysis of tree rings and other
proxy data tried to deny the existence of these historic climate swings; but
this so-called "hockey-stick" result, that earth temperatures have been
constant until recent decades, has now been thoroughly discredited.
2. If the cause of warming is mostly natural, then there is little we can do
about it. We cannot influence the inconstant Sun, the likely origin of most
climate variability. None of the schemes of mitigation currently bandied
about will do any good; they are all irrelevant, useless, and wildly
expensive:
* Control of CO2 emissions, whether by rationing or by elaborate
cap-and-trade schemes
* Uneconomic "alternative" energy, such as ethanol and the impractical
"hydrogen economy"
* Massive installations of wind turbines and solar collectors
* Proposed projects for the sequestration of CO2 from smokestacks or
even from the atmosphere
Ironically, all of these schemes would be ineffective even if CO2 were
responsible for the observed warming trend-unless we could persuade every
nation, including China, to cut fuel use by 80 percent!
3. Finally, no one can show that a warmer climate would produce negative
impacts overall. The much-feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend
on short-term temperature changes, as the rate of sea-level increases has
been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many
economists argue that the opposite is more likely-that warming produces a
net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. All agree
that a colder climate would be bad. So why would the present climate be the
optimum? Surely, the chances for this must be vanishingly small, and the
history of past climate warmings bear this out.
But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader.
Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a
non-problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease,
denial of human rights-not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear
wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics
that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid,
such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites
throughout much of the world prefer to toy with and devote our limited
resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real ones. Just
consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world
figures: the chief scientist of Britain's Labor Party tells us that unless
we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic
will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding
couples propagating the human race. Seriously!
I imagine that in the not-too-distant future, all of the hype will have died
down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool-as it did during
much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed
since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and
wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient
Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind
them.
S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is professor emeritus of
environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, adjunct scholar at the
National Center for Policy Analysis, and former director of the U.S. Weather
Satellite Service. He is also a research fellow at the Independent Institute
and author of Hot Talk, Cold
< HYPERLINK "http://independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=42" \o "Open URL: http://independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=42" \t "linkWin" http://independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=42> Science: Global
Warming's Unfinished Debate (The Independent Institute, 1997).