Global Warming Interview with John Daly
1.Once and for all is global warming fact or fiction. Please explain reasons.
We must discriminate here between natural warming which may occur through natural variability, and warming which has been (or may become in the future) generated by human activity. Most of the warming in the 20th century occurred before 1940, a large number of scientific papers attributing that warming to the sun. The sun is now hotter and more active than at any time in the last 400 years, and it would be absurd not to expect some warming from that source alone. The sun will eventually decline in activity – it always does.
As for man-made warming over and above that caused by natural variability and the sun, the present climate cannot yet be considered as having a significant human component for the simple reason that nothing we have today is unprecedented in recorded human history. The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, confirmed by proxy evidence from all over the world. Even the 1930s was warmer in the 20th century in the USA than present climate. This is particularly significant as the USA has the best quality monitoring network of any country, making it’s climate history all the more credible as a guide to what has been happening globally. Other countries have less reliable data, and consequently may be exhibiting, not human-induced warming, but instrument-induced warming.
We now have satellites to measure global temperature for us more accurately than the surface network (most in poorer countries). It is significant that since 1979 when the satellites began, the surface warming amounts to +0.3″C while the same warming measured by the satellites is only +0.08″C, all of it in the northern hemisphere (the southern hemispheric has cooled very slightly). Only one reasonable explanation exists for this discrepancy – the surface record as compiled by the greenhouse industry is wrong. If it is wrong post-1979, then the same statistical processing must have made the pre-1976 wrong also. The fact that the high-quality U.S. surface record shows a quite different trend to the claimed global record further suggests that the claims of global warming during the 20th century cannot be believed.
2.Is man-made carbon dioxide causing a greenhouse effect on earth?
CO2 has always caused a greenhouse effect on earth. It’s contribution to the overall effect is quite small, most of the effect being a result of water vapour in the atmosphere. An increase of CO2 to double the pre-industrial level, expected in about 150 years, is theorised to add about +0.6″C warming to the atmosphere on its own. However, that is only the beginning – there are `feedbacks’, both positive (making things even warmer) and negative (dampening that warming). The earth could not have survived billions of years with positive feedback. This is because positive feedback is inherently unstable as it magnifies any small trend either way. The earth would have boiled over, or frozen into an ice ball, billions of years ago if there had been net positive feedback in the system. So we must have net negative feedback. This is supported by the fact that the earth has not warmed nearly as much as the models say it should have (most of that warming being solar anyway). With net negative feedback, the CO2×2 warming would be down to around +0.25″C, barely measurable.
The IPCC and the models deny this and predict net positive feedback, building on the initial +0.6″C warming to give a final warming up to 6″C. In effect, they have built a global warming mountain out of a CO2 molehill.
Is the sea level actually rising?
The IPCC claims it is, but this claim is based on yet another model, the ICE-3G model, which shows that sea level should have risen 10-25 cm during the 20th century. For the IPCC that seems to be enough. However, tide gauge evidence from outside the North Atlantic basin (which is badly affected by post-glacial rebound, causing some land to rise, some to subside) shows this claim to be incorrect. In Australia, fronting onto three oceans, a survey of long-term tide gauges shows a sea level rise of only +0.16 mm/yr compared with the IPCC claim of 1 to 2.5 mm/yr.
A small islet in southern Tasmania called the `Isle of the Dead’ (so named because it is a convict graveyard from the convict days of the mid-19th century), has a sea level mark on its north-facing cliff, put there in 1841 by Captain Sir James Clark Ross (the renowned Antarctic explorer). He said in his later book that the mark was struck at the `mean level of the sea’ (he said this several times). The mark is still there, but it is now 30 cm above mean sea level as it exists today. This apparent fall in sea level since 1841 cannot be explained by land uplift as that is estimated to be only a few cms during that time. The lead author of the IPCC 2001 Report chapter on sea levels is Dr John Church of the University of Tasmania. He is familiar with the Isle of the Dead, but there is no reference to this important sea level benchmark in that report, even though it bemoans the lack of data in the southern hemisphere, and the lack of data before the 20th century. Only my website reveals exactly what is significant about the Isle of the Dead. After years of research by the CSIRO and several universities, not a word has been published in the scientific literature about the benchmark.
A recent Swedish study in the Maldives shows no sea level rise there either.
If it is, are the consequences dire, as predictions have shown?
If sea level did rise, we are looking at an IPCC prediction of around 50 cm to 1 metre sea level rise in the next 100 years. This would require a sea level rise rate of +10 mm/yr. This compares with the Australian tide gauge survey of +0.16 mm/yr. The IPCC prediction is thus not credible. If it were to happen though, it would cause significant problems for low-lying countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh. Coral atolls would also be in difficulty.
3.How do we deal with the economic consequences of reducing fossil fuel usage, if Kyoto protocol is implemented?
We would have to deal with a serious brake on economic development, rising unemployment, massively increased energy costs (energy being an economically price inelastic commodity). A better option would be to make technology work for us, not to arrest it. For example, removal of CO2 at the point of production in power stations would be a better option economically than simply reducing fossil fuel use. The billions of dollars now spent wastefully on climate research and modeling could by now have produced the very technology needed – if indeed we think we need it.
4.Are the Global Warming “dissenters” being funded by the oil and gas companies
The question of funding is a one-sided proposition. Does not the 4 billion dollar funding worldwide for climate research and modeling amount to a powerful bureaucratic self-interest? Twenty years ago, climatology was just a small-scale science, a minor offshoot of meteorology. Today, thanks to the intervention of politics, it attracts more money than any other science.
And yet, the dissenters to this bureaucratic juggernaut are held to account for their own meagre funding sources, while the `greenhouse industry’ escapes any accountability for the massive funding it receives.
That said, I can only speak for myself, not other dissenters. I finance my own website out of my own pocket. I have a regular full-time job unrelated to climate. Over the years, I have made some money through the sale of articles and reports, some of them to organisations which are themselves connected to fossil fuel companies such as the Greening Earth Society and `Norwegian Oil Review’. In these cases, I simply receive the normal fees that anyone authoring articles involving extensive research would earn. That amounts to simple `fee-for-service’, not funding. No-one funds my website except me. But the occasional fees I receive for articles and reports help me to continue my work. In no case have I ever tailored such articles and reports to suit the biases and prejudices of those who buy them.
The alternative of course would be for me to work long hours for free, something I don’t think the rest of the industry does, or would be expected to do. If Green Peace were to commission me to write a report for them, I would readily oblige – and expect payment – and without any tampering by them with what I have written, other than minor editing. That’s the basis on which I have written articles for others.
5.Is the Kyoto protocol effective in combating the global warming?
Completely ineffective. Tom Wigley of NCAR has even estimated that the climate would be a few hundredths of a degree cooler with the Kyoto Protocol compared with the `business as usual’ position. Mass poverty is a high price to pay for a mere few hundredths of a degree.
6.how true is the notion that increased global temperatures would if anything have a beneficial effect on agriculture and food production.
CO2 has a fertilizer effect. Since it provides the carbon mass for plants via photosynthesis, plants will grow better and faster with enhanced CO2. Numerous experiments confirm that. However, that is not due to warming per se, but the gas itself. However, Neville Nicholls of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia published results in `Nature’ to show that warming in Australia during the 20th century resulted in enhanced wheat yield over an above that due to other factors such as better fertilizers and farming methods. If warming were significant, it would enable agriculture to spread into areas presently unusable, particularly in the far north.
7.There is a school of thought that solar variability is a major cause of Global warming as opposed to greenhouse gases. What is your opinion on that? Has it got any credibility?
There is now a large body of published scientific evidence to show that the sun is highly variable, not just with the 11-year sunspot cycle, but also with the length of that cycle and the effect of the solar wind indirectly modulating cloudiness. A further effect arises from the sun’s own motions (it is not stationary relative to the rest of the solar system, but moves around to balance the other planets as they orbit), and also the effects of solar flares. One scientist has even linked solar changes to the El Nino/La Nino oscillation, and has predicted that the next El Nino will peak late in 2002, a prediction based entirely on solar motions and activity.
It must also be remembered that the cycle of ice ages and interglacials (100,000 year ice ages, with 10,000 year interglacials) is itself caused by subtle changes in solar insolation as the earth’s orbit undergoes slow changes in its geometry. This has been known for over 60 years, ever since Milutin Milankovich first published his calculations. The Milankovich is the now established explanation for the glacial-interglacial cycle, an explanation which has been validated numerous times from observations of ice and sediment cores.
8. Please clarify my doubts. If the whole global warming theory is a hoax or an exaggeration, what is it in aim of? Who gains from concocting a story like that?
Social science tells us that bureaucracy has but one imperative – growth. Growth underpins careers, funding, promotion. Climatology has undergone explosive growth in the last 20 years, a growth which must inevitably corrupt the scientific ideals that should have been the cornerstone of their work. This shows itself most clearly in the difficulty that any scientist now has in gaining publication for any paper which contradicts or moderates IPCC predictions. Peer review, a process which should assure scientific quality, has now become an instrument of censorship in the climate sciences, and I have numerous reports of this. For example, the INQUA report on sea levels in the Maldives to show there has been no sea level rise there has so far not been published in peer reviewed journals. And yet, I can cite numerous cases of sub-standard papers which have been published without any difficulty at all – their only common denominator being their support or confirmation of IPCC policy.
Look also at the history of climatology. It has built its vast bureaucratic empire on the basis of frightening the general public. In the 1970s it was the predictions of an impending ice age which had the public in a state of anxiety, allowing politicians to increase funding for climatology. A sharp warming in the late 1970s ended that theory. By the 1980s the industry moved onto new pastures scaring people about a possible `nuclear winter’ – with yet more funding. The abrupt end of the Cold War in the late 1980s also ended that scare. But with hardly a missed step, the industry moved onto `global warming’ and has ridden that wave ever since – much to the benefit of the industry itself. It is hard to trust anything such an industry says given its past form. They blame the media of course, but I don’t. Whenever a new `study’ is published which reinforces the warming scenario, the scientists concerned are quickly appearing before media conferences to convey the news to an increasingly alarmed public. Such scare mongering thus comes from the scientific institutions themselves, the media being merely carriers of the bad news (have you even seen a good news story related to climate?).
9.I am made to believe by official purveyors of the global warming theory that ‘global warming dissenters’ are a minority. How far is this true?
No-one knows. I know of many scientists who are `dissenters’ – in private. They do not come out in public because of the adverse impact that would have on their careers. Much of the information I get on my website comes from just such people. How else would someone like me, isolated on an island at the bottom of the world, still be able to report on the unfolding drama of `climate change’ – or more accurately lack of change. Many of the scientists on the IPCC who are part of the `consensus’ are not climate scientists at all, but `impacts’ scientists. These are people such as biologists, social scientists, oceanographers etc. who *begin* with the assumption of the modellers that there will be global warming. From that assumption, they can then dream up a limitless variety of `impacts’ of that warming – all of them undesirable of course. But the dissenters are not interested in those impacts people. Rather the dissenters question the underlying assumption about the warming itself. Without that warming, the `impacts’ and the vast bureaucratic effort spawned by it, amount to nothing. The number of scientists on the IPCC who originate the warming theory and are qualified in climate sciences amounts not to thousands, but mere dozens.
It is significant that state climatologists in the USA have opposed the IPCC predictions, as have 18,000 signatories to the Oregon petition, most of whom are qualified scientists in climate or related fields. That petition was subject to `hacking’ attacks by environmentalists getting bogus names onto the list in a bid to discredit it. The organizers of that petition were in no position to fund an in-depth vetting of every single name (which would be an invasion of privacy among other things), so it took a `dirty tricks’ campaign to throw doubt on that petition. That such a campaign should be engaged in illustrates the degree to which the petition was seen as posing a danger to the claim that the debate was a done deal.
How much of academic/political backing and credibility does the ‘greenhouse dissenters’ have? Are your efforts considerably dampened by the major media institutions that endorse the idea of global warming?
Some of the dissenters are leading scientists in the field like Richard Lindzen. Others, like myself, take the more journalistic approach. The degree of expertise varies a lot, as does the particular specialties. The attitude of the media is not helpful as headlines like “The Climate is OK” does not exactly appeal to editors. The biggest problem is that the media regards all science with deference, uncritically accepting anything scientists say. We do not do this with any other profession -lawyers are the butt of jokes and frequent contempt, doctors are often regarded as self-serving, dentists and accountants are little better in the public perception. But when it comes to science, there is a disturbing lack of questioning or accountability.
With most sciences, this is no serious problem as the scientists themselves are more interested in their own work than in what the media thinks of them. But with greenhouse science, we have a quite different beast – a science which has built itself and prospered on public scare mongering, using both the media and the political clout of the environmental movement. But the media seems reluctant to stand back and ask themselves if greenhouse science deserves to be given the same degree of deference that they accord to other sciences. Only the dissenters are active in calling the greenhouse industry to account for their actions. Part of the problem is that it is very easy for unscrupulous institutions to use jargon and mathematics to throw up a smokescreen to avoid public accountability of their activities. This is why the dissenters are so necessary to cut through this smokescreen and hold the industry to some degree of account.
10. What is the IPCC controversy? Is it true that the original IPCC climate report was tampered with?
The IPCC is the `Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, an offshoot of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). In other words, the IPCC is an intergovernmental organization under UN auspices, not a scientific organization. It uses the work of scientific institutions in its reports, but then proceeds to write `summaries’ which often run counter to, or exaggerate the scientific reports which underpin them. The latest summary is highly selective and biased in that it selects only those parts of the scientific report which suits their policy position. The scientific report itself is open to question as the participants are themselves beneficiaries of the odious history of climate science.
This was at its most extreme in the 1995 report when the scientific report was drafted by panels of scientists representing the various chapters. The final draft of the summary was agreed by the scientists concerned, only to find that the published version was significantly different to what the scientists agreed to. There has never been a satisfactory explanation as to why these changes were made without reference to the full scientific panels. The IPCC claims they were merely `editing’ changes to clarify the original version. However, I have published the changes made on my website, and these changes go far beyond mere editing.
To sum up, the composition of the scientific panels assures bias. But even here, the summaries are then further biased by the intervention of government officials inspired by environmental activism. And then, in the case of 1995, the bias was refined further between the completion of the summary and the published version.
The IPCC is therefore a political organization, plain and simple, and carries no authority with those of us who dissent against the whole basis of this industry.
No related posts.
