Agbrigg & Belle Vue Community Association

Sam Liddicott
I want to really save the world. Mere compliance with environmental or political fads is a poor substitute. But how to tell the difference? All discussion on global warming (including this) is politically loaded. Astute readers may have noticed generally that the old global warming problem is now termed climate change – possibly due to lack of actual evidence for problematic warming trends?

Humans generally predict the future by looking at the past, but the computer models which predicted global warming in the past have turned out to be wrong. The computer models were based on past climate data and trends and were very good at “forecasting” past climate trends, but now the future is here, we can see how poor they were at predicting the future – now global warming seems to have “stopped”.

The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

“Has global warming stopped?”, David Whitehouse, 19th December 2007 “New Statesman”¹

The difficulty of constructing accurate predictive models and then having to wait to measure their usefulness before we know if we should have relied on them is only part of the problem. Most people don't understand or have access to climate models and rely on others to explain the risks and solutions; yet most of us aren't even fit to judge the qualifications or character of individual climate pundits – but does even this matter if we can't trust the raw data on which their varied opinions are based?

In “Is the earth getting warmer or cooler? - A tale of two thermometers²” Steven Goddard draws attention to work by Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre who reports³ that NASA, a major source of climate data has been indulging in historical revisionism – that means changing historical records – the evidence for global warming. It is a sad day when researchers in the free west have to ask for real historical records⁴.

It seems that man-kinds search for environmental truth is as fraught and doubtful as earlier searches for religious truth: a varied line-up of strangers each requiring that we believe their version of truth or we damn ourselves (only this time our angry neighbours and also future generations) to oblivion – and when we look behind the curtain we see the usual silencing of dissenters, the fabrication of truth and social enforcement by “true believers” of the one true scientific orthodoxy.

I am a religious person, but I'm not spoon-fed religion, and I won't be spoon-fed environmental doctrine. While some climatists are busy altering and selecting data that suits them, I have to ask: who is selecting those climatists? If the public can't agree on pundits, and if the scientists can't agree, then who is making the choice of which climatists to follow and base public policy on? Of course it's the policy makers and darned politicians (but is it really their fault that their professional survival depends being seen to care by those few who actually vote?) So lets skip straight to the outcomes: What sort of people like the idea of taxation, control and penalties for minute every day activities? It hasn't worked for crime, why will it work now?

In some areas, environmental crime can mean slightly over-filling your wheelie-bin resulting in a £100 fine – which of course only catches people who actually put their rubbish in the bin, those who dump it in Sugar Lane cemetery get off without a fine; but bigger harms surely come from the hastily preached good and green intentions which now result in further destruction of rain forests⁵ – this time to grow bio-fuels as well as the starvation of millions as grain prices rise due to use as... you guessed – so called green bio-fuel⁶.

If we don't discount the views of those who disagree with our own favoured position then we naturally have to agree that there is no consensus on climate change: it's causes or it's effects, or it's solutions or even the effects those solutions might have when carried out on a necessarily large scale.

Saving the world is not simple, and we can't easily tell if our efforts are more like struggling in the quicksand, Nero fiddling while Rome burns or King Canute attempting to turn a perfectly natural tide.

Fortunately some things still make sense like avoiding wastefulness, carefully disposing of refuse, planting parks and gardens and generally keeping a clean environment – things that make life pleasant.