Climate Actually

Peter Williams – NZ Broadcaster

There’s an old saying which goes something like this: we only have climate models to make astrologers look good.

The world has been beset by dire climate predictions for around half a century. Originally it was all about the cooling of the planet. Remember the story in Time magazine in 1974 titled “Another Ice Age?”

Noel Brown, the North American Regional Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was reported by the Associated Press in 1989 saying that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000. Mr Brown’s news for Bangladesh was that one sixth of the country could be flooded, displacing a quarter of its population. The Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives was predicted to be covered entirely by rising seas.

Just as well there was a question mark because we know that ice age never arrived. But within fifteen years the narrative had changed. Planet Earth was warming, land ice in Greenland and Antarctica would melt and sea levels would rise with disastrous consequences.

As we know, those predictions have proved to be arrant nonsense. Yes, Bangladesh is low lying and has always been susceptible to flooding, but a quarter of the 120 million population have not had to find a new home. The Maldives, a tourist haven for the rich and famous, is still there, and now has four international airports, the most recent of which opened in December 2019. Doesn’t sound like a country about to be inundated, does it? So, the forecasts and climate alarmism, such a feature of environmental reporting for most of the last thirty years, have been consistently wide of the mark.

The UNEP’s climate predictions have given way to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. There have now been six assessment reports from the IPCC. The most recent – AR6 – came out soon before the 2021 climate conference in Glasgow. This was the report that persuaded the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres to offer yet another calamitous warning. AR6, he said, was “Code Red for humanity.”

Yet back in 1990, the year of the First Assessment Report (FAR) from the IPCC, the conclusion presented was that the climate was indeed changing, but it always had been. The IPCC were unable to say whether recent climate change was human caused or natural or both. As the Irish physicist Dr Ronan Connolly points out, this was very, very inconvenient for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the FCCC, which was
formed in 1992 to treat climate change as definitively caused by human activity.

But over the ensuing three decades the IPCC, most likely under intense political pressure, has now decided that climate change or its often used synonym, global warming, IS caused by human activity, especially through the creation of human induced greenhouse gases, particularly CO2 and methane.

For thirty years the nations of the world, virtually all of them members of the UN, have tried to reach agreement on how much CO2 a country should be allowed to emit through the activities of its people. The activities under most scrutiny are driving vehicles powered by petrol and diesel, and burning coal and gas to power manufacturing and to keep people warm. Ironically, in the thirty years since the FAR over a billion people have been lifted out of
poverty because of (1) the increased supply of energy to impoverished nations, and (2) because more CO2 in the atmosphere means more food is being produced on the planet than ever before.

Yet the UN’s determined push to reduce global CO2 emissions continues with alacrity. The Glasgow conference was the 26th such gathering. But China, the world’s largest emitter of CO2 because of its incessant need for coal fired power stations, did not bother to attend the Glasgow meeting. When a country that puts out nearly thirty percent of the planet’s greenhouse gases doesn’t take part in an international conference on the issue, maybe the time has come to reconsider the role of CO2 as an influence on global climate.

Alan Trotter, Mike Sankey and Andrew Hollis have now explained why CO2 is not the culprit in the world’s ever-changing climate. CLIMATE ACTUALLY claims that far from being the cause of human induced climate change, CO2 should be celebrated as the “elixir of life.” The increase in world food production in recent years, and expanding afforestation around the globe, do indeed attest to the attributes of this most valuable of atmospheric gases, without which life just cannot exist. With supporting material from other highly educated individuals, Hollis, Sankey and Trotter effectively debunk the theories that we need to get out of our Ford Rangers and instead drive a government subsidised Nissan Leaf.

Dire predictions such as those from Noel Brown in 1989 have been commonplace in the years since. None have come to pass. Millions of people have not been displaced by rising sea levels. The world is not running out of food. Extreme weather events are not more prevalent than in other periods through modern history.

Planet Earth has been here four and half billion years. It has endured through the hot and the cold of geological time. There is little reason to believe anything different will happen in the billions of years ahead.

Alan Jones – Australian Broadcaster

I welcome and endorse this latest contribution, “Climate Actually”, to the one-sided debate about so-called climate change.

Indeed, this book should be compulsory reading in our schools where too many of our students suffer from intellectual pollution.

With immense damage to individuals, to business and, as a consequence, to national economies, when it comes to so-called climate change, emotion and hysteria have overtaken true science.

Debate has been difficult to develop because the cancel culture has entered the equation to the extent that anyone who dares to disagree with the alarmist rhetoric, articulated by an uneducated 16-year-old girl – such people are then cancelled.

In other words, we don’t want debate; we must silence those who challenge the alarmism.

This book concludes and reveals that the climate “debate” has been hijacked, worldwide, by politicians for various political ends.

Reputable research has been corrupted and distorted to serve political ends; and the so-called scientific “consensus” is not based on scientific truth, but rather on the determination to terrify the world that all will end unless carbon dioxide, the source of all plant life, is arrested.

This book demonstrates, clearly, that the alarmists have distorted important issues and, in my view, destroyed any credibility that may attach to them.

Common sense would tell you that carbon dioxide is such a small component of the atmosphere, 0.04%, that it is fanciful to imagine it can create the damage attributed to it.

As the book shows, for carbon dioxide to be toxic, it would need concentrations of 80,000 ppm, not the current 413 ppm.

Of course, should such reductions in carbon dioxide occur, which the political alarmists seek, then plant life would be threatened and, as the book highlights, the question must then be raised, where do we produce the oxygen on which we all depend for our survival?

When you ask politicians what the problem is with carbon dioxide and what is the percentage of the atmosphere occupied by carbon dioxide, they don’t have a clue.

And while New Zealand and Australia are being economically destroyed by the demonisation of fossil fuels –

China, taking advantage of it’s W.T.O. status of being a “Developing Nation”, is opening two coal-fired power stations every week; and they have over 120 in the pipeline; Indonesia has 52; India 27; Japan 22; Vietnam 17; and

Australia exports up to $70 billion worth of coal so that other countries can have the cheap electricity denied to Australia, as a result of the obsession with climate change.

The world authority, Bjorn Lomborg, that stated, simply, that President Biden’s climate alarmism is almost entirely wrong.

President Trump was maligned for getting rid of a lot of this climate change baggage, knowing that you can’t have low-cost energy from endless supplies of wind and solar.

Indeed, under President Trump, the US became an energy exporter for the first time in 60 years, a magnet for energy-intensive industries; and Trump reversed the decline in manufacturing.

How politicians change!

It is only six years ago that Scott Morrison, yet to become the Australian Prime Minister, brought a lump of coal to the Dispatch Box at Question Time, brandishing it as “an irreplaceable energy source”.

Dr John R. Christy, a climatologist from Alabama, argued what this book confirms, when he said, “I have often heard that there is a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue and that human beings are causing catastrophic change to the climate system. Well, I am one scientist and there are many who think that is not true.”

Dr Charles Wax is the former President of the American Association of State Climatologists, who has argued, “First off, there isn’t a consensus among scientists. Don’t let anybody tell you there is.”

Stanley B. Goldenberg, a meteorologist at the UN National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is on the record as saying, “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.”

William Kinninmonth, the former head of the National Climate Centre within the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, argues, emphatically, “Climate science is not settled. Four decades of observations highlight that computer models have exaggerated the influence of anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. The Paris Agreement has been negotiated from faulty premises.”

Dr Richard Lindzen, a world authority, and recognised as such, the retired Professor of Meteorology at MIT left us in no doubt, “What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness, as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panels.”

Dr Robert Laughlin is a Nobel Prize winner for Physics, who argues, “You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geological time, something that the Earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.”

Another Nobel Prize winner, the biochemist, the late Dr Kary Mullis, has made the disturbing point –

 “Those people at the IPCC don’t always tell you the truth. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage to always tell you the truth.”

Dr Madhav Khandekar, a meteorologist and an expert reviewer for the UN IPCC 2007 Climate Change report, bells the cat, “Finding global warming in Canada and elsewhere is like the proverbial finding a needle in a haystack. I’m sorry, there is no global warming anywhere in the world today, April 19, 2019.”

One of the world’s most eminent climatologists, a former NASA scientist, Dr Roy Spencer, described pejoratively as a “climate denier”, is one of many eminent scientists who are ignored, yet makes the observation, “This is the state of climate science today.

If you support the alarmist narrative, you can exaggerate threats and connections with human activities, fake experiments, break government rules, intimidate scientific journal editors and make them resign and even violate the law, as long as you can say you are doing it for the children.”

This book confirms, in detail, the conclusions by these international scientific experts.

The only conclusion that can be drawn after reading Climate Actually, is to demand that our politicians and doom-mongers do a little homework.

Alan Jones AO –

Australian Broadcaster (May 2023)