by Paul George
I have been reading with interest the letters on climate change between Dr. Jo-Anne Bell and non-scientists. Since the non-scientists have expressed their opinion, and advocate their support for the ‘carbon’ bogeyman, this sceptical non-scientist and avid science enthusiast will be supporting Dr. Bell since we still live in a democracy and have free speech (for now).
I have always been sceptical of anything that is continuously and relentlessly repeated in the media and by authority figures, especially politicians and any political organizations. When I realize this is happening, I know that we are being brainwashed and propagandized. That’s when I do my own research and investigate what opposing views have to say.
Every year, we hear about the latest UN IPCC report and their latest apocalyptic climate prediction, many of which have come and gone, with the latest one from the UN giving us 11 years to prevent irreversible damage from climate change. Never mind that the recent data suggests there has been no warming for the past decade. What many people don’t realize is that the UN’s IPCC scientists’ terms of reference for their reports assumes only human causes of climate change, and that their predicted warming rate is real, and then extrapolate that rate and the effects on the planet into the future. Am I the only one who remembers, or even heard about, the ’climategate’ email scandal at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, in which historic warmer temperature data needed to be made to look cooler in the models in order to make the modern era look warmer, and then block access to their data?
We are being propagandized to believe that ‘carbon’ and CO2, which makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere, and the human caused component is 0.04% of that, is such a big problem, and yet the effects of water vapour and solar activity are negligible and can be ignored! Really?! And, in a recent study out of Finland and Japan, scientists were very concerned that the IPCC models also don’t include the effects of increased cloud cover due to increased cosmic ray levels during solar minimum, and that the effect of the human-caused portion of increased CO2 levels are way overblown.
Current C02 levels are near historic lows, at about 410ppm. It, apparently, has been as high as 2000-4000ppm about 400-500Mya according to Wikipedia. Plants cannot survive with CO2 levels below about 200ppm. Current CO2 levels are not optimum for plant life, which is around 1000ppm, and so greenhouse growers inject C02 into their greenhouses to accelerate plant growth.
Water vapour makes up 95% of all greenhouse gases. It’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, so why aren’t we taxing humidity, water vapour or steam? And if all the polar ice caps are melting at incredible rates, and should have been ice-free by now according to some predictions, where are the increases in sea levels? Many coastal cities around the world are supposed to be under water by now, we were told.
I’ve also read, contrary to what we are being told, that increases in CO2 levels don’t actually cause temperatures to increase, but that this correlation is backwards. Atmospheric CO2 levels actually lag temperature changes, because the oceans release CO2 with increasing ocean temperature but can hold more CO2 with cooler water temperatures. These changes take many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, due to the ocean’s vast thermal mass.
The IPCC is also totally ignoring the Sun’s effect and says it is negligible and can be ignored. I have been observing and learning about the Sun, and it is currently in a very deep solar sunspot minimum, resulting in a slightly cooler and less active Sun and climate on Earth; and the past few sunspot cycle peaks have been successively weaker and the minimums successively deeper. Could it be that solar minimum caused this past cold winter and cool extended spring, and we can again expect an early and colder 2019-2020 winter? Solar scientists are now wondering if the Sun will be going into a grand solar minimum, like the Maunder minimum that happened in the mid 1600’s, in the next few decades, resulting in the climate cooling off significantly. Perhaps that explains the rush to legislate all the various carbon taxes and carbon trading systems recently, before it becomes too obvious the climate isn’t warming as predicted.
The ‘consensus’ in climate change, I suspect, is political. Declaring that there is a ‘consensus’ and that the science is ‘settled’, as if the UN IPCC knows everything there is to know about the Earth’s complex climate system, is the height of arrogance, and these terms are designed to shut down debate. I’m not saying that I have all the answers and know better, and no doubt one can find plenty of articles online to endlessly argue against everything I’ve mentioned here. But let us keep learning and doing real science, and in about 15-20 years it will be quite obvious whether we’re all going to die in a human-caused climate change infernal apocalypse, or we see a reversal of the slight warming trend of the past few decades. To this non-scientist, I think, it’s looking like the latter.
