Nine facts about climate change

This links to a PDF from the Lavoisier group.

1. Climate change is a constant. The Vostok Ice Cores show five brief interglacial periods from 415,000 years ago to the present. The Greenland Ice Cores reveal a Minoan Warm Period 1450–1300 BC, a Roman Warm Period 250–0 BC, the Mediaeval Warm Period 800–1100AD, the Little Ice Age and the late 20th Century Warm Period 1900–2010 AD.

2. Carbon dioxide is necessary for all life on earth and increasing atmospheric concentrations are beneficial to plant growth, particularly in arid conditions. Because the radiation properties of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already saturated, increasing atmospheric concentrations beyond current levels will have no discernible effect on global temperatures.

3. The twentieth century was almost as warm as the centuries of the Mediaeval Warm Period, an era of great achievement in European civilisation. The recent warm period, 1976–2000, appears to have come to an end and astro-physicists who study sunspot behaviour predict that the next 25–50 years could be a cool period similar to the Dalton Minimum of the 1790s-1820s.

4. The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is limited to a correlation which holds only for the period 1976 to 2000. Attempts to construct an holistic theory in which atmospheric carbon dioxide controls the radiation balance of the earth, and thus determines average global temperatures, have failed.

5. The anthropogenists claim that the overwhelming majority of scientists are agreed on the anthropogenic carbon dioxide theory of climate control; that the science is settled and the debate is over; and that scientific sceptics are in the pay of the fossil fuel industries and their arguments are thus fatally compromised. These claims are an expression of hope, not of reality.

6. Anthropogenists such as former US Vice President Al Gore blame anthropogenic emissions of CO2 for high temperatures, droughts, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and retreating glaciers, and a decline in the polar bear population. They also blame anthropogenic CO2 for blizzards, unseasonable snow, freezing weather generally and for hurricanes, cyclones and other extreme weather events. There is no evidence at all to justify these assertions.

7. Increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will have negligible impact on the earth’s radiation balance and will promote plant growth everywhere. There is no need to sequester CO2 in the ground or to subsidise nuclear or other non-carbon based methods of energy production.

8. ‘Tropical’ diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are not related to temperature but to poverty, lack of sanitation and the absence of mosquito control practices.

9. The decarbonisation of the world’s economy would, if attempted, cause huge economic dislocation. Any democratic government which seriously sought to fulfil decarbonisation commitments would lose office. Shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy sources such as windmills or solar panels will cause unemployment and economic deprivation.