ANDREW BOLT
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12286336%255E25717,00.html
Age of no reasonAndrew Bolt18feb05
Want to make a greenie boil? Just question their claims of global warming. It's not hard when so much of the evidence is paper thin.WHAT a relief it was, to be given the top 10 reasons to panic about global warming.
At last – the list that would save me from doubt!
It's been tough, resisting this new faith. I'd ask for proof that humans really have been heating the world up to hell with their exhausts, and believers would stare at me as if I were coal.
As a furious green told a weekend paper, sceptics like me are "Holocaust deniers that make themselves look so disgustingly evil".
Even during these latest warnings that the Great Barrier Reef would die in 20 years and polar bears soon after – wild warnings to coincide with the coming into force of the Kyoto protocol – I couldn't find faith.
So I thanked The Age, Australia's most Left-wing daily paper, for launching a crusade to convert sinners like me – pages and pages on global warming, starting on Saturday with a huge graphic:
Here, then, was a carefully researched list of the 10 clearest signs a serious newspaper could find of the harm already caused by global warming. These 10 Truths had to end all doubt."10 Reasons to Start Worrying Now." And a
headline screaming: "WAKE UP. THIS IS SERIOUS."
But – forgive me my sin – I checked this list against the facts. Forgive me again, but is this tosh truly all it takes to panic an entire newspaper – and so many of you, dear readers? Is reason now dead?
Let's go through The Age's 10 "reasons to start worrying now", so you can see I do not say all this for the fun of farting in church.
1: Hudson Bay
Claim: "Polar bears have become thinner", as sea ice retreats.
Facts: A Canadian Wildlife Service study did say Hudson Bay's bears were thinner – but as polar bear expert Mitch Taylor recently noted: "We're seeing an increase in bears that's really unprecedented."
The CWS study also said earlier melting of sea ice may make it harder for bears to catch food – but said this melting affected only western Hudson Bay. Indeed, there was "a gradual cooling trend in eastern Hudson Bay . . . and the Labrador Sea".
What's more, Greenland, which also has polar bears, has cooled since 1940. More bears, then. And more cold.
2: Tuvalu
Claim: These Pacific islands are "shrinking with rising sea levels".
Facts: Australia's National Tidal Facility monitors Tuvalu's sea levels and found: "The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year", with "no visual evidence of any acceleration".
At this rate, Tuvalu's seas will in 100 years rise by the thickness of a pen. "We have never believed these island will go under water," said University of South Pacific oceanographer Than Aung.
But our seas have risen – 120 metres in the 17,000 years since the last Ice Age, without human gases to fuel it. Satellites detect almost no rise in the past decade.
3: Antarctica
Claim: Fewer Adelie penguins breed, as seas warm.
Facts: The New Zealand Journal of Ecology in 1990 found "the numbers of Adelie penguins in the Ross Sea have increased greatly", and suggested global warming was to blame. Now there are fewer Adelies (in some colonies, but not overall) and that's a sign of warming, too. Yeah, sure, whatever.
But several recent studies, including one by NASA, agree Antarctica – with 90 per cent of the world's ice – has grown colder and more ice-bound over the past 20 years or more. Ice-breakers this month had to cut through 80 nautical miles of ice instead of the usual 10 to reach McMurdo station.
4: Glacier National Park, Montana, US
Claim: Montana's glaciers are melting away.
Facts: Climatologist Professor Patrick Michaels says these glaciers have melted since the end of the Little Ice Age 150 years ago – well before we were belching all this carbon dioxide – and Montana's temperatures in the past century of growing industrialisation have not risen significantly.
5: China
Claim: Many of China's glaciers are melting.
Facts: China has had to thaw out from the Little Ice Age that killed the famous citrus groves of Jiangxi. The Chinese Science Bulletin in 2003 said scientists found evidence in peat deposits in Hongyuan that China had a warm period around 1000 years ago, before the Little Ice Age, "suggesting ... the main driving force of Hongyuan climate change is from solar activities".
Fancy – warming being caused by the sun. New studies agree solar activity may indeed be behind some of the surface temperature changes we think we've seen – a 0.6 C warming from 1890 to 1940, followed by a cooling of 0.2 C until 1975, and a 0.4 C warming since.
6: Afghanistan
Claim: A long drought in Afghanistan, and also in Australia, "may be the product of climate change".
Facts: Afghanistan's drought seems broken by recent heavy rain and snow. Rainfall over Australia rose slightly over the past century, says the Bureau of Meteorology, and our worst known drought came in the 1890s. But do such inevitable changes to local climates prove anything?
7: Great Barrier Reef
Claim: Warmer seas are turning the reef white.
Facts: An El Nino caused coral bleaching in 1998, but the reef recovered, as it did again in 2002 – and from worse events in 1782-1785 and 1817. After all, the reef is 60 million years old, and has survived much hotter times.
Dr Andrew Baker, head of America's Coral Research Laboratory, says bleaching may be how a coral adapts – by expelling one of the algaes that help it thrive to make room for a better one.
In fact, reefs "could do well in a warmer world", Australian geochemist Professor Malcolm McCulloch has said, since "warmer ocean temperatures allow expansion of reefs to sub-tropical regions".
8: Arctic Ocean
Claim: The ice is melting.
Facts: The Arctic warmed until 1938, but then cooled before warming again – so is still no "hotter" now than it was 60 years ago.
Greenland, however, is still colder and icier than it was then, says the Danish Meteorological Institute, and was once so warm that Vikings thought it a truly green land.
9: Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alps
Claim: Snow gums have moved up the ranges as they've warmed. Migratory birds are affected too.
Facts: One study claims snow gums are now found 30m higher up mountains. Horror – more trees! But does this prove a global warming? No one knows.
Another study found four species of migratory birds now arrive a little earlier in spring – but one a little later. Yes, and...?
10: The Netherlands
Claim: Flycatcher birds migrate from Africa to find Europe so warm that the caterpillars they eat have emerged sooner than usual.
Facts: Very sad, but is global warming or local warming to blame? And are a few warmer years in one area a trend, or a natural cycle of an Earth that knew warmer times often before?
And that is it. That's The Age's list of the most frightening signs of global warming. See how little there is in it to justify this panic.
The truth is that despite the hype, not much about global warming is known for sure, not even how much the Earth has heated, and whether our carbon dioxide (CO2) caused it. So say even lead authors of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose doctored "predictions" are most used to frighten us.
One of them, Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asks: "Will increases in CO2 affect the climate significantly? Are significant changes occurring now? Climate models suggest the answer is yes. Real data suggests otherwise."
Adds another, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "The temperature is always changing for the earth, so it has only two choices – going up or going down. It has done both, and that doesn't say it's due to CO2; it doesn't say it's going to continue; it doesn't say anything beyond that."
This is why Lindzen calls the Kyoto accord, which demands expensive cuts to our emissions, "absurd".
But so much is absurd in the global warming hysteria, not least the media's willing surrender of its reason.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
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