Still more on the global warming swindle

Scientist Fred Singer offers a good one-page summary of the arguments promoted in the film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle.'

Incidentally, Thrutch posts the link with this comment: "To end the litany of arbitrary and/or fraudulent claims made by the man-hating environmentalists will take a new morality and the rediscovery of a rational epistemology." And he's right.

If you want a more thorough but still readable paper summarising the up-to-date science of global warming, Russell Lewis of Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs has a thorough 48-page paper which is just that [pdf]. If you want the bones of it, head straight to the three-page centre-section on page 18, the Rejoinder to the Main Points of the IPCC 4th Report on the Science of Climate Change.

Small sample:
IPCC: Global temperatures continue to rise with 11 of the 12 warmest years since 1850
occurring since 1995. Computer models suggest a further rise of about 3 ºC by 2100 with a
6 ºC rise a distant possibility
RL: Yes, but balance that with the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998.
Besides, present historically high temperatures are due to the superimposition of a powerful
El Niño (a huge cyclical climatic change in the Pacific) in 1998 on top of the rise of
temperatures achieved earlier in the 20th century. Moreover the actual climb in temperatures
has fallen far short of the scary computer predictions originally trumpeted which led to the
setting- up of the UN International Panel on Climate Change.
IPCC: It is virtually certain that that carbon dioxide levels and global warming are far
above the range of natural variability over the past 650,000 years.
RL: Past estimated levels of CO2 have been disputed as too low, being based on evidence
from ice cores, which leak and are otherwise contaminated. Global temperatures were
higher than today in the medieval era and in Roman times.
IPCC: It is virtually certain that human activity has played the dominant role in causing
the increase of greenhouse gases over the last 250 years.
RL: Let’s get this in perspective: The amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere each year:
natural 169 billion tons (ocean: 106 bn, land: 63 bn.), man-made 6 bn. – hardly dominant!
In any case, it is equally plausible to argue that the oceans have been warmed by the sun or
the earth’s core and in consequence have released most of the greenhouse gas increase over
the last 250 years. This would mean that most of the growth of greenhouse gas is natural
and not due to human activity.
IPCC: Man-made emissions of atmospheric aerosol pollutants have tended to counteract
global warming which otherwise would have been significantly worse.
RL: This is merely an excuse for the failure of previous doom- laden computer predictions
that the hemisphere should have warmed in the 20th century by 2.3 ºC while the actual
warming was only 0.65 ºC. In any case, as Prof. Patrick Michaels put it...

Read on here for more [pdf]. I'll conclude with the quote from HL Mencken with which Russell begins his paper:

The whole art of politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with and endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

That's a lesson wider than just the present debate, isn't it.

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