Great Global Warming Swindle, The (2007) Movie Script
When people say we don't believe
in global warming,
I say no, I believe in global warming,
I don't believe that human CO2
is causing that warming.
A few years ago,
if you would've asked me,
I would tell you it's CO2.
Why?
Because just like everyone
else in the public...
I listen to what the media have to say.
Each day, the news reports
grow more fantasticly apocalyptic,
politicians no longer dare to express
any doubt about climate change.
There is such intolerance...
of any dissenting voice...
...some of the worst climate
criminals on the planet.
This is the most pollitically
incorrect thing possible
is to doubt this climate
change orthodoxy
Climate change has gone
beyond politics
it is a new kind of morality.
The Prime Minister is back
from his holidays...
unrepentant and unembarrassed
about yet another long haul destination...
Yes, as the frenzy of a man-made
global warming grows shriller,
many senior climate scientists
say the actual scientific
basis for the theory is crumbling.
There were periods for example
in our history
when we had three times as
much CO2 as we have today
or periods when we had ten times
as much CO2 as we have today;
and if CO2 has a large effect on climate
then you should see it in the
temperature reconstruction.
If we look at climate from
the geological timeframe,
We would never suspect CO2
as a major climate driver.
None of the major climate changes
in the last thousand years...
...can be explained by CO2.
You can't say that CO2
will drive climate.
It surely never did in the past.
I've often heard it's said that there is
a consensus of thousands of scientists...
...on the global warming issue
and that humans are causing...
catastrophic changes
in the climate system.
Well, I am one scientist and
there are many that simply...
...think that is not true.
Man-made global warming
is no ordinary scientific theory.
This morning, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change made up a...
It is presented in the media as
having the stamp of authority
of an impressive international organization:
"From the IPCC..."
The United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change or "IPCC".
The IPCC, line any UN body,
is political;
the final conclusions
are politically driven.
This claim, that the IPCC is the world's
top one thousand five hundred...
or two thousand five hundred scientists...
you look at the bibliographies of the
people, and it's simply not true.
There are quite a number
of non scientists.
And to build the number up
to twenty five hundred
they had to start taking group reviewers
and government people, and so on,
anyone who ever came
close to them,
and none of them are asked
to agree, many of them disagree.
Those people who are specialists
but don't agree with the polemic,
and resigned (and there have
been a number that I know of)
they are simply put
on the author list
and become part of these two thousand
five hundred of the world's top scientists.
People have decided they have
to convince other people
that since no scientist desagrees,
you shouldn't disagree either.
But that, whenever you
hear that is science,
that's pure propaganda.
This is the story of how
a theory about climate...
...turned into a political ideology.
I don't even like to call it the
environmental movement anymore,
because really it is a
political activist movement,
and they have become hugely
influential at a global level.
It is the story of the distortion
of a whole area of science.
Climate scientists need there to be
a problem in order to get funding.
We have a vested interest in
creating panic because then,
money will flow to climate science.
There's one thing you
shouldn't say and that is:
this might not be a problem.
It is the story of how a
political campaign...
...turned into a burocratic
bandwagon.
The fact to the matter is that
tenths of thousands of jobs...
...depend upon global
warming right now.
It's a big business.
It's become a great
industry in itself
and if the whole global
warming farrago collapsed,
there would be an awful
lot of people...
out of jobs and looking
for work.
This is a story of censorship
and intimidation.
I've seen and heard that
spitting fury at anybody
who might
disagree with them,
which is not the scientific way.
It is the story of Westeners invoking
the threat of climatic disasters
to hinder vital industrial
progress in the developing world.
One clear thing that emerges from
the all environmental debate...
is the point that there's somebody
keen to kill the African dream.
And the African dream is to develop.
The environmental movement has evolved
into the strongest force there is...
for preventing development
in the developing countries.
The global warming story
is the cautionary tale...
...of how a media scare became
the defining idea of a generation.
The whole global warming business
has become like a religion...
and people who disagree
are called heretics.
I'm a heretic.
The makers of this program,
all heretics.
In 2005, a House of Lords enquiry
was setup to examine...
the scientific evidence of
man-made global warming.
A leading figure in that enquiry
was Lord Lawson of Blaby
who as Chancellor of the Exchequer
in the 1980's was the first politician...
to commit government money
to global warming research.
We had a very very thorough
varied took evidence...
from a whole lot of people expert
in this area and produced a report.
What surprised me was to discover how
weak and uncertain the science was.
In fact, there are more and
more thoughtful people,
some of them a little bit frightened
to come out in the open,
but who quietly privately and
some of then publicly are saying:
"hang on, wait a minute:
this simply doesn't add up"
We are told that the Earth's
climate is changing:
but the Earth's climate
is always changing!
In Earth's long history, there have
been countless periods...
when it was much warmer
and much cooler than it is today
when much of the world was
covered by tropical forests
or else vasts ice sheets.
The climate has always changed,
and changed without any help
from us, humans.
We can trace the present warming
trend back at least two hundred years,
to the end of a very cold
period in Earth's history.
This cold spell?
It's known to climatologists
as the Little Ice Age.
In the 14th century, Europe
plunged into the Little Ice Age,
and when we look for evidences of this,
are the old illustrations and prints,
and pictures of old father Thames
because during the hardest and
toughest winters of that Little Ice Age
the Thames would freeze over
and there were wonderful ice fairs
held on the Thames
skating, and people actually
selling things on the ice.
If we look back further in time,
before the Little Ice Age,
We find a barmy golden era
when temperatures where
higher than they are today
a time known to climatologists
as the Medieval Warm Period.
It's important people know
that climate enabled
a quite different lifestyle
in the medieval period.
We have this view today that warming is
going to have apocalyptic outcomes.
In fact, wherever you describe
this warm period
it appears to be associated
with riches.
In Europe, this was the great age
of the cathedral builders
a time when, according to Chaucer,
vineyards flourished even
in the North of England
All over the City on London there
are little memories of the vineyards
that grew in the medieval warm period,
So this was a wonderfully rich time.
And this little church, in a
sense, symbolizes it
as it comes from a period
of great wealth.
Going back in time further still,
before the medieval warm period,
we find more warm spells?
including a very prolonged period
during the Bronze Age
known to geologists as
the Holocene Maximum,
where temperatures were significantly...
higher than they are now
for more than three milennia.
If we go back 8000 years
in the Holocene period,
our current interglacial, who is
much warmer than it is today
now the polar bears obviously
survived that period
they are with us today
they are very adaptable and
these warm periods in the past
(we call hipsy thermals),
posed no problem for them.
Climate variation in the
past is clearly natural
so why do we think is
any different today?
In the current alarm about
global warming
the culprit is industrial society.
Thanks to modern industry luxuries
once enjoyed exclusively by the rich
are now available in abundance
to ordinary people.
Novel technologies have made
life easier and richer;
modern transport and communications
have made the world...
...seem less foreign and distant.
Industrial progress has
changed our lives.
But has it also changed
our climate?
According to the theory of
man-made global warming,
industrial growth should cause
the temperature to rise,
but does it?
Anyone who goes around and says
that CO2 is responsible
...of the warming of the 20th century...
hasn't looked at the
basic numbers.
Industrial production in the early
decades of the 20th century...
...was still in its infancy restricted
to only a few countries...
handicapped by war and
economic depression.
After the Second World War
things changed.
Consumer goods like refrigerators and
washing machines and TVs and cars...
began to be mass-produced
for an international market.
Historians call this global
explosion of industrial activity
the post-war economic boom.
So how does the industrial story
compare with the temperature record?
Since the mid 19th century
the Earth's temperature...
has risen by just of a
half a degree Celsius.
But this warming began
long before cars...
and planes were even invented:
What's more, most of the rise in
temperature ocurred before 1940,
during the period when
industrial production...
was relatively insignificant.
After the Second Wold War,
during the post-war economic boom,
temperatures, in theory,
should have shot up,
but they didn't,
they fell;
not for one or two years,
but for four decades.
In fact, paradoxically, it wasn't
until the world...
economic recession in the 1970's
that they stopped falling.
CO2 began increase
exponentially in about 1940
but the temperature actually
began to decrease in 1940,
continued to about 1975
so this is the opposite relation.
When the CO2 increasing rapidly
but yet the temperature decreasing
then we cannot say that CO2
and the temperature go together.
Temperature went up significantly
up to 1940,
...when human production
of CO2 was relative low,
and then in the post war years,
when industry...
and the whole economies
of the world really got going,
and human production
of CO2 just soared
the global temperature
was going down.
In other words: the facts
didn' fit the theory.
Trusted time when,
after the Second World War
industry was booming,
CO2 was increasing and yet
the Earth was getting cooler...
and starting off scares of
a coming Ice Age,
it made absolutely no sense,
it still doesn't make sense.
Why do we suppose that CO2 is
responsible for our changing climate?
CO2 forms only a very small
part of the Earth's atmosphere.
In fact we measure changes
in the level of atmospheric CO2
in tenths of parts per million.
If you take CO2 as a percentage
of all the gases in the atmosphere
--the Oxygen, the Nitrogen
and Argon and so on--
...is 0.054 percent
and it's an incredibly small portion
and then of course you've got
to take that portion...
that supposedly humans are adding
(which is the focus of all the concern)
and it gets even smaller.
Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas,
greenhouse gases themselves only
form a small part of the atmosphere.
What's more, CO2 is a relatively
minor greenhouse gas.
The atmosphere is made up
of multitude of gases
a small percentage of them
we call greenhouse gases
and of that very small percentage
of these greenhouse gases
a 95% of it is water vapour, it's the
most important greenhouse gas.
Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, by
far the most important greenhouse gas.
So is there any way of checking whether
the recent warming was due...
to an increase in greenhouse gas?
There is only one way to tell and
that is to look up in the sky,
or a part of the sky known to
scientists as the troposphere.
If it's greenhouse warming,
you get more warming...
in the middle of the troposphere
(the first 10-12 km of the atmosphere)
than you do at the surface.
There are good theoretical
reasons for that,
having to do with how
the greenhouse works.
The greenhouse effect
works like this:
the Sun sends its heat
down to Earth:
if it weren't for greenhouse gases,
this solar radiation would
bounce back into space,
leaving the planet cold
and uninhabitable.
Greenhouse gas traps the scaping
heat in the Earth's troposphere,
a few miles above the surface.
And it's here, according
to the climate models,
the rate of warming should be highest
if it's greenhouse gas
that's causing it.
All the models, everyone of them,
calculates that the warming
should be faster
as you go up from the surface
into the atmosphere.
That in fact the maximum warming
over the Equator should take place
at an altitude of about 10 km.
A scientist largely responsible
for measuring the temperature...
in the Earth's atmosphere
is Professor John Christie.
In 1991 he was awarded NASA's medal
for exceptional scientific achievement,
and in 1996 received a special award from
the American Meteorological Society
for fundamentally advancing
our ability to monitor climate.
He was a lead author...
on the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.
There are two ways to take
the temperature...
in the Earth's atmosphere:
satellites and weather balloons.
What we found consistently is that,
in a great part of the planet,
the bulk of the atmosphere
is not warming as much as...
we see at the surface in this region.
And that's a real head
scratcher for us,
because the theory is
pretty straightforward:
and the theory says that
if the surface warms,
the upper atmosphere
should warm rapidly.
The rise in temperature of that
part of the atmosphere...
...is not very dramatic at all and
really does not match the theory
...that climate models are
expressing at this point.
One of the problems thas is plaguing
the models is that they predict that,
as you go up through the atmosphere
(except in the polar regions),
that the rate of warming increases
and it's quite clear, from two datasets,
not just satellite data
which everybody talks about,
but from weather ballons data
that you dont' see that effect.
In fact it looks like the surface
temperatures are warming slightly
more than the upper air temperatures:
that's a big difference!!
That data gives you a handle
on the fact that what you're seeing
is warming that probably is
not due to greenhouse gases.
That is, the observations do not
show any increase with the altitude.
In fact, most observations show a slight
decrease in the rate of warming with altitude.
So in that sense you can say that the
hypothesis of man-made global warming
is falsified by the evidence.
So the recent warming of
the Earth happened...
...in the wrong place and
at the wrong time.
Most of the warming took place
in the early part of the 20th century,
and ocurred mostly at
the Earth's surface,
the very opposite of what
should have happened...
according to the theory of
man-made global warming.
I am Al Gore, I used to be Vicepresident
of the United States of America...
Former Vicepresident Al Gore's
emotional film "An Inconvenient Truth"
...is regarded by many as the definite
popular presentation of the theory...
of the man-made global warming.
His argument rests on one all
important piece of evidence...
taken from icecore surveys in which
scientists drill deep into the ice
to look back into Earth's
climate history,
hundreds of thousands of years.
The first icecore survey took place
in Vostok, in the Antarctic:
what it found, as Al Gore
correctly points out,
...was a clear correlation
between CO2 and temperature.
We're going back in time
now 650.000 years...
Here's what the temperature
has been on our Earth.
Now one thing that comes and jumps
out at you is the data are fit together
(most ridiculous thing
I've ever heard)
The relationship is actually
very complicated
but there is one relationship
that is far more powerful
than all the others and it is this:
when there's more CO2 the
temperature gets warmer.
Al Gore says the relationship
between the temperature...
...and CO2 is complicated
but he doesn't say what
these complications are.
In fact, there was something
very important...
in the icecore data that
he failed to mention:
Professor Clark is a leading Arctic
paleoclimatologist who looks back
into the Earth's temperature record
tenths of millions of years.
When we look at the climate
on long scales
we're looking for
geological material...
that actually records climate.
If we were to take an ice sample
for example we use isotopes...
to reconstruct temperature but the
atmosphere that is imprisoned...
in that ice we liberate it and
then we look at the CO2 content.
Professor Clark and others
have indeed discovered,
as Al Gore says,
a link between CO2
and temperature.
But what al Gore doesn't say...
is that the link is the
wrong way round.
So here we're looking at the
icecore record from Vostok
and in the red we see temperature
going up from early time
to later time at a very key interval
when we came out of a glaciation.
And we see the temperature going up
and then we see the CO2 coming up.
CO2 lags behind that increase.
It's got a 800 year lag...
...so temperature is leading
CO2 by 800 years.
There have now been several
major icecore surveys,
everyone of them shows
the same thing:
the temperature rises or falls,
and then,
after a few hundred years,
CO2 follows.
So obviously, CO2 is not the
cause of that warming;
In fact we can say that the warming
produced the increase in CO2.
CO2 clearly cannot be causing
temperature changes,
it's a product of temperature.
it's following temperature
changes.
The icecore record goes
to the very heart...
...of the problem we have here.
They said: "if the CO2 increases
in the atmosphere,
...as a greenhouse gas,
then the temperature will go up".
But the icecore record
shows exactly the opposite:
so the fundamental assumption,
the EMOs fundamental assumption
...of the whole theory
of climate change...
...due tu humans,
is shown to be wrong.
But how can it be that
higher temperatures lead...
to more CO2 in the atmosphere?
To understand this,
we must first restate...
the obvious point that CO2
is a natural gas...
...produced by all living things.
Few things annoy me more
than to hear people...
talking about CO2
as being apollutant:
you are made of CO2,
I'm made of CO2,
CO2 is how living things grow.
What's more, humans are not
the main source of CO2.
Humans produce a small fraction
in the single digits percentage-wise
of the CO2 that it is produced
in the atmosphere.
Volcanos produce more CO2 each year
than all the factories and cars and planes
and other sources of man-made
CO2 put together.
More still comes from
animals and bacteria,
which produce about a 150
gigatonnes of CO2 each year,
compared to a mere 6.5
gigatonnes from humans.
An even larger source of CO2
is dying vegetation,
from falling leaves for example
in the autumn.
But the biggest source of CO2
by far is the oceans.
Carl Wunsch is Professor
of oceanography at MIT.
He was also a Visiting Professor...
...in Oceanography
at Harvard University,
...and University College in London,
and a Senior Visiting Fellow...
in Mathematics and Physics
at the University of Cambridge.
He's the author of four major
textbooks on Oceanography.
The ocean is the major
reservoir into which CO2 goes...
...when it comes out
of the atmosphere.
or to, from which it is readmitted
to the atmosphere.
If you heat the surface of the
ocean it tends to emit CO2...
So similarly if you cool
the ocean surface,
...the ocean can dissolve
more CO2.
So the warmer the oceans,
the more CO2 they produce...
and the cooler they are,
the more the suck in.
But why is there a timelag
of hundreds of years...
between a change in temperature
and a change in the amount of CO2...
...going into or out of the sea?
The reason is that oceans
are so big and so deep...
they take literally hundreds
of years...
...to warm up and to cool down.
This timelag means the oceans
have what scientists call...
...a memory of temperature changes.
The ocean has a memory of past events,
running out as far as
ten thousand years,
so for example if somebody says:
"Oh, I'm seeing changes
in the North Atlantic,
...this must mean that the
climate system is changing",
it may only mean that
something happened...
...in a remote part of the ocean
decades or hundreds of years ago
whose effects are now beginning
to show up in the North Atlantic.
The current warming
began long...
...before people had cars
or electric lights.
In the past 150 years,
the temperature has risen
just over half a degree celsius.
But most of that rise
occurred before 1940.
Since that time, the
temperature...
has fallen for four decades,
and risen for three.
There's no evidence at all...
...from Earth's long
climate history...
...that CO2 has ever determined
global temperatures.
But if CO2 doesn't drive
Earth's climate, what does?
The common belief that CO2
is driving climate change...
is at odds with much of
the available scientific data.
Data from weather
balloons and satellites,
from icecore surveys and from
the historical temperature records.
But if CO2 isn't driving climate,
what is?
Isn't it bizarre the thing
that it's humans,
you know when we're filling apart car,
turning on our lights,
that we are the ones
controlling climate?
Just look in the sky, look at
that massive thing, the Sun.
Even humans, at
our present 6.5 billion
are minute relative to that.
In the late 1980's, solar physicist
Piers Corbin decided to try...
a radically new way of
forecasting the weather.
Despite the huge resources
of the official Met Office,
Corbin's new technique consistently
produced more accurate results;
He was held in the national press
as the super weatherman.
The secret of his success
was the Sun.
The origin of solar weather technique
of long range forecasting...
came originally from study of sunspots
and the desire to predict those,
...and then I realized there was
actually much more interest in...
...to use the Sun to
predict the weather.
Sunspots, we now know,
are intense magnetic fields...
...which appear at times
of higher solar activity.
But for many hundreds of years,
long before this was
properly understood,
the astronomers around
the world used to count...
...the number of
sunspots in the belief,,,
...that more spots
heralded warmer weather.
In 1893 the British astronomer
Edward Maunder observed...
that during the Little Ice Age
there were barely
any spots visible on the Sun.
A period of solar inactivity
which became known as...
...the Maunder Minimum.
But how reliable are sunspots
as an indicator of the weather?
I decided to test it by gambling
on the weather through William Hill,
against what the Met Office
said was, you know,
a normal expectation.
And I won money month after
month after month after month.
Last winter the Met Office
said it could be...
...or would be an
exceptionally cold winter;
We said: "no, that is nonsense,
it's gonna be close to normal"
and we specifically said
when it would be cold,
after Christmas and February:
we were right, they were wrong.
In 1991, senior scientists of the
Danish Meteorological Institute
decided to compile a record
of sunspots in the 20th century...
and compare it with the
temperature record.
What they found, was an
incredibly close correlation...
between what the
Sun was doing...
and changes in temperature
on Earth.
Solar activity they found
rose sharply to 1940,
fell back for four decades
until the 1970's...
...and then rose again after that.
When we saw this correlation...
between the temperature and
solar activity or sunspot cyclings,
then the people said to us:
"OK, it can be just a coincidence",
so how can we prove that
it's not just a coincidence?
Well, one obvious thing is
to have a longer timeseries...
...or different timeseries
and we went back in time.
So Professor Friis Christensen
and his colleagues examined...
...four hundreds years
of astronomical records...
to compare sunspot activity...
...against temperature variation.
Once again, they found...
that variations in solar activity...
were intimate linked...
...to temperature
variation on Earth.
It was the Sun, it seemed,
not CO2, or anything else,
that was driving changes
in the climate.
In a way, it's not surprising:
the Sun affects us directly...
...of course when it
sends down its heat.
But we now know...
the Sun also affects
indirectly through clouds.
Clouds have a powerful cooling effect,
but how are they formed?
In the early 20th century
scientists discovered that...
the Earth was constantly
being bombarded...
...by subatomic particles.
These particles, which
they called cosmic rays,
originated (it was believed)
from exploding supernovae,
far beyond our Solar System.
When the particles coming down
meet water vapour rising
up from the sea,
they form water droplets
and make clouds.
But when the Sun
is more active...
and the solar wind is strong,
fewer particles get through
and fewer clouds are formed.
Just how powerful
this effect was,
became clear only recently,
when an astrophysicist,
Professor Nir Shaviv...
...decided to compare
his own record...
of cloud-forming
cosmic rays...
with the temperature record
created by a geologist,
Professor Jan Veizer...
...going back six hundred
million years.
What they found was that
when cosmic rays went up,
...the temperature went down;
when cosmic rays went down,
the temperature went up.
Clouds and the Earth's climate
were wery closely linked.
To see how close,
you just flip the lines.
We just compared the graph,
just put them one upon the other
and it was just amazing
and Jan Veizer looked at me and said you know,
We have very explosive data here.
I've never seen such a
vastly different records...
coming together
so beautifully...
to show really what's happening
over that long period of time.
The climate was controlled
by the clouds.
The clouds were controlled
by cosmic rays,
and the cosmic rays were
controlled by the Sun.
It all came down to the Sun.
If you had X-ray eyes
what appears as a nice
friendly yellow ball...
...would appear like a raging tiger.
The Sun is an incredibly
violent beast...
..and is raying out great
explosions...
and puffs of gas...
...and endless solar wind...
that's forever rushing
past the Earth.
There, in a certain sense,
inside the atmosphere
of the Sun...
the intensity of its magnetic
field...
more than doubled...
...during the 20th century.
In 2005, astrophysicists
from Harvard University...
published the following graph...
in the official Journal of the
American Geophysical Union:
The blue line represents
temperature change...
in the Arctic over the
past hundred years...
and here is the rising CO2
over the same period.
The two are not
obviously connected.
But now look again at
the temperature record...
and at this red line...
which depicts variations
in solar activity...
over the past century as recorded
independently by scientists...
from NASA and American's
National Oceanic...
...and Atmospheric Administration.
Solar activity over the
last hundred years...
or over the last several
hundred years...
correlates very nicely
on a decadal basis...
with sea ice and Arctic
temperatures.
To the Harvard astrophysicists...
and many other scientists
the conclusion is inescapable:
The Sun is driving
climate change,
CO2 is irrelevant.
But why, if this is so, are we
bombarded day after day...
with news items about
man-made global warming?
Why do so many people
in the media...
and elsewhere regard it
as an undisputed fact?
To understand the power
of global warming theory,
we must tell the story
of how it came about.
"The weather satellite depicts
a planet that grieves...
...for his lost harvests
and coming to the..."
Doom laid and predictions...
about climate change
are not new.
In 1974 the BBC warned us of
impending disasters
that might seem
strangely familiar.
Again and again,
the newsreels...
have been showing us
disasters of the weather:
...the American Midwest suffered...
...its worst droughts
since the 1930's...
...and tornados were
on the rampage.
And what was going to be
the cause of these disasters?
The man behind the series was...
former New Scientist Editor,
Nigel Calder.
In "The weather Machine"
we reported...
...the mainstream
opinion of the time
...which was global cooling and
the threat of a new ice age.
"Nature's ice dwarfs us and..."
After four decades of
falling temperatures...
experts warn that
a cooler world...
...would have catastrophic
consequences.
"There's the ever-present
threat of a big freeze.
Will a new ice age
claim our lands...
...and bury our Northern cities?"
But in mid to doom and gloom
there was one voice of hope:
a Swedish scientist called Bert Bolin,
...tentatively suggested
that man-made CO2...
might help to warm the world,
although he wasn't sure:
And there's a lot of oil,
and there are vast
amounts of coal...
and they seem to be burning
with an ever increasing rate
and if we go on doing this,
in about fifty years time,
the climate may be...
a few degrees warmer
than today...
we just don't know.
We were also the first to put
Bert Bolin of Sweden
on international television
talking about the dangers of CO2
and I remember being bitterly
criticized by top experts
...for indulging him
in his fantasy.
At the height of the
cooling scare in the 70's...
Bert Bolin's eccentric theory...
of man-made global
warming seemed absurd...
two things happened
to change that:
First, temperatures
started to rise
and second, the miners
went on strike.
To Margaret Thatcher,
energy was a political problem.
In the early 70's the oil crisis had
plunged the world into recession
and the miners had dropped down...
Ted Heath's conservative government
Mrs. Thatcher was determined
the same would not happen to her
she set out to break their power.
"What we have seen in this country...
is the emergence of an
organized revolutionary minority
who are prepared to exploit industrial
disputes but whose real aim is...
the breakdown of law and order
and the distraction of democratic
parlamentary government."
The politization of this subject...
started with Margaret Thatcher.
She was very concerned, always
(I remember when I was Secretary
of State for Energy),
to promote nuclear power,
long before the issue of
climate change came up,
because she was concerned
about energy security
and she didn't trust the Middle East
and she didn't trust the
National Union of Mineworkers
so she didn't trust oil
and she didn't trust coal,
so therefore she thought
we really had...
...to push ahead with nuclear power.
And then, when the climate change
global warming thing came up,
she thought this is great,
this is another argument
because it doesn't have
any CO2 emissions
this is another argument
why we should go for nuclear
and that is what she
was really largely saying
it's been misrepresented
since then.
And so she said to the scientists,
she went to the Royal Society
and she said:
"there's money on the table
for you to prove this stuff"
so of course they went
and did that.
Inevitably the moment politicians
put that weight behind something
and attach their name to
it in some ways of course
money will flow,
that's the way it goes
and inevitably research,
development, institutions,
started to bubble up
(if you put it that way)
which are going to
be researching climate
but with a particular emphasis
on the relationship between
CO2 and temperature.
At the request of Mrs. Thatcher,
the UK Met Office set up
a climate modelling unit
which provided the basis...
for a new international
committee called
the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change or IPCC.
They came out with the first big report
which predicted climatic disaster
as a result of global warming
I remember going to the
scientific press conference
and being amazed by two things:
first, the simplicity and
eloquence of the message
(and the vigour with which was delivered)
and secondly, the total disregard
of all climate science up to that time,
including incidentally
the role of the Sun,
which had been the subject
of a major meeting...
at the Royal Society just
a few months earlier.
But the new emphasis
on man-made CO2
as a possible environmental problem
didn't just appeal to Mrs. Thatcher.
It was certainly something very favourable
to the environmental idea,
what I call the medieval
environmentalism,
a sort of "let's get back
to the way things were
in medieval times
and get rid of all these
dreadful cars and machines"
They loved it, because
CO2 was for them...
...an emblem of industrialization.
While CO2 clearly is
an industrial gas...
and tried and self-tied
in with economic growth
with transportation in cars,
with what we call civilization,
and there are forces in the
environmental movement
that are simply against
the economic growth,
they think that's bad.
It could be used to
legitimize...
a whole sweet of myths
that already existed:
anticar, antigrowth,
antidevelopment...
and, above all, anti that
great Satan: the US.
Patrick Moore is considered...
one of the foremost
environmentalists
...of his generation.
He is co-founder of Greenpeace.
The shift to climate being
a major focal point
came about for two
very distinct reasons:
the first reason was
because by the mid 80's
a majority of people now agreed
with all of the reasonable things
we in the environmental movement
were saying they should do;
now when a majority of
people agree with you,
it's pretty hard to remain
confrontational with them,
and so the only way to remain
anti-establishment was...
to adopt ever more
extreme positions.
When I left Greenpeace it was
in the midst of them...
adopting a campaign to
ban chlorine woldwide.
Like I said: "You guys,
this is one of the elements
in the periodic table you know,
I mean, I'm not sure
if that's in our jurisdiction
to be banning a whole element".
The other reason that environmental
extremism emerged
was because world communism failed,
the wall came down,
and a lot of peaceniks
and political activists
moved into the environmental movement,
bringing their neo-marxism with them
and learnt to use green language
in a very clever way
to cloak agendas that
actually have more...
to do with anticapitalism
and antiglobalization
than they do anything
with ecology or science.
The left have been
instantly disoriented
by the manifest failure
of socialism
and indeed marxo-communism
as it was tried out,
and therefore they still remain
as anticapitalists as they were
but they have to find new
guys for that anticapitalism.
And it was a kind of
amazing alliance...
from Margaret Thatcher
on the right
through to bioleft wing
anticapitalist environmentalists.
That created this kind
of "momentum"...
...behind a looney idea.
By the early 1990's
man-made global warming
was no longer a slightly
eccentric theory about climate,
it was a full-blown
political campaign,
it was attracting media
attention those result:
more governmental funding.
Prior to Bush the elder,
I think the level of
funding for climate
and climate-related
sciences was...
somewhere around the
order of 170 million dollars a year,
which is reasonable for
the size of the field;
it jumped to two billion a year:
more than a factor of ten
and yes, that changed
a lot I mean,
lot of jobs, it brought a lot of new people
into it who otherwise
were not interested,
so you develop whole cadres
of people whose...
only interest in the field was that...
...it was global warming.
If I wanted to do research on,
shall we say,
the squirrels of Sussex,
what I would do,
and this is anytime
from 1990 onwards,
I would write my grant
application saying:
"I want to investigate...
the not-gathering
behaviour of squirrels,
with special reference
to the effects of
global warming",
and that way I get my money...
if I forget to mention
global warming...
I might not get the money.
There's a question in my mind...
that the large amounts of money
that have been fed into this particular,
rather small area of science
have distorted the
overall scientific effort.
We're all competing for funds
and if your field is the
focus of concern,
then you have done much
less work rationalizing
why your field should be funded.
By the 1990's tenths of billions of dollars of government
funding in the US,
UK and elsewhere
were being diverted into
research relating
to global warming.
A large portion of those funds
went into building computer models
to forecast what the climate
will be in the future.
But how accurate are those models?
Doctor Roy Spencer
is a senior scientist
for climate studies
at NASA's Marshall
space flights Center;
he has been awarded medals
for exceptional scientific achievement
in both NASA
and the American
Meteorological Society.
Climate models are only as good
as the assumptions that go into them,
and they have hundreds of assumptions.
All it takes as one assumption
to be wrong for the forecast
to be way off.
Climate forecasts are not new,
but in the past scientists
were more modests
about their ability to
predict the weather.
"Any attempt of forecasting
changes of climate...
meets skepticism from the men
who model the weather by computer."
In making decisions
which affect people,
a bad prediction as to what...
the climate of the future will be,
can be far worse than none at all.
I'm afraid that our understanding
of the complex weather machine
is not yet good enough to make
a reliable statement of the future.
All models assume that man-made CO2
is the main cause of climate change,
rather than the Sun or the clouds.
The analogy I use is like my car
is not running very well
so I'm going to ignore
the engine which is the Sun,
and I'm gonna ignore the transmission
which is the water vapour
and I'm gonna look at one
knot at the right rear wheel
which is the human-produced CO2.
It's that, the science is that bad.
If you haven't understood
the climate system,
If you haven't understood
all the components...
that cause the increase
the solar, the CO2, the
water vapour, the clouds
and put it all together,
If we haven't got all that
then your model isn't
worth anything.
The range of climate
forecasts varies greatly.
These variations are
produced by subtly
altering the assumptions upon
which the models are based.
The runs are so complicated
you can often adjust them
in such a way that they
do something very exciting
I work with modellers,
I've done modelling and,
with a mathematical model
and you tweak parameters
you can model anything,
you can make it get warmer,
you can make it get colder
by changing things.
Since all the models assume
that man-made CO2
causes warming,
one obvious way to produce
a more impressive forecast
is to increase the amount
of imagined man-made
CO2 going into the atmosphere.
We put an increase in CO2
in number of 1% per year
it's been 0.49% per year
for the last ten years,
so the models have twice as much
greenhouse warming
radiation going in them
as is known to be happening.
It shouldn't shock that they predict
more warming than is ocurring.
Models predict what the temperature
might be in fifty or a hundred years time.
It is one of their peculiars features
that long-range climate forecasts
are only proved wrong long
after peope have
forgotten about them.
As a result, there is a danger,
according to Professor Carl Wunsch
that modellers will we less concerned
in producing a forecast that is accurate
than one that is interesting.
Even within the scientific community,
you see, it's a problem.
If I run a complicated model
and I do something to it
like melt a lot of ice into the ocean
and nothing happens,
it's not likely to get printed.
But if I run the same model
and I adjust it
in such a way that something dramatic
happens to the ocean circulation
like the heat transport turns off
it will be published, people will say:
"This is very exciting"
and will even be picked up by the media.
So there's a bias,
there's a very powerful bias
within the media and within
the science community itself
towards results which
are dramatized upon.
If all freezes over,
that's a much more interesting story
than saying well, you know,
it all fluctuates around
sometimes the mass
flocks goes up by 10%,
sometimes it goes down by 20%
but eventually it comes back.
You know, which would
you do a story on?
I mean, that's what is about.
To the untrained eye computer
models look impressive
and they give often wild
speculation about the climate
the appearance of rigoruous science.
They also provide an endless...
source of spectacular
stories for the media.
The thing that has amazed me
as lifelong journalist
is how the most elementary
principles of journalism
seem to have been
abandoned on this subject.
In fact, the theory of
man-made global warming
has spawned an entirely
new brand of journalism.
We've got a whole new generation of reporters,
environmental journalists;
now, if you are an
environmental journalist
and if the global warming
story goes in the trash can,
so does your job.
It really is that crude,
and their reporting has to
get more and more hysterical
because there are still,
fortunately,
a few hardened news
editors around who will say:
"This is what you were
saying five years ago".
"Oh, but now is much
much worse, you know,
they are going to be
ten feet of sea level rise
by next tuesday or something..."
They have to keep on getting shriller...
and shriller and shriller.
It is now common in the media
to lay the blame for every storm
or hurricane on global warming,
but is there any scientific basis for this?
This is purely propaganda.
Every textbook in
Meteorology is telling you
the main source of
weather disturbances
is the temperature difference
between the tropics and the pole,
and we are told in a warmer world
this difference will get less.
Now that would tell you
you'll have less storminess
you'll have less variability
but for some reason that
isn't considered catastrophic
so you tell the opposite.
News reports frequently argue
that even a mild increase
in global temperature
could lead to a catastrophic
melting of the polar ice caps,
but what does Earth's
climate history tell us?
We happen to have temperature
records of Greenland...
that go back thousands of years.
Greenland has been much warmer.
Just a thousand years ago
Greenland was warmer than it is today.
Yet it didn't have a
dramatic melting event.
Even if we talk about
something like permafrost,
a great deal of the permafrost
(that icy layer under the
forests of Russia for example)
seven or eight
thousand years ago
melted far more than we're having
any evidence about it melting now.
So in other words...
this is a historical pattern again
but the world didn't come
to a country humpy, does it?
Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu
is head of the International
Arctic Research Center...
in Alaska.
The IARC is the world's leading
Arctic research institute.
Professor Akasofu
insists that over time
the ice caps are always
naturally expanding and contracting.
There are reports
from time to time
of big chunks of ice break
away from Antarctic continent.
Those mass have been
happening all the time
but because now we have a satellite
they can detect those.
That's why they become news.
These data, from NASA's
meteorological satellites,
shows the huge
natural expansion...
and contraction
of the Polar sea ice...
taken place in the 1990's.
I'd say all the TV programs
that debate to global warming
so big chunks of ice falling
from the edge of the glaciers
well people forget that
ice is always moving.
News reports frequently
show images
of ice breaking from
the edge of the Arctic
what they don't say is that...
this is as ordinary event in the Arctic
as falling leaves on
an English autumn day.
They ask me, they just see ice falling
from the edge of the greatest:
yes, that's spring breakup
that happens every year.
Press come to us towards
the time, you know:
"you want to say something...
...about the greenhouse disaster?",
and I say: "there is none".
Alarming television programs
raised the fear for prospect
a vast tidal waves flooding Britain.
But what causes the sea
level to change...
...and how fast does it happen?
Sea level changes over
the world in general
are governed fundamentally
by two factors:
what we would call
"local factors",
the relationship of
the sea to the land
which often by the way is
to do with the land rising or falling
and anything to do with the sea,
but if you're talking about
what we call eustatic changes of sea,
worldwide changes of sea,
that's through the thermal
expansion of the oceans,
nothing to do with melting ice.
And that's an enormously slow,
a long process.
People say: "Oh, I see the ocean...
doing this last year...
that means that something changed
in the atmosphere last year",
and this is not
necessarily true at all,
in fact this is actually
quite unlikely
because it can take hundreds
to thousand of years
for the deep ocean to
respond to forces
and changes
hat are taking place
at the surface.
It is also suggested that
even a mild rise in temperature
will lead to the spread northward
of deadly insect-born tropical
diseases like malaria.
But is this true?
Professor Paul Reiter
of the Pasteur Institute in Paris
is recognized as one of the world's
leading experts on malaria
and other insect-born diseases.
He is a member of the
World Health Organization,
expert advisory committee...
was chairman of the...
American Committee
of Medical Entomology...
of the American Society
for Tropical Medicine...
and lead author on
the health section...
of the US National
Assessment...
of the potential consequences
of climate variability.
As Professor Reiter
is eager to point out,
mosquitoes thrive in
very cold temperatures.
Mosquitoes are not
specifically tropical.
Most people would
realize that...
in temper regions there
are mosquitoes;
in fact, mosquitoes are
extremely abundant
in the Arctic.
The most devastating
epidemic of malaria...
was in the Soviet
Union in the 1920's:
there was something like
and something like
a tremendous
catastrophy...
that raised up to
the Arctic Circle...
Archangel had
and about 10 thousand deaths.
So it's not a
tropical disease.
Yet these people in the
global warming fraternity
invent the idea that...
malaria will move northward.
Climate scare stories cannot be blamed
solely on sloppy or
biased journalism.
According to Professor Reiter,
hysterical alarms have
been encouraged...
by the reports of the UN's IPCC.
On spread of malaria,
the IPCC warns us that:
"Mosquito species that
transmit malaria...
do not usually survive...
where the mean
winter temperature...
drops below 16-18C".
According to Professor Reiter
this is clearly untrue.
I was horrified to read the second
and the third assessment reports
because there was
so much misinformation,
without any kind of records
or virtually without mention
of the scientific literature,
the trully scientific literature,
literature by specialists
in those fields.
In a letter to the
Wall Street Journal,
Professor Frederick Seitz,
America's National
Academy of Sciences,
revealed that IPCC officials
had censored the
comments of scientists.
He said that:
"This report is not
the version...
that was approved by
the contributing scientists"
At least 15 key sections
of the science chapter
...had been deleted.
These included statements like:
"None of the studies cited
has shown clear evidence...
...that we can attribute
climate changes...
...to increases in
greenhouse gases."
"No study to date has
positively attributed...
...all or part
of the observed
climate changes to
man-made causes."
Professor Seitz concluded:
"I have never witnessed
a more disturbing corruption
of the peer-review process
than the events that
led to this IPCC report."
In its reply, the IPCC...
did not deny making
these deletions;
but it said that there
was no dishonesty...
or bias in the report,
and that uncertainties about...
...the cause of global warming
had been included.
The changes have been made,
it said, in response
to comments...
...from governments,
individual scientists
and non-governmental
organizations.
When I resigned from the IPCC
I thought this was the end of it;
but when I saw the final draft,
my name was still there.
I asked for it to be removed:
Well, they told me,
that I had contributed
so it'd remain there.
So I said: "No, I haven't contributed
because they haven't
listened to anything I said".
So in the end it was
quite a battle
but finally I threatened
legal actions against them
and they removed my name,
and I think this happens
a great deal;
those people who are specialists
but don't agree
with the polemic
and resigned...
(and there have been
a number that I know of)
they are simply put
on the author list...
and become part of these...
top scientists.
Research relating to
man-made global warming
is now one of the best
funded areas of science.
The US government alone spends...
...for than 4 billion dollars a year.
According to NASA
climatologist Roy Spencer,
scientists who speak out...
...against man-made global warming
have a lot to lose.
It's generally harder to get
research proposals funded
because of the stands
we've taken publicly,
and you'll find very few of us
that are willing to take public stand
because it does cut
into the research funding.
It is a common prejudice
that scientists
who do not agree...
with the theory of man-made
global warming...
must have been paid by
private industry to tell lies.
I get it all the time:
"You must be in the pay
of the multinationals".
Sadly, like most of the
scientists you'll talk to,
I haven't see a penny
from the multinationals.
I'm always accused of being paid
by oil and gas companies.
I've never received a nickel
from the oil and gas companies.
I joke about I wished
they would pay me
then I could afford
their product.
Whenever anybody says that...
I'm in the pay of an oil company,
I say my bank manager
would wish.
There's almost no private sector
investment in climatology
and yet, to be involved
in any reseach project
which involves an industry grant,
no matter how small,
and spell ruin to a
scientist's reputation.
Modern technology fuelled
by greenhouse gases.
Patrick Michaels is Professor
of Environmental Sciences
at the University of Virginia.
He was chair of the committee
on Applied Climatology
at the American Meteorological Society,
president of the American Association
of State Climatologists,
the author of three books on Meteorology,
...and an author and reviewer
on the UN's IPCC.
But when he conducted research
which was part funded
by the coal industry,
he found himself among those
under attack from
climate campaigners.
"British based corporations...
are some of the worst climate
criminals on the planet...
Shell is based in the UK,
right here, in London
and we have the right and the duty
to take it back into public ownership,
dismantle it, break it up
and send its managers
to rehabilitation training
and send its managers
to rehabilitation training.
But reasoned debate...
is not the only casualty in
the global warming alarm.
As international public
policy bears down
on industrial emissions of CO2,
the developing world is coming
under intense pressure
not to develop.
"I'm not expert on climate change,
I'm not scientist,
what I'm gonna say next
is a great big turn off,
is just that: turn it off!
Anything you don't need,
you're not using,
it's easier than you think
to make a difference."
Delegates from
around the world...
are flying into Nairobi
for a conference
sponsored by the UN
to talk about global warming.
Civil servants,
professional NGO campaigners,
carbon offset funder managers,
environmental journalists and others,
will discuss every aspect
of man-made climate change:
from how to promote
solar panels in Africa,
to the relationship between
global warming and sexism.
The conference lasts ten days;
the number of delegates
exceeds 6,000.
The billions of dollars
invested in climate science
means there's a
huge constituency
of people dependent
upon those dollars
and they will want to
see that carry forward,
happens in any burocracy.
Where I live we have local council,
a local council global warming officer.
There's a huge tail out there of people
who have in one way
or another
been recruited to join this
particular bandwagon.
Anybody who then
stands up and says:
"hey, wait a minute,
let's look at this coolly
and rationally and carefully,
and see actually how much merit,
how much this stands up,
they will be ostracized.
Scientists, accustomed to the relatively civility
and obscurity of academic life,
suddenly find themselves
publicly attacked...
if they dare to challenge
the theory of...
...man-made global warming,
...vilified by campaign groups
and even within
their own universities.
there's an old English saying:
"if you stand up in the coconut-shy,
they're gonna throw at you".
So I understand there's
going to be some of that,
but it gets pretty difficult
and pretty nasty and very personal.
And I've been death threats
and all sort of things
so I'm not doing it for my health.
These days, if you are skeptical
about the Litany around
climate change,
you are suddlely like as if
you are a Holocaust denier.
The environmental movement really
it is a political activist movement
and they have become hugely
influential at a global level.
And every politician
is aware of that today.
Whether you are in the left,
in the middle or the right,
you have to pay homage
to the environment.
In the past moth,
the global warming campaign
has won a great victory:
the United States government,
once a bastion of resistance,
has succumbed.
George Bush is now an allied.
Western governments have now
embraced the need for
international agreements
to restrain industrial production
in the developed and developing world.
But is it what cost?
Paul Driessen is a former
environmental campaigner.
My big concern with
global warming,
is that the policies
being pushed...
to supposedly prevent
global warming...
are having a disastrous effect
...on the world's poorest people.
Global warming campaigners say
it does not harm to be on the safe side;
even if the theory of man-made
climate change is wrong,
we should impose draconian measures
to cut carbon emissions, just in case.
They call this the
precautionary principle.
The precautionary principles
are very interesting beast.
It's basically used to promote
a particular agenda in ideology,
it's always used in one direction only.
It talks about the risks of
using a particular technology
fossil fuels for example,
but never about the
risks of not using it.
It never talks about the benefits
of having that technology.
Anne Mougela is about to cook...
...a meal for her children.
She is one of the 2 billion people,
a third of the world's population,
who have no access to electricity.
Instead, they must burn wood
or dried animal dung in their homes.
The indoor smoke this creates
is the deadliest form of
pollution in the world.
According to the World
Health Organization,
four million children
under the age of five...
die each year from
respiratory diseases...
caused by indoor smoke,
and many millions of
women die early...
from cancer and lung disease
for the same reason.
If you ask a rural person
to define development,
they'll tell you:
"yes I'll know I move
to the next level
when I have electricity".
Actually not having electricity
creates such a long
chain of problems...
cause the first thing
you miss is the light.
So you have to go to sleep earlier
because there's no light,
there's no reason to
stay awake, I mean,
you can't talk to each
other in darkness.
No refrigeration or
modern packaging...
means food cannot
be kept.
Fire in the hut is too smoky
and consumes too much
wood to be used as heating.
There is no hot water.
We in the West cannot
begin to imagine
how hard life is
without electricity.
The life expectancy of people...
who live like this in
terrifyingly short.
Their existance impoverished
in every way.
A few miles away the UN
is hosting its conference
on global warming
in its plush gated headquarters.
Gift shop is selling souvenirs
of peasant travel life
while delegates discuss...
how to promote what
are described as:
"sustainable forms of
electrical generation".
Africa has coal,
and Africa has oil,
but environmental groups
are campaigning...
against the use of these
sources of energy.
Instead, they say Africa...
and the rest of the
developing world...
...should use solar
and wind power.
A short drive out of Nairobi
we find our first solar panel.
A Kenian public health official
has brought us to a clinic
which serves several villages.
The only electrical
implements...
in the clinic are
the electric lights...
and a refrigerator in which
to keep vaccines,
medicine and blood samples.
Electricity is provided
by two solar panels.
- So what can you to do successfully?
- Lighting.
What happens when you put
lighting plus the refrigerator?
Tell us, what happens?
- It sounds an alarm?
- Yes.
- Can we maybe see that?
The solar panels allow Dr. Samuel Morangui
to use either the lights
or the refrigerator,
but not both at
the same time.
If he does, the
electricity shuts down.
Wind and solar power
are notoriously unreliable
as a source of electricity,
and are at least three
times more expensive
than conventional forms
of electrical generation.
The question would be
how many people in Europe,
how many people in the United States
are already using
that kind of energy,
and how cheap is it, you see,
if it's expensive for the Europeans,
if it's expensive for the Americans,
and we are talking
about poor Africans,
you know, it doesn't make sense.
The rich countries
can afford...
to engage in some
luxurious
experimentation with
other forms of energy,
but for us we are still
at the state of survival.
To former environmentalist
Paul Driessen,
the idea that the world's
poorest people
should be restricted
to using the world's
most expensive and inefficient
forms of electrical generation,
is the most morally
repugnant aspect...
of the global warming campaign.
Let me make one
thing perfectly clear:
if we are telling the Third World
that they can only have
wind and solar power,
what we are really telling them is:
"You cannot have electricity".
The challenge we have,
when we meet western
environmentalists
who say we must engage
in the use of solar panels
and wind energy
is how we can have
Africa industrialized,
because I don't see how a solar panel
is going to power a steel industry,
how a solar panel, you know,
is going to power maybe
some railway train network.
It might work maybe to
power a transistor radio.
I think one of the most pernicious aspects
of the modern environmental movement
is the romantization of peasant life,
and the idea that industrial societies
are the destroyers of the world.
One clear thing that emerges
from the old environmental debate
is the point that there's somebody
keen to kill the African dream,
and the African dream is to develop.
The environmental movement
has evolved into the
strongest force there is
for preventing development
in the developing countries.
We have been told
don't touch your resources,
don't touch your oil,
don't touch your coal,
that is suicide.
I think it's legitimate for me
to call them anti-human,
like OK, you don't have to think
humans are better than whales,
or better than owls,
or whatever if you don't
want to, right?
But surely it is not a good idea
to think of humans as sort of being scum,
you know, that is OK to have
hundreds of millions them
going blind or dead or whatever,
I just can't relate to that.
The theory of man-made
global warming
is now so firmly entrenched,
the voices of opposition
so effectively silenced,
it seems invincible,
untroubled by any
contrary evidence,
no matter how strong.
The global warming alarm
is now beyond reason.
There will be still people
who believe that this is
the end of the world
particularly when you
have, for example,
the chief scientist
of the UK,
telling people that by
the end of the century
the only habitable
place on the earth
will be the Antarctic.
And it may, humanity
may survive
thanks to some
breeding couples
who moved to
the Antarctic.
I mean this is hilarious.
It would be hilarious
actually if it weren't so sad.
in global warming,
I say no, I believe in global warming,
I don't believe that human CO2
is causing that warming.
A few years ago,
if you would've asked me,
I would tell you it's CO2.
Why?
Because just like everyone
else in the public...
I listen to what the media have to say.
Each day, the news reports
grow more fantasticly apocalyptic,
politicians no longer dare to express
any doubt about climate change.
There is such intolerance...
of any dissenting voice...
...some of the worst climate
criminals on the planet.
This is the most pollitically
incorrect thing possible
is to doubt this climate
change orthodoxy
Climate change has gone
beyond politics
it is a new kind of morality.
The Prime Minister is back
from his holidays...
unrepentant and unembarrassed
about yet another long haul destination...
Yes, as the frenzy of a man-made
global warming grows shriller,
many senior climate scientists
say the actual scientific
basis for the theory is crumbling.
There were periods for example
in our history
when we had three times as
much CO2 as we have today
or periods when we had ten times
as much CO2 as we have today;
and if CO2 has a large effect on climate
then you should see it in the
temperature reconstruction.
If we look at climate from
the geological timeframe,
We would never suspect CO2
as a major climate driver.
None of the major climate changes
in the last thousand years...
...can be explained by CO2.
You can't say that CO2
will drive climate.
It surely never did in the past.
I've often heard it's said that there is
a consensus of thousands of scientists...
...on the global warming issue
and that humans are causing...
catastrophic changes
in the climate system.
Well, I am one scientist and
there are many that simply...
...think that is not true.
Man-made global warming
is no ordinary scientific theory.
This morning, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change made up a...
It is presented in the media as
having the stamp of authority
of an impressive international organization:
"From the IPCC..."
The United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change or "IPCC".
The IPCC, line any UN body,
is political;
the final conclusions
are politically driven.
This claim, that the IPCC is the world's
top one thousand five hundred...
or two thousand five hundred scientists...
you look at the bibliographies of the
people, and it's simply not true.
There are quite a number
of non scientists.
And to build the number up
to twenty five hundred
they had to start taking group reviewers
and government people, and so on,
anyone who ever came
close to them,
and none of them are asked
to agree, many of them disagree.
Those people who are specialists
but don't agree with the polemic,
and resigned (and there have
been a number that I know of)
they are simply put
on the author list
and become part of these two thousand
five hundred of the world's top scientists.
People have decided they have
to convince other people
that since no scientist desagrees,
you shouldn't disagree either.
But that, whenever you
hear that is science,
that's pure propaganda.
This is the story of how
a theory about climate...
...turned into a political ideology.
I don't even like to call it the
environmental movement anymore,
because really it is a
political activist movement,
and they have become hugely
influential at a global level.
It is the story of the distortion
of a whole area of science.
Climate scientists need there to be
a problem in order to get funding.
We have a vested interest in
creating panic because then,
money will flow to climate science.
There's one thing you
shouldn't say and that is:
this might not be a problem.
It is the story of how a
political campaign...
...turned into a burocratic
bandwagon.
The fact to the matter is that
tenths of thousands of jobs...
...depend upon global
warming right now.
It's a big business.
It's become a great
industry in itself
and if the whole global
warming farrago collapsed,
there would be an awful
lot of people...
out of jobs and looking
for work.
This is a story of censorship
and intimidation.
I've seen and heard that
spitting fury at anybody
who might
disagree with them,
which is not the scientific way.
It is the story of Westeners invoking
the threat of climatic disasters
to hinder vital industrial
progress in the developing world.
One clear thing that emerges from
the all environmental debate...
is the point that there's somebody
keen to kill the African dream.
And the African dream is to develop.
The environmental movement has evolved
into the strongest force there is...
for preventing development
in the developing countries.
The global warming story
is the cautionary tale...
...of how a media scare became
the defining idea of a generation.
The whole global warming business
has become like a religion...
and people who disagree
are called heretics.
I'm a heretic.
The makers of this program,
all heretics.
In 2005, a House of Lords enquiry
was setup to examine...
the scientific evidence of
man-made global warming.
A leading figure in that enquiry
was Lord Lawson of Blaby
who as Chancellor of the Exchequer
in the 1980's was the first politician...
to commit government money
to global warming research.
We had a very very thorough
varied took evidence...
from a whole lot of people expert
in this area and produced a report.
What surprised me was to discover how
weak and uncertain the science was.
In fact, there are more and
more thoughtful people,
some of them a little bit frightened
to come out in the open,
but who quietly privately and
some of then publicly are saying:
"hang on, wait a minute:
this simply doesn't add up"
We are told that the Earth's
climate is changing:
but the Earth's climate
is always changing!
In Earth's long history, there have
been countless periods...
when it was much warmer
and much cooler than it is today
when much of the world was
covered by tropical forests
or else vasts ice sheets.
The climate has always changed,
and changed without any help
from us, humans.
We can trace the present warming
trend back at least two hundred years,
to the end of a very cold
period in Earth's history.
This cold spell?
It's known to climatologists
as the Little Ice Age.
In the 14th century, Europe
plunged into the Little Ice Age,
and when we look for evidences of this,
are the old illustrations and prints,
and pictures of old father Thames
because during the hardest and
toughest winters of that Little Ice Age
the Thames would freeze over
and there were wonderful ice fairs
held on the Thames
skating, and people actually
selling things on the ice.
If we look back further in time,
before the Little Ice Age,
We find a barmy golden era
when temperatures where
higher than they are today
a time known to climatologists
as the Medieval Warm Period.
It's important people know
that climate enabled
a quite different lifestyle
in the medieval period.
We have this view today that warming is
going to have apocalyptic outcomes.
In fact, wherever you describe
this warm period
it appears to be associated
with riches.
In Europe, this was the great age
of the cathedral builders
a time when, according to Chaucer,
vineyards flourished even
in the North of England
All over the City on London there
are little memories of the vineyards
that grew in the medieval warm period,
So this was a wonderfully rich time.
And this little church, in a
sense, symbolizes it
as it comes from a period
of great wealth.
Going back in time further still,
before the medieval warm period,
we find more warm spells?
including a very prolonged period
during the Bronze Age
known to geologists as
the Holocene Maximum,
where temperatures were significantly...
higher than they are now
for more than three milennia.
If we go back 8000 years
in the Holocene period,
our current interglacial, who is
much warmer than it is today
now the polar bears obviously
survived that period
they are with us today
they are very adaptable and
these warm periods in the past
(we call hipsy thermals),
posed no problem for them.
Climate variation in the
past is clearly natural
so why do we think is
any different today?
In the current alarm about
global warming
the culprit is industrial society.
Thanks to modern industry luxuries
once enjoyed exclusively by the rich
are now available in abundance
to ordinary people.
Novel technologies have made
life easier and richer;
modern transport and communications
have made the world...
...seem less foreign and distant.
Industrial progress has
changed our lives.
But has it also changed
our climate?
According to the theory of
man-made global warming,
industrial growth should cause
the temperature to rise,
but does it?
Anyone who goes around and says
that CO2 is responsible
...of the warming of the 20th century...
hasn't looked at the
basic numbers.
Industrial production in the early
decades of the 20th century...
...was still in its infancy restricted
to only a few countries...
handicapped by war and
economic depression.
After the Second World War
things changed.
Consumer goods like refrigerators and
washing machines and TVs and cars...
began to be mass-produced
for an international market.
Historians call this global
explosion of industrial activity
the post-war economic boom.
So how does the industrial story
compare with the temperature record?
Since the mid 19th century
the Earth's temperature...
has risen by just of a
half a degree Celsius.
But this warming began
long before cars...
and planes were even invented:
What's more, most of the rise in
temperature ocurred before 1940,
during the period when
industrial production...
was relatively insignificant.
After the Second Wold War,
during the post-war economic boom,
temperatures, in theory,
should have shot up,
but they didn't,
they fell;
not for one or two years,
but for four decades.
In fact, paradoxically, it wasn't
until the world...
economic recession in the 1970's
that they stopped falling.
CO2 began increase
exponentially in about 1940
but the temperature actually
began to decrease in 1940,
continued to about 1975
so this is the opposite relation.
When the CO2 increasing rapidly
but yet the temperature decreasing
then we cannot say that CO2
and the temperature go together.
Temperature went up significantly
up to 1940,
...when human production
of CO2 was relative low,
and then in the post war years,
when industry...
and the whole economies
of the world really got going,
and human production
of CO2 just soared
the global temperature
was going down.
In other words: the facts
didn' fit the theory.
Trusted time when,
after the Second World War
industry was booming,
CO2 was increasing and yet
the Earth was getting cooler...
and starting off scares of
a coming Ice Age,
it made absolutely no sense,
it still doesn't make sense.
Why do we suppose that CO2 is
responsible for our changing climate?
CO2 forms only a very small
part of the Earth's atmosphere.
In fact we measure changes
in the level of atmospheric CO2
in tenths of parts per million.
If you take CO2 as a percentage
of all the gases in the atmosphere
--the Oxygen, the Nitrogen
and Argon and so on--
...is 0.054 percent
and it's an incredibly small portion
and then of course you've got
to take that portion...
that supposedly humans are adding
(which is the focus of all the concern)
and it gets even smaller.
Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas,
greenhouse gases themselves only
form a small part of the atmosphere.
What's more, CO2 is a relatively
minor greenhouse gas.
The atmosphere is made up
of multitude of gases
a small percentage of them
we call greenhouse gases
and of that very small percentage
of these greenhouse gases
a 95% of it is water vapour, it's the
most important greenhouse gas.
Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, by
far the most important greenhouse gas.
So is there any way of checking whether
the recent warming was due...
to an increase in greenhouse gas?
There is only one way to tell and
that is to look up in the sky,
or a part of the sky known to
scientists as the troposphere.
If it's greenhouse warming,
you get more warming...
in the middle of the troposphere
(the first 10-12 km of the atmosphere)
than you do at the surface.
There are good theoretical
reasons for that,
having to do with how
the greenhouse works.
The greenhouse effect
works like this:
the Sun sends its heat
down to Earth:
if it weren't for greenhouse gases,
this solar radiation would
bounce back into space,
leaving the planet cold
and uninhabitable.
Greenhouse gas traps the scaping
heat in the Earth's troposphere,
a few miles above the surface.
And it's here, according
to the climate models,
the rate of warming should be highest
if it's greenhouse gas
that's causing it.
All the models, everyone of them,
calculates that the warming
should be faster
as you go up from the surface
into the atmosphere.
That in fact the maximum warming
over the Equator should take place
at an altitude of about 10 km.
A scientist largely responsible
for measuring the temperature...
in the Earth's atmosphere
is Professor John Christie.
In 1991 he was awarded NASA's medal
for exceptional scientific achievement,
and in 1996 received a special award from
the American Meteorological Society
for fundamentally advancing
our ability to monitor climate.
He was a lead author...
on the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.
There are two ways to take
the temperature...
in the Earth's atmosphere:
satellites and weather balloons.
What we found consistently is that,
in a great part of the planet,
the bulk of the atmosphere
is not warming as much as...
we see at the surface in this region.
And that's a real head
scratcher for us,
because the theory is
pretty straightforward:
and the theory says that
if the surface warms,
the upper atmosphere
should warm rapidly.
The rise in temperature of that
part of the atmosphere...
...is not very dramatic at all and
really does not match the theory
...that climate models are
expressing at this point.
One of the problems thas is plaguing
the models is that they predict that,
as you go up through the atmosphere
(except in the polar regions),
that the rate of warming increases
and it's quite clear, from two datasets,
not just satellite data
which everybody talks about,
but from weather ballons data
that you dont' see that effect.
In fact it looks like the surface
temperatures are warming slightly
more than the upper air temperatures:
that's a big difference!!
That data gives you a handle
on the fact that what you're seeing
is warming that probably is
not due to greenhouse gases.
That is, the observations do not
show any increase with the altitude.
In fact, most observations show a slight
decrease in the rate of warming with altitude.
So in that sense you can say that the
hypothesis of man-made global warming
is falsified by the evidence.
So the recent warming of
the Earth happened...
...in the wrong place and
at the wrong time.
Most of the warming took place
in the early part of the 20th century,
and ocurred mostly at
the Earth's surface,
the very opposite of what
should have happened...
according to the theory of
man-made global warming.
I am Al Gore, I used to be Vicepresident
of the United States of America...
Former Vicepresident Al Gore's
emotional film "An Inconvenient Truth"
...is regarded by many as the definite
popular presentation of the theory...
of the man-made global warming.
His argument rests on one all
important piece of evidence...
taken from icecore surveys in which
scientists drill deep into the ice
to look back into Earth's
climate history,
hundreds of thousands of years.
The first icecore survey took place
in Vostok, in the Antarctic:
what it found, as Al Gore
correctly points out,
...was a clear correlation
between CO2 and temperature.
We're going back in time
now 650.000 years...
Here's what the temperature
has been on our Earth.
Now one thing that comes and jumps
out at you is the data are fit together
(most ridiculous thing
I've ever heard)
The relationship is actually
very complicated
but there is one relationship
that is far more powerful
than all the others and it is this:
when there's more CO2 the
temperature gets warmer.
Al Gore says the relationship
between the temperature...
...and CO2 is complicated
but he doesn't say what
these complications are.
In fact, there was something
very important...
in the icecore data that
he failed to mention:
Professor Clark is a leading Arctic
paleoclimatologist who looks back
into the Earth's temperature record
tenths of millions of years.
When we look at the climate
on long scales
we're looking for
geological material...
that actually records climate.
If we were to take an ice sample
for example we use isotopes...
to reconstruct temperature but the
atmosphere that is imprisoned...
in that ice we liberate it and
then we look at the CO2 content.
Professor Clark and others
have indeed discovered,
as Al Gore says,
a link between CO2
and temperature.
But what al Gore doesn't say...
is that the link is the
wrong way round.
So here we're looking at the
icecore record from Vostok
and in the red we see temperature
going up from early time
to later time at a very key interval
when we came out of a glaciation.
And we see the temperature going up
and then we see the CO2 coming up.
CO2 lags behind that increase.
It's got a 800 year lag...
...so temperature is leading
CO2 by 800 years.
There have now been several
major icecore surveys,
everyone of them shows
the same thing:
the temperature rises or falls,
and then,
after a few hundred years,
CO2 follows.
So obviously, CO2 is not the
cause of that warming;
In fact we can say that the warming
produced the increase in CO2.
CO2 clearly cannot be causing
temperature changes,
it's a product of temperature.
it's following temperature
changes.
The icecore record goes
to the very heart...
...of the problem we have here.
They said: "if the CO2 increases
in the atmosphere,
...as a greenhouse gas,
then the temperature will go up".
But the icecore record
shows exactly the opposite:
so the fundamental assumption,
the EMOs fundamental assumption
...of the whole theory
of climate change...
...due tu humans,
is shown to be wrong.
But how can it be that
higher temperatures lead...
to more CO2 in the atmosphere?
To understand this,
we must first restate...
the obvious point that CO2
is a natural gas...
...produced by all living things.
Few things annoy me more
than to hear people...
talking about CO2
as being apollutant:
you are made of CO2,
I'm made of CO2,
CO2 is how living things grow.
What's more, humans are not
the main source of CO2.
Humans produce a small fraction
in the single digits percentage-wise
of the CO2 that it is produced
in the atmosphere.
Volcanos produce more CO2 each year
than all the factories and cars and planes
and other sources of man-made
CO2 put together.
More still comes from
animals and bacteria,
which produce about a 150
gigatonnes of CO2 each year,
compared to a mere 6.5
gigatonnes from humans.
An even larger source of CO2
is dying vegetation,
from falling leaves for example
in the autumn.
But the biggest source of CO2
by far is the oceans.
Carl Wunsch is Professor
of oceanography at MIT.
He was also a Visiting Professor...
...in Oceanography
at Harvard University,
...and University College in London,
and a Senior Visiting Fellow...
in Mathematics and Physics
at the University of Cambridge.
He's the author of four major
textbooks on Oceanography.
The ocean is the major
reservoir into which CO2 goes...
...when it comes out
of the atmosphere.
or to, from which it is readmitted
to the atmosphere.
If you heat the surface of the
ocean it tends to emit CO2...
So similarly if you cool
the ocean surface,
...the ocean can dissolve
more CO2.
So the warmer the oceans,
the more CO2 they produce...
and the cooler they are,
the more the suck in.
But why is there a timelag
of hundreds of years...
between a change in temperature
and a change in the amount of CO2...
...going into or out of the sea?
The reason is that oceans
are so big and so deep...
they take literally hundreds
of years...
...to warm up and to cool down.
This timelag means the oceans
have what scientists call...
...a memory of temperature changes.
The ocean has a memory of past events,
running out as far as
ten thousand years,
so for example if somebody says:
"Oh, I'm seeing changes
in the North Atlantic,
...this must mean that the
climate system is changing",
it may only mean that
something happened...
...in a remote part of the ocean
decades or hundreds of years ago
whose effects are now beginning
to show up in the North Atlantic.
The current warming
began long...
...before people had cars
or electric lights.
In the past 150 years,
the temperature has risen
just over half a degree celsius.
But most of that rise
occurred before 1940.
Since that time, the
temperature...
has fallen for four decades,
and risen for three.
There's no evidence at all...
...from Earth's long
climate history...
...that CO2 has ever determined
global temperatures.
But if CO2 doesn't drive
Earth's climate, what does?
The common belief that CO2
is driving climate change...
is at odds with much of
the available scientific data.
Data from weather
balloons and satellites,
from icecore surveys and from
the historical temperature records.
But if CO2 isn't driving climate,
what is?
Isn't it bizarre the thing
that it's humans,
you know when we're filling apart car,
turning on our lights,
that we are the ones
controlling climate?
Just look in the sky, look at
that massive thing, the Sun.
Even humans, at
our present 6.5 billion
are minute relative to that.
In the late 1980's, solar physicist
Piers Corbin decided to try...
a radically new way of
forecasting the weather.
Despite the huge resources
of the official Met Office,
Corbin's new technique consistently
produced more accurate results;
He was held in the national press
as the super weatherman.
The secret of his success
was the Sun.
The origin of solar weather technique
of long range forecasting...
came originally from study of sunspots
and the desire to predict those,
...and then I realized there was
actually much more interest in...
...to use the Sun to
predict the weather.
Sunspots, we now know,
are intense magnetic fields...
...which appear at times
of higher solar activity.
But for many hundreds of years,
long before this was
properly understood,
the astronomers around
the world used to count...
...the number of
sunspots in the belief,,,
...that more spots
heralded warmer weather.
In 1893 the British astronomer
Edward Maunder observed...
that during the Little Ice Age
there were barely
any spots visible on the Sun.
A period of solar inactivity
which became known as...
...the Maunder Minimum.
But how reliable are sunspots
as an indicator of the weather?
I decided to test it by gambling
on the weather through William Hill,
against what the Met Office
said was, you know,
a normal expectation.
And I won money month after
month after month after month.
Last winter the Met Office
said it could be...
...or would be an
exceptionally cold winter;
We said: "no, that is nonsense,
it's gonna be close to normal"
and we specifically said
when it would be cold,
after Christmas and February:
we were right, they were wrong.
In 1991, senior scientists of the
Danish Meteorological Institute
decided to compile a record
of sunspots in the 20th century...
and compare it with the
temperature record.
What they found, was an
incredibly close correlation...
between what the
Sun was doing...
and changes in temperature
on Earth.
Solar activity they found
rose sharply to 1940,
fell back for four decades
until the 1970's...
...and then rose again after that.
When we saw this correlation...
between the temperature and
solar activity or sunspot cyclings,
then the people said to us:
"OK, it can be just a coincidence",
so how can we prove that
it's not just a coincidence?
Well, one obvious thing is
to have a longer timeseries...
...or different timeseries
and we went back in time.
So Professor Friis Christensen
and his colleagues examined...
...four hundreds years
of astronomical records...
to compare sunspot activity...
...against temperature variation.
Once again, they found...
that variations in solar activity...
were intimate linked...
...to temperature
variation on Earth.
It was the Sun, it seemed,
not CO2, or anything else,
that was driving changes
in the climate.
In a way, it's not surprising:
the Sun affects us directly...
...of course when it
sends down its heat.
But we now know...
the Sun also affects
indirectly through clouds.
Clouds have a powerful cooling effect,
but how are they formed?
In the early 20th century
scientists discovered that...
the Earth was constantly
being bombarded...
...by subatomic particles.
These particles, which
they called cosmic rays,
originated (it was believed)
from exploding supernovae,
far beyond our Solar System.
When the particles coming down
meet water vapour rising
up from the sea,
they form water droplets
and make clouds.
But when the Sun
is more active...
and the solar wind is strong,
fewer particles get through
and fewer clouds are formed.
Just how powerful
this effect was,
became clear only recently,
when an astrophysicist,
Professor Nir Shaviv...
...decided to compare
his own record...
of cloud-forming
cosmic rays...
with the temperature record
created by a geologist,
Professor Jan Veizer...
...going back six hundred
million years.
What they found was that
when cosmic rays went up,
...the temperature went down;
when cosmic rays went down,
the temperature went up.
Clouds and the Earth's climate
were wery closely linked.
To see how close,
you just flip the lines.
We just compared the graph,
just put them one upon the other
and it was just amazing
and Jan Veizer looked at me and said you know,
We have very explosive data here.
I've never seen such a
vastly different records...
coming together
so beautifully...
to show really what's happening
over that long period of time.
The climate was controlled
by the clouds.
The clouds were controlled
by cosmic rays,
and the cosmic rays were
controlled by the Sun.
It all came down to the Sun.
If you had X-ray eyes
what appears as a nice
friendly yellow ball...
...would appear like a raging tiger.
The Sun is an incredibly
violent beast...
..and is raying out great
explosions...
and puffs of gas...
...and endless solar wind...
that's forever rushing
past the Earth.
There, in a certain sense,
inside the atmosphere
of the Sun...
the intensity of its magnetic
field...
more than doubled...
...during the 20th century.
In 2005, astrophysicists
from Harvard University...
published the following graph...
in the official Journal of the
American Geophysical Union:
The blue line represents
temperature change...
in the Arctic over the
past hundred years...
and here is the rising CO2
over the same period.
The two are not
obviously connected.
But now look again at
the temperature record...
and at this red line...
which depicts variations
in solar activity...
over the past century as recorded
independently by scientists...
from NASA and American's
National Oceanic...
...and Atmospheric Administration.
Solar activity over the
last hundred years...
or over the last several
hundred years...
correlates very nicely
on a decadal basis...
with sea ice and Arctic
temperatures.
To the Harvard astrophysicists...
and many other scientists
the conclusion is inescapable:
The Sun is driving
climate change,
CO2 is irrelevant.
But why, if this is so, are we
bombarded day after day...
with news items about
man-made global warming?
Why do so many people
in the media...
and elsewhere regard it
as an undisputed fact?
To understand the power
of global warming theory,
we must tell the story
of how it came about.
"The weather satellite depicts
a planet that grieves...
...for his lost harvests
and coming to the..."
Doom laid and predictions...
about climate change
are not new.
In 1974 the BBC warned us of
impending disasters
that might seem
strangely familiar.
Again and again,
the newsreels...
have been showing us
disasters of the weather:
...the American Midwest suffered...
...its worst droughts
since the 1930's...
...and tornados were
on the rampage.
And what was going to be
the cause of these disasters?
The man behind the series was...
former New Scientist Editor,
Nigel Calder.
In "The weather Machine"
we reported...
...the mainstream
opinion of the time
...which was global cooling and
the threat of a new ice age.
"Nature's ice dwarfs us and..."
After four decades of
falling temperatures...
experts warn that
a cooler world...
...would have catastrophic
consequences.
"There's the ever-present
threat of a big freeze.
Will a new ice age
claim our lands...
...and bury our Northern cities?"
But in mid to doom and gloom
there was one voice of hope:
a Swedish scientist called Bert Bolin,
...tentatively suggested
that man-made CO2...
might help to warm the world,
although he wasn't sure:
And there's a lot of oil,
and there are vast
amounts of coal...
and they seem to be burning
with an ever increasing rate
and if we go on doing this,
in about fifty years time,
the climate may be...
a few degrees warmer
than today...
we just don't know.
We were also the first to put
Bert Bolin of Sweden
on international television
talking about the dangers of CO2
and I remember being bitterly
criticized by top experts
...for indulging him
in his fantasy.
At the height of the
cooling scare in the 70's...
Bert Bolin's eccentric theory...
of man-made global
warming seemed absurd...
two things happened
to change that:
First, temperatures
started to rise
and second, the miners
went on strike.
To Margaret Thatcher,
energy was a political problem.
In the early 70's the oil crisis had
plunged the world into recession
and the miners had dropped down...
Ted Heath's conservative government
Mrs. Thatcher was determined
the same would not happen to her
she set out to break their power.
"What we have seen in this country...
is the emergence of an
organized revolutionary minority
who are prepared to exploit industrial
disputes but whose real aim is...
the breakdown of law and order
and the distraction of democratic
parlamentary government."
The politization of this subject...
started with Margaret Thatcher.
She was very concerned, always
(I remember when I was Secretary
of State for Energy),
to promote nuclear power,
long before the issue of
climate change came up,
because she was concerned
about energy security
and she didn't trust the Middle East
and she didn't trust the
National Union of Mineworkers
so she didn't trust oil
and she didn't trust coal,
so therefore she thought
we really had...
...to push ahead with nuclear power.
And then, when the climate change
global warming thing came up,
she thought this is great,
this is another argument
because it doesn't have
any CO2 emissions
this is another argument
why we should go for nuclear
and that is what she
was really largely saying
it's been misrepresented
since then.
And so she said to the scientists,
she went to the Royal Society
and she said:
"there's money on the table
for you to prove this stuff"
so of course they went
and did that.
Inevitably the moment politicians
put that weight behind something
and attach their name to
it in some ways of course
money will flow,
that's the way it goes
and inevitably research,
development, institutions,
started to bubble up
(if you put it that way)
which are going to
be researching climate
but with a particular emphasis
on the relationship between
CO2 and temperature.
At the request of Mrs. Thatcher,
the UK Met Office set up
a climate modelling unit
which provided the basis...
for a new international
committee called
the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change or IPCC.
They came out with the first big report
which predicted climatic disaster
as a result of global warming
I remember going to the
scientific press conference
and being amazed by two things:
first, the simplicity and
eloquence of the message
(and the vigour with which was delivered)
and secondly, the total disregard
of all climate science up to that time,
including incidentally
the role of the Sun,
which had been the subject
of a major meeting...
at the Royal Society just
a few months earlier.
But the new emphasis
on man-made CO2
as a possible environmental problem
didn't just appeal to Mrs. Thatcher.
It was certainly something very favourable
to the environmental idea,
what I call the medieval
environmentalism,
a sort of "let's get back
to the way things were
in medieval times
and get rid of all these
dreadful cars and machines"
They loved it, because
CO2 was for them...
...an emblem of industrialization.
While CO2 clearly is
an industrial gas...
and tried and self-tied
in with economic growth
with transportation in cars,
with what we call civilization,
and there are forces in the
environmental movement
that are simply against
the economic growth,
they think that's bad.
It could be used to
legitimize...
a whole sweet of myths
that already existed:
anticar, antigrowth,
antidevelopment...
and, above all, anti that
great Satan: the US.
Patrick Moore is considered...
one of the foremost
environmentalists
...of his generation.
He is co-founder of Greenpeace.
The shift to climate being
a major focal point
came about for two
very distinct reasons:
the first reason was
because by the mid 80's
a majority of people now agreed
with all of the reasonable things
we in the environmental movement
were saying they should do;
now when a majority of
people agree with you,
it's pretty hard to remain
confrontational with them,
and so the only way to remain
anti-establishment was...
to adopt ever more
extreme positions.
When I left Greenpeace it was
in the midst of them...
adopting a campaign to
ban chlorine woldwide.
Like I said: "You guys,
this is one of the elements
in the periodic table you know,
I mean, I'm not sure
if that's in our jurisdiction
to be banning a whole element".
The other reason that environmental
extremism emerged
was because world communism failed,
the wall came down,
and a lot of peaceniks
and political activists
moved into the environmental movement,
bringing their neo-marxism with them
and learnt to use green language
in a very clever way
to cloak agendas that
actually have more...
to do with anticapitalism
and antiglobalization
than they do anything
with ecology or science.
The left have been
instantly disoriented
by the manifest failure
of socialism
and indeed marxo-communism
as it was tried out,
and therefore they still remain
as anticapitalists as they were
but they have to find new
guys for that anticapitalism.
And it was a kind of
amazing alliance...
from Margaret Thatcher
on the right
through to bioleft wing
anticapitalist environmentalists.
That created this kind
of "momentum"...
...behind a looney idea.
By the early 1990's
man-made global warming
was no longer a slightly
eccentric theory about climate,
it was a full-blown
political campaign,
it was attracting media
attention those result:
more governmental funding.
Prior to Bush the elder,
I think the level of
funding for climate
and climate-related
sciences was...
somewhere around the
order of 170 million dollars a year,
which is reasonable for
the size of the field;
it jumped to two billion a year:
more than a factor of ten
and yes, that changed
a lot I mean,
lot of jobs, it brought a lot of new people
into it who otherwise
were not interested,
so you develop whole cadres
of people whose...
only interest in the field was that...
...it was global warming.
If I wanted to do research on,
shall we say,
the squirrels of Sussex,
what I would do,
and this is anytime
from 1990 onwards,
I would write my grant
application saying:
"I want to investigate...
the not-gathering
behaviour of squirrels,
with special reference
to the effects of
global warming",
and that way I get my money...
if I forget to mention
global warming...
I might not get the money.
There's a question in my mind...
that the large amounts of money
that have been fed into this particular,
rather small area of science
have distorted the
overall scientific effort.
We're all competing for funds
and if your field is the
focus of concern,
then you have done much
less work rationalizing
why your field should be funded.
By the 1990's tenths of billions of dollars of government
funding in the US,
UK and elsewhere
were being diverted into
research relating
to global warming.
A large portion of those funds
went into building computer models
to forecast what the climate
will be in the future.
But how accurate are those models?
Doctor Roy Spencer
is a senior scientist
for climate studies
at NASA's Marshall
space flights Center;
he has been awarded medals
for exceptional scientific achievement
in both NASA
and the American
Meteorological Society.
Climate models are only as good
as the assumptions that go into them,
and they have hundreds of assumptions.
All it takes as one assumption
to be wrong for the forecast
to be way off.
Climate forecasts are not new,
but in the past scientists
were more modests
about their ability to
predict the weather.
"Any attempt of forecasting
changes of climate...
meets skepticism from the men
who model the weather by computer."
In making decisions
which affect people,
a bad prediction as to what...
the climate of the future will be,
can be far worse than none at all.
I'm afraid that our understanding
of the complex weather machine
is not yet good enough to make
a reliable statement of the future.
All models assume that man-made CO2
is the main cause of climate change,
rather than the Sun or the clouds.
The analogy I use is like my car
is not running very well
so I'm going to ignore
the engine which is the Sun,
and I'm gonna ignore the transmission
which is the water vapour
and I'm gonna look at one
knot at the right rear wheel
which is the human-produced CO2.
It's that, the science is that bad.
If you haven't understood
the climate system,
If you haven't understood
all the components...
that cause the increase
the solar, the CO2, the
water vapour, the clouds
and put it all together,
If we haven't got all that
then your model isn't
worth anything.
The range of climate
forecasts varies greatly.
These variations are
produced by subtly
altering the assumptions upon
which the models are based.
The runs are so complicated
you can often adjust them
in such a way that they
do something very exciting
I work with modellers,
I've done modelling and,
with a mathematical model
and you tweak parameters
you can model anything,
you can make it get warmer,
you can make it get colder
by changing things.
Since all the models assume
that man-made CO2
causes warming,
one obvious way to produce
a more impressive forecast
is to increase the amount
of imagined man-made
CO2 going into the atmosphere.
We put an increase in CO2
in number of 1% per year
it's been 0.49% per year
for the last ten years,
so the models have twice as much
greenhouse warming
radiation going in them
as is known to be happening.
It shouldn't shock that they predict
more warming than is ocurring.
Models predict what the temperature
might be in fifty or a hundred years time.
It is one of their peculiars features
that long-range climate forecasts
are only proved wrong long
after peope have
forgotten about them.
As a result, there is a danger,
according to Professor Carl Wunsch
that modellers will we less concerned
in producing a forecast that is accurate
than one that is interesting.
Even within the scientific community,
you see, it's a problem.
If I run a complicated model
and I do something to it
like melt a lot of ice into the ocean
and nothing happens,
it's not likely to get printed.
But if I run the same model
and I adjust it
in such a way that something dramatic
happens to the ocean circulation
like the heat transport turns off
it will be published, people will say:
"This is very exciting"
and will even be picked up by the media.
So there's a bias,
there's a very powerful bias
within the media and within
the science community itself
towards results which
are dramatized upon.
If all freezes over,
that's a much more interesting story
than saying well, you know,
it all fluctuates around
sometimes the mass
flocks goes up by 10%,
sometimes it goes down by 20%
but eventually it comes back.
You know, which would
you do a story on?
I mean, that's what is about.
To the untrained eye computer
models look impressive
and they give often wild
speculation about the climate
the appearance of rigoruous science.
They also provide an endless...
source of spectacular
stories for the media.
The thing that has amazed me
as lifelong journalist
is how the most elementary
principles of journalism
seem to have been
abandoned on this subject.
In fact, the theory of
man-made global warming
has spawned an entirely
new brand of journalism.
We've got a whole new generation of reporters,
environmental journalists;
now, if you are an
environmental journalist
and if the global warming
story goes in the trash can,
so does your job.
It really is that crude,
and their reporting has to
get more and more hysterical
because there are still,
fortunately,
a few hardened news
editors around who will say:
"This is what you were
saying five years ago".
"Oh, but now is much
much worse, you know,
they are going to be
ten feet of sea level rise
by next tuesday or something..."
They have to keep on getting shriller...
and shriller and shriller.
It is now common in the media
to lay the blame for every storm
or hurricane on global warming,
but is there any scientific basis for this?
This is purely propaganda.
Every textbook in
Meteorology is telling you
the main source of
weather disturbances
is the temperature difference
between the tropics and the pole,
and we are told in a warmer world
this difference will get less.
Now that would tell you
you'll have less storminess
you'll have less variability
but for some reason that
isn't considered catastrophic
so you tell the opposite.
News reports frequently argue
that even a mild increase
in global temperature
could lead to a catastrophic
melting of the polar ice caps,
but what does Earth's
climate history tell us?
We happen to have temperature
records of Greenland...
that go back thousands of years.
Greenland has been much warmer.
Just a thousand years ago
Greenland was warmer than it is today.
Yet it didn't have a
dramatic melting event.
Even if we talk about
something like permafrost,
a great deal of the permafrost
(that icy layer under the
forests of Russia for example)
seven or eight
thousand years ago
melted far more than we're having
any evidence about it melting now.
So in other words...
this is a historical pattern again
but the world didn't come
to a country humpy, does it?
Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu
is head of the International
Arctic Research Center...
in Alaska.
The IARC is the world's leading
Arctic research institute.
Professor Akasofu
insists that over time
the ice caps are always
naturally expanding and contracting.
There are reports
from time to time
of big chunks of ice break
away from Antarctic continent.
Those mass have been
happening all the time
but because now we have a satellite
they can detect those.
That's why they become news.
These data, from NASA's
meteorological satellites,
shows the huge
natural expansion...
and contraction
of the Polar sea ice...
taken place in the 1990's.
I'd say all the TV programs
that debate to global warming
so big chunks of ice falling
from the edge of the glaciers
well people forget that
ice is always moving.
News reports frequently
show images
of ice breaking from
the edge of the Arctic
what they don't say is that...
this is as ordinary event in the Arctic
as falling leaves on
an English autumn day.
They ask me, they just see ice falling
from the edge of the greatest:
yes, that's spring breakup
that happens every year.
Press come to us towards
the time, you know:
"you want to say something...
...about the greenhouse disaster?",
and I say: "there is none".
Alarming television programs
raised the fear for prospect
a vast tidal waves flooding Britain.
But what causes the sea
level to change...
...and how fast does it happen?
Sea level changes over
the world in general
are governed fundamentally
by two factors:
what we would call
"local factors",
the relationship of
the sea to the land
which often by the way is
to do with the land rising or falling
and anything to do with the sea,
but if you're talking about
what we call eustatic changes of sea,
worldwide changes of sea,
that's through the thermal
expansion of the oceans,
nothing to do with melting ice.
And that's an enormously slow,
a long process.
People say: "Oh, I see the ocean...
doing this last year...
that means that something changed
in the atmosphere last year",
and this is not
necessarily true at all,
in fact this is actually
quite unlikely
because it can take hundreds
to thousand of years
for the deep ocean to
respond to forces
and changes
hat are taking place
at the surface.
It is also suggested that
even a mild rise in temperature
will lead to the spread northward
of deadly insect-born tropical
diseases like malaria.
But is this true?
Professor Paul Reiter
of the Pasteur Institute in Paris
is recognized as one of the world's
leading experts on malaria
and other insect-born diseases.
He is a member of the
World Health Organization,
expert advisory committee...
was chairman of the...
American Committee
of Medical Entomology...
of the American Society
for Tropical Medicine...
and lead author on
the health section...
of the US National
Assessment...
of the potential consequences
of climate variability.
As Professor Reiter
is eager to point out,
mosquitoes thrive in
very cold temperatures.
Mosquitoes are not
specifically tropical.
Most people would
realize that...
in temper regions there
are mosquitoes;
in fact, mosquitoes are
extremely abundant
in the Arctic.
The most devastating
epidemic of malaria...
was in the Soviet
Union in the 1920's:
there was something like
and something like
a tremendous
catastrophy...
that raised up to
the Arctic Circle...
Archangel had
and about 10 thousand deaths.
So it's not a
tropical disease.
Yet these people in the
global warming fraternity
invent the idea that...
malaria will move northward.
Climate scare stories cannot be blamed
solely on sloppy or
biased journalism.
According to Professor Reiter,
hysterical alarms have
been encouraged...
by the reports of the UN's IPCC.
On spread of malaria,
the IPCC warns us that:
"Mosquito species that
transmit malaria...
do not usually survive...
where the mean
winter temperature...
drops below 16-18C".
According to Professor Reiter
this is clearly untrue.
I was horrified to read the second
and the third assessment reports
because there was
so much misinformation,
without any kind of records
or virtually without mention
of the scientific literature,
the trully scientific literature,
literature by specialists
in those fields.
In a letter to the
Wall Street Journal,
Professor Frederick Seitz,
America's National
Academy of Sciences,
revealed that IPCC officials
had censored the
comments of scientists.
He said that:
"This report is not
the version...
that was approved by
the contributing scientists"
At least 15 key sections
of the science chapter
...had been deleted.
These included statements like:
"None of the studies cited
has shown clear evidence...
...that we can attribute
climate changes...
...to increases in
greenhouse gases."
"No study to date has
positively attributed...
...all or part
of the observed
climate changes to
man-made causes."
Professor Seitz concluded:
"I have never witnessed
a more disturbing corruption
of the peer-review process
than the events that
led to this IPCC report."
In its reply, the IPCC...
did not deny making
these deletions;
but it said that there
was no dishonesty...
or bias in the report,
and that uncertainties about...
...the cause of global warming
had been included.
The changes have been made,
it said, in response
to comments...
...from governments,
individual scientists
and non-governmental
organizations.
When I resigned from the IPCC
I thought this was the end of it;
but when I saw the final draft,
my name was still there.
I asked for it to be removed:
Well, they told me,
that I had contributed
so it'd remain there.
So I said: "No, I haven't contributed
because they haven't
listened to anything I said".
So in the end it was
quite a battle
but finally I threatened
legal actions against them
and they removed my name,
and I think this happens
a great deal;
those people who are specialists
but don't agree
with the polemic
and resigned...
(and there have been
a number that I know of)
they are simply put
on the author list...
and become part of these...
top scientists.
Research relating to
man-made global warming
is now one of the best
funded areas of science.
The US government alone spends...
...for than 4 billion dollars a year.
According to NASA
climatologist Roy Spencer,
scientists who speak out...
...against man-made global warming
have a lot to lose.
It's generally harder to get
research proposals funded
because of the stands
we've taken publicly,
and you'll find very few of us
that are willing to take public stand
because it does cut
into the research funding.
It is a common prejudice
that scientists
who do not agree...
with the theory of man-made
global warming...
must have been paid by
private industry to tell lies.
I get it all the time:
"You must be in the pay
of the multinationals".
Sadly, like most of the
scientists you'll talk to,
I haven't see a penny
from the multinationals.
I'm always accused of being paid
by oil and gas companies.
I've never received a nickel
from the oil and gas companies.
I joke about I wished
they would pay me
then I could afford
their product.
Whenever anybody says that...
I'm in the pay of an oil company,
I say my bank manager
would wish.
There's almost no private sector
investment in climatology
and yet, to be involved
in any reseach project
which involves an industry grant,
no matter how small,
and spell ruin to a
scientist's reputation.
Modern technology fuelled
by greenhouse gases.
Patrick Michaels is Professor
of Environmental Sciences
at the University of Virginia.
He was chair of the committee
on Applied Climatology
at the American Meteorological Society,
president of the American Association
of State Climatologists,
the author of three books on Meteorology,
...and an author and reviewer
on the UN's IPCC.
But when he conducted research
which was part funded
by the coal industry,
he found himself among those
under attack from
climate campaigners.
"British based corporations...
are some of the worst climate
criminals on the planet...
Shell is based in the UK,
right here, in London
and we have the right and the duty
to take it back into public ownership,
dismantle it, break it up
and send its managers
to rehabilitation training
and send its managers
to rehabilitation training.
But reasoned debate...
is not the only casualty in
the global warming alarm.
As international public
policy bears down
on industrial emissions of CO2,
the developing world is coming
under intense pressure
not to develop.
"I'm not expert on climate change,
I'm not scientist,
what I'm gonna say next
is a great big turn off,
is just that: turn it off!
Anything you don't need,
you're not using,
it's easier than you think
to make a difference."
Delegates from
around the world...
are flying into Nairobi
for a conference
sponsored by the UN
to talk about global warming.
Civil servants,
professional NGO campaigners,
carbon offset funder managers,
environmental journalists and others,
will discuss every aspect
of man-made climate change:
from how to promote
solar panels in Africa,
to the relationship between
global warming and sexism.
The conference lasts ten days;
the number of delegates
exceeds 6,000.
The billions of dollars
invested in climate science
means there's a
huge constituency
of people dependent
upon those dollars
and they will want to
see that carry forward,
happens in any burocracy.
Where I live we have local council,
a local council global warming officer.
There's a huge tail out there of people
who have in one way
or another
been recruited to join this
particular bandwagon.
Anybody who then
stands up and says:
"hey, wait a minute,
let's look at this coolly
and rationally and carefully,
and see actually how much merit,
how much this stands up,
they will be ostracized.
Scientists, accustomed to the relatively civility
and obscurity of academic life,
suddenly find themselves
publicly attacked...
if they dare to challenge
the theory of...
...man-made global warming,
...vilified by campaign groups
and even within
their own universities.
there's an old English saying:
"if you stand up in the coconut-shy,
they're gonna throw at you".
So I understand there's
going to be some of that,
but it gets pretty difficult
and pretty nasty and very personal.
And I've been death threats
and all sort of things
so I'm not doing it for my health.
These days, if you are skeptical
about the Litany around
climate change,
you are suddlely like as if
you are a Holocaust denier.
The environmental movement really
it is a political activist movement
and they have become hugely
influential at a global level.
And every politician
is aware of that today.
Whether you are in the left,
in the middle or the right,
you have to pay homage
to the environment.
In the past moth,
the global warming campaign
has won a great victory:
the United States government,
once a bastion of resistance,
has succumbed.
George Bush is now an allied.
Western governments have now
embraced the need for
international agreements
to restrain industrial production
in the developed and developing world.
But is it what cost?
Paul Driessen is a former
environmental campaigner.
My big concern with
global warming,
is that the policies
being pushed...
to supposedly prevent
global warming...
are having a disastrous effect
...on the world's poorest people.
Global warming campaigners say
it does not harm to be on the safe side;
even if the theory of man-made
climate change is wrong,
we should impose draconian measures
to cut carbon emissions, just in case.
They call this the
precautionary principle.
The precautionary principles
are very interesting beast.
It's basically used to promote
a particular agenda in ideology,
it's always used in one direction only.
It talks about the risks of
using a particular technology
fossil fuels for example,
but never about the
risks of not using it.
It never talks about the benefits
of having that technology.
Anne Mougela is about to cook...
...a meal for her children.
She is one of the 2 billion people,
a third of the world's population,
who have no access to electricity.
Instead, they must burn wood
or dried animal dung in their homes.
The indoor smoke this creates
is the deadliest form of
pollution in the world.
According to the World
Health Organization,
four million children
under the age of five...
die each year from
respiratory diseases...
caused by indoor smoke,
and many millions of
women die early...
from cancer and lung disease
for the same reason.
If you ask a rural person
to define development,
they'll tell you:
"yes I'll know I move
to the next level
when I have electricity".
Actually not having electricity
creates such a long
chain of problems...
cause the first thing
you miss is the light.
So you have to go to sleep earlier
because there's no light,
there's no reason to
stay awake, I mean,
you can't talk to each
other in darkness.
No refrigeration or
modern packaging...
means food cannot
be kept.
Fire in the hut is too smoky
and consumes too much
wood to be used as heating.
There is no hot water.
We in the West cannot
begin to imagine
how hard life is
without electricity.
The life expectancy of people...
who live like this in
terrifyingly short.
Their existance impoverished
in every way.
A few miles away the UN
is hosting its conference
on global warming
in its plush gated headquarters.
Gift shop is selling souvenirs
of peasant travel life
while delegates discuss...
how to promote what
are described as:
"sustainable forms of
electrical generation".
Africa has coal,
and Africa has oil,
but environmental groups
are campaigning...
against the use of these
sources of energy.
Instead, they say Africa...
and the rest of the
developing world...
...should use solar
and wind power.
A short drive out of Nairobi
we find our first solar panel.
A Kenian public health official
has brought us to a clinic
which serves several villages.
The only electrical
implements...
in the clinic are
the electric lights...
and a refrigerator in which
to keep vaccines,
medicine and blood samples.
Electricity is provided
by two solar panels.
- So what can you to do successfully?
- Lighting.
What happens when you put
lighting plus the refrigerator?
Tell us, what happens?
- It sounds an alarm?
- Yes.
- Can we maybe see that?
The solar panels allow Dr. Samuel Morangui
to use either the lights
or the refrigerator,
but not both at
the same time.
If he does, the
electricity shuts down.
Wind and solar power
are notoriously unreliable
as a source of electricity,
and are at least three
times more expensive
than conventional forms
of electrical generation.
The question would be
how many people in Europe,
how many people in the United States
are already using
that kind of energy,
and how cheap is it, you see,
if it's expensive for the Europeans,
if it's expensive for the Americans,
and we are talking
about poor Africans,
you know, it doesn't make sense.
The rich countries
can afford...
to engage in some
luxurious
experimentation with
other forms of energy,
but for us we are still
at the state of survival.
To former environmentalist
Paul Driessen,
the idea that the world's
poorest people
should be restricted
to using the world's
most expensive and inefficient
forms of electrical generation,
is the most morally
repugnant aspect...
of the global warming campaign.
Let me make one
thing perfectly clear:
if we are telling the Third World
that they can only have
wind and solar power,
what we are really telling them is:
"You cannot have electricity".
The challenge we have,
when we meet western
environmentalists
who say we must engage
in the use of solar panels
and wind energy
is how we can have
Africa industrialized,
because I don't see how a solar panel
is going to power a steel industry,
how a solar panel, you know,
is going to power maybe
some railway train network.
It might work maybe to
power a transistor radio.
I think one of the most pernicious aspects
of the modern environmental movement
is the romantization of peasant life,
and the idea that industrial societies
are the destroyers of the world.
One clear thing that emerges
from the old environmental debate
is the point that there's somebody
keen to kill the African dream,
and the African dream is to develop.
The environmental movement
has evolved into the
strongest force there is
for preventing development
in the developing countries.
We have been told
don't touch your resources,
don't touch your oil,
don't touch your coal,
that is suicide.
I think it's legitimate for me
to call them anti-human,
like OK, you don't have to think
humans are better than whales,
or better than owls,
or whatever if you don't
want to, right?
But surely it is not a good idea
to think of humans as sort of being scum,
you know, that is OK to have
hundreds of millions them
going blind or dead or whatever,
I just can't relate to that.
The theory of man-made
global warming
is now so firmly entrenched,
the voices of opposition
so effectively silenced,
it seems invincible,
untroubled by any
contrary evidence,
no matter how strong.
The global warming alarm
is now beyond reason.
There will be still people
who believe that this is
the end of the world
particularly when you
have, for example,
the chief scientist
of the UK,
telling people that by
the end of the century
the only habitable
place on the earth
will be the Antarctic.
And it may, humanity
may survive
thanks to some
breeding couples
who moved to
the Antarctic.
I mean this is hilarious.
It would be hilarious
actually if it weren't so sad.