Do scientists now believe the planet gets cooler when the sun gets hotter?
The science journal Nature recently published research relating to the sun’s energy output. The study, led by Professor Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London, measured solar warming during a three-year period between 2004 and 2007 when solar activity waned at the end of an eleven-year cycle. The data apparently showed increases in the amount of light and heat reaching the Earth! When challenged about the implications for climate change forecasting, Professor Haigh said: “It may suggest that we don’t know that much about the Sun. It casts no aspersions at all upon the climate models.”
Huh? Does she mean the sun is not a factor in the climate models?
Isn’t it bad enough that these models have been based on flimsy evidence such as the tree ring data from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia? Last year, leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit revealed that scientists, anxious to make measurements fit the IPCC’s iconic ‘hockey stick’ graph, found themselves having to ‘cherry-pick’ the data, eventually ignoring samples from all but one single tree, YAD061, dubbed the most influential tree in the world.
The computer models have also been decidedly shaky on the significance of other factors in the context of global warming. Water vapour accounts for about 95 percent of atmospheric greenhouse gases but is often ignored by those who want us to buy into the green agenda. Those who do acknowledge its relevance insist that the effect of increased temperature on water vapour is to amplify the warming process, but they often neglect to factor in the resultant cloud cover. Clouds tend to cast shadows over the best global climate prediction models.
How is it possible for research to be so misleading? Well, unfortunately, it probably comes down to who is funding it.
Global warming guru Al Gore is chairman of a carbon trading firm. He, and others, are making utterly mind-boggling sums of money out of our naive inclination to trust politicians and scientists who may be complicit in the greatest scam of all time – the carbon trading market.
By focusing on carbon trading and carbon offsets, the developed world has found a way of appearing to reduce CO2 emissions while doing nothing of the kind. Carbon trading may be thriving as a mechanism for redistributing wealth among companies and traders, but it’s not achieving a net reduction in emissions. Its rationale is evaporating into the upper atmosphere along with all the CO2. Companies find it cheaper to buy carbon credits than to actually cut emissions and, to make matters worse, they buy the credits from those who were allocated too many in the first place! The entire scheme is flawed.
As for carbon offsets – these are effectively a licence to pollute beyond agreed limits, on the supposition that reductions will be made elsewhere sometime in the future! Those who labour under the misapprehension that carbon offset projects benefit poor countries may be interested to know that they are often merely land grabs resulting in either exploitation or displacement of indigenous peoples. In 2002, for example, the Uganda Wildlife Authority evicted more than 300 families from the Mount Elgon area and destroyed their homes and crops in preparation for a reforestation project. Offsets are a shabby figleaf for businesses embarrassed about their failure to make real reductions in their consumption of “dirty” energy.
If the rapidly expanding carbon trading market collapses, the fallout will make the subprime mortgage crisis look like peanuts. If Barack Obama succeeds in pushing his carbon trading bill through the Senate, it could easily become a $2 trillion market within a few years. Complex financial instruments (futures and other derivatives) are being devised in order to increase speculative profit, further inflating the “carbon bubble”.
A market in which money chases intangible or bogus assets is doomed to failure.
Obviously, whatever we think about the science and the case for anthropogenic global warming, it’s imperative that we address the issue of dwindling finite resources. I also believe money wasted on compliance with climate change agreements would be better spent on eliminating hunger and malnutrition and providing universal access to clean water and sanitation.
There are better and more sensible ways of conserving the planet’s riches than allowing this carbon market madness to go unchecked. The bubble is growing bigger and getting more pear-shaped all the time. The sooner we prick it and dismantle the associated markets, the better.
