Global warming profiteers are wrong

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Christopher Monckton
April 3, 2008

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Climate alarmists are alarmed, scaremongers scared, for their predictions of catastrophe are not coming true. "Global warming" has stopped. For 10 years, average temperatures on earth have not risen. For seven years, the trend has been downward. The fall between January 2007 and January 2008 was the biggest since records began in 1880.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's climate panel, says it had better find out where it got its sums wrong. Lord Lawson, a former UK Treasury Secretary, says the panel should be scrapped.

Polls reveal that voters worldwide, bored with wolf-crying scientists, see "global warming" as just another pretext for more tax, regulation and empire-building. So the tiny clique of politicized scientists driving the scare are desperate to revive fear of doom. Otherwise, the multibillion-dollar climate-change industry is headed straight down the pan.

A favorite tactic is to blame any passing extreme-weather event on "global warming." This just in: "A 5,282-square-mile ice shelf has begun to collapse because of rapid climate change in the Antarctic Peninsula. The Wilkins is one of a string of ice shelves that have collapsed in the past 30 years. Larsen B disappeared in one month in 2002. Six similar collapses underscore the region's unprecedented warming."

Blood-curdling, but false. The Wilkins Ice Shelf, like its vanished neighbors, was not there in the medieval warm period, or in the 2,000-year-long Holocene Climate Optimum, when global temperatures were above today's.

Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who first spotted the disintegration in March, says the Wilkins has been in place for a few centuries. So it was not there before.

The Antarctic Peninsula represents just 2 percent of the continent, and still less of its ice mass. The vanished ice shelves covered a combined area just 1/55 the size of Texas. Massive chunks break away from Antarctica all the time, to re-grow in colder times. Whalers' logs going back centuries report sightings of vast icebergs hundreds of miles long.

Since regular temperature records were first kept 50 years ago, most of the continent has been cooling. The Antarctic peninsula is an exception. Local undersea volcanic activity may be partly to blame.

Another factor is the warming effect of the recently ended 70-year Solar Grand Maximum, when the sun was more active, and for longer, than at almost any similar period in the past 11,400 years. Long-term ocean changes have also contributed.

In the Arctic, the media reported less summer sea ice than at any time since records began. Most did not report that records began only 30 years ago; that at both Poles there is more sea ice now than ever since records began; that there are five times more polar bears today than 50 years ago; that the Arctic was warmer in the 1940s than today; or that the average thickness of the vast Greenland ice sheet grew by 2 inches yearly from 1993-2003.

Even the UN's climate panel says melting ice will not raise sea level by Al Gore's imagined 20 feet for several millennia, largely through natural causes.

Back in the Antarctic, winter has come, so ice-shelf disintegration has stopped. Even if Wilkins collapses altogether, melting ice shelves add not a millimeter to sea level: the ice is already floating. Niklas Moerner, who has spent his entire 30-year career studying sea level, says sea level will rise this century by little more than the 8 inches observed in the 20th century. Just 3 inches of that rise will come from ice-melt. "Global warming" profiteers had better start looking for another job -- or another scare.

Christopher Monckton was policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister and has lectured on climate at university physics departments and at corporate meetings.