Sunspots could eclipse drought

Warwick Stanley

March 19, 2007

The worst drought in a century could end this year, according to a scientist who has linked the cycle of sunspots and the “looping” of the sun’s magnetic field to Australia’s weather patterns.

Associated Professor Robert Baker, of Armidale’s University of New England, says his tracking of sunspots since records were kept in 1876 shows that switches in the sun’s poles and magnetic field every 11 years are consistent in their effect on Australia’s weather.

He said the current stage of the cycle, since the last “flip” in 2001, meant that the eastern half of Australia could look forward to 18 months of heavy rain and a 10-year “window” of average falls in which to prepare for an even worse dry period in the 2020s.

“I’m looking at the location of sunspots between 40 degrees north and south of the solar equator, their migration and therefore, in terms of this, looping of the magnetic field,” Prof Baker said.

“The sun’s magnetic field is now in a similar position to what it was in 1924 and 1925, when eastern Australia had particularly good rainfall.

“If this tracking continues, we can expect average to heavy rainfall for eastern Australia within six months and into 2008.”

Prof Baker said sunspot activity was increasing as it normally did in this part of the sun’s magnetic cycle, which has been a historic pointer to above-average rainfall.

While long-range weather prediction using the sun or any other measure was problematic, Prof Baker said his own theory pointed to 2009 as the next period of potential drought in Australia.

In the longer term, an even worse drought could await the country in the 2020s.

Prof Baker said his system of analysis simply complemented other methods of weather prediction and did not take into account the effects of carbon emissions on climate change.

“If this coming cycle of predicted rainfall does not occur, it will be undeniable that carbon emissions are impacting on our climate in a very profound way,” Prof Baker said.

“In using this system as opposed to other methods (of long-range weather prediction), I’m trying to be as transparent as possible.

“This is a very useful tool - this is the engine that drives the whole climate system.”

But Prof Baker said even if his predictions were borne out and Australia received solid rainfall over the next 18 months, government and water consumers should not rest on their laurels.

“There will still be a big cause for concern,” Prof Baker said.

“We will simply have a 10-year window of opportunity to get our act together.”

 

SCIENCE@NASA

Solar Storm Warning 

March 10, 2006: It’s official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.

Like the quiet before a storm.

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming—the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn’t tell that a solar storm was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn’t exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many other modern technologies.

Dikpati’s prediction is unprecedented. In nearly-two centuries since the 11-year sunspot cycle was discovered, scientists have struggled to predict the size of future maxima—and failed. Solar maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable, as in 1805, obeying no obvious pattern.

The key to the mystery, Dikpati realized years ago, is a conveyor belt on the sun.

We have something similar here on Earth—the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, popularized in the sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow. It is a network of currents that carry water and heat from ocean to ocean—see the diagram below. In the movie, the Conveyor Belt stopped and threw the world’s weather into chaos.

The sun’s conveyor belt is a current, not of water, but of electrically-conducting gas. It flows in a loop from the sun’s equator to the poles and back again. Just as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt controls weather on Earth, this solar conveyor belt controls weather on the sun. Specifically, it controls the sunspot cycle.

Solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science & Technology Center (NSSTC) explains: “First, remember what sunspots are—tangled knots of magnetism generated by the sun’s inner dynamo. A typical sunspot exists for just a few weeks. Then it decays, leaving behind a ‘corpse’ of weak magnetic fields.”

Enter the conveyor belt.

“The top of the conveyor belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up the magnetic fields of old, dead sunspots. The ‘corpses’ are dragged down at the poles to a depth of 200,000 km where the sun’s magnetic dynamo can amplify them. Once the corpses (magnetic knots) are reincarnated (amplified), they become buoyant and float back to the surface.” Presto—new sunspots!

All this happens with massive slowness. “It takes about 40 years for the belt to complete one loop,” says Hathaway. The speed varies “anywhere from a 50-year pace (slow) to a 30-year pace (fast).”

When the belt is turning “fast,” it means that lots of magnetic fields are being swept up, and that a future sunspot cycle is going to be intense. This is a basis for forecasting: “The belt was turning fast in 1986-1996,” says Hathaway. “Old magnetic fields swept up then should re-appear as big sunspots in 2010-2011.”

Like most experts in the field, Hathaway has confidence in the conveyor belt model and agrees with Dikpati that the next solar maximum should be a doozy. But he disagrees with one point. Dikpati’s forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.

“History shows that big sunspot cycles ‘ramp up’ faster than small ones,” he says. “I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear in late 2006 or 2007—and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011.”

Who’s right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming.

Oceans to blame for weather, says expert

By Jeff Franks in New Orleans

April 07, 2007

NATURAL changes in ocean currents are to blame for increased Atlantic hurricane activity in recent years, not man-made global warming as many scientists believe, hurricane forecaster William Gray said overnight.

“I think the whole human-induced greenhouse gas thing is a red herring,” Gray said in a speech at the National Hurricane Conference.

Mr Gray, whose annual forecasts for the hurricane season are closely watched, said the Earth has warmed the past 30 years, but that it was due to flucuations in ocean currents. He predicted a cooling off period would begin in five to 10 years as the currents change again.

“I see climate change as due to the ocean circulation pattern. I see this as a major cause of climate change,” Gray told the meteorologists and emergency management specialist who attend the annual conference.

The Atlantic had destructive hurricane seasons in 2004, when four major hurricanes struck Florida, and 2005 when Katrina and Rita badly damaged the US Gulf Coast.

In 2005, there were a record 28 named storms and 15 hurricanes, but last year was much calmer with 10 tropical storms and five hurricanes.

This year, Mr Gray’s forecasting team is predicting an active season with 17 named storms, nine of which will become hurricanes.

Periods of intense Atlantic hurricane activity are not unusual and follow the change of a key Atlantic Ocean current that shifts every 30 years or so to bring warmer ocean waters that encourage hurricane formation, Mr Gray said.

He said carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere have increased, but periods of hurricane activity preceded the build-up of the gas, which is blamed for warming and is the byproduct mostly of fossil fuel burning.

The changing ocean current “goes back for hundreds of thousands of years,” Mr Gray said. “These are natural processes. We shouldn’t blame them on humans and CO2.”

Mr Gray said the Atlantic current appears to change because of a rise and fall in water salinity.

The combative professor dismissed the work of scientific colleagues who have linked global warming and increased hurricane activity, saying they were simply seeking grant money.

“You’ve heard a lot of foolishness over the last few years,” said Mr Gray.

Cow Emissions Harm Planet Far More Than C02 From Cars
By Geoffrey Lean
Environment Editor
4-19-7

Meet the world’s top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow.
 
A United Nations report has identified the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.
 
The 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow, also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world’s 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.
 
Burning fuel to produce fertiliser to grow feed, to produce meat and to transport it - and clearing vegetation for grazing - produces 9 per cent of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. And their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another, methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.
 
Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world’s emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.
 
Ranching, the report adds, is “the major driver of deforestation” worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert.Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk.
 
Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health.
 
The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating “dead zones” devoid of life. One is up to 21,000sqkm, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi.
 
The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases.
 
 
Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD
Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural Economics
Univ of West Indies
 
 
 
Please visit my “Emerging Diseases” message board at:
http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php
Also my new website:
http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/
Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
Go with God and in Good Health

»   Look to Mars for the truth on global warming The Deniers — Part IX

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post

Friday, February 02, 2007

Climate change is a much, much bigger issue than the public, politicians, and even the most alarmed environmentalists realize. Global warming extends to Mars, where the polar ice cap is shrinking, where deep gullies in the landscape are now laid bare, and where the climate is the warmest it has been in decades or centuries.

“One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age,” NASA scientist William Feldman speculated after the agency’s Mars Odyssey completed its first Martian year of data collection. “In some low-latitude areas, the ice has already dissipated.” With each passing year more and more evidence arises of the dramatic changes occurring on the only planet on the solar system, apart from Earth, to give up its climate secrets.

The series

Statistics needed — The Deniers Part I
Warming is real — and has benefits — The Deniers Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science — The Deniers Part III
Polar scientists on thin ice — The Deniers Part IV
The original denier: into the cold — The Deniers Part V
The sun moves climate change — The Deniers Part VI
Will the sun cool us? — The Deniers Part VII
The limits of predictability — The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming — The Deniers Part IX
Limited role for C02 — the Deniers Part X

NASA’s findings in space come as no surprise to Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory. Pulkovo — at the pinnacle of Russia’s space-oriented scientific establishment — is one of the world’s best equipped observatories and has been since its founding in 1839. Heading Pulkovo’s space research laboratory is Dr. Abdussamatov, one of the world’s chief critics of the theory that man-made carbon dioxide emissions create a greenhouse effect, leading to global warming.

“Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians,” he told me. “These parallel global warmings — observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth — can only be a straightline consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance.”

The sun’s increased irradiance over the last century, not C02 emissions, is responsible for the global warming we’re seeing, says the celebrated scientist, and this solar irradiance also explains the great volume of C02 emissions.

“It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth’s oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations.”

Dr. Abdussamatov goes further, debunking the very notion of a greenhouse effect. “Ascribing ‘greenhouse’ effect properties to the Earth’s atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated,” he maintains. “Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away.”

The real news from Saint Petersburg — demonstrated by cooling that is occurring on the upper layers of the world’s oceans — is that Earth has hit its temperature ceiling. Solar irradiance has begun to fall, ushering in a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012 to 2015. The depth of the decline in solar irradiance reaching Earth will occur around 2040, and “will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-60” lasting some 50 years, after which temperatures will go up again.

Because of the scientific significance of this period of global cooling that we’re about to enter, the Russian and Ukrainian space agencies, under Dr. Abdussamatov’s leadership, have launched a joint project to determine the time and extent of the global cooling at mid-century. The project, dubbed Astrometry and given priority space-experiment status on the Russian portion of the International Space Station, will marshal the resources of spacecraft manufacturer Energia, several Russian research and production centers, and the main observatory of Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences. By late next year, scientific equipment will have been installed in a space-station module and by early 2009, Dr. Abdussamatov’s space team will be conducting a regular survey of the sun.

With the data, the project will help mankind cope with a century of falling temperatures, during which we will enter a mini ice age.

“There is no need for the Kyoto Protocol now. It does not have to come into force until at least 100 years from no w,” Dr. Abdussamatov concluded. “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse- gas emissions.”

Lawrence Solomon@nextcity.com



- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.Urban-Renaissance.org

CV OF A DENIER:

Habibullo Abdussamatov, born in Samarkand in Uzbekistan in 1940, graduated from Samarkand University in 1962 as a physicist and a mathematician. He earned his doctorate at Pulkovo Observatory and the University of Leningrad.

He is the head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academies of Sciences’ Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station’s Astrometry project, a long-term joint scientific research project of the Russian and Ukranian space agencies.




Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Global warming debunked

By ANDREW SWALLOW - The Timaru Herald

Saturday, 19 May 2007

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.

Man’s contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn’t change the climate if we tried, he maintained.

“We’re all going to survive this. It’s all going to be a joke in five years,” he said.

A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it.

“It is time to attack the myth of global warming,” he said.

Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained.

“If we didn’t have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at minus 18 deg C but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is plus 15 deg C, all the time.”

The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.

However, carbon dioxide as a result of man’s activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively.

“That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then,” he said.

“We couldn’t do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates.”

Yet the Greens continued to use phrases such as “The planet is groaning under the weight of CO2” and Government policies were about to hit industries such as farming, he warned.

“The Greens are really going to go after you because you put out 49 per cent of the countries emissions. Does anybody ask 49 per cent of what? Does anybody know how small that number is?

“It’s become a witch-hunt; a Salem witch-hunt,” he said.

Excerpt from Fox News:

New Research Adds Twist to Global Warming Debate

12 October 2006

A new study provides experimental evidence that cosmic rays may be a major factor in causing the Earth’s climate to change.

Given the stakes in the current debate over global warming, the research may very well turn out to be one of the most important climate experiments of our time – if only the media would report the story.

Ten years ago, Danish researchers Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen first hypothesized that cosmic rays from space influence the Earth’s climate by effecting cloud formation in the lower atmosphere. Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover – that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth’s climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the sun’s magnetic field which shields the Earth from cosmic rays. According to the hypothesis, then, less cosmic radiation would mean less cloud formation and, ultimately, warmer temperatures – precisely what was observed during the 20th century.

If correct, the Svensmark hypothesis poses a serious challenge to the current global warming alarmism that attributes the 20th century’s warmer temperatures to manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Just last week, Svensmark and other researchers from the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Centre published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A – the mathematical, physical sciences and engineering journal of the venerable Royal Society of London – announcing that they had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.

In the experiment, cosmic radiation was passed through a large reaction chamber containing a mixture of lower atmospheric gases at realistic concentrations that was exposed to ultraviolet radiation from lamps that mimic the action of the sun’s rays. Instruments traced the chemical action of the penetrating cosmic rays in the reaction chamber.

The data collected indicate that the electrons released by the cosmic rays acted as catalysts to accelerate the formation of stable clusters of sulfuric acid and water molecules – the building blocks for clouds.

“Many climate scientists have considered the linkages from cosmic rays to clouds as unproven,” said Friis-Christensen who is the director of the Danish National Space Centre. “Some said there was no conceivable way in which cosmic rays could influence cloud cover. [This] experiment now shows they do so, and should help to put the cosmic ray connection firmly onto the agenda of international climate research,” he added.

But given the potential significance of Svensmark’s experimentally validated hypothesis, it merits more than just a place on the agenda of international climate research – it should be at the very top of that agenda.

Low-level clouds cover more than a quarter of the Earth’s surface and exert a strong cooling effect. Observational data indicate that low-cloud cover can vary as much as 2 percent in 5 years which, in turn, varies the heating at the Earth’s surface by as much as 1.2 watts per square meter during that same period.

“That figure can be compared with about 1.4 watts per square meter estimated by the [United Nations’] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the greenhouse effect of all the increase in carbon dioxide in the air since the Industrial Revolution,” says Svensmark.
That is, cloud cover changes over a 5-year period can have 85 percent of the temperature effect on the Earth that has been claimed to have been caused by nearly 200 years of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. The temperature effects of cloud cover during the 20th century could be as much as 7 times greater than the alleged temperature effect of 200 years worth of additional carbon dioxide and several times greater than that of all additional greenhouse gases combined.

So although it has been taken for granted by global warming alarmists that human activity has caused the climate to warm, Svensmark’s study strongly challenges this assumption.

Given that the cosmic ray effect described by Svensmark would be more than sufficient to account for the net estimated temperature change since the Industrial Revolution, the key question becomes: Has human activity actually warmed, cooled or had no net impact on the planet?

Between manmade greenhouse gas emissions, land use patterns and air pollution, humans may have had a net impact on global temperature. But if so, no one yet knows the net sign (that is, plus/minus) of that impact.

Not surprisingly, Svensmark’s potentially myth-shattering study has so far been largely ignored by the media.

Though published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A, it’s only been reported – and briefly at that – in The New Scientist (Oct. 7), Space Daily (Oct. 6) and the Daily Express (U.K., Oct. 6).

The media’s lack of interest hardly reflects upon the importance of Svensmark’s experiment so much as it reflects upon the media’s and global warming lobby’s excessive investment in greenhouse gas hysteria.

 

Danish National Space Centre

Global warming and cosmic radiation

What does cosmic radiation have to do with global warming? Read more about what researchers at the DNSC think.

The Earth’s climate is always changing. This has been the case in the geological and historical time and even during the last 150 years, where systematic climate measurements have been made, we have seen clear climate changes.

Climate changes have both a scientific and a social perspective. The social perspective is associated with the range of climate change that can be attributed to the increasing human induced contribution. The scientific perspective is an endeavour to understand the full complex system of the various sources of climate change and their mutual interactions.

The Danish National Space Center, DNSC, comprises the country’s largest collected expertise in the scientific disciplines that play a major and documented role in the understanding of climate change both in geological and historical time, namely variations in solar activity. DNSC regards it essential that this collected expertise is being used in an attempt to understand the natural causes of climate change in order to evaluate the contribution of natural causes to global change. Taking into account the large uncertainty associated with the estimated human contribution, a good research based estimate of the range of natural climate variations is an essential information.

DNSC is basing its effort in this area on own scientific results – observational, experimental, and theoretical. The scientific results have been published internationally and indicate that the varying activity of the Sun is indeed the largest and most systematic contributor to natural climate variations. The effect goes through solar modulation of the cosmic radiation, which affects the formation of aerosols and thereby also the formation of clouds. Even though a physical mechanism connecting cosmic rays to aerosol formation has been found experimentally, no climate model has yet made an attempt to include such an effect.

That there exists a significant contribution from solar activity variations to global temperature increase does not, however, exclude other contributions to the rising global temperature, natural as well as human. DNSC, however, is focused on establishing the best possible and scientifically based evaluation of the size of solar induced effects on climate.

 

 

Open your eyes to see who really is doing the swindling


Miranda Devine
May 27, 2007

After months of dithering, the ABC has announced it will broadcast, but not until July, the controversial British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, a science-backed rebuttal of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Dark conspiracy theories have ensued. Surely the national broadcaster would never air such a dangerous, subversive heresy unless forced to by a board stacked with execrable right wingers.

“We’re not into censorship,” ABC science journalist Robyn Williams said while doing back-to-back interviews last week denouncing the program. But he advised the TV division not to buy it anyway.

ABC director of television Kim Dalton wrote an article defending himself against charges that “our decision to show such a documentary is dangerous and damaging” because the debate on climate change “is over”. He cited several ABC shows which embrace the concept of human-caused climate change as some sort of antidote to TGGWS. “And if it were available to us we would love to show Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth”. What’s the bet Williams wouldn’t be advising against that one. In one interview he likened TGGWS to “flaky stuff” such as Psychic Detectives.

But as anyone who watches TGGWS on the internet can see, it is a legitimate documentary which, like Gore’s much-lauded polemic, takes sides in the man-made global warming debate.

It is a story about “how a theory about climate turned into a political ideology … a story of censorship and intimidation … of the distortion of a whole area of science … a cautionary tale of how a media scare became the defining idea of a generation”.

Co-founder-turned-critic of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, tells how climate change theory became the main focus of extremists after “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 used green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation than … ecology or science.”

Director Martin Durkin’s premise is that climate change has always occurred, and is a result of the sun, not man-made carbon dioxide.

Interviewing reputable scientists, he rebuts the assertions of An Inconvenient Truth, including the all-important ice-core data on which Gore’s argument rests. Gore claimed ice cores taken from the Antarctic showed earth’s temperature rising as CO2 in the atmosphere increased. But Dunkin’s film asserts that it’s not increased CO2 that causes warming but vice versa; as the atmosphere warms, due to increased solar activity, more CO2 is produced by the oceans.

Admittedly, one of the main scientists for this argument, Carl Wunsch, MIT professor of oceanography, claimed later to have been misrepresented by Durkin and branded the program “propaganda”.

But why shouldn’t we hear dissident scientists? Why shouldn’t we be told humans produce a small fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere each year, compared with volcanoes, bacteria, animals, rotting vegetation and the oceans?

“Isn’t it bizarre to think that it’s humans, when we’re filling up our cars and turning on our lights, that we’re the ones controlling climate?” asks Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London. “Just look up in the sky. Look at that massive thing, the sun. Even humans, at our present 6 billion, are minute compared to that.”

Why shouldn’t we hear about the 2005 House of Lords inquiry, which first examined the economics of climate change, expressing concern about the objectivity of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Its report was ignored and superseded by the Stern review whose shameless cheerleading for climate alarm orthodoxy received a superstar reception which sealed the fate of the heretics. Now even John Howard, George Bush and Rupert Murdoch are claimed as converts - or at least realists. The market may have capitulated but we don’t all have to close our minds.