As Canada becomes the first major nation to cut and run from the UN’s global warming scam a prominent environmentalist now plunges another deadly dagger into the soft underbelly of junk climate science.
Geologist and radio and TV broadcaster Leighton Steward succinctly points to eight crucial unanswered questions to slay the mythical climate dragon. The questions Steward poses should now be thrust to the fore as nations scramble for excuses to pull the plug on the Kyoto Protocol’s life support after the abject failure of the UN’s COP17 talks in Durban.
It’s these eight glaring anomalies in the science that Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, can add to those 14 billion other reasons (those dollars saved in unpaid UN penalties) why his nation was right to bail out of the biggest scam in history.
Canada, the new climate realist at the party, joins Japan and Russia in steadfastly refusing any new Kyoto-style climate commitments. The CO2-limiting treaty, signed by various world governments in 1997 expires in December 2012 with little if any prospect of a replacement in sight before 2020. But joy of joys, Kyoto is increasingly exposed for being premised on the discredited hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would precipitate runaway global warming.
Inconvenient Questions Routinely Dodged by Alarmist Advocates
In his analysis ‘The climate-change con artists’ for WorldNetDaily (December 9, 2011) Steward lists his eight straightforward key questions that climate science dodged for decades and which must be addressed before cash-strapped governments ever again vote to fatten UN coffers:
- Why can’t warming alarmists produce a single legitimate example of empirical evidence to support the manmade global-warming hypothesis?
- Why has Earth been warming for 300 years when man has only emitted measurable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere for the last 150 years?
- Why did Earth cool for 500 years before the recent 300-year warming and warm for several hundred years before that when even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says CO2 levels did not change?
- Why was the Medieval Warm Period, a thousand years ago, warmer than today even though the CO2 level was 38 percent lower than today?
- Why did many of Earth’s major glaciers in the Alps. Asia, New Zealand and Patagonia begin to retreat nearly half a century before the Industrial Revolution and man’s CO2 emissions?
- Of the last five interglacials, going back 400,000 years, why is our current interglacial the coolest of the five even though Earth’s CO2 level is about 35 percent higher?
- Why has our current 10,000-year-long Holocene epoch been warmer than today for 50 percent of the time when CO2 levels were about 35 percent lower than today?
- Why are correlations of Earth’s temperature with natural factors such as sunspot numbers, solar cycle lengths, solar magnetic variations and changes in major ocean currents all better than the correlation of Earth’s temperature with CO2 levels?
Why are such inconvenient yet crucial questions still left unanswered? What turns mere incompetence into wilful fraud is that these ‘researchers’ were also intentionally ignoring all evidence that disproved their hypothesis.
Governments and voters may now fairly infer that for the last 30 years a clique of government climate scientists in English-speaking nations deliberately wasted millions toying with unfeasible toy models hoping (but failing) to concoct a causal link between carbon and climate.
Two Degrees Celsius Drop in Temperatures ‘Plucked out of Thin Air’
The evidence for fraud gets more compelling when we add to the mix the leaked Climategate 2.0 emails of November 2011. Our conscientious friendly whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, England (UEA) shows us that government climatologists secretly concede the science to back Kyoto is paper-thin.
A main requirement is that the treaty demands a two degree Celsius drop in global temperatures. But top UEA climate scientist, Professor Jones, admits that no scientific basis was ever established for the “2 degrees Celsius” benchmark. Jones admits:
“The 2 deg C limit is talked about by a lot within Europe. It is never defined though what it means…. I know you don’t know the answer, but I don’t either! I think it is plucked out of thin air.”
[Phil Jones email to C. Kremer; Thursday, September 06, 2007 6:40 PM]
Thus opinion trumps hard evidence in the topsy-turvy world of climate science as further substantiated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). Buried deep in the 2007 IPCC Report is the disturbing fact that climatologists admit to “low” or “very low” understanding of 13 of the 15 factors that drive climate. [1.]
No wonder Professor Jones chose to break the law and refuse to honor Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests from independent researchers. There was so little evidence to back all those doomsaying climate claims and Jones didn’t want to be caught giving policymakers mere opinions (dressed as ‘fact’). He and his co-conspirators needed to keep milking that research cash cow. All the while, gleeful that their scientists were giving them ammunition to concoct apocalyptic scenarios to scare the public into paying ever higher taxes, the politicians went along with the scam. Just follow the money, as they say.
As Icecap reports, Penn State University, a hub of climate alarm, alone acquired $470,000,000 in federal grants and contracts between 2010 and 2011. After the Sandusky child sex scandal the world now sees just how Penn State values profit over principle.
The US government alone spent over $106 billion on climate research money between 2003 and 2010. Such munificence can buy a lot of ‘consensus’ in university laboratories. Opinionated and ill-informed faux climate science was thus used to justify a $100-billion-a-year “climate change reparation and mitigation” fund for poor nations.
That hotchpotch treaty, designed to severely restrict human emissions of an essential life-giving gas (CO2), offered nothing for the planet while impoverishing humanity by crippling industrial development.
Canada Saves Taxpayer Billions in Moment of Climate Realism
In short, Kyoto was never about climate change but more probably a nefarious UN vehicle for global population control and wealth redistribution – a veritable gravy train for corrupt and opinionated ideologues. No wonder Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, denounced Kyoto as one of Canada’s “biggest” policy errors. At the earliest opportunity (Monday 12, December 2011) the Canadian government sensibly invoked its legal rights and withdrew from the Kyoto agreement.
By bailing out of the UN’s climate Ponzi scheme Canada will now save itself having to pay $US14 billion ($A13.94 billion) in needless penalties for not achieving its Kyoto targets. Mike Hudema of Greenpeace Canada reacted to the news with the expected doomsayer hyperbole: “The Harper government has imposed a death sentence on many of the world’s most vulnerable populations by pulling out of Kyoto.”
Yet Canada’s environment minister aptly summed up the lunacy of the extreme cost of climate legislation, as it would be:
“the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads or closing down the entire farming and agriculture sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada.”
Thus by consideration of the aforesaid paucity of hard evidence and Leighton Steward’s Eight Unanswered Questions the Kyoto Protocol deserves to be tossed into the trash can of history. Rest assured, Canada will be just the first of a glut of nations abandoning pointless and moribund UN ‘emissions targets’ that do more harm than good.
Taxpayers have a right to demand this secretive, corrupt and wasteful culture in government science be swept away. It urgently needs replacing with a new era of principled, open and objective science.
[1.] IPCC: Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis; 2.9.1 Uncertainties in Radiative Forcing.
John O’Sullivan is a science writer and legal analyst, coordinator of the ‘Slayers’ and founder member of Principia Scientific International (PSI).
