Leatherhead Matters

MYTH – 1:  Planet earth is currently undergoing global warming

FACT
Accurate and representative temperature measurements from satellites and balloons show that the planet has cooled significantly in the last two or three years, losing in only 18 months 15% of the claimed warming which took over 100 years to appear — that warming was only one degree Fahrenheit (half of one degree Celsius) anyway, and part of this is a systematic error from groundstation readings which are inflated due to the ‘urban heat island effect’ i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming…and it is these, ‘false high’ ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models, which live up to the GIGO acronym — garbage in, garbage out.

MYTH – 2:  Even slight temperature rises are disastrous, ice caps will melt, people will die

FACT
In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, also parts of ice caps are melting yet other parts are thickening but this isn’t reported as much (home experiment: put some water in a jug or bowl, add a layer of ice cubes and mark the level — wait until the ice has melted and look again, the level will have fallen). Data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise, and fallen again, in the space of a human lifetime.

MYTH – 3:  Carbon Dioxide levels in our atmosphere at the moment are unprecedented (high).

FACT
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently only 350 parts per million have been over 18 times higher in the past at a time when cars, factories and power stations did not exist — levels rise and fall without mankind’s help.

 MYTH  – 4:  Mankind is pumping out carbon dioxide at a prodigious rate.

FACT
96.5% of all carbon dioxide emissions are from natural sources, mankind is responsible for only 3.5%, with 0.6% coming from fuel to move vehicles, and about 1% from fuel to heat buildings. Yet vehicle fuel (petrol) is taxed at 300% while fuel to heat buildings is taxed at 5% even though buildings emit nearly twice as much carbon dioxide!

 MYTH – 5: Carbon dioxide changes in the atmosphere cause temperature changes on the earth.

FACT
A report in the journal ‘Science’ in January of this year showed using information from ice cores with high time resolution that since the last ice age, every time when the temperature and carbon dioxide levels have shifted, the carbon dioxide change happened AFTER the temperature change, so that man-made global warming theory has put effect before cause — this shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile King Canute exercise! What’s more, both water vapour and methane are far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide but they are ignored.

 MYTH – 6:  Reducing car use will cut carbon dioxide levels and save the planet

FACT
The planet does not need saving, but taking this on anyway, removing every car from every road in every country overnight would NOT produce any change in the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, as can be seen using the numbers from Fact 4, and in any case it is pointless trying to alter climate by changing carbon dioxide levels as the cause and effect is the other way round — it is changes in the activity of the Sun that cause temperature changes on earth, with any temperature rise causing carbon dioxide to de-gas from the oceans.

 MYTH – 7:  The recent wet weather and flooding was caused by mankind through ‘global warming’

FACT
Extreme weather correlates with the cycle of solar activity, not carbon dioxide emissions or political elections, the recent heavy rainfall in winter and spring is a perfect example of this — it occurred at solar maximum at a time when solar maxima are very intense — this pattern may well repeat every 11 years until about 2045.

 MYTH – 8:  The climate change levy, petrol duty, CO2 car tax and workplace parking charges are justifiable environmental taxes.

FACT
As carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories does not have any measurable impact on climate, these taxes are ‘just another tax’ on enterprise and mobility, and have no real green credentials.

 MYTH – 9:  Scientists on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue reports that say ‘global warming’ is real and that we must do something now.

FACT
Scientists draft reports for the IPCC, but the IPCC are bureaucrats appointed by governments, in fact many scientists who contribute to the reports disagree with the ’spin’ that the IPCC and media put on their findings.
The latest report suggests that the next 100 years might see a temperature change of 6 Celsius yet a Lead Author for the IPCC (Dr John Christy UAH/NASA) has pointed out that the scenarios with the fastest warming rates were added to the report at a late stage, at the request of a few governments — in other words the scientists were told what to do by politicians.

 MYTH – 10:  There are only a tiny handful of maverick scientists who dispute that man-made global warming theory is true.

FACT
There are nearly 18,000 signatures from scientists worldwide on a petition called The Oregon Petition which says that there is no evidence for man-made global warming theory nor for any impact from mankind’s activities on climate.
Many scientists believe that the Kyoto agreement is a total waste of time and one of the biggest political scams ever perpetrated on the public.

As H L Mencken said:

the fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary … the desire to save the world usually fronts a desire to rule it.

See more debunking of global warming at The Great Global Warming Hoax