CLIMATE CHANGE

A CURIOUS claim has become popular since Michael Mann produced his average global temperatures graph. The alarmists seem to think there has been virtually no global warming prior to the industrial revolution. A court recently ruled Mann had failed to supply the data to justify his “hockey stick”.

Yet the idea of no climate change prior to the industrial revolution like the fictional Dracula, just won’t die. In fact, it has gained momentum in respectable journals and the media. This has emboldened the alarmists to link correlation to causation, a most unscientific assumption.

An online article by Michael Collett for the ABC stated; “Climate scientists writing in the journal Nature have found there is no evidence for ‘globally coherent warm and cold periods’ over the past 2000 years prior to industrialisation.”

Skepticalscience.com says much the same.

A bemused Oxford Physics Professor Jonathan Jones stated; “Like many people I was dragged into this by the hockey stick. I was looking up some minor detail about the medieval warm period and discovered this weird parallel universe of people who apparently didn’t believe it had happened, and even more bizarrely appeared to believe that essentially nothing had happened in the world before the 20th century, so I started reading round the subject. And it soon became clear that the first extraordinary thing about the evidence for the hockey stick was how extraordinarily weak it was, and the second extraordinary thing was how desperate its defenders were to hide this fact. I’d always had an interest in pathological science, and it looked like I might have stumbled across a really good modern example. The hockey stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong. Climate-gate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year.”

The climate-gate email scandal has exposed the agenda of climate alarmists.

Should these climate change deniers silenced? No, neither side should be suppressed. Open debate in academia should be encouraged.

ERROL BRIANT, Toowoomba