Climate has been changing for aeons

THE climate is changing, as Farouk Cassim notes, but is it anything to panic about?

First, climate is always changing, and has been for as long as we can tell going back millions of years. My great-grandfather was born at the end of the Little Ice Age, when they had crop failures and winter fairs on the River Thames.

Since then the world has been warming, and it started long before we began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in industrial quantities.

If we ignore the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) computer models and focus on the observed data, the temperature is rising, according to the IPCC Summary for Policymakers 2018 as follows, “observed global mean surface temperature for the decade 2006-2015 was 0.87°C (likely between 0.75°C and 0.99°C) higher than the average over the 1850-1900 period (very high confidence).”

This isn’t the stuff of doom when 1850 was around the end of the cold period. The sea level is rising but at a steady rate of around 30cm per century, and that’s no cause to panic.

If Hurricane Laura is, as you say, “the worst storm in 150 years”, then you are saying there were worse storms a century-and-a-half ago, which means in turn there is no correlation-link to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

It is not the failure of the DA to declare a state of climate emergency that will cost Cape Town dearly, but rather yielding to the unsupported claims of hysterical climate activists and wasting vast sums of money, which we desperately need for more immediate problems, on a crisis that is more in the mind than in the scientific data.