More readers’ thoughts on Keith Bryer’s climate opinion,

LIKE a child poking a large bear, Keith Bryer has understandably provoked the wrath of the “global warmers” all of whom accuse him of cherry picking an “inconvenient truth”, that of the whopping increase in the Arctic ice sheet.

This they say is just a blip on the longterm trends, but for your information, Dr King et al, another inconvenient truth that Bryer did not mention is that the evidence shows that there has been no warming of the earth for the last 17 years.

At least, this was the broad consensus in the UK when I spent September 2013 there. That man-made global warming (MMGW) was considered a myth was summed up by noted columnist Christopher Booker in an article in the Sunday Telegraph (22.9.2013), “The ice is not melting, yet the scaremongers blunder on”.

Much was made in the press of the nonsensical predictions made by a prominent climate change scientist that the Alps would be ice free by 2013 and the claim by the BBC that the entire Arctic ice sheet would have melted by the same date, not to mention the falsification of results by certain universities.

That warming has not occurred means that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to somehow continue to spin the idea that, despite a lack of hard evidence, catastrophic MMGW is “extremely likely”, otherwise their cushy jobs are on the line.

Also at risk is the lucrative industry arising around carbon emission taxes and, of course, the lucrative funding to universities!

Consequently, I was surprised that, on my return, the first article I read in The Mercury was the warning, “As things stand, the world is set for an average global temperature hike of at least 2ºC before the end of the century”.

There was more nonsense later (Mercury, 18.11.2013) under the headline, “Preparing for a future eight degrees hotter”, gleaned from “fact sheets” provided by the government (surely an oxymoron).

As usual there is the rider, “the department acknowledges it is hard to make accurate predictions because of the many uncertainties and inherent complexity of climate change”, which was the only sensible statement in the article.

The question that should concern people is how one determines the temperature of the earth? How does one confidently state that the Pacific Ocean’s temperature has risen by 0.5ºC in the last so many months? How does one say that the earth will warm by 2ºC by a certain date and the Alps will be ice-free by 2013?

The answer of course is that all these “facts” are “predicted” using “super computer modelling”, which surely has to be the curse of modern science!

King admits “climate change implies volatility”, and if he is dealing with volatile parameters, how can his computer model predict future changes in climate when these same climate scientists cannot correctly predict the weather six months hence?

Fortunately there were no super computer models available to climate scientists in 1963 when the seas off Britain froze.

These scientists then claimed this heralded the onset of a new ice age and, had they available the super computers of their modern contemporaries, they would probably have been able to predict, to the nearest month, when the Thames would have become a glacier. It seems it is in man’s nature to thrive on scare stories based on junk science that is picked up and promoted by the media. It is fortunate that these scares are cyclic; once the scare becomes boring and the consequences fail to eventuate, something new is cooked up.

The last big scare (among a long list of others) not long ago was the certainty that we were all going to die because CFC’s were destroying the ozone layer. Extravagant claims, some by local scientists, claimed that it would take hundreds of years for the ozone layer to recover.

One local scientist was even able to give the mass of krill (to the nearest ton!) that would die because of the “hole” over the Antarctic. All of these claims have been proved to be computer generated nonsense – the hole is a natural phenomenon.

But there is money to be made out of scare stories; scientists cashed in on “ozone hole research”, Nobel Prizes were awarded and fortunes were made by industries replacing CFCs. Now that we have moved on to Global Warming, when last did anyone hear of the anticipated horrors due to the slow recovery of the ozone hole?

All these scare stories ignore the elephant in the room – the indisputable fact that we humans are breeding ourselves to extinction.

Much was made in the press of the nonsensical predictions made by a prominent climate change scientist that the Alps would be ice free by 2013…