The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change New York, March 2nd - March 4th) was attended by over 500 scientists, economists and policy-makers, with over 100 speakers delivering keynote addresses or participating in panel discussions.
At the end of their deliberations they issued The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, which reads as follows …
We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,
Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;
Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;
Recognising that the causes and extent of recently observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed 'consensus' among climate experts are false;
Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering;
Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:
Hereby declare:
That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity's real and serious problems.
That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.
That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.
That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.
That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.
Now, therefore, we recommend -
That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as An Inconvenient Truth.
That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.
Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.
Well, come on, lads, don't pull your punches - tell it like it is!
As Melanie Phillips wrote in the Spectator, "500 scientists, economists, policymakers and business leaders, eh? Bang goes that consensus!"
She also questions "why has the UK media, in pretty well all its forms, failed to report 'The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change', signed in New York on March 4, 2008?" Sadly, I think we know the answer, and it is one that reflects very badly on our supine UK media (the only exception appears to be The Sunday Telegraph). If ever evidence were needed of the dangerous 'control' of our media by pernicious grand narratives, then this is surely it."
Phillips also reports the extreme difficulty some scientists have found in expressing their views …
Scientists "… talked mostly of work and upcoming papers and went through the standard ritual of griping about journal editors and the ridiculous hoops we sometimes have to jump through to get papers published. But some of the guys had absolute horror stories of what happened to them when they tried getting papers published that explored non-consensus views. Really outrageous and unethical behaviour on the parts of some editors. I was shocked," wrote conference participant Dr. William M. Briggs, a climate statistician who serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.
Prominent Hungarian Physicist Dr. Miklós Zágoni, a former global warming activist who recently reversed his views about man-made climate fears and is now a sceptic, presented scientific findings at the conference refuting rising CO2 fears. Zágoni's scientific mentor Hungarian scientist, Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist, resigned from his post working with NASA because he was disgusted with the agency's lack of scientific freedom. Miskolczi, who also presented his peer-reviewed findings at the conference, said he wanted to release his new research that showed "runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," but he claims NASA refused to allow him. 'Unfortunately, my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results," Miskolczi said.
Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, noted that many of his scientific colleagues did not attend the conference because they "feared their attendance might affect their employment." D'Aleo described the fear of retribution many sceptics face as a "sad state of affairs." But D'Aleo noted that he believes there is 'very likely a silent majority of scientists in climatology, meteorology, and allied sciences who do not endorse what is said to be the consensus position.'
It's hard for us ordinary blokes to understand just why the big guns are all lined up on the side of the climate hysterics. We know the whole thing is an enormous hoax, but what's in it for them?
The answer is two-fold: money and power. Global Warming hysteria is massively well funded, partly by governments - and the British government is the worst offender since it was Margaret Thatcher who set the ball rolling in the first place - who see it as a means of exercising more and more control over their citizens, and of denying developing countries the opportunity to become competitors by properly exploiting their wealth of minerals and cheap labour.
It's often claimed by hysterics that all us sceptics are in the pay of the oil industry- so-called "Big Oil". The fact is that for every dollar spent on denying man-made Global warming, $2.6 are spent on promulgating "the Big Lie".
The other great source of financial support for climate hysteria is businessmen like Al Gore who have vast stakes in the "carbon exchange" industry and are making obscene profits basically by selling something that (a) doesn't exist, (b) wouldn't work if it did, and (c) nobody needs.
You can sign up to indicate your support of the Declaration here, even if you're not a scientist but just a "concerned citizen". You'll need to copy some of the text, edit it and paste it into an email.
And while we're mentioning the slanted version of scientific fact peddled by most of the press in this country, "Climate change soon could kill thousands in UK" was the headline in the Guardian about a new report from two UK health bodies, the Department of Health (DoH) and the Health Protection Agency (HPA). "Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK 2008" was an update on an earlier 2002 report. It looked at a range of areas that might be affected by rising temperatures: flooding and windstorms; vector-borne diseases like malaria and food-borne diseases like salmonella; water quality; the direct effect of temperature on health; air pollution; and sunshine.
Based on the decidedly shaky imaginings of the by-now discredited IPCC, the report predicts:
• Floods will become less frequent in spring but more common in late summer, but few people die in such events and the wider health effects are uncertain;
• Outbreaks of insect-borne diseases will remain rare, and will be as much due to changes in land-use and activity - like spending more time in wooded areas - than climate change;
• Warm summers could increase the risk of food poisoning, so further improvements in food hygiene standards are desirable;
• The quality of untreated water might decline as more bacteria will be present, but this is 'unlikely to pose a threat to well-managed water treatment plants';
• Air pollution problems caused by small particles, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide will be unaffected or will fall, but periods of high ground-level ozone will increase deaths and hospital admissions.
Not too much to worry about, then, even in the unlikely event that the IPCC turns out to be right. The one area where problems might arise is heat-related deaths in prolonged heat-waves, as happened in France in 2003. But what English newspapers don't appreciate is that in France everyone goes on holiday at the same time - and I mean virtually everyone - so the high temperatures arrived just when the cities were full of old people with nobody to keep an eye on them.
Our actual experience over nearly 40 years suggests that we can cope with hot weather perfectly well. Mean annual heat-related mortality did not rise as summers warmed between 1971 and 2003. And the hot summers in southern Europe cause few more deaths than the milder summers of more northerly regions.
So, for different UK regions, the report's authors estimated that between 1971 and 2003 heat deaths, per million population, had fallen from 258 to 193 in the south-east of England; from 188 to 93 in the rest of England and Wales; and from 125 to only 8 in 2003.
Meanwhile, actual deaths due to cold weather fell from 9,174 to 5,903 in the south-east, from 9,222 to 6,088 in the rest of England and Wales, and from 9,751 to 6,166 in Scotland. We should be shouting this from the rooftops - far fewer people are dying because of the temperature than in the past. Global Warming, if it exists, is likely to bring as many benefits as drawbacks.
Did we all know just how cold the world has been this winter? Melanie Phillips again: "OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades. But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature."
• This year, China had its coldest winter in 100 years …
• … and Baghdad saw its first snow in all recorded history …
• … and North America had the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began …
• … and Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina and Chile all reported record low temperatures …
• … and all four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) all report that over the past year global temperatures have dropped precipitously. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C - a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year …
• a… and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that almost all the allegedly 'lost' ice has come back …
• … and there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual.
But have the headlines been proclaiming "Global Warming at an end"? Have our television presenters stopped ending every single nature programme with dire warnings that "these beautiful creatures are under threat from climate change and we may never be able to film them again"? (If it's a film about polar bears or badgers, that'd be brilliant. Vicious bastards, the lot of 'em).
Has our government changed its tune even a tiny bit? No, not at all - in fact, as I write we await the Budget speech which is expected to include an enormous tax hike on new cars (to combat global warming) and a ban on plastic supermarket bags (to save the sweet ickle sharks and, like, turtles, you know? And combat global warming, of course).
The Chief Scientist has said nothing about it. The Royal Society has said nothing about it. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and Al Gore and George Monbiot have said nothing about it. No, for them Global Warming just carries on its merry way, same as usual.
Funny thing, that. But then Global Warming has often been described as a new religion, and religion depends very heavily on faith and not so much on hard evidence. As a Jesuit priest of my acquaintance often says, "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts."
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