Some very interesting statements popping up on the web this week regarding climate change. First up, the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus, quoted on Physicist Lubos Motl's website the reference frame saying the following in an interview with Hospodarska Niny, a Czech Republic economics newspaper,
Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment.
Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" and "if's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should.
The full transcript is here.
Next up, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is feeling the political heat after it emerged that he had remarked in a 2002 fundraising letter that the Kyoto Protocol was "a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations." This is interesting, because back in April 2006 60 scientists signed a letter sent to the Canadian Prime Minister in which they stated,
Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based.
"Climate change is real" is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural "noise."
The full text of the letter here.
In 2005, one of the 60 scientists who signed the letter, paleoclimatologist Dr. R. Timothy Patterson, professor, Dept. of Earth Sciences at Carleton University, testified before the Canadian Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development that,
There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.
The full text of this article is here.
Comment
There are many more scientists making public statements to the effect that they do not support the scientific conclusions being presented to the public. Now that the label "climate change sceptic" is being attached to anyone who does so, it will be interesting to see if these 'maverick scientists' continue to speak out against what they see as false and misleading science. Whatever the truth, it is a 'science' that is being used to justify a radical restructuring of the world economy and one which will continue to affect all our lives.
