The Great Global Warming Swindle Page #2

as the Medieval Warm Period.

It's important people know

that climate enabled

a quite different lifestyle

in the medieval period.

We have this view today that warming is

going to have apocalyptic outcomes.

In fact, wherever you describe

this warm period

it appears to be associated

with riches.

In Europe, this was the great age

of the cathedral builders

a time when, according to Chaucer,

vineyards flourished even

in the North of England

All over the City on London there

are little memories of the vineyards

that grew in the medieval warm period,

So this was a wonderfully rich time.

And this little church, in a

sense, symbolizes it

as it comes from a period

of great wealth.

Going back in time further still,

before the medieval warm period,

we find more warm spells?

including a very prolonged period

during the Bronze Age

known to geologists as

the Holocene Maximum,

where temperatures were significantly...

higher than they are now

for more than three milennia.

If we go back 8000 years

in the Holocene period,

our current interglacial, who is

much warmer than it is today

now the polar bears obviously

survived that period

they are with us today

they are very adaptable and

these warm periods in the past

(we call hipsy thermals),

posed no problem for them.

Climate variation in the

past is clearly natural

so why do we think is

any different today?

In the current alarm about

global warming

the culprit is industrial society.

Thanks to modern industry luxuries

once enjoyed exclusively by the rich

are now available in abundance

to ordinary people.

Novel technologies have made

life easier and richer;

modern transport and communications

have made the world...

...seem less foreign and distant.

Industrial progress has

changed our lives.

But has it also changed

our climate?

According to the theory of

man-made global warming,

industrial growth should cause

the temperature to rise,

but does it?

Anyone who goes around and says

that CO2 is responsible

...of the warming of the 20th century...

hasn't looked at the

basic numbers.

Industrial production in the early

decades of the 20th century...

...was still in its infancy restricted

to only a few countries...

handicapped by war and

economic depression.

After the Second World War

things changed.

Consumer goods like refrigerators and

washing machines and TVs and cars...

began to be mass-produced

for an international market.

Historians call this global

explosion of industrial activity

the post-war economic boom.

So how does the industrial story

compare with the temperature record?

Since the mid 19th century

the Earth's temperature...

has risen by just of a

half a degree Celsius.

But this warming began

long before cars...

and planes were even invented:

What's more, most of the rise in

temperature ocurred before 1940,

during the period when

industrial production...

was relatively insignificant.

After the Second Wold War,

during the post-war economic boom,

temperatures, in theory,

should have shot up,

but they didn't,

they fell;

not for one or two years,

but for four decades.

In fact, paradoxically, it wasn't

until the world...

economic recession in the 1970's

that they stopped falling.

CO2 began increase

exponentially in about 1940

but the temperature actually

began to decrease in 1940,

continued to about 1975

so this is the opposite relation.

When the CO2 increasing rapidly

but yet the temperature decreasing

then we cannot say that CO2

and the temperature go together.

Temperature went up significantly

up to 1940,

...when human production

of CO2 was relative low,

and then in the post war years,

when industry...

and the whole economies

of the world really got going,

and human production

of CO2 just soared

the global temperature

was going down.

In other words:
the facts

didn' fit the theory.

Trusted time when,

after the Second World War

industry was booming,

CO2 was increasing and yet

the Earth was getting cooler...

and starting off scares of

a coming Ice Age,

it made absolutely no sense,

it still doesn't make sense.

Why do we suppose that CO2 is

responsible for our changing climate?

CO2 forms only a very small

part of the Earth's atmosphere.

In fact we measure changes

in the level of atmospheric CO2

in tenths of parts per million.

If you take CO2 as a percentage

of all the gases in the atmosphere

--the Oxygen, the Nitrogen

and Argon and so on--

...is 0.054 percent

and it's an incredibly small portion

and then of course you've got

to take that portion...

that supposedly humans are adding

(which is the focus of all the concern)

and it gets even smaller.

Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas,

greenhouse gases themselves only

form a small part of the atmosphere.

What's more, CO2 is a relatively

minor greenhouse gas.

The atmosphere is made up

of multitude of gases

a small percentage of them

we call greenhouse gases

and of that very small percentage

of these greenhouse gases

a 95% of it is water vapour, it's the

most important greenhouse gas.

Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, by

far the most important greenhouse gas.

So is there any way of checking whether

the recent warming was due...

to an increase in greenhouse gas?

There is only one way to tell and

that is to look up in the sky,

or a part of the sky known to

scientists as the troposphere.

If it's greenhouse warming,

you get more warming...

in the middle of the troposphere

(the first 10-12 km of the atmosphere)

than you do at the surface.

There are good theoretical

reasons for that,

having to do with how

the greenhouse works.

The greenhouse effect

works like this:

the Sun sends its heat

down to Earth:

if it weren't for greenhouse gases,

this solar radiation would

bounce back into space,

leaving the planet cold

and uninhabitable.

Greenhouse gas traps the scaping

heat in the Earth's troposphere,

a few miles above the surface.

And it's here, according

to the climate models,

the rate of warming should be highest

if it's greenhouse gas

that's causing it.

All the models, everyone of them,

calculates that the warming

should be faster

as you go up from the surface

into the atmosphere.

That in fact the maximum warming

over the Equator should take place

at an altitude of about 10 km.

A scientist largely responsible

for measuring the temperature...

in the Earth's atmosphere

is Professor John Christie.

In 1991 he was awarded NASA's medal

for exceptional scientific achievement,

and in 1996 received a special award from

the American Meteorological Society

for fundamentally advancing

our ability to monitor climate.

He was a lead author...

on the UN's Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.

There are two ways to take

the temperature...

in the Earth's atmosphere:

satellites and weather balloons.

What we found consistently is that,

in a great part of the planet,

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