The Great Global Warming Swindle Page #6

ban chlorine woldwide.

Like I said:
"You guys,

this is one of the elements

in the periodic table you know,

I mean, I'm not sure

if that's in our jurisdiction

to be banning a whole element".

The other reason that environmental

extremism emerged

was because world communism failed,

the wall came down,

and a lot of peaceniks

and political activists

moved into the environmental movement,

bringing their neo-marxism with them

and learnt to use green language

in a very clever way

to cloak agendas that

actually have more...

to do with anticapitalism

and antiglobalization

than they do anything

with ecology or science.

The left have been

instantly disoriented

by the manifest failure

of socialism

and indeed marxo-communism

as it was tried out,

and therefore they still remain

as anticapitalists as they were

but they have to find new

guys for that anticapitalism.

And it was a kind of

amazing alliance...

from Margaret Thatcher

on the right

through to bioleft wing

anticapitalist environmentalists.

That created this kind

of "momentum"...

...behind a looney idea.

By the early 1990's

man-made global warming

was no longer a slightly

eccentric theory about climate,

it was a full-blown

political campaign,

it was attracting media

attention those result:

more governmental funding.

Prior to Bush the elder,

I think the level of

funding for climate

and climate-related

sciences was...

somewhere around the

order of 170 million dollars a year,

which is reasonable for

the size of the field;

it jumped to two billion a year:

more than a factor of ten

and yes, that changed

a lot I mean,

lot of jobs, it brought a lot of new people

into it who otherwise

were not interested,

so you develop whole cadres

of people whose...

only interest in the field was that...

...it was global warming.

If I wanted to do research on,

shall we say,

the squirrels of Sussex,

what I would do,

and this is anytime

from 1990 onwards,

I would write my grant

application saying:

"I want to investigate...

the not-gathering

behaviour of squirrels,

with special reference

to the effects of

global warming",

and that way I get my money...

if I forget to mention

global warming...

I might not get the money.

There's a question in my mind...

that the large amounts of money

that have been fed into this particular,

rather small area of science

have distorted the

overall scientific effort.

We're all competing for funds

and if your field is the

focus of concern,

then you have done much

less work rationalizing

why your field should be funded.

By the 1990's tenths of billions of dollars of government

funding in the US,

UK and elsewhere

were being diverted into

research relating

to global warming.

A large portion of those funds

went into building computer models

to forecast what the climate

will be in the future.

But how accurate are those models?

Doctor Roy Spencer

is a senior scientist

for climate studies

at NASA's Marshall

space flights Center;

he has been awarded medals

for exceptional scientific achievement

in both NASA

and the American

Meteorological Society.

Climate models are only as good

as the assumptions that go into them,

and they have hundreds of assumptions.

All it takes as one assumption

to be wrong for the forecast

to be way off.

Climate forecasts are not new,

but in the past scientists

were more modests

about their ability to

predict the weather.

"Any attempt of forecasting

changes of climate...

meets skepticism from the men

who model the weather by computer."

In making decisions

which affect people,

a bad prediction as to what...

the climate of the future will be,

can be far worse than none at all.

I'm afraid that our understanding

of the complex weather machine

is not yet good enough to make

a reliable statement of the future.

All models assume that man-made CO2

is the main cause of climate change,

rather than the Sun or the clouds.

The analogy I use is like my car

is not running very well

so I'm going to ignore

the engine which is the Sun,

and I'm gonna ignore the transmission

which is the water vapour

and I'm gonna look at one

knot at the right rear wheel

which is the human-produced CO2.

It's that, the science is that bad.

If you haven't understood

the climate system,

If you haven't understood

all the components...

that cause the increase

the solar, the CO2, the

water vapour, the clouds

and put it all together,

If we haven't got all that

then your model isn't

worth anything.

The range of climate

forecasts varies greatly.

These variations are

produced by subtly

altering the assumptions upon

which the models are based.

The runs are so complicated

you can often adjust them

in such a way that they

do something very exciting

I work with modellers,

I've done modelling and,

with a mathematical model

and you tweak parameters

you can model anything,

you can make it get warmer,

you can make it get colder

by changing things.

Since all the models assume

that man-made CO2

causes warming,

one obvious way to produce

a more impressive forecast

is to increase the amount

of imagined man-made

CO2 going into the atmosphere.

We put an increase in CO2

in number of 1% per year

it's been 0.49% per year

for the last ten years,

so the models have twice as much

greenhouse warming

radiation going in them

as is known to be happening.

It shouldn't shock that they predict

more warming than is ocurring.

Models predict what the temperature

might be in fifty or a hundred years time.

It is one of their peculiars features

that long-range climate forecasts

are only proved wrong long

after peope have

forgotten about them.

As a result, there is a danger,

according to Professor Carl Wunsch

that modellers will we less concerned

in producing a forecast that is accurate

than one that is interesting.

Even within the scientific community,

you see, it's a problem.

If I run a complicated model

and I do something to it

like melt a lot of ice into the ocean

and nothing happens,

it's not likely to get printed.

But if I run the same model

and I adjust it

in such a way that something dramatic

happens to the ocean circulation

like the heat transport turns off

it will be published, people will say:

"This is very exciting"

and will even be picked up by the media.

So there's a bias,

there's a very powerful bias

within the media and within

the science community itself

towards results which

are dramatized upon.

If all freezes over,

that's a much more interesting story

than saying well, you know,

it all fluctuates around

sometimes the mass

flocks goes up by 10%,

sometimes it goes down by 20%

but eventually it comes back.

You know, which would

you do a story on?

I mean, that's what is about.

To the untrained eye computer

models look impressive

and they give often wild

speculation about the climate

the appearance of rigoruous science.

They also provide an endless...

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