In an examination of the international controversy that is climate change and global warming, there are two conflicting positions and interest groups – the Scaremongers who fully support the theory, and the Idealists who want more concrete evidence. However in Australia much of the so-called support for the ‘Yes’ case is based on distorted information, untruths, and naked lies.

Of all the countries in the western world, Australia is the one that suffers most from the vagaries of the weather. At any one time, part of the country experiences drought. At the moment large parts of inland Australia on the Pacific side of the country are experiencing this problem whilst other areas are enjoying more favorable conditions.

The Scaremongers believe the present drought is the worst ever – it may be the worst in living memory, but it’s not the worst since European civilization started in 1788. The Federation drought of 1895 to 1903 is considered to be the one that caused the most damage to the economy and life in general.

The farming community in rural Australia accept drought as a normal aspect of life. Since the 1860s there have been 9 periods of major and prolonged drought covering large areas of the country, excluding the current situation. In addition there has been 6 droughts during this period covering smaller regions of the country.

During the periods of pre-European settlement, that is pre-1788, when industrial pollution could not have caused greenhouse gases and therefore affected climate change, droughts were just as prevalent. Examination of rings on trees and coral support this view. In fact examination of a piece of coral taken from the Barrier Reef in northern Australia shows that there was a drought in that region lasting 20 years from 1660.

However, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that droughts are a regular occurrence of Australian farming life, the media still push the line that the present drought is caused by global warming. Even the saner and more responsible parts of the press insist that Australia’s current predicament is being exacerbated by the government’s late signing of the Kyoto agreement.

Just more unsupported distortions of the truth from the people who are happiest when they’re dispelling doom and gloom.

Droughts in Australia are caused by, and have always been caused by, the activity of the El Nino Southern Oscillation – ELSO.  This is a complex weather pattern that influences climatic conditions throughout the Pacific region. This phenomenon only became known in the late 70s and although much more work needs to be done to understand its complexity, weather scientists are now able to determine the influence it has on countries bordering the south Pacific fairly accurately.

However, the average man in the street now believes changes in climatic conditions in Australia are caused by global warming, rather than the more likely affect of the ELSO. Aided by the local media who attribute every unusual circumstance to world-wide global warming, from the increase in bush-fires to the desalination problems of the River Murray to the decline in coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef, the gullible public blindly follow what they’ve been told.

So successful are the Scaremongers in Australia that 2 out of  3 people writing letters to the press and web sites vigorously support the concept of man-made global warming. In actual fact, Australia’s last Federal election, in November 2007, was won by the party most vocal in supporting this theory. A gullible public were frightened into voting for a party that claimed to be able to play God.

As an indication of the untruths and down right lies coming from the Australian Scaremongers camp, consider this gem – taken from the very best Joseph Goebbels propaganda manual:

…but in 2007 our Prime Minister still finds it hard to accept the possible existence of a human driven climate change.

Taken from http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html

So what this web site, and other similar ones, is saying is that every climatic disaster that’s occurred in the last 50 to 100 years has been caused by man-made climate change, but they don’t know what caused climatic disasters before that.

Quite plain and simple, an increase in greenhouse gases by the burning of fossil fuels, allegedly causing climate change cannot be proven or supported by the sparse facts presented by its gullible supporters. Hysteria outweighs credible facts.

In 2008, scientists from all over the world are jumping off the man-made global warming bandwagon. This is due to the fact that environmental study after study concludes that the behavior of man is not the cause of significant global warming.

In a recently released Geological Society of America abstract, Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presented data showing that the global warming cycle from 1977 to 1998 is now over and that we have entered into a new global cooling period that should last for the next three decades.

He also suggests that since the IPCC climate models are now so far off from what is actually happening that their projections for both this decade and century must be considered highly unreliable.

Meanwhile, David Douglass and John Christy, in a paper just accepted for publication and now available on the internet, have come to the conclusion that natural changes in global water temperature are responsible for an increase in global temperature. Here is their scientific conclusion:

“El Nino and La Nina effects in the tropics have a more significant affect on global temperature anomalies than carbon dioxide, in particular it was an El Nino event that drove the 1998 global temperature maximum”.

At NASA, Dr. Roy Spencer, believes natural cycles account for most of last century’s warming, with carbon dioxide increases contributing only a modest amount.

His new research, which was submitted to Geophysical Research Letters for publication, shows that climate models overstate the positive feedback from an increase in carbon dioxide, and therefore grossly overstate the projected warming during the next century

In addition, two new studies (article in Science Magazine) point to wind-induced circulation changes in the ocean as the dominant cause of the recent ice losses through the glaciers draining both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, not ‘global warming.’

In June, Dr. David Evans, an architect of Australia’s Kyoto compliance, and for years a noted climate change alarmist, became the latest man-made global warming doubter. Evans outlines the four main reasons why 2008 has become the year of the global warming skeptic and why he recently jumped off of the global warming bandwagon.

1.The missing “greenhouse signature”, which would be a hot zone about 10 km up in the atmosphere. It’s been sought for years – hundreds of measurements using radiosondes (a sort of temperature measuring weather balloon). It would constitute the smoking gun . Hundreds of tests have returned the same answer – it’s not there. It is statistically impossible that the hundreds of tests missed the spot. The existing models on greenhouse warming do not work without this hot zone.
2. “There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming” says Evans. “None”. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations” constituting evidence that carbon emissions are a significant driver in warming trends.
3. Satellites measuring the world’s temperature uniformly show that the warming trend stopped in 2001 and that in the past year the temperature actually returned to 1980 levels. Satellite measurements are the only truly reliable method for capturing the data as land-based measurements are vulnerable to encroachments of expanding cities and “urban heat island effect.”
4.”The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.”

As global temperatures continue to cool and research against man-made global warming continues to pile up, as scientists abandon the man-made global warming bandwagon, one thing is becoming increasingly clear. The cause of global climate change should be based on facts and evidence and not just our fear.

In February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in their Fourth Assessment Report that human actions are “very likely” (i.e. with 90% or greater probability) the cause of global warming, indicated by an increase of 0.75 degrees in average global temperatures over the last 100 years. This statement is the result of very tough discussions on a worldwide scale between thousands of climate researchers whether human activity is the main cause of global warming. The results of this discussion were presented to the public in many publications, for instance in Martin Durkin´s documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, presented in March 2007 at UK´s Channel 4. The main message of this production was that man-made global warming is “a lie” and “the biggest scam of modern times.” Martin Durkin and coworkers argue that the scientific consensus on climate change is the product of “a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding and propped up by complicit politicians and the media”. The documentary showcases scientists, politicians, economists, writers, and others who are sceptical of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming. Some of the scientists, opposing the main stream of greenhouse gas theories, simply argue that it has not yet been ascertained whether humans are the primary cause of global warming or if there are other natural variations responsible for this phenomenon like increased solar activity, cosmic rays or variations in natural climatic cycles. There is also a series of scientists questioning the temperature records used in the databases as temperature differences attributed to the greenhouse effect are reasonable small (fractions of a ºC). The so-called “urban heat island” effect leads to a local warming in more populated areas, showing slightly higher temperatures due to to increased heat generated by cities, rather than a global temperature rise. Anyhow, this argument was confuted by the IPPC, indicating that the effect of the urban heat island on the global temperature trend is no more than 0.05 °C (0.09 °F) degrees through 1990.

Other facts presented by the film were shown to be incorrect or misinterpreted. The film asserts for instance that records of atmospheric CO2 levels since 1940 show a continuing increase, but during this period, global temperature decreased until 1975, and has increased since then. Anyhow, it is well recognized that this cooling was driven mostly by aerosols (i.e. pollution) in the atmosphere. There is nothing contradictory about this cooling when all sources of radiation changes are considered. A second argument that easily can be invalidated is the impact of the so-called “solar variation theory” on global warming. According to the authors, solar activity (and involving cosmic rays as well as heat from the sun aiding cloud formation) is currently at an extremely high level and directly linked to changes in global temperature. The film argues that solar activity is far more influential on global warming than any other anthropogenic or natural activity on Earth. What the film does not mention is that solar activity has declined over the last 30 years – at the same time as the major spike in global temperature.

But there are some statements related to the influence of the oceanic mass and water vapour on climate change which are more difficult to confute. Water vapour makes up about 98% of the greenhouse gases by volume and provides something between 40 to 80 percent of the natural greenhouse effect. It probably has the largest impact on the planet’s temperature and climatic conditions, much larger than CO2. Water particles in the form of clouds act to reflect incoming solar heat, but the film argues that the effects of clouds cannot be accurately simulated by scientists attempting to predict future weather patterns and their effects on global warming. This argument probably is correct and it is well recognized that water vapor is responsible for the natural warming up of the surface temperature to approximately 30-35ºC. Anthropogenic greenhouse effect, according to the film’s argumentation, is only about 2% of the total “natural” greenhouse effect, which corresponds to a 0.6-0.7 ºC increase in temperature. This estimate is somewhat smaller compared to the results of much more sophisticated simulations (0.9 – 2.7ºC), but there is undoubtedly an anthropogenic effect of CO2 increasing the average surface temperature.

One example of the complexity of climatic simulations is the prediction of future storm events considering global warming effects. According to a recently published study, published online by research meteorologist Tom Knutson in the journal Nature Geoscience and resumed in the New York Times (May 18, 2008), global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic. The study predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent. In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic. And Knutson is not alone with this view. Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, also say there is no link between global warming and hurricane frequency. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle. According to the prediction, the number of hurricanes touching land in the US and its neighbors will drop by about 30 percent because of wind factors. However, the biggest storms, those with winds of more than 110 mph, would only decrease in frequency by 8 percent. The biggest decrease is forecasted for storms with winds between 39 and 73 mph (normal tropical storms), who would decrease by 27 percent.

It’s not all good news from Knutson’s study, however. His computer model also forecasts that “hurricanes and tropical storms will be wetter and fiercer. Rainfall within 30 miles of a hurricane should jump by 37 percent and wind strength should increase by about 2 percent”, Knutson’s study says.

There are already critical reactions on this new publication. MIT hurricane meteorologist Kerry Emanuel claims that the computer model used by Knutson is not adequate enough to look at storms and according to Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., Knutson’s computer model is poor at assessing tropical weather and ”fail to replicate storms with any kind of fidelity.” It also does not considering well enough the intensity, duration and size of the storm events, as not only the number of hurricanes is important to evaluate.

Positive feedback comes from NOAA hurricane meteorologist Chris Landsea , who wasn’t part of this study, praised Knutson’s work as ”very consistent with what’s being said all along.” ”I think global warming is a big concern, but when it comes to hurricanes the evidence for changes is pretty darn tiny,” Landsea said.