Shepherd on Climate

The fourth part of Small is Beautiful is much more important for modern audiences than much of the rest of the book. E.F.Schumacher's essay on Buddhist economics has historical significance as it sent a whole generation scuttling off to the Orient but Schumacher always preferred the Homecomers to the Onward and Upward Brigade. His Catholic theology, much of which is synonymous with the best of Western philosophy, provides the intellectual underpinnings for Small is Beautiful and for its follow-up, the Catholic primer, Guide for the Perplexed.

There is a lot of bad Catholic thinking and much ignorant nonsense preached on God’s authority by other Christian churches, particularly those obsessed with The Book of Revelations. However truth can be found in the strangest of places. Certain aspects of the Creationist worldview, for instance, deserves serious consideration because it has kept alive some of the questions about the historic fossil record, raised in the 1950s by Immanuel Velikovsky's books, Worlds in Collisions (1950, ISBN 0-963-97590-0) and Earth in Upheaval (1955, ISBN 0 349 13574 6).

Velikovsky argued that the fossil record points not to the current conventional wisdom of gradual geological change over millions of years but to catastrophic change within historic times, with Noah's flood merely the last of several widespread annihilations…before the next one. Professor Einstein even has a walk-on part in the controversy…see Beyond Velikovsky: the history of a public controversy by Henry Bauer (ISBN 0-252-01104-X).

Subsequently in the early 1990s, Maurice Cotterell unearthed corroborating evidence from ancient pyramids in Mexico and Egypt…see The Mayan Prophecies (ISBN 1-85230-888-5). Both the Maya and the Egyptians knew what Velikovsky had rediscovered, understood its causes, and left a record of their knowledge encoded in their pyramids. They associated global upheavals with the long-term cyclical behaviour of the sun's magnetic fields and in particular the regular instability in the 3750 year long cycle which is capable of reversing the Earth's magnetic poles.

These ancient civilizations clearly understood the influence of the sunspot cycles and their related electromagnetic fields upon climate changes on Earth. Schumacher’s Catholic Church may also be endeavouring to come to terms with galactic influences on their Church, its religion and the future of its flock. Many of the sacred books from Mesoamerica were removed by the Jesuits who accompanied the victorious conquistadors. Some were burnt but others would have been removed to the safekeeping of the Vatican vaults.

There is also circumstantial evidence from the Vatican's interest in NASA’s solar data that the obsession of ancient civilizations in the fertility of their crops and themselves was based on the historical memory of its failure. In Appendix 1 of The Tutankhamun Prophecies (1999, ISBN 0-7472-6050-8), Maurice Cotterell published a long essay about the sun (pps. 244-314 in the 1999 Headline edition). The essay ends with a hypothesis the effect of solar radiation on honeybees.

Cosmic rays, clouds and climate is the focus of The Chilling Stars: a cosmic view of climate change by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder (2007, ISBN 978-1840468-66-3). But the authors also summarise the evidence that cosmic rays from outside our solar system have an impact on life on Earth…see, for instance, Starbursts, tropical ice and life’s changing fortune (pps. 156-179 in the 2007 Icon edition) and Children of the supernovae? (pps. 180-203).

The Roman Catholic Church's repeated refusal to countenance contraception also suggests that the Vatican is aware that the historic record reports a periodic fluctuation in fertility. A failure of human fertility for just forty or fifty years would eliminate the human species and recent evidence with other species suggests that reproduction might be much more fragile than we realize.

Dear David,

In your daughter's recent letter she wrote that even if I don't accept the reality of greenhouse gases, all the other arguments hold true, and are reason enough to legislate limits on carbon production and emissions for individuals, communities and corporations. I am not sure I agree.

The H20 (water) and the CH4 (methane) molecules in the atmosphere completely overwhelm the supposed 'global warming effect' of the CO2 (carbon dioxide) molecule. But more importantly, history has taught us, time and again, that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is usually a mistake.

For several years I have been warning The Left not to jump aboard the climate bandwagon but to read the science instead of relying on the spin. I am what the German Green Party once called a Fundi and, like most Fundis, I believe that in the long run Fundis are Realos.

Getting things done that need to be done by using unproven facts and partial theories about greenhouse gases and climate change is a tactical error. The road to hell is paved with good intentions...and unanticipated consequences...and is trod by those who put their trust in faith instead of facts. Computer forecasts are not facts. Nowadays any fool can command a spreadsheet to produce nonsense.

In the beginning, the Environmental Movement insisted that no one should dump anything into the atmosphere or into the oceans, nor bury obnoxious substances underground or leave them trashing up the planet. From this came the Polluter Pays Principle. They should also have insisted on the Closed System Principle backed up by binding treaties and financial penalties imposed on those responsible for industrial and distribution pollution and man-created environmental pollution (e.g. cities). They should have been compelled to take in their own rubbish at their own expense.

Instead The Right diverted The Left and The Greens off into the weeds by packing them off (all expenses paid) to exotic places to chat at pointless summits (Johannesburg) about meaningless treaties (Kyoto).

The practice of the past 500 years has been to permit the owners of private property...and in particular judicial persons who should never have been given equality before the law with real persons in the first place…to enclose and trash the commons and to steal the personal possessions of real people. Passing on private costs to the personal and the public purse is wrong. It is time to make it unprofitable too. This means laws, courts, fines, bailiffs and prisons.

The invention of the Global Warming Scare with Carbon Dioxide Emissions as its cause has enabled The Right to drastically limit the application of the Polluter Pays and the Closed System principles to a tiny percentage of the pollution they are responsible for.

Duping environmentalists to go along with Carbon Emissions Exchanges...with many more exotic exchanges to follow...legitimises the practise and ensures that the public purse picks up the tab for even this relatively minor clean-up operation. The world has been steadily moving from carbon to hydrogen as its source of piped energy for decades and recent increases in oil and gas prices will accelerate the trend.

The Left has been fooled by the Climate Scare into extending into the Real Economy, the application of market mechanisms and exchange manipulations, which had previously been limited to the Financial Economy.

The techniques of the Commodity Exchanges in London, New York and Chicago are being rapidly expanded until, the Exchange Masters can, at a whim, throttle the lifeblood out of the worldwide supply and distribution system delivered by the globalisation of the latter part of the 20th century.

Until now, apart from the froth and exuberance of futures contracts, these exchanges have served a useful purpose in hedging against volatility in supply and demand, and smoothing fluctuations in the prices of real commodities that readily lend themselves to such manipulations…the overground metal mines, air- and container-ship freightable plantation produce and the like.

But now the scope of these market practices…cornering, insider trading, speculation, gambling etc…are involving ever more exotic commodities like electricity and pollution with the practices institutionalised to create structural monopolies that are impossible to dismantle and easy to meter and monopolise. Pollutants like sulphur dioxide should not be in the atmosphere in the first place.

Electricity grids, gas pipelines and wind farms are the wrong answers for a planet which receives enough energy from the sun in forty-five minutes to meet its needs for a year. We are on a slippery slope.

The Right is intent on transforming Financial Capitalism into Resource Capitalism. And it will use the Disaster Capitalism described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine to force us through the transition. The end result will be global genocide on an unparalleled scale. Susan George has described how the global operation will be carried out in The Lugano Report. When written, this was fiction. It is rapidly becoming reality.

To add insult to the coming massacre, the elitists and their global conglomerates are getting paid for their ethnic cleansing of the planet. Just as bankers create money out of nothing so these Exchange Masters receive their licences to pollute for nothing to sell on to the Real Economy for windfall profits.

Energy Companies get their carbon credits for free…or they have until now. One tiny light at the end of the tunnel is that someone in Whitehall has finally woken up and is pushing the idea of auctioning off the carbon credits as if they were bandwidth for mobile phones.

The Left is being taken for a ride by the One World Government conspirators. These men in suits are not nice guys and it's time The Left started playing hardball again. Instead they are letting themselves be outgunned and outmanoeuvred. It's time to wise up and figure out how to get even. Getting mad is a pretty good way to start.

Best wishes as always.

William Shepherd
Monday 11th August 2008

Dear Ella

For the past few years I have been warning colleagues on The Left to be careful about the positions they choose to take on climate change and global warming.

Increasingly I have come to the view that bigger games are in play and that the Carbon Dioxide Hypothesis...which I don't think stands up to scientific scrutiny... is part of an orchestrated (and to date a very successful) attempt to blindside the left and divert them away from challenging the shift going on from Financial Capitalism via Disaster Capitalism...see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine...to Resource Capitalism where resources are controlled directly (seed, soil, water, energy etc) instead of through central banking and financial intermediaries.

I also agree with the views of Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Crichton and have posted interviews with them on my holobolo website...although the best link is to my Agnetha Fältskog page...the best female voice in the world.

I suspect that the point of the Carbon Dioxide Hypothesis is to set up the trading exchanges for manipulating and then controlling the ownership and distribution of resources. There are then secondary benefits such as getting the public purse to pick up the tab for the conversion of the global transport fleet from oil to hydrogen grids, nuclear power etc. but control of the Resource Exchanges is the main purpose.

My daughter...one of my fiercest critics...recommends that you read Ice Ages and Science Wars before making up your own mind about global warming. My approach to climate change has been to explore the science behind the political headlines. The fifty posts on my climate blog is one measure of the complexity of the issues. But I hope that my honesty at least is infectious. My blog statistics show that the Shepherd on Climate blog received 1932 page views and 856 visitors in July 2008 while my website dispatched several dozen copies a day of my 2006 pamphlet England's Climate & Energy Politics into cyberspace in response to requests flowing into my webserver from somewhere out there in the ether.

It may be that many of these went to Right Wingers. Most people like to have their prejudices reinforced and many people come to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. However my own position is about as far to the left as you can get. I don't like ordinary people being bossed around (and necessarily slaughtered) by rich, wealthy unaccountable elites and I don't want to see a One World Government imposed on my grandchildren...my first was born earlier this week and is likely to be alive in 2108.

I believe that by the mid 2030s most of the energy and electricity grids and pipelines that lace our world with a network of vulnerable terrorist targets will be closed down and dismantled. They are unjustifiable by either economics or energy fundamentals.

The sun showers enough energy on the Earth in forty-five minutes to meet the planet's need for a year. No elite, however powerful, can alter this reality. They can hide the fact. They can obstruct honest attempts to exploit its implications. But not for ever. It would be smarter for them to change tack sooner rather than later. The MIT Professor Daniel Nocera has put another nail in their coffin. Predictably their first reaction to his breakthrough on solar energy storage will be to steal, control and restrict access to the invention. But reality will break through. It always does...in the end.

This grid-pipeline demolition job is not one I would give to the energy companies and the pipeline operators. They have strong vested interests in doing the exact opposite, namely monopolising the energy flows and creating artificial energy scarcities.

I think that is enough to give you a flavour of the issues surrounding the climate change debate. My underlying attitude should also come through clearly from my climate blogs. More and more people will be moving this way as Good Science...the method rather than the individual scientist...leads us ever closer to the truth. Sensible steps are best made on firm foundations and not shifting sands. Slow and small are beautiful.

Best wishes as always.

William Shepherd
Saturday 2nd August 2008

Many of the new offences created by Parliament in the coming years will stem from the new religion of global warming. The reason is simple. It increases the power of government. Indeed it is a politician's dream because the scope for governmental interference and pious lectures is limitless.

Industry can be splattered with new regulations. The private citizen can be subjected to constant hectoring on how this or that might save the planet. Politicians can appear in the media, unquestioned, and new fields of supposed expertise can be created. The subject can be ordained for the schoolroom so children can sternly rebuke their parents over their carbon emissions and reckless lifestyles.

One of the oddities about the cult of planet-saving is the wide acceptance of the gospel of global warming, despite the fact that most of us are shivering in the cold. History shows that the planet has over the ages warmed up and cooled down over long periods before the arrival of any SUVs or anything else on wheels. Since we are dependent on the sun's seemingly enigmatic behaviour for our heat, this is not altogether surprising.

So far as the scientific debate is concerned, it is fascinating to observe the rush to join the new religion. As Andrew Alexander pointed out on 2nd January 2009 in his column in the Daily Mail 'Some of you will knowingly add, grants and posts and promotion are readily forthcoming for those accepting the new orthodoxy, not the challengers. After a lifetime observing the whimsical views of orthodox 'experts' in so many fields and the publicity their views receive, I find this pattern familiar.'

The heretical Danish professor Bjorn Lomborg prefers to deal in facts and numbers about global warming than join the priesthood. This puts him on a collision course with 'the crazed extent of global warming argued by Al Gore in his famous and fatuous film An Inconvenient Truth,' to quote Alexander. Unfortunately the facts are turning against the new religion.

Satellite data show that global sea level is rising by a truly tiny amount, with no rise for the past two years. And global temperatures have probably fallen in the past year-and-a-half, leaving the global position unchanged over the past decade.

Lomborg declares that the vast sums of money due to be involved in preventing global warming could be better spent elsewhere...food and water for all and a war against malaria just for starters. He calculates, for instance, that if all the Kyoto agreements were fulfilled it would reduce the global temperature in the year 2100 by only .0075 degrees.

Britain's contribution to Kyoto would be tiny to the point of immeasurable in terms of global warming. But would there be any casualties from a refusal to worship at the altars of the carbon exchanges? Individual ones undoubtedly...and deservedly so for they stand accused of misleading the people...after deluding themselves. But the majority would prosper from a change of tack.

We are told that hardworking scientists with families to support would find themselves short of employment, no longer with fame and fortune within their grasp. Or would they? The real threat from our ignorance of cosmic and galactic affairs needs every scientist and astronaut we can muster. The real risks of catastrophic change in the Earth's climate will come from without and not from within.

But pity the poor power companies. Their share price will be exposed to the folly of their nuclear power fiascos. How will they survive the cancellation of their free grants of carbon pollution vouchers without lucrative profit offsets from their inefficient wind turbines?

The real need is to dismantle the planet's electricity grids, oil and gas pipelines and the related transport infrastructure and rebuild energy needs and energy supply from the ground up...one household, one business, one village, one town, one rural county and one city region at a time. For bankers profit rules and they would soon go about once it is worth their while.

And what of our politicians going boldly into a brave new world of controlled climate and ambient temperatures? Must they admit the error of their ways? I don't think so. John Maynard Keynes once said that a sound banker is not one who foresees ruin and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. My advice? Stick with the herd but get it headed in the right direction. Where the planet's climate is concerned it is hard facts and not blind faith that will be needed in the 21st century.

Over the past decade the need to save the planet from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. In 2004 Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, even claimed that global warming posed 'a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism', warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

But whenever such claims are questioned, the messenger is denounced, the evidence is ridiculed and the message is ignored. Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But is there? Here is the story of how this fear was promoted. It will leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

One consistent critic has been the Daily Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker. At the end of last year he and his long-term colleague Richard North published a book entitled Scared to Death: From BSE To Global Warming - How Scares Are Costing Us The Earth where the case was made against Global Warming in general and against the Carbon Dioxide Theory in particular. In the UK the book's publication was met with a deathly silence. Why?

Christopher Booker explains that the story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international agenda falls into five main stages. Stage one came in the 1970s when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of 'a new Ice Age'.

For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times. The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the 'Roman Warming', coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the 'Medieval Warming', when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began 'the Little Ice Age', that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the 'Modern Warming'. But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the 'Little Cooling' between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

A scare is often set off when two things are observed together and scientists suggest one must have been caused by the other. In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been rising. Perhaps it was this increase that was causing the new warming in the 1980s?

Stage two of the story began in 1988 when, with remarkable speed, the global warming story was elevated into a ruling orthodoxy, partly due to hearings in Washington chaired by a youngish senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 1960s. But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because in 1988 the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion.

First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was to be prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in consultation with governments and officials - essentially a political document - in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report would not appear. This was very similar to the process that produced the notorious Blair/Campbell Dodgy Dossier that duped the House of Commons into sending military forces into Iraq in 2003.

This contradiction was obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming that the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established. This study
came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence.

But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policy-makers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, by this time US Vice-President, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing governments to drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best attempts of Mr Gore.

Not the least of his efforts was his bid to suppress an article co-authored by Dr Revelle just before his death. Gore didn't want it to be known that his guru had urged that the global warming thesis should be viewed with more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century. In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the 'hockey stick' because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the hockey stick. Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless. And now it was led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto Treaty was finally ratified.

In the past three years, we have seen the European Union announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines, to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced carbon emissions by 60 per cent. This is a pledge that could only be met by such a massive reduction in living standards that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it.

All this frenzy has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with CO2 and that, unless mankind takes drastic action, our planet is faced with the apocalypse so vividly described by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet recently, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of question marks being raised over Gore's alleged consensus. For instance, he claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 ft when even the IPCC in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches.There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by the Kyoto Protocol, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly ten per cent a year, with China likely to be emitting more CO2 than the US within two years.

More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures. At least scientists, unlike politicians, understand that correlation and causation are different things.

Let Christopher Booker have the last word. 'If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.'

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Sea levels will rise over the coming century about a foot or about as much as they rose over the past 150 years. This is Bjorn Lomborg's best guess...and his guesses are better than most because he knows what he is talking about.

To learn more read Cool It!: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming...the antidote to what Lomborg refers to as 'choreographed screaming'. This detailed study of global warming is published by Marshall Cavendish. (London, 2007, 352 pps, £19.99, ISBN 978-0-462-09912-5) and includes a thousand references and a thousand endnotes.

If sea levels rise this amount it will be a problem...but it won't be a catastrophe. Ask a very old person about the most important issues that took place in the 20th century. She will likely mention the two world wars, the cold war, the internal combustion engine and perhaps the IT revolution. But it is very unlikely she will add: 'Oh, and sea levels rose.'

We dealt with sea levels rising in the past century, and we will do so in this century too. It doesn't mean that it will be unproblematic, but it is unhelpful...and incorrect...to posit it as the end of civilization.

Moreover sea level rise will be a much bigger problem for countries that are poor than for countries that are wealthier. In fact if we work hard at reducing sea level rises, it is likely that we will reduce the rise by 35% but at the same time end up making each person about 35% poorer. The upshot is that places such as Micronesia and Tavalu will get three times more flooded, simply because lower incomes more than outweigh the lower sea level rise.

Thus we cannot talk about CO2 when we talk about dealing with climate change...we need to bring it into the dialogue considerations both about carbon emissions and about economics, for the benefit of both humans and the environment.

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extracted from weblog two hundred and fifty nine published on Saturday 16th September 2006

Across the Irish Sea, out in the country and down on the farm policymakers have discovered that Irish agriculture accounts for 29% of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions…and that half of this emerges from the front and back ends of the animals which give us Irish Beef and Kerrygold Butter.

The Kyoto Protocol reckons that methane is twenty times as lethal as Carbon Dioxide. New Zealand has known this for quite a while...ever since local scientists calculated that the country's thirty million sheep and ten million cows were giving off thirty seven million tons of methane a year…more than any other part of the economy. How was it to meet it’s Kyoto Commitments?

A Flatulence Tax on the country’s sheep, cows and deer was the answer New Zealand’s Labour Government came up with. You couldn’t make it up. The idea was not to persuade the dumb beasts to hold back their wind but to delude the dumber politicians that the £14 million a year raised by the tax would be used to subsidise research into ways of getting the animals to give off rather less of the noxious gas sometime in the future.

The nationwide guffaw of incredulity was soon followed by a roar of protest from New Zealand’s 130 000 farmers who launched a Fight Against Ridiculous Tax…FART…campaign.

Polls showed that only 12% of the population were green enough to think the Fart Tax was anything other than a bad joke. On behalf of the 84% opposed to the tax, farmers blocked the streets of Wellington the capital with 200 tractors. One Member of Parliament even drove a tractor up the steps of the parliament building in protest…and earned himself a bossy reprimand on health and safety grounds from the country’s Prime Minister Helen Clark for his pains. A local newspaper gave out free baked beans to the demonstrators so they could make up for all the cows and sheep which could not be represented.

Up until now New Zealand’s farmers were best known for the fact that alone in the developed world they receive no government subsidies. Since these were abolished agriculture has become the fastest growing sector of the economy. New Zealand’s farmers are now so efficient they can transport their lamb and butter half way round the world to Britain and still compete on price with their lavishly-subsidised European Union counterparts.

But terrified that their country might get the reputation of being a bastion of the free market New Zealand’s politically correct Labour Party ministers seem determined to make their country the laughing stock of the farming world. At least Ireland hasn’t announced plans to do the same…yet.

But the really terrifying thought is that when the Department for Environment Farming and Rural Affairs works out that Britain has even more sheep and cattle than either of these countries the English might be commanded to save the planet by following New Zealand’s example.

Not that the Irish and the Kiwis are the only ones in trouble. Pity the poor Norwegians. Their national symbol is the moose and they are worried about the noble beast's propensity to burp and fart his way through the forest. Moose too produce a steamy heap of methane. According to calculations at Trondheim Technical University one moose lets fly with the equivalent of a couple of long-haul flights a year. And it's getting worse. Here's the science.

The planet warms up, the snows recedes, the moose eat more blueberries and make more baby moose, up goes the Norwegian methane count and down goes their Kyoto compliance. The ultimate perpetual motion machine.

So the next time David Cameron drives a husky sledge across Norway's Svalbard Peninsula he might think about shooting a passing moose. The perfect carbon offset for his photo-shoot. A shoot for a shoot. And think of the side-effects. Who wouldn't want a rugged hunting 'n shooting man as their next Prime Minister?

Read England's Climate & Energy Policy for background or visit my climate website for more on the politics of climate change.

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Inconvenient Truth One

There was acute embarrassment at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) following the exposure of a serious flaw in its record of US surface temperatures since 1880. The error was so glaring that on 7th August 2007 GISS had to post revised figures which show instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the ten warmest years since 1880 it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade.

According to Christopher Booker writing in the Sunday Telegraph on Sunday 19th August 2007, the significance of this is that the head of GISS is James Hansen the inventor of global warming and for the past 20 years, Al 'Inconvenient Truth' Gore's closest scientific ally in his promotion of the global warming scare. The revised figures relate only to temperatures in North America but the fact that the pre-eminent scientific champion of the orthodoxy has been promoting erroneous data has considerable implications.

The expert responsible for spotting GISS's error was Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst who four years ago scored the greatest coup in the history of this debate by demolishing the notorious hockey stick - the graph which purported to show temperatures flat-lining for centuries until they suddenly began an exponential rise in the late 20th century was produced by concealing data for the Medieval Warm Period recognised by all historians of the period. The hockey stick was adopted as the supreme icon of the global warming lobby led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which reproduced it no fewer than five times in its 2001 sexed-up report.

Since McIntyre exposed the mass of basic computer errors on which it was based, the IPCC in its most recent dodgy dossier quietly dropped it. The new GISS graph, conceding that the last decade may not have seen the hottest years of the past century, follows the latest satellite figures from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showing that in recent years global temperatures have not continued to rise (as orthodox CO2 warming theory would suggest) but have flattened out at a level significantly lower than in 1998.

Inconvenient Truth Two

Officials in the UK Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform briefed ministers on how to explain to the EU's energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs that the UK will not be able to comply with a European Council decision in March 2007 that the EU must derive 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The officials calculated that this could cost UK electricity users alone an additional 22 billion pounds a year equivalent to two thousand pounds per household. This is two percent of GDP and double Sir Nicholas Stern's estimate for the entire cost of halting global warming.

Whitehall officials advised the Government that the target was not remotely achievable anyway and, taking a leaf out of the Yes Minister Handbook, recommended ministers to start being economical with the actualite. So expect nuclear power to become sustainable (as well as carbon-lite) again. Germany meanwhile would like to move the target up seven percentage points to 27 percent.

Inconvenient Truth Three

Cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale proposed by Al Gore might possibly save $12 trillion but their cost would be $34 trillion.
Professor William Nordhaus of Yale - the world's leading expert on the financial costs of tackling global warming.

Then there are the inconvenient supplementaries as to who pick up the costs and the benefits. Who? Whom?

more from Shepherd on Climate

From 1962 to 1966, Nigel Calder edited the scientific journal New Scientist. Subsequently he became well-respected as a science journalist with many books and articles to his name. Forty years on he joined forces with Henrik Svensmark and wrote The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (Icon Books, ISBN 1-84046-815-7).

The book launch earlier this year was coordinated with publication of Dr. Svensmark’s peer-reviewed article entitled ‘Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges' which appeared in the February 2007 issue of Astronomy & Geophysics, (Vol. 48, Issue 1, pages. 1.18-1.24). The article represented the culmination of ten years of work at the Danish National Space Center correlating satellite records of low-altitude clouds with variations in cosmic rays.

Experiments in the basement of the Danish National Space Center showed that electrons are set free when cosmic rays pass through air. These free electrons then act as catalysts in the assembly of nuclei onto which water vapour condenses to make clouds.

But dust particles from air-borne pollution and ash from erupting volcanoes play a similar role. It was a key mechanism in Carl Sagan’s Nuclear Winter Scenario that has been quietly forgotten. Cloud science is at an early stage and the best cloud scientists sit with their backs to the window. They plan to turn their chairs around if their computer models ever look like simulating what goes on outside their windows.

Cosmic ray intensities change because of a number of factors…the Sun’s own activity such as solar flares, the variations in the Sun’s magnetic field which is crucial in shielding planets in our solar system from cosmic rays coming from elsewhere in the galaxy, and changes in the properties of the local interstellar medium (LISM).

According to Professor D.E. Shemansky of the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California, ‘the dominant role of neutral hydrogen in the formation of the termination shock in the collision of the solar wind with the LISM has only recently been recognized by the particles and fields research community. Indeed he claims that ‘…the NASA Space Physics Division has shown a persistent pernicious bias against work on the effects of the neutral gas in the LISM in the United States, from the time of the formation of the division.’ Strong words but suggestive that Henrik Svensmark might just be onto something.

Cosmic rays intensity varies on both short and long timescales and with it the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 and other unusual atoms created by these cosmic rays…thereby providing a record of shifting cosmic-ray intensities. And this record shows repeated alternations between cold and warm periods during the past 12 000 years.

Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Ján Veizer of the Ruhr University and the University of Ottawa linked these changes to the journey of the Sun and the Earth through the Milky Way galaxy. They blame the icehouse episodes on encounters with bright spiral arms, where cosmic rays are most intense. More frequent chilling events, every 34 million years or so, occur whenever the solar system passes through the mid-plane of the Galaxy. In Snowball Earth episodes around 700 and 2300 million years ago, even the equator was icy. At those times the birth-rate of stars in the galaxy was unusually high, which would have also meant a large number of exploding stars and intense cosmic rays.

According to Svensmark, whenever the Sun was feeble, cosmic-ray intensities were high and cold conditions ensued. The most recent occurrence was in the Little Ice Age that climaxed 300 years ago. During the past 500 million years the Earth has passed through four ‘hothouse’ episodes, free of ice and with high sea levels, and four ‘icehouse’ episodes like the one we live in now, with ice-sheets, glaciers and relatively low sea levels. The theory of cosmic rays and clouds would also seem to explain why the Earth did not freeze solid when it was very young. The Sun was much fainter but also more vigorous in repelling cosmic rays, so the Earth would not have had much cloud cover.

But the Cosmoclimatology Hypothesis may also have a contribution to make to discussions of the fossil record. While calculating the changing influx since life began about 3.8 billion years ago, Dr Svensmark discovered a surprising connection between cosmic-ray intensities and a variability of the productivity of life. The biggest fluctuations in productivity coincided with high star formation rates and cool periods in the Earth’s climate. Conversely, during a billion years when star formation was slow, cosmic rays were less intense and the Earth’s climate was warmer, the biosphere was almost unchanging in its productivity.

In any properly conducted scientific endeavour these ideas of Shemansky, Svensmark and Calder would be treated seriously. They would be formed into an hypothesis, predictions would be made, experiments designed to test them and attempts made to replicate results with a view to disproving or modifying the hypothesis. This is the scientific method one of the most powerful tools ever invented by mankind.

Its purpose…articulated by Sir Francis Bacon…is to advance knowledge by the deployment of a collective enterprise that pushes back the boundaries of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. This has never been easy…in part because it is too easy to cherry-pick the data. New Scientist indicates the scope of the problem in this diagram from an article published on 16th May 2007 in Issue 2604 (page 34-42) entitled ‘The Seven Biggest Myths about Climate Change’.

In the Age of the Gentleman Scientist real attempts were made to uphold The Baconian Oath. Minds were open, royal societies were free and open. Scientific careers advanced on merit more than patronage. But this is no longer the case. Nowadays rhetoric is deployed to discredit ideas and assassinate character at the behest of the political agendas of shadowy forces that are only ever seen as through a glass darkly. New Scientist it seems is among their public spokesmen. Here is New Scientist in its published critique of the Cosmoclimatology Hypothesis that the ionisation of air by cosmic rays imparts an electric charge to aerosols that encourages them to clump together; the clumps become large enough to trigger the condensation of water, and hence clouds form.

‘As yet there is no convincing evidence that such clumping occurs. Experiments under way at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva should settle the issue, but will not reveal if it matters in the real world: the atmosphere already has plenty of cloud condensation nuclei, so it is not clear why cosmic rays should have any great effect on cloud formation.’

This is unlikely to be the whole truth and would doubtless be challenged by Dr Svensmark. But the journal continues in the best Alistair Campbell manner with a piece of classic spin.

‘A series of attempts by Svensmark to show an effect have come unstuck. Most recently, he has claimed there is a correlation between low-altitude cloud cover and cosmic rays. Yet a correlation does not prove cause and effect. What's more, the correlation holds up after 1995 only if data is "corrected", and others in the field say this correction is not justified. "It's dubious manipulation of data in order to suit his hypothesis," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London. A few independent studies by other groups hint at a very tiny effect on clouds, but most have found no effect.’ This is disingenuous.

Every scientist’s data is ‘manipulated’. Peer review is one technique that is deployed to address the potential problem. It is not always so easy to separate out scientific fact from scientific fraud. The deliberate suppression of data providing evidence of a medieval warming period went too far…and a Senate Committee rightly rapped IPCC on the knuckles for being party to the planting of false evidence in the public domain. Every temperature-time series needs massaging. There is very little data in very few fields of scientific endeavour that do not need adjusting for operant conditions or to ensure a better fit to other data. The whole point of statistical techniques is to do precisely that. Any set of data can be forced to fit any mathematical equation. And so to New Scientist’s final point.

‘Even if changes in cosmic ray intensity do turn out to influence cloud cover and temperature, they cannot explain the rapid warming of the past few decades. Direct measurements going back 50 years show a periodic variation in intensity, but no downward trend coinciding with the recent warming. Indirect measurements of cosmic rays, based on the abundance of certain isotopes, suggest that their intensity fell between 1900 and 1950. While there can be a lag between a big change in a climate ‘forcing’ and its full effect on temperature, most warming should occur within a few years and taper off within decades. This is not the pattern we see.’

This again is disingenuous. At the heart of the scientific debate about global warming is the Lambda Factor that converts Heat-Energy Forcings into Temperature Changes. There is no scientific consensus about its value. Accountants always make sure they include a line in their spreadsheets called ‘adjustment’. Lambda is the climate modeller’s adjustment. Here is what I posted to my climate blog on 11th November 2006 about the ‘Battle of the Lambdas’ in a piece entitled Climate Thermodynamics.

‘The Stefan-Boltzman Law is to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is to astrophysics. Boltzman relates energy to the square of the speed of light but by reference to temperature rather than mass. It was derived experimentally 100-years ago by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student. Buried in the small print of IPCC’s third assessment report is the bizarre statement that its climate models had found lambda to be 0.5C per watt of Forcing. Lambda from the Boltzman Equation is half this…based on Experiments with Nature not Manipulations with Computers.

Lambda Inflation is in fashion because the bigger the value of lambda the bigger the temperature increase you can predict from any particular set of Forcings Data. James Hansen who invented Global Warming in his evidence to Senate Hearings in the middle of a Washington Heatwave offers lambdas of 0.67, 0.75 or 1.0. John Houghton who chaired the IPCC working group trumps this with 0.8 while IPCC’s computer models now use 1.0. But The Stern Report deserves an Oscar for its implied lambda of 1.9…between six and eight times the Boltzman lambda.

Multiply by Boltzman’s lambda and temperature rise this century is in line with observation at 0.44 to 0.6C. Stern’s lambda gives nonsense. The Hadley Centre had the same problem so they now have one lambda to predict with and another…lambda divided by three…to match actual 20th Century temperatures.’

In his article Svensmark writes that the ‘multidisciplinary nature of Cosmoclimatology is both a challenge and an opportunity for many lines of inquiry. Even the search for alien life is affected because it should now take into account of the need for the right magnetic environment if life is to originate and survive on the planets of other stars.’ We can take this thought further. Our sun is at the heart of every religion…including Christianity…and it is becoming increasingly clear that something is going on. We need to find out and understand what this is.

With new data from all over the universe pouring into the antennae of the Hubble Telescope and with NASA’s planetary missions collecting an incredibly rich archive of data and images from within our own solar system we should be on the brink of a golden age of science. Analysing and understanding the true implications of this treasure trove is much too important to be left to the small-minded.

The warring of bureaucrats and the political shenanigans of public relations firms with scant regard for truth and cavalier attitude to scientific integrity and the scientific method will lead us to disaster. Their way is to deploy rhetoric, disinformation, character assassination and dodgy dossiers in pursuit of strange hidden political agendas. Science is increasingly threatened with enclosure by shadowy forces with little interest in the fate of their fellow man and great ignorance of the consequences of their arrogant disregard for the web of life created on this planet.

This creeping enclosure this stealthy clearance of the commons must be stopped. Our way, the right way, the only sane humane ecological way must be the way of truth and not authority. The fruits of science are our common wealth; part of the heritage our generation passes on to our children. It is not just another commons to be bought and sold at the whim of the rich, the powerful and the ignorant.

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