Warming proven? I don't think so.

 Interesting to note yet another letter of misinformation from Peter Otway relating to the myth of global warming (Letters, 17 Feb).

As Peter said in his presentation last year, he is not a scientist, he is simply reporting what scientists say.  As a non-scientist, I suppose he can be excused for failing to realise that science is not dependent on consensus.  If it were we would still believe that theearth was the centre of the universe and was also flat.  These were consensus beliefs until a few hundred years ago, when a very small number of scientists disproved them despite huge opposition from the establishment. Little, if anything, has changed.

The science behind the global warming myth is based on the frequently incorrect analysis of non-representative data combined with the fraudulent production of the infamous ’hockey stick’ graph, a scientific fraud exceeding that of the Piltdown Man early last century.  Based on this ’evidence’, the preposterously arrogant myth has been proposed that we are causing global warming by releasing carbon dioxide, a highly undesirable ’greenhouse’ gas which must be kept at low levels or the earth will overheat (even though water vapour is a far more effective greeenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). In fact the 375ppm concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is one of the lowest there has ever been - it has been at least 25 times as high in the past without significant temperature change.  If it goes much lower plant growth will cease, then we will have problems. The 10,000 active volcanoes worldwide, most of them submarine, put out far more carbon dioxide per week than humans have ever produced.  And global temperatures have no relationship to carbon dioxide concentrations anyway; they correlate well with solar heat output and solar flares, over which we have absolutely no control.

We are currently at the end of an interglacial period that has lasted for 15,000 years, approximately 50% longer than previous average interglacials.  At this point in the past four interglacials (and probably for the other >20 that have occurred in the past few million years) the temperature has dropped rapidly - over years or decades, not centuries - sending the earth into a glacial period lasting about 80,000 years.  During the last glacial period, with an average temperature drop of around 5 deg C, the sea level dropped 100m or more due to the accumulation of glacial ice on land.

This will be the first glacial that so-called civilised humans have experienced - it should be interesting (from scientiific and sociological viewpoints) to see how we cope.

Alan Willoughby

MSc Earth Science

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