Dear W.A. I am very worried that low-lying Pacific islands will soon disappear because of rising sea-levels caused by carbon dioxide emisssions? Signed: Friend of Tuvalu
Dear Friend of Tuvalu - Don’t. It ain’t so. Environmental groups like Greenpeace like to show pictures of Pacific islands being inundated by sea water, blaming it on sea level rise caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. But the story is not that simple. Recently, on May 3, New Zealand TV broadcast a program round the launch of a global warming book POLES APART, by economist Gareth Morgan and writer John McCrystal. They showed sea water sloshing through a village on Takuu island, situated about 250 km north-east of Bougainville. The story was that rising sea levels were drowning the island and that its inhabitants would soon have to be evacuated. They would then become the first global warming refugees. Searching the Internet, I found that the sea level is rising by a huge 20 cm per year. I also found information that the island is SINKING, because of its position on the Pacific tectonic plate that is being subducted into the Solomon Trench. Plate tectonics is causing the island to disappear below the waves, not human carbon dioxide emissions. Some people criticised the TV program, pointing this out. A discussion developed in blogosphere, some people maintaining that it was global warming, not plate tectonics . These people are not susceptible to simple logic. If the sea is rising by 20 cm per year (that is 20 metres by the end of this century!!), it should also be noticed in other Pacific islands. Fortunately, we can check with the Australian South Pacific Sea Level & Climate Monitoring Project (www.bom.gov.au/pacificsealevel/). They have twelve monitoring stations over a wide area around Takuu. Their Figure 11 shows monthly mean sea levels from 1992 to March 2009. Most show variations over time but no overall rise, not even in Tuvalu, the poster island for the global warming alarmists. From this can be concluded that the sea level rise of 20 cm per year in Takuu is mainly caused by a sinking tectonic plate.
Incidentally, the IPCC, in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, has projections (NOT predictions!) for global sea level rise by the end of this century of between 18 and 59 centimetres only.
But real-world data will not deter global warming alarmists. If one search for Takuu on Google Earth, it shows a nearby island group to the west, called Carteret Islands. These islands are on the same sinking tectonic plate as Takuu. It has the Greenpeace G-logo next to it. Clicking on it brings up the following text:
The Carteret Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, could be one of the first casualty communities as a result of climate change related sea level rise. This idyllic South Pacific paradise is suffering from the combined effects of sea level rise, erosion, storm surges, increased population and increased salinity of the soil. The combined effect are making the Carteret Islands uninhabitable. No mention of tectonic plates of course. This blatant dishonesty is typical for groups like Greenpeace. Anything to scare the living daylight out of the unsuspecting public. All we can say is: DON’T WORRY. IT AIN’T SO
Dear W.A. I can’t sleep, because I am scared witless that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere are already above 350 ppmv and may increase further, ending in catastrophe. Signed: Scared Witless.
Dear Scared Witless - Don’t be! The belief that CO2 levels in the atmosphere above 350 ppmv (part per million by volume) are dangerous is pure fantasy, not based on any scientific evidence whatsoever. That figure is just plucked out of the hat for ideological- environmental reasons.
Global warming fundamentalists are afraid that no new draconian international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol will emerge from the December UN climate conference in Copenhagen. They have started a world-wide action, based on the mythical number 350. They have created a website to promote their action, called 350.org. Their aim is to have world-wide demonstrations on October 24 to try to force political delegates to the Copenhagen conference to pass an economically devastating treaty to drastically reduce CO2 emissions. There is no scientific evidence that human CO2 emissions are causing, or will cause catastrophic global warming. Such evidence that there may be is purely based on non-validated computer models. But the 350 activists are hell-bent to push through a treaty to reduce emissions anyhow, through world-wide demonstrations. We call these activists therefore climate extremists. One has to wonder why these people obtain satisfaction in scaring little children and elderly ladies with unfounded myths.
We feel that Warmaholics Anonymous will become very important, to reduce anxieties, in the coming months, leading up to the Copenhagen conference. Climate fundamentalists will pull out all stops to realise their dangerous fantasies. We will try, in our small way, to counter that. In coming A.A. blogs, we will use the scare arguments of the 350 extremists to tell you that It Ain’t So.
The polar bear picture in the masthead is a modification of the famous painting by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, of God creating Adam. One of our members, a wizard with Photoshop, replaced Adam with a polar bear. He uses that tongue-in-cheek image in lectures about polar bears. The story goes as follows:
Many global warming alarmists are telling the public that polar bears will soon be extinct because of man-made global warming. For instance, an Australian global warming fundamentalist, Tim Flannery, predicted that polar bears could be extinct in 25 years. Believing the alarmists, the Bush administration in the US decided to list the polar bear as a threatened species. Not that there were any signs of polar bears being threatened. No, it was purely based on predictions of global warming, based on computer models.
The reality is that forty years ago polar bear numbers were down dramatically, probably as low as 6000. That was mainly due to hunting. Since restrictions on hunting were put in place, numbers have increased substantially. There may now be between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears. According to a report by the US Geological Survey, polar bear numbers may be at an all-time high.
How ludicrous these predictions of the imminent demise of the polar bears are, becomes clear when we look at the geological history. Polar bears survived many periods in the past when it was much warmer than today. For example: (1) The present ice age period started about 2.8 million years ago. Ninety percent of the time, the planet was in the grip of ice. Only ten percent of the time there were warmer periods, so-called Interglacials(see graph above – the orange peaks are the warm Interglacials) .
We live in one of those Interglacials. Polar bears survived such warm Interglacials. For instance, temperatures during the last Interglacial period (between 130,000 and 116,000 years ago) were at least 5 degrees Celsius warmer than at present, for 14,000 years. The polar bears did not become extinct. They also survived more recent warmer periods, like the Holocene Optimum (approx. 7500 to 4000 years ago), the Roman Warm Period (approx. 250 BC to 450 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (approx. 900 to 1300 AD).
The reasoning behind the masthead picture was as follows: if the alarmists are right about the imminent extinction of the polar bears, then polar bears must have become extinct many times before, during those earlier warm periods. So why are they still here? The only explanation the maker of the masthead picture could think of (tongue-in-cheek) was that an Intelligent Designer must have loved these cuddly animals so much that he recreated them ex nihilo time and time again.
The French title below the picture (Bien étonné de se trouver rassemblé – Surprisedto find itself re-assembled)is a play on the French saying Bien étonné de se trouver ensemble (surprised to find themselves together).
Therefore, for those people who are very worried about the plight of the polar bears, you can sleep peacefully. There is nothing to worry about
The first indication that a blog like WARMAHOLICS ANONYMOUS might be necessary came when one of our members attended a birthday party, at which two elderly friends told him that they had been to see Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, and that they had come out in tears. Our member first thought that they may have shed tears of laughter, as he had done when he saw the movie. No, it were tears in reaction to the horrifying apocalyptic message of the movie. We also read about children in the UK who are suffering from anxiety and sleepless nights because of worries about the apocalyptic global warming future, after seeing Al Gore’s movie in schools. The UK Government had sent free copies to all secondary schools. The purpose of the Warmaholics Anonymous Association is to help these people by telling them IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO or IT AIN’T SO. By telling them, for instance, that at least 35 scientific errors have been identified in Gore’s movie. That his movie is just science fiction. We will also explain to them that the belief in catastrophic man-made global warming is the biggest scam in human history. We will tell them that the planet has not warmed anymore since 1998 and has even cooled since 2002 - see graph. The red graph is from land-based temperature measurements, the blue graph is from satellite observations. The dashed lines are the trend lines (going down!). The green line represents the continuing increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). It is obvious that there is no correlation between temperature and CO2. We will also tell them, based on historic records, that a warmer world is beneficial, but a cooling world is awful and something to be really afraid of. We will use climate data from the real world (NOT computer models) and data from hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles. Ideologues that are pushing the apocalyptic global warming scare are not really interested in global warming. Many have separate societal agendas, which we hope to discuss in this blog in the near future. They use all possible means to promote the scare. As we know from Al Gore’s movie, such movies can be very effective propaganda vehicles. We just read about a new catastrophic global warming propaganda movie, called The Age of Stupid. An interview with the producer, Lizzie Gillett, was published in Issue 02, 2009 of the New Zealand glossy lifestyle magazine Pilot. In it she says that the aim of the film is to stop runaway climate change (she means of course “runaway global warming”). Some audiences have already seen the film and, as she says “At every screening there are a lot of positive reactions WITH PEOPLE CRYING and wanting to change their lives”. Like the crying elderly friends mentioned earlier we want to help these crying people. Last November there was a heated debate during a film festival in Amsterdam, where The Age of Stupid was shown, between Franny Armstrong, the director of the film, and two sceptics. She predicted, without a flicker of shame, that in 50 years' time when hundreds of people have died (as a result of runaway global warming), there will be an environment court and climate sceptics will be charged with the murder of the victims of this catastrophic man-made global warming. This is one of the worst examples of climate fundamentalism I have heard in a long time. It shows that the global warming debate has nothing whatsoever to do with science anymore, but has become a fundamentalist religion. A better name for the film would therefore be The Age of Climate Fundamentalism. We are worried that people like Franny Armstrong may be beyond the help of Warmaholics Anonymous.
This new blog is under development. We have just begun to learn how to do things. This blog is organised by an association calling itself Warmaholics Anonymous. Its aim is to help people who suffer from so-called "catastrophic global warming panic". The stories they read in the media and see in movies like Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" can instill severe anxieties, resulting in seeing the world through black glasses and causing sleepless nights. We want to help them by explaining in simple terms that many of these apocalyptic global warming predictions are not as bad is they are portrayed. We want to discuss various global warming beliefs, like the predicted imminent extinction of polar bears, the vanishing of the Arctic ice, the increase in severe weather events and the flooding of low-lying areas by rapidly rising see levels. In simple terms and based on real-world facts (instead of non-validated computer models) we are planning to explain that IT AIN'T NECESSARILY SO or even that IT AIN'T SO. To put it simply: " to put their minds at rest".
