[ExI] climate change scientific papers and NATURE

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Tue Oct 14 04:52:25 UTC 2008


This is important and interesting in its own right, of course, but I 
draw the last par of the extract below to the attention of those here 
(hi, John Clark!) who just know in their bones that It's True 
(whatever it is) only if NATURE publishes it:

<http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-climate-change-unbelievers-958237.html>


David Bellamy is an environmental campaigner and former television 
presenter. He was senior lecturer in Botany at Durham University 
until 1982, where he is now an honorary professor

"Global warming is the biggest scam since the church sold indulgences 
back in the Middle Ages. If our Government actually believes that all 
those people are going to die, why did it build Terminal Five?

"I've been doing research on the stability of ecosystems, which is 
all tied up with human activity, for 22 years. That's why I became a 
leading greenie in the early days. I have probably stood on more 
picket lines than anyone to stop forest-clearing, wind farms and the 
overfishing of the sea. But when the scientific arguments don't add 
up, one starts to question them: CO2 levels have risen in the 
atmosphere, but why don't all the other bits of science fall in around that?

"The speed of retreat of glaciers worldwide has not changed. The 
latest data shows that both the northern and southern ice caps are 
actually growing. The recent studies of the ice core show that rises 
in temperature are followed by a release of carbon dioxide, not the 
other way around. I'll be in New Zealand soon, and two of the major 
glaciers there are growing like the clappers. And from 1998 there has 
been no rise at all in the temperature of the earth. Indeed, all the 
sunspot data tells us we're headed for 15 very cold years.

"Many peer-reviewed papers show that as CO2 goes up, many plants and 
forests grow up to 40 per cent faster. The New Scientist has reported 
that 300,000 square kilometres of former desert are now covered with 
trees. Why don't we have all those good points publicised?

"Global temperature has risen at a natural rate that began 300 years 
ago. That slope of change has not changed since then, so how can we 
say that carbon is the driver? The sun has more correlations with 
temperature change than carbon.

"The whole world is hooked on a fear of carbon, and there really is 
nothing to fear.

"The scientific consensus is not strong, but every time I turn on the 
television or read a newspaper, I hear that it is. The BBC constantly 
tells us the lakes in Africa are drying up because of global warming. 
The lakes are drying up because of the dams around them, and the fact 
that we are using that local water to produce cut flowers for the 
European market. Why aren't we told these things?

"If you go through the peer-reviewed literature on our side of the 
argument, it's near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe. 
But it has got to a state of McCarthyism within science. As a 
university don, I used to try to get every tenth paper of mine into 
[the weekly science journal] Nature. But Nature will not touch any 
papers which are anti the global-warming ethic. I have been called a 
Holocaust denier. If they weren't really frightened they were losing 
the argument, they wouldn't write those things." '




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