Climate change is bull, says SA think tank

According to the 23rd issue of @Liberty, the IRR’s policy bulletin, he belief that mankind is raising global temperatures by increasing carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air is not a ruling conviction of the modern age but a fallacy.

The IRR asked “engineer and energy expert” Andrew Kenny, to examine scientific reasons for widespread public alarm over “Global Warming” or “Climate Change”. He writes this public alarm merely provides funding and careers for large numbers of activists, bureaucrats, activists, and politicians around the world. “But basic physics shows that CO₂, a weak greenhouse gas, can never have an important effect on temperatures. Observation confirms this.”

History proves that climate is always changing, he says. “It has been changing since the Earth was born, about 4.5 billion years ago. Given changes in the Sun, changes in the Earth’s orbit, changes in the Earth’s continents, changes in the Earth’s geology, and the Earth’s continual rotation, it cannot be otherwise. CO₂ is also changing, but changes in CO₂ have never been seen to have any significant effect on global temperatures.

“The slight warming of the 20^th Century, which stopped in around 1996, was no different from the Mediaeval Warm Period a thousand years ago, when temperatures were higher than now. This warm period, like others before it in the Earth’s history, was entirely natural. There is no evidence to show that the recent warming was not entirely natural too,” Kenny writes.

He says there is also no basis in science for the notion that rising CO₂ increases the frequency or severity of extreme weather events (floods, droughts, storms, cyclones, extreme heat, extreme cold, and so on). Observation over the last 50 years shows no such increase.

“CO₂ is entirely clean, safe, and natural. It is NOT a pollutant. On the contrary, it is essential to the plant life upon which we all depend. Without it the human race and all other higher mammals would perish. It is a wonderful gas, and its levels are now extremely low in the history of planet Earth, probably dangerously low.”

He says Earth faces many serious environmental problems, but man-made climate change is not such a threat. “It is no threat at all. For the sake of our planet and of the poor people who live on it, we need to end this unfounded and extravagant belief, and turn to science and reason to protect our environment from the many real threats that it confronts, writes Kenny.