A scheming cabal of green bureaucrats, academics and corporate speculators is trying to scare us into a mess of energy taxes, subsidies and rationing in order to combat what they call “catastrophic man-made global warming”.
Climate alarmists speculate that if the level of harmless carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled (which may or may not happen in a century or so), world temperature may be one or two degrees warmer than it would have otherwise been.
The proposition that this mild warming, if it occurs, would be “catastrophic” is so laughable that they had to invent “positive feedbacks” to multiply this scare to maybe six degrees in a century. However the emerging evidence, and Earth’s past history, show that feedbacks are negative – the vast oceans tend to stabilise warming temperatures so that even the two degree forecast is probably excessive.
In many places in Australia, temperature rises about sixteen degrees from dawn to mid-afternoon – over say eight hours, or two degrees per hour. So people who can cope with a daily warming of 16 degrees over 8 hours are supposed to panic about a fudged forecast of two degrees over a century – about the warming we feel in just one hour every morning. Even less “frightening” is the less than one degree of warming that has occurred over the last 200 years.
Why worry about warming anyhow?
The world has never suffered “runaway global warming” even when carbon dioxide levels were far above those of today. But it does suffer regular ice ages. It is not warmth that causes hardship and mass extinctions – it is the deathly grip of ice. The Little Ice Age that ended just 150 years ago was a time of failed crops, abandoned farms, advancing glaciers and famines. Even in modern times, there are more deaths caused by winter cold snaps than by summer heat waves. And those people free to move (tourists and retirees) always flock to warm places like Florida, Bali and the Riviera, not to frigid climes like Siberia, Alaska or Antarctica.
Moreover, more warmth always causes extra evaporation from lakes and oceans. What goes up, must form clouds and come down somewhere as extra precipitation. And if there is more carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere, plants will grow better. Why do we need carbon taxes and ration cards to protect us from a warm moist climate with more luxuriant plant life?
The whole climate scam is just a smoke screen to hide the UN inspired grab for more taxes and more power.
Viv Forbes
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
