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Global Warming

Saving the Planet from the dangers of global warming is today’s most fashionable cause. Make Poverty History and all the Health and Safety scares have taken a back seat. Most politicians, most of the media, including very prominently the BBC, and the Churches, Catholic and Protestant, follow, or perhaps one should say, lead the fashion. Most - but by no means all - scientists, many of whom are not climatologists, share this view*.  The general public, at least in this country, are rather more sceptical. They have heard of so many scares that were going to wipe out millions and which have come to nothing. A Mori poll in July 2007 showed that 56% of the population did not accept that there was scientific consensus on global warming and that 59% said they were doing nothing about it.

Fashion is not a good guide to the truth.

I do not believe that the planet is now in any greater danger than it has been since mankind has lived on it.

Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and a greater quantity of it will, other things being equal, serve to warm this planet. But other things may well not be equal. There are thousands of other variables which can affect the global climate. CO2 makes up only 3% of the total greenhouse gases. Over 90% is accounted for by water vapour and there are many variables which affect it. Another important variable affecting the global climate is the amount of cosmic rays reaching the earth, which Danish scientists have recently shown to be varied by the intensity of the solar wind (marked by the incidence of sun spots) and which have an effect on cloud cover. Other variables include changes in ocean currents. To quote from a recent article by Philip Stott, Professor of Biogeography at the University of London: “The idea that climate can be managed in a predictable way by manipulating one factor, carbon dioxide, out of the millions of factors involved is Alice-in-Wonderland science, with the verdict before the trial”.

The International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) established by the UN is seen by many as the ultimate authority on global warming. But it seems to me to be every bit as prone as were Mandelson and Alistair Campbell to spin. Ten years ago all reputable climatologists accepted without question that temperatures during the Mediaeval Warm Period ( roughly 10th to 13th centuries) were higher than today and that it was immediately  followed by the Little Ice Age, when ice fairs were regularly held on the frozen Thames. And yet the IPCC has tried to maintain that the global temperature had been absolutely steady from the year 1000 until the 20th Century when it began rising steeply to be at its warmest in the final decade of the century. This is just not true. Indeed the warmest decade in the 20th Century proves to have been the 1930s (which I remember well as a schoolboy as a period of almost unbroken hot summers, culminating in that glorious weather of August and September 1940 while the Battle of Britain raged overhead). This was followed by a significant cooling from 1940 to about 1970. Indeed in the early seventies the scientific consensus was that there was a serious danger of global cooling. Temperatures in the NASA satellites circling the earth have shown virtually no change since 1998 and this in a period when the amount of CO2 has increased at the highest ever rate.

It is folly - and probably harmful - to take on projects which are quite unattainable. There is not the slightest chance that the governments of the world can effectively combine to make any significant reduction - or even reduction in the growth - of CO2, which is only one of thousands of factors affecting the world’s climate. It is sheer hubris.

But I have a much more significant reason for not believing the planet to be in any danger. And that is Divine Providence. I am a little surprised that the churches should be so enthusiastically promoting the scare of global warming. Indeed recent pronouncements from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Norwich go so far as to suggests that those who are not trying to reduce their emission s of CO2 are actually being sinful. Oh that they would confine their preaching to the real sins of hate, envy, greed, pride and lust. Anglicans have mixed feelings about the future of the planet. On the one hand, in the Book of Common Prayer, after every psalm they recite the words “As it was in the beginning is now and for ever shall be, world without end” and yet, on the other, they seem to believe literally what Matthew's gospel says about the second coming of Jesus taking place at the end of the world when the stars will fall rom the sky. They can’t both be right.

For my part I am convinced that the universe and this planet will continue for ever. The spiritual universe and the material universe have a kind of symbiotic relationship and neither can continue without the other. Swedenborg says: (Heaven and Hell  para. 304)


We should all be much better relying on Divine Providence. But this does not mean sitting back and not taking responsibility for how we behave whilst on this earth. But we have to take these responsibilities sensibly and not fall into almost hysterical witch hunting.   
    At the age of 83 I never expected to live long enough to experience the next period of global cooling, but since writing the above in January 2008, I now suspect that the next period of global cooling has just begun. There is a close correlation between sunspot activity and global temperatures; low sunspot activity goes with global cooling. Sunspot activity at the end of the 20th century was exceptionally high. It has now been declining for about 8 years; this may explain why even with large emissions of CO2 there has been no increase in global temperatures(as measured by NASA’s satellites) since 1998.
    The extent of Arctic ice has not only recovered from the marked melting in the summer of 2007, but is now more extensive than it was at this time last year. This March, instruments on NASA’s Aqua satellite and NOAA and U.S. Defence Department satellites showed the maximum sea ice extent slightly increased by 3.9 percent over that of the previous three years. The US National Climate Data Center in April stated that snow cover in January 2008 on the Eurasian landmass had been the most extensive ever recorded. This past winter has been the coldest in China for 52 years. In North America it has been the coldest for 26 years. Quite remarkably there has even been snow in Riyadh and the Parthenon was under snow in January. The ski resorts in the Alps have had an abundance of snow.
    It will be a year or two before we can conclude that cooling has actually started, but I now think it probable. I am not alone in thinking this. Christopher Booker has gone on record in the same vein.

30th April 2008

*For information on scientists who do not share this view enter into Google Prof. Lindzen and Prof. Bob Carter.


Guy de Moubray
January 2008