Global warming or a lot of bunkum?

All those who hate Bush and his oil politics have come together to push hard for policies that reduce global warming, without knowing whether the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases temperature

It has been an unusually cold winter, and the Met Department does not promise much relief till we are well into February. I look around in the Hardnews office and find my colleagues wearing layers of woollens to ward off the chilly wind blowing down from the nearby mountains. I have felt the need for some serious global warming to raise the temperature in my office and my home. Nothing seems to be happening. Was nature having a rethink about whether it should have an ice-age or unrelenting warming induced by polluting human beings? There were no ready answers as many like me continued to shiver in cities of north India wondering what to watch out for. All the articles that we carried in the past in Hardnews merely corroborated the impending doom caused by greenhouse affect. They were no help.

Climate change, as we realised, was being less science and more politics. It had little to do with our world and what really raised temperatures and what brought them down. As I probed deeper on the net I found a running battle between those who believed “science was settled” on the issue of climate change and there was an urgent need for governments to act — and the “deniers”, who thought otherwise. The deniers had mustered enough evidence to show that the basic premise of those who swear by “climate change”— a temperature graph resembling a hockey stick prepared by a scientist to show rapid rise in the temperature in the last 10 years — was debunked when questioned by statisticians.

Au contraire they were able to show that the temperatures had stopped rising from 2001 and plateaued since then. Such views were considered heretical by the climate changers who seemed to be on the wrong side of the Americans, who refused to cut down on their carbon emissions as they insisted that it would bring down their industrial growth. So badly botched up is the reputation of US President George W Bush that his government's opposition to the Kyoto protocol was seen as an attempt to protect the status quo sustained by the ugly multinationals. Climate changers built on this opposition to show that rise in temperature induced by carbon emissions was a priori and there was no space for any kind of rethink on this issue. So vicious has been the face-off between the climate changers and the deniers that all kinds of methods have been used to block contrarian views in the venerated IPCC report of the United Nations.

Some scientists, I gathered after gleaning some climate change websites, have been threatened with dire consequences if they deign to put their views in the report. Scientists associated with the IPCC report have been accused by naysayers of articulating views that have not been peer reviewed.

The purpose of giving space to the deniers stems from the desire to find out the truth about climate change in which more than 50 billion dollars have already been spent in research. Despite this, there are only seven per cent scientists who believe there is a consensus on climate warming. The rest believe that science is still not capable of fully comprehending why temperatures change. The corroborative evidence that the climate changers and the purveyors of “inconvenient truth” have made such as the increase in hurricanes due to global warming, have been found to be inadequate. Interestingly, there has been a fall in the intensity of hurricanes in the last few years.