Ian Bradford: Some Arguments Against Climate Alarmists

Skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin - Thomas Huxley, 19 C Biologist

Sea Level Rise

Alarmists continue to push sea level rise, plus the rise is accelerating as yet more propaganda. Let’s go back in time.

This comes from Peter James Spielmann journalist, from 1989.

United Nations (AP): A senior UN environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000 - yes 2000!

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco refuges” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environmental Programme - UNEP.

He said governments had a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes out of control. Yes that’s still by the year 2000!

As the warming melts the polar ice caps (that’s both ice caps) ocean levels will rise up to three feet -that’s nearly a metre, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview.

Coastal regions will be inundated, one sixth of Bangladesh will be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta will be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and US Environmental Protection Agency study. Ecological refugees will become a major concern.

Here we are 36 years later and has all this happened? NO not a scrap of it. The climate alarmists will say anything to get the general public extremely worried, and under control of their government. New Zealand researchers with study lead author and scientist Paul Kench published a study in 2018. Based on aerial photos and satellite images of Pacific Islands over the last four decades it was found that most atolls they examined were actually increasing in size. The Maldives were showing a similar effect. In September 1988, Agence France-Presse reported that a gradual rise in sea level is threatening to cover the 1200 small islands of the Maldives within the next 30 years. Population then was 200,000. The population of the Maldives now is 417,000 and it’s ALL above water.

Time to introduce Nils Morner. Nils is a sea level specialist. He did his PhD thesis on sea levels and has worked on sea levels since 1970. He is a recently retired director of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Dept of the University of Stockholm.

He did some work on the rotation of the Earth. Briefly without getting into too much of the physics of the consequence, if sea level rises the diameter of the earth will increase by a small amount. Using the conservation of angular momentum, the speed of rotation of the Earth will decrease- only by a tiny amount. Some corrections for El Nino and La Nina have to be made. So the length of day increases (only a fraction of a second). (There are probably as many areas of land rising as sinking, so that effect will be very small. Also the oceans occupy about 70% of the earth so their influence is large.)

Nils Morner found that the increase in sea level from 1850 to 1940 was 1.1 mm per year. (He also referred to tide gauges and satellite readings.) This gave a rise over that period of about 11cm. From 1940 to 1970 the sea stopped rising. In the last 10-15 years Morner has seen no rise in sea level and certainly no acceleration of sea level as the IPCC claim. This relates well to the findings of the Heartland institute. The highest quality tide gauges around the world show no evidence of tidal acceleration since 1920. A 2017 study released by the Heartland Institute by geophysicist Dennis Hedke analysed data from ten coastal cities with long and reliable sea level records. Hedke found there was no correlation between changes in sea level at these locations and rising carbon dioxide levels.

Nils Morner became President of the Commission on Sea Level Change and Coastal Evolution. In 100 years from now Nils Morner considers sea level rise will only be of the order of 5cm. Compare this with Michael MacCracken writing under the title “The increasing Pace of Climate Change”, in 2009. Yet another scaremongering prediction: “By the end of the century sea level rise could be a metre or more.”

Finally, more evidence comes from the European satellite EVISTAT. It showed falling sea levels since it was launched in 2002. For the years up to 2012 decline continued at about 5mm per year. Unfortunately, EVISTAT broke down in 2012, but NASA had also reported that sea level was about 6mm lower that year.

The Mann Hockey Stick

The global warming alarmists needed to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period (about 1000AD to 1250AD). It has been long accepted that this period was .5 to 1deg C warmer than present. They couldn’t have any temperature in the immediate past higher than present.

This is what Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation said: “When prosecuting the case for “unprecedented” man made global warming, the first thing you need to make sure of is that no recent climate era was as warm or warmer than the present, even if it means having to rewrite the past to fit your narrative.”

A major researcher in the area of climate change sent an E-mail to Dr Denning a member of the US senate: “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

In 1995 the IPCC made a decision to make the Medieval Warm Period disappear. So by the 2001 IPCC report the MWP disappeared and became much cooler than the late 20th Century.

The saviour was Michael Mann who produced the infamous Hockey stick graph shown below.

Compare this to Lamb’s graph which the IPCC actually included in its 1990 report. Then they stated in the same report: “ This period- the Medieval Warm Period, of widespread warmth, is notable in that there is no evidence that it was accompanied by an increase of greenhouse gases.”

Using the evidence from one single tree Mann flattened the temperature over 500 years from 1000Ad to 1500Ad and made the MWP disappear. Mann was reticent to allow anyone to check his work.

However, a PhD student Steven McIntyre, teamed up with Prof. McKitrick in attempting to replicate the chart and finally debunked it as statistical nonsense. If someone did a graph like this in a stock prospectus they would be jailed.

Since then the Hockey stick has been thoroughly discredited.

Dr Hamish Campbell PhD geologist with the NZ Institute of Geological Sciences said: “Mann’s Hockey stick has been substantially discredited.”

Dr Michael R Fox, Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University said: “We now know that the hockey stick is fraudulent.”

Climate alarmists have claimed that the Southern Hemisphere did not experience the MWP. South African cave records show this was incorrect. In fact the records show the temperature may have been 3 deg. higher than now.

The IPCC welcomed the Mann Hockey Stick in its 2001 report. Al Gore in his book- “The Inconvenient Truth” made use of it. Gore had a little red blip above the average line where the Medieval Warm Period is supposed to be. He said this: “Sceptics say that global warming is an illusion and that differences in yearly temperatures occur naturally, not from what people are doing to the atmosphere. To support their view they frequently point to the Medieval Warm Period- the little red blip occurring around 1350AD. But this spike is tiny compared to the enormous increase in temperature during the past 50 years at the far right of the chart.”

He then goes on to say that the highest temperature recorded during this entire period was in 2005.

In fact the highest temperature during the entire period was in the MWP and the highest temperature since was in 1933/1934.

Although Mann’s Hockey Stick graph was thoroughly discredited, the damage was done. Global warming caused by humans became the cry of the climate alarmists. That is until the embarrassing hiatus from 1998, after which “global warming” became “climate change” and that covered all eventualities. Scientist Tim Ball called Mann a fraud and so Mann sued Ball but lost. Mann could not provide any real scientific evidence for his claims, and was forced to pay Ball’s legal expenses.

Polar Bears

This is what the IPCC said in 2013: “Our analyses highlight the potential for large reductions in the global polar bear population if sea ice loss continues, which is forecast by climate models and other studies.”

Al Gore : “We are facing a climate crisis, one that may seem to be happening slowly but is happening very quickly.” “The threat of extinction of polar bears would increase.”

Then we have extracts from a BBC article written by Helen Briggs and Victoria Gill on 20th July 2020. “Polar bears will be wiped out by the end of the century unless more is done to tackle climate change, a study predicts.” (doesn’t say what study.)

Scientists say some populations have already reached their survival limits as the Arctic ice shrinks. “The bear has become the poster child for climate change”, said Dr Peter Molner of the University of Toronto in Ontario Canada.

Polar bears are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with climate change a key factor in their decline. There were a number of headlines stating that polar bears face extinction.

Most polar bears are found in Canada. Their main diet is young seals. This happens in spring before the young seals leave the ice. At this time a bear puts on a lot of fat. It can then go without food till next Autumn. Bears do not need ice over summer so some spend time on land. Inuit have hunted bears for skins and food but their contribution to the decrease in polar bear numbers is small. From 1850 to 1930 sealers hunted the bears for the skins. After the Second World War hunters got in on the act purely for sport. This became a concern in the 1950’s and 60’s with polar bear numbers steadily decreasing. In 1973 all the Arctic region signed a treaty to regulate the hunting of bears.

The Arctic has gone through periods of losing and gaining ice. From 1980 to the present it is in a losing ice phase. Predictions about habitat loss caused authorities under the ESA to list polar bears as threatened. Note that it is only the summer ice that declines not the winter ice. Researchers working hard to bring a case for polar bears being threatened, used computer modelled predictions of sea ice loss and some assumptions as to the response of bears to habitat loss. They stated: “Our modelling suggests that realisation of the sea ice future which is currently projected would mean a loss of 2/3 of the world’s current polar bear population by 2050 as a direct result of going over a particular threshold of sea ice loss.”

The bear population at the time was taken as 25,000, and the threshold of sea ice loss was that there was going to be less than 4 million sq km of ice at 50% concentration. Now remember this was projected to happen at 2050.

Here’s the interesting bit: IN SEPTMBER 2007 THE AMOUNT OF SEA ICE AT 50% CONCENTRATION HAD ALREADY FALLEN BELOW THE PREDICTION FOR 2050. This is important because in 2007 with the ice below the threshold already, polar bears were actually thriving, and increasing in numbers. So they had NOT lost 2/3 of their number - the modelling was wrong. The polar bears did not deserve the threatened status. Just more scaremongering.

Let’s look at the numbers:

YEAR NUMBER OF BEARS YEAR NUMBER OF BEARS

1950’s 5000 2005 20,000 - 25,000

1970 8000 - 10,000 2015 22,000 - 31,000

1984 25,000 2022 32,000 +

Below is a graph of those figures (From Fee stories and Susan Crockford)

It seems clear that the alarmists grossly underestimated the flexibility and adaptability of the polar bears. For one this they simply shifted their dens to places where there was sufficient ice. Less sea ice favoured the seals too. They could feed in ice-free conditions and as a result more seal pups were born. This of course provided more feed for the bears. Lack of summer ice did not affect the bears. They had sufficient fat from being well fed in the spring to last them over summer without having to feed over that period. POLAR BEARS ARE THRIVING.

Susan Crockford is a polar bear expert. Here are some headlines relating to Dr Crockford.

Dr Crockford earned a PhD in biology and Anthropology from the University of Victoria in Canada in 2004. She has studied polar bears for many years and has over 30 publications in her name. She was for 15 years an adjunct assistant professor, but the same university that gave her a PhD rejected her renewal application in 2019. No reason for her dismissal was given and no information has been forthcoming from the University. Susan Crockford believes she was removed in order to suppress her views on polar bears, and to prevent her from challenging the high profile academics who claim polar bears are becoming endangered and are in crisis. Susan says that contrary to the claims of climate alarmists, polar bears are thriving, numbers are increasing, and they are at no risk of extinction from climate change.

The sacking of Susan Crockford is just the tip of the iceberg. Probably, thousands of academics have lost their jobs by now for daring to speak out against anthropogenic climate change. The sad fact of all this is that the general public are either apathetic or do not know what is happening. They will wake up eventually, but how long will that take? In the meantime billions of dollars have been wasted on a fruitless cause - trying to stop a natural event like climate change.

This is just brief sample of lies and propaganda put out by climate alarmists. To include more would make this article far too long.

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.