Reviews

1. Responses to criticism

The letter below was published in Caduceus 91 (2015) and is followed by my response which was sent to Tony Wardle directly.

It’s the Sun What Did It … and Cycles

by Tony Wardle

Peter Taylor’s article, Current Weather ‘Chaos’, is hardly light reading but appears to be a determined attempt to validate a previous claim of five years earlier, that natural and recurring global phenomena are responsible for what global warming there has been and this has now probably past its peak and a cooling will soon begin or may have already.

I confess, I am not a scientist I am a journalist but have spent decades trying to read between the lines of claims by those who maintain they are right and almost everyone else is wrong. There are parallels whatever the subject – mind-boggling detail on the areas where the author is confident of his or her subject and sweeping generalisations where he or she hasn’t done the work or where the facts don’t support their proposition. Interestingly, Taylor accuses the IPCC and other scientists of ‘prior commitment’, supporting a previously held position in order to save face – precisely, it seems, what his article sets out to do.

The starting point for any discussion on global warming has to be to establish the consensus – and that is that global warming is real, progressive and human kind is largely responsible through its emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Of the 36 great academies and scientific institutions in the world, including the British Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences – as well as the IPCC of course - all accept the proposition of anthropogenic climate change. Taylor is not only dismissive of them but maintains that there is a growing movement away from this consensus. The latest research from NASA (1) shows the opposite is happening and the consensus has hardened, with 97 per cent of climate scientists now accepting it. This, of course, doesn’t mean that Taylor is wrong.

However, the most suspect of his claims is that the Arctic ice sheet returned to normal bounds in 2013 and that an expansion of Antarctic sea ice has resulted in an increase in total global sea ice – there is no mention of ice volume, however. The latest research from the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, using the CryoSat-2 satellite (2) produced 68.5 million measurements of the two poles and far from recovering, the Arctic is losing ice at the rate of 375 cubic km per year. The Antarctic is more complex, with the East Antarctic ice sheet increasing but the West Antarctic ice sheet losing ice rapidly. Far from Antarctic ice expanding and ‘exceeding modern records’, it is suffering a net loss of 125 cubic km per year.

Ice loss of the past few years, according to Taylor’s calculations, was all due to natural phenomena and would have happened anyway without increased CO2 levels. And he is scathing of ‘superficial scientific studies’ that equate temperature changes with CO2 levels.

Ice core samples dating back 800,000 years and retrieved by the British Antarctic Survey show that CO2 was stable over the last millennium until the early 19th century. It then started to rise and its concentration is now nearly 40 per cent higher than it was before the industrial revolution. Isotopic measurements reveal that this increase largely arises from fossil fuel usage and deforestation.

Such a rapid increase in CO2 levels is unprecedented over the last 800,000 years. The fastest natural increase during this time span was around 20ppmv (parts per million by volume) but it took place over a 1,000 year period as the Earth emerged from the last ice age 12,000 years ago. Concentrations at this level - 20ppmv – have been measured in the last 10 years alone.

Methane is also increasing dramatically from rice paddies, ruminants (mainly cattle) and landfill. The 2014 appearance of massive, 100-metre diameter methane blow holes in the Siberia tundra is perhaps the most worrying feature of all and not part of Taylor’s scenario. They possibly indicate that the phenomenon of positive feedback, which most scientists fear, has begun and the trillions of tons of Arctic methane will continue to be released and there is nothing we can do about it (4).

Taylor, however, appears to believe that the planet is quite capable of self-regulation and absorbing excess heat into its oceans but the science does not support him. Ice core measurement over 800,000 years show that temperature rises are almost exactly mirrored by increases in CO2 levels. There are no examples where CO2 has increased and temperatures have not! On this basis alone, anthropogenic climate change is undeniable. Interestingly, Taylor refers to ice core samples but only in relation to solar cycles – which are consistent with his thesis – but ignores the convincing science on C02 – which isn’t.

If, over the last 800,000 years, specific levels of CO2 have always triggered dramatic increases in global temperatures, why should this period of history be any different? I am not capable of analysing his data which attempts to prove that natural cycles carry most of the responsibility but I am capable of identifying glaring holes in his argument.

The ability of oceans to absorb heat is not in question but Taylor wants to play it both ways. He disputes the science that shows increased sea temperatures but then adds that even if they have increased and are masking global warming, it indicates the planet’s resilience. Either the oceans are warming or they aren’t and if they are, there is no evidence to support Taylor’s complacency that they can continue to absorb heat at this level.

In a 2013 study, the journal Science (5) reported that Pacific Ocean waters are warming at a rate 15 times faster than the rest of the sea floor. Under normal conditions oceans are a buffer for temperature changes in the atmosphere, says the study’s lead author. She adds: “But right now we are completely out of equilibrium.

The authors admit that they need to know more about the oceans before they can be confident but Taylor cannot simply dismiss this and other work because: “…the data is simply not detailed enough.” Of course more work needs to be done but this study provides far more detail than Taylor does for his denial. Of course, to give it even passing credence blows another hole in his assertions.

I am not saying that the consensus should not be challenged simply that those challenges cannot afford to be selective in their choice of data because there is much too much at risk.

1. W. R. L. Anderegg, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.

P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.

2 Helm, V., Humbert, A., and Miller, H.: Elevation and elevation change of Greenland and Antarctica derived from CryoSat-2, The Cryosphere, 8, 1539-1559, doi:10.5194/tc-8-1539-2014, 2014.

3 http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/bas_research/science_briefings/icecorebriefing.php (contains multiple references).

4. The Big Picture TV Interview with Dr Michael E. Mann, Penn State University, Departments of Meterology and Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) and Director of Penn State Earth Systems Science Centre (ESSC).

5 Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years, Science, 1 November 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6158 pp. 617-621 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240837

My Response

My full response to Mr Wardle can be downloaded by clicking the link below:

Click to download

2. Greta Thunberg

The Climate Book,
Thunberg, Greta.
Allen Lane, 2022. 446 pages, hardback, £25
ISBN 978-0-241-54747-2

Greta…’science does not lie’
We constantly hear about climate ‘denial’ – from those who claim the Earth and humanity face an emergency, a desperate tipping point as temperature rise accelerates – with melting glaciers, rising seas, hurricane winds, droughts, wildfires, dwindling food supplies, loss of forests, coral death…the list is large. This book elaborates on the list. It is mostly rhetoric and opinion, although from acknowledged experts, each getting a few pages to make their claim, with Greta adding her little rants about ‘nothing’ being done, and ‘follow the science – it does not lie’.
Science does lie. The problem is that it is not just Greta who is in denial. She can be excused because the lies don’t make the books she read at school. But the scientists who populate this book – 100 experts, have no excuse. Some may genuinely be ignorant of their history – their institutions do not make a point of informing their members and the sociology of science gets little funding and zero publicity, but we have one recent and classic example of lies from the Covid saga – legitimate to provide here because Tedros Gehbreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation, is invoked by Greta and gets a chapter, along with a chapter on the lessons from the Pandemic by a New York Times author of ‘The uninhabitable Earth – life after warming’. Here we can transpose the nature of that lie directly to climate science.
Early in the Pandemic, the WHO convened a special international expert group for the UN to investigate the ‘origins’ of the virus. They reported that it was probably zoonotic (i.e. it jumped from a wild animal to humans) and very unlikely to have been a leak from a laboratory. This coincided with a paper in Nature, signed on by several virology professors, which claimed it was not possible the virus was engineered. Both groups involved Peter Daszak, a British zoologist leading the Eco-health Alliance – a group specialising in zoonotics. The WHO did not reveal that Daszak had channelled US government funding (from their defence agency) to the Wuhan lab specifically aimed at ‘gain-of-function’ research on bat viruses. Other members of the WHO group had direct conflict of interests related to the pharmaceutical industry – which benefited by hundreds of billions of dollars spent on dealing with the Pandemic and its consequences.
The zoonotic story is not a lie – it is a reasonable postulate. The lie relates to the probability of that and the alternative – a lab-origin. The WHO report was heavily criticised and further investigations were promised but recently abandoned. The Chinese government thoroughly investigated the zoonotic potential and found no evidence to support it. With regard to evidence of a lab-origin, the Wuhan lab had taken down its online virus data-base before the Pandemic was announced and denied further access to the WHO team. There is, however, a paper-trail in the virology literature where the head of the lab announces the success of their gene-splicing for the SARS bat virus – making it more transmissible – the kind of result that the US funding was interested in. The head of the FBI recently advised President Biden that a Chinese government lab-origin was the most probable source. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6, has gone on record saying the security services conclude the lab-origin is the only way to explain the genetic changes logged in the viral genome.
That is how the UN works. It colludes with vested interests and sets up scientific expert groups that defend those interests. It does not publicise data and research findings that do not agree with its preferred theories and models. This is what happened with ocean pollution in the 1980s – first denial of data contradicting models, then packing of special expert groups with those scientists in denial of the data and protecting their labs and their funding prospects. We called them the ‘dilute and disperse mafia’ – they believed that any toxin, if sufficiently diluted, would be harmless. A small group of ‘heretics’ funded by Greenpeace, systematically took apart the models, gained political support at the UN, exposed the lies, and most importantly, offered an alternative based on the Precautionary Principle and Clean Production Strategies. It took fifteen years.
I could list other examples – acid rain, low level radiation and x-rays for pregnant women, the release of CFCs. In these cases, the UN sanctioned the practices and none of the science institutions took the lead in changing them – apart from the one instance when they realised the huge error of releasing CFCs! Apart from CFCs, the system buries the history of errors and no straight science course teaches it.
One day – maybe in another ten years, the climate ‘lies’ will be admitted – how the UN selected the alarmists, how the alarmists denied the science of cycles, manipulated the data, suppressed their critics and how the science journals colluded in that suppression. And maybe not. Because in former times, there was an environmental movement with a bit of nous. Now…there are no allies for the dissident scientists – not Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, Oxfam, the New Internationalist….all members of the ‘climate coalition’ funded by billionaires, governments, the EU and the UN.
Greta, of course, knows none of this history. And she thinks ‘nothing is being done’. In 2022, this coalition pressed the world into $1.4 trillion investments in renewable energy, most of the technology made in China.
Greta is right on one thing - It is ‘not enough’ - of course. Renewables currently account for less than 10% of global primary energy supply, and fossil fuels about 70%. Nuclear is unlikely to do more than maintain a 20% share, so that means a 7-fold expansion of renewables - current investment of which runs at $1.4 trillion or 1% of global GDP and hardly ‘nothing’.
If the science were addressed properly, in open debate where critics were accorded some respect, it would be obvious to many people that there were no certain predictions and projections – and hence, ‘business as usual’ would be the likely result. No environmentalist wants that! And for good reason – the global development model is destroying the global ecology. Greta wants to change that by global governance – but fails to see that the focus on climate is a distraction, and all the actions she wants to see would not help and with regard to biodiversity and human community, have an even bigger impact.

Experts at maintaining falsehood
This book is thus part of a monolithic process that maintains the falsehoods. With 100 experts I can but pick a few examples. ‘As warming accelerates’ says Michael Oppenheimer, IPCC expert, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs. A lie. Warming has not accelerated. In the 44 years since satellite surveillance, the average warming per decade has remained constant – at 0.13°C/decade. That rate could also apply to the 20th century, if you take 1°C as the centennial rise since 1920. However, the last eight years have seen no significant rise, and if you subtract the El Nino cycle from the 21st century record, there would be zero surface warming over the last 23 years. Sea Level Rise has also been monotonic – since 1850 at 2mm/year: an apparent recent ‘acceleration’ to 3mm/year is derived from new satellite measurements and if true would also be seen in the tidal gauge records, but they present the same 2mm/year global average rate.
I have looked through all the chapters – not a single reference to the main criticism of the models and the science: the absence of cycles. No references to the key papers that extrapolate past data on cycles that then predict the current warm-period as on schedule and not unprecedented. This is the mainstay of the IPCC/UN falsification – as before, there is a political and economic agenda and a set of strong vested interests.
One of those vested interests is the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an institute entirely dependent upon ‘climate funding’ – and in the book its director Johan Rockström tells us ‘we have exceeded the warmest global mean surface temperature since we left the last ice-age’ – which is 10,000 years ago. This is not fact, it is a hotly contested argument by climate specialist here presented as fact with none of the counter-argument – for example, that 8000 years ago, the northern hemisphere was likely two degrees warmer than present and the Arctic Ocean was certainly ice-free. This is known as the Holocene Climate Optimum among paleo-climatologists who do not get a seat at the IPCC table. Again, we are dealing with cycles – but not a word of these gets through the filter. Instead, we are warned about ‘tipping points’ – the Arctic ice being one such trigger, despite that point not being triggered in previous warmer times.
This book is not worth detailed analysis – on drought, wildfires, floods, ice-sheets, the Amazon, permafrost, health risks, climate refugees and a food crisis, because every single ‘chapter’ contains the same biased rhetoric. There is no balanced treatment of real-world data, especially paleo-data which would show that none of these changes are unprecedented and are normal for the long-cycle of 1000 years that the IPCC has airbrushed out of existence.

Clouds are an acknowledged major uncertainty in climate projections – which rely upon largely unproven feedbacks to produce the more extreme predictions of 3°C warming by 2100 – which the book accepts as if proven. Without this feedback, projections hover around 1.5°C and are not a cause for concern. The uncertainty means there is scientific debate – at least in the science literature. Here, the chapter on clouds is one page out of 400 – by Paulo Ceppi, of the Grantham Institute, Britain’s Potsdam.
Ceppi acknowledges the past uncertainty but suggests that the latest science supports a positive cloud feedback (i.e. amplifies the carbon dioxide effect). That is not my reading – there are well-qualified scientists who have recently shown that cloud changes drive temperature change, and clouds are cyclic – in particular, El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) clouds. Their data show that the 2016-2020 spike in temperature was caused by cyclic cloud change, and that global temperatures returned to their 21st century flat-line after the ENSO events.

This particular cloud science is ignored, of course. Crucially, it detracts from the ‘acceleration’ narrative. Likewise, there was intense debate about cloud thinning causing the 1980-2000 warming (there was no warming from 1950-1980). I highlighted this data in my 2009 book Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory, when it was a matter of intense discussion at NASA – one expert openly stating ‘did the clouds cause the warming, or were they an effect – a feedback?’ The answer could be seen when the cloud cover recovered in 2001 despite the ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide, and temperatures stabilised until 2016 and the ENSO events. Unfortunately, the protagonists of the feedback theory simply hid under their desks until the world entered the ‘no further debate’ phase.
There is a page on ocean acidification – it is very weak on a very important and live issue, which I happen to think may be more important than climate, as pulses of CO2 (perhaps volcanic) above 400ppmv (where we are now) correlate with mass extinctions of ocean life – of which there have been 38 at intervals of 15 million years.

Whilst none of the science here presented by Greta is worth the paper it is printed on, it is worth reading the ‘solution’ chapters regarding action and the lessons its authors have learned from the Pandemic. First of which is that governments can print vast sums of money when they want to, and take dramatic actions to limit personal freedom. That governments get plunged into massive debt – to the banks, is okay for these authors, mostly journalists and activists.

It is however clear now to all activists that technical solutions – for example, turbines, hydro, biofuels, solar, nuclear and all, cannot solve the global problem, because the global and vulnerable South cannot afford them. Therefore there must be a mandated redistribution of wealth. To the cynical, the activists are losing support in the North and need the South on-board.
That these vast sums of Pandemic money were largely wasted with enormous corruption evident seems not to have registered. Rather, the capacity for surveillance, carbon accounting, income redistribution and a command economy is extolled as virtue. There are calls for military style spending on a ‘war’ footing. Therein lies the rationale for ‘emergency’ status which brings emergency powers – and the suspension of democratic decision making.

Most of the writers advocating such measures seemingly cannot see the Wuhan lifestyle as threatening, perhaps because their own social credit is strong. Sad to see, for me, are the final few pages written by indigenous activists – equally naïve as to whom they have gotten into bed with.

Having unleashed the terrors of expanded copper and lithium mining, rare-earth element moonscape processing and the ascendency of Chinese manufacturing (80% of solar, 80% of lithium batteries, 90% of electric vehicle manufacture, 90% of rare-earth metal processing for magnets in the motors, etc.) - with the vast revenues therefrom financing the Chinese purchase of productive land in the tropics, displacement of subsistence farmers, plus railroads and ports to ship the food) – all in the name of the Green New Deal, this denialist tide is now turning to international justice, equity, women’s rights and the plight of the indigenous.
Slavery gets a few mentions. The global North was built on it, of course. Capitalism was built on it, but that word doesn’t get used much – since the solutions require the capitalists to play ball. The rich 10% who got rich on the back of slavery and colonialism, account for 50% of the carbon emissions. That includes their investment portfolio emissions. There is no mention that the global South have the same aspirations as the North and when they do get money (from selling their resources), they buy the goods those emissions and investments produced. And with the New Globalised Green Deal, they would get plenty of money to buy electric cars, turbines and solar panels from the northern capital’s workhouse in China.

George Monbiot has a relevant chapter toward the end – ‘let them eat slime’, they don’t need farming and real food, and we can ‘rewild’ the countryside. He is now at the Schumacher Institute in Dartington.

This book is a travesty of science. It shows how low science has sunk. It is a paean of naivety, appropriately created by a frightened though very brave schoolgirl and used by the global elite of bankers, investors and billionaire industry moguls – Gore, Carney, Soros, Buffet, Gates, Bezos, Musk, Blackrock, Vanguard, all of whom know how to make money from a crisis, then redistribute it to their own advantage. Climate aid goes primarily on purchasing renewable technology from the rich. And of course, there are our humanitarian minders at the United Nations, ever intent on a global citizenry many steps removed from any democratic accountability.
Depressing, no? I would like to end upbeat on something, but I can’t find anything. I have no allies – no environmental movement, no team, no funding like the old days, and in any case, I am too old. If young guns came to me for advice, I would have none. Jesus said, ‘render unto Caesar’….opposing this Empire is pointless, it will die in the next down-cycle, like they all do. Give it three hundred years maximum. Rather, we need to look inside and safeguard sanity and consciousness, love and faith in humanity. Good luck everybody!

Hugh Barton complained about the review in Caduceus, below is my response:

Comment upon Peter Taylor’s critique of Greta’s book
Hugh Barton

HB First, to be clear, I have not read Greta Thunberg’s book, so cannot comment on that directly. What follows is simply a reaction to what Taylor writes in his article. There are many points I can agree with him – his suspicion of vested interests for example, and his belief that biodiversity loss and changes to the oceans are critically important. Also there are clearly uncertainties in climate science which need to be debated – such as the reliability of the climate models. Models are not facts. What he does not dispute is the fact of rising average global temperatures since the industrial age began. I’m glad about that. However, by raising valid questions in a way which is very dismissive of his fellow scientists, impugning their work……

I would like to know how you come to this conclusion – I am neither dismissive nor do I ‘impugn’ their work. It is true that I can be dismissive of ‘models’ when they are used to trump real-world data; and there are a few characters for whom I have scant respect, such as the conspiring modellers who ‘hid the decline’ and pulled ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ (you can read about the ‘climategate’ debacle in Andrew Montford’s ‘Hide the Decline’ and ‘The Hockey-Stick Controversy’) – but the comment is generally untrue:

1. After publishing my own critique of global warming science (400pp and 200+ references) – it was reviewed in the specialist climate journal The Holocene as ‘essential reading’ along with the publications of IPCC model-based projections.
2. After realising the nature of public discourse – especially the response of the ‘green’ movement (refusing to read the book and calling me a ‘denier’, I visited my colleague (during ocean pollution work) Professor Jackson Davis – who since our work had helped create the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, and in addition was drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol – both of us visited two of the key US modelling labs for extensive discussions and were welcomed – Jackson Davis had before then, despite representing the Pacific Island States as a climate expert at the UN, never reviewed the actual science – like me, he had trusted it was ‘settled’
3. Davis and I co-wrote two papers, with three ancillary papers by him, (in science journals) as a result of our collaboration, focussing on the nature of global climate cycles as evinced in the Antarctic Ice Core Record;
4. These papers led to many invitations to speak at science conferences or publish more work in peer-reviewed journals (note: normally funded by institutes and grant-funded research – which we did not have). I took up one such – Prague, 2019, in which I was able to challenge in conference, the IPCC’s chief modeller – who had to admit ‘we do not do cycles very well’. There was an invitation to his lab at Princeton to discuss things further (Covid intervened).

I could give you dozens more instances. You must surely be able to see that I am not ‘dismissive’ of other scientists. I meet with them, read their work in depth, and take part in the normal review process of critique by which science progresses.

HB He is falling into exactly the same trap as those he accuses of being alarmist. The implication of his analysis is that we need not worry, and do not need to take serious action to mitigate global warming (or adapt to it). That is seriously worrying. Here are some more specific points:

You read an implication that is not the case. We do need to be concerned. What you fail to recognise is that if my analysis is correct (and Davis, after due analysis agreed it was) then any action taken to ‘mitigate’ warming is misguided – it will have no significant effect. And further, even IF the IPCC models are correct (and a growing consensus of critics thinks they are out by at least a factor of 2 – I think, 3) mitigation cannot affect what the climate does before 2100.

HB Taylor argues that there have been periods in the distant past when ‘natural’ climate change was a rapid as it has been recently. That may be so (probably an arguable point), but so what? All the evidence about the properties of ‘greenhouse’ gases like carbon dioxide, methane, Tropospheric ozone, etc, are very well established and attested. It has taken many years for the science establishment, as represented by the IPCC, to come off the fence and declare firmly that recent warming is mainly the result of the changing atmospheric composition. Far from being alarmist, the IPCC has been a model of caution. Only now are they making strong statements.

This is not correct – you are reading The Summary for Policy Makers or the media’s interpretation of it. INSIDE the latest IPCC Scientific Working Group Report (WG1) you will find clear admissions that very few of the current so-called climate extremes can be scientifically attributed to human-caused climate change and the expectation is that it will take another 50 years of data to confirm or otherwise – with the exception of what appears to be shorter/stronger bouts of rainfall.

Further – the science of carbon dioxide is not as ‘ well attested’ as you might think – most likely you know nothing of it and are simply following the media-meme. For example:

i. Whereas CO2 (and others GHGs) concentration is rising on a linear trajectory, its power to heat the atmosphere declines with concentration and falls off rapidly between 200~300 ppmv – and between 300-420 (the last 70 years) the additional heating power is very, very low. This is called the ‘saturation’ effect. Not one Al Gore mentions in his ‘documentary’.
ii. This additional heating power (the man-made element) of 120 ppmv actually contributes about 2 watts/square metre of infra-red radiation averaged planet-wide. That is a lot of energy – but, how does it compare to the natural flux? That is to say, how much more percentage wise have humans altered the atmospherics. You will not find that in the media-circus, nor in IPPC’s summary, and you would have to search through its six Working Group reports and calculate yourself, because nobody draws attention to it! The answer is less than 1%. The natural flux at the surface – 70% of which is water, is 240 watts; and 340 at the top of the atmosphere. These are averages – up to 1000 watts/square metre falls on cloud free equatorial regions perpendicular to the solar rays. Most of the global heat comes in there.
iii. And thus far – we are dealing with WATTS – they have to be converted to temperature, and that depends upon the nature of the absorbing atmosphere and ocean as to how much HEAT results – in actuality temperatures are misleading, it is heat that counts. Now we get really unsettled:
a. A conversion factor is used in simpler models – for 1 watt equals X degrees Celsius: in 1991, IPCC used 0.88; in 2004 they were advised to revise to 0.44. Some models did, others did not – and it is very difficult to know which. The most complex models ‘derive’ the factor by adding the wattage and seeing what temperature results after running for 50~100 years – problem is, knowing the models assumptions, since they are virtually impenetrable and 50 or so variations produce a massive spaghetti of lines leading to that eventual temperature – IPCC selects the median – for example 3C by 2100, assuming…..various factors, chiefly carbon emissions, but also some un-attested feedbacks; but without any major cycles that would counter the warming.
b. IPCC equates infra-red wattage with wattage of solar visible wavelengths – this is dodgy in my view, because IR cannot be absorbed by the oceans – which store 90% of global warmth and contribute 80% of land warming.
iv. Finally – in my work I tested the IPCC assumptions against real-world data on surface flux and cloud cover. The wattage from natural sources varied over the global warming period and dominated the total flux at 3:1. Nobody has gainsaid that figure in the science literature – though James Hansen said he did not trust the data!
HB Vested interests are a big factor, agreed. But my observation is that they have worked in exactly the opposite direction to that stated by Taylor. It is only very recently that big business and governments have been taking climate change seriously, at least at the level of rhetoric. Before about 2015 (give or take) oil companies, development companies, governments were paying no more than lip service to environmental problems of many kinds, including climate change, and action was pitiful. They all had a vested interest in ‘business as usual’.

This is a classic ‘green’ meme. ‘Business as Usual’ and ‘Vested Interests’ actually encompasses keeping the global economy growing, feeding the pension funds of billions of workers, and stimulating the economies of ‘developing’ countries – most particularly China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa, all of which are industrialising using cheap coal and conventional oil resources. This is what the globalised industrial consumer society wants and votes for.. It includes all their food, health services, water supplies, as well as white goods and cars.
Government and many Corporations have been very active in the past 20 years – think massive turbine parks in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Central Wales, Germany, Spain…and now everywhere; solar panels and EVs have had decades of development, thus allowing current targets to be set. Carbon trading has seen a massive transfer of capital funds, particularly to China, whilst US and European manufacturing has declined, especially the energy-intensive steel industry.

HB Oil companies, in particular, were funding bad science to undermine any concerns, just like the tobacco companies before them.

Again, this is a much-replicating ‘green’ meme with no basis in fact – I have read extensively the climate science literature – where funding must always be acknowledged openly and NEVER have I seen any such ‘bad science’ or any science, for that matter. This meme was promulgated after Prof Willie Soon, a specialist in solar dynamics, at the Smithsonian Institute was harangued after that Institute posted a small grant from an oil or electricity company – of which he had no access, no responsibility and could bear no influence upon his work. If you have any specific example, I would like to hear of it.

HB Now, with altered politics, shrewd oligarchs are trying to capitalise on the new mood, while still doing less than they could. Of course they are!
Taylor states at one point that temperature rise of 1.5 degrees is not a cause for concern. If he really believes this, he is living in cloud cuckoo land. We are currently about 1.1 degrees above 1850 levels, and already the observed global weather events (storms, droughts etc) are significantly above the long term average, and the rate of ice retreat in many places, including Greenland, is faster than the models suggested. This may well lead to a greater pace of sea-level rise and eventually changes to ocean currents in the North Atlantic.

Like I said before – there is precious little statistical evidence for things now being above the long-term average – definitely NOT for wildfires, storms (cyclones and hurricanes) nor tornadoes or floods, or drought. Many of these are subject to a 60 year global cycle – and seen clearly in storm data. Ice retreat data do not go back far enough – and are subject to a 1000-year cycles, 4~5 previous peaks had completely ice-free in summer Arctic Ocean conditions and without breaching any ‘tipping points. Sea Level rise is not accelerating and has been rising steadily at 2mm/year since 1850, when glaciers started retreating (well before CO2 levels could have a significant impact)
I actually advised a UK Inter-Agency meeting in 2003 that even in a linearly warming world (and I had not become a critic of that then) North Atlantic currents could shift and Britain would get very cold – I was lambasted by a former advisor to Greenpeace who quoted the ‘consensus’ that this would not happen for centuries. This year several papers have mooted such an event before 2050.

HB My reading of many reports suggests that without dramatic policy and investment change, we are likely to exceed the ‘safe’ 1.5 degrees by a significant margin.

The 1.5 ‘safe’ level has no basis in science – and even the consensus agrees it is a political target. It is somewhat embarrassing for many scientists but they say nothing. Firstly, as you are made daily aware – the danger level is with us NOW, but less aware I suspect, that it is caused by vulnerability of 8 billion people crowding into dodgy high-risk zones. The global temperature varies by 1 degree on a 1000-year cycle (higher at the poles, lower at the Equator). Half-a-degree above that does not spell the end of civilisation.

HB The problem is the uncertainty, and it is right to debate that. However, there are two elements to risk: one is the likelihood of an event; the other is the seriousness of impacts. Any dispassionate analysis would conclude that the risks are quite likely (if not probable), and in terms of impact could be very serious indeed. Yet the tenor of Taylor’s article suggests don’t worry, we need not take action. He is burying his head in the sand, and playing into the hands of business, including the tycoons he lists, who no doubt hope he is right, but hedging their bets.
I agree completely with Taylor that biodiversity, natural ecosystems and human health and well-being are our central concerns. It is puzzling, then, that he does not seem, at least in this article, to recognise that climate warming is a huge threat to these: changing habitats (often, not always, for the worse); potentially huge impacts on human well-being from heat, flood and drought; some heavily populated places in the tropics especially becoming less tenable for agriculture. Migration is already increasing year on year, and not just because of violence. It is likely to increase further in the next decades. We need to agree with other countries how to try to manage the present migrations and the future ones

I have already responded to the human issues – but on biodiversity, I have an in-depth knowledge, being an ecologist and co-founder of numerous ‘rewilding’ and reforesting initiatives – in all that, I have regularly visited global habitats from swamps to deserts, and I have assiduously read all reports ascribing changes to climate shifts – NOT ONE shows evidence for cataclysmic patterns – the changes are small, a few kilometres of range expansions (mostly) and some contractions – in other words, ‘winners and losers’ and they have balanced out – in the case of the UK, more winners than losers, especially with regard to birds. The problem is that in the past, natural cycles could be adapted to – whereas now fauna and flora do not have the space and connectivity. Their main problem is HUMAN expansion – our expanded food supplies (aided by global warming) have fuelled population growth and decimated wildlife.

HB The problem seems to be that Taylor is obsessed with conspiracy theories.

I do know people obsessed by conspiracy theories! I don’t have much time to check them out – because I am actually working, despite retirement, on real and constructive projects. However, for the record – Bezos, Buffet, Gates, Zuckerberg and All, do not, to my knowledge engage in these issues: instead, their money works for them and is directed by investment analysts tasked with getting the best return – the world is full of them – every glass tower you see, that is ‘they’ along with the insurers of it all. The UN establishment dances to their tunes – as witnessed by the Covid Saga (which as far as I am aware has escaped the notice of Greens everywhere – focussed as they are on the climate demon).

HB He is very suspicious of arguments that could be construed as being manipulated by the Buffets and Bezos of this world, as well as by the UN establishment. He is looking for ways to undermine recognition of the problem of climate change and therefore to reduce the need for action to tackle it. Why is he motivated thus? Having worked through a long era (1970-2012) when most organizations, governments and even academics were either in denial or just putting it into the ‘too hard’ box, this seems very sad to me.

Well, Hugh, you are entitled to your judgements. But you are misinformed. My colleague began work on the UNFCC and IPCC in 1993. I began work with UK government agencies on what to do about climate change in 1996 with a commissioned report to the Countryside Agency and from 2000-2003 sat on an advisory panel of the DTI/Countryside Agency that dispensed over £1m to support ‘community initiatives’ in renewable energy. I also developed in 2003~2004 a visualisation programme to integrate renewable technologies into English landscapes. By 2005, when I decided to check the science of climate change to see just how much time we had, I had already concluded that ‘renewable’ a) could not reliably power industrial societies, b) in the process of trying, they (hydro, tidal, biomass, wind and solar) would destroy landscape, community well-being and biodiversity worldwide, especially indigenous peoples.
THAT was my motivation – so I hope you will understand why I object to the term ‘climate denier’ and to having my intelligence and commitment impugned by being placed in a ‘too hard’ box !!!!

3. Healthy Planet

HEALTHY PLANET
Global meltdown or global healing.
Fred Hageneder
Moon Books, Alresford, England, 2022.
Ppk 402pp. £15.99

The ecological crisis and climate emergency are ‘woke’ issues – in the original meaning of an issue that people should pay attention to but tend to ignore. Woke-ness therefore involves campaigners, particularly writers, taking on the task of awakening people but at the same time generating a fashionable concern that changes little. Hargeneder obviously cares about the state of the planet and does a great service in providing a guide to practical action, but as with so many laypeople, he has to ‘follow the science’ and here he displays a profound naivety concerning the relationship of scientists to government (including UN bodies) and to industrial interests, most particularly where he deals with the two most prominent of current issues – climate change and pandemics.
However, he makes a creditable effort at quoting the science – with a masterly treatment of key issues such as habitat destruction, invasive species and pollution, in particular, with sections on ‘what is being done’ and ‘what you can do’.
The book is in three parts – Part 1 looks somewhat philosophically at ‘Planetary Life Support Systems and their Interdependence’ dealing with Gaia Theory and Earth system science as the Foundations; followed by Origins, Elements and Cycles, Communities and Networks, Feedback Systems, Diversity, Complexity and Abundance. These chapters are worth reading in detail – but there is a scientific and hence mechanistic dominance that is at odds with the later sections in Part III on the human interface and the lessons to be learned from indigenous cultures.
Part II is headed Global Disruption – symptoms, causes and reasons for the disintegration. It kicks off with a chapter on the Sixth Mass Extinction. Since 1970, 80% of the world’s cetaceans have gone, 83% of wild land mammals, 83% of freshwater populations and 76% of migratory fish. All true – but it is important to note, that is not the same as ‘extinction’ where he argues 1 million species are in danger thereof. In Europe, North and South America, Africa, India and even China, only a handful of species have gone extinct in the last 50 years, it is abundance that has crashed. And as a side-note, considering the appeal to follow indigenous societies now in balance, and in relation to the ‘6th’ mass extinction – that event began 60,000 years ago in Australia, then Eurasia, then the Americas, with 80% of the large mammal species wiped out by hunting and use of fire.
Loss of habitat to farmland and industrial production of food and fuel, loss of wetlands, invasive species, and pollution are the scientifically acknowledged main drivers of the massive decline – along with trade in bushmeat, population growth and overconsumption (which are dealt with well). The problem with this section and the book in general relates to the elevated position of ‘climate’ – now renamed ‘disruption’ and global ‘heating’ rather than the cuddly ‘change’ or ‘warming’. Every scientific treatment of the threats to wildlife (I don’t like the eco-mechanical term ‘biodiversity’) that I have seen shows climate change below all of the other threats. And all the science papers I have read that deal with wildlife population changes in relation to a gradual warming over 120 years of 1 degree (on top of 15 degrees global average), show the same impact: about 30% of species decline, 30% increase and 30% remain the same, with 10% uncertain fate within the data.
On climate science, Hargeneder falls for the deception that is so widespread and unremarked by the media or indeed most scientists – he shows the straight line CO2 concentration graph from Mauna Loa and rehashes Al Gore’s disingenuous treatment of CO2 in the ice-core record over the last 700,000 years – where the current 400 ppm shoots way above the seven other peaks, thus implying warmageddon. The deception is so pervasive even most scientists are ignorant of the reality – that the correct curve is not concentration, which rises linearly, but the power to warm, measured in watts, and this is not linear but logarithmic and thus bends and tails off above 300 ppm. In this respect the whole of global warming is supposedly driven by an additional 2.5 watts of infra-red radiation per square metre, which when added to the natural flux of surface radiation which averages at 240 watts, represents an increase of 1% in the relevant parameters not a scary 40%.
To take this important matter further – a) there is a large uncertainty factor in converting that change in wattage into actual heat: a factor of three, where the science is certainly not ‘settled’; b) it would take only a few percentage shift in global cloud cover over the post-1950 period to more than exceed the CO2 flux of radiation at the surface – and this has been recorded in data and still the subject of heated debate.
Of course, Hargeneder, like all laypeople coming to the science, is unlikely to be made aware of these massive uncertainties nor the genuine scientific debate and array of papers that get ignored in order to maintain the woke message. For example, in the climate section, there is no critical appraisal, and all critics (none of which are quoted or referenced) are assumed to be ‘deniers’ funded by Big Oil. The climate section lets down the whole book, just as the issue now sabotages all ‘environmental’ work.
Further, he is startlingly naïve – dangerously so, in places where he suggests only a war-footing would be able to drive the Green New Deal and the decarbonisation policy changes he thinks are required (to avoid the ‘climate emergency’. What constitutes ‘war footing’ is not elaborated upon – for example, emergency powers, military-style control and the democratic implications; or the issues of a surveillance-model green city – as in Wuhan.
He deals with the recent Covid pandemic, for example – where most of us have learned a big lesson about science, deception and the UN, with references to Peter Daszak and the Eco-health Alliance – regurgitating Daszak’s now discredited theory that the virus spread unaided from bats. There is no mention of bioweapons laboratories or the dismissal of the WHO report and Daszak constructing a whitewashing of Wuhan’s ‘gain-of-function’ bat virus research.
On nuclear issues – he is on stronger ground with regard to melt-down potential and disposal of wastes, but there is limited treatment of nuclear weapons and the destruction they herald for the whole planet – one page only and that on the costs of radioactive waste from the military operations at Sellafield. This illustrates the real danger of the mesmeric effect of climate change – which sucks the rebellious energy of youth, and leaves the nuclear weapons issue almost completely unprotested!
In the final Part III – the Human Interface, there are chapters on Ethics and Dignity, Anthropocentrism, and the core principles of Ecocentricsm – with a nod to the indigenous soul, as a source of wisdom. Much as I agree we can learn a great deal from indigenous societies, I think the answer lies not so much with indigenous tribal wisdom but with what has gone wrong with ‘western’ white-man colonial culture, the birth of econometric gods, the subjugation of the feminine and the rise of scientific materialism, competition and male strutting upon the world stage (ably supported by modern security-conscious highly competitive women). Hargeneder doesn’t go there. I would add also that every indigenous society living in harmony with Nature has a plant- or fungal-spirit medicine chest for the purpose of initiation and expansion of mind – he doesn’t go there either.

Peter Taylor is an Oxford educated consultant ecologist, social anthropologist and writer – author of Beyond Conservation (Earthscan, 2005), Chill- a reassessment of global warming theory (2009), Rewilding (Ethos, 2011) and The Spirit of Rewilding (Ethos, 2017). He has been consultant to the UK government, EU and UN on a range of issues including renewable energy, nuclear risks, ocean pollution and the development of the Precautionary Principle.