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Trusting in history or computer modelling?

By James Fairbairn - posted Wednesday, 16 September 2009


A few weeks ago I wrote an article entitled “The importance of being informed” which I believed was a measured piece outlining the various different factors that influence climate change - the single most important topic of our times. After all the entire world economy is being realigned around the central tenets of this theory so it is only logical that people should be aware of all the factors in the debate.

The article itself drew a fair amount of comment on various forums, of which some, no doubt heartfelt, was particularly strong criticism of the article. One wrote “It disturbs me that distortions (intentional or otherwise) like this create even more confusion for people who just don't know”. Another said, “This is deliberate disinformation, and is not deserving of respectful debate”. One simply said “It's denialist drivel”. My particular favourite was “There is a difference between an open mind and one that is wantonly empty resisting all facts”.

To be honest such passionate attacks did make me stop and think. Perhaps I was wrong. Didn't Socrates teach “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance”. After all I am not a climate scientist; I am just a historian, a humanist and an environmentalist. Maybe my passionate advocacy that mankind needs to focus his efforts on proven environmental destruction was blinding me to the facts. After all those comments were written by people who clearly, passionately, believed that not only was climate being changed due to man's “CO2 pollution”, but also that this climate change would be catastrophic. Had my desire for our species to live in harmony with our planet, so to ensure the survival of all mankind, mixed up the facts I had read over the last 20 years, in hundreds of history books. After all, the environmental issues that are of greatest concern to me receive less than one hundredth of the press coverage of that dedicated to climate change.

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So for the last few weeks I have gone back to the library to check my facts. First I started looking in books on pre-history. From memory I was sure they had talked about massive and rapid climate change in the past, and yet the IPCC this week warned that climate change would lead to “an unprecedented warming of about 3 degrees, and up to 1.9 metres sea-level rise” in the next century.

Inconveniently the pre-historians were not obliging. Chris Stringer, of the London Natural History Museum, wrote; “The history of Britain and Europe over the last 700,000 years is littered with rapid and severe climate changes, when apparently settled plant, animal and human communities were swept away in periods as short as ten years”.

Dr Kate Prendergast of Oxford University meanwhile wrote "Prehistoric peoples faced temperatures as much as ten degrees Celsius lower than today's and at the end of the last ice age, saw them rise by seven degrees Celsius in 50 years".

Even Australia's most eminent historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, in The Triumph of the Nomads talked about rapid climatic changes and seas level fluctuations of tens of metres.

But what about history books on more recent times? My Roman history books were less than helpful when they talked of wine growing as far north as Hadrian's Wall. Last time I looked I didn't have a bottle of Château de Leeds in my wine cellar.

And the Medieval historians? Well Professor Gwyn Jones, of my old university, Wales, refused to toe the line in his A History of the Vikings in which he talks about Greenland in the middle ages suffering from ever shorter growing seasons, and less grass for cattle and sheep, combined with more sea ice which prevented fishing, leading to the starvation and dying out of the Greenland settlements by 1500. And yet in 1100 they had thrived, at a time when they could circumnavigate the island due to the absence of ice, something that is not possible even now. Other books too talked of a “significant and rapid cooling” of the Earth's climate in the 14th century.

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No doubt many will accuse me of being selective in my references but I can assure I wasn't, and these were just a small cross section of the more than 100 books that I revisited over the last few weeks. Not one book told me that climate change had never occurred before. Not one told me the current, computer-predicted, temperature and sea level rises were anything special. In fact, if anything, they are remarkably mild by historical standards.

So how could this happen? How could historian's be telling us one story and yet the mass media, governments and scientists tell us each day the exact opposite? The simple answer is money, and the coercive power of fear. The whole carbon trading industry is going to mean big business. Very big business. The Head of Environmental Markets at Barclays Capital recently said that “Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market - and it could become the world’s biggest market overall”. The Wall Street Journal estimated this market to be worth in excess of US$2 trillion per annum.

And who is going to be making most of this money? The big banks. Is it a coincidence that a certain leading advocate of man-made climate change, a Mr A. Gore, has a carbon trading company called Generation Investment Management, of which he is Chairman and David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is Chief Executive, and they were given their seed capital by Lehman Brothers for whom he used to sit on the board of Directors?

The big banks are no different to any other corporation. They are in the business of making money as a return on investment for shareholders. The difference here is of course the motivation of potential money involved and the clout of the big banks to manipulate the agenda, whether it be with other corporations, governments or the mass media. This is no conspiracy, just psychology. The potential financial rewards of getting governments worldwide to pass climate change legislation is all out there in the open, and there are a thousand examples of corporations and governments manipulating agendas for their own good in the past, from cigarettes to pharmaceuticals, to WMDs.

Of course the advocates will say, this all may be the case but climate change legislation will help the environment in other ways too. If that is the case it seems remarkably inefficient to deal with just a handful of man's environmental issues, and ignoring most. Take smog for example. Partly this comes from car exhaust fumes which consist of harmless gases (CO2, nitrogen, H2O vapour), pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and PM-10 (very small particulate matter).

Smog also is generated by burning after deforestation, and from the hearth fires that more than a billion of our fellow humans use each night to heat their food and themselves. Smog kills people, plants and animals every day. Will anti-CO2 legislation help reduce smog? If anything it will make it worse as third world countries will be unable to afford to produce cheap electricity due to Western pressure not to use energy sources like coal. Now coal isn't ideal, as it too puts out soot and other pollutants (as well as CO2), however, it is a lot better than what they have currently. Meanwhile deforestation rates are increasing and less food is produced thanks to the planting of crops for bio-fuels, top-soil erosion from poor land management, or enforced inefficient farming methods, such as no-tilling farming, as advocated in Science Magazine recently to “reduce carbon emissions from soil bacteria”.

A standard, and rather sinister, retort to this is “well maybe we just need less people”. Perhaps, however the best way to reduce population growth rates is to raise people’s standards of living, not impoverish them further.

Will anti-CO2 legislation deal with oceanic pollution, such as the plastics which destroy marine life en masse and work their way at a bio-molecular level into the food chain? No.

And what about coral reefs? Only last week headlines warned that “Climate Change is killing the world's reefs”. What the articles also mentioned was that there were other factors involved: imported species (from ship ballast tanks); over fishing; dredge fishing; and most significantly agricultural run off (fertilisers, pesticides etc.). Now looking at your history books which of these factors has happened before, and which are modern man's introductions?

In order to receive further research grants many scientists may wish to take their DaneGeld. After-all I would imagine the audience at the recent Eureka National Science Awards got the message loud and clear when the New South Wales Premier said that “Climate sceptics are like Nazi appeasers”. Luckily for historians, research grants are few and far between at the best of times, and historians know how criticism of the status quo has been suppressed throughout history whether it be “The Inquisition”, “McCarthyism”, or the rise of the “Nazis”.

Many very well meaning people on the left side of politics in the early to mid 20th century had a heartfelt admiration and gave tacit support for the Soviet system after believing the PR put out by “Uncle Joe” Stalin. Millions had died before they slowly accepted the truth of the situation. The big question is how many millions will die until those with equally heartfelt “green” convictions accept this bank enriching scam for what it is, and realise that ensuring mankind's survival will require a lot more than just “tackling CO2”? Perhaps the so called “Green Movement” is now lost to us. We live on a largely blue planet, so perhaps we need a “Blue Movement”, independent of corporate or political influences, to keep campaigning until this PR driven fog clears.

Despite the endless PR assault there is a silent mass of people out there who do care about their planet and humanity's future, and do not believe the central tenets of this cult: that a gas which is just 0.038 per cent of the atmosphere, and according to the IPCC has risen by a further 0.0015 per cent due to man's CO2 emissions, drives climate change on the planet, and that critically this change will be unprecedented and catastrophic.

There are a few trillion reasons why your position will be attacked, but stand firm as you are not alone. As Gandhi said “All through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.”

In meantime those of us who choose historical lessons over computer predictions will keep campaigning for the action on the real environmental issues, and will turn the other cheek to the sincere passions that our beliefs will inevitably stir up.

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About the Author

James Fairbairn, "The Historian", is co-Founder and editor of www.openyoureyesnews.com and is also Vice-President of The Humanist Society of Western Australia. A historian by training, prior to emigrating to Australia he was a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party in the UK (2005 General Election).

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