Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years [Paperback]

This book has two central assumptions, namely, that global warming is happening, but that this is not caused in any way by human activity. Secondly, the authors argue that global warming is not such a bad thing, because a slightly warmer planet is actually better. From old people saving money on heating bills to rare animals being able to extend their normal range thanks to hotter weather, global warming is not such a bad thing.

The authors argue that there have been a number of occassions throughout history when the temperature of the planet has risen and fallen. To prove this, they cite two sources. The first is the records in tree rings and the ice core. The second is the writings of ancient civilizations, which described sudden changes in the climate, without necessarily knowing it. He mentions how the Vikings on Greenland noted a sudden drop in cold, which ultimately led to the end of their settlement there as ice bergs made the sea lanes impassable.

The book also makes an incendiary claim. That green charities, pressure groups and researchers are claiming humans cause global warming for two reasons. Firstly, because there is so much money available in terms of donations from the public if the public can be alarmed enough. Secondly, because government research grants are now so large that many scientists keep their reservations about what is really behind climate change to themselves so as to keep the funding rolling in.

I met the author whilst working at the European Parliament, and found his book to be extremely well written, and the man himself to be very pleasant and a great speaker. This book is strongly recommended.

Singer and Avery suggest that there should be no binding constraints on human emissions of greenhouse gases until three things can be demonstrated:

1. That greenhouse gases are certain to raise global temperatures significantly higher than they rose during previous natural climate warming cycles;
2. That such a warming would severely harm human welfare and nature;
3. That rational human actions could actually forestall whatever warming may occur.

In short, they do not think that the "global warming alarmists", including the IPCC, have been able to meet any of these requirements.

Singer & Avery pull no punches in this book of four parts. The first describes the discovery of the 1,500-year (or, strictly, 1,470 year +/- 500 year) cycle of warming and cooling and the evidence for it both from historical sources and scientific investigation - temperature proxies such as tree rings, marine deposits, habitation patterns, ice cores and sea levels, even stalagmites and fossilised pollen. Temperatures are not yet as warm as they have been in the relatively recent past - long before man was having any significant impact on the atmosphere - when mankind seemed to be thriving. In the second, they rubbish the evidence that human activity, and in particular the production of CO2, is causing any temperature change; they are particularly scornful of computer modelling and the political re-writing of the various IPCC reports. In the third section, they attack what they see as groundless fears about the effects of warming - the sort of thing that Al Gore put into "An Inconvenient Truth". The fourth section concludes by saying that Kyoto is pointless whichever way you look at it, unless you are Putin, looking to be able to sell billions of dollars worth carbon credits (based on Russia's 1990 industrial economy) but not now necessary to Russia or European leaders hoping to restrain the US's faster growing economy.

The 1,470 year temperature cycle was discovered by Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, and the research independently validated by Claude Lorius, based on ice-core research in the 1980s and 1990s. D, O & L did not explain a causal link more sophisticated than that it was due to the sun, and Singer & Avery credit Henrik Svensmark with identifying the link between solar activity, cosmic rays and cloud formation (as explained in Svensmark's "The Chilling Stars"). This solar cycle is thought to be caused by a combination of two previously identified solar cycles: the 87-year Gleissberg cycle and the 210-year DeVries-Suess cycle, but the theory does not get much more sophisticated than that. In short, there does not yet seem to be a theoretical explanation as to why the sun triggers a 1,470 year cycle, nor why it should be +/- 500 years (which does seem quite a lot to a layman like me), but the cycle is based on a great deal of consistent, and planet-wide, empirical evidence. Singer & Avery cite many sources to show that the Roman and Medieval Warmings and the Dark Ages and C16 - C18 "little " ice ages were planet-wide.

Singer & Avery suggest that it would be prudent to consider that mankind is contributing to the (slightly) warming Earth, but that the vast majority of the relatively mild (but greatly overstated) warming is being caused by solar events completely outwith man's ability to control. This may be just as well, as they are highly sceptical about the practical effectiveness of many so-called alternative energies - although they do not go into detail about the practical problems to the extent, for example, that Booker and North do in "Scared to Death". Even nuclear fission, they think, would only be of temporary help, and in the long term, when fossil fuels run out or we are choose to stop using them, we had better hope that we have cracked nuclear fusion. This, ironically, is the same conclusion reached by James Lovelock of the Gaia theory!

This book is at its best in its detailed statement of facts in support of there being significant natural climate variation, and in pointing out the weaknesses in some of the data presented by global warming alarmists. (Some of the facts, based on historical interpretation, would probably be rejected by scientists as insufficiently quantifiable, but they seemed worthy of conclusion, to me, in support of quantifiable data.) Otherwise, I have to admit, I was a little disappointed by it, because I seemed to have read many of their arguments in greater detail elsewhere: Svensmark on the solar/galactic effect, Bjorn Lomborg on the economic consequences of an over-reaction, Booker and North on the limitations of alternative energies as they currently exist, Patrick Michaels on the reasons why scientists find themselves acting, unscientifically, to support a developing "paradigm".

This book is, nevertheless, 260 tightly-argued pages demonstrating that there is no "global warming consensus" that man made global warming is out of control. If, for example, you are alarmed by the arguments of the "consensus" and wish to explore some of the arguments of the "sceptics" then you could do a lot worse than starting here.

Fred Singer, Research Professor at George Mason University in Virginia, and Dennis Avery, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in New York, have written a thorough account of the causes of global warming. Their work is backed by a lengthy list of references from refereed and peer-reviewed science journals.

They show that over the past million years the earth has been through 600 cycles of warming caused by regular changes in the sun's radiance. Each cycle lasts about 1,500 years and the temperature varies from 20C above the mean to 20C below it. The sun's radiance has increased by 0.050C per decade for the last 25 years and we are about 150 years into a moderate warming cycle.

This is the only explanation for the modern warming that is backed by physical evidence, from ice cores, fossilised pollen, core stalagmites and seabed sediments.

They demolish Michael Mann's famous hockey-stick graph - used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by US billionaire Al Gore in his movie. This graph purported to show that the 20th century was uniquely hot. But two experienced statisticians, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, studied Mann's data and concluded that they did not produce the claimed results due to "collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects."

The early 15th-century warming was hotter than the 20th-century warming, refuting the claim that the 20th century's record CO2 emissions caused unprecedented global warming. Antarctic ice cores show a strong correlation between temperature changes and CO2 levels, but CO2 levels rise about 800 years after temperatures rise. So temperature changes cause CO2 changes not vice versa.

Greens promote baseless fears, for example, "the oceans will rise by a metre by 2010." No, the most likely rise is ten centimetres, according to the International Union of Quaternary Research's Sea Level Commission. Al Gore wrote in 1992, "global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions." No, the Antarctic has been cooling since 1966; temperatures at both poles are lower than they were in 1930.

"A million species will be lost." No, there will be more species because higher CO2 concentrations help plants, and therefore other species, to accept higher temperatures without harm. "There will be more frequent and fiercer storms." No, a warmer climate is more stable and has fewer storms. "Millions will die from warming." No, fewer people die from excess heat than from excess cold. "Warming will reduce crops." No, it encourages growth in food crops, as do warming's increased rainfall (2% up in the 20th century) and increased CO2.

Solar and wind power is between four to ten times as dear as fossil-fuel and nuclear power. Shifting to `renewables' would mean converting hundreds of millions of acres of forest and wilderness to wind farms, solar panel arrays and biofuel crops. But since global warming is not dangerous and is not manmade, we don't need to cut our use of indispensable fossil fuels.