Deepak Lal: Hot air over Gleneagles

In early July, the G-8 will meet in Gleneagles to discuss and purportedly take action on what Tony Blair has identified as the two major challenges facing mankind: eliminating poverty in Africa and dealing with global warming.

In my last column I had poured cold water on the proposed massive increases in foreign aid being touted as the panacea for Africa's endemic problems by many of the world's great and the good.

In this column I will examine the merits of the other great global challenge identified by Blair for the G-8 summit: climate change.

Both the Indian and Chinese Prime Ministers have been invited to the meeting, no doubt to pressure them to reduce their carbon emissions to save humanity.

The science academies of all the G-8 nations and those of India, China, and Brazil have joined in to say that humans are responsible for making the planet hotter and as Lord May, president of the Royal Society, put it: "Never before have we faced such a global threat. And if we do not begin effective action now, it will be much harder to stop the runaway train as it continues to gather momentum".

Is there such a runaway train? Can anything be done to stop climate change? Will catastrophe face us if we do not? Instead of preventing climate change can we adapt to it as humans have been doing for millennia in the face of dramatic and natural climate change?

On runaway global warming there seems to be general scientific agreement: there is no such danger. As Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, shows in an excellent book (Meltdown, Cato Institute, 2004) we now know precisely how much "the climate will warm in the policy- foreseeable future of 50 years, a modest three quarters of a degree (C) (1.4 degrees F)".

NASA's James Hanson, whom many credit with lighting the fire over the greenhouse issue with his incendiary 1988 congressional testimony, wrote this in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001: "Future global warming can be predicted much more accurately than is generally realized ... we predict additional warming in the next 50 years of 3/4 C +/- 1/4 C, a warming rate of 0.15C +/- 0.05C per decade.

That warming rate is about 4 times less than the lurid top figure widely trumpeted by the UN in its 2001 compendium on climate change and repeated ad infinitum in the press" (p. 19).

Will this bring catastrophe to the world? The accompanying figure from a book (Global Warming: The Complete Briefing) by Sir James Houghton, who has been the co-chairman of the science assessment working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shows the derived record from direct and indirect sources of the average temperatures for Central England for the past thousand years.

A recent warming trend is discernible, which will continue, but on all the evidence, will not lead to even the temperatures seen in the medieval warm period between AD 1100 and 1300. This warming trend is merely reversing the "Little Ice Age" between AD 1450 and 1850.

The current warming attributable to human carbon emissions of 3/4 degree C over the next 50 years is a mere blip in the large natural variations in climate that mankind has lived with over the last thousand years.

Houghton admits: "There is as yet no certain explanation for these warm and cold periods during the past thousand years" (p. 49).

If, on the much-touted but derisory precautionary principle of the Greens, there is nevertheless an attempt to stop this modest human contribution to the natural global warming trend, will it make much difference to the natural warming trend following the Little Ice Age: the answer is no.

As Prof Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at University College, London, has noted, even if every fossil fuel-powered power station in the world is shut down, every car is destroyed and every aircraft grounded the Earth's climate would continue to warm ("Warmer, sunnier, and better," Sunday Telegraph, June 12, 2005, p. 19).

But would that be so disastrous? While all the environmental scientists and Greens have continued to emphasise the possible costs of global warming""many of which from the melting of the icecaps to the spread of diseases have been shown to be false (see Michaels, op. cit.)""the benefits from global warming and in particular of carbon dioxide emissions are rarely cited.

Increased carbon dioxide emissions are already increasing global vegetation including the tropical forests""so dear to the hearts of many Greens. Moreover, through human history, warm periods like that in the Middle Ages were marked by prosperity, while the subsequent Little Ice Age was characterised by famines, pestilence, and social disorder.

Prof. Stott notes: "Cold is nearly always worse for everything""the economy, agriculture, disease, biodiversity". What then of the 11,000 who died in France during the 2003 heatwave? A study of weather-related deaths (W R Keatings et al., British Medical Journal, September 2000) found annually in all regions cold-related mortality greatly exceeds heat-related mortality.

The Grey Panthers in the US have sensibly moved from the cold northern states to Florida.

Finally, as humans have done for millennia in the face of much larger climatic change than is likely to occur due to the carbon emissions from human activity, they have always adapted to these variations in climate.

There is no reason to believe that they will not do the same again. In fact recent studies by economists like Profs. Mendelsohn and Nordhaus at Yale, examining the relative costs and benefits of adaptation rather than the prevention of global warming, find that adaptation provides much larger net benefits than prevention.

Why then do the majority of environmental scientists and their main mouthpiece, the IPCC, continue to peddle these climate scares? The answer, as Deep Throat advised the reporters investigating Watergate, is to "follow the money".

Since 1990 US federal agencies have spent $20 billion of taxpayers' money on climate research. It would be a brave climatologist who would turn his or her back on this gravy train.

So what about the IPCC and its scary projections of carbon emissions, where the major future culprits are India and China, as their rapid industrialisation is fuelled like that in current developed countries, by burning fossil fuels.

As Michaels shows painstakingly, the IPCC projections are seriously flawed because they assume, first, that trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide are increasing exponentially, when in fact they are merely linear, and, secondly, because they wrongly use (as my old colleague David Henderson and the Australian statistician Ian Castles have shown) market-based rather than purchasing power parity exchange rates to estimate the current inequality between rich and poor countries leading to future growth rates of developing countries, which are absurd, as they are much higher than has ever been observed in any country in history.

Thus, in 2100 the IPCC projects that the countries which will have higher per capita income than the US are: North Korea, South Africa, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Argentina!

This junk "science" now poses a serious threat, as this column has argued many a time, to the future prosperity of the poor in India and China.

The purpose of the Gleneagles summit is to strong arm the Prime Ministers of the two countries into accepting a curb on their carbon emissions.

This would slow the industrialisation which is gradually lifting their masses out of poverty. Having recently returned from a bitterly cold St. Andrews, adjacent to Gleneagles, my advice would be to tell Tony Blair that, instead of the hot air of the summit, Scotland would greatly benefit from a spot of global warming.