Mon, Jan 31, 2005 page9

• Climate change: true or false?

  • By David Adam / THE GUARDIAN
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  Here is the truth about global warming: It is an anti-capitalist agenda, a Machiavellian political plot and a convenient rumor started by bungling Japanese pineapple farmers. It is a front for paranoia about immigration, an incitement to civil war, and the reason that the world's attention was distracted from the risk of a tsunami. And it hasn't killed as many people as Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin.

  Welcome to the UK's first dedicated meeting of climate change skeptics, where the consistent message is that global warming will not have a catastrophic effect, and if it does there is little the world can or should do about it.

  The meeting, held last Thursday at the Royal Institution in London, was billed by organizers as "a valuable opportunity for debate on a topic frequently obscured by angst and alarmism." Climate change, they said, was a topic "that has been subject to widespread misrepresentation and politicization."

  Speakers included British botanist David Bellamy, a former television presenter and a special professor at the University of Nottingham, England; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US; and Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, England.

  It precedes a big meeting of climate scientists this week at the Hadley Center, part of the UK Met Office.

  Peiser said Thursday's meeting, organized by the lobby group the Scientific Alliance, grew from a concern that the Hadley Center conference would ignore important questions about whether current predictions were alarmist.

  He said catastrophic climate change was falsely blamed for everything from the fall of the Mayan civilization to extreme weather events such as the 2003 summer heatwave.

  "It's important for people to know there are eminent scientists who don't share this viewpoint," he said.

  Famine, war and disease were bigger threats to civilization.

  Fred Singer, a former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, told the conference that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had overestimated the risk posed by carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that scientists think warms the atmosphere by trapping heat.

  "Carbon dioxide is plant food and makes them grow faster," Singer said.

  Global warming would increase levels of fresh water because it evaporated more sea water and led to it falling as rain.

  Nils-Axel Morner, the head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University, Sweden, showed pictures of the high tide slipping down beaches in the Maldives to challenge predictions that future climate change could raise global sea levels and flood cities such as London and New York.

  "I want to break the IPCC link between global warming and sea-level rise," he said. "It's nonsense."

  Some tales of sea-level rises, he said, could be attributed to the Japanese pineapple industry, which caused land to subside by drilling for too much fresh water. Several at the conference compared themselves to Galileo, who was tortured when he said the Earth orbited the sun.

  Other scientists dismissed their arguments.

  "There is a very clear consensus from the scientific community on the problems of global warming and our use of fossil fuels," said David King, the chief scientific adviser to the British government.

  "It's very important to know where these skeptics are coming from and to identify lobbyists as distinct from scientists," he said.

  Last month the Scientific Alliance published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute, a group funded by ExxonMobil, which it claimed "undermined" theories of climate change.

  Bob May, the president of the UK's Royal Society, said the skeptics were a "denial lobby" similar to those who refused to accept that smoking caused cancer.

  But John Maddox, a former editor of the journal Nature, who attended Thursday's meeting, said the skeptics might have a point.

  He did not dispute that carbon dioxide emissions could drive global warming, but said: "The IPCC is monolithic and complacent, and it is conceivable that they are exaggerating the speed of change."

  David Adam is the science correspondent of the Guardian newspaper.
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