Canterbury Farming, July 2012

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Global warming ‘fraud’ passing into history By Hugh de lacy The sky is obstinately refusing to fall in, the Chicken Lickens are scrambling for something new to be terrified of, and the great fraud of global warming is passing into history. That’s the view of New Zealand Climate Science Coalition partner Bryan Leyland as the science and politics of global warming take a global hammering. The coalition comprises the country’s most prominent climate change sceptics.

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July 2012

“With the Government putting the extension of its emissions trading scheme (ETS) to agriculture on indefinite hold, a glut of carbon credits poleaxing the European scheme — the only other one in operation — and Australians reacting angrily to Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s introduction of an ETS across the Tasman, the political construct of global warming is rapidly unravelling.” Leyland told Canterbury Farming. Canada last year joined Japan and Russia in pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol that was supposed to drive an international fight back against global warming, and last month’s Rio Conference, a reprise of the event 20 years earlier that ignited fears world-wide, was a spectacular fizzer. “The science too is debunking the grand theory that human activity is warming the atmosphere to a potentially

destructive degree.” Leyland said. “If you look at it scientifically, the whole thing’s been a fraud from the beginning, and right now the fact that the world’s not getting warmer proves that that’s the case,” he said. Leyland concedes that the world did indeed warm by 0.7oC between 1975 and 1988, but there’s been no significant warming since.

decade of the last century. The lead researcher, Professor Roger Davies, was reported as saying that a consistent reduction in cloud height would allow the earth to cool more efficiently, reducing the planet’s surface temperature and slowing any global warming effects. In the face of such evidence the environmental lobby was “shifting the field,” Leyland said.

This cooling coincided with the abeyance of the influence of the last sunspot cycle, the likely cause of such warming as there has been, and raised the likelihood of an extended cooling period.

“Now it’s all about loss of biodiversity and ocean acidification — though how the hell can something that’s become a little less alkaline be labelled acidic? — and a whole lot of other scaremongering.

“History tells us that long sun-spot cycles are always followed by cooling, with no exceptions.”

“They avoid the fact that the world’s not warming by saying a whole lot of things are ‘consistent’ with global warming, therefore it must be happening even though it’s not.”

“There’s no doubt that the world is heading for a cooling period, and the whole [dangerous man-made global warming theory] is bloody nonsense,” Leyland said. Leyland noted that Auckland University scientists in February this year showed that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems to lower the cloud cover, offsetting any warming tendency. Their research, using data from a NASA satellite, showed that cloud cover round the world dropped 1%, or between 30mm and 40mm, in the last

“It’s weird and dangerous, but the problem is that all over the world the mainstream media don’t want to know,” he said. The Gillard Government in Australia had managed to impose an ETS there because “it’s probably held to ransom by the Greens, and if you get a change of government in New Zealand that would be exactly what would happen here.” Leyland said the problem with “big scares” like global warming was that after they

faded away the legislation and associated structures that had been built around them tended to be left behind, exacerbating distortions in world economies such as subsidisation of uneconomic forms of renewable electricity generation. “You’ve got these huge lobbies in the renewable energy industry, which is making money hand over fist, except for the manufacturers of windmills and solar cells who are going broke.” “The windfarm people, by contrast, are making heaps of money because of huge subsidies, and they’re using millions of lobbying dollars to make sure the subsidies keep coming.” “You’ve got a whole pile of scientists whose income depends entirely on [the fear of global warming] keeping going, and it would be improbable that they admitted they were wrong,” Leyland said. Chief among the global warming scientists in New Zealand is David Wratt, head

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climate change scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research (NIWA) and a leading member of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “As far as the science is concerned, from the people who really know about the science, there is still no debate at all but that the world is showing the effects of greenhouse gases,” Wratt told Canterbury Farming. “The world has not been cooling for the past 12 years.” “The expectation from all the science is that if we continue down the track we’re on now in terms of releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world will warm substantially over the coming decades, and that will lead to a number of problems.” “The science has really not changed from where it was five years ago.” Wratt said.


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