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.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS