Michael Mann and the Climate Change Fraud

On Friday 23^rd August this year, the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of British Columbia in Vancouver dismissed with prejudice a libel action brought by Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, against retired Canadian climatologist Tim Ball. Despite  receiving almost no attention in the mainstream media, this ruling represents a pivotal development in the climate change debate. For by throwing out Michael Mann’s case, the court effectively vindicated Tim Ball’s claim that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, published by Mann and two co-authors in 1998 and prominently cited in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001, was a scientific fraud.

To fully appreciate the significance of this, however, one must first understand what the hockey stick graph was intended to achieve. For up until Mann’s publication, it had been generally accepted that our planet’s climate had varied significantly, not just in the distant past when dinosaurs roamed the earth and tropical plants grew in Alaska, but even in the relatively recent history of the last thousand years, which, up until 1998, climatologists had divided into three more or less distinct periods: the Medieval Warm Period, which was believed to have lasted from around 950 CE to around 1250 CE; the Little Ice Age, which was believed to have reached its nadir in the second half of the 17^th century, when the Thames froze over each winter, allowing ‘ice fairs’ to be held on the river outside the Palace of Westminster; and the Modern Warm Period which was believed to have started sometime in the middle of the 19^th century and is thought to be still in progress. In fact, so widely accepted were these three climatological periods that both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were prominently displayed on graphs, both in the presentation given to Congress by James Hansen in 1988 – the event which first brought the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to the wider public’s attention – and in the IPCC’s First Scientific Assessment published in 1990. 

For proponents of the AGW theory, however, this apparent evidence of a natural variability in the earth’s climate posed a number of serious problems. For if the climate had both warmed and cooled a number of times prior to the industrial revolution, then there had to have been factors other than carbon dioxide at work affecting it. Moreover, this being so, one could legitimately ask whether climate scientists were not therefore obliged, not only to discover what these other factors were, but to investigate whether they were still operative in the climate today and to determine how much they might be contributing to current global warming. As a result, the very existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age not only threatened to undermine the central premise of the AGW theory – that it is man-made carbon dioxide, liberated as a result of burning fossil fuels, that is the primary cause of climate change – but actually risked undermining the science of climatology altogether as it is currently structured. For not only is it unable to answer these fundamental questions, but it is largely ill-equipped to do so, many of the answers almost certainly lying outside its current range of competencies. 

The only solution, therefore, was to erase both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the climatological record. And so that is what Michael Mann did. In what he called ‘a new statistical approach to reconstructing global patterns of annual temperature’, he expunged from history any significant variation in the earth’s climate prior to the 19^th century, replacing the graph shown in the lower half of Figure 1 with the new flattened out version in the upper portion, which shows no significant warming of the climate until the 19^th century and which consequently looks a bit like a hockey stick.

Figure 1: Michael Mann's Rewriting of History

So how exactly did he achieve this transformation? Good question! The answer, however, is that nobody knows. For despite numerous requests from other scientists for him to release his data and explain his methodology, for twenty years Michael Mann has resolutely refused to do either, claiming that both the data and the methodology were his intellectual property, even though his research was actually funded by Pennsylvania State University and therefore by the taxpayer.

 

The inevitable result, however, was that speculation on these matters very quickly became rife, with a number of scientists trying to generate the same results using different methods, all of them without success, thereby giving rise to a widespread suspicion that the only way in which Mann could have produced such a uniform data series was by splicing together data from different data sets: a suspicion which will probably make more sense once one remembers that even in a country like Great Britain, with a long scientific tradition, recorded temperatures measured using some kind of thermometer only date back a little over three hundred years, and that the temperatures of earlier periods therefore have to be calculated from what is known as proxy data: tree rings, lake bed sediments, ice core samples and the like. The problem with calculating temperatures in this way, however, is that while it may be relatively easy to detect changes in temperature within a single proxy series – wider tree rings, for instance, indicating better growing seasons and therefore higher temperatures – it can be far more difficult to calibrate these relative changes within a series to the absolute temperatures of a standard metric. Even though different data series based on different proxies and using different methods of calculation may all show the same relative changes in temperature over time, it is quite possible, therefore, for them all to translate into slightly different absolute temperatures. To get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, all Michael Mann had to do, therefore, was use a data set with a relatively low calibration to measure the former and splice it together with a data set with a slightly higher calibration to measure the latter. And this is what many people believe him to have done.

Not, of course, that anyone was particularly keen to call him out on the matter. For even as early as 2001, the climate science community was already becoming grossly intolerant of anyone who questioned the AGW orthodoxy, with dozens of scientists around the world being denied funding for their research and even hounded from their jobs. Prominent names who have suffered in this way over the years include Roger Pielke, who was forced to resign from his position as Professor of Meteorology at the University of Colorado after a publishing a paper in which he statistically demonstrated that extreme weather events had not become more frequent as a result of global warming, and Judith Curry, who was similarly forced to abandon her position at the Georgia Institute of Technology for daring to suggest what everyone had taken for granted before Michael Mann’s rewriting of history: that our endlessly variable climate is almost certainly determined by many more factors other than just the one currently in vogue. 

The result was that it was largely left to retired climatologists such as Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at MIT, to criticise what he was the first to call the increasing ‘alarmism’ in climate science, and another ex-professor, from the University of Winnipeg, Tim Ball, to challenge Michael Mann directly, famously commenting in a recorded interview that he thought ‘Mann should be in the State Pen, not Penn State’.

Rather than simply letting the comment go, however, Mann decided to sue Tim Ball for libel in the Canadian courts: a move which took just about everybody by surprise, not only because resorting to the law was not generally deemed to be an appropriate way of resolving scientific disputes, but because, to anyone who understood how the law functions, it was immediately obvious that, in order uphold his complaint, the Canadian courts would require Mann to disclose precisely what, by then, he had been refusing to disclose for more than ten years: his data and his methodology. In fact, so extraordinary and apparently misjudged was Mann’s action that it is widely suspected that he didn’t actually realise that this would be the case. Once committed, however, he then had no choice but to spend the next eight years trying to avoid the legal consequences of his impetuous bravado, continually promising to produce his data as the court instructed, but then continually finding reasons not to do so, until on 23^rd August 2019, the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of British Columbia finally decided that it had had enough and dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning that Michael Mann could not bring the case again, or at least not in Canada.

Not, of course, that he was in any way embarrassed or fazed by this. In fact, he was back on television within a couple of weeks demanding that all American universities declare a ‘climate emergency’. Nor has it affected the widespread consensus on climate change, either in the media or in the minds of the public at large, not least because, with the entire court case having largely gone unreported, very few people know about it. Thus while you and I and few dozen others may feel justified in regarding Mann’s refusal to disclose his data as a tacit admission of his guilt, for the IPCC, most world governments and the mainstream media, both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age continue to have never existed, leaving carbon dioxide as the sole factor affecting climate.

While others may shake their heads in bewilderment and frustration at the seeming impossibility of ever being able to get a politically blinkered establishment to change its mind on this issue, however, my own primary interest is rather in how this state of affairs could have come about. How did it happen? And why? Why did Michael Mann decide to commit scientific fraud rather than simply follow the evidence wherever it took him? After all, that’s what scientists are supposed to do, isn’t it? Especially in a field as young as climatology, with so many unanswered questions and so much still to be discovered.

I say this because a couple of years ago I had the good fortune to stumble upon a lecture – which you can find here – given by Carl-Otto Weiss, a retired professor of physics at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Germany, who, along with a couple of other retired colleagues, came up with the novel idea of subjecting climate data to spectral analysis. 

For those not acquainted with this particular mathematical technique, spectral analysis is what is used to isolate electromagnetic signals of different frequencies from a background of ‘white noise’. However, it can also be used to reveal recurring or cyclical patterns of different periodicities in large data sets: patterns which may otherwise be lost due the fact that, being of different lengths, their effects will sometimes reinforce each other while, at other times, cancel each other out, giving rise to a combined data series in which no overall pattern may be discernible.

Now, of course, a data series with no discernible pattern may be just that: a data series in which the changes to the values are the result of purely random influences with no underlying pattern to them at all. Applying spectral analysis to climate data, therefore, could easily have turned out to have been a total waste of time and effort. Moreover, Professor Weiss and his colleagues had no way of knowing that this was not the case when they first started out. What is quite remarkable, therefore, is not only that it actually worked, but that, by using this technique, they were able to separate out no less than nine distinct cyclical patterns in the data, each one representing a different factor affecting climate, with different periodicities ranging from under twenty years to over two hundred years and with varying effects upon temperature. 

They also made one other extremely important discovery. This was that there were no non-cyclical patterns in the data: no linear or exponential progressions of the kind one would have expected them to have found if a progressive increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide were one of the factors affecting the climate. This, in itself, therefore, would appear to falsify the AGW theory. Even more significantly, however – from the point of view of this new fledgling science of climatology – of the nine different patterns they did find in the data, they were only able to positively correlate the two strongest or most dominant with factors already believed to contribute to overall climate variability.

The first of these was the 65 year oceanic cycle – which includes both the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) – during which ocean temperatures vary by between 0.3°C and 0.5°C above and below the mean, spending around 30 to 35 years warming and then 30 to 35 years cooling down again.

The second was a cycle which has long been associated with changes in the climate but which, on the face of it, would appear to have very little possible connection. This is the 230 to 250 year Grand Solar Cycle, so called in order to distinguish it from the ordinary 11 year solar cycle, during which the sun’s magnetic poles invert, the north pole becoming the south and vice versa, a process which is both regular and continuous and which also produces fluctuations in the strength of the sun’s overall magnetic field. And it is these fluctuations which provide us with our first clue as to how solar cycles in general might possibly affect climate. For just as the earth’s magnetic field protects us from some of the more harmful effects of solar radiation, so the sun’s magnetic field protects us from radiation coming from outside of the solar system – usually referred to as cosmic radiation – which primarily consists of free neutrons thrown out into space by exploding stars.

These have a number of effects on our atmosphere. Colliding with nitrogen atoms, for instance, they strip the nitrogen nuclei of protons, thereby turning nitrogen (atomic number 7) into carbon (atomic number 6). They also break oxygen atoms (atomic number 8) in half, creating beryllium (atomic number 4). With regard to the issue at hand, however, their most significant effect is that they also ionise the atmosphere and act a catalyst for turning water vapour into water droplets, which then form into clouds. The weaker the sun’s magnetic field, therefore, the greater the cloud formation on earth, and the greater the consequent albedo effect – the reflection of the sun’s energy back into space – resulting in a cooling of the climate.

In the case of the ordinary 11 year solar cycle, this effect is, of course, very small. In fact, in the current political climate, its existence at all will be categorically denied. According to a new theory  developed by a team of astrophysicists led by Professor Valentina Zharkova at the University of Northumbria, however, these fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field, and their consequent effect upon the earth’s climate, are not only replicated in grand solar cycles but are actually amplified by them, the magnetic field first becoming stronger and then weaker again in each of the successive 11 year solar cycles of which the grand solar cycle is comprised, until in the last three to five cycles, the sun enters a stable but significantly weakened magnetic state known as a Grand Solar Minimum, the most obvious manifestation of which is an almost total absence of sun spot activity.

Indeed, it is this lack of sun spots, which otherwise occur as a regular and wholly predictable effect of the sun’s turbulent polar inversions, that has allowed solar astronomers to record grand solar minima for more than four centuries, the most famous example of which being the Maunder Minimum – named after solar astronomers Edward and Annie Maunder – which occurred during the second half of the 17^th century, in the middle of what was previously known as the Little Ice Age… until, of course, Michael Mann wrote it out of existence.

Given the absolutely fascinating nature of the science which could potentially explain this once universally accepted period of global cooling, again we have to ask, therefore, why he should have done this, especially as by simply following the science, vast vistas of opportunity would seem to be on offer. 

I say this because it hardly requires a huge amount of imagination to see that one could quite easily build a whole career simply by following the path which Professor Weiss and his colleagues have already laid out: firstly by verifying the results of the group’s spectral analysis, preferably with a larger data set, the Weiss group having only had access to European data; then by identifying and understanding the causal connections between climate variability and however many cyclical factors the spectral analysis ultimately reveals; and finally by bringing them all together in a complex climate model which would hopefully predict future climate change with far more accuracy than currently achieved by models based purely on levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, if I were a young climate scientist today, I’d be champing at the bit to participate in just such a programme of work.

It is at this point, however, that the real problem begins to reveal itself. For not only would such a programme be very expensive, requiring a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing fields as diverse as oceanography and astrophysics, but being of purely academic interest, with no obvious practical application, it is not easy to see who would fund it. For without the public policy interest which the AGW theory engenders, climatology as a separate field of research, independent from either meteorology or geology, would likely be accorded even less priority today than when it was first given impetus during the cold war, when the rival world powers, eager to stake their claim to various parts of Antarctica, had to find something for their ‘scientific research stations’ to do there, and so set them to drilling ice-core samples, thereby opening up the Pandora’s Box of unacceptable truths which has led us, somewhat ironically, into the morass of lies and deceit in which we currently find ourselves.

I say ‘ironically’ because the initial discovery made by all these scientific research stations was, of course, that the so-called ‘ice age’ – in the singular – which, until the 1970s, the earth was thought to have undergone during much of the last one hundred thousand years but which most people believed had finally and completely ended around ten thousand years ago, was merely the latest in a whole series of glaciations and glacial retreats stretching back 2.58 million years, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation

Immediately, there are a number of things you will probably notice about this chart, the first being that it is based on sedimentary data rather than ice core samples. This is because the oldest ice core samples so far extracted – at the Russian Vostok Station in eastern Antarctica – only come from around 3.7km below the surface, which is the equivalent of only going back in time around 800,000 years. Although a truncated graph, covering just this period, would still show a pattern of warming and cooling – which is what was first discovered in the 1970s – it would not therefore show the overall cooling trend that preceded it. And it is to this that I primarily want to draw your attention.

For although it is still almost universally asserted that the Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation, as this greater ‘ice age’ is now known, came to an end 10,000 years ago, there is absolutely no basis for this assumption in the data as presented, from which it can be clearly seen that the cycles of glaciation and glacial retreat have not only been getting longer over the last 2.58 million years – going from around 41,000 years in duration at the beginning to around 100,00 year in the last dozen or so cycles – but have also been getting considerably colder, the last few cycles reaching up to 9°C below the Vostok mean. Even if this greater ice age has now bottomed out, therefore – and there is no basis for this assumption either – based on this overall trend, the chances are that the earth will still have to go through another 2.58 million years of gradually warming glacial cycles before it gets back to the climate of 2.58 million years ago.

And it was this that naturally made all the headlines back in the mid-1970s when the discovery was first announced: that having just come through what we now know as the Holocene – the brief warm period of around 10,000 years at the top of the current cycle – at some point in the near future – within the next few hundred years or so, perhaps – the earth is almost certain to enter another period of glaciation, the prospect of which seemed all the more imminent during the mid-70s due to the fact that, at that time, before historical temperature data began to be systematically adjusted downwards – something to which I shall return later – the planet appeared to be already cooling, the 1950s, 60s and early 70s having been markedly cooler than the 1930s and 40s. In fact, if one goes back to the unadjusted temperature data from the pre-war period, one finds that the late 1930’s were actually the warmest years of the 20^th century, with the US in particular suffering long, hot summers and a period of intense drought known as the ‘dust bowl’, during which thousands of farmers in the Midwest were driven off their land and forced to embark upon the mass migration to California famously commemorated in John Steinbeck’s novel, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.

With such a devastating drought still very much part of living memory, and the bitterly cold winters of the 1960s and early 70s a simple fact of everyone’s life, the fear which people felt at the prospect of another ‘ice age’, as the newspapers still insisted on calling it, was consequently very real. And yet, still, money for climate research remained in short supply, partly, one suspects, because there simply wasn’t the institutional infrastructure to absorb it, but also because climatologists already had a readily available theory as to why these regular cycles of glaciation and glacial retreat occurred. And it wasn’t what most people wanted to hear.

I say this because although the correlation was by no means exact, these newly discovered large scale cyclic variations in the earth’s climate clearly coincided with the multi-millennial cyclical variations in the earth’s orbit of the sun which had been worked out more than fifty years earlier by the Serbian mathematician and astronomer, Milutin Milankovitch.

The Milankovitch cycles, as they are called, describe three separate aspects of the earth’s solar orbit:

1. The shape of the orbit, itself, which, being acted upon by the gravitational pull of the other planets in the solar system – particularly Jupiter and Saturn – is not constant, being more acutely elliptical at some times than others. Even more significantly, as a further consequence of these gravitational distortions, the sun itself is rarely at the centre of the ellipse, usually being closer to one end – known as the perihelion – than the other – known as the aphelion – with the result that the distance between the earth and the sun varies by up to five million miles.
2. The difference between the length of the sidereal year – the time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun once – and the calendar year, as measured from midwinter solstice to midwinter solstice and caused by the earth’s wobble on its axis. It may not seem much, but the sidereal year is twenty minutes longer than the calendar year, which means that every calendar year it slips back another twenty minutes from its starting point: a phenomenon known as precession. What this also means, therefore, is that the northern hemisphere’s winters occur at different places in the elliptical orbit, sometimes – for a few thousand years in a row – occurring in the perihelion, when the winters are consequently quite mild, and sometimes – also for a few thousand years in a row – occurring in the aphelion, when the winters are significantly colder.
3. The variation in the earth’s axial tilt or obliquity, which ranges from 21.1° to 24.5° and means that during some northern hemisphere winters, the earth is actually pointing further away from the sun than in others. If this happens when the winters are occurring in the aphelion, this therefore makes them even colder.

You will, of course, have noted that I speak here specifically of the northern hemisphere. This is because the land in the northern hemisphere is significantly closer to the polar ice cap than it is in the southern hemisphere. Even though the south pole is actually on land, the Antarctic sea ice would have to leap across hundreds of miles of heat-retaining ocean in order to reach South America, South Africa or Australia. For the Arctic sea ice to claim northern Canada, Siberia and northern Scandinavia, in contrast, it wouldn’t have to move very far south at all. Indeed, it already reaches these northern outposts of the three closest continents each and every winter, blocking any Arctic seaway, and would therefore only require a few cold summers, in which it failed to retreat, for a new period of glaciation to begin.

Despite the undisputed soundness of Milankovitch’s astronomical calculations and the clear if only approximate correlation between the earth’s ever changing solar orbit and the cyclical patterns in its multi-millennial climate history, it is not surprising, therefore, that no government in the world was particularly keen on giving scientists money to study this relationship further and thereby provide a more precise date as to when the next period of glaciation would actually begin. For if, as the Milankovitch cycles suggested, the earth’s climate is driven by gravitational forces far beyond the control of any human being, then there was absolutely nothing any government in the world could do about it. Giving people a more accurate forecast as to when an ice sheet a mile thick was going to descend upon North America and Europe would therefore have achieved nothing other than to foster despondency and a total loss of will to do anything constructive. For make no mistake, another period of glaciation like the last one, with a drop in global average temperatures of 9°C, would mean the death of billions of people, if not the whole of human civilization.

In the early 1980s, when governments would have been agonizing over what, if anything, they should do about this problem, it must have seemed like mana from heaven, therefore, when NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), under the directorship of James Hanson, revived a long-abandoned theory, first put forward by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, which promised a possible solution. For due to the so-called Greenhouse Gas Effect, Arrhenius had posited that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which the world had been experiencing ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, should actually lead to an increase in global temperatures, which Hanson now suggested might be sufficient to counteract the effects of the Milankovitch cycles and hence remove this looming threat.

What Hanson and his colleagues at NASA GISS failed to inform the world, however, is why Arrhenius’ theory had been so long abandoned. Whether or not this was intentional, they entirely neglected to mention the fact that, in 1901, just five years after the theory’s publication, it had been utterly debunked by another Swedish physicist, Knut Ångström, who empirically demonstrated that, due to the limited number of signature wave-lengths at which infra-red radiation is absorbed by carbon dioxide, and the further fact that most of these wave lengths are also absorbed by water vapour, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide could not have anywhere near the effect upon climate that Arrhenius had claimed. Using an infrared camera, which Ångström himself had developed, what he discovered, in fact, was that:

1.  at the shorter wavelengths absorbed by carbon dioxide – those which are also absorbed by the thirty times more plentiful water vapour – all of the infra-red radiation re-emitted by the sun-warmed earth is already absorbed by latter, such that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has no effect on climate whatsoever, while
2. at the longer wavelengths, at which carbon dioxide uniquely absorbs infra-red radiation, the much lower temperatures of the objects from which the radiation is emitted means that the effect is minimal.

Unfortunately, it seems that to governments in the mid-1980s the actual science was not their primary concern. They were happy merely to be assured that they were no longer facing an end-of-the-world catastrophe over which they had no control. As a consequence, they still didn’t really question the science even when they were told that man-made global warming might not merely counteract the effects of the Milankovitch Cycles, but might, in itself, be a threat to the planet. After all, this was something they could control. They could systematically reduce their nations’ carbon dioxide emissions and even gain popularity as a result of their virtuous actions in ‘saving the planet’.

And so the taps were opened and the money flowed, especially in America and the UK, where climate research very quickly became big business. In the UK, for instance, the two largest centres of the science are the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of Exeter, which also houses the UK meteorological office, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which, between them, employ more than three hundred scientists – along with their associated administrative and auxiliary staff – and jointly produce the highly influential HadCRUT dataset, which is used by the IPCC in its scientific assessment reports, and from which an equally influential version of the GAST or Global Average Surface Temperature is derived.

To those unfamiliar with the way in which climate science is currently conducted, this concept of the GAST, and the fact that it needs to be calculated, will probably require some explanation. After all, most people probably imagine that, these days, the earth’s atmospheric temperature is measured from space. As indeed it is. Since 1978, microwave sounding units (MSUs) on polar orbiting satellites, controlled by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have measured the intensity of microwave radiation emitted by atmospheric oxygen, from which the temperature of  different layers in the atmosphere can be calculated. Not only are these stratified atmospheric temperatures all significantly cooler than the earth’s surface temperature, however, but, as stated, they only go back to 1978. And as with proxy data, one cannot mix and match datasets. If one wants a longer historical record – one dating back to 1850, for instance, as in the case of the HadCRUT dataset – one therefore has to go back to surface temperature records measured in the old-fashioned way, with a thermometer.

The trouble is, of course, that if one’s objective is to obtain is a global average surface temperature, this enforced methodology, in itself, presents a number of almost insurmountable challenges. The first and most obvious is that weather stations are not evenly distributed about the globe, with far more in Europe and North America than in Africa, Asia and South America, and hardly any at all, in fact, in most of the more inhospitable but climatically critical parts of the world, such as northern Siberia and the Sahara Desert. Just as importantly, this is also reflected historically, with less and less records having been kept outside of Europe and North America the further one goes back in time. In fact, during the first four years of the HadCRUT dataset, from 1850 to 1853, there is only one actual data point in the whole of the southern hemisphere, in Indonesia as it happens.

So how do you calculate a global average surface temperature from such a paucity of actual data? Well it’s a bit like playing a game of Sudoku. Firstly, you divide the world up into a grid of equal sized areas. Then you fill in the average temperatures for those areas for which you have actual data. Then you take two areas for which you have data and extrapolate values for the areas in between. How? Unfortunately this is not made public. For just as in the case of Michael Mann’s data and methodology, the institutions which undertake this work, although publicly funded, claim that their algorithms are proprietary and the primary source of their income, which they therefore have a right to protect.

One can, however, make some educated guesses as to the kind of variables these algorithms would have to include. Take, for example, two areas on the grid – call them A and B – which differ in average temperature by 2°C and which are separated by four dataless areas. The simplest way to extrapolate the average temperatures for these transitional areas would therefore be to divide 2°C by four and assume that the temperature increases by 0.5°C in each of the areas one passes through in moving from the colder area A to the warmer area B. Immediately, however, one can see a number of problems with this. Is the difference in the average temperature between A and B caused by a difference in altitude, for instance? And if so, is the gradient constant? Or is the difference between A and B due to the fact that one is in an urban area while the other is in the countryside, urban areas generally being two or three degrees warmer than rural ones? If so, how far does the urban heat island effect (UHIE) radiate into the countryside? And what happens if one combines these two possibilities? Suppose that both A and B are urban areas at different altitudes, with colder countryside in between. How does one calculate these values?

Not, of course, that this particular example is mathematically very difficult. And I certainly don’t mean to say that the people who work on these problems don’t generally get the answers right or that they are not empirically verified wherever possible. There are, however, areas of the world where the factors affecting the local climate are not only far more complex than in the above example, but where that complexity itself not only produces the kind of inhospitable environment where human habitation and hence weather stations are a rarity, but where it is also that much more difficult to verify their assumed effects.

Take the world’s oceans, for instance, which cover 71% of the planet’s surface and which have such a complex thermodynamic interaction with the atmosphere that even after decades of oceanic-atmospheric studies, meteorologists still find it difficult to predict the development and course of hurricanes with any certainty. What’s more, meteorologists do not have to rely on tethered coastal buoys or ships to feed them surface temperature data in the way that climatologists do.

Then there are the world’s deserts which, due to a lack of water vapour in the atmosphere, experience dramatic drops in temperature when not subjected to direct sunlight. Or the world’s tropical rain forests which, due to their extreme humidity, hardly experience any change in temperature at all whether it be day or night. If you look at maps showing the locations of the worlds weather stations, however, deserts and rain forests hardly figure at all, meaning that whatever changes in temperature these regions of the world experience are nearly all extrapolated from somewhere else: somewhere else that almost certainly does not have these same extreme climatic conditions.

Even more worrying is the fact that, just as in a game of Sudoku, extrapolated data points become data points from which other data points are then extrapolated, such that any error in calculating the value for one particular area can spread and even be amplified across the matrix: a fact which, I suspect, would have scientists in many other fields raising a sceptical eyebrow, especially as we are not allowed to see the algorithms by which these calculated values are generated. Indeed, it’s highly likely that there would be a good many scientists in other disciplines who would not only question the scientific soundness of this whole endeavour but would likely wonder at how it could receive so much public founding while being subject to so little public scrutiny.

Indeed, it is a question which, I suspect, a good many more people will have started asking in the last few months, following the publication of the work of an Australian PhD student called John McLean, whom the guardians of the HadCRUT dataset inexplicably allowed to audit HadCRUT4, the fourth and latest version of their dataset.

Presumably, as a humble PhD student, the senior management at the Hadley Centre and the CRU thought that McLean posed no threat. Unfortunately for them, he found a publisher who was not only willing but eager to publish his findings, which detailed over seventy serious errors in the data.
Admittedly, most of these were just simple mistakes. But even as such, they demonstrate a casualness on behalf of the scientists involved which one would not have expected from people processing such supposedly significant information, especially given that many of the mistakes are so glaring.

By way of a few examples, there are two separate months, for instance, when the measured or calculated average temperature for the Caribbean islands of St. Kitts is recorded as being 0°C. For the whole month of September 1953, to take another example, a town in Romania was supposed to have experienced an average temperature of minus 46°C: the usual average temperature for that month being plus 10°C. Then there is the temperature data recorded by ships at sea, the geographical coordinates of which are logged as being up to two hundred miles inland. In fact, reading this catalogue of glaringly obvious errors, it is almost as if none of the data was ever actually checked or subjected to quality control, which in turn quite naturally leads one to question the quality of the systems and processes by which it is amassed.

Bad as these individual errors are, however, they are as nothing compared to the numerous systematic adjustments to which the data is subjected, especially with respect to the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is largely a 20^th century phenomenon. This is because modern building materials – bricks, concrete and tarmac – are much better at absorbing and storing heat than those which they replaced – stone, wood and cobbles. With the advent of central heating, buildings also started to be heated to much higher levels, and although this coincided with an improvement in insulation, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, all this additional heat always eventually leaks out into the colder surrounding environment, thereby warming it: something which those responsible for weather stations in urban areas, especially at universities and other places of learning, gradually began to recognise as the century progressed.

As a consequence, they therefore slowly began to move these weather stations into more rural areas or any green, open space the school or university happened to own, sports fields being a very popular choice. The result was that average temperatures recorded by these weather stations in the year immediately following their relocation usually and often quite dramatically fell. Instead of assuming that the temperature rise at the previous location had been gradual over a number of years, however, what John McLean discovered was that the compilers of the HadCRUT dataset assumed rather that the older temperatures had always been overstated by the difference recorded in the year of relocation. Instead of adjusting the figures downward on a gradual basis, therefore, they deducted the entire difference from the whole data history of the weather station in question, effectively cooling the past by far more than any reasonable person would regard as warranted.

Nor are the scientists at the Hadley Centre and the CRU alone in this practice. Over the last couple of decades, the same adjustments have been systematically made to the datasets compiled by NASA GISS and the NOAA. Indeed, it is how these institutions, working together, managed to eradicate the warmer years of the 1930s and 40s. Even more importantly, it is also how they have managed to maintain their elevated level of public funding. For in order to keep the money spigots open, the climate science establishment, as a community of institutions, know that they have to keep public concern over climate change at a critical level. For all these institutions, therefore, it is imperative that anything which brings the AGW narrative into question – even the slightest hint that other factors might be involved in climate variability – has to be suppressed.

Shocking as this is, however, the real problem is that the corruption does not stop at the laboratory gates. If it did, it would just be a minor scam. Having embraced the AGW narrative, however, governments around the world have had to make good on their implicit commitment to do something about it, and there have been plenty of other scam artists out there who have been than more than willing to help them: crony capitalists who have no problem accepting public grants and subsidies in return for largely bogus promises of limitless clean energy produced from non-viable technologies which are otherwise so far from being economic that, during their lifetime, they barely recoup the energy expended in their manufacture, installation and maintenance. Worse still, in order to fund these grants and subsidies, both taxes and electricity prices have to be increased for both consumers and businesses alike, thereby suppressing demand in other parts of the economy, while the intermittent nature of the energy produced by wind and solar farms is a constant threat to the stability of any electricity grid which is forced to rely on them, eventually giving rise to power outages which are even more economically damaging.

At the same time, demands that we eliminate the use of fossil fuels for transport have forced an already depressed automotive industry to scrap billions of dollars of cumulative investment in internal combustion technologies while investing even more billions in the development of alternative electric vehicles for which there is currently little to no existing refueling infrastructure and insufficient electricity available to power one even if there were, our generating capacity having already become too degraded by the green energy revolution. And to cap it all, it is now being discovered that, because of their lithium ion batteries, electric cars are not nearly as safe as everyone imagined, having a tendency to suddenly burst into flames should any of their battery casings become compromised, allowing the lithium inside to come into contact with the oxygen in the air and causing them to explode.

But surely, you say, governments employ engineers and economists to advise them on these matters. If the direction in which we are currently headed were as misguided and ill-conceived as I say it is, then surely they would have been told. And you are right, they probably have been. It’s just that no politician hoping to be re-elected could ever repeat any of this advice, let alone base their policies on it, while many of them almost certainly choose to cynically profess a belief in a post-fossil-fuel world in order to appeal to that small but extremely vocal part of the electorate with whom it most resonates: the idealistic but largely directionless graduates of our post-modernist education system for whom the traditional aspirations of getting married, raising a family and owning their own home now seem as anachronistic and ideologically defective as they are economically unattainable. When set beside the yawning chasm of nihilistic emptiness which otherwise beckons, to many of this generation the idea of ‘saving the planet’ has thus become the one thing they can cling to: not just as an indubitably good cause to which they can devote themselves entirely without further need of reason or justification, but as something which, in its very purposefulness, offers them salvation.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the climate change movement has often been compared to a religious cult. For like a religious cult it gives meaning to its followers’ lives. Based on such an abstruse foundation, however – the actual physics of which few of its followers even claim to understand – it also engenders the kind of anxiety which naturally comes with the possibility that this ‘meaning’ could at any time be undermined by some random sceptical thought, and which in turn therefore fosters an almost hysterical hostility towards any dissenting voice. Like heretics in the middle ages, ‘deniers’ must consequently be silenced by any means possible, whether that means de-platforming them and banning them from any form of media, or removing them from any office they may hold, especially if that office involves any form of teaching.

What is most disturbing about this descent into mob rule, however, is not just the rejection of disinterested enquiry and reasoned debate – or even the existential malaise which it clearly signifies – but the fact that, unlike in the middle ages, and the centuries of ever-increasing enlightenment which followed, science may no longer be able to come to our rescue. For by abandoning actual science in favour of whatever narrative would garner public funding, scientists like Michael Mann have not only subverted their own disciple and weakened the status of science in general, but have undermined the entire epistemological foundation upon which the modern world is built: a principled and determined commitment to basing our beliefs solely upon empirical evidence and reasoned argument, which, until now, has kept our feet firmly on the ground and our beliefs tethered to reality, and without which all manner of fantasy, delusion and madness is made possible, including, it seems, the belief that a colourless, odourless gas, which comprises just 0.04% of the atmosphere and is essential to all life on earth, is actually a pollutant born of our nature-despoiling original sin, which, unless we recant and mend our ways, will eventually see us all burning in hell or plunged beneath the waters of a second great flood.

It is thus for his contribution to ushering in this new dark age of ignorance and superstition that Michael Mann is most culpable. And it is for this, therefore, that he cannot be forgiven.

Milankovitch and the ‘Earth History’ Perspective on Climate Change, or ‘Why We Should All Stop Worrying About Global Warming’

It is, I believe, a little known fact that we are currently living in an ice age. It is called the Pleistocene-Quaternary Glaciation and it started about 2.58 million years ago.

That this may come as a bit of a surprise to some people is probably due to the fact that it is generally believed – at least by people of my own generation – that the last ice age came to an end around 10,000 years ago. This, however, now turns out to have been an erroneous interpretation of the then available data by 19^th century geologists who had neither the evidence nor the theoretical basis to distinguish between whole or completed ice ages and oscillating phases within an ice age, in which, it seems, temperature ranges are seldom if ever constant.

In fact, the current ice age can probably be best characterised as one in which relatively long periods of glacial advance, resulting from global cooling, are punctuated by shorter period of glacial retreat, resulting from global warming. What geologists in the 19^th century took as the end of an ice age was only, therefore, the end of the most recent period of glaciation, which lasted around 100,000 years, and the beginning of the current interglacial period, which has so far lasted around 10,000 years.

Over the last 2.58 million years there have therefore been many such cycles of glacial advance and interglacial retreat. With respect to true ice ages, however, there is evidence of only five in earth’s history, as shown in Figure 1 – although there may have been others for which there is no geological evidence, or for which the geological evidence has not yet been found. 

Name	Period
Huronian	2.4 to 2.1 Billion years ago
Cryogenian	850 to 630 Million years ago
Andean-Saharan	460 to 420 Million years ago
Karoo	360 to 260 Million years ago
Pleistocene-Quaternary	2.58 Million years ago to present

Figure 1: Known Ice Ages

What is truly remarkable about these five ices ages, however, is how very little we seem to know about any of them – at least outside scientific and academic circles. If you look up each one on Google, for instance, you will find out:

•  that evidence of the existence of the Huronian ice age, which formed during the Proterozoic eon, comes from unique rock formations in an area north of Lake Huron.

• that the Cryogenian ice age, which, as its name suggests, was probably the most severe of the known ice ages, covered the entire planet – turning it into snowball in space – and that it was probably brought to an end by tectonic or volcanic activity, which threw enough green-house gases into the atmosphere to start a period of global warming – though this, of course, is largely conjecture.

• that of the Andean-Saharan ice age, nothing appears to be known whatsoever.

•  that occurring at the onset of the Devonian period, when land based plants were beginning to cover the continents, the Karoo ice age was very possibly caused by this new vegetation extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus reducing the greenhouse effect and starting a period of global cooling – which, again, is pure speculation.

• that of the Pleistocene-Quaternary glaciation, the only thing that is known for certain is that it is still going on.

That we know this – when the 19^th century geologists did not – is because we now have ice-core samples from Antarctica and the Greenland ice-sheet which show that, around 2.58 million years ago, average global temperatures began to decline below the Vostok mean (named after the research station in Antarctica where this benchmark was first established), and that, despite the increasing amplitude of the fluctuations, they have continued to decline ever since, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Ice Core Record of the Pleistocene-Quaternary Glaciation

Significantly, the increase in the amplitude of the oscillation tells us is that, throughout the ice age so far, the periods of glaciation have not only been getting colder but longer, with the average length of cycle having increased from 41,000 years during the first half of the ice age – as calculated to date – to around 100,000 years in the second half. What we don’t know, of course, is whether this trend is still continuing, or whether it has already reached the bottom. What we do know, however, is that, whether or not global temperatures are now on the upturn, further oscillations will occur. Without very significant external intervention, trends like this don’t simply come to an end. 

Because the current interglacial period has already lasted for around 10,000 years, we also know that we are due to enter a new period of glaciation sometime soon – even though the word ‘soon’, here, is intended in climatological terms, which could mean anything between 1 and 5,000 years. 

In fact, it was the imminence of the next cycle of glaciation which sparked much of the current research into climate change. When, in the 1980s – as a result of work on ice-core samples – it was first discovered that we are still in an ice age and that a return to a period of glaciation was due, this was very much everyone’s principal fear. And it was then that a number of climatologists came forward with the idea that the emission of man-made greenhouse gases might delay this outcome. As a result, politicians throughout the developed world then channelled funds into research to discover whether this was, indeed, the case, only to be told by the researchers concerned that man-made greenhouse gases, and the global warming to which they gave rise, might themselves prove to be problem.

Since then, of course, nearly all our attention has been focused on addressing this issue. Billions of dollars have been spent, both on fundamental research and on the technologies and changes to our economy that would be required to rein back man-made global warming. Far less attention has been given, however, to the more fundamental issue that for the last 2.58 million years the earth has been going through repeated cycles of global warming and cooling without any help from ourselves.

Indeed, for those who are not already aware of it, it is important to note that the whole of our civilisation, from the development of agriculture, around 10,000 years ago, to the creation of all the technological marvels we see around us today, has taken place entirely within the current interglacial period, a timespan so short that if you look for it on the graph in Figure 2, it is so hard up against the right-hand vertical axis that it is lost within the width of the printed line. Rather than have any causal effect on the cyclical pattern of climate change that is clearly indiscernible within the graph, our civilisation, in fact, would not have been possible at all without this brief interglacial respite between the much larger cycles of global freezing.

Of even greater importance, however, is the fact that being cyclical and entirely natural in origin, the pattern of climate change we see in Figure 2 is almost certainly driven by something which, in addition to being immensely powerful, is also fundamentally cyclical in nature. Given, therefore, that there is only one object in our solar system which meets both these requirements – exhibiting both immense power and cyclical fluctuations – it is almost certainly the case that this underlying pattern has something to do with our sun – or, more precisely, with our planet’s orbit around it.

To understand how this could be possibly, however, one first has to appreciate that the earth’s solar orbit is not uniform, being subject to cyclical variations known as the Milankovitch Cycles, named after the Serbian astronomer and mathematician, Milutin Milankovitch, who first postulated and demonstrated their existence while serving as a prisoner in an Austrian POW camp during the first world war.

The Milankovitch Cycles are the result of three fundamental, though probably little known facts about the earth’s orbit:

1. The fact that the solar or tropical year, on which our calendar year is based, is slightly shorter than the earth’s orbital or sidereal year, thus giving rise to a phenomenon known as planetary precession.
2. The fact that the earth not only tilts on its axis at different degrees to the sun during the cycle of each tropical year, thus defining our seasons, but that the tilt itself is subject to cyclical fluctuations.
3. The fact that, due to the gravitation pull of the other planets, particularly Jupiter and Saturn, the eccentricity of the earth’s elliptical orbit – the degree to which it diverges from the perfectly circular – is also subject to cyclical variations.

I shall explain each of these in turn, starting with the first, which has the largest effect upon our climate, and is the factor which other factors therefore either augment or partially serve to nullify.

So let’s start with the basics.

If asked to define the term ‘year’, I suspect that most people would say that it is the amount of time it takes for the earth to complete one whole orbit of the sun. This, however, is what is known as the sidereal year. Our calendar year, in contrast, is based on the tropical year, which is measured from equinox to equinox: seasonal phenomena which result from the fact that the earth not only turns on its access, but wobbles on it, tilting first one way and then the other. What is probably less well known, however, is the fact that that these two ‘years’ are not quite the same.

If, for instance, we were to select a point in the earth’s orbit at which we could say that both years began – a point which, for convenience, we might choose to have coincide with one of the earth’s two equinoxes – then even after our wobbling planet had completed one whole inclinational cycle – leaning first one way and then other, before returning to the perpendicular again – in terms of its sidereal journey around the sun, it would still not yet have returned to its original starting point. Admittedly it only falls short by about 20 minutes. But cumulatively these annual discrepancies add up, with the earth slipping further and further back around its orbital path, until eventually – 25,772 years later – it slips all the way back to meet itself one lap behind, at which point it may have notched up 25,772 tropical years, but has only completed 25,771 actual orbits.

But what possible effect could this have on our climate, you ask. Well, if our planet’s orbit were perfectly circular, it wouldn’t have any effect at all. But, as we know, the earth’s orbit is elliptical. This means that there are times when it is further away from the sun than other times. And should these times also coincide with times when, due to its tilt, the earth is also pointing away from the sun, the effect is magnified as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Solstices at Extremes of Ellipse

Here we see a situation in which both the summer and winter solstices are at the extremes of the ellipse, while the spring and autumn equinoxes are therefore at the closest points to the sun. In this configuration, winters are likely to be the coldest in the entire cycle. With the earth furthest from the sun and tilting away, less light reaches the winter hemisphere than at any other time. Summers are also likely to be poor, in that, although the summer hemisphere is pointing towards the sun, the earth is so much further away that the amount of light reaching the surface is still less than during any other summer. The only periods of respite in this cycle of rather gloomy seasons, in fact, are likely be the springs and the autumns, which, occurring at points at which the earth is closest to the sun, are likely to be warmer than usual, merging almost imperceptibly with the rather tepid summers, so that the only seasons that actually stand out – and this for their harshness – are likely to be the winters.

This is in marked contrast to the opposite configuration, as shown in Figure 4, in which the winter and summer solstices occur when the earth is closest to the sun. In this case, the summers are likely to be the hottest in the cycle, with the winters at their mildness, merging almost imperceptibly with the rather poor springs and autumns resulting from the equinoxes now being at their furthest points from the sun. In fact, in this configuration, the only seasons which are likely to stand out are the summers.

Figure 4: Equinoxes at Extremes of Ellipse

As this is based on the certainty of physical laws, geometry and mathematics, unlike many other factors affecting our climate, this, therefore, is an ever constant heartbeat, something one can absolutely depend on, and almost certainly constitutes our climate’s most fundamental cyclical base. If there were no other factors involved, in fact, this cyclical coincidence of tilt and elliptical extremes would result in the earth’s climate simply being divided into four periods, each of 6,443 years, in two of which the planet would experience cycles of overall cooling, while in the other two it would experience cycles of overall warming.

As already stated, however, Milankovitch identified two further factors which affect this underlying pattern. The first of these concerns variations in axial obliquity, or the degree to which the earth tilts one way and then the other during its tilt cycle, which varies between 22.1° and 24.5° over a period of 41,000 years. This means that during some of its precession cycles, and for quite long periods at a stretch, the earth points further away from the sun during its winter solstices than during other cycles, making these years even colder. What is also quite interesting here is that this cycle of 41,000 years just happens to be the same as the cycle of glaciation and retreat in the first half of the current ice age, as shown in Figure 2. 

This is then further complicated  by a third factor which concerns the shape of the earth’s orbit, itself, which is pulled in different directions, becoming more or less elliptical, depending on the alignment of the other planets in the solar system. These are again entirely determined by physical laws, geometry and mathematics, and are therefore wholly predictable, operating within an overall cycle of 413,000 years – although, within this, there are smaller cycles of around 100,000 depending on planetary alignment. 

To produce an overall model of our planet’s underlying climatic cycle, therefore, all it would seem that we now need to do is work out how all these factors interact. For depending upon the way in which their individual peaks and troughs coincide – or not, as the case may be – there are clearly going to be times when their effects reinforce and magnify each other, and times when they counteract and perhaps even nullify each other. The problem, however, is that although the Milankovitch cycles clearly constitute a fundamental part of this overall pattern, no one has yet come up with a model based on them that fully accounts for all the available climatological data, even though climatologists, today, include in their calculations two addition orbital factors – apsidal precession and orbital inclination – which were not taken into account by Milankovitch himself.

What this means, therefore, is that there have to be additional factors affecting the cycle which go beyond the pure mathematics of moving bodies in space. And two of these, it is generally believed, are feedback loops – one positive and one negative – resulting from glaciation itself.

The positive feedback loop, known as increasing albedo, results from the fact that snow and ice reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space than grey ocean and brown earth. The further the polar ice caps extend, therefore, the more of the sun’s energy is lost in this way, and the cooler the planet becomes, raising the question, in fact,  as to how, once a period of glaciation has started, the earth ever manages to escape its grip. Indeed, increasing albedo is quite possibly one of reasons why periods of glaciation gradually get longer and deeper over time, each cycle starting from a lower base.

What stops this downward slide going on indefinitely, however, is believed to be a counter-acting or negative feedback loop which results from the fact that, as the ice sheet extends over more and more of the planet, this reduces the amount of both land-based vegetation and oceanic algae which would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide. As a result, more and more greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere; the planet starts to warm; and the ice sheet retreats. 

What this amounts to, therefore, is another natural cycle of cooling and warming which, in a way, sits on top of and further augments the Milankovitch cycles, making the overall picture even more complicated. Even taking these feedback loops into account, however, climatologists have still not yet been able to produce a model which completely satisfies all the empirical data. Other factors – some of them possibly still to be identified – have got to be involved. What makes climatologists so concerned about the current situation, however, is that, according to the model, as I have so far presented it, greenhouse gases should only build up in the atmosphere towards the end of a period of glaciation. They should actually be at their lowest towards the end of an interglacial period. What this suggests, therefore, is that although our own contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is relatively low – accounting for less than 3% of the 793 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide deposited in the atmosphere each year, according to the International Panel on Climate Change – and although most of this (782 billion metric tons) is then reabsorbed by the world’s forests and oceans in yet another purely natural cycle, through deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, we, ourselves, have nevertheless become another factor in the equation. 

So what’s new, you may ask. Climatologists have been telling us this for the last twenty-odd years. And so they have. What they haven’t done, however, is provide us with the kind of climatological background and historical perspective that I have been trying to provide here.  By omitting such factors as the Milankovitch cycles from their presentations, and by failing to mention that we are still actually living in an ice age, intentionally or otherwise, they have therefore given the impression that without the greenhouse gases which we ourselves are generating, our climate would be more or less stable. More to the point, by ignoring the fact that without these anthropogenic greenhouse gases we would almost certainly be heading into another cycle of glaciation, they make it seem as if man-made global warming is entirely a ‘bad thing’. But consider the alternative. For, make no mistake, if we were to prevent man-made global warming from bringing an end to the cycles of warming and cooling shown in Figure 2, then sooner or later we would enter another period of global cooling. 

As a result, the ice cap at the north pole would gradually extend further south again until, eventually, if geological evidence is anything to go by, it would reach a latitude of around 40° N, making much of Northern Europe and North America uninhabitable. Ice hundreds of metres thick would cover all of Canada and the northern states of the USA, including all of New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Montana. In Europe, it could easily extend as far south as the Alps and the Rhone valley – which was glaciated during the last cycle of global cooling – and would certainly cover much of northern Germany, Poland and Russia.

Admittedly, the alternative – if we allow global warming to continue – isn’t much better. In this case, the polar ice caps would continue to recede until, eventually, they would disappear altogether, returning the planet to something like its normal condition. I say this because, in the 2.1 billion years since the Huronian Ice Age, ice has only actually covered the earth’s poles for 17% of that time. What this also means, however, is that sea levels would continue to rise, with some whole countries disappearing beneath the waves. Indeed, without massive new sea defences, some of the world’s largest cities, such as London and New York, would also be at risk.

The fact is, however, that of these two possible futures, global warming offers the better prospect for survival. It may be difficult and cost a great deal of money. For as we have seen during the floods in Britain recently, defending oneself against the forces of nature is a mammoth task. It is a lot easier, however, than trying to maintain agricultural production in a country covered by millions of tons of ice.

This being the case, the question one has to ask, therefore, is why we are so exercised by the second of these two possible outcomes but seem not to care about the first, especially given the fact that if, by some miracle, we were able to prevent global warming from bringing the Pliocene-Quaternary Glaciation to a permanent end, we would actually be responsible for plunging ourselves into another period of global freezing. 

Part of the answer, of course, is simply one of timescale. For, as already mentioned, another cycle of glaciation might not happen for another thousand years or more, and even then it would take some time for the ice sheet to reach its maximum depth and coverage. In the last cycle, for instance, its didn’t reach its peak until 85,000 years in. Given that our entire civilization is only 10,000 years old, this doesn’t therefore fill one with immediate concern. The effects of global warming, in contrast – or so we are told – are already being felt. It makes sense, therefore, to concentrate on the problem at hand.

Eminently pragmatic though this strategy may seem, however, I have my doubts as to whether it actually plays any significant part in most people’s thinking. Indeed, most people, I’m fairly sure, have absolutely no idea that another cycle of glaciation is even an option. Another possibility, therefore, is that, sceptical of our ability to reverse the current trend, both climatologists and politicians alike have more or less concluded that a return to glaciation is no longer a threat: a conclusion which would certainly explain why, over the last thirty years, it has so completely slipped off the radar.

Not, of course, that one can blame politicians for doubting our collective will to combat climate change. For even if governments around the world were actually to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – rather than merely talking about them – this wouldn’t reduce the volume of such gases already in the atmosphere. In fact, unless emissions were reduced to a level lower than the rate of oceanic absorption, this residual volume would still continue to rise. If these greenhouse gases have the effect upon our climate which so many people claim they have, it is hard to see, therefore, how this effect could be reversed without a drastic reduction in economic activity: something which would almost certainly result in the deaths of millions, if not billions of people.

The question which this naturally prompts, therefore, is why, if curtailing the emissions of man-made green-house gases is so politically out of the question, politicians throughout the democratic world still largely support a green agenda, trotting out all the right words and phrases on camera, even if no real action is being taken behind closed doors. A very large part of the answer to this question, however, has to do with the way in which the campaign against man-made global warming was initially set in motion. For if one remembers back to the early years of this century, prior to the financial collapse of 2008, when venerable presenters such as David Attenborough stood in front of collapsing glaciers and bemoaned the fate of the polar bear, the way in which the issue was presented was not, primarily, as a matter of scientific concern, but as one of moral urgency. It may not have been the intention of Sir David or his producers to deliberately play upon our feelings for furry animals, but that, of course, is what they did, and with entirely predictable results. For not only did we, too, start to bemoan the way in which we – or, more specifically, right-of-centre governments and big business – were raping and destroying the planet, we also made it impossible for our politicians to adopt any other stance.

And to make matters worse, this popular media campaign to enlist our support in a world-wide movement to reverse global warming didn’t stop there. For having engaged our sympathy and provoked our moral outrage, it also triggered what I can only describe as our predisposition to mythologise. For having lifted global warming out of its historical context and attributed it purely to the activities of man, the barely disguised subtext with which we were then presented was inescapable: mankind had been given a green and pleasant land – a veritable Garden of Eden – which, in our infinite folly and wickedness, we were now in the process of turning into a watery grave. The appeal to the biblical – to the flood and Noah’s Ark, in fact – couldn’t have been more blatant. More importantly, however, it stirred in us that self-flagellating fascination with the eschatological which has haunted writers and artists for millennia, and which retains its place within our deepest fears even to this day.

The reasons for this dark obsession at the heart of our religious and artistic culture are, of course, fairly obvious. By linking our own deaths to the extinction of the species, we imbue our individual lives with a tragic significance they otherwise lack. This only works, however, if our extinction is our own fault. Being wiped out by a rogue asteroid, for instance, provides no such narrative fulfilment. Indeed, it only goes to show just how meaningless our lives are – or were. To be meaningful, our destruction has to follow from our own actions, and has to be seen as a just punishment. And the destruction of the planet as a result of man-made global warming fits this requirement perfectly.

In fact, in many ways, it is the almost perfect artistic expression of the many ambivalent feelings we have about our stewardship of the planet over the last the 10,000 years, during which period we have:

• Used up most of the world’s non-renewable resources, squandering them on the manufacture of material possessions we don’t need, don’t used, and for which, in many case, we don’t even have enough room in our houses;
• Driven countless other species to extinction, or to a marginal existence in which their numbers can be counted in thousands, if not hundreds;
• So increased our own population that the earth is barely able to support the 7.2 billion people it currently has to feed, without the adverse climate conditions which global warming will almost certainly bring about.

So numerous are our crimes against the planet, indeed – at least in our own fevered, anthropocentric imagination – that it is hardly any wonder that there are those on the extreme wing of the green movement who have a tendency regard human beings as something more akin to a parasitic virus: one that is slowly consuming the body it has infested. Nor is it particularly surprising, given such attitudes, that advocates of radical action to combat global warning often sound more like religious zealots than political campaigners, vilifying those who express any scepticism about their beliefs as ‘climate-change deniers’ and heretics.

The problem this presents for politicians, however, is that, having created this monster – or having at least given it the oxygen it needed to flourish – they cannot now distance themselves from it without being labelled as apostates. At the same time, they have also become increasingly aware of how little they can actually do to address the underlying problem, especially in a world recovering from an economic recession, in which growth and the balancing of budgets quite naturally take priority.

To make matters worse, they are also now being told that global temperatures over the last fifteen years have not increased in the way that climatologists predicted – remaining more or less static – which makes them question whether the models on which these predictions were based were correct. In fact, for most politicians today, the whole issue of climate change has become a disaster zone they enter at their peril.

But global warming is happening, right? Probably. 

And human beings are at least partly responsible, yeah? Again, probably. 

So there’s no real change in the underlying position? Correct.

The fact remains, however, that our climate models are incomplete. We do not know what caused the five ices ages of which we are aware, or what brought them to an end. We don’t even know what causes the cycles of warming and cooling within the current ice age. We know that the Milankovitch cycles are involved, as are various feedback loops resulting from glaciation, itself. But the model is incomplete. We still do not have a complete picture.

Indeed, I mentioned earlier that there are almost certainly other factors involved in climate change which may not yet have even been identified. One of these is almost certainly the sun itself, not just in the role it plays in determining the earth’s orbit, but in the energy it radiates, particularly in the form of sun spots or solar flares. These produce waves of ionised particles, known as the solar wind, which washes across the earth’s upper atmosphere, stripping out dust and other accumulated debris, thereby allowing more light to penetrate through to the surface, while at the same time interacting with the oxygen in the atmosphere to increase the amount of ozone, thus doubly contributing to global warming.

Unsurprisingly, this form of solar activity is again cyclical, though nobody really knows why. Nor is it quite as predictable as the Milankovitch cycles. Typically, solar cycles last around 22 years, with very little in the way of gaps between them. However, between Solar Cycle 23, which ended in early 2008, and Solar Cycle 24, which started in late 2009, there was a gap of nearly 2 years in which virtually no sun spots occurred, and in which global temperatures already began to fall, causing some climatologists to fear that this could actually have been the start of another Maunder Minimum.

This was a period which lasted from 1645 to 1715, in which sun spots became extremely rare, resulting in a period of global cooling often referred to as the Little Ice Age, which is still commemorated on many of our more traditional Christmas cards. Famously, the Thames in London froze over each year, allowing for the construction of an annual ice fair, which became a perennial feature of the capital’s economic and social life, providing both a market and various forms of entertainment from December through to March. 

So what am I saying? That another Maunder Minimum is going to come along and save us from the effects of global warming? Of course not. Such events are totally impossible to predict. But that’s the point. Given the incompleteness of our climate models, even our best guess at what is going to happen may be completely wrong. To spend our time and our energies worrying about global warming when (a) we can’t do anything about it, (b) it may not actually happen, and (c) it may not be a entirely bad thing if it does, is therefore the height of irrationality, especially when it is elevated to the status of a religion.

So what then? Do we just sit here and let the waves roll over us? No, there’s plenty of things we can do: things that are both rational and practical. Following the floods we have suffered in Britain this winter – which many people have attributed to global warming, though that, of course, is impossible to establish – we can start by improving our flood defences. Given that infrastructure projects are generally believed to be a good way to stimulate the economy, this would therefore be a very good way to spend a few billion pounds. It won’t stop global warming, of course, but it might just mitigate some of the effects – which is the point I’m trying to make.

To finish, therefore, I’d like to leave you with one further thought: that it is not changes to the environment that cause species to become extinct, but the failure of a species to adapt to the said changes.

Recently, I caught a news item which reported that US authorities are extremely worried about a species of Asian carp getting in the great lakes and displacing the indigenous species. They are therefore planning to spend billions of dollars to prevent this.

While watching the report, however, I couldn’t help thinking about an alternative approach. Instead of stopping the carp entering the lakes, they could stimulate a fishing industry to catch them and sell them to consumers. After all, carp are very good source of protein and omega 3, and, if prepared correctly, are very palatable. In Poland, I believe, they are served at Christmas as a seasonal delicacy. If caught in sufficient numbers, this would therefore stop them displacing other species and would create both food and employment at the same time. Only it takes is a bit of lateral thinking.

The problem, it seems to me, is that, too often, we think that our only responsible attitude to the environment is one of conservation. Nothing must be allowed to change, including our climate, even though we know, from earth’s history, that our climate is in constant flux. So we spend billions trying to prevent what cannot be prevented, rather than prepare for the changes we, ourselves, will need to make once the inevitable has happened. For, make no mistake, the carp will get into the great lakes. Sometimes, therefore, accepting change, and adapting to it is the best policy. Sometimes, indeed, it is the difference between survival and extinction.