Climate Change Manmade (question mark?)

                                                                 

The question mark should stay; according to a documentary by Channel 4 The Great Global Warming Swindle, aired on Thursday 8th March. The documentary directed by Martin Durkin, which you can find here, puts up some pretty convincing arguments against the theory that climate change is caused by human CO2 emissions.

The documentary put recent climate change into perspective. Fundamentally the Earth has a long history of climate change which includes a mini ice-age in the Seventeenth Century, a medieval warm period, and the Holocene Maximum, the warmest period in the last 10,000 years. These fluctuations, more extreme than the one we are experiencing currently, occurred before humans started to produce carbon dioxide on a large scale. Therefore there is every possibility that climate temperatures are going through a natural change. The prevailing consenus that this change is manmade by our use of fossil fuels is contradicted by that fact that post 1945 and up to 1975, global temperatures fell back. During this period where human CO2 emissions increased at an unprecendented rate, the prevailing consensus says that there should have been a corresponding increase in temperatures. There was not.

Further, the scientists who featured in the documentary claim that if climate change was driven by CO2 emissions then the Troposphere, the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere some 10-15 km above us, would be warming at a quicker rate than the temperatures on the ground. In actual fact the opposite is occuring which indicates that temperature increases are not caused by CO2 emissions. In fact they argue that it is the rise in global temperatures that is producing the additional CO2 rather than the other way round. They point to the fact that increasing temperatures have corresponded with an increase in the number of sun spots on the Sun, or what can technically be described as areas of intense magnetic activity. These send out powerful waves of energy which are pushing up temperatures on Earth. In turn the oceans warm up and produce more CO2.

The upshot is, any efforts to reduce our CO2 emissions may have no affect on climate change at all.