Friday, February 18, 2005
GLOBAL WARMING LETTER - SCOTSMAN
Letter in today's Scotsman. The first letter from former Tayside Tory MP Bill walker is also excellent on the subject of windmills:
According to Mark Ruskell (Platform 15 January) "the debate on whether climate change is real or not is over". He isn’t far from correct, if not in quite the way he suggests. The research used to scare us into supporting Kyoto, by "proving" that global temperatures had flatlined for a millennium until rising rapidly in the past few years, has been discredited. It was based on faulty calculations which would have given the same graph from almost any input figures. The author is even refusing to make the rest of his calculations public - thus entirely removing them from the realm of testable science.This was in reply to a guest editorial by Green MSP Mark Ruskell saying how we all have to give up fire if we don't want a catastrophe. Since the cost of Kyoto is approximately $800 million a day & the alleged benefit a cut of 8 millionths of a degree a day (see www.junkscience.com)
Furthermore, there is still a legitimate debate on whether the rise, approximately 1C over the past century, will continue, whether it is caused by mankind, sunspot activity or something else and whether an increase of that level is a good thing for us or not.
The increase in CO² levels is almost certainly beneficial, as it allows crops to grow better.
Clearly, history will look back on the Kyoto process with the same bemusement we have when we read that in 1975 Newsweek claimed there was a "unanimous" scientific consensus that we were heading for a new ice age.
