Global warming?

Christopher Booker explains:

"It might well be called "the tale of two planets". On one planet live all the Great and Good who have recently been trying to whip up an ever greater panic over global warming, as the clock ticks down to next December's UN conference in Copenhagen when they plan a new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

There was, for instance, the three-day gathering organised by Prince Charles at St James's Palace, at which 20 Nobel laureates (including two African winners of the Peace and Literature prizes) listened to speeches from Lord Stern and Prince Charles, before issuing a declaration which compared the threat of global warming to that of all-out nuclear war. They also heard President Obama's Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, solemnly telling them that if all buildings and pavements were painted white, to reflect the sun's rays back into space, this would be equivalent to taking all vehicles off the world's roads for 11 years.

Then there was the 103-page report launched by Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, on behalf of something called the Global Humanitarian Forum, claiming, without a shred of hard evidence, that global warming is already "killing 300,000 people a year". But Mr Annan himself had to admit that this report, drawn up by a firm of consultants, was not "a scientific study" but was "the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change".

Even this was topped by a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claiming that world temperatures could rise this century by 7 degrees C, "killing billions of people worldwide and leaving the world on the brink of total collapse". According to MIT, these projections are based on new evidence which has come to light since 2003.

Now for the other planet, the one the rest of us live on. Here all the accepted measures of global temperatures show that their trend has been downwards since 2002, declining at a rate that averages to about 0.25 degree per decade. Yet such a fall was predicted by none of those 25 computer models on which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the rest of the Great and the Good rely for their theory of runaway global warming. Their computers are programmed to assume that as CO2 goes up, temperatures inevitably follow. But the graph below, where the variation of global temperatures from a 30-year mean is plotted against CO2 levels, shows the two lines clearly diverging, contrary to the theory. In this century, temperatures have fallen as CO2 has risen.

Furthermore, the Arctic ice has failed to disappear, as can be seen from the Crysophere Today website: it is now not far off its 30-year mean. Al Gore's polar bears have failed to drown. The ice in the Antarctic is actually way above its 30-year average. Except in the minds of Kofi Annan, Lord Stern and Prince Charles's assembled worthies, the threatened catastrophe seems not to be happening.

Meanwhile, on the planet where the rest of us live, the prospects for a new treaty in December, which according to an estimate by the International Energy Agency would cost us all $45 trillion, are not looking too hot. The Chinese and the Indians insist that, since all this global warming is the fault of the developed world, they will only sign the treaty if we agree to pay them $300 billion a year. The Africans and South Americans make similar demands.

But herein lies a mystery. Our own wonderfully sensible and honest MPs, it will be recalled, have already passed the Climate Change Act, committing us to restrict our CO2 emissions within 40 years to a level only 20 per cent of where they were in 1990. President Obama has committed the US to the same. Since these targets could only be met by closing down our economies, it is hard to know where we will find the money to pay the rest of the world what it is demanding. The real question we must decide in the years ahead is which of these two planets we are actually living on. "