Heat rises as debate rages over alleged global warming

By Andrew Heasley Copyright 1999 Canberra Times January 9, 1999

Those who suffered through sleepless nights this week would not need a lot of convincing about the effects of global warming.

As if to confirm one's intuition, the Bureau of Meteorology this week declared 1998 to be the hottest year since records began in 1910. While the average temperature for 1998 was 0.73 degrees Celsius higher at 22.54 degrees Celsius compared with the bureau's baseline reference period of 1961 to 1990, a telling statistic is the record increase in average minimum temperatures.

The average minimum temperature across Australia for the year was 16.02 degrees, a full 1.03 degrees more than for the same reference period.

Australia's meteorologists were not the only ones to come out swinging with record temperatures.

None other than the World Meteorological Organisation announced the Earth's global temperature in 1998 was the highest since 1860. On average, it was 0.58 degrees above the 1961-1990 reference period, and an estimated 0.7 degrees greater than at the end of the 19th century. Even 7km up into the stratosphere, the temperature was nearly half a degree hotter in 1998 than the average for the last 20 years.

So the proponents of the greenhouse effect on global temperatures seem to have the data to support their theory. The extra carbon dioxide and other gases produced by industrial activity has thickened the planet's solar blanket: the heat from the sun that penetrates the ozone layer is trapped in the lower atmosphere and cannot escape, thus causing a gradual, cumulative rise in temperature over time.

According to the United Nations expert committee on the greenhouse effect   the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control  the effects of the increases in temperature are dramatic: the polar caps will melt, the sea level will rise up to half a metre over the next 100 years, cool-water fisheries in low-altitude locales will become extinct and coral reefs may die. The food chain will be affected.

The intensity and distribution of rainfall and storms will change, resulting in severe droughts and floods; more land is likely to become desert.

The panel's report, Climate Change 1995: the Science of Climate Change lays the blame for global warming at the feet of industrialised man. The report was used as the basis for the 1997 Climate Summit in Kyoto, Japan, where industrialised states were under pressure to set targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The balance of evidence, from changes in global mean surface air temperature and from changes in geographical seasonal and vertical patterns of atmospheric temperature, suggests a discernible human influence on global it said.

But not everyone agrees. One prominent atmospheric physicist in the United States, Dr S. Fred Singer, described the report as dangerously simplistic, quite ineffective and economically destructive. Singer is a veteran of all things atmospheric. From 1946 and post-war rocket programs to the invention of stratospheric ozone-measuring equipment for satellites, he has a string of academic and US government policy achievements to his credit.

Not only does Singer dispute that mankind is to blame, he disputes the very climactic data and computer modelling on which the panel and other greenhouse doomsayers base their dire predictions. He has accused the panel of unannounced and unauthorised changes to the part of the report that deals with the measurement and responsibility for global warming, claiming the report was changed after the draft report had been approved by government delegations.

A global conspiracy? According to Singer, More serious than the clandestine alterations of the panel report has been the misuse of that report in advancing the political agenda of the global bu reaucracy. His foundation, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, reports that he and his board alleged the conclusions of the panel had been deliberately distorted for political and ideological purposes.

Singer found 100 climate scientists who were prepared to sign a statement, dubbed the Leipzig Declaration, attesting much of the panel's work to be flawed. It said, The policies are based on unproven scientific theories, imperfect computer models  and the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from an increase in greenhouse gases, requiring immediate action. We do not agree. If anything, Singer believes the planet is cooling. It is colder now than it was 1000 years ago, and the global climate cooled from 1940 to about 1975, raising fears of an impending ice age. Carbon-dioxide levels are certainly rising, but the climate seems not to be warming, as many would he said.

The fully corrected satellite data still show a slight cooling trend between 1979 and 1997. The same trends are also observed in the balloon data covering the same period as the he said.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration offers another theory that may support the cooling proposition: erupting volcanoes.

It believes that when volcanoes erupt they throw millions of tonnes of dust particles and sulphur gases into the air. The sulphur gas turns into sulphuric acid particles, called aerosols, which deflect the sun's rays from Earth.

Recently, Singer wrote in the Washington Times, In formed scientists predict that sea levels will drop  not rise - if oceans warm; the evaporated moisture may simply turn to snow in the polar regions and increase the thickness of the Greenland and Arctic ice caps. Even if global warming occurred, it might actually be beneficial, he said.

All historical evidence shows that during the Middle Ages (around 1100), people were better off than during the hard times of the "Little Ice Age' (1450-1850) when crops failed and people starved. His foundation is critical of the pressure for scientists to conform to a politically correct view. Scientific debate is being replaced by pressure to conform to a new orthodoxy, reinforced by the control of research funds by governmental agencies.

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