Temperature change is normal
In response to Michael Job (Letters, March 10) and the other climate alarmists, can I set out the facts as I see them?
Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the climategate-email scandal, has admitted there has been "no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years".
In an open letter to the president of the Maldives, Professor Nils-Axel Morner, the world's foremost expert on sea levels, stated: "I have been on no fewer than six different field expeditions to the Maldives. We worked in the lagoon, we drilled in the sea, we drilled in lakes, we looked at the shore morphology -- many different environments.
"We have always found the same thing: a total stability for the last 30 years, preceded by a 20cm drop in sea level in the 1970s." In other words, sea levels have not changed at all.
Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University, in Australia, has shown that temperatures have often changed by more than 5C per century over the past 50,000 years, based on ice-core samples.
The slight temperature changes we see now are perfectly normal.
The National Snow and Ice Data Centre has reported that the extent of both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is currently increasing.
Professor Rachel Pinker from the University of Maryland has shown that solar irradiance increased over the period from 1983 to 2001, precisely the time when there was some warming of the earth.
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it's the sun, stupid.
Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas -- it absorbs infra-red radiation from the earth's surface at three particular wavelengths. However, water vapour is a much "better" greenhouse gas, and there is an awful lot more of it.
Does Michael Job want to ban kettles as well?
Computer models assume a positive feedback loop that leads to runaway global warming, but if that were true, the earth would have fried long ago.
Despite what propagandist-in-chief Al Gore says, CO2 is not a pollutant -- it is plant food and I'm looking forward to a bumper crop this year!
Dr Alan Rogers
Dublin 15
Irish Independent
