Ablaze

Seven hundred years ago, Dante Alighieri told us that the deepest level of the Inferno consists not of fire, but ice.

Down there, Satan keeps Judas's head firmly clenched in his jaws while other sinners are immobilised in solid H20 for eternity. It's ice we sinners need fear. Not fire.

And yet - possibly because of that other prediction that the Earth will be destroyed by flames - we have a politically enhanced, media-driven frenzy that if we buy just one more car or open just one more factory, we are all going to burn. Not only that, our favourite holiday island resorts and waterfront villas will become homes for fish.

Tripe.

Though the Earth will finally be destroyed by fire, that won't happen for another 5,000 million years - when the sun goes red giant - so don't start wearing asbestos underpants just yet.

It is global freezing we have to fear. For at least the past 2 million years, the Earth has normally been much colder than now. We are in a warm period, and we should be grateful.

Words: 1100

The above is the beginning of the article only.  To read, or purchase, the complete article, please see the left hand column for conditions of sale and then clickhere and request the article. You will recieve a confirmation email including instructions for payment.

Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift wrote about scientists trying to make pillows from marble and food from faeces.  If Swift was able to take scientists with a pinch of sodium chloride, why can’t we?

Throughout most of the last century, top-level astronomers were convinced there were networks of canals on Mars, supposedly made by the residents so they could irrigate crops.  Their delusion went so far as to publish highly detailed maps in scientific journals.  In 1969, photos taken by the Mariner spacecraft showed there were no canals at all, only the very occasional linear surface feature.

Scientists can get it wrong, can let their imaginations run away with them; a clipboard and a lab coat are no guarantee of infallibility.

Some months before the Mars photos arrived on Earth, the Observer Newspaper in London published the first mainstream article about the Greenhouse Effect.  Our planet was apparently about to overheat because of human-produced carbon dioxide.  Some scientists - and some journalists and politicians - took up this latest doomsday prophesy with gusto and the sky has been falling ever since.

Words: 2500

The above is the beginning of the article only.  To read, or purchase, the complete article, please see the left hand column for conditions of sale and then click here and request the article. You will recieve a confirmation email including instructions for payment.

How do scientists manage to average daily variations of tens of degrees and then tell us that the planet has become 0.5 °C hotter in the last one hundred years?

How CAN they accurately measure, and average, a temperature change as small as 0.5 °C in a hundred years, across the whole planet?

Well, this is how they try:

A thermometer is kept in a white box, called a Stevenson Screen - named after one of its designers, Thomas Stevenson, father of Robert Louis.

For a century, Stevenson Screens have sat in green forests, on windy headlands, in white ice fields… and more recently in car parks, airports … in the middle of growing concrete jungles.

And they are monitored by anyone from top-level scientists in the South Pole, to underpaid postmasters in Africa.  The maximum and minimum temperatures are measured for the day, and the average taken.

The whole world is then divided into sections.  The figures from each section are then fed into a computer.

But it’s the screens in the middle of growing cities that are showing the most significant rises - and skewing the results - especially cities in the developing world, where they have a lot of dirt.

What’s dirt got to do with it?

Words: 800

The above is the beginning of the article only.  To read, or purchase, the complete article, please see the left hand column for conditions of sale and then click here and request the article. You will recieve a confirmation email including instructions for payment.

Throughout most of the 20th century some scientists, including the highly esteemed astronomer, Percival Lowell, were convinced there were canals on Mars. This delusion went so far that they published detailed maps in scientific journals. In 1969, photos taken by the Mariner spacecraft showed there were no canals.

Scientists can get it wrong.

A few months before the Mars photos arrived, The Observer in London published the first mainstream article about the Greenhouse Effect. Some scientists - and journalists and politicians - took up this doomsday prophecy with gusto.

The sky has been falling ever since.

Words: 1561

The above is the beginning of the article only.  To read, or purchase, the complete article, please see the left hand column for conditions of sale and then click here and request the article. You will recieve a confirmation email including instructions for payment.

THERE is a fine line between science and religion, and as British scientist Thomas Huxley once said, "Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed."

Has the greenhouse effect become a creed?

The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. He also predicted the existence of tropical jungles on Venus.

If his first prediction was correct, the temperature of the earth could have risen 3.5`C by now.

Worst-case estimates put the actual rise at just 0.6`C, though it is very difficult to make a measurement of that accuracy across the entire planet over a 100-year period.

Huxley also said - with exquisite irony - that the tragedy of science is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact".

Is the ugly fact the temperature rise is simply nowhere near as high as the greenhouse hypothesis predicted?

Words: 1300

The above is the beginning of the article only.  To read, or purchase, the complete article, please see the left hand column for conditions of sale and then click here and request the article. You will recieve a confirmation email including instructions for payment.

Solicitors and purveyors of insurance love small print, and, when it comes to keeping themselves employed, so do some scientists. Just look at the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Such IPCC reports are the backbone of the Greenhouse lobby's argument, and are continually referred to in debate on the issue. But they're a sham.

The 2001 report, for example, has a lengthy Summary for Policy Makers (available at www.ipcc.ch) that pronounces in bold type that: "The global-average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century by about 0.6C." How can you accurately make such fine measurements across the whole, varied planet? But it doesn't stop there: "Since the start of the satellite record in 1979, both satellite and weather balloon measurements show the global average temperature of the lowest 8 kilometres of the atmosphere has changed by +0.05 +/- 0.10C per decade."

That's outrageous. The margin for error (0.10C) is twice as high as the reading! Would you accept a car with a speedo that indicated that you were heading down the road at 180km/h while simultaneously saying maybe you were going backwards at 60km/h? In fact, the report shows the temperature of the atmosphere could have actually gone down by 0.05C.

Words: 820

The above is the beginning of the article only.  To read, or purchase, the complete article, please see the left hand column for conditions of sale and then click here and request the article. You will recieve a confirmation email including instructions for payment.