From Dr. Tim Ball, Historical Climatologist
Some highlights - but read it all.
Frontier Centre: We are all familiar with the modern theory that the world’s climate is getting warmer. Is it?
Tim Ball: Yes, it warmed from 1680 up to 1940, but since 1940 it’s been cooling down.
Wow! Cooling down - despite the fact that we've been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an unprecendented rate since 1940 - it's got cooler. Still think you know what you're talking about Nicky boy?
FC: A corollary of the popular theory of global warming is that its cause is human activity. But aren’t changes in the climate a product of cosmic forces beyond our influence, i.e., the sun?
TB: Yes, when David Anderson or the federal government says we are going to stop climate change, it is the most ludicrous statement in the history of the world. The climate changes all the time and dramatically. All you have to do is sit here in Manitoba and imagine that just 20,000 years ago, which in the Earth’s history is nothing, you would have been sitting under about 1,000 meters of ice. In fact, 20,000 years ago there was an ice sheet covering Canada that is larger than the current Antarctic ice sheet. All that ice melted in less than 5,000 years and we are not even sure where all the heat energy and the causes of that melting that occurred came from. So to suggest that the fractional amounts of CO² that humans are putting up has any influence on global climate is really quite ludicrous.
And to suggest that we should spend billions upon billions of dollars trying to stop something we have absolutely no power to prevent is so ludicrous as to be the ravings of a madman.
FC: In layman’s language, can you describe the role played by water vapour in determining atmospheric conditions?
TB: Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas. This is part of the difficulty with the public and the media in understanding that 95% of greenhouse gases are water vapour. The public understand it, in that if you get a fall evening or spring evening and the sky is clear the heat will escape and the temperature will drop and you get frost. If there is a cloud cover, the heat is trapped by water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the temperature stays quite warm. If you go to In Salah in southern Algeria, they recorded at one point a daytime or noon high of 52 degrees Celsius – by midnight that night it was -3.6 degree Celsius. That’s a 56-degree drop in temperature in about 12 hours. That was caused because there is no, or very little, water vapour in the atmosphere and it is a demonstration of water vapour as the most important greenhouse gas.
That should be clear enough even for an economist to understand, Nicky boy. What do you think we should do - get rid of all the water? That'd stop global warming. It'd end life on earth too, but you can't have your cake and eat it, eh?
FC: Your view on windmills?
TB: They are not hot air but there is certainly a lot of blowing in the wind. They only function between a certain range of wind speed. Below a certain wind speed they don’t operate; above a certain wind speed they have to shut down. They make an enormous amount of noise; in fact, there are studies in Europe now showing that some of the low harmonics actually cause problems in the body for people living near them. There is also the irony that the Greens in Germany are trying to shut the windmills down because they are killing birds by the millions. There is one windmill in California that is in a mountain pass that has killed condors and eagles and all sorts of other species that have been designated as “at risk.” The problem is, of course, that the wind mills are put where the wind blows and that’s where the birds fly particularly during migration. The other thing is that wind doesn’t blow all the time and if you have a wind generation system you have to almost 100% backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and so it simply doesn’t work.T><>>
Wind farms - ugh! Ugly, brutish, noisy, crude, destructive and -as Tim points out - utterly, utterly pointless.
FC: The politically correct version of climate change theory is taught in our schools, particularly the greenhouse gas version which blames human activity and excess materialism for warming. How do we depoliticize these topics in our schools?
TB: The simple answer is that you have got to have the climate change and global warming issue taught in the science part of the curriculum as well as the social sciences. The fact that it is totally restricted to the social science curriculum puts a terrible bias on it.
In other words, education not indoctrination. So there you go Mr Stern - eminent ecnomist and chief government scaremonger. You have produced a 700 page report of no worth or value whatsoever. Still - who cares about all those trees, eh?
2 comments:
It must be tough sitting and waiting for an oil company to hire you, trying to say just the right things.
"Wind farms - ugh! Ugly, brutish, noisy, crude, destructive and -as Tim points out - utterly, utterly pointless."
Oh, dear. A scientist who doesn't buy into the AGW theory so he must have something to do with the oil businesss - or trying to get a job in the oil business, right?
I realise that most Environazis are teenagers - mentally if not physically, but how about you AGW people start trying to answer the arguments rather than trying to slur those who make them?
Eventually, you are going to have to back up your theories with cold, hard facts - real facts, not guesstimates, assusmptions, model based predictions and wild-eyed doom mongering. Real evidence. Real data. Real proof that global warminig a) exists, b) is not just a short term trend, c) will do what you say it will do and most importantly d) is caused by man and IS NOT just the normal behaviour of the planet.
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