A simple list of nine items

Hat tip to Maggie's Farm for their link to this essay. They say: Candidate for Best Essay of the Year: Nine Facts about Climate Change and I agree with them completely. The author Ray Evans lists the nine facts and then proceeds fact by fact to document his findings. Read: Nine Facts about Climate Change

Introduction
In January 2006 I wrote a pamphlet entitled Nine Lies about Global Warming in which I sought to summarise for the lay reader the state of the debate about increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and the widespread predictions of catastrophic global warming which would ensue as a consequence of man's use of fossil fuels. Despite the inherent scientific implausibility of these predictions, and the complete lack of empirical evidence to support them, a number of current political leaders and former leaders, notably UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, former US Vice President Al Gore and Australian Labor Leader Kim Beazley, have embraced these predictions. The Environmentalist movement throughout the West has united behind global warming as its primary campaign ambition, and the political power of the Environmentalist movement has generated very large expenditures as a consequence. The most bizarre manifestation of what Cardinal George Pell has described as 'pagan emptiness' is the despoliation of coastlines and mountain ridges with thousands of wind turbines in the UK, in Germany, Denmark, and now increasingly in Australia.

The science debate is at the heart of the global warming campaign. On one side of that debate we have those prominent scientists who preach the gospel of anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide-generated global warming. Without exception, their careers have been made in the shadowy world where science and politics intersect; a world described by the once celebrated but now forgotten novelist of the 1950s, CP Snow. Lord May and Sir David King in the UK, and James Hansen in the US, are outstanding examples of the genre. On the other side of the debate is a long and growing list of scientists whose careers have been built on successful research into the extraordinarily complex physics and chemistry of the earth's atmosphere and oceans, and the influence which the Sun has on the earth's climate. The most recent example of devastating critique of the anthropogenist carbon dioxide school comes from William Gray, the doyen of American hurricane scientists.

A bit more:

Those who have seen Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, and who are acquainted with American history, will have recognised the religious tradition of millenarian preaching to which it conforms. The end of the world is nigh! Judgment Day is at hand! Repent you of your sins and resolve to lead a better life! Missing from the Gore version is God's participation in these climactic events. Nature has taken God's place, but otherwise the script is unchanged. Man's sin is responsible for the coming catastrophe, and unless we repent of our sins and give up our use of fossil fuels, then catastrophe will surely bring the world to an end.

And the list of Nine Facts? Here are the first four:

Fact 1. Climate change is a constant. The Vostok Ice Cores show five brief interglacial periods from 415,000 years ago to the present. The Greenland Ice Cores reveal a Minoan Warm Period 1450-1300 BC, a Roman Warm Period 250-0 BC, the Mediaeval Warm Period 800-1100AD, the Little Ice Age and the late 20th Century Warm Period 1900-2010 AD.

Fact 2. Carbon dioxide is necessary for all life on earth and increasing atmospheric concentrations are beneficial to plant growth, particularly in arid conditions. Because the radiation properties of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already saturated, increasing atmospheric concentrations beyond current levels will have no discernible effect on global temperatures.

Fact 3. The twentieth century was almost as warm as the centuries of the Mediaeval Warm Period, an era of great achievement in European civilisation. The recent warm period, 1976-2000, appears to have come to an end and astro-physicists who study sunspot behaviour predict that the next 25-50 years could be a cool period similar to the Dalton Minimum of the 1790s-1820s.

Fact 4. The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is limited to a correlation which holds only for the period 1976 to 2000. Attempts to construct an holistic theory in which atmospheric carbon dioxide controls the radiation balance of the earth, and thus determines average global temperatures, have failed.

Ray Evans also takes on the Mann hockey-stick chart and provides proof (links) as to its innumeracy.