CLIMATE
The counter consensus
By Prof. Robert M. Carter. Stacey International. 200 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 906 768 294
Anyone buying this book for a serious balanced discussion on the evidence for or against climate change caused by human activity will be disappointed.
The title says it all. It is written to combat what Carter perceives as a worldwide conspiracy to mislead the public on what is happening to the earth’s climate. In Carter’s world the scientific community on climate change is divided into two groups — those aligned with the UN-sponsored, Nobel-prizewinning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and those who dispute the evidence for man-made climate change, termed by Carter the ‘independents’. Being funded by carbon-based businesses apparently does not influence their independence. Those in the IPCC group, by Carter’s description, have launched a bandwagon which has scared governments into parting with billions of pounds in research to substantiate man-made climate change while excluding the ‘independents’. According to Carter, the IPCC and its allies had successfully bullied the UK’s Royal Society, the US National Academy of Science and, by inference, the Nobel prize committee into uncritically accepting the case for man-made climate change.
Carter is a paleoclimatologist; that is, he studies historic climate changes as recorded in geological structures. His central premise is that there have been many cycles of warming and cooling in the earth’s history. Some cycles have been very long and some quite short, spanning a few decades. He believes the earth is still gradually warming from the last ice age. He then attempts to discredit the scientific evidence on which the IPCC case is built. First of all, he claims that the IPCC does not recognise historic temperature cycles, although it clearly does. The central core of his argument is that carbon dioxide, the principal green house gas causing man-made climate change, is in fact quite benign. He appears to totally disregard the evidence that the present levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere maintain the earth at a pleasant average 15°C rather than an unliveable 0°C without it.
His belief is, rather, that the earth’s climate system is so large that man-made carbon dioxide will either just cause some beneficial extra plant growth or be absorbed in the oceans and precipitated in due course as limestone rock. The fact that human activity can have detrimental effects on the earth, such as the hole in the ozone layer, as a consequence of man-made emission of chemical compounds of carbon and the halogens is never mentioned.
While Carter spends a lot of space finding counter arguments to the IPCC case, my overwhelming reaction is that Carter doesn’t occupy the same world as me. Whenever he touches on something I feel truly expert in, he is wrong. The figure for solar radiation on the earth is wrong at 342 watts per sq. metre rather than 1342 watts per sq. metre. It is alleged that the UK government will spend £100 billion on measures to migrate to a low carbon economy between now and 2020. This is news to me and I’m sure it is to the UK government too.
Climate change is a complex issue as Carter also admits. It is true that temperature changes that have been recorded are within normal cyclical variations, but the changes are, in this reviewer’s opinion, only just beginning. Despite Carter’s assertion, very little is actually being done to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. By the time it’s obvious that there’s a problem, it’ll be too late.
Dr. Tim Bruton has 30 years’ experience in development of solar cell technology and was head of global R&D in silicon technology at BP Solar until 2004.
