State of Fear – Prof.Sriram Prabhakar

19 Jan 2022.

Over the last 2 to 3 decades, we have heard a lot of talk on “Global Warming” little realizing whether its actually true or not.

Let’s look at the definition of Global Warming. Global Warming is defined as per the common convention as the heating up of the surface of the earth from the excess of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere that is produced by burning fossil fuels.

That’s not all, in the late 80s and early 90s, we heard that most coastal cities will sink in 30 years’ time, as a result of increasing sea levels and the result is obvious. Today the media claims it will happen by year 2100 which also looks equally dubious.

This is because till date we only have mean sea level and not absolute sea level which means that the water on the beaches of Goa might be at a higher altitude than the water in the beaches of Bali.

If Earth were a perfect sphere, calculations of depth and distances would be easy because we know the equations for those calculations on a sphere. However, the Earth more closely approximates an ellipsoid, which is what a ball looks like if you sit on it. Ellipsoid calculations aren’t as easy as spherical calculations, but they’re still well-known and do-able. Be that as it may, we all know that the earth is not really an ellipsoid either because there are oceans, and mountains, and valleys, and many other
features that are not part of an ellipsoid. Hence the sea levels differ over large distances.
What climate scientists do agree on is the fact that Global Warming is unproven at best, fantasy at worst.
The issue arises when most people would call it a dramatic rise in CO2 levels. What exactly constitutes dramatic, is it 1% or 2% or anything else and also is it ⁰C or ⁰F.

Let’s look at composition of air

Source: https://scied.ucar.edu/image/gases-earths-atmosphere

Countries including some major economies refused to sign the Kyoto protocol as the effect of the protocol was to reduce Carbon emissions by .04% or four hundredths of a degree over a span of 100 years.

Tom Wigley, a climate scientist formerly at the University of Adelaide and currently with The Breakthrough Institute along with 17 other scientists and engineers around the world made a careful study and concluded that reducing carbon emissions with the existing technology is not possible. Their paper was published in Science magazine.

Besides the fact that we are trying to reduce something which is already minuscule in the atmosphere.

Next, we come across the phenomenon of Antarctic ice melting. At 14,200,000 square kilometres, Antarctica is the fifth largest continent and is 1.5 times the size of either US or Europe and holds 90% of all ice on the planet. The Antarctic ice in many places is 8 to 10 Kilometres thick with an average thickness of 2 Kilometres. What the news hides is the fact that Antarctic peninsula is melting and calving huge icebergs, but the continent on the whole is getting colder and thicker and the peninsula is 2% of the continent and the ice here has been melting ever since the Holocene era (6,000 years).

Furthermore, we come across the term of Carbon credits, frankly with just 0.4% of atmospheric air comprising of Carbon compounds, the usefulness of Carbon credits is better left unsaid.

Former US Vice President Al Gore in his wisdom had said in 2006 that Arctics will completely melt by 2013. A decade later we don’t see any such thing happening, in fact there were several news reports in the early 90s that Mumbai and other coastal cities would cease to exist by 2020. The result is contrary. During the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro in 1992, Vanuatu and several other South Pacific territories made spectacular documentation stating they would not last beyond 2000. Vanuatu was represented in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and will also be there in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and am sure will be there for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics as well.

However, since this a known fact by various think tanks which have influence over Government policies, Global Warming tends to get mixed with pollution which is an entirely different aspect. This also adds glamour to the entire spectrum of activities and world economies are spending billions of dollars in seminars, conferences, meetings and whatever else to prove the unprovable, and with a variety of activists it’s a spectacle.

Whether most scientists outside climatology believe that global warming is happening is less relevant than whether the climatologists do. A letter signed by over 50 leading members of the American Meteorological Society warned about the policies promoted by environmental pressure groups. “The policy initiatives derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. They are based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuel and requires immediate action. We do not agree.” Those who have signed the letter represent the overwhelming majority of climate change scientists in the United States, of whom there are about 60. McMichael and Haines quote the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is widely believed to “prove” that climate change induced by humans has occurred. The original draft document did not say this. What happened was that the policymakers’ summary (which became the “take home message” for politicians) altered the conclusions of the scientists. This led Dr Frederick Seitz, former head of the United States National Academy of Sciences, to write, “In more than sixty years as a member of the American scientific community … I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

Policymaking should be guided by proved fact, not speculation. Most members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believe that current climate models do not accurately portray the atmosphere-ocean system. Measurements made by means of satellites show no global warming but a cooling of 0.13°C between 1979 and 1994. Furthermore, since the theory of global warming assumes maximum warming at the poles, why have average temperatures in the Arctic dropped by 0.88°C over the past 50 years?

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