Drought blamed on lack of faith

A LEADING Muslim cleric has blamed the devastating drought, climate change and pollution on Australians’ lack of faith in Allah.

Radical sheik Mohammed Omran told followers at his Brunswick mosque that out-of-control secular scientific values had caused environmental disaster.

“The fear of Allah is not there. So we have now a polluted earth, a polluted water, a wasteland,” he told a meeting this year.

“What are the people now crying for? The prophet told you hundreds of years ago, ‘Look after the water’.”

A Sunday Herald Sun investigation also found clerics railing against “evil” democracy, vilifying Jews and Christians and encouraging jihad and polygamy.

And in a popular DVD selling locally, a foreign sheik exhorts Muslims to take control of Australia by out-breeding non-believers.

British-based Sheik Abdul Raheem Green forbade Muslims from having fewer than four children so Australia would become an Islamic state.

Behind the closed doors of some Melbourne mosques and bookshops, sheiks push for Sharia law, declare Islam at war with the “sick” West and gloat that September 11 boosted Muslim numbers.

At a Muslim information centre in Coburg, extreme literature shares shelves with DVDs by firebrand sheiks from around the globe.

The centre, run by Abu Hamza, serves Muslims in the northern suburbs.

Many CDs and DVDs there feature London sheik Abdul Raheem Green, who is on an Australian Government watchlist.

On one he tells his audience to Islamise Australia through a Muslim baby boom.

“The birth rate in the Western countries is going down. People are more interested in their careers . . . they don’t want to have babies,” Sheik Green says in one DVD.

“So don’t you think, Muslim brothers and sisters, we’ve got a bit of an opportunity here? They’re not having babies any more. So what if, instead, we have the babies?

“In Canada one in three or one in four children being born is a Muslim. What does that do to the demographic shift of a Muslim population in 20 years’ time?

Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Waleed Aly said he was disappointed though not surprised by the Sunday Herald Sun‘s discoveries.

But he said extremist speech and literature was confined to only a couple of Melbourne groups.

“If I walked into (Omran’s group) or (Hamza’s centre) it wouldn’t surprise me,” he said.

Mr Aly said he believed Muslims were radicalised by “cult-like peer groups”, not hate literature.

Brown wants ‘new world order’ to fight global warming

Mon Mar 12, 4:20 AM ET

LONDON (AFP) – Gordon Brown, likely to be the next prime minister, will deliver a speech calling for a “new world order” to combat global warming on Monday.

According to excerpts released by the finance ministry, Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown will also say the United Nations should make the fight against global warming a core “pillar” of its international mission.

Brown will praise the  Union‘s progress in combatting climate change after EU leaders on Friday agreed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 20 percent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels.

He is set to announce domestic policy proposals that are targetted at helping Britons save energy, thereby cutting their individual carbon emissions, ahead of the government’s publication of its Climate Change Bill on Tuesday.

“People want to make the right choices and they want help to take the right decisions,” Brown will say.

“Government must provide practical help with, wherever possible, incentives in preference to penalties.”

Brown is the favourite to be Britain’s next prime minister, as Tony Blair has pledged to step down by September.

Scientists threatened for ‘climate denial’

By Tom Harper, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 11/03/2007

By JULIE WHELDON – More by this author » Last updated at 00:22am on 5th March 2007 Comments (55)

Research said to prove that greenhouse gases cause climate change has been condemned as a sham by scientists.

A United Nations report earlier this year said humans are very likely to be to blame for global warming and there is “virtually no doubt” it is linked to man’s use of fossil fuels.

But other climate experts say there is little scientific evidence to support the theory.

In fact global warming could be caused by increased solar activity such as a massive eruption.

Their argument will be outlined on Channel 4 this Thursday in a programme called The Great Global Warming Swindle raising major questions about some of the evidence used for global warming.

Ice core samples from Antarctica have been used as proof of how warming over the centuries has been accompanied by raised CO2 levels.

But Professor Ian Clark, an expert in palaeoclimatology from the University of Ottawa, claims that warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels.

The programme also highlights how, after the Second World War, there was a huge surge in carbon dioxide emissions, yet global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

The UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in February. At the time it was promoted as being backed by more than 2,000 of the world’s leading scientists.

But Professor Paul Reiter, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said it was a “sham” given that this list included the names of scientists who disagreed with its findings.

Professor Reiter, an expert in malaria, said his name was removed from an assessment only when he threatened legal action against the panel.

“That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed,” he said. “It’s not true.”

Gary Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, claims clouds and solar activity are the real reason behind climate change.

“The government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King is supposed to be the representative of all that is good in British science, so it is disturbing he and the government are ignoring a raft of evidence against the greenhouse effect being the main driver against climate change,” he said.

Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds.

He said: “The system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on CO2 production would be or indeed of continuing to produce CO2.

“It is ridiculous to see politicians arguing over whether they will allow the global temperature to rise by 2c or 3c.”

The documentary is likely to spark fierce criticism from the scientific establishment.

A spokesman for the Royal Society said yesterday: “We are not saying carbon dioxide emissions are the only factor in climate change and it is very important that debate keeps going.

“But, based on the situation at the moment, we have to do something about CO2 emissions.”

Allegre’s second thoughts

The Deniers — The National Post’s series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science

LAWRENCE SOLOMON, Financial Post

Published: Friday, March 02, 2007

Claude Allegre, one of France’s leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.

“By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century,” Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie..” Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming’s “potential risks are very great” and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe’s fragility in order to stave off “spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.”

In a polemical and thought-provoking documentary, film-maker Martin Durkin argues that the theory of man-made global warming has become such a powerful political force that other explanations for climate change are not being properly aired.

The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a ‘greenhouse effect’ of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun’s radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

The film argues that the earth’s climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease.

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biogeography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.

The film hears from scientists who dispute the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures.

[English translation from Harvard Professor Lubos Motl]

Developing…

Cosmic rays blamed for global warming
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 1:08am GMT 11/02/2007

Man-made climate change may be happening at a far slower rate than has been claimed, according to controversial new research.

Scientists say that cosmic rays from outer space play a far greater role in changing the Earth’s climate than global warming experts previously thought.

In a book, to be published this week, they claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.

High levels of cloud cover blankets the Earth and reflects radiated heat from the Sun back out into space, causing the planet to cool.

Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.

This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.

He claims carbon dioxide emissions due to human activity are having a smaller impact on climate change than scientists think. If he is correct, it could mean that mankind has more time to reduce our effect on the climate.

The controversial theory comes one week after 2,500 scientists who make up the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change published their fourth report stating that human carbon dioxide emissions would cause temperature rises of up to 4.5 C by the end of the century.

Mr Svensmark claims that the calculations used to make this prediction largely overlooked the effect of cosmic rays on cloud cover and the temperature rise due to human activity may be much smaller.

He said: “It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds.

“This has not been taken into account in the models used to work out the effect carbon dioxide has had.

“We may see CO2 is responsible for much less warming than we thought and if this is the case the predictions of warming due to human activity will need to be adjusted.”

Mr Svensmark last week published the first experimental evidence from five years’ research on the influence that cosmic rays have on cloud production in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. This week he will also publish a fuller account of his work in a book entitled The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change.

A team of more than 60 scientists from around the world are preparing to conduct a large-scale experiment using a particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, to replicate the effect of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If so, it could force climate scientists to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs.

Mr Svensmark’s results show that the rays produce electrically charged particles when they hit the atmosphere. He said: “These particles attract water molecules from the air and cause them to clump together until they condense into clouds.”

Mr Svensmark claims that the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth changes with the magnetic activity around the Sun. During high periods of activity, fewer cosmic rays hit the Earth and so there are less clouds formed, resulting in warming.

Low activity causes more clouds and cools the Earth.

He said: “Evidence from ice cores show this happening long into the past. We have the highest solar activity we have had in at least 1,000 years.

“Humans are having an effect on climate change, but by not including the cosmic ray effect in models it means the results are inaccurate.The size of man’s impact may be much smaller and so the man-made change is happening slower than predicted.”

Some climate change experts have dismissed the claims as “tenuous”.

Giles Harrison, a cloud specialist at Reading University said that he had carried out research on cosmic rays and their effect on clouds, but believed the impact on climate is much smaller than Mr Svensmark claims.

Mr Harrison said: “I have been looking at cloud data going back 50 years over the UK and found there was a small relationship with cosmic rays. It looks like it creates some additional variability in a natural climate system but this is small.”

But there is a growing number of scientists who believe that the effect may be genuine.

Among them is Prof Bob Bingham, a clouds expert from the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils in Rutherford.

He said: “It is a relatively new idea, but there is some evidence there for this effect on clouds.”

An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.

Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.

The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.

The Chilling Stars is published by Icon. It is available for £9.89 including postage from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585

“Never before has all of civilization been threatened,” Gore said. “We have everything we need to save it, with the possible exception of political will. But political will is a renewable resource.”