News from the New Party

A primer on global warming

Thanks to the Adam Smith Institute for alerting us to a splendid new resource for those more interested in climate change science than climate change hysteria.  The National Center for Policy Analysis, an American think tank, has produced a primer for distribution to the media, the public and schools.  Here, courtesy of ASI, are a few of the salient points made in the document:

• Greenhouse gases make up no more than 5 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. CO2 accounts for just 3.6 percent of that. Humans only contribute 3.4 percent of annual CO2 emissions. This means humanity is responsible for just one-quarter of one percent of the greenhouse effect.
• Over the last 600 million years, there is no close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature.
• Over the last 400,000 years, there has been a series of ice-ages interrupted by warm periods. In ice ages the temperature drops, sea levels fall and glaciers expand. In warm periods sea levels rise and glaciers retreat. We are currently at the tail end of a warm period.
• During those 400,000 years temperature and CO2 levels have varied together. However, rises and falls in temperature have consistently preceded rises and falls in CO2 levels by several hundred years.
• In the Roman and Medieval eras, the earth was as warm (and frequently much warmer) as it is today. A mini ice age began in the 1300s and ended in the mid-1800s.
• In the last century, the earth's temperature has risen by less than one degree Celsius. Nearly half of that warming occurred before 1940 - even though human greenhouse gas emissions began to rise substantially only after the 1950s.
• Despite larger population growth and higher economic growth, the US has slowed its emissions growth faster than the EU since 1997. Up to 40 percent of human CO2 emissions in the US are reabsorbed, primarily by vegetation.

The document even includes encouraging news for those concerned with the future of polar bears (they are five times as many polar bears around today as there were fifty years ago, and there is no noticeable decline in global terms); details of the negligible impact of the Kyoto protocols; and lots more that the BBC won't tell you.  Download and view the primer here.