THE documentary Climate the Movie is the most needed and the most important contribution to the debate about the so-called climate crisis since the ‘alarmism era’ began in the late 1970s. You can read our climate science (sceptic) expert, Paul Homewood’s review of it here. It is one and half hours of careful argument and evidence requiring considerable concentration! We thought it would help, for ease of readers’ reference, if we published the transcript in sections over the rest of this week.
Yesterday we published the film’s preamble followed by the first sections on the scientific history of the earth and the ‘history’ of CO2. Today’s transcript is of the next sections on natural climate change and extreme weather.
You can watch the full film here. The transcript follows: the sections in bold type are the commentary.
NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE PART 1 – CLOUDS
In Earth’s atmosphere there are powerful forces at work, and perhaps the most powerful of all are clouds.
JOHN CLAUSER: CO2 is quite unimportant in controlling the Earth’s climate. What is important is clouds. Clouds don’t absorb any energy at all, they simply reflect all the sunlight back out into space. Big bright white clouds and they vary dramatically from one day to the next. That is hundreds of times more powerful than the trivial effects of CO2.
But what controls the number and density of clouds on earth? Professor Henrik Svensmark, from the Danish National Space Institute, is in Jerusalem with the astrophysicist Nir Shaviv. Together they’ve been exploring cloud variation and its effect on climate. And, strangely, they’ve found a link between clouds and exploding supernovae, far off in our galaxy.
HENRIK SVENSMARK: When we have big stars, they don’t live very long relatively, only a few million years up to 40million years but they end their life in a huge explosion which we call a supernova.
Exploding supernovae send out vast quantities of debris – tiny charged subatomic particles known as cosmic rays – travelling almost at the speed of light. And as they hit earth they develop into seeds which attract water vapour, and form clouds.
NIR SHAVIV: The really mind-boggling thing is that using geology, you can reconstruct the climate on earth over the past billion years. And you can reconstruct our galactic journey. Both tell the same story.
But what about temperature change on shorter time scales? The sun – our source of heat and light, a seething mass of gigantic magnetic storms, which vary in strength and number over time, and which affect earth directly and indirectly. When it is very active the sun sends giant gusts of solar wind through the solar system. This solar wind warms us indirectly, by acting as a barrier, limiting the number of cloud-forming cosmic rays reaching earth.
HENRIK SVENSMARK: Sun, we have the solar wind it carries this sort of magnetic field out to a large distance and it works like a shield against cosmic rays.
NIR SHAVIV: When the sun is more active you have a stronger solar wind, you have less cosmic rays ageing the inner solar system and ageing the atmosphere and the clouds which are then formed are less white, they reflect less of the sunlight, which means that it’s going to be warmer here on Earth.
Here is a proxy reconstruction of ocean temperatures over thousands of years. And here is one of solar activity over the same period. What is causing the ocean temperature to change is clearly variations in solar activity.
WILLIE SOON: Because IPPC is determined to go on a narrative that only CO2 can drive the climate system, they turn off the sun essentially. The sun is just a background thing for them. It doesn’t do anything.
Astrophysicist Willie Soon decided to look again at the rural temperature record for the past 150 years. Then he looked at a record of changes in solar activity over the same period. To Dr Soon, it was obvious that it was the sun, not CO2, that was driving temperature.
WILLIE SOON: As of 2023, IPPC says this: that the sun has absolutely zero chances to explain the changes of the climate system, on a broad scale, let’s say global warming in the northern hemisphere. We say no! We can easily demonstrate it. All of it. There is zero for the CO2, 100 per cent for the sun. How about that?
NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE PART 2 – EXTREME WEATHER
STEVEN KOONIN: So my first instinct as a scientist, and what I teach my students is, well let’s look at the data. And when you do that, you discover, as you can read in the IPPC reports themselves, that it’s pretty hard to find trends in extreme events, much less attribute them to human influences.
ROSS McKITRICK: You’ve now had decades of putting the idea in people’s heads that any time the weather is bad, it’s climate change and greenhouse gases. I think people at this point can’t help themselves. If there’s a heatwave, immediately everyone is thinking ‘Oh, what have we done to the weather?’
STEVEN KOONIN: If somebody says on the news, well this is the warmest day since 1980 or something, well you can look up the temperature records, and see for yourself whether it was warmer in the 1930s, as it often is.
US temperature records are the best in the world, and here is the official US government record of heatwaves in the US over the past century. It shows very clearly that the 1930s were far more prone to heatwaves than we are today. Not only were there more heatwaves in the 1930s, the heatwaves then were much hotter than those of today. Likewise official figures show that the number of hot days in the US has markedly declined.
TONY HELLER: The United States was much hotter in the 1930s. North Dakota reached 121 degrees F. South Dakota was 120 degrees F. Wisconsin was 114 degrees F. These sort of temperatures are just completely out of range of anything people experience now.
A common mistake is to suppose that higher average temperature will mean more hot weather. But this isn’t true. Here again is the Central England Temperature Record, the longest instrumental temperature record in the world. Summer temperatures, over the past 300-400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age, have barely changed at all. It is winter temperatures that have been slightly rising. The earth’s climate has not been getting hotter, it’s been getting milder.
WILL HAPPER: And that’s certainly being observed all over the world, if you look at temperature records the high temperatures are almost unchanged. But cold temperatures at night, or during the winter, are going up a little bit. Not very much, but you can measure it.
STEVEN KOONIN: When the average goes up it’s really more due to the coldest temperatures getting warmer. So the temperature’s getting milder rather than getting hotter.
What about the increasing number of wildfires we’re often told about?
STEVEN KOONIN: If you look at the actual number of forest fires from satellite observations, the actual number is going down.
Here is an estimate of global wildfires since 1900. It shows a clear decline. And here is a record of areas affected by wildfires in the US. It shows that wildfires were far, far worse in the 1930s.
WILLIE SOON: From the 1930s and 1920s, when you have data, the thing was huge. Five to ten times bigger than the current level.
How about hurricanes? The US has by far the best record of hurricane activity in the world. Over the past 120 years, there is no overall change. In fact the trend is slightly down. When you [look at the data] for hurricanes, technically tropical cyclones, you see there is no long-term trend. How about the rest of the world? Here is a chart of global hurricane activity over the past 40 years.
WILL HAPPER: Hurricanes have been around for ever, you know. We’ve got good proxy records of hurricanes and there’s been no change in their frequency, even the IPPC admits that.
How about melting ice-caps and drought? Here’s a satellite record of temperature in Antarctica since the late 1970s. It shows no increase whatsoever. And here is a record of global drought since 1950. There is no observable increase at all. Polar bears are meant to be going extinct, but studies suggest their numbers are growing. The Great Barrier reef too, but it recently reached record levels.
PATRICK MOORE: There is no such thing as a climate emergency happening on this planet now. There is no evidence of one.
TONY HELLER: Yeah, the extreme weather story is just absurd. There’s no basis to it at all. It’s just based on propaganda. The actual data shows the opposite.
STEVEN KOONIN: I’ve shown you the official data, the official science, tell me what I’m denying.
WILL HAPPER: The climate alarm is nonsense, it’s a hoax, I’ve never liked hoax, I think scam is better word but I am willing to live with the hoax.
But why are we told, again and again, that man-made climate chaos is an undisputed scientific fact? Beyond question. Beyond doubt. To answer this, we must examine the so-called consensus on climate change.
Tomorrow: The consensus, its funding, the climate bandwagon and the politics of climate