Am I the only one who sees irony in the upcoming climate meeting of the International Panel on Climate Change being held in Denmark?

Quite apart from the fact most delegates will fly there – despite the known environmental ill-effects of air travel – Denmark is the homeland of Hans Christian Andersen who realized that, sometimes, the emperor has no clothes.

How does that reference bear on this meeting?

The participants will attend with the unquestioned assurance that global warming is real and is caused by increasing anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Their focus will be on ways and means of minimizing our output of greenhouse gases, with disagreements about which countries are blameworthy, and what reduction targets should be required by which countries.

But, are these really the questions to be addressed?

Are we really in a global warming phase? Data from the last few decades indicate that is not the case; the warmest year on record was 1934, not 1988 which was previously thought to be the warmest. It ranks second.

The past two or three years have seen slowly dropping average temperatures; is this yet another minor fluctuation or the start of another cycle? An agreed answer would be a great help to scientists, social- and resource-use planners.

Temperature fluctuations have occurred regularly in the past with four recognizable warm periods: the Minoan 150,000 years ago; the Roman 100,000 years ago; the Medieval 800–1,000 years back; and the late 20th century, which was no warmer than the Medieval and not so warm as either the Roman or Minoan periods.

These warm spells were separated by cool or cold periods the most recent being the so-called Little Ice Age between 1500 and 1800 AD. These fluctuations are natural phenomena, indeed change is the only constant, so perhaps we’d do better to develop flexible management policies to accommodate change rather than to attempt to maintain the status quo.

It’s widely accepted that increasing greenhouse gases are causing global warming, but if the world is not warming what are the connections between burning fossil fuels, greenhouse gases and temperature?

Available data do not support the theory of a causal relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature.

Between 1870 and 1915, use of fossil fuels changed little, but annual mean temperatures declined; from 1940 until 1975 burning of fossil fuels rose but mean annual temperatures fell; in the 1975 to1998 period both fossil fuel use and temperatures rose; now, CO2 and the other greenhouse gases are still increasing, yet global surface and global atmosphere temperatures are falling.

Clearly these data do not validate a direct cause-and-effect relationship. The data from earlier times – long before anthropogenic greenhouse gases were formed – also reject such a relationship.

Given these data, shouldn’t the international panel analyze the climate models which have been put forward to support the case for an anthropogenic cause of global warming?

Certainly some modelled predictions developed a few years ago have proven to be very inaccurate, which calls into question their validity as planning tools.

Dr. Roy Strang writes weekly on the environment for the Peace Arch News. rmstrang@shaw.ca