DAVID BELLAMY: 'GLOBAL WARMING IS NONSENSE'
OUTSPOKEN: Former TV presenter David Bellamy's views fly in the face of powerful
environmentalists
Saturday November 29,2008
BANNED by the BBC, ignored by his peers and ridiculed by the alarmist green lobby,
David Bellamy has launched his own bold crusade to say the unsayable - global warming
is nonsense.
Recently the Daily Express published a short interview with David Bellamy, the renowned
botanist. It was his first in several years. In it he controversially – and persuasively –
crushed the theory that global warming is destroying our planet.
Once TV’s favourite boffin, he has not appeared on the small screen for more than a
decade. Perhaps speaking out in this way is the reason why.
Gone he may be (from the media at least) but forgotten he’s not. After the article
appeared an extraordinary thing happened. The Daily Express website received almost
200,000 hits – half of them on a single day – from no fewer than 190 countries.
This places the Bellamy interview easily in the top three most popular stories ever
published on the site. Many of those internet visitors logged on specifically to read it,
including the sole reader in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific
(population 86,616).
A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400
programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless
enthusiasm.
Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the
BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists.
His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming.
Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on
climate change.
"When I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn’t believe what we were being told about
global warming I had no idea what the consequences would be.
I am a scientist and I have to follow the directions of science but when I see that the truth is being
covered up I have to voice my opinions.
According to official data, in every year since 1998 world temperatures have been getting colder, and
in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that?
The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been
allowed to make a TV programme.
My absence has been noticed, because wherever I go I meet people who say: “I grew up with you on
the television, where are you now?”
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article
published in which I described global warming as poppycock.
The truth is, I didn’t think wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I said so. Back
then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn’t doing that.
At that point I was still making loads of television programmes and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I
suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren’t getting taken up. I’ve asked
around about why I’ve been ignored but I found that people didn’t get back to me.
At the beginning of this year there was a BBC show with four experts saying: “This is
going to be the end of all the ice in the Arctic,” and hypothesising that it was going to be
the hottest summer ever. Was it hell! It was very cold and very wet and now we’ve seen
evidence that the glaciers in Alaska have started growing rapidly – and they’ve not grown
for a long time.
I’ve seen evidence, which I believe, that says there has not been a rise in global
temperature since 1998, despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the
atmosphere. This makes me think the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is
not the driver.
The idiot fringe have accused me of being like a Holocaust denier, which is ludicrous.
Climate change is all about cycles, it’s a natural thing and has always happened. When
the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on
the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer.
If you were sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we’d be under ice. So thank God for
global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn’t be here otherwise.
People such as former American Vice-President Al Gore say that millions of us will die
because of global warming – which I think is a pretty stupid thing to say if you’ve got no
proof.
And my opinion is that there is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide is anything to do
with any impending catastrophe. The science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it’s
not even science any more, it’s anti-science.
There’s no proof, it’s just projections and if you look at the models people such as Gore
use, you can see they cherry pick the ones that support their beliefs.
To date, the way the so-called Greens and the BBC, the Royal Society and even our
political parties have handled this smacks of McCarthyism at its worst.
Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop
these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to
solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
And how were we convinced that this problem exists, even though all the evidence from
measurements goes against the fact? God knows. Yes, the lakes in Africa are drying up.
But that’s not global warming. They’re drying up for the very simple reason that most of
them have dams around them.
So the water that used to be used by local people is now used in the production of cut
flowers and vegetables for the supermarkets of Europe.
One of Al Gore’s biggest clangers was saying that the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was drying
up because of global warming. Well, everyone knows, because it was all over the news
20 years ago, that the Russians were growing cotton there at the time and that for every
ton of cotton you produce you use a vast amount of water.
The thing that annoys me most is that there are genuine environmental problems that
desperately require attention. I’m still an environmentalist, I’m still a Green and I’m still
campaigning to stop the destruction of the biodiversity of the world. But money will be
wasted on trying to solve this global warming “problem” that I would much rather was
used for looking after the people of the world.
Being ignored by the likes of the BBC does not really bother me, not when there are
much bigger problems at stake.
I might not be on TV any more but I still go around the world campaigning about these
important issues. For example, we must stop the destruction of tropical rainforests,
something I’ve been saying for 35 years.
Mother nature will balance things out but not if we interfere by destroying rainforests and
overfishing the seas.
That is where the real environmental catastrophe could occur.
INTERVIEW BY HELEN DOWD
From The Times
October 22, 2007
Today’s forecast: yet another blast of hot air
Why I would rather be called a heretic on global warming
David Bellamy
Am I worried about man-made global warming? The answer is “no” and “yes”.
No, because the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction has come up against an
“inconvenient truth”. Its research shows that since 1998 the average temperature of the
planet has not risen, even though the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
has continued to increase.
Yes, because the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the
questioning rigours of hard science and become a political cause. Those of us who dare to
question the dogma of the global-warming doomsters who claim that C not only stands
for carbon but also for climate catastrophe are vilified as heretics or worse as deniers.
I am happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up
against dogma based on the bigotry of vested interests. But I don’t like being smeared as
a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. The truth is that there are no facts that
link the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global
warming. Instead of facts, the advocates of man-made climate change trade in future
scenarios based on complex and often unreliable computer models.
Name-calling may be acceptable in politics but it should have no place in science; indeed,
what is happening smacks of McCarthyism, witch-hunts and all. Scientific understanding,
however, is advanced by robust, reasoned argument based on well-researched data. So I
turn to simple sets of data that are already in the public domain.
The last peak global temperatures were in 1998 and 1934 and the troughs of low
temperature were around 1910 and 1970. The second dip caused pop science and the
media to cry wolf about an impending, devastating Ice Age. Our end was nigh!
Then, when temperatures took an upward swing in the 1980s, the scaremongers changed
their tune. Global warming was the new imminent catastrophe.
But the computer model – called “hockey stick” – that predicted the catastrophe of a
frying planet proved to be so bent that it “disappeared” from the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change’s armoury of argument in 2007. It was bent because the historical
data it used to predict the future dated from only the 1850s, when the world was
emerging from the Little Ice Age. Little wonder that temperatures showed an upward
trend.
In the Sixties I used to discuss climate change with my undergraduates at Durham
University. I would point to the plethora of published scientific evidence that showed the
cyclical nature of change – and how, for instance, the latest of a string of ice ages had
affected the climate, sea levels and tree lines around the world. Thank goodness the
latest crop of glaciers and ice sheets began to wane in earnest about 12,000 years ago;
this gave Britain a window of opportunity to lead the industrial revolution.
The Romans grew grapes in York and during the worldwide medieval warm period – when
civilizations blossomed across the world – Nordic settlers farmed lowland Greenland
(hence its name) and then got wiped out by the Little Ice Age that lasted roughly from
the 16th century until about 1850.
There is no escaping the fact that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
has been rising for 150 years – and very uniformly since the 1950s. Yet the temperature
has not increased in step with CO2. Not only have there been long periods of little change
in temperature, but also the year-to-year oscillations are totally unrelated to CO2
change. What is more, the trend lines of glacial shortening and rise in sea level have
shown no marked change since the big increase in the use of fossil fuels since 1950.
How can this be explained unless there are other factors at work overriding the
greenhouse effect of CO2? There are, of course, many to be found in the peer-reviewed
literature: solar cycles, cosmic rays, cloud control and those little rascals, such as El Niño
and La Niña, all of which are played down or even ignored by the global-warming
brigade.
Let’s turn to Al Gore’s doom-laden Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
First, what is the point of scaring the families of the world with tales that polar bears are
heading for extinction? Last year Mitchell Taylor, of the US National Biological Service,
stated that “of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in
number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”
Why create alarm about a potential increase in the spread of malaria thanks to rising
temperatures when this mosquito-borne disease was a major killer of people in Britain
and northern Russia throughout the Little Ice Age?
Despite the $50 billion spent on greenwashing propaganda, the sceptics and their
inconvenient questions are beginning to make their presence felt.
A recent survey of Klaus-Martin Schulte, of Kings College Hospital, of all papers on the
subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found
that only 7 per cent explicitly endorsed a “so-called consensus” position that man-made
carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming. What is more, James Lovelock,
the author and green guru, has changed his mind: he recently stated that neither Earth
nor the human race is doomed.
Yes, melting sea ice around Greenland has recently opened up the fabled North West
passage. And, yes, the years 2006 and 2007 have seen massive flooding in Europe.
However, a quick dip into the records of the Royal Society – which ranked alongside Dr
Lovelock as arch doomsters, before his change of mind – shows that dramatic
fluctuations happened long before the infernal combustion engine began spewing out
carbon dioxide.
The year 1816 went down in history as the “year without a summer”, thanks to the
eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia that veiled much of the world with dust,
screening out the Sun. Yet in 1817, while still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, the Royal
Society was so worried that 2,000 square leagues of sea ice around Greenland had
disappeared within two years, and massive flooding was taking place in Germany, that its
president wrote to the Admiralty advising of the necessity of an expedition to find out
what was the source of this new heat.
Perhaps, when similar things are happening 190 years later, the Royal Society should
accept that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is unlikely to be the main – or only – driver of
“global warming”.