Global warming? I am a confirmed Agnostic!

There is a new religion called "Global Warming" and I am a most assured Agnostic. G.K.Chesterton, the great English essayist said "A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything. " The West certainly has abandoned belief in God, particularly in Europe, and so environmentalism, global warming, has taken over. It has all the trappings of a religion, Al Gore is the new self appointed Messiah and Kyoto the new Jerusalem. The latest acolyte is the Conservative Leader. Mr. Cameron [call me Dave] but the rush is lead by Guardian readers and others of that ilk. What really marks it as a religion is the gob smacking hypocrisy generated by the believers that hits the media every day!

I have never been persuaded on this subject. It is not that I think that mankind has not changed the world, far from it, no land has been more changed [and some of it with great beauty] than England. However to state, affirm, and declare absolutely that an apparent climate change is due entirely to mankind's endeavours is dangerous and arrant nonsense. The following comment is an extract from a letter signed by 60 top scientists [many of them polymaths] to the Prime Minister of Canada - it puts an appropriate approach to the whole subject that any reasonable thinking person can accept. I urge anyone to read it and deny the commonsense approach.

"Climate change is real" is a meaningless phrase, used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming, and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time, due to natural causes, and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural "noise." The new Canadian government's commitment to reducing air, land, and water pollution is commendable, but allocating funds to "stopping climate change" would be irrational. We need to continue intensive research into the real causes of climate change, and help our most vulnerable citizens adapt to whatever nature throws at us next.


http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/april2006/15/warming.html

Why do I doubt so strongly? My career as a seafarer has given me constant awareness of the oceans, the engine rooms of climate, and an intimate knowledge of the lands bordering those seas. Two disciplines in seafaring come to the fore, navigation and meteorology.

In navigation the compass dominates and so the earth's magnetism is of paramount importance - the mariner, aviators, [and indeed anyone navigating] has to know and understand magnetic variation. Magnetic variation is he difference between True North and Magnetic North. One of the first facts given to me as a young man in the 1950s was that when Bartolomeu Dias [1488] and Vasco da Gama [1497] rounded Africa for the first time the Magnetic Variation there was zero and so they called the southernmost tip of Africa - Cape Agulhas - this word meaning Needle to signify this unique fact in their voyage. By 1954, when I was studying magnetism, the Magnetic Variation was 28 degrees West off the Cape and still increasing. This means that in 500 years the magnetic pole has moved significantly across the earth's surface. The earth's magnetism is not fully understood but its significance can be gauged from the illustration above. The magnetosphere shields the surface of the Earth from the charged particles of the solar wind. It is compressed on the day [or Sun] side due to the force of the arriving particles, and extended on the night side. The image is a computer generated image and not to scale. Many phenomena are directly related to the solar wind including geomagnetic storms that can knock out power grids on Earth.

Some scientific thought suggests that the poles may ultimately flip and some predict dire consequences. The key question is that the magnetic poles have moved, mariners know this, but what is it effects on the world's climate? This question has to be addressed, it cannot be ignored.

In meteorology, oceanography, and related disciplines the mariner uses the data acquired over centuries and decades to navigate with safety. Consider the following two points:

• Royal Naval records show more than twice as many land falling hurricanes in the Caribbean in the period 1700 - 1850 as in the period from 1850 to date.
• On the 7th January 1927 t,he whaler "Odd 1" observed a tabular berg 90 miles long and about 35 meters in height in a position 50 miles NE of Clarence Island in the South Atlantic. During the years 1927-1933 there were an exceptional number of these huge bergs in the Weddell Sea.

I could go on with similar facts that the environmentalists chose to ignore or explain since they would counter or confuse their bigoted sense of this world. The mariner is not using this information to score points; it is essential to the seafarer to have a detailed knowledge to navigate with safety. Marine disasters such as the "Titanic" off Newfoundland or the "Sinclair Petrol Ore" off South Africa are the result of ignoring the data available to the mariner.

The 60 scientists who wrote the letter quoted above have it right - it would be folly to act otherwise and the more I hear from the 'environmentalists' the more my agnosticism is confirmed.