Dr. Jim Buckee, PhD Astrophysics, University of Oxford

Dr. Jim Buckee says he feels like a heretic, persecuted for his views and treated like an outcast. His crime? Being a climate change sceptic. Next week the former chief executive of the oil and gas firm Talisman, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford, will try to convince others that climate change has nothing to do with human activity.

During a lecture at the University of Aberdeen he will argue that, far from warming, the Earth is set to enter a 20-year cooling period. Dr Buckee believes human behaviour has no effect on the climate and the vast sums spent by governments trying to promote renewable energy to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being wasted. Far from being a key cause of climate change, he says, carbon dioxide emissions have little or no impact. His views are contrary to those held by governments, the Royal Society - an independent science body - the Met Office and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Instead of human activities being responsible for the warming climate over the past 100 years, Dr Buckee insists there is a natural explanation, based on the activity of the Sun. Solar activity can affect the cosmic rays that reach the Earth’s atmosphere, and this in turn affects the climate, he says.

The “solar explanation” is one shared by many climate change sceptics. Dr Buckee says he is arguing against a tide of popular opinion which verges on the religious. “Any dissension is like a heresy,” he says. “People are stamped on so they can’t be heard. That has religious overtones.”

Dr Buckee believes his views are widespread although not always voiced. “I think it is the dominant view in professional science circles,” he says. “I know lots of people in universities and so on and quite often they have to retire before they can say what they want because it’s so frowned upon.”

Although he spent his career in the oil and gas industry, he denies having any vested interest. “A vested interest would make me shut up because it would drag up controversy,” he says. He adds that, while he was chief executive of Talisman, he did not make his views known, although he would explain them if asked. Dr Buckee’s belief in a solar explanation, a view expounded on a vast array of websites, is familiar to those in the climate change movement, who argue it has been discounted.

In the lecture, Dr Jim Buckee will put forward the idea that solar activity is responsible for changes to the climate. He will say the climate of the past few hundred years is a continuation of a normal process of gradual warming since the ice age 10,000 years ago. During that time, he argues, there have been constant fluctuations. He believes those fluctuations are caused by varying solar activity. When the sun is strong, it deflects cosmic rays from within and outside our galaxy. When the sun is weak, the rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere and cause low cloud, which has a cooling effect. He believes that, after a period of warming, the Earth is now entering a period of cooling that will last until 2030 or beyond. It is just one of the many theories put forward by sceptics, who argue that humans are not responsible for climate change. Read more here.

BBC News

A Northern Ireland minister’s decision to block a government advertisement campaign on climate change has led to a call for his removal from office. The advertisements urged people to reduce energy consumption and cut carbon dioxide output.  But Environment Minister Sammy Wilson claimed the adverts were part of an “insidious propaganda campaign”.

Calling for his removal, the Green Party said Mr Wilson made “a laughing stock out of Northern Ireland.” Sammy Wilson argued that the Scottish executive had objected and stopped the adverts being broadcast. However, the Scottish executive told the BBC the reason it did not run these adverts was because they are already running their own climate change adverts.

He argued that they were “giving people the impression that by turning off the standby light on their TV they could save the world from melting glaciers and being submerged in 40ft of water”. He said that was “patent nonsense”.

Mr Wilson said he had written to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to say that the advertising campaign Act on CO2 “was not welcome”. He explained that he did not believe in its message that “man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of climate change” and that the campaign was contrary to his personal views.

He told DECC: “I do not wish for climate change messages to be promoted by other Whitehall departments here”. But Brian Wilson, of the Green Party, said the environment minister should be removed from office for refusing to recognise climate change.  “He is a climate change sceptic. We have got to take all measures we can to reduce our carbon footprint. Mr Wilson does not agree with that.  “This is totally incompatible with him being minister for the environment,” he said.  Friends of the Earth NI director John Woods said: “It’s bad enough that we have an environment minister who doesn’t accept that human activity is driving climate change, but trying to block advice to people on how they can help tackle it is completely irresponsible.

“The reality is that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe that our activities are causing global warming and that urgent action is needed to tackle it.” The Alliance Party and the SDLP have also criticised Mr Wilson’s decision.  Alliance leader David Ford said: “The simple fact is that there is scientific evidence, accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists, that manmade climate change will affect our environment if it is not brought under control,” he said.  The DUP’s Sammy Wilson has objected to the government campaign. Tommy Gallagher, SDLP, accused Mr Wilson of “political sabotage of an important public awareness campaign”. Read more here.

By Melanie Phillips, UK Spectator

Yet another example of the bogus ‘research’ masquerading as science that is used to reinforce the man-made global warming fraud. One of the difficulties the green zealots have had is that Antarctica has been not warming but cooling, with the extent of its ice reaching record levels. A few weeks ago, a study led by Professor Eric Steig caused some excitement by claiming that actually West Antarctica was warming so much that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Warning bells should have sounded when Steig said “What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using the back of an envelope.”

To those of us who have been following this scam for the past two decades, ‘interpolate carefully’ sounds like a bit of, er, creative calculation. And so it has proved. Various scientists immediately spotted the flaw in Steig’s methodology of combining satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The flaw they identified was that, since Antarctica has so few weather stations, the computer Steig used was programmed to guess what data they would have produced had such stations existed. In other words, the findings that caused such excitement were based on data that had been made up.

Even one of the IPCC’s lead authors sniffed a problem: “This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,” Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said in an e-mail. “It is hard to make data where none exist.”

Well, yes. But then the invention of data that does not exist and the obliteration of data that does exist has been precisely how the man-made global warming fraud has been perpetrated right from the get-go. The most egregious example of this was the piece of ‘research’ that underpinned the entire IPCC/Kyoto shebang from 2001 when it was published—the so-called ‘hockey stick’ curve, which purported to show a vertiginous and unprecedented rise in global temperature in the 20th century.

The problem with pegging such a rise to the evils of industrialisation had always been the Medieval Warm Period, during which global temperatures were warmer than in modern times. So the ‘hockey stick’ study dealt with that by simply managing to airbrush out the Medieval Warm Period and its subsequent corrective Little Ice Age altogether. Some seven centuries of global history were simply excised from the data—because an algorithm had been built into the computer programme which would have been created a ‘hockey stick’ curve whatever data were fed into it.

This shoddy research was subsequently torn apart so comprehensively that it has been called the most discredited study in the history of science (and has been quietly dropped by the IPCC, leaving man-made global warming theory with no more substance than the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat. Read more of Melanie’s story here.

See a complete compilation of the sudden flurry of counterattacks by the folks at Real Climate, proving to be home for some of the most fanciful and discredited pseudo-science on the planet here.

See why even as we win the science, derailing the carbon control train accelerating down the tracks won’t be easy here.