Climate Change Quotes

“It is a cruel irony that, while it was science which, more than anything else, was able by its great achievements, to establish the age of reason, it is all too many climate scientists and their hangers-on who have become the high priests of a new age of unreason.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“So how is it that much of the Western world has succumbed to the self-harming collective madness that is climate change orthodoxy? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change orthodoxy has in effect become a substitute religion, attended by all the intolerant zealotry that has so often marred religion in the past, and in some places still does so today.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“It is relevant to note at this point that there is an important distinction between science and scientists. I have the greatest respect for science, whose development has transformed the world for the better. But scientists are no better and no worse than anyone else. There are good scientists and there are bad scientists. Many scientists are outstanding people working long hours to produce important results. They must be frustrated that political activists then turn those results into propaganda. Yet they dare not speak out for fear of losing their funding.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“Biologists have always known that CO2 is essential for plant growth, and of course without plants there would be very little animal life, and no human life, on the planet. The climate alarmists have done their best to obscure this basic scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as ‘pollution’—which, whether or not they warm the planet, they most certainly are not—and deliberately mislabelling forms of energy which produce these emissions as ‘dirty’. In the same way, they like to label renewable energy as ‘clean’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that by far the largest source of renewable energy in the world today is biomass, and in particular the burning of dung, which is the major source of indoor pollution in the developing world and is reckoned to cause at least a million deaths a year.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“First, as a branch of the United Nations, the IPCC is itself an intensely political and not a scientific body. As its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri observed in an interview with the Guardian newspaper: We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do. If the governments decide we should do things differently and come up with a vastly different set of products we would be at their beck and call.10 To boot, the IPCC charter requires that the organisation investigates not climate change in the round, but solely global warming caused by human greenhouse emissions, a blinkered approach that consistently damages all IPCC pronouncements.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“In fact, only one molecule of every 85,000 in the atmosphere is CO2 of human origin, and yet we are asked to believe that this one molecule drives hugely complex climate change systems. We are also asked to believe that the 32 molecules of CO2 of natural origin in every 85,000 molecules play no part in driving climate change.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“It is widely misrepresented in the public domain that Earth’s current levels of atmospheric CO2 are dangerously and atypically high. Such claims are false, because modern CO2 levels lie near to an all-time low as assessed against the geological record.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“The central lesson to be learned from this episode in scientific history is that to create an organisation financially and ideologically dependent upon coming to a single, aprioristic viewpoint, regardless of the objective truth, is to create a monster that ignores the truth. Regrettably, the cumulative effect of the IPCC’s conduct over the last 25 years has inflicted severe and long-term damage on the reputation of science and of scientists everywhere.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“the IPCC has been practicing ‘para-science’ in that, while it affects the appearance of practicing science, it has violated longheld scientific norms and practices of fully and accurately representing the current state of scientific knowledge, and of proposing and testing alternative hypotheses in order to extend knowledge.33 Instead, the IPCC and its authors have acted out of prejudice in a manner that has misled both politicians and a largely unsuspecting public. As a redress, I have spelled out here several of the IPCC’s numerous, specific and grievous errors in science. Each error has the effect of minimising the role of the sun and thereby supporting the IPCC’s unsupportable claim to be ‘95 per cent confident’ that most of the 0.7°C global warming since 1950 was manmade. That assertion is made without evidence. The assertion is also self-serving, in that the IPCC depends on it for its own continued existence.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“the IPCC asserts against all evidence that the sun has little influence on climate change. This represents neither a consensus nor an authoritative review of the subject.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“The many, many thousands of pages of the Assessment Reports of the UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are the expression of the beliefs of a small circle of scientists and interested lobbyists who, against all evidence, have convinced themselves that humans are having a dramatic effect on the Earth’s climate.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“A problem that deserves much further investigation is how climate science could continue in its remarkable denial that the aggressive global warming paradigm has been shattered, with now 37 consecutive years of documented, systematic model failure.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“The US alone spends $7 billion each year on ‘warming studies’ which, in truth, is nothing but a huge money laundering operation, since no real science is conducted. Vapid alarmist reports are the only product generated.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“the cryosphere is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events; and an increased release of methane into the atmosphere from permafrost or sub-seabed gas hydrates is unlikely. The current generation of general circulation climate models (GCMs) are unable to make accurate projections of climate even ten years ahead, let alone the 100-year period that has been adopted by policy planners. The output of such models should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation until they have been validated and shown to have predictive value.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“the cryosphere is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events; and an increased release of methane into the atmosphere from permafrost or sub-seabed gas hydrates is unlikely. T”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“It is the quasi-religion of green alarmism and global salvationism, of which the climate change dogma is the prime example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“It is true that China is planning to reduce its so-called ‘carbon intensity’ quite substantially by 2020. But there is a world of difference between the sensible objective of using fossil fuels more efficiently, which is what this means, and the foolish policy of abandoning fossil fuels, which it has no intention of doing. China’s total carbon emissions are projected to carry on rising—and rising substantially—as its economy grows. This puts into perspective the UK’s commitment, under the Climate Change Act, to near-total decarbonisation. The UK accounts for less than two per cent of global CO2 emissions: indeed, its total CO2 emissions are less than the annual increase in China’s. Never mind, says Lord Deben, chairman of the government-appointed Climate Change Committee, we are in the business of setting an example to the world.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“Unlike intelligent adaptation to any warming that might occur, which in any case will mean different things in different regions of the world, and which requires no global agreement, decarbonisation can make no sense whatever in the absence of a global agreement. And there is no chance of any meaningful agreement being concluded. The very limited Kyoto accord of 1997 has come to an end; and although there is the declared intention of concluding a much more ambitious successor, with a UN-sponsored conference in Paris 2015 at which it is planned that this should happen, nothing of any significance is remotely likely.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“a case can be made for the proposition that today’s climate science establishment is betraying science itself. During the period justly known as the Enlightenment, science achieved the breakthroughs which have so benefited us all by rejecting the claims of authority—which at that time largely meant the authority of the church—and adopting an overarching scepticism, insisting that our understanding of the external world must be based exclusively on observation and empirical experiment. Yet today all too many climate scientists, in particular in the UK, come close to claiming that they need to be respected as the voice of authority on the subject—the very claim that was once the province of the church.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade—according to the Met Office, 0.8°C. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it—0.5°C out of the 0.8°C—occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born. But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide emissions, as China’s coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error. And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“Climate change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such. There is, indeed, an accepted scientific theory which I do not dispute and which, the alarmists claim, justifies their belief and their alarm. This is the so-called greenhouse effect: the fact that the earth’s atmosphere contains so-called greenhouse gases (of which water vapour is overwhelmingly the most important, but CO2 is another) which, in effect, trap some of the heat we receive from the sun and prevent it from bouncing back into space. Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be so cold as to be uninhabitable. But, by burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus, other things being equal, increasing the earth’s temperature. But four questions immediately arise, all of which need to be addressed, coolly and rationally. First, other things being equal, how much can increased atmospheric CO2 be expected to warm the earth? (This is known to scientists as climate sensitivity, or sometimes the climate sensitivity of carbon.) This is highly uncertain, not least because clouds have an important role to play, and the science of clouds is little understood. Until recently, the majority opinion among climate scientists had been that clouds greatly amplify the basic greenhouse effect. But there is a significant minority, including some of the most eminent climate scientists, who strongly dispute this. Second, are other things equal, anyway? We know that over millennia, the temperature of the earth has varied a great deal, long before the arrival of fossil fuels. To take only the past thousand years, a thousand years ago we were benefiting from the so-called medieval warm period, when temperatures are thought to have been at least as warm, if not warmer, than they are today. And during the Baroque era we were grimly suffering the cold of the so-called Little Ice Age, when the Thames frequently froze in winter and substantial ice fairs were held on it, which have been immortalised in contemporary prints. Third, even if the earth were to warm, so far from this necessarily being a cause for alarm, does it matter? It would, after all, be surprising if the planet were on a happy but precarious temperature knife-edge, from which any change in either direction would be a major disaster. In fact, we know that, if there were to be any future warming (and for the reasons already given, ‘if’ is correct) there would be both benefits and what the economists call disbenefits. I shall discuss later where the balance might lie. And fourth, to the extent that there is a problem, what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“Third, and perhaps most influential of all, with very few exceptions major media outlets have provided unceasing support for measures to ‘stop global warming’. This behaviour appears to be driven by a combination of the left-wing (‘liberal’ in the US sense) and green personal beliefs of most reporters, and the commercial nose of experienced editors who understand that alarmist environmental reporting sells both product and advertising space.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“Second, from local green activist groups up to behemoth NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, over the last twenty years the environmental movement has espoused saving the planet from global warming as its leitmotif. This has had two devastating results. One is that radical environmentalists have worked relentlessly to sow misinformation about global warming in both the public domain and the education system. And the other is that, faced with this widespread propagandisation of public opinion and young persons—and also by strong lobbying from powerful self-interested groups like government research scientists, alternative energy providers and financial marketeers—politicians have had no choice but to fall into line.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? —C.P. Snow”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“The overwhelming majority of scientists in climate and related fields, therefore, remain commendably open to the possibility that some other influence—such as the sun—may be the true primum mobile of the Earth’s climate. In manipulating its selection and representation of the scientific literature on the solar influence on global mean surface temperature, the IPCC has attempted to bolster the stance of a tiny minority of scientists and then to pretend, with 95 per cent confidence, that this represents a ‘scientific consensus’. Such a consensus, even if it did exist, would be of no interest to science.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“If policies were based upon climate science rather than climate studies, this simple, straightforward analysis would spell the end of any onerous climate policy. However, while our similar studies can be scientifically cited,7 to date, there has been an understandable reluctance to publish this in the tier-1 scientific literature, such as Nature or Science, as that would indicate a massive, unexplainable, and persistent failure of the studies driving global climate policy. Paltridge recently speculated that when this is ultimately permitted, the cost to all science (not just climate science) is going to be dear and lasting, much to the detriment of our society and our public policies.8 It will provoke serious doubt that the present incentive structure in science—which requires that the practitioners keep their problems ‘important’—has far-reaching and disastrous unintended consequences.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“prediction,”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“The oceans have been alkaline throughout the history of time because water chemistry, ocean floor sediments, and new volcanic rocks on the sea floor buffer seawater to stop it becoming acid, even during times of CO2 concentrations that were thousands of times the present value. Ocean waters, such as borates, buffer seawater and keep its pH constant.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“The sea levels fall and lower temperatures during glacial events kill higher latitude coral reefs and they continue to thrive at lower latitudes. The geological record shows that coral reefs love it warm, especially when there is more CO2 in the atmosphere.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts

“only one molecule of every 85,000 in the atmosphere is CO2 of human origin, and yet we are asked to believe that this one molecule drives hugely complex climate change systems. We are also asked to believe that the 32 molecules of CO2 of natural origin in every 85,000 molecules play no part in driving climate change.”
― Alan Moran, Climate Change: The Facts