No Global Warming: Due to China Burning “Extra Coal”!

No Global Warming: Due to China Burning “Extra Coal”!

By Peter C. Glover  July 8, 2011

As a superb bronze of Ronald Reagan was being unveiled in the gardens of London’s U.S. Embassy on July 4, a new study into why global temperatures stalled back in the mid-1990s was making headlines. According to the study’s lead author Robert Kaufmann the “lack of global warming” may well be due ... to the Chinese burning “extra coal”. So there it is. Hot off the presses is the suggestion that not only is man’s burning of coal a chief cause of global warming, man’s burning of even more coal, at least temporarily, may also be responsible for cooling global temperatures, too.

Hard to take in, isn’t it? Or is the growing desperation to pile theory on theory to explain away—what Monty Python’s John Cleese might term the “bleedin’ obvious” - that the CO2-global temperature causative link theory is looking increasingly shaky and difficult to maintain. Reagan had a clear-sighted ability to see things for what they were. And when complex issues of the day found alleged experts performing verbal contortions to underpin one theory or another, Reagan invoked a famous dictum: “Don’t be afraid to see what you see”.

The new study by Kaufmann’s team at the National Academy of Sciences very much takes the party-line on climate alarmism and thus had little trouble being reported. Indeed, Kaufmann was interviewed by BBC environment correspondent Richard Black. It’s an interview that is highly revealing as motivation behind the report and to the on-going collusion of the mainstream media journalists not only to report alarmist news but to put the boot in to anyone who may have a different hypothesis.

Soaring coal use in fast-industrializing China over the past decade may be causing “smog from the extra coal” to “mask greenhouse warming”

Reporting on July 5, the BBC’s Black summed up the study’s conclusion that soaring coal use in fast-industrializing China over the past decade may be causing “smog from the extra coal” to “mask greenhouse warming”. Central to the claims of non-alarmists, scientists, economists and others, as study author Kaufmann well knows, is that China is undermining all of the decarbonising efforts in the West by opening new coal-fired plants at the rate of one a week. The BBC article rightly states that China’s coal consumption doubled between 2002 and 2007 alone. The piece goes on to show that Kaufmann maintains that while coal produces more warming CO2, it additionally “produces more tiny sulphate aerosol particles in the atmosphere” that “cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space”. Just why the global burning of coal before the Chinese began burning “extra coal” didn’t have the same effect, the elephant in the room, neither Kaufmann nor Black explain. But I digress.

Clearly aware of the inherent irony in the study, Black couches his report in terms plainly sympathetic to the climate alarmist grand narrative. The BBC’s Black even puts speech marks around the term “climate sceptics” to separate Kaufmann and himself from such as these. So there will be no hard questions here for Kaufmann to answer, we should know. The article then warns readers how the “absence of a temperature rise” is “used” by sceptics—the fiends—to “deny the existence of man-made global warming”. Thus Black’s does what many intellectually emasculated journalists who have signed up to the AGW narrative does: it reports any theory that aids the Grand Narrative “science”, any theory opposing becomes mere “belief”. Indeed, the BBC’s Black gives over the last three paragraphs of his published article to Kaufmann to specifically put the boot in at this point.

“People can choose not to believe in man-made climate change—but the correct term here is ‚‘belief—believing is an act of faith” says Kaufmann, “whereas science is a testing of hypotheses and seeing whether they hold up against real world data.” For Kaufmann, it seems merely adding one new theory to—as Black delineates them in his article—others is providing a scientific “answer”. Alternative hypotheses should, it seems, in Kaufmann-Black world, be viewed as anti-science “unbelief”. Perverse, no? According to my math—and it’s not bad—one theory plus alternative theories add up to a bundle of mere theories, not to conclusive empirical science. Why then take some much time to demonize alternative theories, views and opinion? Unless, of course, the only actual empirical evidence that point to a particularly glaring alternative hypothesis: that the absence of temperature rise suggests the CO2 causative link is looking increasingly ‚‘unscientific’. Don’t be afraid of what you see.

Black’s interview of Kaufmann is particularly enlightening as to the author’s original motivation. Giving a talk on climate change in 2009, one “older gentleman” wanted to know “why I should believe in this climate change—I was watching Fox News and they said the earth’s temperature hasn’t changed in 10 years and has actually gone down”. Kaufmann explained to the BBC’s Black, “At that stage I wasn’t paying attention to climate change ... so I went back and checked the data and found that was just about right”.

Now stop right there. Kaufmann is delivering an address on a subject he is supposed to be clued up about yet he doesn’t even know that global warming stopped more than a decade before his talk? Not impressive, Robert. Indeed, Kaufmann admits to being flummoxed by facts known to Fox News, and to this “gentleman”. But there were, in 2009, already various theories, as Black’s article makes clear, as to why global temperatures were not rising. Interestingly, they don’t seem to have convinced Kaufmann. Kaufmann thus sets out to find a more convincing one. And in the theory that the Chinese burning “extra coal” theory Kaufmann, at a stroke, both provides a scientific-sounding explanation—albeit a theory which cannot be proved—and deals a blow to those who maintain we are fighting a losing war on carbon emissions.

At a stroke, Kaufmann beefs up the weight of theories sounding scientific outweigh the obvious explanation that the baseline climate grand narrative may be the real problem here. Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

Pseudo-science, elitists and the Emperor’s new clothes

Reading through Kaufmann’s study and Black’s report, it is hard to avoid making a more metaphysical link: between “emperor” and “no clothes”. As with pseudo-science and elitists in every generation, theory is loaded on theory to present the illusion of science and intellectual thought, in an increasingly desperate bid to obfuscate the “bleedin’ obvious” reality.

Reagan cut through the pseudo-intellectual BS. It’s what made him a great president. He called the Soviet Union what it then was, an “evil empire”. Countless advisors warned Reagan not to deliver his “Mr Gorbachov, tear down this wall!” speech. But Reagan, thankfully, had the courage of his convictions. Bring Reagan’s dictum to bear, and we may smell more than a ‚‘science’ rat in Kaufmann’s latest theory on “stalling” global temperatures; the “consensus” climate grand narrative starts to read as the elitist pseudo-science it has long been.

“Don’t be afraid of what you see.” Works for me.

Peter C. Glover (www.petercglover.com) is an English writer & freelance journalist specializing in political, media and energy analysis (and is currently European Associate Editor for the US magazine Energy Tribune). He has been published extensively with columns at World Politics Review, TCS Daily and American Thinker with contributions to numerous publications including American Spectator, New English Review, British Journalism Review, Human Events, as well faith publications Christian Renewal (US), Catholic Insight (Canada) and Evangelical Times (UK). 
He is also the author of a number of books including The Politics of Faith: Essays on the Morality of Key Current Affairs which set out the moral case for the invasion of Iraq and a Judeo-Christian defence of the death penalty.