: Peter Taylor
: Climate, Covid and Conspiracy
: Clairview Books
: 9781912992782
: 1
: CHF 13.00
:
: Politikwissenschaft
: English
: 242
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In recent years, growing national and international networks are challenging the two dominant 'emergency' narratives that relate to the Covid pandemic and Climate Change. It was the experience of Covid, and the co-ordinated global response that involved suppression of the virus's laboratory origins, fast-tracking of mRNA vaccines, lockdowns, and neglect of the most vulnerable - all of which contradicted scientific evidence and proven effective responses - that led to alarm over the consolidation of emergency powers within groups of unelected bureaucrats. Whilst this kind of subterfuge has characterized the climate issue for decades, the Covid-led awakening brought many to question the origins and reality of the 'climate emergency'. Peter Taylor - an independent advisor, consultant and scientific expert on environmental issues - has long been asked for updates on his ground-breaking book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory (2009). Here he responds with a series of challenging and revealing essays. His treatment is based on published and peer-reviewed science as well as first-hand research in the field - visiting research labs and asking direct questions. His startling conclusions reveal that the science is far from 'settled'. Perhaps worse, discussion is no longer possible - the branding of critics as 'deniers' has become commonplace. But now the fight-back has begun, and this book provides scientific ammunition for anyone who cares about societal freedoms.

PETER TAYLOR has two Oxford degrees but left academia in 1978 and - 'blessed with companions of a similar mind' - set up operations to clean the oceans and atmosphere. His organization - the Oxford-based Political Ecology Research Group (1976-1992) worked for citizens' initiatives against dangerous developments - some were stopped, like the Plutonium Economy, the dumping of nuclear waste at sea and Acid Rain. Other toxic policies were transformed through the instigation of Clean Production Strategies. He became an analyst of environmental science, and as an activist got to know the nodal points of influence of what he called 'a long game through many decades'. He is a strong believer in the power of small groups of committed people and is a long-standing member of the California-based Environmental Studies Institute, a founding member of Cambrian Wildwood, a founding member and Associate of the Wildland Research Institute at Leeds University, and founding member of the Institute for Life-based Architecture in Germany. He has children and grandchildren - they are his 'skin in the game' - and is the author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory, numerous scientific papers on pollution, several books on conservation including Beyond Conservation and The Spirit of Rewilding, and an autobiography, Shiva's Rainbow.

Introduction


It is now some 15 years, as I write, since my bookChill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory was published. I observe an overall trend in the dominant narrative of human-induced warming, with the focus having shifted to ‘extreme’ weather and ‘record’ temperatures. This focus has drifted far from the science base. Certainly, we are experiencing ‘record’ daily temperatures—but the ‘record’ referred to is the last 150 years of instrumental readings. These temperatures are far from unprecedented considering warmer peaks in a past millennial cycle that has been consistent for thousands of years (as determined by proxies for temperature such as the ice-core record, tree-rings and constituents of ocean sediments). The weather does appear chaotic—but this is due to changes in the Jetstream that alter wind patterns and to be expected toward the peak of the cycle.

Even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 6th report finds no long-term trends in droughts, wildfires and floods. The current alarm at ‘unprecedented’ changes is almost entirely a ‘media’ creation behind which powerful well-funded ‘coalitions’ of interest groups operate.

There is, however, strong evidence that the world is in a major ‘warm’ period (seeChill Revisited, 1.1). Temperatures of land and ocean have been rising since 1850, along with retreating glaciers and rising sea levels. However, the proxy records do not support any statement that current temperatures and their rates of change, nor the rate of sea-level rise, loss of ice and consequent movements of flora and fauna, areunprecedented—as often maintained by the mainstream media, and sadly abetted by some scientific papers upon which there is no consensus.

Proxies are used for past temperature patterns in the pre-instrumental record but they are inexact and caution is needed when they are compared to modern satellite-aided global coverage by advanced instruments. It ispossible that current northern hemisphere temperatures are now higher than in the previous warm period about one thousand years ago (The Medieval Warm Period) when the Vikings colonised Greenland, but this is by no means an established fact. Whereas we have global coverage of land and ocean temperatures, both surface and atmospheric, from satellites as well as a network of surface stations, the 1,000-year records rely upon ‘proxies’ in the ice cores, ocean sediments and tree-rings, all of which are localised.

In the case of the Arctic, I reported inChill that many station records up to the year 2000, only just matched the record of the 1940s—an Arctic Oscillation (a regular cycle) was involved (see 2.1, Fig.1). Although some Arctic station temperatures peaked later, the global average showed no trend for the next 15 years—known as the ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause’ in surface temperatures. As I predicted in some of the articles—temperature would likely dropunless there was a major El Niño. We had two—one in 2016, and one in 2023/24, both riding on top of the longer cycles.

The media and many scientists claimed ‘global warming’ had resumed—but we need to wait for the expected post-Niño drop, and it is disingenuous of scientists to include these Niño peaks as indicative of accuracy in their modelling, or continuation of a late 20th-century trend.

The pattern is clear—several decadal, centennial and millennial cycles were in their rising phase in the period 1900~2000 at the same time as carbon emissions began in earnest—but these cycles are neither represented nor predicted in the models that underlie the UN’s supposed consensus.

SinceChill (2009), there has been growing interest from the scientific community in my analysis of climate-change cycles. This is the fruit of 12 years of collaborative work with Professor Jackson Davis at the Environmental Studies Institute in California, in the 1980s. Jackson and I worked for 15 years on ocean-pollution issues (1980~1995) when he was an advisor to