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Sponsored by the Natural Environment Research Council |  |  | 
|  |  | | (This debate is closed and is a read-only archive) | | Lomborg makes unnecessary concessions
[25-Nov-2001]
| Professor Lomborg substantially weakens his argument by making at the outset an unnecessary concession to the alarmists; namely that 'The global average temperature has increased by 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past century, and it is likely that this is partly due to an anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse effect'. First, it is far from clear that this figure is anything other than a statistical quirk. Many well-maintained monitoring stations throughout the world do not show this effect, and indeed some show an actual decrease. Second, even if true, such an observation would not be unexpected, since the Earth has not yet returned to the benign temperatures that occurred before the Little Ice Age. Third, carbon dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas, dwarfed by water vapour. Fourth, the worthlessness of the computer models cannot be over-emphasised. I have been modelling with computers for over 40 years and would not even contemplate beginning to try to model the climate on the information so far available concerning the interactive mechanisms involved.
| John Brignell, UK
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