The great 'global warming' caravan has descended in full force on Marrakech in southern Morocco. And what a caravanserai for a 1960s soul: 'Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, they walk into mine....'
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For two weeks, delegates from 178 countries have once again sweated and toiled to produce a last-minute legally binding document to control human emissions of so-called 'greenhouse gases' based on the previous shenanigans in Kyoto, The Hague and Bonn. The Marrakech meeting, rather inelegantly known as COP7 - the Seventh Conference of the Parties to the UN treaty first signed in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro - aimed to tie up all the loose ends.
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Yet overheated delegates would have done well to consider the historic climate curve for their very own caravanserai city of Marrakech. To mangle slightly a famous piece of dialogue from that finest of noir films, Casablanca (1942):
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Louis Renault: 'And what in heaven's name brought you to Marrakech?'
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Rick Blaine: 'Climate change. I came to Marrakech for the global warming.'
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Louis Renault: 'Global warming? What global warming? You seen the curve.'
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Rick Blaine: 'I was misinformed.'
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We are indeed 'misinformed', Mr Blaine, for there isn't so much as a glimmer, not even a mirage, of recent global warming in Marrakech (1). Indeed, as with so many curves from around the world, the peak period of recent warmth falls firmly within and around the time of the Second World War, during the 1930s and 40s, in Casablanca with Rick and Ilsa. Significantly, this correlates closely with variations in solar activity, not with carbon dioxide emissions.
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I am, of course, well aware that the low-latitude Marrakech curve is not a perfect choice, but many mid-latitude and high-latitude curves exhibit similar patterns - such as those from rural locations within Vermont and at Bethel, Alaska. This also accords perfectly with new work just published in the journal Climatic Change (2), which shows that, as with the Marrakech curve, the warmest period in Norway was in the 1930s, not during the past 10 years.
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All this should remind us that most global warming to date resides firmly with the virtual world of the computer chip, and that questioning the all-too prevailing eco-hype about our overheating planet is not as stupid as some would have us believe. This is especially so when we take into account the criticisms of the economics of the Kyoto Protocol, brilliantly made by Bjørn Lomborg.
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The main point about Kyoto - admitted even by some of its strongest supporters - is that it will do little about global warming - even if global warming were actually taking place, which appears not to be the case at Marrakech and elsewhere. Moreover, Kyoto has now been completely hijacked politically by Australia and Russia who are very cleverly extracting more and more concessions from the over-eager, myth-obsessed Europeans.
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Behind the myth, there has grown up the idea of a 'sustainable climate', nicely managed by humans to produce the best of all worlds. But until we can control successfully the 'Blue Planet' of the ever-surging oceans, the changing geometry of the Earth, the dynamic cycles of the Sun, and everything else from atmospheric water vapour to meteors in space, the concept of controlling climate predictably is just nonsense, Alice-in-Wonderland science, where the verdict comes before the trial.
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Above all, we should remind ourselves of one key fact: in a coupled non-linear system as complex as climate we no more know the ultimate outcome of not doing something (that is, cutting down on gas emissions) as we do of doing something (that is, increasing gas emissions).
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The Kyoto Protocol is inherently dangerous because of this central lie. So 'Play it again, Uncle Sam' - the Kyoto Protocol is indeed 'fatally flawed', even if it is President George W Bush who says so.
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And global warming is as mythical as the 'Play it again, Sam' quotation.
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Philip Stott is Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the University of London. His latest book, with Dr Sian Sullivan, is Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power, Arnold and Oxford University Press, 2000. Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA).
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