Jerome R. Corsi
A prominent environmental scientist has gone public with his scorn for the recently released fifth climate assessment of U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that a continued rise in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere could risk human extinction.
Leslie Woodcock, emeritus professor of chemical thermodynamics at the University of Manchester’s School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, mocked the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in a scientific critique of the U.N.’s climate fears.
Woodcock, a former NASA researcher, said the theory of “man-made climate change” is an “unsubstantiated hypothesis.”
“Water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, and there is 20 times more of it in our atmosphere, around one percent of the atmosphere, whereas CO2 is only 0.04 percent,” he said, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post in the U.K.
Woodcock, who received his Ph.D. from the University of London, is a fellow of the royal society of chemical engineering, a founding editor of Molecular Simulation and a recipient of a Max Plank Society Visiting Fellowship.
He has published 70 professional papers in peer-reviewed journals.
“Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas, but the truth is that it’s the gas of life. We breathe it out, plants breathe it in and it’s not caused by us,” he insisted.
“Global warming is nonsense.”
Woodcock argues that theories of anthropogenic global warming, now morphed by radical leftist environmentalists into less well-defined theories of “climate change,” are economically motivated.
“If you talk to real scientists who have no political interest, they will tell you there is nothing in global warming. It’s an industry that creates vast amounts of money for some people,” Woodcock said.
His outspoken critique of global warming and climate change theories were published in the U.K. a day after the BBC agreed to give less airtime to climate skeptics.
With pressure exerted by Parliament’s Commons Science and Technology Committee, the government-funded network decided editors should seek special clearance to interview climate skeptics and accompany their appearances with “health warnings.”
In his interview with the Yorkshire Evening Post, Woodcock did not hesitate to debunk the “science” behind global warming/climate-change alarmism.
“The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless,” Woodcock contended.
“The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago,” he said.
“The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis about our climate that says it has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences.”
There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 gas even slightly increased in the last 100 years, he argued, insisting climate change is a constant throughout geological time, with radical changes being documented over eons, long before human beings appeared on the planet.
“Events can happen with frequencies on all time scales in the physics of a chaotic system such as the weather,” he said. “Any point on lowland can flood up to a certain level on all time scales from one month to millions of years, and it’s completely unpredictable beyond around five days,” Woodcock said.
“We can go back to great floods and Noah’s Ark in the Middle East regions which are now deserts,” he said.
He explained that the reason records seem to be being frequently broken is “simply because we only started keeping them about 100 years ago.”
“There will always be some record broken somewhere when we have another natural fluctuation in weather,” he said.
It’s “absolutely stupid to blame floods on climate change, as I read the Prime Minister did recently.”
“I don’t blame the politicians in this case, however. I blame his so-called scientific advisors.”
Woodcock said the global warming/climate change political lobby is imposing costs by making it increasingly expensive just to keep warm “as a consequence of the idiotic decisions our politicians have taken in recent years about the green production of electricity.”
“The green lobby has created a do-good industry, and it becomes a way of life, like a religion,” he said. “I understand why people defend it when they have spent so long believing in it; people do not like to admit they have been wrong.”
He said the term “global warming” does not mean anything unless it is given a time scale.
“The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years,” he said. “If there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us.”
He pointed to light bulbs to illustrate his concern that climate hysterics are imposing unnecessary costs and hazards on society.
“Light bulbs are a good example of the contradiction with the green movement. Europe has outlawed the tungsten light bulb,” he noted. “Tungsten is a harmless metal, like gold. It does not react with anything, and yet now, in the name of conserving energy, we have low-energy light bulbs full of toxic chemicals, including mercury vapor, which is poisonous.”
He noted that if a low-energy light bulb is smashed, the advice from the Department for the Environment is to vacate the room for 15 minutes.
