Past Swings

The Times, 9 September 1998
Geologist attacks climate claims

An adviser to the Government said yesterday that some scientists and politicians were "talking rubbish" about global warming. David Bowen, a geologist at Cardiff University and vice-chairman of the Countryside Council for Wales, said that the computer models on which claims about the effects of man-made pollution were based were flawed. There was evidence that the Earth had gone through periods of warming and cooling over the past two million years, well before man-made pollution could have had any impact. Yet this natural variability in the climate, recorded in Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, was ignored in the computer models used to forecast the impact of man-made pollution on the Earth's weather systems, he said. The models used "assume the climate has been stable for 10,000 years", he said. "Until you build in natural variability it is impossible to forecast the future."

Professor Bowen told the festival that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knew of the ice-core work, but natural variability in the Earth's climate was not included in the report which paved the way for the Kyoto meeting where cuts in energy use were agreed. He emphasised that he was expressing his own views: "I am not paid by some large American oil conglomerate."