Dissenting views

Sir,

In all the words printed and spoken in the next fortnight at the COP26 conference there is one which will never be mentioned - and that is water vapour. Yet water vapour is the main greenhouse gas.

Confirmation of this can be found deep in the full text of the 2007 IPCC report. Because there is so much more of it in the atmosphere, it has about 15 times more effect than that of CO2. It is strange it is seldom mentioned, perhaps because there is no way it could be taxed as is done with CO2.

Science attributes all the warming seen in the world these last 200 years to carbon dioxide and a few other minor gases - this is incorrect. Carbon dioxide and the other minor gases are responsible for no more than one third of the warming; the rest is due to water vapour. Water vapour is invisible but eventually forms clouds.

President Obama’s chief scientific officer John Holdren stated in 2016 that ‘a one per cent change in the amount of cloud cover was enough to change the temperature by 0.8 degrees centigrade’, or about 75 per cent of the warming seen.

It works both ways, more cloud the temperature goes up, less cloud it goes down. Cloud cover is estimated to average about 67 per cent. One per cent would never be noticed.

The world’s climate has always changed over many years and will continue to do so with or without humans on it. Climate science is now a closed shop where dissenting scientists, and there are plenty, are never heard. Group thinking has taken over where no-one is allowed to challenge ideas.

It’s all CO2 and zero carbon; more like a case of CO2 on the brain.

Yours,

Jim Climie,

Whiting Bay.