My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

The following is an extract from a book written in 1975:

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a dramatic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating out-break of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 US states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and the extent of the trend, as well as its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they agree they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity. (Gwynne, 1975 cited in Lomborg, 2001)

The above extract was from a book on Global Cooling. Back in the mid-70's the worlds scientists were worried about global cooling - this was used in Lomborg's book to help illustrate the problems with using short-term trends.

There are often problems that arise in Australia's weather due to short-term trends. Often, we are reported to about droughts and major weather events of that nature - however - due to their being such little amounts of data, more often than not, most of these reported weather events are not as extreme as one would have you believe - they are infact, climatic, and not weather related at all. We just do no have enough data to make accurate climate models at this stage, and many of our models we are relying on are based on small amounts of data that have been extrapolated and interpolated to buggery.