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Participants look at a screen showing a world map with climate anomalies during the World Climate Change Conference 2015, near Paris in December that year. Photo: Reuters
OpinionLetters

Doubts remain on human agency in climate change

Climate change
Letters
Letters
Why you can trust SCMP
Your correspondent Lee Sai-ming, from the Hong Kong Observatory, rejected Mr G. Bailey’s sensible points on climate change (“Human influence through greenhouse gas emissions proved”, January 5). But Mr Lee does not appear to have read the report he refers to.

The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 states, in its technical section of 78 pages, that human involvement in climate change can only be shown by mathematical models.

It then goes on to say that the 100-plus models generated by the scientists did not predict the slowdown in the increase of temperature in the period 1998 to 2013.

If the only way to prove the human connection is the modelling process and the models cannot predict, surely there is some doubt in most clear-thinking people’s minds about the connection between humans and climate change.

The climate scientists want us to give up driving fossil-fuelled cars and travelling on trains and planes. This much is known.

But what is not emphasised is that we are not supposed to grow rice or rear cattle. Also not mentioned in the IPCC report is the need to stop making steel and cement, which are huge users of coal and other fossil fuels.

Are we really going to take all these steps? Or are we going to pretend to do so, as in the Paris agreement, which will not change anything as the accord is so modest in its aim? Its creators must have intended it purely as virtue signalling.

Again, Mr Lee refers to the increased frequency of typhoons, which is not true and is even dismissed in the IPCC report.

Sea levels have been rising for over 100 years at a steady rate of 1.8mm per year. There has been no increase in this rate.

The figures for world temperature have come in and show that 2017 was cooler than 2016 and 2015.

Should we be in fear of a new ice age as was trumpeted in all the newspapers when I was young?

Alan Crawley, Sai Kung

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Claims of human links to climate change do not hold water
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