Global warming can be bad or good news – it depends on what you want to see

By Neil Thomas
(Filed: 22/11/2004)

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Robert Sarmast is feeling pretty pleased with himself. He believes he's found the lost city of Atlantis, that quasi-mythical island civilisation that disappeared so mysteriously thousands of years ago. He's not the first to believe he's found it, but he's the first to have done so in the mile-deep water between Cyprus and Syria.

It's all frightfully exciting. Mr Sarmast, a 38-year-old architect from Los Angeles, studied Plato, Sumerian scripts and biblical references before sending deep-water sonar scanners into the area he thought most likely, and Bingo! The images reveal the presence of "man-made" structures including a wall and trenches, and evidence of two streams flowing from a hilltop. Few others can see anything more than a few fuzzy pictures, but perhaps they don't have Mr Sarmast's imagination to see beneath the mud of centuries.

Well, bully for him, you might say. After all, they sneered at Heinrich Schliemann and his theory that Troy really existed, rather than being merely a figment of Homer's imagination. Troy turned out to be real, so why not Atlantis? Curiously, the curators of museums in Cyprus seem able to curb their enthusiasm. Perhaps they can remember that Atlantis has been discovered before, off Ireland, near Cadiz, Cuba, Devon…

In each one of those locations, some enthusiast had convinced himself that there was strong evidence to support his theory. It's what is known as confirmation bias. We are instinctively drawn to something we agree with, while we question something we don't like much more carefully. Mr Sarmast has invested years in the Atlantis question, and his sonar search is the culmination of the work. It would be so disappointing to find nothing but mud that his brain would probably just not accept it. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest, as Simon and Garfunkel used to sing.

The Maldives may not be quite the modern-day equivalent of Atlantis, but there are plenty of people who are convinced that it faces the same watery fate. Rising 8,000 feet from the ocean depths, the islands just (and only just) break the surface, by about six feet. A sceptic might wonder why they exist as islands at all, suspecting that it is more than mere chance that these submarine mountains don't top out a few feet lower down, but that's another question.

The Maldives are Exhibit A in the catalogue of catastrophes which the global warming doomsters have compiled. The equation is simple: global warming will melt the Arctic ice cap and raise sea levels, so bye-bye Maldives, hotly followed by low-lying areas of Bangladesh, the world's coastal cities and much of the Home Counties. Millions of people die.

Yet the Maldives pit canary is resolutely refusing to keel over. According to Nils Axel-Morner of Stockholm University, the sea level in the islands is not rising, and the locals say it was higher 30 years ago. Longer-run data confirm this. Detailed records for Tuvalu, another island on the danger list, show no change in sea levels over the past 25 years. That global warming is happening is beyond reasonable doubt, but those expecting to see dire consequences because of rising sea levels have no evidence to support their view.

At least the doomsters have noticed that it makes no difference if the Arctic melts, since it's already floating. They still find reasons to be miserable, arguing that because snow reflects sunlight back into space, if it turns to water, more heat will be absorbed, accelerating global warming. Well, maybe, but this is little better than conjecture. It may be that more water means more clouds, which are also strong reflectors of sunlight, leading to global cooling and a new ice age - 30 years ago, plenty of eminent scientists were worrying about this very effect.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work underpins the Kyoto accord, projects various "scenarios", but the assumptions do not stand up to rigorous scientific analysis, and the extreme projections, the ones that make the best headlines, are well into the world of fantasy. Besides, would it be such bad news if the Arctic ice cap retreats? The answer's obvious if you're a polar bear, but much less so if you're a commercial fisherman, although almost as important. Ragnar Arnason, an economist at the University of Iceland, admits that the net impact is hard to judge, but concludes that it would help the commercially valuable species such as herring and cod. For the north Atlantic, at least, "global warming appears to be good news rather than bad".

The net effect of global warming is impossible to calculate, either in magnitude or direction, which is why America sensibly refuses to sign the Kyoto accord, and the Russians have done so against the strong recommendation of President Putin's chief economic adviser. Meeting the demands for lower CO2 emissions is going to be a material brake on economic growth, and is unlikely to have any noticeable impact on the world's climate. It is, in short, a waste of money. A project to bring clean water to everyone in Africa would do far more to increase the sum of human happiness than anything flowing from Kyoto, and could be done for a fraction of the price.

Unfortunately, like Mr Sarmast, our politicians have looked at a fuzzy picture and seen what they want to see in it. Unlike Mr Sarmast with his dreams of Atlantis, their interpretation of doubtful data will damage us all. Perhaps the last word should go to Dr Christian Hubscher of the Institute of Geophysics at Hamburg University, who has studied the Mediterranean sea bed. He confirms that there are indeed underwater hills and that the sea has been much lower. The hills, he says, are extinct volcanoes, and the sea was lower six million years ago. Even Plato didn't claim Atlantis was that old.