Professor Fritz Vahrenholt - A voice of sanity in the climate debate

Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of Germany's environmental movement and the director of RWE Innogy, one of Europe's largest renewable energy companies, last week delivered the 3rd Global Warming Policy Foundation Annual Lecture at the Royal Society in London. Vahrenholt, whose book "Die kalte Sonne: Warum die Klimakatastrophe nicht stattfindet" (The Cold Sun: Why the climate catastrophe is not happening), written together with Sebastian Lüning, has become a best seller in Germany, is a powerful and convincing critic of the alarmist global warming establishment: 

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN's climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.

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In the last 10 years the solar magnetic field dropped to one of its lowest levels in the last 150 years, indicating lower intensity in the decades ahead. This may have contributed to the halt in global warming and is likely to continue for a while, until it may resume gradually around 2030/2040. Based on the past natural climate pattern, we should expect that by 2100 temperatures will not have risen more than 1°C, significantly less than proposed by the IPCC.

Climate catastrophe would have been called off and the fear of a dangerously overheated planet would go down in history as a classic science error. Rather than being largely settled, there are more and more open climate questions which need to be addressed in an impartial and open-minded way.

Firstly, we need comprehensive research on the underestimated role of natural climate drivers. Secondly, the likely warming pause over the coming decades gives us time to convert our energy supply in a planned and sustainable way, without the massive poverty currently planned.

In the UK and Germany, for example, power-station closures and huge expenditure for backup of volatile wind or solar energy or harmful ethanol production will raise energy prices massively and even threaten power cuts: the economic cost will be crippling, all driven by fear.

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The question is; When will the political leaders, who have allowed themselfs to be hijacked by the enviro-fundamentalist scaremongers, begin to listen to climate realists like professor Vahrenholt? Politicians should realize that the longer they toe the alarmist line, the more they will contribute to a damaging development, with a growing number of people impoverished and many real environmental problems left unsolved.