Multi-disciplinary scientist Zbigniew Jaworowski, has researched the atmospheric pollution of glaciers and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for many years, and is the author of numerous publications on climate change. He serves as the Polish representative in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and is a member of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a group of scientists who are sceptical of global warming. In this interview, initially published December 12, before the failure of the Copenhagen Climate summit, by the Polish daily Our Journal, he talks with reporter Mariusz Bober.
MB: What do you have to say about the recently leaked e-mail correspondence of scientists specializing in the problem of global warming who have promoted the theory that man-made carbon dioxide causes global warming? Are they perpetrating a big lie?
Jaworowski: The e-mails were released on November 17 by some honest scientists working probably in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), at the University of East Anglia in England, and for this they should be rewarded. It is noteworthy that, on December 1, the director of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, was suspended, pending the outcome of the investigation in this case. For now, the investigation is by the university authorities, but soon it will probably also be by the prosecutor.
In the United States, a group of Senators has called for a Congressional investigation, and the University of Pennsylvania has already begun an investigation of Michael Mann, another professor implicated in this affair, who is the creator of the famous "hockey stick" curve, which purports to show that man has caused a big and sudden increase in temperature.
The "Climategate" affair, as it is nicknamed, also revealed something else: The enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world, Wikipedia, in the wholesale falsification of past climatic trends. No wonder that now, Wikipedia, together with green organizations, is condemning, as a criminal act, the disclosure of base scientific misbehavior, and says that climatic science remains as strong as before, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is superb, including its head, and lists a litany of persons and institutions expressing the same opinion.
But with many millions of "Climategate" entries on the Internet, on search engines like Google, it is now impossible to sweep the affair under the carpet, even for the entities standing behind it, which are much more powerful than Wikipedia.
MB: This means that the scientists who are responsible for research in this field, lied to frighten people about a coming apocalypse? Why?
Jaworowski: Indeed, these researchers are guilty of brazen fraud, bringing us into a trap, which has dire consequences. For many years they have been incredibly confident, ignoring any criticism of their arguments. But they had the overwhelming support of the United Nations, and specifically the IPCC, the United Nations group charged with examining the impact of human activities on climate change, which takes the lead in all this confusion. The IPCC thesis is based on research from the CRU. Scientists from the University of East Anglia have at their disposal enormous sums of money and political support. In practice, they simply obey the dictates of the United Nations, which is promoting the global warming initiative, in order to suppress the development of industry, which they claim is destroying the Biosphere of the Earth.
MB: And does industry have this bad effect?
Jaworowski: Of course not. In fact, the truth is that the richer a country, and the more industrialized, the better that country takes care of the environment. The anti-industry propaganda is aimed at the destruction of our civilization! Representatives of the UN, such as Maurice Strong, a former advisor to the former [UN] Secretary-General Kofi Annan, has stated this openly. It was Strong who organized and chaired the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where he said that to save the Earth, you must destroy modern industrial civilization. He was also the founder of the Kyoto Protocol. So this is an open conspiracy, involving the people of the United Nations, aimed at influencing the government of each country.
MB: You mean by forcing them to reduce CO2 emissions?
Jaworowski: Yes, precisely. Paragraphs 36 and 38 of the draft treaty prepared for climate summit in Copenhagen called for a world governmental body, which would monitor all activity on the planet in terms of CO2 emissions. Therefore, what is planned is an incredible transfer of money worldwide over the next decades, from the pockets of all the world's taxpayers into the coffers of the financiers and the so-called green industries. These companies promote clean energy production at the expense of fossil fuels, although such energy is several times more expensive than using current methods— nuclear and coal — to generate electricity.
MB: Is Copenhagen planned to be another step in this scenario?
Jaworowski: Copenhagen has laid a very dangerous trap, more threatening than anything so far. So far, Poland is obliged by 2020 to institute a further 20% reduction in CO2 emissions. According to the consulting firm Ernst & Young, this requirement would mean a decline in GDP of $503 billion! That is, it would reduce Poland's GDP to a level of about half the GDP for the year 2007! You can imagine how this would drastically reduce the standard of living of the Poles. Yet today, battles are under way to limit budgetary expenditures! Meanwhile, the UN wants us to institute "reductions" that will cost us half a trillion dollars!
MB: What are the top decision makers preparing in Copenhagen?
Jaworowski: Even more harmful "treatment." There were more than 180 pages of draft minutes at the beginning of the conference with different versions of restrictions of CO2 emissions by 2050. Some involve cutting even to 95% of the 1990 levels. This would mean that in the next few years we would have to reduce emissions by 5% per year! This would be the greatest revolution in history, as 86% of energy in the world is currently produced from fossil fuels. If such drastic restrictions were introduced, it would risk the destruction of our civilization, just as advocated by the guru Maurice Strong and other like-minded environmentalists and many representatives of the Western establishment. In this way, humanity was declared to be a fictitious enemy, or a cancer of the Earth, with which Club of Rome (the influential umbrella organization of businessmen, scientists, and politicians, which has ambitions to control global politics) had proposed for decades to fight bravely, sacrificing our present and future prosperity.
MB: Is it illusory that global warming is really the enemy?
Jaworowski: Of course. The climate of the 20th Century has warmed from natural causes and this is beneficial: More water is evaporated from the ocean, vegetation has better conditions for growth, there is reduced soil desertification, and animals thrive. In the years 1982-2003, in the countries around the Sahara — Mauritania, Mali, and Chad — cover crop increased by 50%. The largest increases have occurred in Niger, where trees have again begun to grow, which had died as a result of previous droughts. For many centuries, the planet was not as green as it is today. NASA satellite measurements show that over the past 18 years, global biomass production increased by about 6%. And the largest increase (42%) occurred in the Amazon rainforest.
MB: Does this mean that glaciers do not melt and do not raise sea levels?
Jaworowski: The "disastrous rise" of the ocean is another myth. Glaciers began to melt much earlier than in the 20th Century, as the Earth began to exit from the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1350 to 1880. Modern glaciers began melting in about 1750. Records show that before this date, the Alpine glaciers flowed down into the valleys, destroying entire villages and fields, inundating them with rocky moraine debris and ice. Processions of priests came out to the glaciers, praying for a halt of the ramming ice. Maximum warming occurred in the 1930s (at least in the United States, where the hottest year was 1934, and which has the best network of temperature measurements), and the glaciers began to melt faster than they had previously. In the past ten years, however, this process was reversed, and the climate began to cool (in the United States, between 1998 and 2008 temperatures dropped by about 1°). However, during this same time period, global emissions of carbon dioxide have increased by 34%! As you can see, there is no connection between CO2, which has been under such fierce attack, and climate change. Indeed, more than 500 million years ago, according to the geological record, CO2 was present at 23 times the levels we now have in the atmosphere, and yet, half a billion years ago, the land was covered by glaciers.
Climate change depends on many factors, and now we are fighting against only one factor, CO2, which happens to be negligible.
MB: So the obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol did not yield any results?
Jaworowski: Of course not. What's more, despite the fact that it committed the 185 countries that have adopted this document, to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2% (compared to 1990 levels), in fact, industrial CO2 emissions released to the atmosphere had increased worldwide by 38% by 2004! In the EU countries, emissions increased by nearly 7% in that time period. By contrast, Poland since 1990 reduced its CO2 emissions by 18% — that's 32% of what emissions were in the year 1988! Nevertheless, Brussels asks us to reduce CO2 emissions by a further 20%. This would be a disaster for Polish industry economically.
MB: But in many countries, including in Western Europe, there have been extreme weather events in recent years.
Jaworowski: It is proven that these storms did not result from global warming. In Poland, you can see that we have not experienced a greater number of storms or floods, when one takes into account the observations conducted in Krakow since the 19th Century, when there were more storms than at present. Perhaps today, these storms seem more devastating, because we have recorded all the material losses, but that's because our cities are more complex, and, generally, we have generated more wealth. In addition, many buildings were situated in areas that storms and tornadoes pass through (the latter mostly in America). For this reason, insurance companies incur greater losses, but we must remember that, with the development of towns and villages, they are also experiencing increased revenue. So do not worry about the results of insurance companies.
MB: Why, then, did the governments of 185 countries agreed to introduce draconian restrictions on their economy, if there were no reasonable grounds to do so?
Jaworowski: This question should be properly addressed to sociologists or politicians. It seems to me that the Polish government is aware of this problem, and this makes for a difficult diplomatic situation. I do not think the Polish delegation in Copenhagen could simply say that the fight against global warming is just plain wrong, and therefore we will not accept any obligations to reduce CO2 emissions. But I hope that it will try to soften the economic disaster, from the position of the hard-core greens leading to economic disaster.
MB: But won't the e-mail disclosures of the fraud by researchers from England and the U.S. about the alleged effects that human-emitted CO2 have on climate change, make it absurd to call for further reductions in CO2?
Jaworowski: I hope that the publicity of these emails will change the attitude of politicians participating in the conference. That is precisely the conclusion reached by the Australian authorities, who on December 1, the day that the head of the CRU, Phil Jones, was suspended from his functions as the director, announced that they withdrew from the mechanism of CO2 emissions trading. Indeed, the emissions trading boils down to the transfer of enormous sums of money which will benefit the financiers and governments of some countries. Therefore, probably, some of them enthusiastically support reductions in CO2 emissions. But those who reap the most benefits are the companies that use so-called clean-energy technologies such as wind turbines to produce electricity. They benefit from tax incentives, and thus, taxpayers are financing them, even if the windmills do not produce the projected amount of energy. It is true that windmill construction is less expensive than, say, nuclear or coal power stations, but the current generated by windmills is several times more expensive. Well, according to various estimates, wind turbines produce electricity only one-fifth of their lifetime; energy companies cannot afford such downtime, and therefore must use electricity from other sources as back up.
MB: How is it possible that for at least the last 20 years, the fiction of human-CO2 emissions causing global warming has been allowed to exist?
Jaworowski: The best answer to this question is my story. For many years, I analyzed the results of measurements of CO2 concentrations in ice cores, in which the gas is trapped, as it were. The whole global warming hysteria is based on this ice core work. In the last century, since the 1960s, I organized 10 trips to 17 different glaciers, collecting data on the impact of manmade emissions — mainly heavy metals from industry — on the environment. However, I learned how this climate ideology functioned, when my wife and I spent eight years in Norway. After arriving there, I worked at the University of Oslo, but eventually became employed at the Norwegian Polar Institute. After some time, the Ministry of Environment asked the Institute to examine the implications of global warming due to human activities, for the Norwegian part of the Arctic (including Svalbard). I began to investigate the question of whether any warming had actually occurred in this part of the Arctic. After conducting research, I came to the conclusion that there is no reason to believe so, because the temperature measurements carried out in this part of the world for nearly 100 years showed no signs of warming. The deeper I analyzed the problem, the more it convinced me that there is no man-made global warming, and CO2 does not noticeably cause the process of warming.
In this regard, my colleagues and I have shown that extrapolating the atmospheric measurements of CO2 from the gas measured in polar ice cores was an exaggeration of the results, and even, manipulation. The ice itself, we found, is not a suitable material for assessing the chemical composition of the former ancient atmosphere. This is because it is not a closed system in which nothing happens, but conversely, several physical and chemical processes are going on in the ice. These lead to loss of CO2 from air bubbles trapped in ice. All the cores themselves are cracked, and extremely contaminated with heavy metals from the drilling fluid which penetrates into their interior.
For example, in the ice core from Vostok Station, Antarctica — which is a very foundation stone of the man-made warming hysteria — inside its parts, taken from the depths of 1,850 meters in the glacier, the concentration of lead is 6,800 times higher than in the surface snow at Vostok Station, and the concentration of zinc from the depth of 851 meters is 600,000 times higher. So, the whole hypothesis of humans heating up the climate is based on faulty material like this.
MB: Can you describe the results of these tests?
Jaworowski: We wrote two reports and a few articles on the subject. Here I see an analogy to the e-mail disclosures released by honest researchers at the University of East Anglia on climate warming. Following the publication of the results of our study, the scientific director of the Norwegian Polar Institute called me for an interview and said that our publications were not a way of gaining research contracts in Norway! In consequence, he did not renew my contract — I was being discriminated against. I stayed for a time dependent on my wife's salary. I understood then, that it was an important objective of the operation of the Polar Institute to gain research grants from the Ministry of Environment, whose raison d'être was based on finding proof of human pollution.
MB: So, you are saying that any scientist who does not comply with the global warming ideology imposed on universities, will fall victim?
Jaworowski: Yes. If politicians are funding the studies, on the one hand, scientists rejoice because science requires big money. But, on the other had, such research cannot freely flourish by listening to, and obeying political orders.
MB: Where did you next find a job?
Jaworowski: I moved some time later to Japan, where I worked at the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo. There I wrote the research results about the CO2 content in glaciers.
MB: You are not afraid of revenge from the "warming" lobby?
Jaworowski: Now I am 82 years old, and the financial consequences of the views which I preach are not of importance to me. But among researchers who share my views, there are not many younger scientists, especially those who have families dependent on them, who can afford to support such views. And besides, when I was younger, I did some research that concluded that man does pollute the world.
MB: What was that?
Jaworowski: In the late 1960s, I examined a small Polish glacier over Morskie Oko (a lake in the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland) for the presence of heavy metal compounds. This glacier contains about 100 annual layers of ice, so you can use it as a basis to explore of what was happening in the atmosphere in this area over the last century. My research showed that in this — seemingly — clean place, the concentration of lead rose as much as 12-fold in recent years.
MB: Was this study incorrect?
Jaworowski: It was correct, but at the time, I did not know that such results cannot be generalized. Meanwhile, on the basis of these studies, in an article in the scientific journal Nature, I stated that the concentration of lead in Europe had increased 12-fold. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), then asked me to carry out further research, for which I got — in the 1970s — $1.3 million. These funds financed ten of these glacier expeditions. Then, I performed the world's first pollution survey of glaciers in the last several hundred years, looking at heavy metals deposited on 17 glaciers between Spitsbergen and Antarctica. And, it was after I analyzed these results, that I realized that such high concentrations of lead on our local glacier over Morskie Oko were unique.
MB: Why?
Jaworowski: Because, for decades, cars emitting lead were allowed free access to this beautiful lake. . . . There was no evidence of such an increase in concentrations of heavy metals on the other glaciers. Conversely, in the 20th Century, some heavy metals were bound to fall with a little volcanic activity until 1963. The highest concentrations of heavy metals, we found not on the European glaciers in the Alps and Norway, but at the equator — Glacier Stanley in Ruwenzori Mountains, Africa , and in the Peruvian Andes, far from any industrial centers.
In cooperation with the EPA, I also made the first examination of the level of lead in human bones over the past 1,800 years, to see if it had changed. (I got special permission to collect the bones from the Polish church buildings from Fr. Card. Stefan Wyszynski, the Primate of Poland.) Then I carried out similar studies, covering the period of the last 5,000 years, in France, Peru, and Georgia. It turned out that the European population was heavily contaminated with lead throughout the Middle Ages, until the very end of the 19th Century. Only in the 20th Century, did the lead level among the Polish population fall by a hundred times, compared with the people buried in past ages.
For example, in human bones entombed in St. Mary's Church in Krakow, and two monasteries near this city, the lead levels ranged up to 92 micrograms of lead per gram of bone in the 11th Century, to 373 micrograms in the 17th Century, and 231 micrograms in the 19th Century. Then, in the bones of 42 persons from the same region, who died in the 20th Century, the lead content dropped to an average level of 5.4 micrograms of lead per gram of bone, only twice as high as the average level of 2.8 micrograms in 18 skeletons of inhabitants of the cave some 70 km west of Krakow, living 1,800 years earlier.
The lead levels which my French colleagues and I found in people buried in the 14th-16th centuries inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris reached up to 280 micrograms of lead per gram of bone, whereas in the Bronze Age (ca. 3,000 B.C.) the average lead level was 15 micrograms per gram of bone, almost the same as in the recent Parisians.
Later, a similar phenomenon was detected in the United States, Japan, and other countries. The biosphere and humankind are not so polluted as green chemiophobia made us to believe.
MB: From what you have said, it can be inferred that the lobby of radical environmentalists and industry for what's called clean energy has a greater influence than, say, lobbyists for energy companies operating on fossil fuels. It's hard to believe, however, by observing the power of the latter. . . .
Jaworowski: Here again, I use an example from my own experience. After I moved back from Japan, I worked for some time at the Norwegian Institute of Energy. At that time, we decided to see if the research on CO2 in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica was conducted properly. For half a year, I drafted a proposal for our research project. Our institute sent the proposal to 15 different potential sponsors, mainly companies operating oil and gas reserves. We held a seminar for them, which . . . was attended by, among others, a representative of one company, perhaps Statoil. This person heard what we said, and then told us that he liked our project, and his group would like to finance these studies, despite the costs amounting to $2 million.
Note, however, that after the company had consulted with the government, probably with the Environment Ministry, these "consultants" decided that this project would be "immoral." At the time, the Prime Minister of Norway was Mme. Gro Harlem Brundtland. She is now the UN special climate envoy. During the UN General Assembly session in May 2007, Brundtland declared that
"it's completely immoral, even to question the UN's scientific consensus" (on man-made global warming).
Climatic morality sounds like a Norwegian specialty.
MB: What did this mean?
Jaworowski: The Statoil representative said that, if his company had funded such research, that would be used against them by their competitors, and the company would be penalized much more than it costs to finance our research. Thus ended our project. . . .
MB: So you think that industrial civilization does not pollute the environment?
Jaworowski: Nature produces toxic substances, and often, these are many times greater in scale than those produced by the entire world's industry. For example, take the scare story of the accumulation of mercury in fish. Meanwhile, studies have shown that for centuries there has been a lot of mercury in the seas.
Such examples could be multiplied. However, we see that the terrible 20th Century, with all its dirty industry, has brought us two "horrible" things: an average of a doubled life expectancy in Poland, compared with that of 1900. Also that Poles, French, other Europeans, North and South Americans, and other peoples, since the 20th Century, have been less contaminated with lead than were our ancestors going back to the Middle Ages.
MB: How so? Precisely because of industry? After all, industry does emit a lot of harmful chemicals and we still have problems with the elimination of the effects of industrial pollution.
Jaworowski: The idea is that, already by the 10th Century, people in Europe ate from tin dishes. Meanwhile, the tin used in their manufacture of these dishes included up to 20% lead. If someone ate some sour foods, such as vinegar-based, then the acid reacted with lead, and a sweet lead acetate was created and consumed during a meal. In this way the compounds of the metal are dispatched in human organisms. There are many other similar examples of household, not environmental, sources of pandemic lead contaminations in the decades before the 20th Century.
In the 20th Century, thanks to the development of science and industry, we started to use porcelain, glass, and stainless steel in the kitchen, thus eliminating from our lives many sources of lead contamination. Among them the least important of the contaminants eliminated was the lead contained in gasoline. Just when we started to use leaded gasoline in the 1920s, the lead level in population dropped back to near pre-historic levels.
MB: Let us return to the issue today, the fight against CO2 as the alleged perpetrator of the alleged global warming. What will be the outcome of this fight?
Jaworowski: Maybe, Climategate, the recently disclosed affair of hiding and manipulating the real data on the alleged global warming, will have the effect of cleansing science and policy, and protecting civilization from catastrophe.
MB: Since there is so much data to disprove theories that blame man-made CO2 emissions for global warming, why aren't these theories simply thrown into the trash? Are universities, politicians, and some businesses so blinded by ideology, that they "squeeze" or knowingly lie to the public. If so, why? For a small group of people to profit at the expense of the majority?
Jaworowski: There are many intertwining reasons. The least important may be that a professor, for example, can ensure that he gets contracts and grants for research "on demand" — although personally he may not like it — so that his institute has the funding to maintain itself. If you confirm the expectations of the grant sponsors, you get further grants. And you do so, especially if you know that if reliable studies show that the expected results are wrong, that you would get no further grants.
MB: Does anyone in Copenhagen have enough courage to just throw into the trash the plans for draconian restrictions on CO2 emissions?
Jaworowski: Let's hope the politicians will open their eyes, and that "Climategate" will help in this. On the other hand, it will be difficult to limit the desire to use global warming ideology to increase revenue for some and to create a world government. Already in the 1960s, a report of a U.S. study group was created, composed of scientists, which was to present a forecast for world development. They looked at the coming period of peace, in which there would be no great war. The group's "Report from Iron Mountain," proposed a number of substitutes for war. One of them was to create a "fictitious enemy of the world" and have it be a matter of climate. In subsequent years, the proposal became almost pathological, or criminal, in nature. The Club of Rome held that "Earth has cancer; the cancer is man." Humanity as a whole has become a "fictitious enemy of the planet." That favourite of the environmentalists, Jacques Y. Cousteau, said that to maintain balance on Earth, every year 123 million people should be "removed." Such statements, unfortunately, multiplied. UN representatives want to reduce the number of people on Earth to 1 billion or less.
MB: Where do such inhuman ideas come from?
Jaworowski: It has its roots in Malthus, the British clergyman [Rev. Thomas Malthus], who, in 1798, formulated the false theory that while populations of the world would increase in geometric proportions, the food resources available to them would increase only arithmetically. Malthus interpreted overpopulation as an evil that would reduce the amount of food available per person, and he failed to take into account the technological advances in agriculture and food production. His drastic recommendations from 212 years ago are still being used, and are the basis of the Malthusianism of the Club of Rome and the green ideology. I wish to add that after the November outbreak of "Climategate", in December 2009, the former chief economic advisor of [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin, now the director of the prestigious Institute of Economic Analyses in Moscow, Dr. Andrei Illarionov, disclosed the mechanism of falsifying the global climate trends and constructing the infamous hockey curves of temperature. The Russians transferred to the CRU center at East Anglia University all the temperature data for the years 1860-2005, from their 476 meteorological stations covering about 20% of the land surface of the globe. From among these Russian stations, the CRU workers selected the data from only 121 stations, in such a way that in the years 1965-2005, the CRU made the temperature higher, and in the years 1860-1960 lower than the real temperature. Thus, they created a false increasing temperature trend of 0.67°C. Almost an exactly similar falsification of Australian temperature data by CRU and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Global Historical Climate Network (NOAA/GHNC), was disclosed in December by Dr. W. Eschenbach. In this case, the temperature trend was "corrected" to be 2.5°C higher. This illustrates how credulous the public and politicians have been for decades. They were falsely made to believe that they were well informed, with 90% certainty and full scientific consensus! "Climategate" might become a catharsis, a bitter medicine, that will free science and the public from the gloomy climatic phantom, save the world from global economic disaster, and allow us to enjoy the golden gift of nature: our Modern Warm Period. Let it last long.