From the Diary of Ra

From the Diary of Ra, God of Global Warming

[Found in the Control Room of a certain auditorium in The Hague]

January, 2000

1st: A new millennium dawns. I feel mighty. Endless life swells within me. In the next century I shall melt the ice caps, flood the Ganges basin, and bring malaria to Spitzbergen - in winter!

8th: Those party-poopers with the satellite temperature data say it was no warmer last year than twenty years ago. Must get my people to rush out their surface temperature aggregates - cleansed of all urban heating effects, naturally.

13th: The President of the American Association of State Climatologists, George Taylor, says that after ten years’ study he has concluded that greenhouse warming is not a serious threat. Wise guy! No more greenhouse research grants for your state!

February

9th: Those insufferable satellite people say last month was one of the ten coldest since 1979. I am not going to look at those numbers for the rest of year - unless they warm up, of course.

18th: I publish an article in Science explaining why those silly satellite numbers don’t show any warming. It’s all because of dust from the Mt. Pinatubo volcano. Why didn’t I think of that before?

March

13th: Pat Michaels says I left out the El Chichón volcano, and that if you include it, the satellites again show no warming. He even reminds everyone how I got a warming trend out of the weather balloon data in ’96:

Sure I left out the beginning and end of the graph. But you can see my problem. If I’d put in all the data, there wouldn’t be a warming trend. That would have sent quite the wrong message in that sensitive pre-Kyoto period. Surely no-one believes Michaels anyway. Why, he used to be President of the American Association of State Climatologists!

April

1st: The perfect day to send the draft of my Third Assessment Report to the chosen few. I’ve learnt my lesson from last time. I make no predictions at all, so whatever happens, I did it. But I’ve also put in lots of scary scenarios that the papers can say are the consensus of 2,500 scientists.

I had a bit of trouble with CO2. It is still only rising at 1.5 ppm a year, as it has been since 1975. But I soon fixed that. I just cheated a bit on every factor that could push it up. I took the highest guesses I could find for population growth and industrial emissions, and the lowest for CO2 absorption by plants and the sea. Hey presto! In a couple of decades, the rate will double!

Demographers and stargazers I consult are only too happy to help. They get brownie points for interdisciplinary research. And I add them to the contributor’s list. My consensus rises to 2,550…

10th: The Tasmanian Devil, John Daly, gives out the url of my Report. Blast! Now anyone can send in comments, even if they don’t agree with it! And people will notice if I beef it up a bit after it’s finished. Just like last time when Fred Seitz said, “In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.” What a spoilsport!

May

10th: Warwick Hughes is poking around in my surface temperature aggregates. He shows how I deleted the first 50 years of the twentieth century from the record for De Bilt, Netherlands. Well I had to, Warwick! When I had those years in, the place was cooling. Everyone knows that’s impossible. And don’t tell me tiny little colonial settlements like Sydney or Melbourne have urban heat islands. Ridiculous!

30th: S. Fred Singer organises a briefing in Washington that pans my Report. His radiation experts have come up with some far-fetched notion that the sun might be warming the earth. Preposterous! Then they claim that observed changes in the sun might affect temperature here. Oil industry propaganda!

June

12th: I publish a report on Climate Change Impacts on the United States. The best climate models come from there. Unfortunately they are not scary enough. So I choose one Canadian one and one English one. They are both turkeys. Where one predicts floods, the other says droughts. But it’s all bad so I don’t care.

July

10th: This should be the top of the 11-year sunspot cycle. OK, let’s see those satellite numbers for June. Curses! - 0.005 degrees below average. Can’t somebody dig up some dirt on those infidels?

August

19th: I go to the North Pole for my holidays and find water. Hurrah! I tell the New York Times this is dramatic evidence of global warming. It’s the silly season so the story spreads like wildfire: “Pole melts for first time in 50 million years!”

28th: Oooooh, I loathe that Fred Singer. He tells the Wall Street Journal it’s often 10 degrees C at the North Pole in summer, and open water is quite common. Then a US Navy captain says he’s seen water there in May and my story is ridiculous. The NYT and Associated Press retract it. Luckily no-one notices. I wonder if the US Navy gets any greenhouse funding I can cut off…

September

3rd: Harry Priem of the University of Utrecht compares my consensus of 2,500 scientists to the Nazi publication, "A Hundred Against Einstein". He says that when Einstein heard about this book, he said “One would have been enough”, since a single irrefutable objection would have invalidated his theory. Thank heavens there aren’t too many smart alecs like Einstein around any more!

30th: I hear a lot of twittering from the Canaries this week. Those beastly solar people are in Tenerife trying to suborn my followers. The sun worshippers even appeal to me, shouting “Ra, Ra, tell them you’re the Sun God, not the Greenhouse God”. Well I used to be. But I was tired of getting up every morning at the crack of dawn for Brekke. So when those nice greenhouse people offered me cash and 2,500 fanatical followers, I decided to take up the challenge.

October

24th: My annual Conference starts in two weeks. If all goes well it will agree to a scheme that will sacrifice several percent of world production to ME. I get my disciples to leak a new scenario that says everyone will fry if they don’t agree. That should put them in the right frame of mind.

November

9th: Do I have to include these satellite sea level measurements in my Report ? Last time I said sea level rose 10-25cm in the 20th century, and will rise another 15-95cm in the 21st. So seven centimetres a century just can’t be right! At that rate it will take me until the middle of the fourth millennium to get it up one lousy meter. I may be eternal but I do get frustrated!

13th: Annual World Ecumenical Conference of my followers opens in The Hague. Fortunately the weather’s been lousy lately and Ministers from everywhere blame me. Dominique Voynet from France is my special favourite. I feel my thermohaline circulation rise when she walks into the hall…

20th: Limousine John Prescott squeezes behind the lectern to insist on the need to cut our consumer lifestyles. The windbag has a sandbag used in recent floods. I love him!

22nd: I throw a pie in the face of the American delegate to make him see reason. He caves in to 80 per cent of my demands. But that’s not enough! He must sell his nation’s SOUL. I tell the Europeans to send one of their number to tempt him. And they send PRESCOTT! The talks collapse. Holy halocarbons!

December

2nd: I’m still in The Hague and it’s freezing. Ahem - all because of the greenhouse effect, of course. I just slowed the Gulf Stream so global warming couldn’t improve the rotten European weather. Easy.

People are writing me off. Professors of climatology are saying it’s time to get off the greenhouse bandwagon. Can’t people see that anyone not on the bandwagon is bound to deny me? Anyway, I’ve still got $10 billion a year to give away to those who pledge allegiance. And I have every government in the world at my feet. I’ll be back. Don’t you worry about that.

You read it first here.

Posted 20, December, 2000