He doesn’t believe in ‘global warming’ and says ‘climate change’ is a meaningless term used as a sop by big business to create money. Neil Hudson met prof Les Woodcock

Climate change is once again back on the agenda following the publication of a number of reports from Government and the UN.

On Monday, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report in seven years on the now widely accepted phenomenon known as ‘climate change’.

And this week, the House of Commons Science and Technology committee also published a report, damning the media for confusing ‘fact’ with opinion and pushing the message that, in terms of freak weather, ‘the worst is yet to come’.

In spite of the seemingly overwhelming tide of scientific opinion on the matter, there are still some who steadfastly refuse to jump on the ‘global warming’ bandwagon.

Emeritus Professor Les Woodcock is one of them. When I ask the former NASA scientist about ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, he laughs.

“The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences.

“The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ – in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent.

“There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years.

“Anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean anything in science, its not significant.

“Events can happen with frequencies on all time scales in the physics of a chaotic system such as the weather. Any point on lowland can flood up to a certain level on all time scales from one month to millions of years and its completely unpredictable beyond around five days.

“We can go back to great floods and Noah’s Ark in the Middle East regions which are now desserts.

“The reason records seem to be being frequently broken is simply because we only started keeping them about 100 years ago. There will always be some record broken somewhere when we have another natural fluctuation in weather.

“Its absolutely stupid to blame floods on climate change, as I read the Prime Minister did recently. I don’t blame the politicians in this case, however, I blame his so-called scientific advisors.”

But surely most of the world’s leaders, scientific community and people in general can’t be wrong can they?

Prof Woodcock hits back: “This is not the way science works. If you tell me that you have a theory there is a teapot in orbit between the earth and the moon, its not up to me to prove it does not exist, its up to you to provide the reproducible scientific evidence for your theory.

“Such evidence for the man-made climate change theory has not been forthcoming.”

He adds: “It’s become almost an industry, as a consequence of this professional misconduct by Government advisors around the world, not just UK – you can’t blame ordinary people with little or no science education for wanting to be seen to be good citizens who care about their grandchildren’s future and the environment.

“In fact, the damage to our economy the climate change lobby is now costing us is infinitely more destructive to the livelihoods of our grand-children. Indeed, we grand-parents are finding it increasingly expensive just to keep warm as a consequence of the idiotic decisions our politicians have taken in recent years about the green production of electricity.

“Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas but the truth is it’s the gas of life. We breath it out, plants breath it in. The green lobby has created a do-good industry and it becomes a way of life, like a religion. I understand why people defend it when they have spent so long believing in it, people do not like to admit they have been wrong.

“If you talk to real scientists who have no political interest, they will tell you there is nothing in global warming. It’s an industry which creates vast amounts of money for some people.

“Even the term ‘global warming’ does not mean anything unless you give it a time scale. The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”

He adds: “Light bulbs are a good example of the contradiction with the green movement. Europe has outlawed the tungsten lightbulb. Tungsten is a harmless metal, like gold, it does not react with anything and yet now, in the name of conserving energy, we have low energy light bulbs full of toxic chemicals, including mercury vapour, which is poisonous. If you smash a low energy lightbulb, the advice from the Department for the Environment is to vacate the room for 15 minutes.”

The Environment Agency website has this to say on low energy lightbulbs: “Energy saving light bulbs and fluorescent light tubes contain small amounts of mercury… mercury is a hazardous substance, these lightbulbs should be disposed of in accordance with hazardous waste regulations.”

Claims of a new elemental ‘state’ challenges scientific opinion and could have implications for business in the future.

Prof Woodcock is also challenging other scientific dogma and now he’s come up with a radical theory about matter.

He explained: “It’s called a fourth state of matter. A colloid is a material in which one phase (solid, liquid or gas) disperses as very small particles or droplets in another (solid, liquid or gas).

“Colloid science is a huge part of condensed matter physics and, indeed everyday life, for example: blood (solid in liquid) milk (emulsion of an oil in water).

“Up to now, the two phases are different materials. Colloids are stabilised by forces at the surface of the dispersed phase which has a very large surface area. In colloid science, the dispersed phase and the continuous phase are two different materials, like air and water.

“There are nine possible different types of colloid: clouds are a colloid of liquid in gas, foam is a colloid of gas in liquid, wet sand is a colloidal dispersion of solid in liquid, dry sand is a dispersion of solid in gas, porous rock above sea level is a colloid of gas (air) in solid (dry sponge), porous rock underwater is colloid of liquid (water) in solid (wet sponge), uncorroded rock is an aggregate of solid in solid (like set concrete), the remaining one is emulsion (liquid in liquid).

“To my knowledge, there is no colloid of gas in gas.

“For a pure material, like water, at low temperatures it was believed there was just solid liquid and gas. In 1873 van der Waals was awarded the Nobel Prize for his PhD thesis on the critical point above which liquid and gas become the same. This hypothesis has been accepted for 140 years but what we find now is that there is no continuity of liquid and gas and no critical point. The liquid and gas phases are separated even up to high supercritical temperatures by [something called a] mesophase which is neither pure liquid nor pure gas nor a hybrid. It is a colloid of gas in liquid or liquid in gas.

“This is a fourth equilibrium state that is not solid liquid or gas, a colloid of the same material dispersed in itself as a different phase is new science.”.

 

FACTFILE

Carbon dioxide (CO2) was discovered around 1770 by Joseph Priestley, who also discovered oxygen (O2) in 1774, for which he is better known.

A scientist called Le Chatelier proposed the so-called ‘equilibrium law’, which has been used to argue if CO2 increases in the atmosphere, plants will metabolise it faster.

Before the Industrial Revolution there used to be about 27 molecules of CO2 for every 100,000 molecules of air – now there are roughly 39 molecules per 100,000

molecules of air.