A new ice age is due now, but you wont hear it from the green groups, who like to play on Western guilt about consumerism to make us believe in global warming.

THE Earth's climate is changing in a dramatic way, with immensedanger for mankind and the natural systems that sustain it. This wasthe frightening message broadcast to us by environmentalists in therecent past. Here are some of their prophecies.

The facts have emerged, in recent years and months,from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a newice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source ofwholesale death and misery for mankind. (Nigel Calder, former editor ofNew Scientist, in International Wildlife, July 1975)

The cooling has already killed thousands of people inpoor nations... If it continues, and no strong measures are taken todeal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, andprobably world war, and this could all come about by the year 2000.(Lowe Ponte, The Cooling, 1976)

As recently as January 1994, the supreme authority on matters environmental, Time magazine, wrote:

The ice age cometh? Last week's big chill was a reminderthat the Earth's climate can change at any time ... The last (ice age)ended 10,000 years ago; the next one— for there will be a next on—couldstart tens of thousands of years from now. Or tens of years. Or it mayhave already started.

The scare about global cooling was always the same: unprecedented low temperatures; the coldest weather recorded; unusual floods and storms; a rapid shift in the world's climate towards an icy apocalypse.

But now, the scare is about global warming. To convert from thefirst scare to the second, all you have to do is substitute "thecoldest weather recorded" with "the warmest weather recorded". Replacethe icicles hanging from oranges in California with melting glaciers onMt Everest, and the shivering armadillos with sweltering polar bears.We were going to freeze but now we are going to fry.

Even the White House is making cautionary sounds about warming.

What facts have emerged to make this dramatic reversal? Well, nonereally. The most reliable measurements show no change whatsoever inglobal temperatures in the past 20 years. What has changed is theperception that global warming makes a better scare than the coming iceage.

A good environmental scare needs two ingredients. The first isimpending catastrophe. The second is a suitable culprit to blame. Inthe second case, the ice age fails and global warming is gloriouslysuccessful. It is not the destruction itself of Sodom and Gomorrah thatmakes the story so appealing but the fact that they were destroyedbecause they were so sinful.

One of the real threats to mankind is the danger of collision with alarge asteroid. It has happened in the past with catastrophic effect,and it will probably happen again. But there are no conferences,resolutions, gatherings, protests and newspaper headlines aboutasteroid impacts. The reason is that you cannot find anyone suitable toblame for them. If you could persuade people that President Bush or theoil companies were responsible for the asteroids, I guarantee therewould be a billion-dollar campaign to "raise awareness" about theasteroid danger, with sonorous editorials in all the papers.

Global warming has the perfect culprit: naughty, industrialised,advanced, consuming, Western society, which has made itself very richby burning a lot of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). This, so thescare goes, is releasing a lot of carbon dioxide. which is dangerouslyheating up the world.

THERE are two facts in the scare. First, it is true that carbondioxide is a greenhouse gas one which traps heat on Earth. (Without it,the Earth would be too cold for' life.) Second, it is true that theconcentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. The restis guesswork.

The global warmers said the most accurate measure of climate changewould be air temperatures. For the past 20 years or more, airtemperatures have been measured with extreme accuracy. They show nowarming whatsoever.

Surface temperatures are much less reliable since the recordingstations are often encroached on by expanding cities, which warm thelocal environment. The curve most often used by the global warmers isone showing surface temperatures rising by about half a degree in thepast 100 years. (The curve, incidentally, is a bad match against risingcarbon dioxide but a good one against solar activity, which suggeststhe sun might be the reason for the warming.)

However, there are accurate methods of measuring sea temperaturesgoing back much further. Past temperatures for the Atlantic Ocean havebeen found by looking at dead marine life. The isotope ratio ofcarbon-14 in their skeletons tells you when they lived. The ratio ofother isotopes tells you the temperature then. Thus we are able to knowtemperatures in the Atlantic and northern Europe going back thousandsof years. They make nonsense of the global warming scare.

The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. Temperatures rose tothe "Holocene Maximum" of about 5000 years ago when it was about l.5°Chigher than now, dropped in the time of Christ, and then rose to the"Medieval Climate Optimum" in the years 600 to 1100, when temperatures.were about 1°C higher than now. This was a golden age for northernEuropean. agriculture and led to the rise of Viking civilisation.

Greenland, now a frozen wasteland, was then a habitable Vikingcolony. There were vineyards in the south of England. Then temperaturesdropped to "The Little Ice Age" in the 1600s, when the Thames frozeover. And they have been rising slowly ever since, although they arestill much lower than 1000 years ago.

We are now in a rather cool period.

What caused these ups and downs of temperature? We do not know.Temperature changes are a fact of nature, and we have no idea if theclaimed 0.3C heating over the past 100 years is caused by man'sactivities or part of a natural cycle.

What we can say, though, is that if Europe heats up by 1°C it woulddo it a power of good. We can see this from records of 1000 years ago.Moreover, increased carbon dioxide makes plants grow more quickly, soimproving crops and forests.

The Earth's climate is immensely complicated, far beyond our presentpowers of understanding and the calculating powers of modern computers.Changes in phase from ice to water to vapour; cloud formation;convection; ocean currents; winds; changes in the sun: the complicatedshapes of the land masses; the ability of the oceans to absorb carbondioxide — all of these and a thousand other factors operating withsmall differences over vast masses and distances make it practicallyimpossible for us to make predictions about long-term climate patterns,and perhaps make such predictions inherently impossible. The computermodels that the global warmers now use are ludicrously oversimplified,and it is no surprise they have made one wrong prediction after another.

If the global warming scare has little foundation in fact, theice-age scare is only too solidly founded. For the past two millionyears, but not before, the northern hemisphere has gone through aregular cycle of ice ages: 90,000 years with ice: 10,000 years without.The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. Our time is up. The next iceage is due.

We do not know what causes the ice ages. It is probably to do withthe arrangement of northern land masses and the path of the GulfStream, but we do not know.

However, a new ice age, unlike global warming, would be a certain calamity.

It may be that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphereare actually warding off the ice age. In this case, we should give taxrelief to coal power stations and factories for every tonne of carbondioxide they release.

When the global warmers tell us the stakes are high, they are quiteright. Global warming has become an immense international gravy trainworth billions of dollars. It is now one of the largest recipients ofgovernment research money in the world.

It finances jobs, grants, conferences, international travel andjournals. It not only keeps a huge army of people in comfortableemployment but also fills them with self-righteousness and moralsuperiority. It enables the green movement to say: "The end is nighunless you give us more funding, repent, and do what we say."

Behind these exhortations is the vision of Rousseau, of a retreatfrom the evil industrialised world of motor cars and electricity backto the simpler, nobler world of nature (except for the green priesthoodwho will still be allowed to fly in jet planes to conferences).

When President Bush denounced the Kyoto Protocol on greenhousegases, the global warmers said: "It's payback time." They werereferring to the oil companies which had supposedly made big donationsto his election campaign.

But if Al Gore had won and given even more funding to the warmers,it would have been payback time in a more pointed way. The oilcompanies can easily diversify out of oil and into other forms ofenergy — they are already doing so; BP is the world's largest producerof solar panels.

The global warmers are a more constrained vested interest. Theydepend on frightening the public and need global warming. This is whythey get so furiouswhen anyone dares to challenge the scare.The fraud of the warming scare is seen most vividly when the warmerspropose their remedies for it. The best technology for avoiding theemission of carbon dioxide is nuclear power. In operation, nuclearpower plants release no carbon dioxide and over their whole cycle(construction, fuel processing and decommissioning) they release theleast carbon dioxide of any energy source, including wind and solarpower. Half of the 272 million tonnes of man-made carbon dioxide thatSouth Africa produces comes from coal power stations; South Africacould halve its total emissions simply by turning to nuclear power forelectricity generation.

Nuclear power has by far the best safety record of any large-scalesource of electricity. The worst accident at a nuclear power station inthe West, at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, killed noone, injured no one and had no ill effects afterwards. By contrast gas,oil, coal and hydro accidents almost routinely kill thousands of peopleevery year. The Chernobyl accident, which after 16 years has killedabout 40 people, was caused primarily by bad reactor design, whichwould never be allowed in the West. The waste from nuclear power issmall, solid, stable and of finite life. Nuclear power is the onlylarge-scale source of electricity that has procedures for disposing ofits waste (which is easy to do). The waste from coal stations isenormously larger, much more dangerous and longer lived; it includesheavy metal toxins, which last for ever, and radioactive elements suchas thorium, which has a half-life of 14 billion years.

COAL waste is simply thrown on to open ash tips or hurled into theair we breathe. But the global warmers fiercely resist nuclear power.They do not want it precisely because it offers the world bountifulelectricity. What they want is to turn away from the modern world ofplenty to a primitive world of scarcity. They do not want people in thepoor countries to obtain higher living standards; they want them miredin noble poverty.

One of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide is motor vehicles. Ifyour speed doubles, you emit four times as much carbon dioxide. SomeEuropean politicians, especially in Germany, are very concerned aboutglobal warming. So how about imposing a 80km/h speed limit on all roadsin the European Union and limiting engine size to 1000cc? Ask Germanpoliticians who back the warming scare, which is more important, thefuture of the world or an infantile desire to travel at high speed. Theanswer is clear: speed. So much for serious debate.

The global warming scare uses almost every propaganda device. Thereare continual appeals to scientific authority. The propagandistspretend there is scientific consensus that man's activities aredefinitely changing the climate in a dangerous way.

This is an outright lie. You will find no reputable scientist whosays so. Graphs are carefully edited so that parts showing cooling areremoved and those showing warming are kept. Cooling incidents, such asthickening of ice caps, snow in Saudi Arabia and record lowtemperatures, are ignored. Warming incidents, such as breaking iceshelves and record high temperatures, are headlines. This is not aco-ordinated conspiracy but a fashion in which self-interest andideology combine, and green activists, politicians and journalists helpeach other to get more funding, more sensational stories and moreenemies to blame.

The climate of our planet is far too important for this nonsense.What we need is more genuine scientific research. If we do decide onthe "precautionary principle" of keeping carbon dioxide levels stable,we can turn to those many technologies, proven or in prospect, whichrelease no or little carbon dioxide. Nuclear power is the obvious firstchoice.

There is no reason the world economy cannot continue to prosper withlower greenhouse emissions. But, for heaven's sake, let's start bytelling the whole truth and giving all the facts.