World getting cooler, not warmer, insists Bellamy

RONAN McGREEVY

WORLD-RENOWNED botanist and broadcaster Prof David Bellamy has predicted the world will get cooler over the next 30 years rather than warmer, as many climate scientists have predicted.

He said a period of global cooling had already begun, citing evidence that the Alps had more snow last winter than at any time for the last 26 years.

Prof Bellamy has been one of the best-known sceptics of man-made global warming, despite being an environmentalist. Yesterday, as patron of the Tree Appeal, he helped children at Cabinteely Community School to plant trees. The initiative aims to plant 100,000 trees in the UK and Ireland to encourage biodiversity and to act as a learning resource.

Prof Bellamy said temperature fluctuations are part of the natural process. “The argument [for man-made global warming] is going downhill. Climate change is a completely natural thing. It is based on the sun, and at the moment we are into the 24th sun cycle and there has been no sunspots for two years. The last time that happened, the Thames froze over.”

Prof Bellamy said the climate conference at Copenhagen will fail, and that many countries were already trying to pull out of it.

He has been criticised repeatedly by the scientific community for his views. Prof William Reville, who writes in this newspaper, said changes in the sun had affected global temperatures in the past, but the correlation between the sun and climate ended in the 1970s while global warming continued.