A RETIRED Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University physics professor has rejected the theory of global warming, arguing that temperatures are, in fact, cooling.

Addressing a group of students and lecturers in his old department on Friday, Prof Koos Vermaak said a global temperature rise was “not possible”.

What fluctuations there were had nothing to do with human activity and the generation of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide – a cornerstone of the warning by the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he said. “Politicians, Greenpeace and the media are to blame for these global warming lies.”

Vermaak (who was president of the EP Rugby Football Union in 1990) said the IPCC’s famous “hockey stick graph”, which showed a dramatic increase in global temperature since the start of the industrial revolution a century ago, was a case of “cherry-picking select results”.

The mediaeval warming period 900AD-1300AD and the Little Ice Age 1280-1850AD had been left out, skewing the graph. The results were consequently wrong, he said.

He said a 1990-2007 satellite study of the temperatures in the inner atmospheric envelope of stratosphere and the outer envelope of troposphere ought to show global warming, if it was occurring, because this was where the reflected heat of the sun was absorbed, in terms of the greenhouse effect.

But results of this study showed a –0,493°C decline over the past decade, “so in fact there is a cooling trend”.

Asked about the melting of ancient ice caps and similar increased heat events in other parts of the world, as filmed and televised across the world, he said these were region-specific and cyclical.

Battling to reduce carbon emissions was going to cost “R13-trillion”, and it was not worth it, he said.

He scoffed at the warning by climate change scientists of a dangerous rise in sea levels unless greenhouse emissions were drastically reduced.

“The biggest victims will be developing countries, which will miss out on the subsidies they used to get from developed countries.

“The most disturbing aspect of the climate change lie is the way people’s legitimate environmental concerns have been manipulated to further a political and financial agenda.”

A South African representative on the IPCC, Dr Guy Midgley of the SA National Biodiversity Institute, said Vermaak’s statements appeared to be “regurgitated denialist material”.

The “hockey stick graph” had been confirmed by several independent reports, including one by the US National Academy of Science, and Vermaak’s allegation about previous ice ages having been left out of the IPCC report was incorrect, he said. “There is a whole chapter in the (last) IPCC report (www.ipcc.ch) devoted to palaeo-climate and how it fits in.”

He said Vermaak’s reference to the stratosphere warming study was also flawed.

“A subsequent review showed that satellite drift and loss of altitude affected its findings. The matter was sorted out in 2003-04 in a review by a least three scientific publications which confirmed warming results correlating with surface studies.”

Suggestions that the IPCC was biased made no sense as the panel included scientists from the developed and developing world, he said.

Developing countries had an opportunity through UN climate change negotiations to attract funding and other support for technology transfer, adaptation support, and capacity building.