Our Guest Speaker - Mervyn Merrilees

Anthropogenic Warming: Questioning the Narrative

I have had a longstanding interest in climate and weather and around 2000 started to question the narrative that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is the primary driver of increased global temperatures and the cause of catastrophic storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and rises in sea level.

I have spent the past two and half decades looking at data and concluded that the approximately 1C of warming over the past century does not constitute a climate emergency. Importantly, CO2 at current levels plays only a small and diminishing role. Water vapour not only dominates CO2 as a warming gas but, when condensed as clouds, provides strong negative feedback to warming.

The talk will cover these and other aspects of climate including comments on current attempts to control warming through mandates such as net zero.

Mervyn Merrilees trained in the biological sciences at the Universities of Otago (BScHons) and Toronto (PhD), Research Fellow in the Department of Surgery University of Auckland investigating wound healing, academic appointment to Department of Anatomy University of Auckland teaching and undertaking research in musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and respiratory pathologies over a period of 40 years. Awarded a DSc from the University of Otago in 2004.