Do you feel duped about Global Warming? You’re not alone

Spiegel Online
February 9, 2012

Will reduced solar activity counteract global warming in the coming decades? That is what outgoing German electric utility executive Fritz Vahrenholt claims in a new book. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he argues that the official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science.

The articulate utility executive is nervous at the beginning of the conversation. He is groping for words — not a common occurrence for the practiced provocateur. After all, Fritz Vahrenholt, 62, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, has been a rebel throughout his life. “Perhaps it’s just part of my generation,” he says.

He is typical of someone who came of age during the student protest movement of the late 1960s, and who fought against the chemical industry’s toxic manufacturing plants in the 1970s. His party, Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), chose him as environment senator in the city-state of Hamburg, where he incurred the wrath of the environmental lobby by building a waste incineration plant, earning him the nickname “Feuerfritze” (Fire Fritz). He worked in industry after that, first for oil multinational Shell and then for wind turbine maker RePower, which he helped develop. Now, as the outgoing CEO of the renewable energy group RWE Innogy, he is about to embark on his next major battle. “I’m going to make enemies in all camps,” he says.

He wants to break a taboo. “The climate catastrophe is not occurring,” he writes in his book “Die Kalte Sonne” (The Cold Sun), published by Hoffmann and Campe, which will be in bookstores next week.

He has only given the book to one climatologist, Jochem Marotzke, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, to read prior to its publication. Marotzke’s assessment is clear: Vahrenholt represents the standpoints of climate skeptics. “A number of the hypotheses in the book were refuted long ago,” Marotzke claims, but adds, on a self-critical note, that his profession has neglected to explain that global temperatures will not increase uniformly. Instead, says Marotzke, there could also be phases of stagnation and even minor declines in temperature. “This has exposed us to potential criticism,” he says.

While books by climate heretics usually receive little attention, it could be different in Vahrenholt’s case. “His fame,” says Marotzke, “will ensure that there will be a debate on the issue.”

The book is a source of discomfort within Vahrenholt’s party. No one with the SPD leadership is willing to comment on the theories of their prominent fellow party member, from former Environment Minister and current SPD Chairman Sigmar Gabriel to parliamentary floor leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was given an advance copy of the book.

A lecture Vahrenholt was scheduled to give at the University of Osnabrück in northwestern Germany was recently cancelled.

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