Posted on 12/28/2007 12:40:59 PM PST by neverdem
'The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001'
Global warming stopped? Surely not. What heresy is this? Haven’t we been told that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all that’s left to the so-called sceptics is the odd errant glacier that refuses to melt?
Aren’t we told that if we don’t act now rising temperatures will render most of the surface of the Earth uninhabitable within our lifetimes? But as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent IPCC’s Synthesis report that says climate change could become irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something is not quite right in the global warming camp.
With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been no warming over the 12 months.
But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.
In principle the greenhouse effect is simple. Gases like carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere absorb outgoing infrared radiation from the earth’s surface causing some heat to be retained.
Consequently an increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases from human activities such as burning fossil fuels leads to an enhanced greenhouse effect. Thus the world warms, the climate changes and we are in trouble.
The evidence for this hypothesis is the well established physics of the greenhouse effect itself and the correlation of increasing global carbon dioxide concentration with rising global temperature. Carbon dioxide is clearly increasing in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a straight line upward. It is currently about 390 parts per million. Pre-industrial levels were about 285 ppm. Since 1960 when accurate annual measurements became more reliable it has increased steadily from about 315 ppm. If the greenhouse effect is working as we think then the Earth’s temperature will rise as the carbon dioxide levels increase.
But here it starts getting messy and, perhaps, a little inconvenient for some. Looking at the global temperatures as used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met Office and the IPCC (and indeed Al Gore) it’s apparent that there has been a sharp rise since about 1980.
The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.
For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.
The explanation for the standstill has been attributed to aerosols in the atmosphere produced as a by-product of greenhouse gas emission and volcanic activity. They would have the effect of reflecting some of the incidental sunlight into space thereby reducing the greenhouse effect. Such an explanation was proposed to account for the global cooling observed between 1940 and 1978.
But things cannot be that simple. The fact that the global temperature has remained unchanged for a decade requires that the quantity of reflecting aerosols dumped put in our atmosphere must be increasing year on year at precisely the exact rate needed to offset the accumulating carbon dioxide that wants to drive the temperature higher. This precise balance seems highly unlikely. Other explanations have been proposed such as the ocean cooling effect of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
But they are also difficult to adjust so that they exactly compensate for the increasing upward temperature drag of rising CO2. So we are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does not stand the test of data.
It was a pity that the delegates at Bali didn’t discuss this or that the recent IPCC Synthesis report did not look in more detail at this recent warming standstill. Had it not occurred, or if the flatlining of temperature had occurred just five years earlier we would have no talk of global warming and perhaps, as happened in the 1970’s, we would fear a new Ice Age! Scientists and politicians talk of future projected temperature increases. But if the world has stopped warming what use these projections then?
Some media commentators say that the science of global warming is now beyond doubt and those who advocate alternative approaches or indeed modifications to the carbon dioxide greenhouse warming effect had lost the scientific argument. Not so.
Certainly the working hypothesis of CO2 induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far or that the working hypothesis is a sufficient explanation for what is going on.
I have heard it said, by scientists, journalists and politicians, that the time for argument is over and that further scientific debate only causes delay in action. But the wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.
The science is fascinating, the ramifications profound, but we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth’s atmosphere’s interaction with sunlight to decide. We know far less than many think we do or would like you to think we do. We must explain why global warming has stopped.
So, let me get this straight. Global warming enthusiasts claim that the globe will warm as concentrations of CO2 increase. Such concentrations have increased during the 67 years since 1940. During that same period, the globe cooled for 38 years (1940-1978), neither warmed nor cooled for 7 years (2000-2007), and warmed for 22 years (1978-2000). How exactly does this data support the global warming hypothesis?
I totally agree with you. There is enough there for conservatives to agree upon, without engaging in the hysterics and hyperbolics of the Left. Its a shame really.
You are kidding? AGW is strictly a political, money grabbing scheme. Gore, the frauds at realClimate and all those pushing AGW are out to destroy what's left of our capitalist system and get rich doing it. The MSM is relentless in brainwashing the masses. The Earth is fine and all that we need to do is "adapt" to any "natural" changes that are occurring. I am sorry you drank the koolaide of the AGW Stalinists.
One more thing.. Biased, left-wing scientists in academia had better come to grips with their bias or they are going to start making creationists look good.
Your credibility suffers by your use of such sources.
I like it!
Well, with his monthly utility bill, whew, he needs the dough.
The conservative movement *has* come to grips with AGW, determined that it is mostly a bunch of hooey, and is waiting for the inevitable acceptance of the fact that the flat-Earthers-—indeed, the spawn of the lovelies who treated Galileo so well-—are the Branch Algorians.
The same is true of cover photos of some “happy” celebrity couple, with the title of the article declaring this-—THIS-—is The Hollywood marriage that is working.
It’s always Splitsville a few months later.
No the end of global warming like a reduction in oil prices will only come when Hillary is elected. (sarcasm)
We all agree on being good stewards of the environment. But that is a completely separate issue from the wholly political agenda of AGW.
Since I am a cattle farmer, I had been led to believe the COWS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING. Glad to know I’m not to blame after all.
tight lines
right turns
Caddis
Even stipulating your article's complaints about cherry picking statistics; prior to any statistical analysis, some type of error analysis must be done on the data. The increases talked about are on the order of 1/10 C. That implies that the initial measurements had to have been made with at least that precision. The dirty little secret is that as the data goes back in time, the precision of the initial measurements degrades considerably. Your reference even admits that 1978 was the year that troposheric temperature data from satellites began being collected. There is no mention however of the effect of this change on the precision of the data that is being statistically analyzed. As one of the following posters says, the liberal scientist will join the flat earth society if they keep abstracting from rigorous scientific principles.
See the following: 400 Scientists doubt climate change.
100 Scientists appeal to the UN to not fight global warming.
List of 100 scientists, their degree and expertise.
You sound like a really nice guy but not up to the task on this issue.
"A high school dropout, ABD in streetlife, I've been self employed since my early twenties. Previous to my current business I made my living as an electron cop (I owned a company which specialized in specing and installing data comm products for large corporations). In "retierment" I started a Home Inspection business, I also purchase and rehab residential and investment properties. Like many self-educated people my opinions are rooted in wide and eclectic reading, filtered through a basically anecdotal approach to understanding life, and bobby-trapped with various surprising gaps in my knowledge.
“and uses the totally debunked “hockey-stick” graphics...”
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11646
According to whom?
Speaking of cherry picking data... From Canada's National Post, Published: Monday, August 13, 2007.
Last week, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- whose temperature records are a key component of the global-warming claim (and whose director, James Hansen, is a sort of godfather of global-warming alarmism) -- quietly corrected an error in its data set that had made recent temperatures seem warmer than they really were.
A little less than a decade ago, the U.S. government changed the way it recorded temperatures. No one thought to correlate the new temperatures with the old ones, though -- no one until Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, that is.
McIntyre has become the bane of many warmers' religious-like belief in climate catastrophe. In 2003, along with economist Ross McKitrick, McIntyre demolished the Mann "hockey stick" --a graph that showed stable temperatures for 1,000 years, then shooting up dangerously in the last half of the 20th Century.
The graph was used prominently by the UN and nearly every major eco lobby. But McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated it was based on incomplete and inaccurate data.
To NASA's credit, when McIntyre pointed out their temperature errors they quickly made corrections.
Still, the pro-warmers who dominate the Goddard Institute almost certainly recognized the impacts these changes would have on the global-warming debate, because they made no formal announcement of their recalculations.
In many cases, the changes are statistically minor, but their potential impact on the rhetoric surrounding global warming is huge.
The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third.
Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. Claiming that man-made carbon dioxide has caused the natural disasters of recent years makes as much sense as claiming fossil-fuel burning caused the Great Depression.
The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards.
In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.
Read it and weep, turkey.
G A S P ! ! ! !
Nobody saw this coming!!!!!!
(And you can be sure of the seriousness of my reply by the liberal use of exclamation marks.)
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