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Global Warming
- Thread starter Disco08
- Start date
Giardiasis said:
no its not. Its an insult to anyone who actually has lived under a totallitarian regime to suggest it is.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/how-i-saw-past-the-hot-air-on-climate-20120730-239zl.html
Bolta.tigersnake said:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/not_a_sceptic_not_our_champion_not_conclusive_but_warmists_cheer/
Freezer said:
It's a story about Muller's seeming change of heart about anthropogenic global warming given his recent analysis of temperature station data. Here's another link about the topic, from the WSJ no less. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html
The denialists have a (minor) point in that Muller was always a scientist who looked at the empirical data but tended more towards the "AGW is not yet proven" side, so it's arguable that he was ever truly a denialist.
The interesting thing is that Bolta and the denialists are more interested in the semantics of what labels should or shouldn't be applied to Muller rather than the actual science. Guess nothing ever changes on this front.
He's an amazing man Bolt. You have to ask what majority would convince him? Would he still be ranting and raving if there is one scientist left who's theory he agrees with?
His head might explode one day. But I guess he knows where his bread is buttered.
His head might explode one day. But I guess he knows where his bread is buttered.
FWIW
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/here-comes-the-sun-chilling-verdict-on-a-climate-going-to-extremes-20120806-23q5o.html
The bloke is just a third rate hack from Baronia TAFE who once allegedly cheated on his tax and had an affair with his secretary, but anyway, I thought some might find it interesting.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/here-comes-the-sun-chilling-verdict-on-a-climate-going-to-extremes-20120806-23q5o.html
The bloke is just a third rate hack from Baronia TAFE who once allegedly cheated on his tax and had an affair with his secretary, but anyway, I thought some might find it interesting.
I heard Muller interviewed and thought his arrogance was medal-worthy. He has done fresh research and come to the same conclusion as the multitude of scientists before him but declares HIS study to be definitive. Glad to be able to pull yet another gun from the arsenal of the deluded but can't say I warmed to the man upon hearing him.antman said:
tigersnake said:
Yeah what would a NASA bloke know. They just flew a $2.5 bilion lab half way across the galaxy and landed it on Mars. Losers, not like those cando science guys Jonesy, Bolta and Monkton
I am amazed this thread still exists seeing the science of "carbonic acid" climate change goes back to the 19th century.
Here's the take of another commy rag "Forbes" magazine.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/10/the-basic-science-of-climate-change-is-undeniable/
I don't get how the political right can be taken seriously when opposing AGW on the basis of the science. Whether the physics is right or wrong has nothing to do with politics. The only reason for AGW to become a right wing issue can be economic. How can they be treated seriously when they claim their view is based on science rather than the hip-pocket?
Wow, Jones held to account somewhat. Amazing.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/alan-jones-ordered-to-undergo-factual-accuracy-training-20121018-27srs.html
It will have zero effect on his message however. He'll just change tack a little, stay away from specifics, put subtle riders in maybe, and plough on regardless. Cash for comment, incorrect facts, water off a parrot's back. Don't you worry about that.
As someone who has long hated the half-truth and lies peddled with apparent impunity by right wing hacks such as Jones and Bolt, I love the headline. 'Alan Jones forced to undergo 'Factual Accuracy' training.' I'd love to be a fly on the wall in that classroom.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/alan-jones-ordered-to-undergo-factual-accuracy-training-20121018-27srs.html
It will have zero effect on his message however. He'll just change tack a little, stay away from specifics, put subtle riders in maybe, and plough on regardless. Cash for comment, incorrect facts, water off a parrot's back. Don't you worry about that.
As someone who has long hated the half-truth and lies peddled with apparent impunity by right wing hacks such as Jones and Bolt, I love the headline. 'Alan Jones forced to undergo 'Factual Accuracy' training.' I'd love to be a fly on the wall in that classroom.
tigersnake said:
What about 2GB's defence of Jones' fallacious direct statement on Australia's contribution to atmospheric carbon?
"It's just a matter of opinion"
"There's scientific doubt about AGW"
and finally, best of all,
Jones does his own research!
If 2GB thought those arguments would wash they must think the rest of Australia is as credulous as their deluded audience.
Apologies for the extra long post.
For those of us that aren't scientists or have access to the definitive studies that show the earth continues to warm, when articles like the following are published, why shouldn't we at least ask questions about the so called global warming 'concensus'?
I genuinely don't profess to have the technical knowledge to draw my own conclusions, so I have to rely on the data being interpreted for me. These articles certainly plant more seeds of doubt.
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it
By David Rose, PUBLISHED: 22:42, 13 October 2012 | UPDATED: 14:59, 16 October 2012
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.
The regular data collected on global temperature is called Hadcrut 4, as it is jointly issued by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Prof Jones’s Climatic Research Unit.
Since 1880, when worldwide industrialisation began to gather pace and reliable statistics were first collected on a global scale, the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius.
Some scientists have claimed that this rate of warming is set to increase hugely without drastic cuts to carbon-dioxide emissions, predicting a catastrophic increase of up to a further five degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The new figures were released as the Government made clear that it would ‘bend’ its own carbon-dioxide rules and build new power stations to try to combat the threat of blackouts.
At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.
Flawed science costs us dearly
Here are three not-so trivial questions you probably won’t find in your next pub quiz. First, how much warmer has the world become since a) 1880 and b) the beginning of 1997? And what has this got to do with your ever-increasing energy bill?
You may find the answers to the first two surprising. Since 1880, when reliable temperature records began to be kept across most of the globe, the world has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius.
From the start of 1997 until August 2012, however, figures released last week show the answer is zero: the trend, derived from the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points, has been flat.
Not that there has been any coverage in the media, which usually reports climate issues assiduously, since the figures were quietly release online with no accompanying press release – unlike six months ago when they showed a slight warming trend.
The answer to the third question is perhaps the most familiar. Your bills are going up, at least in part, because of the array of ‘green’ subsidies being provided to the renewable energy industry, chiefly wind.
They will cost the average household about £100 this year. This is set to rise steadily higher – yet it is being imposed for only one reason: the widespread conviction, which is shared by politicians of all stripes and drilled into children at primary schools, that, without drastic action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, global warming is certain soon to accelerate, with truly catastrophic consequences by the end of the century – when temperatures could be up to five degrees higher.
Hence the significance of those first two answers. Global industrialisation over the past 130 years has made relatively little difference.
And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock.
It poses a fundamental challenge to the assumptions underlying every aspect of energy and climate change policy.
This ‘plateau’ in rising temperatures does not mean that global warming won’t at some point resume.
But according to increasing numbers of serious climate scientists, it does suggest that the computer models that have for years been predicting imminent doom, such as those used by the Met Office and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are flawed, and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert. ‘The new data confirms the existence of a pause in global warming,’ Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America’s Georgia Tech university, told me yesterday.
‘Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete. Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect.
‘It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails three years ago, would not normally be expected to agree with her. Yet on two important points, he did.
The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’.
Like Prof Curry, Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’
Yet he insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said.
Yet in 2009, when the plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, he told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
But although that point has now been passed, he said that he hadn’t changed his mind about the models’ gloomy predictions: ‘I still think that the current decade which began in 2010 will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.’
Only if that did not happen would he seriously begin to wonder whether something more profound might be happening. In other words, though five years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years.
Meanwhile, his Met Office colleagues were sticking to their guns. A spokesman said: ‘Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system.’
He said that for the plateau to last any more than 15 years was ‘unlikely’. Asked about a prediction that the Met Office made in 2009 – that three of the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record – he made no comment. With no sign of a strong El Nino next year, the prospects of this happening are remote.
Why all this matters should be obvious. Every quarter, statistics on the economy’s output and models of future performance have a huge impact on our lives. They trigger a range of policy responses from the Bank of England and the Treasury, and myriad decisions by private businesses.
Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast.
Few people would be so foolish. But decisions of far deeper and more costly significance than those derived from output figures have been and are still being made on the basis of climate predictions, not of the next three months but of the coming century – and this despite the fact that Phil Jones and his colleagues now admit they do not understand the role of ‘natural variability’.
The most depressing feature of this debate is that anyone who questions the alarmist, doomsday scenario will automatically be labelled a climate change ‘denier’, and accused of jeopardising the future of humanity.
So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed – a conclusion with enormous policy implications.
For those of us that aren't scientists or have access to the definitive studies that show the earth continues to warm, when articles like the following are published, why shouldn't we at least ask questions about the so called global warming 'concensus'?
I genuinely don't profess to have the technical knowledge to draw my own conclusions, so I have to rely on the data being interpreted for me. These articles certainly plant more seeds of doubt.
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it
By David Rose, PUBLISHED: 22:42, 13 October 2012 | UPDATED: 14:59, 16 October 2012
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.
The regular data collected on global temperature is called Hadcrut 4, as it is jointly issued by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Prof Jones’s Climatic Research Unit.
Since 1880, when worldwide industrialisation began to gather pace and reliable statistics were first collected on a global scale, the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius.
Some scientists have claimed that this rate of warming is set to increase hugely without drastic cuts to carbon-dioxide emissions, predicting a catastrophic increase of up to a further five degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The new figures were released as the Government made clear that it would ‘bend’ its own carbon-dioxide rules and build new power stations to try to combat the threat of blackouts.
At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.
Flawed science costs us dearly
Here are three not-so trivial questions you probably won’t find in your next pub quiz. First, how much warmer has the world become since a) 1880 and b) the beginning of 1997? And what has this got to do with your ever-increasing energy bill?
You may find the answers to the first two surprising. Since 1880, when reliable temperature records began to be kept across most of the globe, the world has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius.
From the start of 1997 until August 2012, however, figures released last week show the answer is zero: the trend, derived from the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points, has been flat.
Not that there has been any coverage in the media, which usually reports climate issues assiduously, since the figures were quietly release online with no accompanying press release – unlike six months ago when they showed a slight warming trend.
The answer to the third question is perhaps the most familiar. Your bills are going up, at least in part, because of the array of ‘green’ subsidies being provided to the renewable energy industry, chiefly wind.
They will cost the average household about £100 this year. This is set to rise steadily higher – yet it is being imposed for only one reason: the widespread conviction, which is shared by politicians of all stripes and drilled into children at primary schools, that, without drastic action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, global warming is certain soon to accelerate, with truly catastrophic consequences by the end of the century – when temperatures could be up to five degrees higher.
Hence the significance of those first two answers. Global industrialisation over the past 130 years has made relatively little difference.
And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock.
It poses a fundamental challenge to the assumptions underlying every aspect of energy and climate change policy.
This ‘plateau’ in rising temperatures does not mean that global warming won’t at some point resume.
But according to increasing numbers of serious climate scientists, it does suggest that the computer models that have for years been predicting imminent doom, such as those used by the Met Office and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are flawed, and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert. ‘The new data confirms the existence of a pause in global warming,’ Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America’s Georgia Tech university, told me yesterday.
‘Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete. Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect.
‘It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails three years ago, would not normally be expected to agree with her. Yet on two important points, he did.
The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’.
Like Prof Curry, Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’
Yet he insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said.
Yet in 2009, when the plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, he told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
But although that point has now been passed, he said that he hadn’t changed his mind about the models’ gloomy predictions: ‘I still think that the current decade which began in 2010 will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.’
Only if that did not happen would he seriously begin to wonder whether something more profound might be happening. In other words, though five years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years.
Meanwhile, his Met Office colleagues were sticking to their guns. A spokesman said: ‘Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system.’
He said that for the plateau to last any more than 15 years was ‘unlikely’. Asked about a prediction that the Met Office made in 2009 – that three of the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record – he made no comment. With no sign of a strong El Nino next year, the prospects of this happening are remote.
Why all this matters should be obvious. Every quarter, statistics on the economy’s output and models of future performance have a huge impact on our lives. They trigger a range of policy responses from the Bank of England and the Treasury, and myriad decisions by private businesses.
Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast.
Few people would be so foolish. But decisions of far deeper and more costly significance than those derived from output figures have been and are still being made on the basis of climate predictions, not of the next three months but of the coming century – and this despite the fact that Phil Jones and his colleagues now admit they do not understand the role of ‘natural variability’.
The most depressing feature of this debate is that anyone who questions the alarmist, doomsday scenario will automatically be labelled a climate change ‘denier’, and accused of jeopardising the future of humanity.
So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed – a conclusion with enormous policy implications.
It was then followed up with the following, a few days later.
The REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming. Last week we explosively revealed a 16-year 'pause' in rising temperatures - triggering a bitter debate. You decide what the real facts are...
By David Rose, PUBLISHED: 22:18, 20 October 2012 | UPDATE,: 11:22, 21 October 2012
Last week The Mail on Sunday provoked an international storm by publishing a new official world temperature graph showing there has been no global warming since 1997.
The figures came from a database called Hadcrut 4 and were issued by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University.
We received hundreds of responses from readers, who were overwhelmingly critical of those climate change experts who believe that global warming is inevitable.
But the Met Office, whose lead was then followed by climate change campaigners, accused The Mail on Sunday of cherry-picking data in order to mislead readers. It even claimed it had not released a ‘report’, as we had stated, although it put out the figures from which we drew our graph ten days ago.
Another critic said that climate expert Professor Judith Curry had protested at the way she was represented in our report. However, Professor Curry, a former US National Research Council Climate Research Committee member and the author of more than 190 peer-reviewed papers, responded: ‘A note to defenders of the idea that the planet has been warming for the past 16 years. Raise the level of your game. Nothing in the Met Office’s statement . . . effectively refutes Mr Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in the global average surface temperature for the past 16 years.
‘Use this as an opportunity to communicate honestly with the public about what we know and what we don’t know about climate change. Take a lesson from other scientists who acknowledge the “pause”.’
The Met Office now confirms on its climate blog that no significant warming has occurred recently: ‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’
Here, we answer some of the key questions on climate change – and invite readers to make their own choice . . .
Q Is the world warming or not?
A The Hadcrut 4 figures that show a ‘pause’ in warming lasting nearly 16 years are drawn from more than 3,000 measuring stations on land and at sea. Hadcrut 4 is one of several similar global databases that reveal the same thing: that since January 1997 there has been no statistically significant warming of the Earth’s surface.
Between 1980 and the end of 1996, the planet warmed at a rate close to 0.2 degrees per decade. Since then, says the Met Office, the trend has been a much lower 0.03 degrees per decade.
However, world average temperature measurements are subject to an error of plus or minus 0.1 degrees, while any attempt to calculate a trend for the period 1997-2012 has an in-built statistical error of plus or minus 0.4 degrees. The claim that there has been any statistically significant warming for the past 16 years is therefore unsustainable.
Q Why does it matter if the world is warming or not?
A For years, the Government’s energy and climate policy has been dominated by the belief that we need swift, drastic and expensive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to avert imminent catastrophe. In September, The Guardian claimed there were ‘less than 50 months to avoid climate disaster’.
These fears are based on computer models that show temperatures continuing to rise in step with levels of CO2.
The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: ‘For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade is projected for a range of emission scenarios’ – a prediction it said was solid because this rate of increase was already being observed.
But while CO2 levels have continued to rise since 1997, warming has paused. This leads Prof Curry to say the IPCC’s models are ‘incomplete’, because they do not adequately account for natural factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and a decline in solar output, which have suppressed the warming effects of CO2.
The Met Office and the CRU’s Professor Phil Jones say a ‘plateau’ of between 15 and 17 years is to be expected. But if the warming does not start again soon, the models will be open to challenge.
Q Did The Mail on Sunday ‘cherry-pick’ data to disguise an underlying warming trend?
A Some critics claim this newspaper misled readers by choosing start and end dates that hide the continued warming.
In fact, we looked at the period since 1997 because that’s when the previous warming trend stopped, and our graph ended in August 2012 because that is the last month for which Hadcrut 4 figures were available.
In April, the Met Office released figures up to the end of 2010 – an extremely warm year – which meant it was able to say there had been a statistically significant warming trend after 1997, albeit a very small one. However, 2011 and 2012 so far have been much cooler, meaning the trend has disappeared. This may explain why the updated figures were issued last week without a media fanfare.
Q But isn’t it true that the science is ‘settled’?
A Some scientists say the pause is illusory – if you strip out the effects of El Nino (when the South Pacific gets unpredictably warmer by several degrees), and La Nina (its cold counterpart), the underlying warming trend remains. Both phenomena have a huge impact on world weather.
Other experts point out one of the biggest natural factors behind the plateau is the fact that in 2008 the temperature cycle in the Pacific flipped from ‘warm mode’, in which it had been locked for the previous 40 years, to ‘cold mode’, meaning surface water temperatures fell. A cold Pacific cycle causes fewer and weaker El Ninos, and more, stronger La Ninas.
Prof Curry said that stripping out these phenomena made ‘no physical sense’. She added that natural phenomena and the CO2 greenhouse effect interact with each other, and cannot meaningfully be separated. It’s not just that the ‘cold mode’ has partly caused the plateau.
According to Prof Curry and others, the previous warm Pacific cycle and other natural factors, such as a high solar output, accounted for some of the warming seen before 1997 – some say at least half of it.
Other scientists say that heat has somehow been absorbed by the waters deep in the oceans. However, the evidence for this is contested, and there are no historical records with which to compare recent deepwater readings.
In the wake of the pause, the scientific ‘consensus’ looks much less settled than it did a few years ago.
Q When will warming start again?
A The truth is no one knows. It is likely that in the 2020s, the Atlantic cycle – currently in warm mode – will also flip to cold, so that for some years both the Pacific and Atlantic cycles will be cold at the same time. When this happens, world temperatures may decline, as they did in the Forties.
Prof Curry said: ‘If we are currently in a plateau and possibly headed for cooling, then sometime in the middle of the century we would likely see another period with a large warming trend.’
She added: ‘Because of natural variability, it is impossible to pinpoint what 2100 would look like. The climate sensitivity to greenhouse warming is still pretty uncertain, and it is not clear whether or to what extent man-made factors will dominate the climate of this period.’
For the world to be two degrees warmer in 2100 than it is now – as the IPCC has predicted – warming would not only have to restart but also proceed much faster than it has before.
Since 1880, temperatures have risen by around 0.75 degrees.
Q But isn’t the world still much warmer than at any time in recorded history?
A Ever since it was published on the cover of the IPCC’s Third Assessment report in 2001, the ‘hockey stick’ graph showing stable or declining temperatures since the year 1000, followed by a steep rise in the 20th Century, has been controversial. There were no thermometers in 1000, so scientists use ‘proxy’ data from items such as tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores.
The hockey stick authors have also been accused of eliminating the ‘medieval warm period’ (MWP) at the end of the first millennium.
Two new separate peer-reviewed studies, published in prestigious academic journals last week, reinstated it. The first study, led by Bo Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute, concluded: ‘The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th Century, equalled or slightly exceeded the mid-20th Century warming.’
There was also a pronounced warming period in Roman times.
Q So where does that leave us?
A Despite The Guardian’s bold claim that we have ‘50 months to save the world’, other evidence suggests that there are still decades left in which to plan an energy strategy driven by something other than panic.
In Britain, in the short to medium term, that would mean building modern ‘dual cycle’ gas power stations, which produce very clean energy and, unlike inefficient wind turbines, do not require subsidies to be economic.
In the longer term, we could be investing heavily in research into new forms of zero-carbon power, such as nuclear fusion, which are much closer to reality than most people realise.
Q Surely we can leave it to our elected representatives to research all the arguments thoroughly and then act accordingly with our taxes?
A Tim Yeo is the chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, which advises the Government on energy policy. Lord Deben is chairman of the Government Climate Change Committee, which also gives direct advice on emissions targets.
Both Mr Yeo and Lord Deben have significant personal stakes in the ‘renewable’ energy industry, which benefits to the tune of billions of pounds a year from wind subsidies.
The REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming. Last week we explosively revealed a 16-year 'pause' in rising temperatures - triggering a bitter debate. You decide what the real facts are...
By David Rose, PUBLISHED: 22:18, 20 October 2012 | UPDATE,: 11:22, 21 October 2012
Last week The Mail on Sunday provoked an international storm by publishing a new official world temperature graph showing there has been no global warming since 1997.
The figures came from a database called Hadcrut 4 and were issued by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University.
We received hundreds of responses from readers, who were overwhelmingly critical of those climate change experts who believe that global warming is inevitable.
But the Met Office, whose lead was then followed by climate change campaigners, accused The Mail on Sunday of cherry-picking data in order to mislead readers. It even claimed it had not released a ‘report’, as we had stated, although it put out the figures from which we drew our graph ten days ago.
Another critic said that climate expert Professor Judith Curry had protested at the way she was represented in our report. However, Professor Curry, a former US National Research Council Climate Research Committee member and the author of more than 190 peer-reviewed papers, responded: ‘A note to defenders of the idea that the planet has been warming for the past 16 years. Raise the level of your game. Nothing in the Met Office’s statement . . . effectively refutes Mr Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in the global average surface temperature for the past 16 years.
‘Use this as an opportunity to communicate honestly with the public about what we know and what we don’t know about climate change. Take a lesson from other scientists who acknowledge the “pause”.’
The Met Office now confirms on its climate blog that no significant warming has occurred recently: ‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’
Here, we answer some of the key questions on climate change – and invite readers to make their own choice . . .
Q Is the world warming or not?
A The Hadcrut 4 figures that show a ‘pause’ in warming lasting nearly 16 years are drawn from more than 3,000 measuring stations on land and at sea. Hadcrut 4 is one of several similar global databases that reveal the same thing: that since January 1997 there has been no statistically significant warming of the Earth’s surface.
Between 1980 and the end of 1996, the planet warmed at a rate close to 0.2 degrees per decade. Since then, says the Met Office, the trend has been a much lower 0.03 degrees per decade.
However, world average temperature measurements are subject to an error of plus or minus 0.1 degrees, while any attempt to calculate a trend for the period 1997-2012 has an in-built statistical error of plus or minus 0.4 degrees. The claim that there has been any statistically significant warming for the past 16 years is therefore unsustainable.
Q Why does it matter if the world is warming or not?
A For years, the Government’s energy and climate policy has been dominated by the belief that we need swift, drastic and expensive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to avert imminent catastrophe. In September, The Guardian claimed there were ‘less than 50 months to avoid climate disaster’.
These fears are based on computer models that show temperatures continuing to rise in step with levels of CO2.
The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: ‘For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade is projected for a range of emission scenarios’ – a prediction it said was solid because this rate of increase was already being observed.
But while CO2 levels have continued to rise since 1997, warming has paused. This leads Prof Curry to say the IPCC’s models are ‘incomplete’, because they do not adequately account for natural factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and a decline in solar output, which have suppressed the warming effects of CO2.
The Met Office and the CRU’s Professor Phil Jones say a ‘plateau’ of between 15 and 17 years is to be expected. But if the warming does not start again soon, the models will be open to challenge.
Q Did The Mail on Sunday ‘cherry-pick’ data to disguise an underlying warming trend?
A Some critics claim this newspaper misled readers by choosing start and end dates that hide the continued warming.
In fact, we looked at the period since 1997 because that’s when the previous warming trend stopped, and our graph ended in August 2012 because that is the last month for which Hadcrut 4 figures were available.
In April, the Met Office released figures up to the end of 2010 – an extremely warm year – which meant it was able to say there had been a statistically significant warming trend after 1997, albeit a very small one. However, 2011 and 2012 so far have been much cooler, meaning the trend has disappeared. This may explain why the updated figures were issued last week without a media fanfare.
Q But isn’t it true that the science is ‘settled’?
A Some scientists say the pause is illusory – if you strip out the effects of El Nino (when the South Pacific gets unpredictably warmer by several degrees), and La Nina (its cold counterpart), the underlying warming trend remains. Both phenomena have a huge impact on world weather.
Other experts point out one of the biggest natural factors behind the plateau is the fact that in 2008 the temperature cycle in the Pacific flipped from ‘warm mode’, in which it had been locked for the previous 40 years, to ‘cold mode’, meaning surface water temperatures fell. A cold Pacific cycle causes fewer and weaker El Ninos, and more, stronger La Ninas.
Prof Curry said that stripping out these phenomena made ‘no physical sense’. She added that natural phenomena and the CO2 greenhouse effect interact with each other, and cannot meaningfully be separated. It’s not just that the ‘cold mode’ has partly caused the plateau.
According to Prof Curry and others, the previous warm Pacific cycle and other natural factors, such as a high solar output, accounted for some of the warming seen before 1997 – some say at least half of it.
Other scientists say that heat has somehow been absorbed by the waters deep in the oceans. However, the evidence for this is contested, and there are no historical records with which to compare recent deepwater readings.
In the wake of the pause, the scientific ‘consensus’ looks much less settled than it did a few years ago.
Q When will warming start again?
A The truth is no one knows. It is likely that in the 2020s, the Atlantic cycle – currently in warm mode – will also flip to cold, so that for some years both the Pacific and Atlantic cycles will be cold at the same time. When this happens, world temperatures may decline, as they did in the Forties.
Prof Curry said: ‘If we are currently in a plateau and possibly headed for cooling, then sometime in the middle of the century we would likely see another period with a large warming trend.’
She added: ‘Because of natural variability, it is impossible to pinpoint what 2100 would look like. The climate sensitivity to greenhouse warming is still pretty uncertain, and it is not clear whether or to what extent man-made factors will dominate the climate of this period.’
For the world to be two degrees warmer in 2100 than it is now – as the IPCC has predicted – warming would not only have to restart but also proceed much faster than it has before.
Since 1880, temperatures have risen by around 0.75 degrees.
Q But isn’t the world still much warmer than at any time in recorded history?
A Ever since it was published on the cover of the IPCC’s Third Assessment report in 2001, the ‘hockey stick’ graph showing stable or declining temperatures since the year 1000, followed by a steep rise in the 20th Century, has been controversial. There were no thermometers in 1000, so scientists use ‘proxy’ data from items such as tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores.
The hockey stick authors have also been accused of eliminating the ‘medieval warm period’ (MWP) at the end of the first millennium.
Two new separate peer-reviewed studies, published in prestigious academic journals last week, reinstated it. The first study, led by Bo Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute, concluded: ‘The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th Century, equalled or slightly exceeded the mid-20th Century warming.’
There was also a pronounced warming period in Roman times.
Q So where does that leave us?
A Despite The Guardian’s bold claim that we have ‘50 months to save the world’, other evidence suggests that there are still decades left in which to plan an energy strategy driven by something other than panic.
In Britain, in the short to medium term, that would mean building modern ‘dual cycle’ gas power stations, which produce very clean energy and, unlike inefficient wind turbines, do not require subsidies to be economic.
In the longer term, we could be investing heavily in research into new forms of zero-carbon power, such as nuclear fusion, which are much closer to reality than most people realise.
Q Surely we can leave it to our elected representatives to research all the arguments thoroughly and then act accordingly with our taxes?
A Tim Yeo is the chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, which advises the Government on energy policy. Lord Deben is chairman of the Government Climate Change Committee, which also gives direct advice on emissions targets.
Both Mr Yeo and Lord Deben have significant personal stakes in the ‘renewable’ energy industry, which benefits to the tune of billions of pounds a year from wind subsidies.
