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LONDON – Global warming has become a topic of contention on both sides of the Atlantic as new scientific data calls into question current assumptions about climate change. Unlike overhyped news of impending planetary doom by the media, this scientifically respected report has received little notice.
Environmental activists and political interests seem to be disregarding the report as well. As late as yesterday, Van Jones, former Special Advisor for Green Job to President Obama tweeted that Al Gore deserves an apology from his distractors in light of Hurricane Sandy and the devastation it has caused.
But the facts are these: 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 1997 till 2012, the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points shows the mean temperature of the planet has not risen at all.
The UK Mail Online, reporting on these new findings, believes the reason little is being reported about this is because of assumptions, politics, and money. According to the Mail Online:
There is a “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. Global industrialization 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.”
The inconvenient truth is not what made Al Gore millions on Green Energy stock but rather that the scientific data points to far different conclusions than his. Computer models used for the last two decades by groups such as UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are seriously flawed and the climate is far more complex than the models avow.
Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at Georgia Tech University in the United States says, “The new data confirms the existence of a pause in global warming. 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, is best remembered for his part in the Climategate scandal over leaked emails three years ago. Those emails proved conclusively that scientist like Jones and others manipulated data to back their assertions of global warming.
This new data has caused Jones to agree with Professor Curry on at least two major points: the data does suggest a plateau and climate models are imperfect. Speaking about the computer models he said, “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.”
In spite of this, Jones insists that 16 years is not a significant period from which to draw conclusions. But in 2009, when the temperature leveling was already becoming apparent, 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.”
Now, in spite of the fact that deadline has passed, Jones still believes global temperatures will soon again begin to increase. “I still think that the current decade which began in 2010,” he said, “will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.”
When asked about a prediction made by the Met Office in 2009 that three of the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record, he offered no comment. No wonder since the statistics coming from his own office have proven extremely unreliable.
What makes all of this most disturbing is that we have a generation that has been raised and educated on faulty assumptions. There is no doubt, protecting the environment is important. But anytime someone questions the end-of-the-world scenarios painted by Al Gore and Professor Jones, they are labeled flat earthers who are dooming humanity to extinction.
