Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped

The latest scam from the global warming denialists is to claim that global warming has actually stopped. It’s over they say, keep moving, nothing to see here. In fact, what they’re doing is exploiting what’s called weather “noise” to distract attention to actual climate change.

Weather noise is the term used to describe the unpredictable variations in the earth’s weather that, looked at in short periods, can lead to false conclusions about climate change. Look at the red lines in the graph above. If you narrow your focus from one peak to the following trough you might conclude that, yes, the world is actually cooling. That’s weather noise. But look at the overall 30-year chart and you see the actual global warming. From Reuters:

Climate change is still nudging up temperatures in the long term even though the warmest year was back in 1998 and 2008 has begun with unusual weather such as a cool Pacific and Baghdad’s first snow in memory, experts said.

“Global warming has not stopped,” said Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) climate program.

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.

“We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean,” Delju told Reuters. “The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing.”

This year has started with odd weather including the first snows in Baghdad in memory on Friday and a New Year cold snap in India that killed more than 20 people. Frost hit some areas of Florida last week but orange groves escaped mostly unscathed.

Delju said climate change, blamed mainly on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, would bring bigger swings in the weather alongside a warming trend that will mean more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas.

“The more frequent occurrence of extreme events all over the world — floods in Australia, heavy snowfall in the Middle East — can also be signs of warming,” he said.

 

The Alchemist’s Prize

Global warming skeptics always claim to have a gaggle of credible scientists ready, willing and able to refute the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusions about man-made global warming and the climate change dangers that lie ahead.

Here’s the truth – they’re full of crap.

First you have to leave out the “usual suspects”, the scientists who gravitated to the service of Big Oil after years of lining their pockets fighting the good fight for Big Tobacco by spreading doubt about the link between cigarettes and cancer. Sorry, those people are paid liars and about as reliable as jailhouse informants.

Then, take whatever dregs are left over and come up with any credible studies they have produced that disprove the IPCC findings. The catchword here is “credible” as in “peer-reviewed”. All that means is that they have published the hard research behind their conclusions so that it can be tested by other scientists and shown to be valid or bogus. That’s not too much to ask, is it? We ask that of the scientists whose research, thousands of pages of it, is used by the IPCC in its work.

Now, don’t be giving us the old saw about how these skeptic scientists can’t come up with the funding that the pampered global warming people enjoy. Think about how stupid that sounds.

Can even you hardened skeptics believe, even for a minute, that Big Oil and Big Coal wouldn’t heap immeasurable money onto any scientist able to refute the IPCC and show that global warming isn’t a man-made problem arising out of greenhouse gas emissions? No one has a more immediate and direct financial interest in this than the fossil fuel industry and, if you’ve read any of the reports about their latest quarterly earnings, these companies are literally awash in profits lately.

Big Oil and Big Coal would pay anything to the alchemist who could allow them to get the global warming and climate change and greenhouse gas emissions problems off their backs. The only thing is that coming up with any credible rebuttal is as hard as turning lead into gold.